Indian Act in On, 1850-1906

Act to Control: The Grand General Indian Council, The
Department of Indian Affairs, and the Struggle over the

Indian Act in Ontario, 1850-1906.
by
Chandra Murdoch
A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements

for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy
Department of History
University of Toronto
© Copyright by Chandra Murdoch 2023

ii
Act to Control: The Grand General Council, The Department of

Indian Affairs, and the Struggle over the Indian Act in Ontario,
1850-1906.
Chandra Murdoch
Doctor of Philosophy
Department of History
University of Toronto
2023
Abstract
This dissertation examines the development of the Indian Act in nineteenth-century Ontario
within the context of Indigenous political response to the law. The Grand General Indian
Council of Ontario was a cross-reserve political organization that met every two years after 1870
to review legislation affecting their communities and to urge the government to act on their
recommendations. Representing various communities, nations, and legal frameworks, the
Council was built on historic alliances between the Anishinaabe and the Haudenosaunee. Over
the years, they drew on multiple forms of Indigenous law, as well as put forward a plethora of
political strategies including engagement with and accommodation of some parts of the law
itself. Understanding the plurality of legal frameworks and political thought put forward by the
Council makes clear the diversity in how Indigenous leaders negotiated the shifting tactics of the
government in their efforts to entrench control over reserve communities, as well as
demonstrates how their political vision never neatly aligned with government goals. This
dissertation also examines the changing legal mechanisms developed by the Department of
Indian Affairs and the expansion of the Indian Agent system–often in relation to resistance– that
ultimately undermined even the most accommodationist alternatives put forward by the Council.
iii
Each chapter traces one aspect of the Indian Act (or related legislation) that was of particular
concern to both the Council and the Department of Indian Affairs: resource regulation,
enfranchisement, reserve governance, inheritance, and the role of Indian Agents. I argue that the
application of the Indian Act in Ontario can be understood as a series of contestations over local
jurisdiction on reserves. These contestations make clear that while the development of the
Indian Act has conventionally been understood as a top-down process, with law being passed in
Ottawa being directly applied to reserves, this framing overlooks Indigenous political leaders
who opposed the law or sought to have it altered to suit their needs, the difficulties that Indian
Agents had in imposing the law, and how the law changed in response to these various struggles
over local jurisdiction.

iv
Acknowledgments
I have received help in many ways to write this dissertation, and for this I am profoundly
grateful. First, as a newcomer to Toronto and the Great Lakes area, I am grateful for the
generations of care, stewardship, work, resistance, and teaching that has allowed me to know this
place as the lands of the Huron-Wendat, the Anishinaabe, and the Haudenosaunee. As a settler
who grew up on Tsleil-Waututh, Squamish and Musqueam territory, the impact of colonialism in
Canada became definite and tangible to me as I worked in harm reduction and housing in my
home of East Vancouver. To the many people who taught me about strength and kindness in the
midst of colonial violence there I owe my ambition to understand what it means to live better
here– you were my first teachers when I dropped out of university at eighteen, and I have never
in my life learned more.
Thank you to my supervisor, Heidi Bohaker, who encouraged me to look further back in
time against my initial attachment to the late nineteenth-century. Your careful engagement with
my work has brought out so many important connections that I did not initially see. Your belief
that things can change for the better, both inside and outside the university, is inspiring and I
have learned so much from your drive to work towards these goals. Thank you for your rigour
and for your support through personal and global setbacks. I am grateful to the other members of
my committee, Brian Gettler and Bhavani Raman, whose insightful advice and conversations I
value immensely and whose individual perspectives greatly enriched my work. Thank you to my
dissertation defence committee: Mark Walters, whose careful evaluation brought important new
questions to me, and to Jim Phillips and Susan Hill for your engagement which renewed my
enthusiasm for thinking through law and history at the very end of this long process.
I am incredibly fortunate that my doctoral studies coincided with the informal beginning
and later establishment of the Manitoulin Island Summer Historical Institute held at the Ojibwe
Cultural Foundation. I am so grateful to Carolyn Podruchny for packing me and other students
into her van to camp out on the land in an attempt to learn differently. Your kindness and
enthusiasm for finding new ways to interact with the past takes hold of those around you – thank
you. I am equally grateful to Alan Corbiere and the late Lewis Debassige for welcoming me and
my family to the island over the six years we visited. Miigwetch Al for so generously sharing
your massive wealth of research and knowledge, and for your explanations of wampum
v
diplomacy which first helped me understand the stakes of nineteenth-century politics.

Miigwetch Lewis for sharing your knowledge, humour, and broad vision for change. Miigwetch
to the other organizers, especially Anong Beam, Naomi Recollet, and the other staff at the OCF
for sharing your knowledge and for your hospitality, and to the dozens of other participants and
speakers over the years from whom I learned so much. Thank you as well to Anne Janhunen
whose insights, conversations, and friendship I greatly valued over these summers.
I am very fortunate to have learned from many incredible speakers, scholars, knowledge
keepers, and friends working on Indigenous history and law during my time at the University of
Toronto. Participating in meetings of the GRASAC network enriched my thinking and
understanding of material histories in relation to law. Thank you to Tom Peace, Alison Norman,
Matthieu Arsenault, Susan Glover, Michael Oberg and Ian McCallum for organizing the
GRASAC Histories of Indigenous Literacies and Education meetings in London and
Ganondagan in 2017 and 2019. Miigwetch to John Borrows, Lindsay Borrows, and Heidi
Kiiwetinepinesiik Stark for welcoming me as a non-law student in the Indigenous Law in
Context program in 2017. I am grateful to Richard Hill and Alan Corbiere for agreeing to speak
at the 2019 First Law of the Land: Sharing from the Great Dish event. Miigwetch to the
Koognaasewin team and the North Shore community members and knowledge keepers who
deepened my understanding of Anishinaabe family law. Miigwetch to Sarah Jackson and Sheila
Wheesk in particular for being such kind companions as I balanced my work with them and my
writing.
Thank you to Sean Mills and Cecilia Morgan who agreed to serve on my comprehensive
exam committee and from whom I learned such a great deal, I appreciate the time and care you
provided to help me build a solid foundation for my research. Thank you to other professors I
have learned from and worked with at U of T including Ian Radforth, Wanda Nanibush,
Adrienne Hood, Steve Penfold, Mark Meyerson, Luis Van Isschot, Anver Emon, Laurie Bertram
and Funké Aladejebi. Thank you to my MA and undergraduate supervisors, Shelley Gavigan,
William Wicken and Wilson Jacob: your impression on my work has been profound and I am
grateful for the path that you set me on. To Vivian Hwang, Davina Joseph, Kelly Barnes, and
other department administrators – thank you for your help over the years.
vi
This research has received generous support from the Social Sciences and Humanities
Research Council of Canada, the Thomas and Beverly Simpson/OGS and Ontario Graduate
Scholarships, the R. Roy McMurtry Fellowship in Legal History from the Osgoode Society for
Canadian Legal History, and the Jeanne Armour Canada Graduate Scholarship from the
Department of History. I was fortunate to hold a Junior Fellowship at the Centre for
Criminology and Sociolegal Studies at the University of Toronto from 2018-2020, and I am
grateful to Mariana Valverde, Catherine Evans, Kerry Taylor, and the many graduate students I
met there who provided an intellectually rich space on campus to talk through the socio-legal
aspects of my work.
Thank you to the many librarians and archivists who have helped me over the years at the
Library and Archives of Canada, the Ontario Archives, the United Church Archives, and the
University of Toronto Libraries, in particular Sara McDowell. Thank you to Alison Norman for
opening the Maynard Sam George library to me at the Ontario Ministry of Indigenous Relations
and Reconciliation, who provided such a welcoming space where I was able to start getting a
handle on the RG10 records through the microfilm copies held there. Thank you to Donald
Smith for answering my queries, sending sources to me, and for sharing his extensive research
archive through the E. J. Pratt library at Victoria College.
My writing significantly improved through workshops with other graduate students,

colleagues, and mentors. I am truly grateful for this help. In particular, thank you to Daniel
Newman for the incredible work you do in supporting graduate writing on campus, and for the
interdisciplinary spaces you foster. It was a great pleasure to read the works-in-progress of my
colleagues in the Dissertation Working Group and to receive their feedback on mine. An early
version of chapter five was shared with the Osgoode Society Legal History Workshop, and with
the History of Indigenous People’s Network at York University. A very early version of chapter
two was workshopped at the American Society for Legal History Graduate Student Colloquium
in 2017, thank you to John Wertheimer and Brooke Depenbusch for organizing this important
opportunity for graduate legal history development. To the participants of all three workshops
who carefully engaged with my work, you helped me such a great deal, thank you.
I have been so fortunate to find supportive colleagues at the Department of History and
the University of Toronto more broadly. Jacqueline Briggs, Cathleen Clark, and Sanchia de
vii
Souza I appreciate your kindness, friendship, and sharp insights into work, life, and teaching.
Thank you to Ed Dunsworth, Matthieu Caron, Simon Vickers, Kimberly Main and other
participants in the Canadianist writing group. Thank you to Dr. Bohakers’ other students
Jennifer Hayter, Zac Smith, Shenella Charles, Roxanne Korpan, Thomas Blampied, Mia McKie,
and Hannah Cooley for your companionship. Thank you to Éric Pecile and Eriks Bredovskis for
your work as union stewards, this work is so important and I appreciate your taking it on so that
collectively we are cared for. To my larger network of co-workers, activists, dreamers, and
friends outside of academia who teach me how to be in the world, thank you– there are too many
of you to name and for this I am so fortunate.
Without the support of the Child Care Subsidy program from the City of Toronto, this
dissertation simply would not have been possible to write. Expanding affordable childcare is a
political project whose scope and implications I could never have fathomed before becoming a
parent. To the Campus Coop Community Daycare whose history of feminist student resistance is
close to my heart and whose staff (Asma, Hugh, Soula, Cathy, Zeb, Ayako, Dechen, Mike, Fred,
Katie, Helin, Simin, Grace, Diane, and Rob among others) helped us get through so much –
thank you for your incredible support of our family. To the various strangers who helped carry
my stroller down the stairs at Keele Station each day: I swore under my breath I was going to
thank you in my acknowledgements for getting me through my degree and I don’t mean it any
less now – thank you.
Thank you to my immediate and extended family. My late granny, Doreen Massam, was
the first historian I knew. Through many months of archival work, I often thought about her
room of notes under the stairs and drive to bring us along to various cemeteries to confirm
genealogical clues. It is to her that this dissertation is dedicated. To Stephanie Perrin and the
large Perrin-Rochon-Purcell network: I am so fortunate to be welcomed into this wonderful loud
family – thank you for your cheerleading over so many years. To my aunt Diane and uncle Yves
thank you for being our family anchor when we moved to Toronto, for feeding us, and for many
too hot and too cold outdoor pandemic visits that kept us going. To Corbin, Mom and Dad: you
are a model of steady work and care and, as time goes on, I realize how much I learned from and
continue to learn from you three. Thank you for everything you are to me.
viii
To Otto and Lenka, who have never known me without this dissertation, you make me
happy to stop working every day and I am better for it. Otto (who loves books more than anyone
I know): I learn so much from you, you inspire me to keep thinking and learning, and you help
me through when I feel scared. Lenka, your deep caring, spark, love for small things, and
thoughtful observations on the world help me in profound ways. You two make me wonderful.
Jesse: in uprooting our lives, through the pandemic, flood, and everything else– thank you for
being your wonderful self. At the end of the day, all I really want to do is sit down and speculate
with you about human history and the rest of the universe. Thank you.
ix
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments.......................................................................................................................... iv
Table of Contents ........................................................................................................................... ix
List of Tables ................................................................................................................................ xii
List of Maps ................................................................................................................................. xiii
List of Appendices ....................................................................................................................... xiv
Introduction ......................................................................................................................................1
Anishinaabe History and Alliances with the Haudenosaunee and the Crown ..........................13
The Grand General Council ......................................................................................................18
The Indian Act and Department of Indian Affairs Policy in the Nineteenth Century...............23
Methodology .............................................................................................................................30
Theoretical Influences: Jurisdiction, Indigenous Law, and Legal Pluralism under Settler
Colonialism ........................................................................................................................32
Chapter Overview .....................................................................................................................39
Chapter 1 “The said Sacred Friendship is not held so sacred”: Timber, Resource Regulation,
and Shifting Alliance Relationships on Manitoulin Island and the Lake Huron Region,
1850-1869. ................................................................................................................................43
1.1. Government Assertion of Control Over Resources: From Protection of Lands to

Protection of Jurisdiction ...................................................................................................48
1.1.1. Commissions of Inquiry, Financial Restructuring in the Department of Indian

