“6. Seeking Safe Harbour Indigenous Refugees and the Making of Canada’s Numbered Treaties” in “Challenging Borders”
Chapter 6 Seeking Safe Harbour Indigenous Refugees and the Making of Canada’s Numbered Treaties
Ryan Hall
We tend to think of our current historical moment as one marked by radical and growing instability, especially regarding the role of borders. Around the world, issues relating to the movement of peoples, the policing of immigrants and refugees, and the security of international boundaries have moved to the centre of increasingly bitter political divisions. Governments’ handling of refugees has become a flashpoint for fractious debates about the security and collective moral conscience of wealthy nations in particular. In this corner of the world, US Americans and Canadians sometimes see their treatment of immigrants and refugees as constitutive of their national differences. For example, in late 2015, when US Republican presidential candidates openly debated the merits of refusing entry to Syrian orphan children based on security concerns, Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau visited Toronto’s Pearson International Airport and publicly greeted Syrian refugees to Canada. In this case, welcoming refugees represented a way for Canadians to present themselves as more enlightened and humane than Americans. Indeed, Canada has become a destination for immigrants and refugees who find the United States increasingly unwelcoming. Issues of refugees and immigration are closely intertwined in Canada and the United States today, but as this chapter will demonstrate, this interconnection is far from new.1
Our current era of human movement and political rancor should prompt Canadians and Americans to reflect with fresh eyes on the foundations of their own physical presence in these lands and the role of refugees in that story. In the case of western Canada, where the conference that produced these papers was held and where the press that published them is located, this would mean revisiting the treaties between Indigenous First Nations and Canadian officials that directly precipitated the settlement of western Canada. Canadians ratified eleven treaties between 1871 and 1921—known today as the “Numbered Treaties”—that transferred most of the Canadian interior out of Native hands. The first seven of the eleven Numbered Treaties all transpired in the decade of the 1870s, which was itself a time of heightened political instability and concern about border crossing. In large part, the treaties represented attempts by Canadian officials and Indigenous nations to wrest some measure of stability during an era of perceived disorder.
This chapter will argue that the presence of refugees played a central role in these treaties, especially Treaty 7, and was therefore a crucial factor in establishing settler society in western Canada. During the 1860s and 1870s, western Canada became a destination for thousands of Indigenous people displaced by America’s so-called Indian Wars. To Canadian officials, the arrival of these refugees fuelled fears of international Indigenous alliances, cross-border raiding, ruinous resource depletion, and impeded settlement. As more Indigenous people fled north of the border seeking safety, the urgency of treaties grew exponentially. The Canadians who demanded and perpetrated the treaties saw them as both a necessary bulwark against potential refugee-caused disorder and a way to exclude Indigenous refugees from Canadian life. At the same time, displaced Indigenous people themselves made important contributions to treaties. On the northwest plains in particular, Native survivors who fled genocidal warfare in Montana had a crucial part in the negotiation and implementation of Treaty 7. Refugees were essential figures before, during, and after the Numbered Treaties.
Understanding this history requires expanding the frames we usually use to understand the history of treaties and Indigenous people. Typically, treaty making is approached as a distinctly national phenomenon, a key moment in the formation of Canada as a settler nation. Perhaps because of this national emphasis, the historiography of Canadian treaties rarely looks seriously at border politics.2 Likewise, despite a number of pathbreaking studies that engage with Indigenous and settler histories across international borders, Indigenous people are still generally understood in national terms as residents of particular ancestral territories that mark them as “American Indians” or “Aboriginal Canadians.”3 The notion of seeing Indigenous people (whose identity is generally defined by their connection to specific homelands) in the same terms as refugees (whose identity is defined by their lack of place) can therefore feel counterintuitive.4 In order to understand the position of Indigenous refugees in the history of the Numbered Treaties, we need to recognize Indigenous people as transnational actors and the treaties themselves as transnational events.
To label Indigenous people as “refugees” is, of course, reflective of colonial worldviews. The word refugees was first coined by Europeans to describe religious exiles during the Reformation and today generally refers to any people who, out of fear for their safety, have left their home country to seek refuge elsewhere.5 By definition, Indigenous claims far predate the imposition of nation-states and international borders, and Indigenous homelands continue to overlap and transcend these constructions. At the same time, Indigenous border crossing reflected an increasingly inescapable political reality for Indigenous people in the nineteenth century: international borders existed, and many Indigenous people deliberately sought to use them for their benefit. By the 1860s and 1870s, US and Canadian officials regularly labeled Indigenous people who crossed the forty-ninth parallel as “refugees.”6 Nevertheless, the scholarship of nineteenth-century Indigenous refugee studies remains fragmentary.7 By seeking out new connections between Indigenous history, refugee history, and treaty history, we can unlock surprising and important new stories that reframe the origins of western Canada itself.
