The Treatied Spaces Research Group is expanding understanding of Indigenous treaties, resources and the environment.
National and international organisations have called repeatedly for Indigenous solutions to help address some of the leading global challenges of our time, including water conservation, the development of sustainable energy, and climate change adaptation. As the world undergoes unprecedented resource, governance, and technological transitions, Indigenous knowledge systems have a vital role to play. 370 million Indigenous peoples steward or hold tenure rights over a quarter of the earth’s terrestrial surface. Their lands include over one-third of the world’s intact forest landscapes plus a high proportion of the transboundary river basins and aquifer systems that form almost half of the earth's surface. Crucially, a majority of energy transition minerals are on or near Indigenous lands. This makes Indigenous Peoples both uniquely vulnerable and pivotal to change.
“Only by taking into account Indigenous treaties, practices, and rights can we solve our most pressing global problems”, says Professor Joy Porter, 125th Anniversary Chair and Professor of Indigenous and Environmental History at the University of Birmingham, UK, and principal investigator of the Treatied Spaces Research Group (TSRG), a collaborative initiative that works across disciplines, sectors, and international contexts to make treaties and environmental concerns central to education, policy, and public understanding.
TSRG works to deepen understanding of treaties as living and contested instruments of inter-cultural diplomacy. “Treaties remain our most unique shared intercultural mechanism for maintaining cooperation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous nations,” says Professor Porter, “because, amongst other things, they are capable of embodying solutions to the threats posed by the extensive overlap between crucial biodiversity zones and industrial extraction areas.”
Indigenous peoples across the world are disproportionately affected by climate change, with severe impacts displacing communities at seven times the rate of the global population, and severing ties to ancestral lands. Many have been displaced by exploitation of the same natural resources that now are contributing to climate change. Resource extraction has often accompanied treaty violations, despite mining also bringing significant benefits to some Indigenous communities.
In Alberta, Canada, Treaty 8, the largest treaty by area in the country’s history, shared title to 325,000 square miles of land with the British Crown with a promise that Indigenous peoples would retain the right to hunt, fish, and trap in the area. Oil extraction across the territory has negatively impacted the exercise of those rights. Toxic and carcinogenic chemicals are found in the water and in animals’ bodies, and a number of Indigenous communities now rely on the oil industry for their livelihoods.
Indigenous peoples across the world have faced similar threats to their land rights as a result of resource extraction. This connection has been a key focus for TSRG, which has a series of research initiatives focused on resource use and environmental futures, including Professor Charles Prior’s Treatied States of America: Interior Diplomacy and the Contest for (Native) American Resources, which delves into the role of treaties in the geopolitics of decarbonisation and Professor Porter’s Canada’s Green Challenge and What Would Nixon Do?: The Forgotten Republican Roots of American Environmentalism. The latter explores ways in which traditional lifeways in Alaska have found ways to coexist with the drilling permitted by the controversial landmark 1971 legislation, the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANCSA).
Ken Maracle, Faithkeeper of the Lower Cayuga Longhouse holding a Pipe/Hatchet Wampum belt.
Other projects by the Group have focused on Indigenous oral traditions and their ongoing intercultural power articulated through treaties. TSRG's Brightening the Covenant Chain (BTCC) revealed globally significant cultures of diplomatic interaction between the British Crown and the Indigenous peoples who dominated Northeastern America up until the 18th century, the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, sometimes described as the world’s oldest participatory democracy.
Timed to correspond with the 260th anniversary of the first ‘special relationship’ between America and Britain, embodied in the ratification of the Treaty of Niagara in 1764, the project worked to ‘brighten’ or rekindle one of the world’s oldest diplomatic relationships. It shaped the North America we know today and continues to be renewed by the Royal family. The project placed a spotlight on the Indigenous diplomatic methods and protocols that bind the British King in an abiding kinship relationship or metaphorical ‘Covenant Chain’ with the Haudenosaunee. These treaty relationships were eroded by ensuing Canadian governments, something many Haudenosaunee people view as a usurpation of their primary nation-to-nation agreements with the Crown.
The researchers have visualised these relationships using a dynamic interactive map of Indigenous settlements and activities in the American northeast called Movement and Common Worlds. The resource – co-developed with Indigenous communities and King's College London’s Digital Lab reveals new stories that displace the narrative that settlers rapidly removed Indigenous nations who then vanished forever from the land. Data which the group has gleaned from British rather than American maps, brings to life how early America was defined by Indigenous and non-Indigenous interaction and movement across shared, defended territories and settlements connected via intercultural diplomacy. Uniquely, the map subverts the traditional topographic depiction of colonial America. Settler communities are revealed as surviving on the peripheries of a continent dominated by Indigenous Worlds.