Affairs, and Ideas about Indigenous Resource Use ...............................................56
1.1.2. The Legal and Administrative Contexts of “Protection” .......................................59
1.2. “We do not want our land regulated as Crown Land: The Response of the
Anishinaabek leadership ....................................................................................................65
1.2.1. Resource Contestations on Manitoulin Island .......................................................66
1.2.2. Regional Council and Links to the Broader Grand General Council Network .....79
1.3. Conclusion .........................................................................................................................85
Chapter 2 Council, Delegation, Deliberation: Enfranchisement, State Law, and Indigenous

Law in the Early Years of the Grand General Council, 1869-1885. .........................................87
x
2.1. Changes in Law and Constitutional Change ......................................................................92
2.2. The First Grand General Council of 1870: Historical Networks in a New
Configuration ...................................................................................................................102
2.2.1. Precursors to the 1870 Grand General Council: The Councils of 1840 and
1858......................................................................................................................111
2.2.2. Enfranchisement at the 1870 Grand General Council .........................................121
2.3. The Approval of the Indian Act in 1876: “Accommodationist” Leaders and the Idea
of Dual Citizenship through Enfranchisement .................................................................125
2.4. Haudenosaunee Assertions of Sovereignty and Their Split with the Grand General
Council .............................................................................................................................140
2.5. Inter-Anishinaabe Debates at the Grand General Council, 1874-1884: The Importance
of Local Autonomy ..........................................................................................................150
2.6. Conclusion .......................................................................................................................157
Chapter 3 Methodists and Municipal Codes: Southern Ontario Christian: Anishinaabe

Leaders and Reserve Governance, 1830-1887. .......................................................................159
3.1. Early Methodist Networks: Education, Religion, and Politics ........................................162
3.2. Municipal Governance for Reserves: Government Legislation .......................................173
3.3. The Grand General Council Responds to the Indian Advancement Act ..........................181
3.4. Peter E. Jones and the Indian Advancement Act .............................................................186
3.5. Conclusion .......................................................................................................................192
Chapter 4 Women, Wills, and Family Surveillance: Inheritance and the Indian Act, 1857-
1900 .........................................................................................................................................194
4.1. Inheritance Law and the Grand General Council ............................................................201
4.2. Inheritance and Band Councils ........................................................................................209
4.3. Women and Inheritance ...................................................................................................214
4.3.1. Women’s Jurisdiction ..........................................................................................215
4.3.2. Women’s Actions to Maintain Property ..............................................................220
4.4. The Role of Indian Agents and Defining the Law: Internal Negotiations of the D.I.A...226
4.5. Conclusion .......................................................................................................................233

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Chapter 5 The Expansion of the Indian Agent System, Amendments to the Indian Act, and
the Grand General Indian Council, 1880-1906. ......................................................................235
5.1. Indian Agents, Legal Change, and the Department of Indian Affairs .............................240
5.1.1. Changes to Indian Affairs After 1880 ..................................................................243
5.1.2. Amendments to the Indian Act ............................................................................251
5.1.3. Indian Agents as Justices of the Peace .................................................................253
5.1.4. Indian Agents, Timber, and Trespass Violations .................................................257
5.1.5. Alcohol Restrictions.............................................................................................262
5.1.1. Hayter Reed’s Influence on the Indian Act ..........................................................266
5.2. The Grand General Council, Indian Agent Powers, and the Indian Act from 1894-
1906..................................................................................................................................270
5.2.1. The Grand General Council on Morality and the Law ........................................278
5.2.2. Jurisdiction Beyond Indian Agents ......................................................................288
5.2.3. Grand General Council Vision for Expanded Political Participation in

Canadian Society .................................................................................................292
5.3. Conclusion .......................................................................................................................296
Conclusion ...................................................................................................................................298
Bibliography ................................................................................................................................307
Appendix 1: Delegates to the Grand General Council.................................................................326

xii
List of Tables
Table 1: Indian Agent Appointments on Ontario Reserves………………………………….....248
xiii
List of Maps
Map 1: Participating Communities at the Grand General Council, 1870-1906…………….……12
xiv
List of Appendices
Appendix 1: Delegates to the Grand General Council………………………………………….326
Introduction
In the late nineteenth-century, Indigenous leaders in Ontario sought to control if and how the
Indian Act would impact their communities’ lives; they created an expansive inter-reserve
political movement to directly respond to the government about the law. The Grand General
Indian Council of Ontario met every two years beginning in 1870 to put forward their positions
about the extensive laws enacted through Parliament that attempted to regulate Indigenous
peoples, lands, and politics– the Gradual Enfranchisement Act and its successor the Indian Act.
One of these many gatherings occurred in mid-September of 1882, when the Mississaugas of
New Credit hosted the seventh gathering of the Grand General Council. The meeting consisted
of one hundred and six delegates from various Anishinaabe, Haudenosaunee, and Munsee-
Delaware communities. Indigenous nations gathered to affirm ties of alliance between their
communities, and to respond clause by clause to government legislation. The 1882 gathering
also coincided with the opening of a new site of governance for the host community, a large new
council house at New Credit that could seat 300 people. Delegates from across Southern
Ontario, from the Georgian Bay region and Manitoulin Island, and from communities along the
St. Lawrence River attended the Grand General Council as well as the great celebration for the
new council house that took place on the third day of the gathering, for which council
deliberations were paused. Government officials also attended the celebration, and a reporter
from the Detroit Free Press was invited to spread word of the new council house by the
Mississauga; from his report “not less that 1,500 of the men of the Six Nations and the
Messissauga with their wives and children” attended the event. 1 Over the six days of the council
gathering delegates convened to celebrate the new site of local governance for the Mississauga,
as well as to engage in intense debate around the laws through which the Canadian government
sought to usurp jurisdiction over local authority on reserves.
The Mississauga of the New Credit built their council house as a site for their local
council to govern their community, as well as to continue to engage in international diplomacy as
1
Minutes of the 7th Grand General Indian Council held upon the New Credit Indian Reserve, Near
Hagersville Ontario, from September 13th to September 18th, 1882 (Hagersville: Hagersville Book and Job
Room, 1883): 22.
1
2
they had done historically, gathering in councils to debate the important issues facing them and
other Indigenous communities and to affirm alliances with neighbouring Indigenous nations as
well as with the Crown. The young Dominion government, however, saw the council house as a
place where it would exercise control over local decision-making within the legal framework
imposed by the Indian Act. As the delegates met in celebration of the new site of local
governance, delegates who had travelled great distances– as well as those closer to home– were
in the process of debating this very law and what it meant for their nations’ relationship with the
Canadian government. As this dissertation will demonstrate, the response of Indigenous political
leaders to the Indian Act was tied to earlier council networks that had long been debating,
asserting, and negotiating their alliance relationships with the Crown, as well as framed by the
changes that settler colonialism had brought to their communities over the nineteenth century.
The Indian Act is simultaneously one of the best and the least understood legislative acts
in Canada. Its devastating impacts on Indigenous women, laws, and governance have long been
established. Yet a deep accounting of its early development in Ontario, as well as the response
to the law by 19th century Indigenous leaders is remarkably absent from historical work.
Centering Indigenous political response to the law is important to understanding its historical
development. Government officials expanded and strengthened the law as they encountered
Indigenous communities’ robust resistance to, and direct engagement with, their legislative
agenda. Indigenous leaders negotiated their response to the expanding context of settler
colonialism and repressive colonial legislation through enduring frameworks of Indigenous
governance and diplomatic laws. Some leaders sought to escape the most repressive aspects of
the law by adopting a more accommodationist position to government policies of assimilation,
albeit often eliding government frameworks of authoritarian control of the process in their
insistence on maintaining community autonomy and strength. This dissertation examines these
intertwined phenomena in the development of the Indian Act through looking at the history of
the Grand General Indian Council of Ontario. I contextualize their work within the expanding
legislative and enforcement apparatus of the Department of Indian Affairs (D.I.A.) through the
Indian Act and the Indian Agent system during the last half of the nineteenth century. After
1870, the Council met on various reserves in Southern Ontario roughly every two years to
review, debate, and respond to the continually changing laws that targeted them. Representing
various communities, nations, and legal frameworks, council delegates put forward a plethora of
3
(often contradictory) strategies. Understanding the plurality of legal frameworks and political
thought within the Council can help us understand how Indigenous communities in Ontario more
broadly negotiated the shifting tactics of the government in their efforts to entrench control over
reserve communities through the Indian Act and related legislation, and how the law was
generated in many instances from contestations on the ground.
Scholars have most often written about the development of the Indian Act by describing
the legislation alone, without due consideration of how it was applied on reserves or of
Indigenous political response to the law. The Indian Act is complex, and its complexity makes
the history of legal development a demanding subject of inquiry in and of itself. The law was
built on precursors that date to the 1830s, and it was amended almost yearly after Parliament
imposed it in 1876. It was designed to regulate all aspects of life, property, resources,
governance, relationships, and education on Indian reserves in Canada and inaugurated a deeply
repressive and enduring nexus of law that has since affected generation after generation of
Indigenous people in Canada. Due to this complexity in both its scope and legislative history,
there is a tendency in the historical and legal literature to remain close to the law in work about
its historical development, describing its many clauses and their genealogies through precursors
and amendments.2 This dissertation broadens our understanding of the history of the law to
include implementation, resistance, and response by moving to the ground level of its imposition
on reserves and through the political response that this generated. By looking at five key areas
that were of concern to both the Department of Indian Affairs and the Grand General Council–
resource regulation, enfranchisement, municipal-style elected government for reserves,
2
These works are outlined in greater detail below but some examples of these are government reports
such as John F. Leslie, Ron. Maguire, and Robert G. Moore. The Historical Development of the Indian
Act. 2nd ed. Ottawa: Treaties and Historical Research Centre, Indian and Northern Affairs Canada, 1983
and classic studies in the history of legal and policy development such as John Milloy “The Early Indian
Acts: Developmental Strategy and Constitutional Change” and John L. Tobias, “Protection, Civilization,
Assimilation: An Outline History of Canada’s Indian Policy” in Ian A. L. Getty and Antoine S. Lussier,
eds. As Long as the Sun Shines and Water Flows: A Reader in Canadian Native Studies (Vancouver:
University of British Columbia Press, 1983).
4
inheritance, and the role of Indian Agents– this dissertation examines how the Indian Act
developed in Ontario alongside the contemporaneous, sustained, and detailed Indigenous
political response to the law as it was imposed. These case studies show that rather than the
D.I.A. being able to immediately achieve its legislative and policy goals, the Indian Act was
unevenly applied and was intensely debated, contested, and negotiated within Indigenous
communities and beyond through their responses to the government. I argue that the imposition
of the Indian Act in nineteenth-century Ontario was actualized through a series of struggles
between Ottawa, agents on the ground, and Indigenous leadership over how local jurisdiction
over many of the law’s targets would be enacted. My analysis of the struggles within these five
case studies reveals both the form and content of Indigenous political response to the law as well
as the government’s attempts to tighten control over all aspects of life on reserves through its
shifting legislative tactics.
Jurisdiction as a frame of analysis is central to my argument. Understanding the