The Refugee “Threat” and Canadian Expansion
Prior to Confederation, the British North American colonies that would later become Canada established a long history of welcoming Indigenous refugees from south of the border. For example, following the American War of Independence, the colony of Upper Canada welcomed several thousand Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) refugees led by the Mohawk chief Thayendanegea, or Joseph Brant, who fled north after his British allies surrendered to American separatists in 1783. Haudenosaunee people established thriving homelands north of the border, and many fought as British allies when the United States and Great Britain again went to war in 1812.8 A similar process unfolded in 1862, when between one thousand and two thousand Dakota people escaped persecution in Minnesota by fleeing north into what later became Manitoba. These Dakota refugees, who asserted traditional territorial claims north of the border and called on previous generations’ military alliances with the British, established peaceful communities and built working relationships with settlers partly by incorporating themselves into the region’s agricultural wage labour economy. Although the Dakota refugees were never afforded treaty relationships, they successfully lobbied British officials for several small reserves that exist to this day.9
Beginning with Confederation, Canadians adopted a more aggressive approach to dominating Indigenous lands and peoples, which would soon lead them to see the issue of refugees differently. In 1867, the distinct British colonies of Upper and Lower Canada (which became Ontario and Quebec), New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia united as the Dominion of Canada. They quickly added to their territorial claims by incorporating Manitoba in 1870, British Columbia in 1871, and Prince Edward Island in 1873. In 1870, the dominion acquired the charter to Rupert’s Land—the drainage of Hudson Bay that encompassed most of what is now Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba—from the Hudson’s Bay Company. Canada remained a small and uncertain country despite these vast territorial claims, with a settler population of just 3.2 million, less than a tenth of that south of the border. Yet Canadian leaders imagined a similar future to the Americans’. To fortify their claims, they conceived of a widespread program of Indigenous dispossession through treaties and the establishment of “reserve” lands. With reserves would come political subjugation and forced assimilation partially modelled on that of the United States.10
Canada’s nascent political leadership, including many of those today known as the “Fathers of Confederation,” worried openly about their lack of control over their expansive western territories. When Canadian officials added British Columbia to the dominion in 1871, they included an explicit promise that they would begin building a transcontinental railway linking British Columbia to the eastern provinces within two years and would complete it within ten. The proposed railway would need to pass through the territories of Indigenous nations that had yet to sign treaties with the government, and officials therefore needed to remove them or secure their permission to operate in their territories. Once they could confine and control Native people, officials imagined that the railway would bring farmers and other settlers onto the prairies, thus expanding the dominion and securing Canada’s claim to the region against potential American interference. The process seemed orderly in theory, and boosters explicitly touted the relative peacefulness of settlement in the Canadian West compared with that of the United States in order to attract settlers. From the perspective of Canadian expansionists, dispossessing and controlling Native people through treaties formed the essential first step toward building railroads, facilitating settlement, and strengthening the nation.11
As Canadians embarked on their project of continental expansion, events in the United States threatened to undermine it. Between the 1840s and the 1870s, the United States expanded rapidly into the lands west of the Mississippi River, where officials sought to systematically extinguish Native titles and restrict Indigenous people to reservations. This invasion led to a series of bitter and catastrophic conflicts throughout the West known as the “Indian Wars,” which only grew in intensity once Americans settled their own Civil War in 1865.12 The most long-lasting and iconic of these conflicts pitted the US Army against the Dakota people’s plains kin, the Lakota Sioux. The largest and most powerful Indigenous nation on the North American plains, the Lakota had established an expansive homeland across what is now Nebraska, South Dakota, Wyoming, and Montana after migrating from midwestern woodlands a century earlier. The Lakota had weathered multiple conflicts with US soldiers and settlers beginning in the 1850s, and in 1868 they forced US officials to grant them an enormous reservation comprising much of what is now South Dakota. When Americans abrogated this agreement by invading the Black Hills in 1874, the Lakota were again pulled into war, this time under the leadership of a holy man named Sitting Bull, who notched an astonishing victory by annihilating the US Army’s Seventh Cavalry at the Battle of Little Bighorn on June 25, 1876. Aware that the victory would lead to a greater mobilization of US troops and that the Lakota were already losing access to bison herds and trade goods, Sitting Bull chose to lead his people north. In the late summer and fall of 1876, Sitting Bull and his followers escaped across the border, and within months, around three thousand Lakota refugees streamed into lands claimed by Canada.13
