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On 24 November 1980, nearly a thousand Indigenous people gathered at the Pacific Central Railway Station in Vancouver, British Columbia. Drumming their way into the station, Elders, Chiefs, and whole families piled into two trains - one heading north through Jasper, the other along the southern route through Calgary, both bound for Ottawa. Meanwhile, two delegates landed in New York. At the very same moment, a young Cree articling student was on her way to Rotterdam, Netherlands. All of these travellers, traversing Indigenous territories and state borders, carried with them the same message: no patriation. That is, the Canadian government could not patriate the Constitution without the consenting authority of the Indigenous Nations upon whose territories and terms the Canadian state very tenuously sits. Over the next two and a half years, more of these journeys would be made: to the United Nations in New York, to the British Parliament in London, to Indigenous communities throughout British Columbia, and to cities and towns across Europe. Starting from the train ride that launched it all, together these journeys would come to constitute a movement known as the Constitution Express.
At the time, Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau had proposed to "bring home" the Constitution from the United Kingdom - a prospect that fuelled his return to leadership and on which he became, by all accounts, hell-bent.1 He touted the move as a decolonial one, ostensibly meant to "break this last colonial link" to the British Crown.2 And yet, his proposal failed to mention the existence of Indigenous Peoples in Canada - their treaties, rights, title, and their persistent jurisdiction. For a decolonial project, it was a rather conspicuous exclusion. Ignoring Indigenous Peoples, patriation promised to consolidate Canadian sovereignty once and for all. Wise to the fact that their rights and jurisdiction were about to be extinguished by omission, the Union of British Columbia Indian Chiefs (UBCIC), with Grand Chief George Manuel at its helm, organized the Constitution Express to oppose patriation outright - that is, until they had the opportunity to sit down with Canada and the United Kingdom at an internationally supervised "Imperial Conference" to determine the nature of their political relationship, responsibility for the treaties, and their respective jurisdiction. This proposal effectively moved the...