struggles over the five areas of the law that I examine as struggles over local jurisdiction, over
who would have the “authority to have authority”3 on reserves, allows us to see contestations
between Indigenous and settler legal systems as well as how Indigenous leaders negotiated the
clauses of the Indian Act themselves. Centering jurisdiction makes clear how contestations took
place over which legal system would be recognized as holding legitimate authority (whether
through Indigenous laws of treaty and alliance historically recognized by the Crown, or the
statutory laws passed by Parliament that undermined these). It also allows me to describe in
detail the negotiation of the mechanics of reserve governance that were debated within later
councils– jurisdiction, as described by Shaunnagh Dorsett and Shaun McVeigh as the “minutest
detail of the ordering of the business of the administration and adjudication of justice.”4 While
leaders here were willing to adopt some aspects of the law, they also sought to place limitations
on the jurisdiction of the D.I.A. more generally to maintain community authority.
3
Shiri Pasternak, “Jurisdiction and Settler Colonialism: Where do Laws Meet?” Canadian Journal of
Law and Society/Revue Canadienne Droit et Société, vol. 29, no. 2 (2014): 146.
4
Shaunnagh Dorsett and Shaun McVeigh, Jurisdiction (New York: Routledge, 2012): 2.
5
Several aspects of the diverse political contexts that influenced Indigenous response to
the Indian Act in the late nineteenth century are made visible by examining the 1882 Grand
General Council and attendant council house opening. The latter is particularly well documented
due to the presence of the Detroit Free Press reporter, “Yusef,” whose account of the celebratory
event was reprinted in the meeting minutes of the council. To open the council, Chief Peter E.
Jones of New Credit “attired in broadcloth as if for a wedding reception, invited all to seats in the
bowery.”5 Jones, an influential Grand General Council member, the first Indigenous medical
doctor in Canada, newspaper publisher, and eventually Indian Agent himself, “saw that all were
placed in order– the clergy, the head chiefs and the visiting members of Parliament upon the
platform, the other chiefs in front, the young Indian women to the right and the other visitors, as
suited their convenience.”6 All of these parties– the church, the federal government, chiefs from
near and far, and women– had gathered to witness the opening of the council house alongside the
many members of local communities who had come for the celebration. Several historical
factors that influenced the struggles over local jurisdiction described in this dissertation are
visible through the reporter’s account; the continuation of alliances between Indigenous
communities and nations that affirmed local jurisdiction through Anishinaabe and
Haudenosaunee law, the place of women within Indigenous societies and political life, the
influence of Christianity, and the relationship between Indigenous nations and the Crown are all
visible within "Yusef’s" report on the council house opening.
The opening of the council house was a celebration between communities and between
Indigenous nations. The reporter notes that “farmers from far and near, as could be seen by
hundreds of teams and vehicles hitched about” had come to enjoy the festivities, and music from
a “well organized brass band of Indian musicians” filled the air.7 A “great many people were
congregated about” enjoying the performance. 8 It was not long before more peals of music were
5
Room, 1883): 23.
6
Ibid.
7
Ibid.
8
Ibid.
6
heard approaching the gathering; “Down the road…the melodious sound of a brass band playing
a march from ‘Fantinitza’” could be heard, “and there were shouts of ‘There come the
Mohawks!’”9 Their performance were followed by “the Ojibway band in red-trimmed uniforms
with Prussian helmets and red and white plumes, who marched up to the council house playing
“Pull for the Shore.”10 This was not the end of the musical procession, and the brass band from
Tuscarora joined their fellow musicians, “making all four Indian Brass bands, and then there was
music in the air.”11 Council gatherings had long been a site for renewing the alliances within and
between nations, but they were also sites where community connections were maintained
through gathering to see friends, relations, and political allies.12
Women milled about with their families and friends. At the beginning of the speeches, as
noted above, Peter E. Jones ensured the place for women to the right of the chiefs. The presence
of women at the gathering was noted by the reporter, and he expresses surprise at their
appearance: instead of “the gay calico skirts, legging worked with porcupine quill, bandana
kerchiefs and blue cloth shawls” that he expected, he writes that women were “dressed
fashionably after the mode of their white sisters”– albeit that their clothing demonstrated a
“partiality… for gay colors.”13 Women wore bright “Scarlet shawls, with silk embroidery” and
sparkling jewellery: “great hoops of earrings, and long gold pendants, were quite plentiful.” 14
Women had prepared an enormous feast for the guests of “poultry, meats, vegetables, fruits, and
pastry” that was, according to the reporter, “more than ordinarily rich and savoury.” 15 The
9
Ibid.
10
Ibid.
11
Ibid.
12
For a description of a much earlier political gathering in 1642 that was similarly important in
celebrating the connections between communities replete with music, dancing, and games see Heidi
Bohaker, Doodem and Council Fire: Anishinaabe Governance through Alliance (Toronto: University of
Toronto Press, 2020): 3-11.
13
Room, 1883): 23.
14
Ibid.
15
Ibid, 25.
7
council closed with the “formal adoption and naming of the wife of Chief Dr. Jones,” a white
woman, demonstrating membership practices that elided the strictures of the Indian Act’s
marriage provisions.16 While the Indian Act stipulated that non-Indigenous women would gain
band membership through marriage to a status Indian, the desire of Jones’ to have this
relationship recognized publicly through Anishinaabe processes of adoption demonstrates how
ideas of family and marriage that were not limited by these settler legal impositions persisted.
Women were historically integrated into Anishinaabe governance through their own councils at
the local level.17 The Indian Act deeply rearranged their political, social, and material realities
through unequal governance, marriage, and property provisions in the law. The implications for
women’s political participation, families, and property relations are visible throughout Grand
Council history as the Indian Act rearranged authority over these numerous aspects of women’s
lives.
The opening of the council also offers insight into the integration of Christianity into
some facets of nineteenth- century Indigenous politics. The clergy were also seated by Jones at
the opening of the Council House. A portable church organ was positioned at one end of the
platform, where “A young Indian girl played the accompaniments and a mixed chorus of trained
voices led in the hymns that were sung.”18 The ceremonies began with prayer by the missionary
F. G. Weaver, followed by the hymn, “in which all joined, ‘Oh, for a thousand tongues to sing
my great Redeemer’s praise!” which was translated to Ojibway (according to “Yusssef”) as “O
uh pagish ke che ingo dwok, Neej uh ne she nah baig!”19 In his speech during the council itself,
Chief Wawanosh of Sarnia noted the intergenerational influence of Christianity on the Jones
family. In council, he had praised the efforts of Dr. Jones in spearheading the new council house
by evoking his father’s Methodist legacy: “the substantial house and the beautiful trees he had
16
Ibid.
17
Cary Miller, Ogimaag: Anishinaabe Leadership, 1760-1845 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,
2010), Heidi Bohaker, Doodem and Council Fire: Anishinaabe Governance through Alliance (Toronto:
published for The Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History by University of Toronto Press, 2020).
18
Room, 1883): 23.
19
Ibid.
8
planted would be a monument to his energy and good advice long after he had passed away, as
his late father’s memory still lives from his having done so much for the benefit of his people by
preaching the blessed Gospel.”20 The influence of religion on Anishinaabe politics, in particular
Methodism, and the intergenerational links between the political and religious communities of
the elder Peter Jones and those of his son and his contemporaries is another important factor in
understanding the response of the Grand General Council to the Indian Act.
On the interior walls of the council house were hung “portraits of the Queen and Sir John
A. Macdonald, Minister of Indian Affairs, and a dozen Indian Chiefs of distinction,” a visual
representation of the equal position that Indigenous nations held in relation to the Crown through
historic alliances.21 The presence of the Canadian government was visible at the gathering itself,
as Members of Parliament were seated by Jones to witness the opening of the council house.
Representing the federal Department of Indian Affairs, the Indian Superintendent for New Credit
and Six Nations, J. T. Gilkison “presided” over the event.22 After Gilkison offered his
congratulations, addresses in Mohawk and Anishinabemowin were given and translated to
English by various leaders who emphasised the long history of alliance between the speakers’
nations and the Crown.23 The reporter noted two speeches of significance: the first by Mohawk
Chief John Smoke Johnson a “warrior upwards of 90 years old, who had fought under Tecumseh
in 1812,” and had been active in international council gatherings since at least 1840, and the
second by Anishinaabe leader Peter Jones of “Lake Huron” (named for Dr. Jones’ father). 24
Both of these men wore silver George III medals, and Jones wore one of Queen Victoria as well,
20
Ibid, 8-9.
21
Ibid, 22.
22
Ibid, 23.
23
Ibid.
24
Ibid. Minutes of a General Council held at the River Credit community on January 16th 1840, RG10-
A, vol. 1011, 69. John Smoke Johnson’s son, G. H. M. Johnson, translated his speech, and Chief Macash
translated for Jones.
9
important symbols of the historic alliance between their nations and the Crown. 25 These
speeches would have reminded all present of the ongoing obligations and responsibilities that
each nation held under these historic alliances. At the Grand Council the previous day,
Wawanosh articulated the Council’s hope that the government would listen to the firm opinions
on the Indian Act that delegates expressed through their council gatherings, as the Province of
Canada and Imperial governments had done to a limited extent in the past: “He referred to the
original Indian Act– how in Councils of his people in times past it was found not suitable to their
welfare; that the Government upon petitions form the Indians had, from time to time, so
amended the Act that now we have a law which though still capable of improvement is far in
advance of the former legislation.”26 This dissertation examines how Indigenous leaders
conceptualized their relationship with the Crown as longstanding allies, how they interpreted the
Canadian government’s actions as they changed this relationship through legislation, and some
of the limited ways they were able to have their views applied by the government.
The council house opening “ended with a display of fireworks and a set concert by the
Ojibwe Band.”27 The many guests left on horses and carriages or walked through the fields of
the cooling September evening full from feasting, tired from socializing, and perhaps carrying
sleeping children or humming the tunes of this last concert. Those from out of town, who had
travelled from Manitoulin Island, from Saugeen, from Muncey, Sarnia, Walpole Island, Cape
Croker, the Bay of Quinté, and more were billeted in homes of New Credit residents and were
provided breakfast with the families there in the morning before returning to their work in
council. Finally, and most significantly, this gathering demonstrates the vast geographic reach
and multiplicity of communities and voices that were present in responding to government
legislation in nineteenth-century Ontario. The following day these leaders would meet again in
council to discuss the reason why so many had travelled so far: the specifics of the Indian Act
25
Room, 1883): 23.
26
Ibid, 8-9.
27
Ibid, 25.
10
and all that it represented for their communities in their relationships with the Canadian
Government.
The Grand General Indian Council was based on historic alliance relationships between
Anishinaabe, Haudenosaunee, Muncey and Delaware peoples, and first met as a recurring
council to discuss government legislation in 1870. This first gathering was called by the Six
Nations of the Grand River in response to the passing of the 1869 Gradual Enfranchisement Act,
an important precursor to the Indian Act. This initial council included ninety delegates from
twenty-one communities in Ontario and Quebec.28 Delegates here decided to form an ongoing
council to meet every two years to deal with government legislation and to provide feedback to
the government on their laws. The Grand General Council continued to meet into the twentieth
century, until it was replaced by the Union of Ontario Indians in 1949.29 Over the years of their
organizing that I examine in this dissertation, which ends with the 1906 Consolidated Statute of
the Indian Act and the Grand General Council’s gathering at Saugeen that same year,30 they
dealt with many significant legislative changes that affected their communities. These included
The Gradual Enfranchisement Act, The Indian Act of 1876 (and the almost yearly subsequent
amendments to the law), the Indian Advancement Act of 1884 that further sought to control band
governance, and the Franchise Act of 1885 that granted Indigenous men the right to vote (and
which was subsequently repealed in 1898). All these laws were debated and dealt with in turn at
the Grand General Council. Over these years, rifts between nations developed on approaches to
government policy, and the Haudenosaunee ceased participation after the 1882 council described
above. Remaining delegates, too, held sharply divergent views regarding the law– if it should be
accepted or rejected, if it should be applied in part, in full, or changed entirely to better reflect
community priorities. These views were expressed at the councils following 1882 between the
Anishinaabek, Muncey and Delaware delegates who continued to attend. Although the
28
The General Council of the Six Nations and Delegates from different Band in Western and Eastern
Canada, June 10, 1870 (Hamilton: The Spectator Office, 1870).
29
The Union of Ontario Indians later became the Anishinabek Nation. See
https://www.anishinabek.ca/who-we-are-and-what-we-do/
11
accommodationist approach of some delegates is surprising from a contemporary perspective–

from which the massively destructive history of the law is understood– I try here to contextualize
these political positions within the many influences, political and religious, of these nineteenth-
century leaders and the communities which they represented.
The lands to whom the nations involved in the Grand General Council belonged stretched
from the banks of the St. Lawrence River in Quebec to Bawating (Sault Ste. Marie) at the
connection between Lakes Huron and Superior, and down to the southern farmlands of Lake St.
Clair, the River Thames and Bkejwanong (Walpole Island). Councils would be held on different
reserves every two years. The following map shows all the locations of the Grand General
Council gatherings sourced from the printed council minutes that I have been able to locate
between 1870 and 1906. Contemporary names of reserve communities are listed, with historical
names printed in brackets. Several communities are not included on the map as their locations
are too vague or I have not found the corresponding community for historical names: these
include the Ojibways of Lake Superior, The Ojibways of Lake Huron, The Ojibways of South
Manitoulin Island, Nahahdebabing, and Wahnahtabung. The Non-Treaty Indians of Saugeen are
also not included on the map. For a complete list of communities and delegates who participated
in each of these councils, see Appendix 1.
12
Map 1: Participating Communities at the Grand General Council, 1870-1906. Map created
by author and Jesse Purcell adapted from Google Maps.
Centering the efforts of the Grand General Indian Council and its precursors, this
dissertation examines the development of the Indian Act in Ontario by tracing the history of
Indigenous resistance and response to the law. I examine a segment of Grand General Indian
Council history that spans from 1870 to 1906, as well as tracing links between these Councils
and earlier councils that met in the 1840s, 50s and 60s. I focus primarily on Anishinaabek
delegates in this work, although I discuss the involvement of the Six Nations in establishing the
1870 council, Haudenosaunee roles in councils prior to this gathering, and their participation to
1882. More work needs to be completed on the specific political visions represented by
individual communities during this era in response to the Indian Act. The varied local contexts
that each of the Grand General Council leaders came from, and how they influenced political
positions expressed by them there is also an area where future scholarly inquiry is needed. The
Grand Council should not be seen as a monolithic entity. It was composed of various
configurations of communities depending on the geographic locations where it was held and, in
some years, had very low attendance– the 1904 meeting is the smallest gathering I examine in
my work and was comprised of only three participating communities. The position of diverse
individual leaders’ opinions and political strategies in dealing with government legislation are
13
present within the Council minutes. As such the Council does not represent a unified
“Indigenous” position on how to deal with the Indian Act and other legislative changes that the
government was imposing on their lives. However, through the Councils’ many complicated
engagements with settler law over this period, I trace how these engagements were premised on
alliances between Indigenous nations and with the Crown that affirmed their self-determination
and sovereignty, were entangled with networks of Anishinaabe-Methodist histories, and, in the
later iterations of the Council, were willing to accept aspects of settler law while actively
strategizing to expand the political possibilities for their communities. This dissertation engages
with and makes contributions to the three key historiographies that follow below: the history of
Anishinaabe alliances with the Crown and Haudenosaunee nations, the history of the Grand
General Council itself, and in the history of the Department of Indian Affairs in the nineteenth-
century.
Anishinaabe History and Alliances with the Haudenosaunee and

