Indigenous lawyer Danika Littlechild doesn’t believe the SDGs are compatible with reconciliation. Here’s why.

Throughout the 17 Sustainable Development Goals and all their associated indicators, the words ‘indigenous peoples’ show up just four times. Danika Littlechild might be the only reason they appeared at all. 

The Indigenous lawyer and assistant professor at Carleton University is quick to say she has no idea whether her arguments to a French diplomat during the final session of the Open Working Group in 2014 that finalized the SDG text actually worked. France, along with several other countries, completely opposed the explicit mention of Indigenous peoples anywhere in the text of the SDGs. Littlechild asked for a meeting with a French diplomat to change their minds. They gave her just 10 minutes to do so. 

“This is not legally binding,” she told the French diplomat. “This is a commitment.” She also said countries that endorsed the UN Declaration On The Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) — including France — promised to promote it in the context of UN processes like the SDG agenda. And, finally, she argued states like France shouldn’t try and shut down the possibility of recognizing UNDRIP in the context of the SDG process when other countries might support it. 

The day after Littlechild’s conversation with the French diplomat, France backed down from blocking the inclusion of the phrase ‘indigenous peoples’. Littlechild believes including those two words was crucial. “In the context of the UN, if you don’t appear in operative text, people do forget you,” she says. 

Littlechild doesn’t believe the SDGs and Canada’s reconciliation process with Indigenous peoples are compatible. Consider their approaches: one is an international framework agreed to by representatives of all 193 UN member-states. The other is supposed to be an effort within Canada to build bridges after centuries of genocidal anti-Indigenous policies, racism, and economic deprivation. Implementing the UN’s plans along the lines of reconciliation would require it to give Indigenous peoples equal consideration alongside all 193 member-states. This simply did not happen when the SDGs were drafted.

All 17 goals are relevant to Indigenous communities across Canada, but getting the most cursory language about Indigenous peoples into the 2015 framework almost didn’t happen. At the end of the day, the UN is also a body representing states, not Indigenous communities. That lack of representation, along with what she sees as Canada’s inability to work collaboratively with Indigenous peoples, leads Littlechild to believe Canada cannot accomplish the SDGs while also respecting Indigenous sovereignty. “I think it’s possible in the future,” she says, “but I don’t think it’s possible now.” 

Indigenous peoples at the UN

Danika Littlechild is from the Ermineskin Cree Nation, an Indigenous community on Treaty 6 territory in Alberta, roughly an hour’s drive south east of Edmonton. She received her law degree at the University of Toronto in 2000, but moved back to Alberta to practice. After a couple of years working in Calgary, she arrived at the law office of her uncle Wilton Littlechild, a distinguished Indigenous lawyer, politician, and athlete. “He just let me do whatever I wanted, so I could work with Indigenous peoples on issues like environment or water, or revitalizing Indigenous legal orders,” Littlechild says. “Not Canadian law about Indigenous peoples, but rather, Indigenous legal systems from Indigenous peoples.”

Around 2008, she started an international law practice of her own working with Indigenous peoples all over the world. Later, she was part of the general counsel for the International Indian Treaty Council (IITC). This international NGO has general consultative status with the United Nations, allowing it to present and participate in the international body’s work. Her career always focused on Indigenous peoples, but it now focused on their rights within the context of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), but also more generally through multilateral environmental agreements such as the Minamata Convention on Mercury. And when the UN’s various member-states began negotiating the SDGs, she travelled to New York City to participate. 

The inclusion of Indigenous representatives at UN functions is a shockingly new phenomenon. “I actually have a photo of the first Indigenous peoples to set foot in UN grounds from 1977,” Littlechild says. “That’s in my lifetime.” (Her uncle at the law office, Wilton Littlechild, was part of that delegation.) Indigenous peoples have been very involved since then on environmental standards set within the UN, but Littlechild says this has happened in a very peripheral way. The UN’s very structure is to blame. “It’s run by and for states,” Littlechild says. “And so, the ability of Indigenous peoples to participate meaningfully at the UN is somewhat constrained.” 

While representatives for Canada and other UN member-states can participate fully in plenary sessions for something like the the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), Littlechild says Indigenous groups at multilateral environmental meetings are allotted as little as three to five minutes of total speaking time — and they are considered members of civil society, not representatives of sovereign peoples. “Whoever is there has to figure out what to say in those three to five minutes that’s representative of what we now know are over 400 million Indigenous people around the world,” Littlechild says. 

