The Proclamation established Crown-Indigenous treaty-making principles in territories Britain acquired after the Seven Years War. Its application to Rupert’s Land, which Canada acquired from the Hudson’s Bay Company in 1870, is not a given. It is genuinely contested in the scholarly literature. Three justices in Calder (1973) held the Proclamation did not extend to British Columbia. The Proclamation is not entrenched in the Constitution of Canada. Section 25 of the Charter references it as a source of rights not to be abrogated, which is a real but limited status. Treating it as the constitutional foundation of modern Alberta may overstate its legal force.

The Act did create the federation that Alberta later joined. It contains no provision making the federation permanent. It does not prohibit secession. The Constitution is silent on the subject, a point the Supreme Court made explicit in 1998. Naming the Act in a meme that argues against secession does not establish that the Act answers the question. It does not.

Here, the graphic omits the operative clause. Treaty 6 provides that the Cree signatories “do hereby cede, release, surrender and yield up to the Government of the Dominion of Canada, for Her Majesty the Queen and Her successors forever, all their rights, titles and privileges, whatsoever, to the lands” within the described territory. Treaties 7 and 8 use materially identical language. What the signatory nations reserved were specific rights: hunting, fishing, and trapping on unoccupied Crown lands, annuities, reserves, and some agricultural and educational provisions. Those reserved rights are real, protected, and enforceable. They do not confer territorial sovereignty over the surrendered land as many mistakenly suggest. The treaty counterparty is the Crown, an entity that exists in multiple jurisdictional capacities. A successor Crown in right of an independent Alberta could plausibly inherit those obligations, perhaps upon negotiations. Some later Indigenous oral history disputes the cession interpretation, and that disagreement deserves engagement on its own terms, but it is not Gospel. The legal text of the treaties says what it says. Ignoring it is disingenuous.

The Act created Alberta inside Confederation. Section 21 of the Alberta Act retained federal control of Alberta’s natural resources, leaving the new province on unequal footing with the central and eastern provinces. The 1930 Natural Resources Transfer Agreement, entrenched constitutionally by the Constitution Act, 1930, finally returned land and resource jurisdiction to Alberta. Alberta scholar Tom Flanagan has called the NRTA “Alberta’s Real Constitution.” Two consequences follow. The framework the graphic presents as unchangeable has been substantially amended within living memory. And the 1930 amendment expanded Alberta’s authority within the same territory the graphic uses to argue that authority is constrained and unchanging. The timeline ends in 1982 and skips 1930. It also ignores everything that came after. The omissions carry inconvenient weight.

Section 35(1) reads: “The existing aboriginal and treaty rights of the aboriginal peoples of Canada are hereby recognized and affirmed.” The Supreme Court has built a justification-and-consultation framework around the section, beginning with Sparrow (1990) and continuing through Delgamuukw (1997), Haida Nation (2004), and Tsilhqot’in (2014). The framework protects specific rights against unjustified infringement. It does not lock the federal structure in place in perpetuity; it is not an Oracle. In Ktunaxa Nation v. British Columbia (2017), the Court confirmed that “the duty to consult does not provide Indigenous groups with a veto right.” Section 35 guarantees a legitimate process, not a specific outcome.