the Crown
Historians have established the breadth of Anishinaabe political power in the Great Lakes
region by situating the history of European trade and settlement in the region within the political
world that newcomers encountered there. Richard White, in his 1992 The Middle Ground:
Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815 argued that shared
political processes and understandings between Anishinaabe and French fur traders were
essential to how power by European leaders was negotiated in the region.31 A “middle ground”
of cultural accommodation was created that was based on Algonquian cultural structures such as
reciprocity and alliances. White reshaped previous historical understandings of contact where
European power over the fur trade was assumed. British reluctance to adopt these cultural forms
of diplomacy lead to tensions which resulted in the Pontiac Rebellion of 1763 and subsequent
British acceptance to continue these alliance relationships. Although White’s thesis is still
largely influential it has also been challenged by work such as Heidi Bohaker’s “Nindoodemag”
which demonstrates the deep influence of Anishnaabe kinship systems in the region and how
31
Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-
1815. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
14
these influenced post-Iroquois war migrations described by White and continued to influence
diplomatic history, challenging White’s metaphors of “imperial glue” holding the region
together, and refugees as “shattered glass.”32 Michael Wittgen’s work An Infinity of Nations
further reframes the history of encounter between Anishinaabe and Europeans by centering
Anishinaabe political motivations over White’s description of accommodation.33 Anishinaabe
political formations were affected by the expansion of settler colonialism in the nineteenth
century and the attendent government and religious attempts at assimilation. Edmund J.
Danzinger has shown the strength demonstrated through negotiations and resistances by
Anishinaabek communities through the “reservation era” of the late nineteenth-century.34 He
traces reserve communities’ response to agriculture, education, Christianity and government
attempts to control Indigenous politics, although his very broad scope dealing with reserves in
both the Canadian and U.S. Great Lakes borderlands makes his analysis at times vague. My
study elaborates on the specifics of how political power was negotiated between Anishinaabek
communities who participated at the Grand General Council and the government in this era.
Anishinaabe historian Brenda Child focuses her work on the central role of women in
maintaining nationhood over these challenging years.35 Her work demonstrates women’s
creativity and drive to ensure continuity in Anishinaabeg nationhood despite the impositions of
settlement, church, and government efforts to restrict life on reserves. These works collectively
establish the power and influence of the Anishinaabek on trade and diplomacy historically, and
how they survived as a political entity through, in Wittgen’s words, a “capacity for change and
adaptation” which “allowed the Anishinaabeg to function as part of a transregional collective
social formation, or to detach from this larger formation and mobilize political power and
identity on a microlevel as members of a doodem, or clan with claims to particular hunting
32
Heidi Bohaker, “‘Nindoodemag’: The Significance of Algonquian Kinship Networks in the Eastern
Great Lakes Region, 1600-1701.” The William and Mary Quarterly 63, no. 1 (2006): 23–52.
https://doi.org/10.2307/3491724.
33
Michael J. Witgen, An Infinity of Nations How the Native New World Shaped Early North America. 1st
ed. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012). https://doi.org/10.9783/9780812205176.
34
Edmund Jefferson Danzinger, Great Lakes Indian Accommodation and Resistance During the Early
Reservation Years, 1850-1900 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009).
35
Brenda J. Child, Holding Our World Together: Ojibwe Women and the Survival of Community (New
York: Viking, 2012).
15
territories, watersheds, rice beds, and so on.” 36 Bohaker, Witgen, Danziger and Child have all
demonstrated that Anishinaabe governments were able to be flexible in the face of new
challenges in large part due to the broad autonomy that local councils retained, and this study
further adds to our understanding of these processes in the face of restrictive government
legislation.
Anishinaabe processes of governance have also been the subject of important recent
scholarly inquiry, drawing on interdisciplinary methods and frames of reference to centre
Anishinaabe categories of leadership and alliance. Philip Belfy’s Three Fires Unity overviews
the political history of alliance between the Ojibwe, Pottowatomie, and Odawa nations in the
Great Lakes.37 Cary Miller’s Ogimaag focuses on the religious or spiritual aspects of
Anishinaabe leaders’ power, and outlines the political structure of Anishinaabe governance by
council, including the influences of Ogimaag (hereditary leaders), Mayosewininiwag (military
leaders), Gechi-Midewijig (Midewiwin or medicine society leaders) as well as women’s
councils.38 She argues against anthropological interpretations that classified Anishinaabe social
structures and governance as weak, through describing how secular and religious power operated
in Anishinaabek society. Heidi Bohakers Doodem and Council Fire: Anishinaabe Governance
through Alliance provides an important reorientation of Anishinaabe governance in relation to
doodem (often referred to as the clan system) which was related to jurisdiction over place as well
as how political and kinship alliances through marriage extended interconnected networks of
relationships across larger territories. 39 Her work draws on material evidence as well as legal
documentation of treaties and petitions, and outlines the connections between doodem and
histories of council-based governance, in which local council fires had distinct spheres of
responsibility and formed interdependent alliances within the larger General Councils in which
36
Witgen, An Infinity of Nations, 19.
37
Phil Bellfy. Three Fires Unity: The Anishnaabeg of the Lake Huron Borderlands. (Lincoln: University
of Nebraska Press, 2011).
38
Miller, Ogimaag.
39
Bohaker, Doodem and Council Fire.
16
they participated.40 The importance of local autonomy within alliances is a political principle
that we can see continuing in many ways through how Grand General Council members sought
to assert jurisdiction over local affairs. In their deliberations about accepting the Indian Act the
Grand General Council often did not take a unilateral position but rather emphasized the
autonomy of participating communities to engage with the law as they saw fit.
Anishinaabe political principles, that became foundational in their treaties with the
Crown, have also been described by the work of Anishinaabe scholars Heidi Kiiwetinepinesiik
Stark, Kekek Jason Stark, Alan Corbiere and John Borrows.41 All of these works have made
ground-breaking contributions to understandings of how Anishinaabe conceptions of alliance and
responsibility established, influenced, and interpreted agreements to share land and maintain
their sovereignty after the British became the dominant European force in North America ending
French rule after 1760. Alan Corbiere’s dissertation provides an extensive accounting for the
terms on which Anishinaabe entered diplomatic alliances, and significantly reorients
historiographical understandings of treaty relationship towards Anishinaabe perspectives. The
continuity of some of these understandings, which included agreements to ensure material
conditions that would allow communities to thrive and to respect Anishinaabe sovereignty, are
visible throughout this study, as nineteenth-century leaders called frequently on their alliance
with the Crown to assert their rights.
Likewise, the history of alliance between the Anishinaabe and the Haudenosaunee has
been the site of recent scholarly and publicly engaged inquiry. The Dish with One Spoon
wampum agreement has become a well-known symbol of caring for the land and shared
40
Ibid.,153. The responsibilities of local councils are outlined in Peter Jones, History of the Ojebway
Indians, with Especial Reference to their Conversion to Christianity; with a Brief Memoir of the Writer
(London: A. W. Bennet, 1861).
41
Heidi Kiiwetinepinesiik Stark, “Respect, Responsibility, and Renewal: The Foundations of Anishinaabe
Treaty Making with the United States and Canada.” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 34,
no. 2 (2010): 145–64. https://doi.org/10.17953/aicr.34.2.j0414503108l8771. Heidi Kiiwetinepinesiik
Stark and Kekek Jason Stark, “Nenabozho Goes Fishing: A Sovereignty Story.” Daedalus 147, no. 2
(2018): 17–26. https://doi.org/10.1162/DAED_a_00486., Alan Ojig Corbiere “Anishinaabe Treaty-
Making in the 18th and 19th-Century Northern Great Lakes: From Shared Meanings to Epistemological
Chasms.” (PhD Diss., York University, 2019), John Borrows “Wampum at Niagara: The Royal
Proclamation, Canadian Legal History, and Self-Government” in Michael Asch, ed. Aboriginal and
Treaty Rights in Canada: Essays on Law, Equity, and Respect for Difference (Vancouver: UBC Press,
1997): 155-172.
17
responsibilities in Toronto and Southern Ontario more broadly. 42 The long history of alliance
between these nations has also recently been examined by Corbiere, as well in earlier work by
Victor Llytwyn and Dean Jacobs.43 Corbiere describes how the agreement was first recorded in
writing at the 1701 Great Peace of Montreal, but could be based on earlier agreements between
the nations while Llytwyn and Jacobs describe the ongoing importance of the agreement for
Indigenous politics to this day.44 Most scholarly attention around meetings to renew this alliance
in the nineteenth-century has focused on the 1840 gathering at New Credit. 45 This dissertation
extends this history of Anishinaabek and Haudenosaunee alliances past 1840 by tracing councils
gatherings in 1858 and in the early Grand General Councils up to 1882. This is important as it
makes clear these alliances were drawn on into the late nineteenth century.
Indigenous alliances described by the scholars above were the foundation of the original
Grand General Council which first met in 1870. These historic alliances were central to how the
Council frames their criticism of the Indian Act and precedent legislation, as the laws changed
the relationship between the Crown and their nations in the nineteenth century. This dissertation
builds on the important works examined above by extending the history of council-based
42
Hayden King discusses the agreement in his overview of Anishinaabe international diplomatic relations
“Discourses of Conquest and Resistance: International relations and Anishinaabe diplomacy” in Randolph
B. Persaud and Alina Sajed, eds. Race, Gender, and Culture in International Relations: Postcolonial
Perspectives (New York: Routledge, 2018): 135-150. See also Leanne Simpson, “Looking after Gdoo-
naaganinaa: Precolonial Nishnaabeg Diplomacy and Treaty Relationships,” Wicazo Sa Review, 23:2 (Fall
2008): 29-42 and Jeffrey G. Hewitt, “Reconsidering Reconciliation: The Long Game,” The Supreme
Court Law Review: Osgoode’s Annual Constitutional Cases Conference 67 (2014). For insights into the
importance of the Dish With One Spoon agreement, both historically and in the present, I am indebted to
the work of Alan Corbiere and Richard Hill at their talk “First Law of the Land: Sharing from the Great
Dish,” University of Toronto, September 28, 2019. For an artistic and popular engagement with the Dish
With One Spoon see Ange Loft, Victoria Freeman, Martha Steigman and Jill Carter A Treaty Guide for
Torontonians (Toronto: Jumblies Press and Toronto Biennial of Art in partnership with Art Metropole,
2022) and the accompanying performance at the Toronto Biennial of Art by Jumblies Theatre in 2022.
43
Corbiere, “Anishinaabe Treaty-Making,” Victor P. Lytwyn, “A Dish with One Spoon: The Shared
Hunting Grounds Agreement in the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence Valley Region,” in David H. Pentlant,
ed., Paper of the Twenty-Eighth Algonquian Conference (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 1997):
210-27. For an overview of recent literature on the agreement see Dean Jacobs and Victor P. Lytwyn,
“Naagan ge bezhig emkwaan: A Dish With One Spoon Reconsidered,” Ontario History, Vol. 112, no 2,
(Fall 2020): 191-210.
44
Corbiere, “Anishinaabe Treaty-Making.”
45
Ibid., Lytwyn, ““A Dish with One Spoon.”
18
diplomacy between Indigenous nations and with the Crown into the late-nineteenth century, and
into the context of responding to government legislation rather than dealing specifically within
the context of treaty relationships. I draw attention throughout my work to how these
relationships were being argued along these lines– Indigenous nations called on treaty
relationships as the Department of Indian Affairs deeply undermined these agreements through
their legislative agenda. While I by no means want to minimize the devastating impact of the
Indian Act on Anishinaabe governance at both the reserve level and the nation, my dissertation
will show that governance processes which reflected earlier modes of sovereign decision-making
described by Miller, Bohaker, Corbiere Lytwyn and others continued to inform how these very
colonial policies and laws were protested. Governance through council, as well as how historic
treaty relationships were drawn on to assert local authority over decision-making in changing
political circumstances demonstrates this continuity. I make clear that the members of the
Grand General Council were also influenced by Christianity and ideas of property and
assimilation through enfranchisement. However, the historiographic tendency to focus on the
destructive power of the Indian Act has often minimized continuity in political views and
structures that were mobilized to deal with the law itself. Indigenous leaders mobilized to
protect their communities in nineteenth-century Ontario as they had historically, negotiating new
challenges such as encroaching white settlement, the government usurping control of their
finances and resources, and legislative assault on their traditional forms of decision-making
authority through Indigenous forms of deliberation and diplomacy.
The Grand General Council

