Blame the Crown, not the monarch, for a broken relationship with Indigenous people

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Douglas Sanderson (Amo Binashii) is the Prichard Wilson Chair in Law and Public Policy at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Law. He is Beaver Clan, from the Opaskwayak Cree Nation, and the author of Valley of the Birdtail: An Indian Reserve, a White Town, and the Road to Reconciliation, co-authored with Andrew Stobo Sniderman.

The passing of Queen Elizabeth has brought into sharp focus the Crown’s relationship with Indigenous people in Canada.

The traditional thinking goes like this: Indigenous people signed treaties with the Crown, and the Crown is the monarch. Ergo, Canada’s Indigenous people have a special relationship with the monarch, now King Charles III, and he should be held to account for broken treaty promises.

But this is wrong in almost every respect.

Between the 16th and 19th centuries, Indigenous people entered into many, many treaties with representatives of the British Crown. Examples of this long history can be found in the Peace and Friendship Treaties, a series of agreements that came to be known as the Covenant chain.

A treaty, as it was understood by the Europeans and Indigenous people who entered into these agreements, was not a written agreement. They were not contracts. Instead, face-to-face discussions outlined the contours of the treaty relationship, and these understandings would also be set out in wampum belts made of beads or shells that served as mnemonic testimony to the nature of a relationship. At first, wampum belts were only made by Indigenous people, but over the decades, the British learned to weave and make the belts, and they used these wampum belts as evidence that they, too, understood the nature of these relationships.

Today, we have access to the written, documentary history of many of these agreements, but we are missing essential components that made these treaties wholly legitimate from every party’s perspective. Over the years, and especially toward the end of the 19th century, wampum belts and other treaty-related items, such as pipes, were carted out of Canada and made their way into private collections and museums in England, France, Germany, Russia and other parts of Europe.

This means that whatever written documentation we might have of those treaties has been separated from the context of the other, equally important elements that set out the terms of these agreements. It is as though we have only one side of the story, or a single piece of the puzzle, and yet the prevailing belief is that we have documentation for these agreements in full.

In fact, we do not. And, most unfortunately, pre-Confederation agreements between the Crown and Indigenous people can only truly be understood once we have all the pieces together in one place.

In 1867, Canada became a Dominion and the British went home, though the Queen remained our figurative head of state, with a role that was nothing more than ceremonial. At Confederation, all of the responsibilities of the British Crown were transferred to the federal government, an entity that today we still refer to as “the Crown.” In 1871, Canada began to sign a new series of treaties with Indigenous people. These became known as the numbered treaties, and eventually they encompassed lands from Ontario to the Rocky Mountains.

In their pre-Confederation negotiations with Britain, Indigenous people controlled the form of diplomacy, which included wampum belts and oral discussion. But under the Dominion government, treaties became written contracts. No belts were woven, and scant evidence of the Indigenous understanding of these agreements exists – not in the wording of the documents, not in contemporaneous reports, not in press accounts of the signings. Indigenous oral histories speak of a desire to share the land, but the written words say “cede” and “surrender.”

I have heard it said that the British Crown hasn’t honoured its treaties. But the problem with the wishful thinking that the King somehow owes something to Canada’s Indigenous people is that, in doing so, it would seem as though the problem comes entirely from somewhere else – but it does not. We are the problem.

Oh, Canada, in all its post-Confederation authority, has clung to every word of the numbered treaties to justify the taking up and possession of Indigenous lands. In this sense, “the Crown” has clung fast to the written terms of these documents, honouring only the letter, and never the spirit, of the numbered treaties. In fact, it is no stretch to say that settler Canadians have been the only beneficiaries of these agreements.

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It was only after Confederation that the Crown’s relationship with Indigenous people became undone. Reservations, the weaponization of treaty language, residential schools, forced starvation, underfunded services, a lack of potable water – all of this followed Confederation.

It is easy to look to the King and say he must solve these problems on behalf of the Crown, but doing so ignores the hard truth. The current relationship between Indigenous people and the federal government – the true, modern-day embodiment of the Crown in Canada – is the result of conscious policy choices by successive Liberal and Conservative governments over the past 150 years.

A monarch isn’t to blame for any of this – we are. And it’s time for us to take responsibility.