The following year, the Nez Perce people of what is now Idaho likewise looked to Canada to escape US soldiers. The Nez Perces’ conflict with the United States began in 1860, when the discovery of gold led to a mass invasion of prospectors and settlers into their homelands. Over time, the Nez Perce people became divided between those who chose to settle on government-imposed reservation lands and others who rejected confinement. After the Lakota victory at Little Bighorn in 1876, US Army officials and Indian agents placed greater pressure on the Nez Perces to restrict themselves to the reservations. By June 1877, these tensions exploded into a war between US soldiers and warriors from the nontreaty faction led by a Nez Perce chief named Joseph. During the summer of 1877, Chief Joseph and his eight hundred followers led US soldiers on an epic chase through Idaho, Wyoming, and Montana. In September 1877, after realizing that they would not receive protection from the Crows of southern Montana as they had hoped, the Nez Perces set their sights northward in hopes that they could find refuge in Canada alongside Sitting Bull’s Lakota.14
The arrival of thousands of Indigenous refugees into Canada in 1876 and 1877 unnerved Canadian expansionists. Although officials allowed Native refugees to remain in Canada, settlers and government officials alike looked at them with enormous concern.15 First and foremost, Canadians worried about the possibility of military alliances between Indigenous nations already present in Canada and the refugees from the United States. Government officials had imagined this scenario as early as 1857, when the Canadian geographer Henry Youle Hind used his seminal report on the western prairies to warn that disaffected Native people from the United States could join with Indigenous groups north of the border to oppose future settlement on the prairies.16 In 1876, Alexander Morris, the governor of Canada’s Northwest Territories, worried that Indigenous people already in Canada would inevitably feel sympathy for the Lakota, and he urged his superiors to send larger military forces west.17 These concerns became widespread among the broader public in 1876 and 1877. For example, when the Nez Perces neared the Canadian border in September 1877, the Toronto Globe breathlessly speculated that the “northern tribes [were] ready for revolt” and that they would surely join together in an antiwhite alliance if possible.18 The Manitoba Free Press likewise circulated reports that Sitting Bull would soon rally the Nez Perces and northern Indigenous peoples like the Blackfoot to his cause, warning darkly that “the consequences” would be “fearful to contemplate.”19
Canadians also fretted about the possibility of refugees using Canada as a base for launching raids into the United States. In the spring of 1876, editors at the Globe warned that if the Lakota were to cross into Canada, it would be “used by them as a place of secure retreat, from which, at convenient seasons, to harass United States troops or settlers.”20 These worries persisted well after the Lakota arrived in Canada that summer. For example, as news of the Nez Perce conflict circulated in Canada during the summer of 1877, editors at the Manitoba Herald predicted that Sitting Bull would see the news and feel inspired to “go again upon the war-path” south of the border.21 Again, public anxieties paralleled those that Canadian government officials expressed in their own correspondence. Federal officials instructed North West Mounted Police (NWMP) officers to impress upon Sitting Bull and his Lakota followers “the necessity of keeping the peace towards the people of the United States.” Allowing Canada to become a launching point for raids into the United States, they worried, would damage relations with their more powerful neighbour beyond repair. It could even give US soldiers an excuse to cross the border and violate Canadian sovereignty.22
Canadians likewise worried that an influx of refugees would lead to dangerous overcompetition among Native people for scarce resources. During the 1860s and 1870s, populations of bison had declined disastrously across the Great Plains. The advent of more effective guns, the destruction of winter forage in river valleys, and the growing demand for leather bison hides for use in manufacturing rapidly accelerated the long downward trend in bison populations during the 1870s.23 The Canadian prairies still hosted resilient herds—among the last of their kind on the continent—but the arrival of thousands of refugee hunters could put new pressure on the bison and instigate clashes between Native nations. The Blackfoot people of what is now southern Alberta stood to lose the most by the arrival of competing hunters. By 1875, Blackfoot leaders were already lamenting to visitors that white, Métis, and First Nations bison hunters had begun to invade their lands from other parts of Canada. Indigenous refugees from the south could push this crisis to its breaking point. The Globe noted that the greatest danger from a potential Lakota migration into Canada would not be from their attacking settlers but from killing bison and thus instigating a catastrophic intertribal war.24 Government officials like Morris worried that a rapid collapse of bison populations would force Canadians to act quickly to prevent a famine, for which the fledgling government had little preparation.25 Although Canadians planned eventually to replace bison ranges with cattle ranches and farms, they feared a crisis in the short term.
