The Great Blackfoot Treaties

Hugh A. Dempsey, The Great Blackfoot Treaties. Victoria: Heritage House, 2015. 262 pages. ISBN 978-1-77203-078-5. $22.95 paperback.Those familiar with the many books (there are no fewer than twenty of them) by Hugh Dempsey will not be surprised by the quality of The Great Blackfoot Treaties, although I would rank this book as one of his most important. In some of his earlier work, especially his biographies of Crowfoot and Red Crow, and in a report written for the Department of Indian Affairs in 1987, Dempsey has previously examined the history of Treaty 7, but this book should now be regarded as the best book on the history of that treaty, despite the fact that its treatment of other Blackfoot treaties is disappointingly brief.The Great Blackfoot Treaties exhibits the same great strength as much of Hugh Dempsey's work: his ability to combine fine story-telling with exhaustive research. Indeed, the depth of Dempsey's archival research, and his access, since the 1950s, to the collective memory of the Blood people, means that this is a book which no one else could possibly have written. In that sense, this book is an invaluable contribution.Treaty 7 is at the centre of this book. Four of the eight chapters deal with that treaty (from prelude to aftermath). Dempsey relied on many accounts preserved before the 1950s of Blackfoot people who attended the negotiations, and on almost all relevant documentary sources, to offer a detailed reconstruction of the events surrounding the treaty. Dempsey does mistakenly state (citing a manuscript that William Parker wrote in his old age) that the Blackfoot held their dramatic sham battle before the treaty negotiations began, while Parker's journals kept at the time of the negotiations show that the exhibition actually occurred after the negotiations were concluded. This is a potentially significant mistake, depending on how one interprets the significance of that event. Nevertheless, those chapters provide the best narrative account of the treaty available.Hugh Dempsey's work is highly regarded among professional historians, but Dempsey has always written for a wide audience. The demands of writing for that audience mean that he does not engage in the same level of analysis and interpretation that professional scholars are accustomed to. In this case, none of the scholarly literature published about Treaty 7 since the beginning of the 1970s even appears in Dempsey's bibliography. Dempsey is clearly aware of it; those familiar with the scholarly literature will recognize when Dempsey alludes to it. But he cites none of it. Plainly, Dempsey rejects most of the Treaty 7 scholarship published since the early 1970s. For example, he firmly rejects the argument that has emerged since the mid-1970s that Treaty 7 was not a land-cession treaty. Dempsey presents documentary and oral evidence that the Blackfoot understood that Treaty 7 included a cession of land rights in exchange for various promises. In a footnote (p. 248) Dempsey also implicitly rejects the relevance of accounts of those Blackfoot people who did not actually attend the treaty negotiations. Although he does not cite scholarly literature on the use and interpretation of oral evidence, he does lay out his approach to oral evidence in that footnote. Dempsey also argues that, although the Blackfoot could not possibly have understood all of the ramifications of the treaty, the interpreters were competent, and the Blackfoot were sophisticated negotiators who understood, broadly, what they were getting into. …

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