Citizenship cloud is a term for the uncertainty that arises when birth, jurisdiction, and territory do not line up neatly. It draws on stories (and myths) about royal births in foreign countries where rooms were said to be treated as “extraterritorial” to avoid unwanted citizenship. Whether or not those specific anecdotes are legally accurate, they capture a real concern: what happens when a child is born in a place that functions like someone else’s jurisdiction?
On Six Miles Deep, every birth certificate issued in a hospital or home located on the Haldimand Tract raises that kind of question. Officially, Canadian law treats those births as jus soli citizenship events: the person is Canadian, full stop. But if the underlying land base is still, in law and honour, a Mohawk refuge granted “for ever,” then each birth also happens within a territory whose true constitutional status is contested.
“Citizenship cloud” does not mean those people are stateless. It points to something more subtle and politically explosive:
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their Canadian citizenship rests on a territorial foundation (the Tract) whose prior grant to Mohawk posterity has never been properly reconciled or extinguished;
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if the extraterritorial reading of Haldimand gains traction, Canada may need to recognize that many people born or residing on Six Miles Deep are, at minimum, subject to two overlapping orders—Canadian and Mohawk—even if Canadian law has so far refused to acknowledge the second.
This cloud hangs particularly heavily over oath-takers—naturalized citizens, councillors, MPs, MPPs, police, and judges—who both:
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swear allegiance into a constitutional order that includes Haldimand, and
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then act on Haldimand lands as if no special status exists.
For them, the citizenship cloud is also a duty cloud: their status and their actions are built on a grant whose terms they have never honoured but continue to exploit. In the Six Miles Deep lexicon, this is not just a philosophical puzzle; it is part of the leverage for arguing that Canada must confront the constitutional consequences of building a citizenship system on top of a promised Mohawk refuge.
