How Idle No More transformed Canada

When Sylvia McAdam recalls the early days of Idle No More in November 2012, she remembers the excitement and beauty of Indigenous people coming together. 

At the time, she couldn't anticipate that the flash mobs taking over malls across the country – with round dances, singing and drumming – would both shift the conversation about Indigenous rights and sovereignty but also help lay the foundation for reconciliation work in the future. 

And 10 years later, the ripple effects of the movement are still spreading. 

"It was an incredible time of prayer and just sacred gathering. It just brought so many people together," Idle No More co-founder Sylvia McAdam told Unreserved host Rosanna Deerchild. 

McAdam, a law professor at the University of Windsor from Big River First Nation, said the first impromptu round dance she witnessed that fall was a powerful experience.

"A 17-year-old young Indigenous woman gathered up her friends and they grabbed up their drums and they went to the downtown mall of Regina," she said. "They start drumming and singing, and you could see security trying to move them along. And they would just gently pull away from security and just continue singing.

"And like any Indigenous people, when you hear the drum, holy heck, you can't get away from it. You're propelled towards it."

The seeds of Idle No More were planted when four women from Saskatchewan – McAdam, Jessica Gordon, Nina Wilson and Sheelah McLean – decided to do something about the federal government's Bill C-45, which they opposed. 

The piece of legislation, crafted by former prime minister Stephen Harper's government, was dubbed an omnibus bill due to its size and scope. At over 400 pages, the legislation proposed changes to the Indian Act, the Navigable Waters Protection Act and the Environmental Protections Act. 

The four women were concerned that the legislation would make it easier for the federal government and corporations to extract resources from Indigenous territories without consent. This, in effect, would be an attack on Indigenous sovereignty, McLean suggested. 

So, she said, they started educating.

"We knew that we could get a large group of people involved if we could just make them aware of the dangers of these government policies," she explained. 

McLean isn't Indigenous but said her years as a public school teacher showed her there was a lack of knowledge in the country about the historic injustices Indigenous people face, Indigenous rights and environmental issues. 

"Even though we have a public education system, we still needed, as a movement, to educate the public on these specific issues because we are living in a colonial context," she said.