Canada and the Métis, 1869-1885 , livre ebook

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“In this book, Professor D.N. Sprague tells why the Métis did not receive the land that was supposed to be theirs under the Manitoba Act.... Sprague offers many examples of the methods used, such as legislation justifying the sale of the land allotted to Métis children without any of the safeguards ordinarily required in connection with transactions with infants. Then there were powers of attorny, tax sales—any number of stratgems could be used, and were—to see that the land intended for the Métis and their families went to others. All branches of the government participated. It is a shameful tale, but one that must be told.”

— from the foreword by Thomas R. Berger

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Publié par	Wilfrid Laurier University Press
Date de parution	10 août 2009
Nombre de lectures	1
EAN13	9781554587919
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	2 Mo

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Half-breed Traders (Provincial Archives of Manitoba)
CANADA and the M TIS, 1869 1885
D. N. Sprague with a foreword by Thomas R. Berger
This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Social Science Federation of Canada, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data
Sprague, D. N. (Douglas Neil), 1944-Canada and the M tis, 1869-1885
Bibliography:p.
Includes index.
ISBN 0-88920-958-8 (bound) ISBN 0-88920-964-2 (pbk.)
1. M tis - Manitoba - History.* 2. M tis - Manitoba - Government relations.* 3. Red River Settlement - History. I. Title.
FC3372.9.M4S69 1988 971.27 02 C88-093344-5 F1063.S69 1988
Copyright 1988
WILFRID LAURIER UNIVERSITY PRESS Waterloo, Ontario, Canada N2L 3C5
88 89 90 91 4 3 2 1
Cover design by Vijen Vijendren Map 2 drawn by Victor Lytwyn Printed in Canada
Canada and the M tis, 1869-1885 has been produced from a manuscript supplied in electronic form by the author.
No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system, translated or reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, microfiche, or any other means, without written permission from the publisher.
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations
Foreword
Preface
Acknowledgements
1. Historiographical Introduction
2. Acquiring Canada s First Colony
3. Asserting Canadian Authority Over Assiniboia
4. Negotiating with Delegates from the North West
5. Eliminating the Riel Factor from Manitoba Politics
6. Unlocking the Territory for Actual Settlers
7. Amending the Manitoba Act
8. Completing the Dispersal of the Manitoba M tis
9. Reaching for the Commercial Value of the North West
10. Confronting Riel and Completing the CPR
Conclusion
Note on Sources and Method
Selected Bibliography
Index
List of Illustrations
Photographs
Frontispiece: Half-breed Traders
Sir John A. Macdonald, Nov. 1883
H.Y. Hind, ca. 1869
William McDougall, 1867
N.J. Ritchot, ca. 1870
Alexander Morris, 1875
Survey Party, ca. 1875
Gilbert McMicken, 1880
Archbishop Tach , ca. 1870
Joseph Royal, ca. 1880
George Stephen, ca. 1885
Lawrence Clarke, ca. 1880
Louis Riel, ca. 1880
Maps
Map 1. The Red River Settlement and the First Dominion Surveys
Map 2. Conflicting Claims to the Colony of St. Laurent
Foreword
The story of the M tis is one of the epics of Canadian history: the rise on the Prairies of a new nation of mixed blood ancestry, the emergence of a distinct culture, the formation in 1869-70 of the provisional government to defend their homeland, their dispersal. Yet in our own time the M tis have re-entered Canada s history, seeking to discover their own past, and to find a place for themselves in Canadian life.
The crucial year for the M tis was 1870. In that year Canada acquired the Red River Settlement, the provisional government of Louis Riel fled, and the dispersal of the M tis began. But it was in that same year that the Manitoba Act was passed by Canada s Parliament, and confirmed the following year by the Parliament of the United Kingdom, to ensure that the M tis would receive title to the river lots they occupied on the Red and Assiniboine and land for future generations. These were solemn promises made to the M tis by the Government of Canada-promises which were not kept.
In this book, Professor D.N. Sprague tells why the M tis did not receive the land that was supposed to be theirs under the Manitoba Act. John A. Macdonald and his Conservatives and Alexander Mackenzie and the Liberals did not honour the promises in the Manitoba Act. The Canadian Parliament passed a series of laws designed to undermine the rights the M tis had under the Manitoba Act. These laws prepared the way for settlers who moved westward to Manitoba from Ontario to acquire control of the provincial legislature. They, in turn, enacted a series of measures to ensure that the land allotted to the M tis would soon find its way into the hands of settlers entering the province from the East. Professor Sprague offers many examples of the methods used, such as legislation justifying the sale of land allotted to M tis children without any of the safeguards ordinarily required in connection with transactions with infants. Then there were powers of attorney, tax sales - any number of stratagems could be used, and were- to see that the land intended for the M tis and their families went to others. All branches of the government participated. It is a shameful tale, but one that must be told. It offers the explanation for the fact that today the M tis, once dominant at Red River, indeed the guardians of the community there, should now find themselves strangers in their own land.