Lastly, the presence of refugees raised fears about Canadians’ ability to guard the region against US incursions. Though largely forgotten today, US invasion and even annexation were persistent topics of conversation in both countries throughout the nineteenth century. Those concerns ratcheted up after the US Civil War ended and there was no longer a political need for Americans to balance the power of slave and free states. US politicians’ open (though ultimately toothless) musings about annexation helped motivate Canadian leaders like Sir John A. MacDonald, Canada’s first prime minister, to push for Confederation and the purchase of Rupert’s Land.26 By the 1870s, annexationist conversations centred on the sparsely settled Canadian West, where, during the Métis Resistance of 1870, a cadre of US Senators openly advocated for adding parts of Manitoba to the United States. US commentators blamed outdated British institutions like the Hudson’s Bay Company for the Canadians’ perceived failure to control and colonize the prairies.27 Indeed, the United States had a history of using weak colonialization as an excuse for aggression toward their neighbours: in its conquest of northern Mexico between 1846 and 1848, the United States claimed that widespread Comanche and Apache raids had rendered Mexico a failed state with no real claim to its northern frontiers. Could the Americans use the same justification to pursue refugees or even lay claim to western Canada? Even if formal annexation was unlikely, US officials could conceivably use perceived Canadian weakness as an excuse to send soldiers north across the border. Canadians’ approach to refugees and treaties should therefore be seen as part of an ongoing strategy to project strength and guard against the existential threat of US interference.28
Canadians had many worries about refugees, and beginning in the summer of 1876, they saw reason to believe that some of their fears had already come to fruition. In May, at least a month prior to the Battle of Little Bighorn, Canadian officials learned that Sitting Bull himself sent tobacco to a powerful Blackfoot chief named Crowfoot, who reported to a visiting police official that the gift came with an invitation to form an alliance. According to Crowfoot, the Lakota messenger told him that if the Blackfoot would join the Lakota in their war against enemy nations like the Crows and the United States, the Lakota would provide horses, mules, and human captives to the Blackfoot, and after the war was won, the Lakota would join the Blackfoot in a war against white Canadians north of the border. Crowfoot rejected the invitation, which he said infuriated the Lakota leader.29 Canadian officials believed in Blackfoot people’s good faith desire for a treaty, but the news planted seeds of doubt in some minds. Editors of the Toronto Globe intoned that Canada owed Crowfoot and the Blackfoot people its “appreciation” as well as its help in defending against Lakota reprisals. By enveloping the Blackfoot with “protection” and goodwill, Canadians believed they could stifle the refugees’ ability to build lasting relationships in the north, thus securing Canadian preeminence.30
While Canadian officials and settlers took some comfort in Crowfoot’s initial refusal of Sitting Bull’s entreaties in 1876, they saw more reason to worry by the following summer. When the snows melted and spring bison hunts began in 1877, the Blackfoot and the Lakota reopened communication. Sitting Bull and his followers had encamped around the Cypress Hills, near what is now the Alberta-Saskatchewan border, just as Crowfoot led his own people near the hills to hunt. When Sitting Bull learned of his Blackfoot counterpart’s approach, he once again dispatched an emissary with tobacco before taking it upon himself to lead a peace delegation to Crowfoot’s camp. Unburdening themselves of the previous year’s acrimony, the two chiefs shook hands and smoked together, and the combined camp held a friendship dance before the Lakota left the next day. (In a testament to their mutual esteem, Sitting Bull later named one of his own children after Crowfoot.)31 Their newfound friendship included no agreement regarding a military alliance, but it alarmed whites nonetheless. Canadian newspapers reprinted a report from a Montana newspaper that Sitting Bull had successfully rallied the Native people of western Canada to his cause. Meanwhile, Canadians continued to follow closely the news of Nez Perce refugees fighting their way through Montana on their way to join Sitting Bull north of the border.32 From the Canadian perspective, forces had begun to align against their carefully laid plans.
Apprehensions about Lakota and Nez Perce refugees and their potential inroads among Indigenous peoples north of the border provide crucial context for understanding treaty making. Canadian officials felt great urgency to make a treaty with the nations that might come into frequent contact with the refugees, especially the Blackfoot, Stoney Nakoda, and Tsuut’ina nations of what is now southern Alberta. Forming treaty relationships would prevent cross-border alliances and would send a clear message to the refugees that they would not receive support from other Indigenous nations, nor would they be granted reserves or assistance themselves. When the Lakota migration into Canada began in the summer of 1876, Canadian officials immediately began discussing the urgent need for treaties that would bind “Canadian” Indigenous nations to the federal government. Historian Sheila Robert has revealed extensive communication between concerned leaders. For instance, on July 11, 1876, Governor Alexander Morris lamented to the Canadian secretary of state that the Lakota entreaties to the Blackfoot had made a timely treaty council essential and urged that a treaty council date be set for the following year. Morris noted ominously that the Battle of Little Bighorn had taken place only 180 miles from the Canadian border (a mild exaggeration) and that violence could easily spread northward without preventive action. Another letter, by an unnamed Department of Interior official later that month, made the case more bluntly. “The Blackfeet and the Indians on the Boundary should be treated with as early as possible so as to secure their friendship,” it stated, in “the event of the American Sioux and other Indians being driven into or taking refuge in our territory.” The spectre of refugees and the many complications that came with them lent urgency to treaty making.33
