Sovereignty and The Indigenous Screen Office: A Proposal to Reshape Canada’s International Cultural Strategy – Yellowhead Institute
February 25, 2026
IT IS NO SECRET that Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) raised critical questions about the relationship between Indigenous and Canadian cultural sovereignty. While those TRC Calls to Action focused on media and culture (notably numbers 83 to 89) do not explicitly frame sovereignty in constitutional terms, they do establish a general framework which correlates reconciliation with Indigenous authority. For example, Call to Action 83 led the Canada Council for the Arts to establish commitments explicitly acknowledging “the cultural sovereignty of Indigenous peoples” and respecting Indigenous “self-determination.”