The most comprehensive of the limited historical accounts of the Grand General
Council’s history is the master’s thesis by Norman Shields, “Anishinaabek Political Alliance in
the Post-Confederation Period, 1870-1936.”46 Shields provides a detailed overview of Council
activities by examining the minutes that they printed, sometimes in greater chronological detail
than I do here due to the thematic focus of my chapters. He also argues for a continuity of
Anishinaabe governance that operated through the council. His work covers the entirety of the
46
Norman Shields, “Anishinaabek Political Alliance in the Post-Confederation Period, 1870-1936” (M.A.
Thesis, Queen’s University, 2001).
19
council as it existed under that name, ending his study in 1936. At this point, Indian Affairs was
placed under the Department of Mines and Resources, and Department approval of funding for
delegates to travel to councils from ceased and the Grand General Council ended. The Council
was reestablished as the Union of Ontario Indians in 1949. Sheilds’ chapter in Karl Hele’s Lines
Drawn Upon the Water examines the important question of women’s status in relation to council
debates, and he clearly places this within the broader political context of “non-treaty”
Pottawatomi migration from the United States, arguing that the Council’s conservative response
to women losing Indian status through marriages should be placed in this broader historical
context of colonially imposed borders and rights accorded to various groups on reserves. 47
Shields’ work is thorough, and I am indebted to his careful overview of the main events at
council gatherings.48
This study adds to the history of Indigenous political organizing in Canada by

significantly expanding on Shield’s work. By placing the Grand General of the 1870s, 1880s
and 1890s within the longer history of council organizing in Ontario stretching back to the 1840s
and to earlier alliances between the Anishinaabe, the Haudenosaunee and the Crown, I add
further specificity to his argument of the continuity of Anishinaabe governance through these
councils. In addition, I examine other influences on the Council in greater depth, in particular the
history of Methodist involvement in council organizing. I also focus each chapter on a specific
area of jurisdictional struggle, and in so doing expand on how each of these (for instance
enfranchisement, inheritance, or how Indian Agents roles were perceived) was dealt with by the
Council. I do so by examining in much greater detail the records of the Department of Indian
Affairs themselves as well as engaging in closely with the legislation they imposed. In doing so,
I provide greater historical detail about the very laws and policies that the Grand General
Council was reacting to, and thus provide greater context for the political and legal conditions in
which the Council was operating.
47
Norman Shields, “The Grand General Indian Council of Ontario and Indian Status Legislation,” in
Lines Drawn Upon the Water: First Nations and the Great Lakes Borders and Borderlands, ed. Karl Hele
(Waterloo, Ont: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2008), 205-218.
48
Another Masters thesis that examines Grand General Council history, albeit more briefly than Shields is
Richard Richard R. H. Lueger, “A History of Indian Associations in Canada (1870-1970)” (M.A. Thesis,
Carleton University, 1977).
20
My work can therefore be placed alongside studies interested more broadly in the history
of Indigenous political organizing in Canada. This includes the foundational work of Paul
Tennant, who examines the history of political organizing in British Columbia between 1849 and
1989, and more recently Sarah Nickel, who uses oral history interviews and gendered analysis in
order to elaborate on the local complexity of Indigenous political organizing in the twentieth
century there.49 Nickel makes the important intervention that “White Paper dominance” exists
in how Indigenous political organizing is understood in Canada, with scholars emphasizing the
reaction to 1969 government efforts to expediate assimilation as the genesis of modern
Indigenous organizing. Nickels argues in contrast, that post 1969 organizing reflects much longer
genealogies of organized resistance.50 She draws our attention to the long histories of sustained
organizing in the decades prior to this movement, an extended trajectory of Indigenous response
to Canadian law and policy to which this study contributes. While Nickel’s work focuses largely
on British Columbia, my dissertation outlines the many long trajectories of Indigenous political
organizing in Ontario.
Various other authors have more briefly examined aspects of the Grand General
Council’s work in response to Canadian statutory laws and policies. Coel Kirkby has taken up
the Grand General Council’s work in dealing with enfranchisement, but as I explain in Chapter 2
has overlooked their history of alliance with the Haudenosaunee through his comparative focus
on how each nation responded to assimilationist legislation.51 Historians have written
biographies of influential Grand General Council delegates, such as the work by Keith Jamieson
and Michelle Hamilton on Dr. Oronhyatekha, and the biography of Peter Edmund Jones by Allan
49
Paul Tennant, Aboriginal Peoples and Politics: The Indian Land Question in British Columbia, 1849-
1989 (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1990), Sarah A. Nickel, Assembling Unity:
Indigenous Politics, Gender, and the Union of BC Indian Chiefs (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2019). See also
Laurie Meijer Drees, The Indian Association of Alberta: A History of Political Action. (Vancouver: UBC
Press, 2002).
50
Sarah Nickel, “Reconsidering 1969: The White Paper and the Making of the Modern Indigenous Rights
Movement.” The Canadian Historical Review 100, no. 2 (2019): 223–38.
https://doi.org/10.3138/chr.2018-0082-2.
51
Coel Kirkby, “Reconstituting Canada: The Enfranchisement and Disenfranchisement of ‘Indians,’ Circa
1837-1900,” University of Toronto Law Journal, vol 69 (Fall, 2019): 497-539 and “Paradise Lost? The
Constitutional Politics of ‘Indian’ Enfranchisement in Canada, 1857-1900” Osgoode Hall Law Journal
56.3 (2020): 606-658.
21
Sherwin.52 Both deal with the respective involvements of these leaders at the Grand General
Council. However, they emphasize these leader’s resistance to the law rather than accounting for
how they were willing to work with the law in many ways as I demonstrate in this dissertation.
Peter Schmalz provides a good summary of some of the council meetings in his The Ojibwa of
Southern Ontario, but likewise tends to overemphasize resistance to the law without proper
contextualization. For instance, he quotes Council President Albert Tobias in 1894 saying he
“disapprov[ed] of the Superintendent assuming all and every responsibility and entirely ignoring
Indian Councils” without providing the context that the issue being debated was inheritance
specifically and not the Indian Act in general.53 This is important because Schmalz’
overemphasis on resistance leads him to attribute the accommodationist reaction of some
factions within the Council to their not comprehending the law.54 Instead I find that leaders’
willingness to accept parts of the legislation reflect long and careful engagement with settler law
and their doing so was strategic and contingent on a broader vision of expanding local authority.
E. Brian Titley categorizes the Grand General Council’s work in the twentieth century as being
generally “innocuous,” or subservient to the government, but again more context is needed in his
analysis. For instance, Titley uses the example of the Council’s broad acceptance of the ban of
cultural practices under the Indian Act in 1904 without describing the deep Christian roots of
many delegates that makes this position coherent. 55 In my work, I try to add specificity around
which aspects of the law were accepted by the Council and on what grounds, while placing this
firmly within broader contexts of how delegates were working towards greater jurisdictional
52
Keith Jamieson and Michelle A. Hamilton, Dr. Oronhyatekha: Security, Justice, and Equality (Toronto:
Dundurn, 2016), Allan L. Sherwin, Bridging Two Peoples: Chief Peter E. Jones, 1843-1909 (Waterloo,
Ont: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2012). The engagement of Canadian political leaders with
prominent Grand General Council members has also been examined by Donald Smith’s chapter
“Macdonald’s Relationship with Aboriginal Peoples” and J. R. Miller’s chapter “Macdonald as Minister
of Indian Affairs: The Shaping of Canadian Indian Policy” in Patrice Dutil and Roger Hall, eds.,
Macdonald at 200: New Reflections and Legacies (Toronto: Dundurn Press, 2014): 58-93 and 311-341
and in Donald B. Smith, Seen but Not Seen: Influential Canadians and the First Nations from the 1840s
to Today (Toronto, Ontario: University of Toronto Press, 2021).
53
Peter S. Schmalz, The Ojibwa of Southern Ontario. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991), 207.
54
Ibid., 204. Schmalz says “their analysis of the complex Indian Act had major shortcomings. Few if
any delegates at the grand council understood the full implications of the act.”
55
E. Brian Titley, A Narrow Vision: Duncan Campbell Scott and the administration of Indian Affairs in
Canada (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1986).
22
power for their communities alongside their acceptance of many of the strictures of gendered and
patriarchal aspects of Victorian Christianity and other accommodationist perspectives they
express.
J. Kēhualani Kauanui’s Paradoxes of Hawaiian Sovereignty: Land, Sex, and the

Colonial Politics of State Nationalism provides a critical analysis of class and gender within the
movement for Hawaiian sovereignty, and a framework to more broadly describe the influence of
settler colonialism on Indigenous politics in the nineteenth century. 56 While work such as
Danzingers’ acknowledge accommodationist positions of Indigenous leaders, her work more
carefully describes the implications of how “white America notions of property title, state
sovereignty, and normative gender relations and sexuality become intimately imbricated in
aspirations for Hawaiian liberation”. 57 Kauanui’s work examines a political context that is
distinct from the one I examine here (both in relation to how nationalism was drawn upon in
Hawaiian sovereignty movements, as well as in their specific histories of colonial encounter), but
her attentiveness to how Indigenous leaders adopted categories of gender, sexuality– and the
material and biopolitical impacts that this had on land and property 58– is a useful frame of
reference for this study. The adoption by Council delegates of some of the law’s terms,
especially their gendered dimensions, and their desire for the rights of political participation and
property that came with British subjecthood reflects their religious and educational histories and
acknowledging these influences of settler colonialism on their negotiations of both settler and
Indigenous law is important.
Overall, my work adds to the history of the Grand General Council in several ways. I
provide greater context to the laws and policies that the council was reacting against than in
previous works. I provide an overview of how the late nineteenth century era of Council-based
organizing relates to both earlier inter-Indigenous councils, and to their alliances with the Crown.
I also tie the political views of many council delegates to their family and personal involvement
56
J. Kēhualani Kauanui, Paradoxes of Hawaiian Sovereignty: Land, Sex, and the Colonial Politics of
State Nationalism (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2018).
57
Ibid., 3.
58
Ibid., 23.
23
in the networks established by the Methodist church and how these earlier religious and political
networks that sought to establish education, Christianity and political integration influenced later
nineteenth century thought. In focusing my chapters thematically, I am also able to provide
greater detail into how Grand General delegates were dealing with these individual issues than
previous writing on the council. As such, this work provides the most detailed study of the
Grand General Council’s work in the nineteenth century to date, and adds to the history of
Indigenous political organizing in Canada. As an organization with hundreds of delegates over
many decades, meeting in various configurations of communities and all bringing local contexts
to the council this is far from a story that can be easily framed in one narrative. Although much
more work is needed to examine the histories of individual delegates, and how these gatherings
in council related to local community politics, I hope this work is a starting place to encourage
future studies in these areas.
The Indian Act and Department of Indian Affairs Policy in the