Indigenous people likewise used the presence of refugees to speed the clock toward a treaty. Blackfoot leaders in particular had already been formally lobbying Canadian officials for a treaty prior to the Lakota arrival, having concluded that a formal agreement represented their only option for preventing incursions into their hunting territories. In 1875, a council of chiefs led by Crowfoot dictated a petition formally requesting a treaty council, but by the summer of 1876, their Canadian counterparts had yet to make firm arrangements. Sitting Bull’s gift of tobacco therefore represented an opportunity for the Blackfoot to pressure the Canadians for a treaty, and they wasted little time reporting it to NWMP officials. Blackfoot leaders may have also deliberately emphasized or exaggerated the salacious details of the invitation—which Canadians said included the promise of “white women”—to curry favour and build goodwill with the Canadians. In response, officials told Crowfoot that Queen Victoria herself was pleased with his rejection of the Lakota. At the same time, Crowfoot’s conversations with Canadian visitors may have carried an implied threat: if a treaty were not to happen, the Blackfoot would need to act in their own interests, either by going to war with other nations or even by taking the Lakota up on their offer of an alliance.34
Hastened by the perceived threat of refugees, the Treaty 7 council began on September 19, 1877. More than six thousand Blackfoot, Tsuut’ina, and Stoney Nakoda people (along with some Cree representatives who came to sign an adhesion to Treaty 6) gathered at the Bow River to meet with Canadian officials and mounted policemen. No refugee nations were included in the treaty negotiations. The treaty council proceeded swiftly despite Indigenous complaints about the lack of qualified translators (which justifiably persist to the present day). By September 22, just three days after the council commenced, representatives from all the assembled nations signed a treaty that reduced Indigenous territories to several reserves and thus opened southern Alberta to widespread settlement. As Treaty 7 elders, Sarah Carter, Walter Hildebrandt, and Dorothy First Rider have argued, commissioners’ fears about the potential threat of refugee nations may have led them to ignore urgent concerns about the poor translation and fast pace of negotiations. Indeed, the treaty concluded just as the Nez Perces were racing toward the Canadian border, though most would fall tragically short of their goal when US soldiers caught up to them at the Battle of Bear Paw eight days later. The commissioners’ anxiety about these refugees, coupled with their zeal for rapid settlement by the new Canadian nation, pushed them to complete a treaty at all costs, with consequences that echo into the present.35
Border Crossers in the Treaty Process
Concerns about the impact of Indigenous refugees motivated the treaty process, but to what extent did refugees themselves participate in the negotiation of the treaties? The Canadian government explicitly excluded Dakota, Lakota, and Nez Perce people from treaty negotiations and denied treaty relationships to refugee nations. Nonetheless, framing the treaties simply as excluding American Indigenous refugees and including Indigenous people already present in Canada might obscure important histories of Indigenous exiles, especially with reference to Treaty 7. In fact, many of the Blackfoot people who signed Treaty 7 could themselves be understood as exiles, or even refugees in part, who had fled violence in their American homelands for safety in Canada.
Blackfoot people, like the Lakota and Nez Perces, faced brutal violence south of the US-Canada border during the Indian Wars era. Historically, three nations have together known themselves as Blackfoot: the Kainai, Siksika, and Piikani. Blackfoot territory traditionally spanned from the North Saskatchewan River in the north, south to the Missouri River, and from the base of the Rocky Mountains several hundred miles onto the prairies, which meant that about a third of their homelands lay within the United States. Few if any Blackfoot people lived entirely in the United States, and many Blackfoot people travelled frequently back and forth across the forty-ninth parallel as they had for countless generations before. However, many Blackfoot people spent most of their time south of the border, particularly among the Piikanis, and Montana was the site of ancient winter camps and many essential religious sites.36 These southern Blackfoot homelands became the site of vicious conflicts with Montana settlers who poured into the region following prospectors’ discovery of gold on the Missouri River headwaters in 1862. Small-scale conflicts proliferated throughout Montana territory during the late 1860s as settlers accosted and sometimes murdered Blackfoot people and Blackfoot people raided settlements in turn. These conflicts culminated in January 1870, when US soldiers massacred nearly an entire band of Piikani people on the Marias River (known to the Blackfoot as the Bear River) about forty miles south of the international border.37
The conflicts in Montana led many Blackfoot people to seek permanent refuge on the Canadian side of the border. During the 1860s, British fur traders at Edmonton and Rocky Mountain House happily noted that many Blackfoot people began to avoid Montana entirely due to the violence. This flow increased after the 1870 Marias Massacre, when the Piikani people grew desperate to avoid further violence from the Americans. According to witnesses, many survivors of the massacre immediately fled north and trekked up to a hundred miles in subzero temperatures to escape the United States, even though the soldiers stole all their horses. More Piikanis from other bands followed, fearful of attacks on their own communities. They spent the winter following the massacre in the Belly River valley (in and near present-day Lethbridge) and then moved to the Cypress Hills for the summer bison hunts. These Blackfoot survivors were not “refugees” insofar as they were never entirely dislodged from ancestral territories, but they were nonetheless exiled from much of their core homeland and forced to seek safety in the north. They therefore had much in common with the Dakota, Lakota, and Nez Perce people who so preoccupied Canadian officials during the same era. (Dakota and Lakota people likewise claim ancestral lands in Canada, but their communities generally resided in the United States.) Many Blackfoot people never returned south of the border, choosing instead to take their chances with the Canadians.38
Displaced Blackfoot people played a significant role in the leadup to Treaty 7 as well as in the treaty negotiations themselves. Although firsthand sources are scarce, we can assume that some Blackfoot people’s unique knowledge and experience from south of the border was valued in conversations within the Blackfoot community prior to the 1877 treaty council. The Blackfoot people who had spent significant time in Montana had far more firsthand experience in dealing with settlers and government representatives than those in Canada. In contrast to south of the border, the settler invasion of Alberta had just begun. Fur trade companies had established isolated outposts in the region as early as 1792, but government officials and law enforcement agents had only established a permanent presence north of the border in 1874.39 As transnational people, the Blackfoot had already experienced a mass invasion of settlers south of the international border, which could provide invaluable perspectives in the north. Those experiences undoubtedly carried warnings about how voracious the settlers’ desire for land and resources could be.
