First Nations? Second Thoughts by Tom Flanagan

Author:Tom Flanagan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MQUP
Published: 2019-02-26T16:00:00+00:00

THE ONTARIO “TREATIES”

What are today known as the Ontario “treaties” are very different in character from the eighteenth-century agreements signed in eastern Canada. The latter were declarations of submission, made to cement peace after periods of fighting among the English and the French and Indian tribes. Those agreements had almost nothing to say about land or property rights. The Ontario agreements, in contrast, were real-estate conveyances, made to extinguish the Indian title to land so that settlement could proceed in Upper Canada.

The Ontario agreements were influenced by two factors: the Royal Proclamation of 1763, which recognized the existence of aboriginal property rights and stipulated that they be surrendered only to agents of the Crown and not to private purchasers; and the urgent need to settle Loyalist refugees from the American Revolution, including Indian allies of the British, who started to stream north in the late 1770s. In 1781 the British authorities began to negotiate the surrender of the Indian title on the north shore of the lower Great Lakes so that resettlement could proceed within a clear framework of property rights.26

The text of one of the earliest of these agreements, for the surrender of the island of Mackinac in the strait between Lakes Huron and Michigan, is illustrative. It simply says that, in return for “Five Thousand Pounds New York Currency,” the undersigned chiefs “and all others of our Nation, the Chipwas, who have or can lay claim to the hereinmentioned Island … do surrender and yield up [their rights to the island] … and we do hereby make for ourselves and posterity a renunciation of all claims in future to said Island.”27 Ironically, the British lost their investment in this deal because the island ended up on the American side of the boundary when peace was concluded.

From 1781 to the War of 1812, the Crown entered into dozens of similar transactions in southern Ontario. According to the leading authority on the subject, all were “relatively simple arrangements. The Crown made a single, one-time payment in goods for a specific portion of territory.”28 There were no subsequent annual payments or any other continuing benefits. The agreements did not mention reserves because, at this stage, land was plentiful and Indians who sold a tract could move elsewhere. After a century and a half of exposure to Old World diseases and frontier warfare, the Indian population had declined so drastically that it was not hard to accommodate. Where reserves were required, they were set aside by executive proclamation, as in the case of the Six Nations reserve along the Grand River.29

There was a new wave of immigration to Upper Canada after the War of 1812, leading to another round of land-surrender agreements. From 1818 on, the Crown payed annuities instead of a one-time purchase price. This originated as an economy measure, because the money for the annuities could be derived from selling the surrendered lands, thus making the process self-financing.30 After 1829 the annuities were changed from payments to individuals to appropriations for bands to spend collectively on housing or other needs.

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