From: The Encyclopedia of Canada's Peoples/Aboriginals: Introduction/J.r. Miller
Unlike the era of alliance, which affected only the southeastern part of the future Canada, the age of agricultural expansion and resource-extraction was one in which the aboriginal peoples of every region were affected. The onset of this new age varied from place to place: farmers began to take over Nova Scotia in the late eighteenth century, southern Upper Canada (Ontario) after the War of 1812, parts of British Columbia in the middle of the nineteenth century, and the prairies from the 1860s onward. Similarly, the extraction of naturally occurring resources, chiefly forest and mineral, was initiated at different times in various regions. Upper Canada experienced a clash in the late 1840s as the mining frontier expanded into Ojibwa country, and British Columbia went through more destructive confrontations over coal lands and gold-bearing rivers and lands in the 1850s and 1860s. Gold seekers initiated the first of a series of harrowing invasions of aboriginal lands in Yukon late in the 1890s, though the rush was short-lived and nonnative transients mostly left within a decade. By the heyday of the Klondike gold rush, however, southern economic interests were beginning to invade the Shield country, then still dominated by aboriginal peoples, for hydroelectric energy (Quebec), base minerals (Ontario and the Northwest Territories), and coal and hydro (British Columbia). Wherever and whenever native peoples experienced the onset of settlement and resource-extraction, the results were the same: the relationship that was formed with Euro-Canadians was the worst aboriginals had experienced to date.
The reason for the trauma that aboriginal peoples suffered from early in the nineteenth century until at least the middle of the twentieth can be appreciated by focusing on the economic aims of the newcomers and the role native communities played in relation to those aims. In contrast to earlier periods when the Europeans’ pursuit of furs or aboriginal souls or alliances led the outsiders to seek cooperative relations with at least some natives, the settlement era was marked by the strangers’ wish to possess lands that aboriginal peoples held for sedentary agriculture, for silviculture that levelled the forests, or for the minerals and energy that lay beneath the lands or in the waterways on which First Nations depended for an extensive hunter-gatherer economy. From the standpoint of the European, the aboriginal peoples, who in the commercial and martial epochs had been essential as partners and allies, were now obstacles to the Europeans’ pursuit of their own eco-Aboriginals: nomic interests. Compatible motives were supplanted by competitive goals, and the result was the replacement of cooperative relations with hostility. Given the Europeans’ new desires to till the lands and harvest their resources, the aboriginal peoples were, in the word of historian E. Palmer Patterson, “irrelevant.”
Since aboriginal peoples were now, at best, incidental to Europeans’ objectives and, at worst, an obstacle, the newcomers began through their colonial administrations (or after 1867 through their national government) to fashion policies that would displace First Nations from the lands the strangers coveted. In Canada the campaign to remove the aboriginal peoples was not military for two reasons, one positive and one negative. On the positive side, the experience in the eras of commercial partnership and military alliance had left a tradition of working with aboriginal peoples, an approach that took concrete form most notably in the Royal Proclamation of 1763. This imperial document acknowledged a minimal version of aboriginal land rights and enjoined colonial societies to negotiate through the representatives of the crown for access to native lands. Less noble were the demographic and military realities: colonial and Canadian governments until the twentieth century lacked the population numbers, financial resources, and military muscle to remove aboriginal opponents by force of arms. The absence of a tradition of hostility to aboriginal peoples as a whole, along with demographic and financial weakness, meant that the removal of aboriginal communities from the path of progress would be conducted peacefully, but nonetheless destructively and effectively. Negotiated dispossession and cultural assimilation were the chosen instruments. In concrete terms, this involved land-surrender treaties and policies designed to expunge aboriginal identity, aboriginal ways, aboriginal beliefs, and, perhaps most important of all, aboriginal techniques for relating to and interacting with the land. The approach was not conquest, but treaty; never actual genocide, but cultural genocide.
There had been treaties between natives and Europeans before the onset of the settlement frontier. Those treaties, however, had usually been concerned with the cessation of military hostilities. The 1701 Treaty of Montreal, by which the League of the Five Nations agreed to end six decades of warfare with the French and live in peace with them and their Canadien offspring, was an example of an early peace treaty. Similarly, the Halifax Treaty of 1752 between the Mi’kmaq and British was a vain attempt by the European to ensure peaceful relations with a long-standing opponent, in return for which the Mi’kmaq were conceded control and rights of usage over their lands.
The treaties of the settlement frontier were different; they involved not the ending of war but the surrender of land. In the 1770s the British military began to negotiate with the Mississauga, an Anishinabe group of the eastern woodlands, for access to the lands in the Great Lakes basin that they had moved into and taken over after the dispersal of the Huron in 1649.