Blackfoot people who had fled Montana provided warnings about the potential flimsiness of government treaties. Representatives of all three Blackfoot nations signed a treaty with the United States in 1855 that the government had violated repeatedly by neglecting to deliver promised annuity goods. Moreover, their subsequent attempts to update the treaty in 1865 and 1868 had been rejected by the US Senate even after both the Blackfoot and US treaty commissioners had signed. The voices of the Blackfoot people who left Montana are often obscured in archival sources, but documents yield some occasional glimpses. In 1871, the year after the Marias Massacre, a close associate of the Piikanis named Jean L’Heaureux noted that the Piikanis in Canada “dread[ed] troops and any conference business, since the treachery of the American government officials towards them.” Several chiefs who had signed the 1855 treaty with the United States attended the 1877 council with the Canadians, including the Kainai war chief Medicine Calf, who openly challenged the Canadian commissioners by sharing his memory that the Americans were generous with annuity goods at first but became more parsimonious over time. In a carefully crafted speech early in the council, he urged his fellow chiefs to insist that the Canadians pay for the timber that mounted police had already used and that the treaty include permanent yearly compensation for all Blackfoot people. Although Medicine Calf’s demands were only partially realized, he provided a hard-earned perspective from south of the border.40
As Medicine Calf knew, history and experience carried hard lessons that spanned international borders. The perspectives of these treaty signers are difficult to access in the archival record, but historians should not ignore the lived linkages between American and Canadian treaties. These Indigenous border crossers surely played an important but little-understood role in negotiating Treaty 7.
Conclusion
Indigenous refugees had a crucial part in the conception and negotiation of the Numbered Treaties in Canada. The presence of refugees from America’s Indian Wars—and the possibility of more to come—was one of the major motivations for Canadian officials to organize treaties and to finish them quickly. In the case of Treaty 7, Indigenous people likewise used anxieties about Indigenous border crossing to advocate for a treaty themselves. Although most refugees were excluded from treaties, in some cases Indigenous border crossers contributed to the negotiation of treaties by bringing their experience from the United States to their dealings in Canada. In each case, Indigenous people used the border in savvy and creative ways to advance their own interests. While US and Canadian officials saw the border as a dangerous and inconvenient impediment to their ambitions, Indigenous people recognized that they could use the border to their advantage by escaping persecution, sharing crucial knowledge, or gaining political leverage. The border and the Indigenous people who crossed it were central to the era of the Numbered Treaties.
In a broader sense, the history of Indigenous refugees in Canada should be a reminder of the importance of transnational perspectives in North American history. Like so many other historical events, treaties do not happen in isolation and cannot be understood in purely national terms. They are events with a wide array of causes and effects that span international borders. The history of Canadian treaties therefore cannot be understood fully in isolation from events in the United States and vice versa. The histories of these settler nations were deeply intertwined then, and they remain so today.
Notes
1. Gregory Krieg, “Christie on Refugees: Not Even 5-Year-Old Orphans”; Agence France-Presse, “Justin Trudeau Shows Up at Airport to Welcome Canada’s First Syrian Refugees”; Jake Halpern, “The Underground Railroad for Refugees.”
2. While there are many excellent studies of the Numbered Treaties, few engage extensively with the role of border politics. See, for example, J. R. Miller, Compact, Contract, Covenant: Aboriginal Treaty-Making in Canada; and D. J. Hall, From Treaties to Reserves: The Federal Government and Native Peoples in Territorial Alberta, 1870–1905. Jill St. Germain’s works utilize a comparative rather than a connective framework for US and Canadian treaties. Jill St. Germain, Indian Treaty-Making Policy in the United States and Canada, 1867–1877; Jill St. Germain, Broken Treaties: United States and Canadian Relations with the Lakotas and the Plains Cree, 1868–1885.
3. Key regional cross-border studies include Sheila McManus, The Line Which Separates: Race, Gender, and the Making of the Alberta-Montana Borderlands; Ryan Hall, Beneath the Backbone of the World: Blackfoot People and the North American Borderlands, 1720–1877; Michel Hogue, Metis and the Medicine Line: Creating a Border and Dividing a People; David G. McCrady, Living with Strangers: The Nineteenth-Century Sioux and the Canadian-American Borderlands; Beth LaDow, The Medicine Line: Life and Death on a North American Borderland; and Benjamin Hoy, A Line of Blood and Dirt: Creating the Canada-United States Border Across Indigenous Lands.
