We think a lot about what it means to run this business well, and two of the words we keep returning to are transparency and accountability. They shape the obvious things, like how we handle a bad batch or a hard conversation with a supplier. But they also shape what we're willing to talk about out loud, including the parts that aren't comfortable.
We also believe that allyship only works when it's intersectional. We can't care about the land the way we do and hold it separate from the people this land was taken from, or from the systems that did the taking. Caring about soil and caring about justice have never been two different commitments for us. They're the same one.
We're a settler-owned business operating on treaty land. That means we aren't bystanders to this history. We're part of it, and part of the responsibility that comes with it. So this September we want to talk plainly about the covenant this land is held under, what it asks of all of us, and where things honestly stand.
What September 30 is
September 30 is the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation. It exists to hold the memory of the children taken to residential schools and the many who never came home, and to keep survivors and their families at the centre of the story rather than the edge of it.
That history is not distant from here. The first residential school in the country, the Mohawk Institute, operated for well over a century just down the highway in Brantford. It is now the Woodland Cultural Centre, a Haudenosaunee-led place of education and truth-telling.
Last year we closed the shop on the 30th and brought our team to the Mohawk Institute's grand re-opening as an interpreted historic site. We don't mention that to be applauded for it. We mention it because stepping back from business as usual and showing up somewhere is one concrete way to mark the day, and it's a commitment we intend to keep. There are many ways to spend September 30. That was ours, and we'd gently encourage finding one of your own.
The Dish With One Spoon
The ground this shop stands on is held by a covenant older than Canada, an agreement between the Haudenosaunee and the Anishinaabe that predates European contact. It's called the Dish With One Spoon, and it's usually taught through its own imagery, because the imagery does the explaining.
Everyone eats from one dish. There is a single spoon, which means you take only your share and never empty the bowl. And there is no knife at the table, because a spoon cannot draw blood and a knife can. Choosing the spoon is choosing to keep the peace. Later arrivals, settlers included, were understood to be brought into the agreement, which is why it is said to cover this land still.
We are not the right people to teach this in any depth, and we won't pretend otherwise. What we can say is that it is law, not metaphor, and that the people it belongs to are the ones to learn it from. We've gathered some places to start at the end of this post.
The idea the covenant was built to disprove
To understand why the covenant matters, it helps to know the idea it stands against.
When Europeans claimed this continent, they relied on two linked concepts. The Doctrine of Discovery held that a Christian power “discovering” a land thereby owned it. And terra nullius, Latin for “nobody's land,” held that the land was legally empty on arrival, as though the people already here did not register at all.
Set those ideas beside the wampum and something clarifying happens. Both begin from the same phrase, “no one owns this land,” and then move in opposite directions.
Terra nullius said: this land belongs to no one, so it can be taken.
The Dish With One Spoon said: this land belongs to no one, so we must share it and leave enough for those still coming.
One of those ideas cleared the way for the country we now live in, and it did so at a staggering and continuing cost, measured in Indigenous lives, lands, languages, and livelihoods taken. The other has cared for this same soil far longer. And here is a fact worth holding onto: Canada's own Supreme Court, in its 2014 Tsilhqot'in Nation ruling, found that terra nullius never applied here. The highest court in the country has stated plainly that this ground was never empty.
What honouring the covenant actually asks
A decade ago, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission set out 94 Calls to Action, concrete steps Canada was asked to take. Two of them echo the heart of the Dish With One Spoon almost word for word.
Call 47 asks governments, right down to the municipal level, to formally repudiate the Doctrine of Discovery and terra nullius, and to reform the policies still resting on them. In plain terms, to say officially that the “empty land” idea was always false. That is the same thing the covenant says, and the same thing the Supreme Court has already confirmed.
Call 43 asks governments to adopt the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples as their framework for reconciliation. That one carries a standard worth explaining on its own, because it's where the real shift lives.
Notice, and consent
When the City makes a land decision, the most it is currently required to do with the nations whose treaty land this is, is send a notice. A letter goes out after an application is already on the table. That is as far as today's rules ask it to go.
The Declaration points somewhere different. It carries the standard of free, prior, and informed consent, which describes something any community gardener understands in their bones. There is a world of difference between being told what is about to happen to a shared plot, and being asked, early, while there is still time for the answer to change anything.
That is the shift the covenant would recognize. From notice to consent. From “we'll let you know” to “we'll decide this together.”
We want to be honest about what a city can and cannot do here, because a fair ask is a stronger one. A municipality cannot hand anyone a veto over land the province controls, and consent in its fullest sense is genuinely complicated. But a city can absolutely move in that direction. It can engage early instead of late. It can build a real relationship agreement with the nations rather than a mailing list. And on the land the City itself owns, its parks and its own projects, it can practice genuine shared decision-making now. There is even an Ontario template for exactly this kind of agreement. The tools exist. What's needed is the will to use them.
Where this stands today in Hamilton
Here is the honest state of things, offered plainly and without heat, because we don't think this is a story about villains.