These pacts with the Mississauga and later with others ensured peaceful access for Britons and their allies to aboriginal lands in return for monetary compensation. The stimulus behind this innovation was to a minor degree the Royal Proclamation and, more practically, the pressing necessity to find lands quickly on which to relocate allies, both non-native Loyalists and defeated aboriginal allies such as the Mohawk. A similar pattern prevailed after the War of 1812 and even more so once the 1820s ushered in a period of heavy British immigration to southern Upper Canada. In the period down to the 1850s almost all of southern Upper Canada was covered by land-surrender treaties, and a start was made on some critically important lands in the mineral-bearing Precambrian Shield. One innovation in treaty-making was introduced after the War of 1812 when the British shifted from providing compensation in onetime payments to promising smaller annual payments, or annuities. Two other innovations were introduced to the treaty-making process in the first two treaties in Shield country, the Robinson-Huron and Robinson-Superior treaties, which were negotiated in 1850 after Chief Shingwauk and some Ojibwa threatened miners who were operating on their lands without native authorization. The Robinson treaties included a promise of reserves and a written guarantee that the natives could continue to hunt and fish throughout the territories surrendered until they were taken up by non-natives for uses that were incompatible with hunter-gatherer exploitation.
The Dominion of Canada inherited and applied the treaty precedents that had been developed in early Ontario when it turned to the task of integrating the western lands it acquired from the Hudson’s Bay Company in 1869. If the leaders of the young country had any doubts that they should negotiate with the First Nations in the west for peaceful entry, such doubts were removed during the winter of 1869–70 by the actions of the Metis communities, both francophone and anglophone, at the Red River settlement (at the site of present-day Winnipeg). Canada’s arrogant failure to talk to the Red River Metis, who numbered some 12,000 and formed most of the population of Red River, sparked great fear and insecurity among many of them that the coming of Canadian rule would dispossess them of the lands that they held only by a customary title, and, in the case of the French-speaking and Roman Catholic Metis, that their cultural institutions such as schools might be in jeopardy as well. The Red River resistance organized by Louis Riel forced the Dominion to negotiate the terms on which the territory that the Metis controlled would become part of Canada. In particular, Riel secured agreement in the 1870 Manitoba Act that the region would enter as a self-governing province rather than a territory administered by appointees of Ottawa, but the failure to get provincial jurisdiction over crown lands and natural resources greatly diminished the usefulness of provincehood. More relevant to the issue of treaty-making was the clause in the act that set aside 1.4 million acres (567,000 hectares) for future Metis families in recognition, as both the act and Prime Minister John A. Macdonald expressed it, that they shared in “Indian title.”
The Metis resistance and the Manitoba Act merely underlined the fact that Canada would find it prudent to negotiate with the approximately 30,000 first peoples in the west rather than attempting to barge into the region. The national government had a healthy respect for the Plains peoples such as the Blackfoot and Plains Cree, and it realized that it could not afford financially to force its way into the west. At the beginning of the 1870s, when the annual Canadian federal budget amounted to about nineteen million dollars, the Americans were spending twenty million dollars a year on Indian wars in their west. For their part, the Saulteaux, Assiniboine, Cree, and Blackfoot were open to negotiation because they recognized that they could not prevent an influx without bloody and probably self-defeating warfare, as well as because the main resource on which the Plains culture was built, the buffalo, was rapidly declining. The result of Canadian prudence and native concern was the negotiation of seven numbered treaties between 1871 and 1877 covering a vast territory from northwestern Ontario to the Rocky Mountains, and from the international boundary to a point about halfway up the present-day prairie provinces. In return for unimpeded access to this enormous kingdom, Canada gave initial payments and annuities to each aboriginal person, promised reserves on which native peoples could learn alternative ways of supporting themselves if that became necessary, and provided a variety of other forms of help such as farming assistance, and, in Treaty 6 in the central region of the North-West Territories (present-day Saskatchewan and Alberta), aid in the event of “famine” or “pestilence.”
The prairie treaties, which built upon the tradition established in colonial Ontario, would set the pattern for the next half-century. In the late decades of the nineteenth century and early years of the twentieth, Canada would move to conclude treaties with First Nations whenever non-native economic interest in aboriginal lands in a particular locality emerged. For example, Canada showed little interest in treating with Na-Dene peoples in northern British Columbia until the Klondike gold rush made clear the importance of access routes to Yukon. The result was Treaty 8, which covered the northeastern part of the province. A parallel case was Treaty 11, signed with the Dene of the western part of the Northwest Territories one year after oil was discovered at Norman Wells in 1920. By the interwar period of the twentieth century, large portions of Canada were covered by these land treaties, although some important areas were not. British Columbia, where prior to Treaty 8 only fourteen treaties covering tiny areas near European settlements on Vancouver Island had been concluded, was for the most part still aboriginal land. The same was true of some portions of the two northern territories and also of Quebec. In fact, most of Quebec remained untouched by land treaties until 1975, when a confrontation between the James Bay Cree and the provincial government over access to the James Bay drainage system for hydroelectric power development led to a court challenge by the Cree and then the negotiation of a tripartite agreement among the Cree, Quebec, and Canada that is known as the James Bay and Northern Quebec Agreement. In most other parts of northern Quebec, Labrador, and the Maritime provinces, anything resembling land-surrender treaties still does not exist. For sharply differing reasons, British Columbia and Quebec in the 1990s emerged as the potential flashpoints for aboriginal and Euro-Canadian differences over land.
