Numbered treaties

The 11 agreements concluded between the Canadian government and various First Nations following confederation are referred to as the western numbered treaties.

Canada recognized the rights of Indigenous people to their lands, accepted their relinquishment of these rights, and in return guaranteed to them what must have seemed a continuation of their way of life, by permitting hunting and fishing on the unsettled lands in the territories they had ceded. By allotting small reserves in scattered locations, the government wished to avoid the American system of “removal” and to cultivate a conservative “home feeling of attachment to the soil,” which would be communally owned to maintain cohesion in the face of immigration.

All these methods were conservative, but the goal was, from an Indigenous point of view, revolutionary: assimilation. Gradual social and economic change was an integral part of each treaty. Most western treaties made provision for education on the reserve to, in the words of Alexander Morris, lieutenant governor of the Northwest Territories, “train the new generation in the arts of civilization.” He stated that “a very important feature” of all treaties was the supply of “agricultural implements, oxen, cattle (to form the nuclei of herds), and seed grain,” the tools necessary to transform hunters into farmers. In a classic imperialist manner Morris considered the rewards of empire due only to those who recognized the responsibilities of their self-assumed burden and fulfilled their Christian duty.