4. For contested definitions of indigeneity, see United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, State of the World’s Indigenous Peoples, 4–7. For a current working definition of refugee, see Bruce Burson and David James Cantor, “Introduction: Interpreting the Refugee Definition via Human Rights Standards,” 1–24.
5. For the origin of the word refugee, see Maximilian Miguel Scholz, “Religious Refugees and the Search for Public Worship in Frankfurt am Main, 1554–1608,” 765.
6. For examples, see George Wright to Thomas Meagher, April 16, 1867, Records of the Montana Superintendency of Indian Affairs, RG 75, Records of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, M833, National Archives Microfilm Publications, roll 1, p. 2; and J. Norquay to Alexander Morris, January 8, 1873, in Dominion of Canada, Sessional Papers of the Dominion of Canada: Volume 5, First Session of the Second Parliament, Session 1873, 14.
7. For works that frame Indigenous histories as refugee studies, see Brenden Rensink, Native but Foreign: Indigenous Immigrants and Refugees in the North American Borderlands; Jerome Green, Beyond Bear’s Paw: The Nez Perce Indians in Canada; Jeff Guinn, Our Land Before We Die: The Proud Story of the Seminole Negro; Evan Taparata, “‘Refugees as You Call Them’: The Politics of Refugee Recognition in the Nineteenth-Century United States,” 9–35; and Paul Conrad, The Apache Diaspora: Four Centuries of Displacement and Survival.
8. Bothwell, Your Country, My Country, 51–56; Alan Taylor, The Divided Ground: Indians, Settlers, and the Northern Borderland of the American Revolution, 77–407.
9. McCrady, Living with Strangers, 17–30; Benjamin Hoy, “A Border without Guards: First Nations and the Enforcement of National Space,” 92–93; David Mills, Report of Minister of Interior, December 31, 1877, in Annual Report of the Department of the Interior for the Year Ended 30th June, 1877, xvii–xviii; Alexander Morris, The Treaties of Canada with the Indians of Manitoba and the North-West Territories; Including the Negotiations on Which They Were Based, and Other Information, 12, 276–84. Dakota people maintain that their ancestral homelands extended into what became Canada. Leo J. Omani, “A Written Response from Canada,” 283–84.
10. Robert Bothwell, Your Country, My Country: A Unified History of the United States and Canada, 117–18; St. Germain, Broken Treaties, 14–26. For a summary of Canadian settler colonialism and assimilationism, see Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, Honouring the Truth, Reconciling for the Future: Summary of the Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, 37–134.
11. Miller, Compact, Contract, Covenant, 148–49, 156; Sheila Robert, “The Negotiation and Implementation of Treaty 7,” 47–48; McManus, Line Which Separates, 60–76; “Notes on the North-West.”
12. For the Indian Wars, see Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, 133–61; Robert V. Hine, John Mack Faragher, and Jon T. Coleman, The American West: A New Interpretive History, 2nd ed., 177–222; and Robert Utley, The Indian Frontier of the American West, 1846–1890, 65–196.
13. McCrady, Living with Strangers, 61–85; Pekka Hämäläinen. Lakota America: A New History of Indigenous Power, 337–79; Robert Utley, The Lance and the Shield: The Life and Times of Sitting Bull, 106–210. In accordance with Lakota language, this chapter uses Lakota in both the singular and plural forms.
14. Elliott West, The Last Indian War: The Nez Perce Story, 123–314; Treaty 7 Elders and Tribal Council with Sarah Carter, Walter Hildebrandt, and Dorothy First Rider, The True Spirit and Original Intent of Treaty 7, 226–28.
15. Canadian officials chose to grant refugees sanctuary but did not provide treaties or support for fear of inflaming Indigenous or US resentments. See Joseph Manzione, “I Am Looking to the North for My Life”: Sitting Bull, 1876–1881, 51–52; and Hoy, “Border without Guards,” 93–94.
16. Arthur Ray, J. R. Miller, and Frank Tough, Bounty and Benevolence: A History of Saskatchewan Treaties, 96–104.
17. Robert, “Negotiation and Implementation of Treaty 7,” 44–45.
18. “The U.S. Indians.”
19. “Storm in the North-West,” Manitoba Free Press.
20. “The Sioux Question.”
21. “Indian and Mexican Troubles.”
22. Quote from Canada Department of the Interior, Annual Report of the Department of the Interior for the Year Ended 30th June, 1877, xviii; St. Germain, Indian Treaty-Making Policy, 45.
23. Andrew Isenberg, The Destruction of the Bison: An Environmental History, 1750–1920, 93–122; Elliott West, The Way to the West: Essays on the Central Plains, 51–79; William Dobak, “Killing the Canadian Buffalo,” 33–52.
24. Treaty 7 Elders et al., True Spirit, 276–77; “The Indians of the North-West”; “The Land of the Blackfeet”; “Sitting Bull”; John Taylor, “Two Views on the Meaning of Treaties Six and Seven,” 26; Utley, Lance and the Shield, 191.
