Treaties of Canada with the Indians of Manitoba and the North-West Territories

Gwynneth C.D. Jones is a policy advisor with the Ontario Native Affairs
Secretariat.

This is a facsimile paperback edition of Morris’s accounts (first
published in 1880) of treaty-making with the Native peoples of
Northwestern Ontario and the Prairies. Morris, born in Ontario, was a
lawyer, businessman, and politician who was the Crown’s negotiator for
Treaties 1 through 7, in his capacities as Lieutenant-Governor of
Manitoba from 1873 to 1878 and Lieutenant-Governor of the North-West
Territories (Now Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba) from 1872 to 1876.

Morris assembled a variety of letters, official reports, dispatches,
notes, and other accounts, written both by himself and by other
witnesses to the treaty process, to create this book. It is a unique,
essential source for the study of Indian treaties and the history of
aboriginal peoples from Northwestern Ontario to the Rockies. These are
eyewitness accounts and verbatim transcripts of the deliberations that
led to the legal removal of Indian title from millions of acres of land,
the creation of the reserve system in the West, and the reshaping of the
relationship between aboriginal peoples and the Crown.

However, it is important for the reader to understand the documents’
context. Morris was genuinely interested in and sympathetic to the
aboriginal peoples with whom he dealt, but his version of events must be
read in the light of the prevailing beliefs of his time, class, and
place: the superiority of Christianity, of British civilization, and of
an individualistic agricultural and industrial economy. Morris’s role,
as he saw it, was to open land to white settlement and progress, while
providing the Indians with some means of adapting to a new
white-dominated agricultural society. Every page of this book reflects
this mid-Victorian worldview. Aboriginal peoples understood the process
and results of treaty-making quite differently from the Crown
negotiators, and consequently their version of the historical events
Morris describes and their interpretations of the Treaty provisions are
often markedly different from the views of Morris and his successors in
federal and provincial governments. To understand the roots of the
current debates on aboriginal rights, one must learn both the history
recorded by Morris and the history preserved by the aboriginal peoples
with whom he dealt.