Nineteenth Century
This dissertation also makes important contributions to how we understand the history of
the Department of Indian Affairs in relation to Indigenous communities in Ontario. I
demonstrate in all the cases that I examine how the Grand General Council was in direct
communication with the DIA about its laws and policies, an oversight of many studies on the
development of the Indian Act. There are few overviews of the Indian Act and Department of
Indian Affairs policy development that are not either produced by the government or that closely
draw on government legislation and policy development in their interpretations. 59 These studies
have nonetheless been greatly influential in how historians have interpreted increasingly
repressive relationship of the government to Indigenous nations as it developed in the nineteenth
century. Studies written in the 1970s and 80s that began to interrogate nineteenth-century
59
Government-produced reports include John F. Leslie, Commissions of Inquiry into Indian Affairs in the
Canadas, 1828-1858: Evolving a corporate memory for the Indian Department (Ottawa: Indian Affairs
and Northern Development, Treaties and Historical Research Centre, 1985) and The Report of the
Pennefather Commissions: Indian Conditions and Administration in the Canadas in the 1850s (Ottawa:
Treaties and Historical Research Centre, 1983), Leslie, John., Ron. Maguire, and Robert G. Moore. The
Historical Development of the Indian Act. 2nd ed. (Ottawa: Treaties and Historical Research Centre,
Indian and Northern Affairs Canada, 1983). See also the report by John S. Milloy, Indian Act
Colonialism: A Century of Dishonour, 1869-1969 (National Centre for First Nations Governance, 2008).
24
Department of Indian Affairs history include the work of John S. Milloy, John Tobias, James
Douglas Leighton, and the edited collections by J. R. Miller, and Ian A. L. Getty and Antoine S.
Lussier (in which Tobias’ and Milloy’s articles were both printed).60 John L. Tobias’
foundational article “Protection, Civilization, Assimilation” is an important example of this body
of work. Reprinted in three collections after its original publication in 1976, and widely cited
due to its concise depiction of the transition from imperial to domestic control of Indian Affairs,
Tobias’ framing has been called by Elsbeth Heaman a “magisterial” summary of Canadian
Indian policy.61 Collectively, these works provide an necessary record of how the Department of
Indian Affairs operated, grew, and developed policies that affected the lives of Indigenous
people in Canada through assertions of control over lands, finances, band membership and
countless other fields of regulation.
60
John L. Tobias, “Protection, Civilization, Assimilation: An Outline History of Canada’s Indian Policy”
and John S. Milloy “The Early Indian Acts: Developmental Strategy and Constitutional Change” in eds.
Getty, Ian A. L., and Antoine S. Lussier. As Long as the Sun Shines and Water Flows : a Reader in
Canadian Native Studies (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1983), James Douglas
Leighton, “The Development of Federal Indian Policy in Canada, 1840-1890" (PhD diss., Western
University, 1975), John S. Milloy “The Era of Civilization – British Policy for the Indians of Canada,
1830-1860” (PhD diss., University of Oxford, 1978), J. R. Miller, ed., Sweet Promises: A Reader on
Indian-White Relations in Canada, (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991), Marion Joan Boswell,
“’Civilizing’ the Indian: Government Administration of Indians, 1876-1896” (PhD Diss. University of
Ottawa, 1977), Jean Manore, “Power and Performance the Indian Agent and the Agency, 1877-1897:
Two Western Case Studies.” (PhD Diss. University of Ottawa, 1986). More recent scholarly work has
deepened understandings of the Department of Indian Affairs through looking at the role of Indian
Commissioners in the West, and in emphasizing the networks of governance that operated through legal
aid programs and the sociology internal to the operations of the Department of Indian Affairs: Jacqueline
Briggs, “Networks of Colonial Governance: Department of Indian Affairs Legal Aid in Canada, 1870-
1970” (PhD Diss., University of Toronto, 2022), David Voght, “’In the Best Interest of the Indians’: An
Ethnohistory of the Canadian Department of Indian Affairs, 1897-1913” (PhD Diss. University of
Victoria, 2020), E. Brian. Titley, The Indian Commissioners: Agents of the State and Indian Policy in
Canada’s Prairie West, 1873-1932 (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 2009).
61
E. A. Heaman, “Space, Race, and Violence: The Beginnings of ‘Civilization’ in Canada” in Elizabeth
Manke, Jerry Bannister, Denis McKim and Scott W. See, Violence, Order, and Unrest: A History of
British North America, 1749-1876 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2019): 135. Tobias’ article
“Protection, Civilization, Assimilation: An Outline History of Canada’s Indian Policy” was originally
printed in The Western Canadian Journal of Anthropology 6, 2 (1976): 13-30 and subsequently in eds. Ian
A. L. Getty and Antoine S. Lussier, As Long as the Sun Shines and Water Flows: A Reader in Canadian
Native Studies (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1983): 29-38, Sweet Promises: A Reader on Indian-White
Relations in Canada, ed. J. R. Miller, (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991): 127-144, and in eds.
Tina Loo and Lorna R. McLean, Historical Perspectives on Law and Society in Canada (Mississauga,
ON: Copp Clark Longman, 1994): 290-305.
25
Since these initial studies, there has been a proliferation of work by historians to greater
contextualize and elaborate on the impacts of the Indian Act and the D.I.A. on Indigenous
peoples. These laws, policies, and practices are now commonly understood by historians as
genocidal in their goal to eradicate Indigenous laws, culture, and existence as unique groups and
nations.62 These more recent studies place government impacts on Indigenous people at the
centre of their analysis, as well as centre the response of Indigenous people to these legal and
policy impositions. Examples include the devastating policies of starvation and the expansion to
the West;63 the impacts of the Indian Act on women;64 the role of money, finance, and welfare in
62
Canada’s Residential Schools: The History, Part 1: Origins to 1939, The Final Report of the Truth and
Reconciliation Commission of Canada, Vol. 1 (Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, 2015)
and Reclaiming Power and Place: The Final Report of the National Inquiry Into Missing and Murdered
Indigenous Women and Girls. Canadian Historical Association. Canada Day Statement: The History of
Violence Against Indigenous Peoples Fully Warrants the Use of The Word “Genocide”. CHA Website.
30 June 2021. https://cha-shc.ca/news/canada-day-statement-the-history-of-violence-against-indigenous-
peoples-fully-warrants-the-use-of-the-word-genocide-2021-06-30.
63
Sarah Carter, Lost Harvests: Prairie Indian reserve farmers and government policy (Montreal: McGill-
Queen’s University Press, 1990) and “Two Acres and a Cow: ‘Peasant’ Farming for the Indians of the
Northwest, 1889–97,” The Canadian Historical Review 70, no. 1 (1989):27-52, James Daschuk, Clearing
the Plains: Disease, Politics of Starvation, and the Loss of Aboriginal Life (Regina: University of Regina
Press, 2013), Shelley A. M. Gavigan, Hunger, Horses, and Government Men: Criminal Law on the
Aboriginal Plains, 1870-1905 (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2012.
64
Gehl, Lynn. Gehl v Canada: Challenging Sex Discrimination in the Indian Act (Regina, Saskatchewan:
University of Regina Press, 2021) and “The Queen and I: discrimination against women in the Indian Act
continues,” Canadian Woman Studies, vol. 20, issue 2 (Summer 2000): 64-69, Kathleen Jamieson, Indian
Women and the Law in Canada: Citizens Minus (Ottawa: Advisory Council on the Status of Women,
1978), Bonita Lawrence, “Gender, Race, and the Regulation of Native Identity in Canada and the United
States: An Overview,” Hypatia vol. 18, no. 2 (2003): 3–31 and “Real” Indians and Others: Mixed-Blood
Native Peoples and Indigenous Nationhood (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2004), and Genevieve Painter,
“Partial Histories: Constituting a Conflict between Women’s Equality Rights and Indigenous Sovereignty
in Canada” (PhD diss., University of California Berkeley, 2015).
26
colonization;65 the role of Indian Agents;66 and the imposition of residential schooling.67
Indigenous response to the Crown through petitions in what became Ontario and Quebec have
also been the subject of recent scholarly work.68 Collectively, work on colonialism in Canada at
the hands of the Department of Indian Affairs is a rich and varied field, and yet there remains
much work to be done on how the law was applied and enforced on Indian reserves.
Despite these landmark changes to how colonialism has been interpreted in Canada, there
has been little significant re-evaluation of the history Indian Act and D.I.A. policy development.
Tobias’ outline history, alongside work by Milloy and Leighton, remain the dominant frame for
understanding how the government imposed its policies over the nineteenth century. These
works, in particular Tobias’ article, have become a shorthand for the development of the Indian
Act in the nineteenth-century; large shifts such as the move away from military alliance after the
war of 1812, the development of “civilization” policies in the 1830s that prioritized education
65
Gettler, Brian. Colonialism’s Currency: Money, State, and First Nations in Canada, 1820-1950.
(Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2020), Hugh Shewell, ‘Enough to Keep Them Alive’: Indian
Welfare in Canada, 1873-1965 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004).
66
Schmalz, The Ojibwa of Southern Ontario, 208-218, Jarvis Brownlie, A Fatherly Eye: Indian Agents,
Government Power, and Aboriginal Resistance in Ontario, 1918-1939 (Toronto: Oxford University Press,
2003) and “Man on the Spot: John Daly, Indian Agent in Parry Sound, 1922-1939.” Journal of the
Canadian Historical Association 5, no. 1 (1994): 63–86, John Steckley, Indian Agents, Rulers of the
Reserves (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2016), Vic Satzewich and Linda Mahood. “Indian Affairs
and Band Governance: Deposing Indian Chiefs in Western Canada, 1896-1911.” Canadian Ethnic Studies
26, no. 1 (1994): 40–58 and “Indian Agents and the Residential School System in Canada, 1946 - 1970.”
Historical Studies in Education 7, no. 1 (1995): 45–69, Vic Satzewich, “Patronage, Moral Regulation and
the Recruitment of Indian Affairs Personnel, 1879-1900.” The Canadian Review of Sociology 33, no. 2
(1996): 213–34, Dorothee Schreiber, “‘A Liberal and Paternal Spirit’: Indian Agents and Native Fisheries
in Canada.” Ethnohistory 55, no. 1 (2008): 87–118, and Rhonda Telford, “The Wikwemikong First
Nation and the Department of Indian Affairs’ Mismanagement of Petroleum Development.” In Anne
Lorene Chambers, ed. Ontario Since Confederation (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000).
67
John S. Milloy and Mary Jane Logan McCallum. A National Crime: the Canadian Government and
the Residential School System, 1879 to 1986. [New edition]. Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada: University of
Manitoba Press, 2017.
68
Maxime Gohier, “La pratique pétitionnaire des amérindiens de la vallée du Saint-Laurent sous le
regime Britannique: pouvoir, representation et légitimité (1760-1860)” (PhD Diss. Université de Québec à
Montréal, 2014), Mathieu Arsenault, “Maintenant nous te parlons, ne dedaigne pas nous ecouter Petitions
et Relation Speciale entre les Premieres Nations et la Couronne au Canada, 1840-1860” (PhD Diss., York
University, 2019). https://yorkspace.library.yorku.ca/xmlui/handle/10315/37407.
27
and agriculture, and later shifts towards assimilation through the precursors to the Indian Act (the
Gradual Civilization Act of 1857 and Gradual Enfranchisement Act of 1869), and the final
imposition of band governance through the law itself are generally the key points in this
narrative, and remain closely tied to Department of Indian Affairs goals during these various eras
rather than a historical examination of what these laws and policies looked like in application,
understanding how they were developed and what benefit they served to the DIA. These
overviews are not inaccurate in their description of government objectives but can nonetheless
skew interpretations of the history towards what the government aspired to rather than what they
were able to achieve on the ground. Southern Ontario, and Quebec were central in the
development of the Indian Act and other policies, as Indigenous peoples there were considered
more “civilized” as many communities here had long histories of agriculture, and engagement
with Christianity and schooling, all cornerstones of assimilationist government policy in the
nineteenth century. Many key aspects of the Indian Act such as enfranchisement and governance
provisions were designed for these provinces alone. This study, by looking at five areas where
the law was contested and expanded within Ontario adds to our understanding of the history of
the Indian Act by localizing these struggles that ended up affecting legal development.
The historical narrative of Department of Indian Affairs policy development is entwined

with the history of its own archives. As archival historian Bill Russell has noted, the keeping of
prolific records by the Department was tied to goals of colonization: recording the “progression”
of Indigenous peoples towards “civilization.”69 Department of Indian Affairs archivist George
M. Matheson produced the first histories written of the Department for the use of bureaucrats to
document this aspirational change in Indigenous communities. 70 Superintendent General
Duncan Campbell Scott also wrote early histories of the Department in 1913 and 1914, and as
Brian Gettler has explained, the historical work of Scott and later Secretary of Indian Affairs T.
69
Bill Russell, “The White Man’s Paper Burden: Aspects of Records Keeping in the Department of
Indian Affairs, 1860-1914” Archivaria 19 (Winter 1984-85): 50-72.
70
See Miscellaneous Papers on Indian Issues: Historical Sketches of Indian Affairs by G. M. Matheson,
Registrar of the Department of Indian Affairs, LAC RG10, vol. 14161.
28
L. R. MacInnnes have been largely influential in the periodization of how policy goals of the
Department have been taken as markers for later historians, including Tobias.71
As Haitian historian Michel-Rolph Trouillot concisely outlines, how archives are

produced and used is vital for the production of historical narratives: “Historical narratives are
premised on previous understandings, which are themselves premised on the distribution of
archival power.”72 Trouillot outlines the process through which historical knowledge is
generated, and the power relations that exist at every stage of this process. 73 He explains:
“Silences enter the process of historical production at four crucial moments: the moment of fact
creation (the making of sources); the moment of fact assembly (the making of archives); the
moment of retrieval of facts (the making of narratives); and the moment of retrospective
significance (the making of history in the final instance).”74 Applying his framework of analysis
to the Department of Indian Affairs historiography yields a way to interpret more clearly the
generation of knowledge that we have on Indian Affairs and their relation to their own archives
that were produced with specific policy goals in mind. We can see the echoes of the original
DIA policy goals in later historical accounts. While this body of work correctly identifies the
aspirations of the Department and roots of many of the legal tools it developed, much is left out
of this narrative. These omissions include the response to the law by those whose lives it sought
to regulate and the many difficulties the DIA had in imposing its agenda of control over life on
reserves which resulted in greater legal and enforcement mechanisms. As these archives were
taken up by Department of Indian Affairs staff, and later by other historians, their original policy
goals continued to be foregrounded within the historical narrative without deeply accounting for
these two factors.
Brian Gettler, “Colonialism’s Currency: A Political History of First Nations Money-Use in Quebec and
71
Ontario, 1820-1950” (PhD Diss. Université du Québec à Montréal, 2011), 32-35.

