by The Critical Compass
«Constitutional lawyer Leighton Grey speaks at the Alberta Prosperity Project independence rally at the Alberta Legislature in Edmonton on August 29, 2026.
Grey, a member of Carry the Kettle Nakoda Nation and host of the Grey Matter Podcast, argues that the Indian Act created a separate legal class of person in Canada. He says a free Alberta must end that “otherness” and invite Indigenous people into one community of equal citizens.
Drawing on his family’s history, including an ancestor at Little Bighorn, his great-grandfather Burrell Grey, and his grandmother’s years at Brandon Indian Residential School, Grey challenges Ottawa’s approach to Indigenous policy. He points to poor outcomes on reserve, race-based sentencing, missing and murdered Indigenous women, and the late Saskatchewan lawyer William Wuttunee, who called more than 50 years ago for an end to the reserve system.
He closes with Roger Scruton’s idea of oikophilia (love of home) and says Alberta independence is a conservation movement: a fight to protect a beautiful home and pass it on to the next generation.»