The Political Development of the Treaty System in Canada

Are Crown-Indigenous treaties instruments of dispossession? Or are they best hope for a just political order in Canada? This question has divided Indigenous and anticolonial advocates and scholars. To adequately respond to it, we need a clearer account of what treaties are. Rather than seeing treaties as Indigenous practices of kin-making, nation-to-nation agreements, or real estate contracts, we need to recognize that the treaty system is a complex, multilayered institution that includes each of these elements. The treaty system combines Indigenous, Imperial, and Settler governance traditions. So understood, the treaty system is a fundamental, intersocietal institution of governance in Canada. It provides the overarching framework through which Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples contest the terms of their territorial co-existence. It follows that treaties are neither instruments of consent nor dispossession; instead, they are sites of contestation and struggle. This dissertation traces the emergence, consolidation, and development of the treaty system from the early modern period to the present. It focuses on the emergence of the treaty system in the mid-eighteenth century, and its transformation into a system of treaty colonialism in nineteenth century Upper Canada. Throughout, I emphasize the simultaneous operation of three treaty traditions: Indigenous relational, Imperial diplomatic, and Settler contractual. These traditions constrained political agents, but they also provided resources that could be mobilized by diversely situated Indigenous and colonial actors, often in surprising ways. The dissertation concludes by endorsing a multi-pronged strategy of treaty renewal, one that simultaneously emphasizes Indigenous relational visions of treaty while strategically deploying the contractual and diplomatic traditions to combat dispossession. In this way, it contributes to debates about the role of treaties in reconciliation and decolonization. It also intervenes in disciplinary debates by insisting that Indigenous institutions, such as treaties, belong at the center of the emerging field of Canadian Political Development

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