72
Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston, Mass:
Beacon Press, 1995), 55.
73
Ibid., 25.
74
Ibid., 26. “To put it differently, any historical narrative is a particular bundle of silences, the result of a
unique process, and the operation required to deconstruct these silences will vary accordingly.” 27.
29
However, Department of Indian Affairs archives also contain records of how Indigenous
leaders in Ontario responded to the rearrangement of their relationship with the Crown that was
imposed through these laws and policies, including petitions, records of delegations to Ottawa,
and the minutes of the Grand General Council and other councils that preceded them. While
these engagements with the law are addressed in a cursory way by many authors in the
conventional narrative of law and policy development, their deep significance for how we might
re-evaluate what the imposition of the Indian Act meant for nineteenth century Indigenous
political leaders as the legislation rearranged longstanding alliance relationships with the Crown
has so far been understudied. It would be difficult, if not impossible, to write the history of
development of the Indian Act without relying on these government archives, and I do so to a
large extent in this dissertation. However, by examining tensions around five key aspects of the
law, I place the development of policy and law directly in conversation with the Indigenous
responses to these legal changes, what Trouillot might classify as an intervention in the retrieval
of facts. These sources are produced by and about men, and as such are greatly limited in their
representation of Indigenous response to the law more generally; women’s positions are cut out
of the sources at the point of their creation, and this is a significant limitation on the archives of
petitions and council minutes that I have worked with for this dissertation. Despite this, what
becomes evident is gaps and complications in the neat progression of D.I.A. laws and policies
that has so far been the standard historical narrative– where the success of laws is often conflated
with the date of their passing. Included among these complications are the uneven nature of how
these laws were applied, problems that Indian agents had in having the laws enforced, and the
wide discretionary authority provided to the Department in applying the law. Most importantly
what is left out by prioritizing a narrative of law and policy development that does not account
for Indigenous response silences the continuing assertions of sovereignty that were made through
these responses. Settler governments imposed a massively repressive legal framework on
Indigenous people in nineteenth-century Canada. However, if we base our historical narrative on
the trajectory of this imposition alone, and neglect to see the imposition as a site of intense
struggle and political debate, we are limited in our ability to understand what the application of
the Indian Act meant in nineteenth-century Ontario.
30
Methodology
I began this dissertation planning to study the role of Indian Agents in enforcing the
Indian Act in nineteenth-century Canada. As a settler scholar, I felt that this investigation into
Canadian law and colonialism was within my area of responsibility, and in my estimation, I felt
would be able to demonstrate both the limits of state law and Indigenous resistance to it through
this work. However, as I worked through the maze that is the Department of Indian Affairs
records at the Library and Archives Canada, trying to get a clear picture of the structure of the
Department, its records keeping practices, and various local agencies where good records of
Indian Agent’s letterbooks and correspondence remained intact, I came across multiple
references to the work of the Grand General Council. As I investigated this group further, the
large network of cross-reserve organizing which gathered to respond to the law brought many
new questions to my work and demonstrated to me the limited way that I was approaching the
application of the Indian Act in nineteenth-century Canada, a demonstration of why Trouillot’s
analysis is necessary.
Although this study remains one that is exclusively archival, I am deeply indebted to the
many engagements that I have had with Indigenous methods of historical and legal analysis
through my time at the University of Toronto. I have been fortunate to attend meetings and
workshops of the Great Lakes Alliance for the Study of Arts and Culture, including presenting
work at the Histories of Indigenous Education, Literacies, and Schooling conference in 2017 and
through this community have learned from this organization’s approach of centering Indigenous
knowledge and community-driven re-interpretations of Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee
collections held in museums. I have learnt from participants here about the importance of
wampum belts and gift exchange in treaty law. Participating in the Indigenous Law in Action
gathering organized by John Borrows at Neyaashiinigmiing in 2017 was instrumental in re-
orienting my understanding of what Anishinaabe law is and its contemporary applications. Over
a six-year period from 2013 to 2019, I participated in and volunteered to help organize the
Manitoulin Island Historical Research Institute hosted by the Ojibwe Cultural Foundation and
the History of Indigenous People’s Network at York University. The land-based historical
inquiries, and engagements with elders and knowledge keepers there reshaped how I understood
Anishinaabe history and treaty history. Here Elder Louis Debassige suggested to me the
importance of investigating the history of resource extraction on Manitoulin, which led to the
31
research that forms the basis of the first chapter of this dissertation. In pursuing this project, I
underwent the Manitoulin Anishinaabek Research Review Committee process. Although I have
subsequently had difficulty in contacting communities whose histories I deal with, I will
continue to honour the obligations that I agreed to under this ethics process moving forward in
terms of making both my research materials and final work available at the community level. I
am also looking forward to following up on initial conversations, that came very late in my
research process, with the Union of Ontario Indians about sharing my research materials with
them in support of their own efforts to trace the history of the organization, and would like to
thank Professor Alan Corbiere for helping me to make this connection.
This study involves careful engagement with several bodies of DIA records that to date
have not been examined in depth, including the files on inheritance that I examine in Chapter 4
and the files on amendments to the Indian Act in Chapter 5. To my knowledge, these records
have not been systematically examined in historical studies to date. My work on the Indian
Affairs at Confederation project lead by Brian Gettler, Maxime Gohier and Dan Rück allowed
me to better understand the structure of Department of Indian Affairs records in the 1860s, which
include many of the petitions from Indigenous leaders and priests, letters from Indian Agents and
priests examined in the first chapter. Collections that I used for this study more broadly include
the Department of Indian Affairs records at the Library and Archives of Canada, the A. E.
Williams fonds at the Archives of Ontario, the Donald B. Smith Fonds held at the Victoria
College library at the University of Toronto, and the United Church Archives.
This study is also limited by various methodological constraints. It is not a close study of
individual leaders or communities, and as such relies on council minutes as well as
correspondence to the Department by Grand Council Leaders rather than positioning these
individuals within the local politics of their home reserves. As noted above, the gendered nature
of Council participation and reserve leadership more generally in this era, which were
exclusively men, poses another significant limitation on this work. The Wawanosh files at the
Western University Archives, as well as my discussion with Ian McCallum (Munsee language
teacher, doctoral candidate and great grandson of Scobia Logan, a long-time Grand General
Council delegate) make clear to me that there are many stories of Council delegates that are not
covered in any great depth here. With more time I would expand research into the lives of
individual delegates. A methodological challenge has been that over the years of the Council,
32
hundreds of individuals were involved. These numbers alone point to the rich and varied
political experiences and positions that were brought to the Grand General Council. Finally, as
this project has remained exclusively archival in part because of the restrictions posed by the
COVID-19 pandemic, I have not been able to engage with community historians and knowledge
keepers to the extent that I had hoped to, and thus the interpretations that I present here are
limited by my use of colonially created records and archives. While I have done my best to
understand the positions presented by Indigenous leaders in the nineteenth-century through these
records, I know that there is much that I have missed due to this limitation.
Theoretical Influences: Jurisdiction, Indigenous Law, and Legal

Pluralism under Settler Colonialism
This study, following work by Lisa Ford, Shiri Pasternak, Shaunnagh Dorsett and Shaun
McVeigh, uses the frame of jurisdiction to examine contestations between various legal systems,
particularly in settler colonial contexts.75 Jurisdiction provides a means to examine the multiple
struggles over specific sections of the Indian Act in the nineteenth century between the
Department of Indian Affairs and the Grand General Council. Through looking at jurisdiction,
the above authors provide ways to frame encounters and interactions between Indigenous and
settler law that allow for detailed understandings of the stakes of the imposition of settler law,
the persistence of Indigenous legal practices through settler colonial efforts to eradicate these, as
well as better understanding the terms on which settler law was negotiated by those who were
affected by the legislation. This dissertation contributes to how Indigenous law and legal
pluralism under settler colonialism have been understood by using jurisdiction to show the
imposition of settler law as a site of sustained contestation over decision-making authority.
The field of Indigenous law has proliferated in the past several decades alongside the re-
evaluation of Canada’s history of colonialism. These studies have precipitated a paradigm shift
in the study of law in Canada, as Indigenous non-Indigenous authors working closely with
contemporary Indigenous communities describe the many legal orders that predate colonization
75
Lisa Ford, Settler Sovereignty: Jurisdiction and Indigenous People in America and Australia, 1788-
1836. (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2010), Shiri Pasternak, Grounded Authority: The
Algonquins of Barriere Lake Against the State. (Minneapolis, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press,
2017), Shaunnagh Dorsett and Shaun McVeigh, Jurisdiction (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2012).
33
and continue to operate today. The work of John Borrows, Val Napoleon, Hadley Friedland, and
others have been centrally influential in scholarly inquiry into how Indigenous law retains
sovereign decision-making authority despite ongoing colonial incursions. 76 This work has
decentered Canadian law as the sole site of legal inquiry in Canada. In conversation with work in
Indigenous studies and legal pluralism, this body of legal scholarship insists on understanding
Canada as a space where multiple legal orders operate and persist with implications for
understanding both contemporary struggles for justice as well as historic understandings of how
the British Crown historically asserted sovereignty. 77 Influenced by these articulations of
Indigenous law, historical literature on the interactions between legal systems has also been re-
evaluated.
The application of British law to Indigenous peoples in Canada has long been an area of
scholarly interest, and critical scholars have examined the often-fraught processes of legal
imposition in sparsely settled areas lacking robust legal infrastructure. 78 These works often
76
John Borrows, Recovering Canada: The Resurgence of Indigenous Law (Toronto: University of
Toronto Press, 2002), Canada’s Indigenous Constitution (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010),
Drawing Out Law: A Spirit’s Guide (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010), Law’s Indigenous
Ethics (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2019), John Borrows and Michael Coyle, eds. The Right
Relationship: Reimagining the Implementation of Historical Treaties. (Toronto: University of Toronto
Press, 2017), Cameron, Angela, Sari Graben, and Val Napoleon, eds. Creating Indigenous Property:
Power, Rights, and Relationships (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2020), Val Napoleon and
Hadley Friedland, “An Inside Job: Engaging with Indigenous Legal Traditions through Stories,” McGill
Law Journal 61, no. 4 (2016): 725–54. https://doi.org/10.7202/1038487ar. Hadley Louise Friedland, The
Wetiko Legal Principles: Cree and Anishinabek Responses to Violence and Victimization. (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 2018), Heidi Kiiwetinepinesiik Stark, “Respect, Responsibility, and
Renewal: The Foundations of Anishinaabe Treaty Making with the United States and Canada.” American
Indian Culture and Research Journal 34, no. 2 (2010): 145–64.
https://doi.org/10.17953/aicr.34.2.j0414503108l8771 and “Marked by Fire: Anishinaabe Articulations of
Nationhood in Treaty Making with the United States and Canada.” American Indian Quarterly 36, no. 2
(2012): 119–49. https://doi.org/10.5250/amerindiquar.36.2.0119.
77
On the links between Indigenous law studies and legal pluralism, see Jeremy Webber, Val Napoleon,
Mireille Fournier, and John Borrows, “Sally Engle Merry, Legal Pluralism, and the Radicalization of
Comparative Law,” Law & Society Review 54, no. 4 (2020): 846–57. https://doi.org/10.1111/lasr.12518.
78
For example: Hamar Foster, “Long Distance Justice: The Criminal Jurisdiction of Canadian Courts
West of the Canadas, 1763-1859,” The American Journal of Legal History 34 no. 1 (1990): 1-48 and
“‘The Queen’s Law is Better Than Yours’: International Homicide in Early British Columbia” in Essays
in the History of Canadian Law Volume V, Jim Phillips, Tina Loo and Susan Lewthwaite, eds. (Toronto:
Published for the Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History by University of Toronto Press, 1994),
Sidney Harring, “The Rich Men of the Country: Canadian Law in the Land of the Copper Inuit, 1914-
1930,” Ottawa Law Review 21 no. 1 (1989): 1-6 and White Man’s Law: Native People in Nineteenth-
34
critically question the power of British law and demonstrate the limitations to asserted claims of
sovereignty and authority, but ultimately can be categorized by their focus on describing a
trajectory of successful legal application. 79 The turn to Indigenous law as a field of study has
influenced how histories of legal imposition are written, with scholars pushing to the foreground
encounters between legal systems, and Indigenous responses to foreign systems. 80 Greater
attention is now paid to the continuation rather than the replacement of Indigenous legal orders. 81
Dan Rück’s recent work is a good example of how the continuation of Indigenous laws
necessitates a re-evaluation of how the imposition of western law is described. Drawing on
settler colonialism scholarship, in particular Patrick Wolfe’s formulation of its permanence and
transformation after the closing of the Turnerian frontier,82 Rück draws our attention to the
multiplicity of legal encounters that continue to this day: many “frontiers (lower case, plural)”
between legal systems “where the forces of settler colonialism meet the forces of Indigenous
sovereignty.”83 This framing expands the timeline of colonial encounter between laws to the
present, as well as fracturing attempts to impose settler law into multiple points of interaction,
thus significantly rearranging straightforward narratives of legal application. Rück’s study
Century Canadian Jurisprudence (Toronto: Published for the Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal
History by University of Toronto Press, 1998), Mark D. Walters, “The Extension of Colonial Criminal
Jurisdiction over the Aboriginal Peoples of Upper Canada: Reconsidering the Shawanakiskie Case (1822-
26),” The University of Toronto Law Journal 46 no. 2 (1996): 273-310, Tina Loo, “Dan Cranmer’s
Potlatch: Law as Coercion, Symbol, and Rhetoric in British Columbia, 1884–1951,” The Canadian
Historical Review 73, no. 2 (1992): 125–65. Amanda Nettlebeck, Russell Smandych, Robert Foster, and
Louis Knafla, Fragile Settlements: Aboriginal Peoples, Law and Resistance in South-West Australia and
Prairie Canada (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2016).
79
Lauren Benton has been influential in framing the limitations of territorial sovereignty asserted by
imperial laws. Lauren A. Benton, A Search for Sovereignty: Law and Geography in European Empires,
1400-1900. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
80
See for example Gavigan, Hunger, Horses, and Government Men.
81
Daniel Rück, The Laws and the Land: The Settler Colonial Invasion of Kahnawà:ke in Nineteenth-
Century Canada. (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2021), Martha Walls, No Need of a Chief for This Band : the
Maritime Mi’kmaq and Federal Electoral Legislation, 1899-1951 (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2010.)
82
Patrick Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” Journal of Genocide Research
8, no. 4 (2006): 387–409. https://doi.org/10.1080/14623520601056240. See also J. Kēhualani Kauanui,
“A Structure not an Event”: Settler Colonialism and Enduring Indigeneity,” Lateral: Journal of the
Cultural Studies Association, Issue 5.1 (Spring 2016).
83
Rück, 8-9.
35
discusses laws regulating land use specifically, but his framing is productive for thinking through
the application settler law more generally. The Indian Act was applied to reserves through
multiple on-going colonial encounters on the ground, contested, negotiated, and limited by the
ability of Indian Agents to enforce its provisions. Separating the application of the Indian Act to
multiple “acts of control” as I do in this study– struggles over jurisdiction in local matters– helps
to describe the application and contestations around legal imposition with much greater
precision.
Jurisdiction has proven to be a particularly productive way to analyze the interactions

