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A four-day conference to expand cooperation between tribal leaders in the U.S. and Canada was held from July 20-23, 1999, in Vancouver, British Columbia. The meeting drew 4,000 participants as tribal leaders met for the first time since a similar effort in 1939. At the end of the sessions, the biggest Indian organizations from each country—Canada's Assembly of First Nations and the Washington-based National Congress of American Indians—adopted a declaration of kinship and cooperation. The following text includes highlights of the Proclamation of cooperation among Indigenous people of North America, signed on July 23, 1999:
We, the people, knowing that the Creator placed us here on Mother Earth as sovereign nations and seeking to live in peace, freedom and prosperity with all humanity in accordance with our own traditional laws are united in our sacred relationship with the land, air, water and resources of our ancestral territories. Common origin and history, aspiration and experience bind us, and we are brothers and sisters, leaders and warriors of our nations.
Other's hands have drawn boundaries between Canada and the United States. These arbitrary lines have not severed, and never will, the ties of kinship among our peoples.
We authorize our national organizations to inform, assist and support each other in the areas of common concern, including:
Achieving the full recognition, protection and implementations of the existing legal and political rights of our constituent nations, including those founded in our own national laws, the laws of Canada and the United States, and in the laws of the wider international community;
Promoting the practice and preservation of our spiritual and cultural expressions;
Raising our children in the loving traditions of our peoples and protecting their primal connections with their families, communities and nations; [and]
Advancing the economic and social well being of the citizens of all our nations, whether or not they live within their traditional homelands, while preserving our traditions of sharing and social justice.
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