Detail from TSRG ‘Movement and Common Worlds’ interactive map.
The map was created with data points gathered from 20 historical maps to show the changing boundaries of Indigenous lands. “After 1776, the Americans essentially erased Indigenous communities from their mapping, but the old British maps still contain place names and metadata that we have incorporated into the new map,” says Professor Porter. “On our map, someone from New York, for example, can locate their home today and see what major Indigenous settlements were nearby in the past, what the key Indigenous placenames were, what pathways linked Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities, what locations were and remain spiritually significant, and where people moved goods and traded.”
Treatied Spaces is further promoting Indigenous diplomatic history through a series of immersive soundscapes. Produced as part of the BTCC project, the ‘Voices at the Edge of the Woods’ soundscapes centralise orality, ritual and ceremony within Haudenosaunee intercultural diplomatic practice across time. The soundscapes, now available on Bloomberg Connects, were recorded on location during the summer of 2022 at Johnson Hall Historic Site in present-day New York with Haudenosaunee speakers, leaders and elders Nathan Brinklow (Tyendinaga Mohawks, Bay of Quinte), Ken Maracle (Cayuga, Six Nations of the Grand River) and Tom Porter (Mohawks, Akwesasne).
They recreate Haudenosaunee Council oratory in Kanyen’kéha (Mohawk), and Gayogo̱hó:nǫ (Cayuga), revitalising elements of Council oratory, speech and song frequently omitted in British transcriptions of treaty councils. Voices at the Edge of the Woods brings alive the importance of ritual, language and sound to diplomacy between the Haudenosaunee and representatives of the British Crown. Prior to any interaction came the ‘words that come before all else’ – the greeting at the wood’s edge by which Haudenosaunee greet newcomers to their territory. The ceremony welcomes the opposite delegation, extends words of condolence for their losses and symbolically cleanses their bodies in preparation for a full diplomatic exchange.
The latest large internationally collaborative project underway from Professor Porter and the Treatied Spaces Group is Historic Houses, Global Crossroads. It revisions historic properties, gardens and demesnes in terms of global diplomatic intercultural exchange. The project explores two of Northern Ireland’s most significant yet under-analysed heritage sites – Clandeboye Estate, which contains exceptional unstudied archives and material culture linked to Lord Dufferin, one of the British Empire’s most impactful diplomats; and Mount Stewart, amongst the National Trust’s most interculturally rich spaces, with gardens and grounds of global significance, and home to a line of figures central to British diplomatic history.
“The project aims to help historic house owners, including the National Trust and private owners, find new ways to contextualise a diverse, global history linked to these special places,” says Professor Porter. One of the ways the project will do this is through application of Choice Modelling econometric techniques. A Choice Modelling Cultural Value Analysis will help inform National Trust and Clandeboye Trust decision-making as well as policy internationally on how nature and material culture are valued in heritage contexts, and how they can advance inclusion and promote awareness of climate risk.
Globalising these spaces is vitally significant in a part of the UK where historic houses are embedded in a long history of colonialism and sectarian division. “The goal is to ensure that when people from diverse backgrounds, whether Bangladeshi, Indian, Chinese, or Indigenous American, visit these properties, they will find meaningful connections and representations of their culture,” says Professor Porter. The work includes new interpretations of material and artefacts as well as of gardens and grounds as sites of global exchange that are now subject to climate stress. The aim is to show how historic sites can serve as transformative sites of inclusion, rather than division.
Mount Stewart Historic House, County Down.
Through these initiatives, TSRG hopes to establish a more nuanced understanding and presentation of Indigenous histories and cultures, foster collaboration and connection between communities, and build applicable, inclusive interdisciplinary narratives.
“We need to continually develop better cultural understanding and meaningfully connect cultures so that we can foster peace and informed decision-making – on a planet running out of fresh water, rushing to capture access to finite resources, and experiencing profound change,” says Professor Porter.
“Treaties”, she concludes, “are central to the quest for social and environmental justice and are a foundation for renewed, more balanced relationships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities. They shape our understanding of sovereignty over land, peoples and environments on earth, in the seas, and in space. Approaching our globe and beyond as ‘treatied space’ is intellectually transformative. It offers a significant means of generating the respect and right relationship between peoples, resources, territories and ecosystems that is necessary to secure all our futures”.
All images courtesy of Professor Charles Prior, Professor of History and Treatied Spaces Research Group Co-Lead.
We work with cultural and civic partners to protect, uplift and understand cultural heritage and its relevance for identity formation.
Professor of Indigenous and Environmental History
Biographical and contact information for Professor Joy Porter, Professor of Indigenous and Environmental History at the University of Birmingham.