These barriers showed up again when Littlechild and other Indigenous representatives worked on the SDGs. In the early stages, she says, the phrase ‘Indigenous peoples’ showed up in nine of the draft goals, along with several targets. “By the end of negotiations, we appeared in two goals,” Littlechild says — SDG 2 (Zero Hunger) and SDG 4 (Quality Education) — “and just a few other targets. That, in and of itself, was a huge win because there were a lot of states that just didn’t want us in there at all.” 

She says Canada’s representatives supported the inclusion of Indigenous peoples in the text of the SDGs, but between the UN’s state-focused approach, and the lack of co-developed programs with Indigenous peoples at the national level, Littlechild believes the federal government cannot adequately include Indigenous peoples in its plan to implement the SDGs. “We’re working in a system that does not have the capacity to truly create space for…Indigenous-led initiatives to implement different Sustainable Development Goals,” she says. (Government spokespeople were not able to provide responses to Future of Good’s questions by deadline. We will update this story as soon as we hear back). 

Reconciliation and Canada’s SDG commitments

Canada is promising to seriously consider reconciliation in its forthcoming federal implementation plan for the SDGs. “The overall focus of the 2030 Agenda on human rights principles and standards, leaving no one behind and reducing inequalities is of particular relevance to Indigenous peoples who are frequently at a disadvantage compared to other segments of the population,” reads a government web page of Towards Canada’s 2030 Agenda National Strategy. “Upholding their rights is an absolute imperative if Canada is to achieve the goals in the 2030 Agenda.”

All 17 of the SDGs are directly linked to the human rights commitments outlined in UNDRIP, the calls to action by the TRC, and the calls for justice from the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, according to the government web page. It suggests the SDGs foundation and their connection to UNDRIP “can provide a common language” to start conversations about the SDGs among Canada’s First Nations, Inuit and Metis communities, as well as non-Indigenous people. 

However, Littlechild argues Canada’s definition of reconciliation is far too broad. “I think reconciliation is a Trickster,” she says. “I’ll tell you why I say that — because reconciliation can mean almost anything. In our Cree teachings, the Trickster is a transformative entity that can be bad or good.” Even the TRC never landed on a definitive idea of reconciliation. They refer to UNDRIP, Littlechild says, but even it is open to all sorts of different interpretations” 

Of course, even if there were a singular definition of reconciliation, there is no guarantee the Canadian government would accomplish it. Although Prime Minister Justin Trudeau did promise to implement all 94 of the TRC’s calls to action, the Yellowhead Institute, an Indigenous think tank, notes that very little progress has been made on the 444 recommendations of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples’ Final Report, completed in 1996. Meanwhile, racism against Indigenous peoples from Wet’suwet’en land defenders in B.C. to Mi’kmaq fishers in Nova Scotia continues. “What is the utility of all these standards and lofty goals and ambitions if we’re still facing such fundamental crises of recognition and appropriate representation?” Littlechild says.  

Slow and incremental progress

Littlechild doesn’t dismiss the importance of the SDGs. “I have hope for the future,” she says. “I think it’s important to use all the tools that we have available to take important positions. And the SDGs are an important tool.” Littlechild believes it is important for civil society to hold Canada to its commitments on the SDGs along with reporting any lapses to the UN. “It’s sort of this ongoing process,” she says. “It’s an iterative process.”

This feedback process is also bringing international law into the Canadian context, allowing domestic courts to consider these arguments as they appear more in terms of legal representation and advocacy. “Once we see that come into our jurisprudence, then things get a little bit stronger,” Littlechild says. Sometimes they become government policy. Both British Columbia and the Northwest Territories adopted UNDRIP years before Canada formally did so. Littlechild also says Canadians are becoming far more aware of inequities, too, a paradigm shift that may help Canada move towards actually implementing the SDGs. 

But Canada (and the UN) also needs to make space for Indigenous leadership. “We have to see a complete shift in the way decisions are made and in the way Indigenous peoples are able to assert their self-determination,” Littlechild says. Currently, she is focused on trying to uplift Indigenous systems rather than working within those that struggle to recognize Indigenous peoples.

In her view, the SDG process qualifies. “When you’re facing something that’s entirely state-led, and there is very little room for Indigenous participation or interpretation, then you face the problematic scenario of having something imposed — or something that just does not include Indigenous people in any interpretation or any implementation process,” Littlechild says. “To me, that’s pretty far from any definition of reconciliation, even a really bad one.” 

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