Numbered Treaties

Numbered Treaties, (1871–1921), in Canadian history, a series of 11 treaties negotiated between the dominion and the country’s aboriginal nations. The treaties are named for the order of their negotiation: Treaty 1 (1871), Treaty 2 (1871), Treaty 3 (1873), and so forth. While they were neither the first nor the last major agreements between these parties, the Numbered Treaties became the legal foundation on which much of the subsequent interaction between indigenous peoples and the Canadian government was built.

Although Native Americans and Europeans made a variety of agreements during the early colonial period, the British Proclamation of 1763 marked a significant change in the scope and tone of such compacts. Executed after the French and Indian War (1754–63) and Pontiac’s War (1762–63) had brought attention to the issue of Euro-American encroachment on Indian land, the proclamation recognized indigenous title to the immense region bounded by Hudson Bay, the Appalachian Mountains, the Gulf of Mexico, and the Mississippi River. It also reserved to the British crown the right to negotiate for the purchase of the lands therein.

Little more than a century later, the British North America Act (1867) created the Dominion of Canada. At the time the country’s westernmost province was Ontario, but within a decade the dominion had reached the Pacific Ocean. Although the Crown Lands Protection Act (1839) had, from the Euro-American perspective, reduced indigenous title to usufruct, or the right to obtain the game, fish, wild plant foods, and other products of a given property, the precedent established in 1763 required negotiation with tribes to establish the right to settle the newly annexed regions.

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While legal precedents were one factor in the government’s motivation for negotiation rather than seizure, the preference for a diplomatic resolution to the title question was considerably advanced by events occurring elsewhere in the British Empire and in the United States. News of bloody interethnic conflicts—most notably the South Asian Indian Mutiny (1857–59), more than a decade of Maori armed resistance to forced land cessions in New Zealand (1860–72), the so-called Sioux Uprising (1862) in the American Midwest, and unrest in South Africa that later devolved into the Zulu War (1879)—made Canada’s Euro-American citizens and legislators acutely aware of the potential for violence against settlers.

From an indigenous perspective, previous events indicated that negotiation could provide a tribe with some degree of enduring legal and property rights. In 1850 the indigenous nations of eastern Canada had successfully concluded negotiations for the Robinson-Superior and Robinson-Huron treaties. Twenty years later the adept legal and political tactics of Métis leader Louis Riel led to passage of the Manitoba Act, which from an aboriginal perspective was an extremely favourable piece of legislation (as written, albeit not as later implemented).

Aboriginal leaders thus had a sound basis for believing that they could craft agreements of long-lasting utility. They were also well aware that settler safety was a key political issue for the government and were quite willing to engage in suggestive displays of military power in order to advance their interests. A final influence was the realization that the opportunity to negotiate would likely be of limited duration: by 1870, Canada’s indigenous nations had begun to receive refugees who were fleeing from U.S. military depredations, accounts of which presaged dire consequences should diplomacy fail. By 1877—the year in which Sitting Bull escaped to Canada after defeat by the U.S. military and in which Dull Knife and Crazy Horse surrendered to the same authorities—it had become eminently clear that even the best military minds could not make armed resistance a secure long-term strategy for maintaining aboriginal sovereignty.

The signatories and provisions of each of the Numbered Treaties are unique, but some generalizations are possible. Native peoples typically ceded particular tracts of land to the dominion, while it in turn provided guarantees that other tracts, known as reserves or reservations, would remain permanently under indigenous control. The amount of land that a tribe or band retained under a given agreement was often calculated on a per capita basis; some treaties allocated as few as 160 acres (approximately 65 hectares) for a family of five, while others provided as many as 640 acres (260 hectares) for the same number of people. The Numbered Treaties also typically included guarantees that the signatories would receive an array of annual compensation (annuities) in perpetuity. These frequently included cash; goods such as farm equipment, livestock, or food; and services such as schools or health care. Many of the Numbered Treaties were later amended by instruments known as adhesions. These typically clarified the language of the agreement, provided for additional signatories, or adjusted the treaty’s terms in other relatively minor ways. The last adhesion, which was made to Treaty 9, was accepted in 1930.

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The negotiation of substantive agreements between the dominion and the aboriginal nations did not end with the Numbered Treaties. The Williams Treaties (1923), for instance, involved the disposition of nearly 13 million acres (more than 5 million hectares) of land in Ontario. The 1982 Canada Act legally recognized the right of indigenous self-government, and many subsidiary agreements enacting that right were negotiated by indigenous polities and by the dominion. In 1993 two acts of Parliament created Nunavut, a predominantly Inuit territory, out of parts of the Northwest Territories. Perhaps most wide-reaching of all, a series of Comprehensive Land Claims Agreements that began with the James Bay and Northern Quebec Agreement (1975) have been used to resolve issues such as the dominion’s failure to fulfill specific treaty obligations and the determination of title for aboriginal lands not included in other compacts.