In 1982, the Canadian Parliament belatedly recognized the M tis as one of the aboriginal peoples of Canada. It remains, to us, now that we know how they lost their land, to see that they get the land-base they were promised.
Thomas R. Berger
April 1987
Preface
The author s central purpose is to explain how the Red River Settlement, one of the most persistent 1 populations of North America from 1820 to 1869, dispersed almost entirely in the 1870s and failed to secure a new homeland by migration to the Canadian North West in the early 1880s. While students of other migrations are certain that push factors are as important as pulls in any mass exodus, in the case of the Red River M tis, the dispersal is usually attributed to some fatal flaw in the M tis character rather than to external pressures arising after 1870. The present study is an inquiry into the discouragements, formal and informal, that forced most of the Red River M tis from Manitoba to Saskatchewan and culminated in the rebellion of 1885.
Informal discouragements included intimidation of the original population by hundreds, then thousands of ultra-Protestants from Ontario who intended to establish new homes for themselves and to become a new majority transforming the Quebec of the West into a new Ontario. Newcomers appropriated M tis land and made the old settlers feel like strangers in a new land.
The M tis might have mounted an effective defence against such informal pressure had they not faced overwhelming formal discouragement from the acts of a colonial establishment created by the Government of Canada. Ottawa witheld self-government from Manitoba until a preferred majority was established. Facilitating the process were numerous Orders in Council and Statutes of Canada, which shifted the administration of insecure land titles from a legislature of the old settlers to a federal department whose primary mission was guaranteeing the security of the newcomers.
Since the formal process of discouragement was the more irresistable one, the operations of the Canadian bureaucreacy are the main focus of the study. The important evidence is communication between officials in the field and policy-makers in Ottawa. The highest level of consideration was frequently the office of the Prime Minister, occasionally operating independently of Cabinet or Parliament. And since Sir John A. Macdonald was the individual who occupied the prime ministerial position for eleven of the years between 1869 and 1885, his decisions are central to the story of formal discouragement. Yet Macdonald was only one of many unsympathetic actors in the drama. Given the pressure from the informal side, opportunities for accommodation of the M tis were easily missed by all operators of the apparatus of formal control. Whether such moments passed by mere carelessness or by deliberate inaction cannot be known with certainty in every instance, but one overall conclusion is inescapably obvious: the Government of Canada conceded a legal framework for the permanence of the Red River Settlement as a province in response to force in 1870, and subsequently presided over the dissolution of the terms of the Manitoba Act with approximately the same regret as would be exhibited by an unwilling victim escaping from a sales contract negotiated under duress.
Acknowledgements
Research support was provided by the Manitoba M tis Federation, the Canadian Department of Secretary of State (Canadian Studies Directorate), and the University of Manitoba Research Board. In the preparation of the manuscript, helpful criticism came from sceptical colleagues: Professor Thomas Flanagan at the University of Calgary, Dr. Philippe Mailhot at the Saint-Boniface Museum, Professor J.E. Rea at the University of Manitoba, and Professor Irene Spry of the University of Ottawa.

Sir John A. Macdonald, Nov. 1883 (Public Archives of Canada [C5332])
... forgery of medical evidence... uncontrolled terror in early Manitoba ... mock diplomacy in 1869-70. Certain nasty bits had been uncovered by establishment historians since 1936.
1 . The evidence for the remarkable persistence of the Red River Settlement is census data compiled by the Hudson s Bay Company before 1849 in comparison with the figures reported in the first Canadian enumeration of the district renamed Manitoba in 1870. See D.N. Sprague and R.P. Frye, The Genealogy of the First M tis Nation (Winnipeg, 1983). Most of the families included in the earlier enumeration were included in the first census by Canada twenty years later. (The typical rate of persistence elsewhere in North America in the mid-nineteenth century was around thirty per cent for ten-year intervals). See David Gagan, Hopeful Travellers: Families, Land, and Social Change in Mid-Victorian Peel County, Canada West (Toronto, 1981), pp. 6, 95.
Chapter 1 Historiographical Introduction