The City of Hamilton already names the covenant. Its official land acknowledgement, the one it reads before meetings and posts on its website, places the Dish With One Spoon at the centre, describing this land as covered by an agreement to share and care for the resources around the Great Lakes. It closes by acknowledging that the City still has more to do to learn this land's history and understand its role as a caretaker. Those are the City's own words.
The City has also done real things. It has an Urban Indigenous Strategy, an Indigenous Relations division, staff training underway, and it marks this day with ceremony each year. That is not nothing, and we won't pretend it is.
What it has not done is formally repudiate the Doctrine of Discovery, or adopt the Declaration as its framework. So we have a City that recites a covenant about sharing and caring for the land, while the two Calls to Action that would put that covenant into practice remain undone. Nationally, ten years on, independent Indigenous-led tracking by the Yellowhead Institute counts just 13 of the 94 Calls as complete.
That is the distance between what is acknowledged and what is acted on. Naming it is not an accusation. It is an invitation to close the gap, and as settlers and residents who share this ground, that invitation is ours to take up too.
So here's what we can do
This is where a held belief becomes something real. And this year it carries added weight, because it is a municipal election year. Everyone hoping for a seat at the council table is listening more closely right now than they will again for some time. That makes this the season to ask, of incumbents and challengers alike: where do you stand on Calls 47 and 43?
We built an email template for you to send a letter asking this very question to your current ward councillor and our city's mayor.
It takes about a minute, and a minute of our time carries more weight in an election year than it usually does.
Go further than the letter, because this was never only about politicians:
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Learn whose land we're standing on. Native Land Digital is a good first step, and read the covenant from Indigenous sources rather than from us.
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Visit or support the Woodland Cultural Centre in Brantford, which carries this history twenty minutes from our door.
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Support the local nations and urban Indigenous organizations directly, including the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation, Six Nations of the Grand River, and Hamilton's own De dwa da dehs nye’s Aboriginal Health Centre.
And the one that lives closest to our own work: bring the covenant into the soil. Take only what we need from it. Keep the ground clean. Leave enough for what's coming, whether that's the pollinators, the neighbours, or whoever tends this patch after us. Plant native. Share the harvest. Garden as though the land is borrowed, because it is.
The ground we're standing on
The Dish With One Spoon was never a statement. No one framed it and hung it on a wall. It was a practice, something done, meal after meal and season after season, by taking only your share and leaving the rest.
That is the part that stays with us as growers. The covenant and good gardening ask for the same thing: pay attention to what you take, leave the ground better than you found it, and remember that we are only ever caretakers passing it along.
So this September, stop by the window. Learn whose land this is. And then, if you're willing, join us in asking the people who represent us to keep the promise they have already written down.
Sources
Every claim above links to a primary or authoritative source. Full list for reference:
National Day for Truth and Reconciliation — Government of Canada — https://www.canada.ca/en/canadian-heritage/campaigns/national-day-truth-reconciliation.html
Woodland Cultural Centre (former Mohawk Institute) — https://woodlandculturalcentre.ca/
Woodland Cultural Centre — grand re-opening announcement — https://woodlandculturalcentre.ca/wcc-announces-grand-reopening/
The Dish With One Spoon — teaching by Lorrie Gallant (Six Nations), Facing History — https://facingcanada.facinghistory.org/the-dish-with-one-spoon-wampum
Doctrine of Discovery, terra nullius & the Tsilhqot'in ruling — CBC Beyond 94 (Call 47) — https://www.cbc.ca/newsinteractives/beyond-94/governments-to-repudiate-doctrine-of-discovery-and-terra-nullius-and-reform-laws-that-rely-on-such-concepts
TRC 94 Calls to Action tracker — CBC Beyond 94 — https://www.cbc.ca/newsinteractives/beyond-94
Call to Action 43 / UNDRIP Act — Justice Canada — https://www.justice.gc.ca/eng/declaration/about-apropos.html
UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples — Justice Canada — https://www.justice.gc.ca/eng/declaration/legislation.html
Free, prior & informed consent in Ontario planning — SharedPath — https://sharedpath.ca/reconciliation-in-ontarios-land-use-planning-understanding-the-duty-to-consult-and-accommodate-in-ontario/
Indigenous-Municipal Relationship Agreements template — AMO — https://www.amo.on.ca/sites/default/files/assets/DOCUMENTS/Indigenous-Relations/Indigenous-Municipal_Relationship_Agreements_Guidance_Document_20211129.pdf
City of Hamilton land acknowledgement — https://www.hamilton.ca/people-programs/inclusion-diversity-equity-accessibility/indigenous-relations/land-acknowledgement
City of Hamilton Urban Indigenous Strategy — https://www.hamilton.ca/sites/default/files/2022-05/EDI-2019urbanindigenousstrategy-Report.pdf
Calls to Action Accountability (13 of 94) — Yellowhead Institute — https://yellowheadinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/YI-TRC-C2A-2023-Special-Report-compressed.pdf
Native Land Digital — https://native-land.ca/
Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation — https://mncfn.ca/
Six Nations of the Grand River — https://www.sixnations.ca/
De dwa da dehs nye’s Aboriginal Health Centre — https://aboriginalhealthcentre.com/