25. Morris, Treaties of Canada, 283–84.
26. For an overview of annexation debates, which have been underexamined by historians in recent years, see Donald F. Warner, The Idea of Continental Union: Agitation for the Annexation of Canada to the United States, 1849–1893; and Bothwell, Your Country, My Country, 116–21. The cross-border raids of the pro-Irish Fenian Brotherhood between 1866 and 1871 added to these concerns.
27. Warner, Idea of Continental Union, 107–25; James G. Snell, “The Frontier Sweeps Northwest: American Perceptions of the British American Prairie West at the Point of Canadian Expansion (circa 1870),” 381–400; Paul Sharp, Whoop-Up Country: The Canadian-American West, 1865–1885, 292–312.
28. Brian DeLay, War of a Thousand Deserts: Indian Raids and the U.S.-Mexican War, 226–96; St. Germain, Indian Treaty-Making Policy, 45; Hall, From Treaties to Reserves, 41.
29. Frederick White to R. W. Scott, December 30, 1876, in Dominion of Canada, Sessional Papers of the Dominion of Canada: Volume 7, Fourth Session of the Third Parliament, Session 1877, 21–24.
30. “The Noble Savage.”
31. Hugh Dempsey, Crowfoot: Chief of the Blackfeet, 91–92; Utley, Lance and the Shield, 201–2.
32. “The Storm in the North-West,” Manitoba Free Press (Winnipeg), September 15, 1877; “The Storm in the North-West,” Globe (Toronto), September 4, 1877.
33. Robert, “Negotiation and Implementation of Treaty 7,” 44–47. See also St. Germain, Indian Treaty-Making Policy, 44–45.
34. Treaty 7 Elders et al., True Spirit, 276–77; White to Scott, December 30, 1876, in Sessional Papers 1877, 21–24.
35. Treaty 7 Elders et al., True Spirit, 228–29. For more on translation problems, see Frank Oliver, “The Blackfeet Indian Treaty,” 28; Ben Calf Robe, Siksiká: A Blackfoot Legacy, 21; White Headed Chief (Spumiapi) interview by Jane Richardson, September 2, 1938, series 1, p. 114, Jane and Lucien Hanks Fonds, M-8458-6, Glenbow Museum Archives, Calgary, Alberta, Canada; Treaty 7 Elders et al., True Spirit, 69–77, 143–44; Jack Crow interview by Albert Yellowhorn, January 1, 1973, Indian History Film Project, Canadian Plains Research Center, University of Regina (IHFP), http://hdl.handle.net/10294/508; Useless Good Runner interview by Dila Provost and Albert Yellowhorn, ca. 1973, IHFP, http://hdl.handle.net/10294/546; and Mrs. Buffalo interview by Johnny Smith, March 12, 1975, IHFP, http://hdl.handle.net/10294/504.
36. Hall, Beneath the Backbone, 13–36, 144–71; Rosalyn LaPier, Invisible Reality: Storytellers, Storytakers, and the Supernatural World of the Blackfeet, 91–145; McManus, Line Which Separates, 57–82.
37. Andrew Graybill, The Red and the White: A Family Saga of the American West, 54–104; Blanca Tovías, “Diplomacy and Contestation Before and After the 1870 Massacre of Amskapi Pikuni,” 269–93. I use the term “Marias Massacre” to differentiate from the US Army’s 1863 Bear River Massacre of Shoshone people.
38. Hugh Dempsey, The Great Blackfoot Treaties, 66; C. Imoda to Alfred Sully, April 11, 1870, Records of the Montana Superintendency of Indian Affairs, RG 75, Records of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, M833, National Archives Microfilm Publications, roll 2, p. 1; Alexander Culbertson, “Regarding the Alleged Massacre of Piegan Indians by Col. Baker,” June 20, 1870, Records of the Montana Superintendency of Indian Affairs, RG 75, Records of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, M833, National Archives Microfilm Publications, roll 2, pp. 4–5; Culbertson, “Journey from the Marias River to the Bow River, Canada, July–August, 1870,” Alexander Culbertson Papers, SC 586, Montana Historical Society, Helena, Montana, pp. 8–10; Johnny Healy, Life and Death on the Upper Missouri: The Frontier Sketches of Johnny Healy, 227; “Personal.”
39. For state expansion in Alberta, see McManus, Line Which Separates, 57–82; Hogue, Metis and the Medicine Line, 73–99; and Hall, Beneath the Backbone, 47, 172–80.
40. Dempsey, Crowfoot, 99–100; Jean L’Heureux to J. W. Christie, 1871, Richard C. Hardisty Fonds, M-5902, Glenbow Museum Archives, Calgary, Alberta, Canada, p. 3; Hall, Beneath the Backbone, 119–43; McCrady, Living with Strangers, 107–8; Morris, Treaties of Canada, 270.
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