Indigenous political organization

Frederick Ogilvie Loft founded the League of Indians of Canada in December 1918 at the Council House in Ohsweken, on the Six Nations Reserve in Ontario. The centuries-old Iroquois League inspired Loft to found this “pan-Indian” organization, the first in Canada, though he may have been aware of the collective potential in such regional alliances as the Allied Indian Tribes of British Columbia. First Nations throughout the country had already been greatly irritated by the federal government, which in 1911 amended the Indian Act to permit the expropriation of reserves adjacent to or within large towns. The Department of Indian Affairs’ continual opposition to the League of Indians hampered its growth. Loft died in July 1934. By this time the League of Indians, apart from its branches in Alberta and Saskatchewan, had effectively become defunct. Other leaders nonetheless took up Fred Loft’s cause of a nationwide organization, most recently the National Indian Brotherhood, formed in 1968, and its successor, the Assembly of First Nations, chartered in 1985.