To drive home for groceries, a resident of Akwesasne may have to enter a second country and come back. The Mohawk territory sits where Ontario, Quebec and New York State meet, cut by the international border along the St. Lawrence. At one point roughly seven in ten crossings at the local port were Akwesasronon making ordinary trips inside their own community, obliged to report to a foreign customs booth to reach a relative, a school or a store on the far bank.
The line they cross was drawn over them, not by them. And a treaty older than either modern government says they should not have to stop at it.
The treaty Canada left on the shelf
The Jay Treaty of 1794, signed between Britain and the United States, recognized in its Article III the right of “Indians” to pass and repass freely across the border the two powers had just fixed, carrying their goods without duty. The United States wrote that right into its immigration law, where it survives: a person of sufficient Indigenous blood born in Canada may live and work in the U.S. under it. Canada never reciprocated. Ottawa has treated Jay Treaty crossing rights as a historical courtesy rather than a legal obligation, which means the guarantee runs in one direction across a border that runs through a single people.
The practical result is a community managing a foreign frontier as a feature of daily life, its own police, ambulances and school buses timed around customs hours, its members detained or turned back over documents.
The passport nobody will stamp
Akwesasne is part of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, which issues its own passport as an assertion that it is a nation with treaties of its own, concluded with Britain, France and the United States before Canada existed. Neither Ottawa nor Washington accepts the document as a travel credential. Travellers who present it have had it seized.
The clearest recent test is playing out in sport. Lacrosse, a Haudenosaunee invention, returns to the Olympic programme at Los Angeles in 2028, and the Haudenosaunee Nationals are the game’s originators and among its best. They are not guaranteed a place, because the International Olympic Committee recognizes only athletes entered through one of its member states’ committees, and the Haudenosaunee are not a state under that definition. In January 2025 the U.S. and Canadian governments issued a joint White House statement urging the IOC to let them compete. Whether that pressure produces an exception, or the founders of the sport watch its Olympic return from outside, is now a live question with a 2028 deadline.
The parallel to the border is exact. In both cases the Haudenosaunee assert a sovereignty grounded in their own treaties; in both cases the modern states recognize it only when convenient. A one-time travel waiver, a supportive statement, a courtesy lane, these are gestures that leave the underlying claim unresolved.
Why it belongs in a foreign-policy story
Canada presents itself abroad as a country that honours Indigenous rights and the treaties beneath them. Akwesasne is where that self-portrait meets a border booth. The community is not asking Canada to erase the line; people there have built lives across it. They are asking Canada to acknowledge, in law rather than sentiment, a right the United States already recognizes and a treaty Canada inherited. Until it does, the simplest journey home remains, for some, an international crossing.