First Nations, Métis and Inuit, 1890–1914: Treaties, Change and Resilience

Let's start with a question

If you made an agreement by talking for hours with someone, and they later handed you a paper with different words on it, which version would count?

For many First Nations who signed treaties between 1899 and 1906, this question is still important today. In this lesson you will learn about these treaties, and about how First Nations, Métis and Inuit communities lived, adapted and resisted in a fast-changing Canada.

Remember from Strand A

In Strand A you study Treaties 1 to 7 (1871–1877), signed across the Prairies, and the Indian Act of 1876. Between 1890 and 1914 the Crown wanted treaties for lands farther north, where there were gold, minerals, forests and routes for railways.

Treaty 8 (1899)

• Signed: 21 June 1899 at Lesser Slave Lake, first with Cree leaders. Denesuline, Dane-zaa and other nations joined later through adhesions.
• Area: about 841,000 km², covering what are now northern Alberta, northwestern Saskatchewan and parts of British Columbia and the Northwest Territories. It is the largest treaty by area in Canadian history.
• Why the Crown wanted it: interest in northern resources, and the Klondike Gold Rush, which sent a flood of newcomers through the region.
• Oral promises: treaty commissioners promised aloud that people would not be prevented from hunting and fishing as they always had. But the written text allowed the government to make regulations, and the interpreter later said that part was not read aloud. Later game laws were often enforced against First Nations hunters.
• Medical care and help for the elderly and poor were promised but unevenly delivered.

Treaty 9: the James Bay Treaty (1905–06)

Treaty 9 covers most of northern Ontario.

• Signed: 1905–06 with Cree and Anishinaabe (Ojibwe) nations, with more adhesions in 1929–30.
• Commissioners: Duncan Campbell Scott and Samuel Stewart for Canada, and Daniel MacMartin for Ontario. Ontario had a say because the land and resources were in the province.
• Terms in the text: a one-time payment of $8 per person, then $4 per person each year, and reserves of one square mile for each family of five.
• Why the Crown wanted it: to open the North for railways, mining, lumbering and settlement.
• Why the Cree and Anishinaabe signed: to protect their lands and the animals they trapped from the newcomers already arriving, and to secure support.
• The words problem: the written treaty said the nations would "cede, release, surrender and yield up" their land. Historians note these ideas had no equivalent in Cree or Ojibwe language and worldview. Many First Nations understood the treaty as an agreement to share the land.

Treaty 10 (1906–07)

Treaty 10 covered nearly 220,000 km² of northern Saskatchewan and part of Alberta, signed with Cree and Dene nations in 1906–07. At the same time, commissioners settled Métis scrip claims, for example at Portage La Loche.

The Métis Nation, 1890–1914

After the North-West Resistance of 1885, many Métis families faced hard times.

• Scrip: rather than signing treaties, Métis people were offered scrip: under Treaty 8, a certificate worth $240 or 240 acres. Scrip ended their land rights in exchange. Many sold it to speculators for much less than it was worth, because they needed money or the land offered was far away.
• Saint-Paul-des-Métis: in 1896, a Catholic priest, Father Albert Lacombe, started a farming colony for Métis families northeast of Edmonton. It struggled, and by about 1909 it was opened to other settlers; many Métis families lost their land again.
• Road allowance people: some families lived on narrow strips of Crown land set aside for roads, often facing poverty and discrimination.
• Resilience: Métis families kept their Michif language, music, fiddling and jigging, beadwork and strong family networks, and many worked as freighters, hunters, trappers and guides. In the next generations, Métis people organized politically to win recognition of their rights.

Inuit, 1890–1914

Inuit lived across the Arctic in their homelands, as they had for many generations, with their own laws, knowledge and ways of life.

• Whalers: American and Scottish whaling ships hunted bowhead whales in the Arctic. Starting in 1890, American whalers spent winters at Herschel Island in the western Arctic. Many Inuit worked for whalers as hunters, guides and seamstresses, trading for goods like rifles, metal tools and cloth. Whalers also brought diseases that took many lives, and over-hunting reduced whale numbers. Commercial whaling collapsed in the early 1900s.
• Police and missionaries: In 1903, the North-West Mounted Police set up posts at Herschel Island and Fullerton Harbour, partly to show that the Arctic was Canadian. Anglican missionary Edmund Peck began a mission on Baffin Island in 1894 and helped spread a syllabic writing system for Inuktitut, which many Inuit still use.
• Continuity: through these changes, Inuit kept hunting, travelling, building and sharing according to their own knowledge and values.

Resisting and speaking out

First Nations did not simply accept these changes. They used petitions, delegations and the courts, and they kept their cultures alive.

• In 1906, Squamish Chief Joe Capilano and two other chiefs from British Columbia travelled to London to ask King Edward VII to recognize their land rights. Most of B.C. had no treaties.
• In 1910, Secwépemc, Nlaka'pamux and Syilx chiefs presented the Memorial to Sir Wilfrid Laurier at Kamloops, explaining how their lands had been taken without agreement.
• In 1913, the Nisga'a Nation sent a petition to the Privy Council in London asking that their land title be recognized. (Their land claim was finally settled in the Nisga'a Final Agreement, in effect from 2000.)
• E. Pauline Johnson (Tekahionwake), born at Six Nations of the Grand River in Ontario to a Mohawk father and an English-born mother, became one of Canada's best-known poets and performers, touring Canada and Britain. She proudly presented her Mohawk heritage to audiences who knew little about First Nations. She died in 1913.