Aaron Mills (2017) has argued persuasively that to understand treaty relationships as contracts is to betray the spirit of those relationships. In this, he joins numerous Indigenous scholars who express wariness of contractualist understandings of treaty. This article inquires into the distinction between contractualist and relational understandings of treaty in order to think about the phenomenon of collective, transhistorical debt. Drawing out the distinction between relational and contractarian modes of thinking about long-term collective obligations, the article examines whether ongoing historical debts to Indigenous nations can be made sense of on a Kantian, contractarian logic. It concludes that the widespread colonial incomprehension of treaty as understood by many Indigenous nations was and remains tied to contractarian confusions. While contractarian thought can serve as a heuristic for articulating the injustices of colonial dispossession, it cannot capture the type of long-term collective responsibilities that treaties are supposed to represent.