between different legal systems within colonial contexts. The work of Lisa Ford, Shiri Pasternak
and Shaunnagh Dorsett all employ jurisdiction to more specifically describe the operation of law
and have influenced this study in various ways. Lisa Ford’s Settler Sovereignty: Jurisdiction and
Indigenous People in America and Australia, 1788-1836 shows how territorial sovereignty in the
settler colonies of Georgia and New South Wales was “perfected” when criminal jurisdiction
was extended over Indigenous people between 1822 and 1847.84 Ford describes how, prior to
this, British subjecthood was the condition for the exercise of settler jurisdiction, while
“pluralism as policy” regulated encounters of violence between Indigenous and settler
populations.85 It was through the assertion of universal criminal jurisdiction that settler
sovereignty was “completed” and reimagined as being tied to territorial boundaries. This study
begins after the rearrangement of settler sovereignty that Ford describes, and yet traces of the
earlier negotiated pluralism that Ford outlines remain. Indigenous nations continued to insist on
their sovereign right to govern themselves, and I see a similar process operating in the mid to late
nineteenth century in terms of “perfecting” the sovereignty of the Crown through practices of
jurisdiction. The Crown both asserted territorial authority (through Crown ownership of reserve
land) as well as authority to enact law and enforce law there (through the Indian Act), and yet
how colonial governance operated in these spaces was a much more complicated process. The
Indian Act created areas of exception within the Canadian law where direct governmental
authority was delegated to Indigenous authority in certain cases (for instance, in initial clauses
84
Ford, 1.
85
Ibid., 35.
36
allowing for hereditary governance to continue, or having bands retain some control over
whether to permit enfranchisement). As this study shows, jurisdictional authority over the five
areas of law examined here was certainly demanded by Indigenous leaders in their claims against
the impositions of the law. Through these struggles, we can see how these exceptions were
systematically closed by the government over time and brought further within the jurisdiction of
the Superintendent General and Indian Agents. As such, Ford’s study of the quest to “perfect”
sovereignty through the application of law to Indigenous persons through jurisdictional practice
can be extended to how these struggles over local jurisdiction through the Indian Act sought to
bring more and more aspects of Indigenous life under the direct control of the government, rather
than the indirectly through the delegated authority of Indigenous leaders. Following Ford’s
framework, the trajectory of Indian Act application can be seen as a way that the government
sought to (further) perfect their sovereignty through the many struggles over local jurisdiction
that I examine in this study, papering over “holes” that remained in their authority by the
sometimes-indeterminate space of reserves and the authority of Indigenous leaders. This was
despite the alternative political visions that emphasized retention of Indigenous sovereignty put
forward by Indigenous leaders.
Ford’s study contains some examples of Indigenous conceptions of justice that were
recognized by settlers (such as reciprocity and retaliation), 86 but her primary focus in looking at
jurisdiction concerns settler law. 87 Pasternak’s Grounded Authority: The Algonquins of Barriere
Lake Against the State, on the other hand, centralizes Indigenous law; her work is grounded in
the Mitchikanibikok Anishinabe Inakinogewin (broadly, the legal system) of the Algonquins of
Barriere Lake. Pasternak argues that Algonquin insistence that their Mitchikanibikok Anishinabe
Inakinogewin is the source of their jurisdiction over their territory poses a direct challenge to the
legitimacy of state jurisdiction. She finds that jurisdiction, through its etymology of being the
“speech” of law,88 might be translated to Indigenous legal conceptions: “Perhaps jurisdiction,
86
Ford, 35.
87
Ford, Settler Sovereignty, Chapter 2, “Pluralism as Policy.”
88
Pasternak cites Emile Beneviste’s etymology “linking the Latin noun ius (law) with the verb dictio (the
saying or speech of law),”10. See also Shaunnagh Dorsett and Shaun McVeigh, Jurisdiction, 4:
“Jurisdiction is derived from the Latin ius dicere – literally to speak the law.”
37
despite being an English word, can describe both Indigenous and settler ontologies because it
marks the inauguration of a legal order, whereupon authorities of various kinds govern the ways
in which these laws will be ordered and organized in space, and define its subjects and scope.” 89
By calling on jurisdictional authority that originates outside of state law, “Indigenous territorial
jurisdiction forms lumps that betray patterns of partial and uneven state sovereignty.” 90
The subject of this study, the Grand General Council, is a sprawling, multivocal, and
contested organization, influenced in the later years as I examine by delegate’s acceptance of
state law; it cannot not be interpreted as having the same unified “grounded” jurisdictional
authority asserted by Barriere Lake that Pasternak’s study explores. It is, however, an important
site through which to see the multiple ways that Indigenous articulations of jurisdictional
authority operated. The Council insisted that treaty and alliance law, which recognized their
sovereignty, be respected in their early years. In later years, their decisions over which bodies of
governing authority (namely the Canadian government or local councils– as would be
appropriate based on historic Anishinaabe practices) should hold jurisdiction over decision-
making on reserve demonstrate another engagement with jurisdiction as a means to negotiate
state power. Understanding both of these instances as directly challenging the asserted
jurisdiction of state law (drawing on Pasternak’s analysis), rather than accepting those assertions
has greatly helped shape this study.
Pasternak also makes clear that Indigenous law operates within ongoing state projects to
erase Indigenous jurisdiction: “Jurisdiction has been enacted by the state as a form of power to
usurp the inherent laws of Indigenous peoples and replace their authority with the delegated
authority of the federal and provincial governments.” 91 The Indian Act is central to this state
project. It is not possible to frame the later accommodationist positions taken by Grand General
Council delegates around the law as being a direct challenge to the state’s legitimate authority to
govern, they accepted parts of the law. However, jurisdiction has likewise helped me to frame
these later, more accommodationist positions to the Indian Act taken by Grand General Council
89
Pasternak, 10.
90
Ibid., Emphasis added.
91
Ibid., 22.
38
delegates. Shaunnagh Dorsett and Shaun McVeigh describe jurisdiction as “encompass[ing] the
broadest questions of the authority and founding of legal order as well as the minutest detail of
the ordering of the business of the administration and adjudication of justice.” 92 This framing is
helpful in better comprehending jurisdiction as a site of contestation between Indigenous law and
settler law: both as a struggle between two legal systems as well as how the day to day
operations of authority on reserves were negotiated by Indigenous leaders. Indigenous leaders in
later years of the council debated and negotiated power in ways that rejected the restrictions of
the Indian Act, despite their working within its delegated authority and accepting some of its
provisions. These two registers of jurisdiction are both useful for this study. Indigenous refusal
to recognize the validity of settler law is visible through the contestations that early Grand
General Councils presented against the law where two legal frameworks are clearly at odds.
These contestations were premised on clear understandings of Indigenous jurisdiction recognized
by treaties, where government statutes were seen as illegitimately infringing on these
agreements. However, understanding jurisdictional struggles in the “minute details” of
administering governance on reserves also allows us to more carefully examine the political
vision put forward by accommodationist leaders. This dissertation uses jurisdiction as a way to
describe with greater precision what aspects of settler law were accepted– and how
simultaneously broader jurisdictional authority for bands was continually argued for. This
framing allows for a more precise understanding of the political vision of Grand General Council
delegates. Framing the five areas of the law that I examine in this dissertation as sites of
jurisdictional struggle between the Grand General Council and the Department of Indian Affairs
makes visible council delegates political vision: both of initial resistance to as well as later
accommodation of settler law that nonetheless remained far from the government’s
assimilationist agenda. Both strategies ultimately sought to maintain community authority and
coherence.
92
Shaunnagh Dorsett and Shaun McVeigh, Jurisdiction (New York: Routledge, 2012): 2.
39
Chapter Overview
This dissertation spans a long period of organizing in council over the nineteenth century
and reflects significant changes in both the legal strategies and the composition of the Grand
General Councils over these years. The first two chapters trace how governance councils
operated historically and were called on and reimagined as a permanent site to engage with
settler legislation in 1870. Subsequent chapters are not neatly chronological, but reflect how the
issues of reserve governance, inheritance, and the jurisdiction of Indian Agents was imposed
through the law and was negotiated by Grand General Councils until 1906.
In Chapter One I examine contestations over resource jurisdiction on Manitoulin Island

and the Lake Huron region in the 1860s that provoked response by Anishinaabek leadership to
the government through active assertions over resource use, councils, and petitions. The
Department of Indian Affairs, after the transfer from imperial control in 1860, was increasingly
concerned about revenues generated from Indian lands within the context of losing the imperial
grant and focused on controlling revenue streams from reserves where they expanded their
jurisdictional control. This provoked a clarification of how protectionist legislation could be used
against Indigenous individuals on their own lands. Anishinaabek leaders contested the
imposition of Indian Agent jurisdiction on their ability to sell timber from their reserves by
insisting on their jurisdiction over resources as had been recognized by historic alliances that
affirmed their sovereignty. Conflict around timber regulation on the island intertwined with
fishing and oil regulations imposed by the Department during this time, and these concerns were
dealt with in local councils that were precursors to the Grand General Council’s more broad-
based response to the Gradual Enfranchisement Act of 1869.
Chapter Two examines a dramatic era in the expansion of assimilationist legislation

between 1869 and 1885 that moved Crown-Indigenous relations even further away from alliance
relationships after the government passed the Gradual Enfranchisement Act in 1869. The need to
respond to this law galvanized the first Grand General Council gathering in 1870. This chapter
focuses on enfranchisement within the Indian Act and precedent legislation to examine how the
Canadian government, the Haudenosaunee and the Anishinaabe were interpreting what John
Milloy has termed a “constitutional change” in how the government dealt with Indigenous
40
peoples.93 I show how initially, Indigenous communities involved in the Grand Council based
their response on historic alliance relationships between themselves and with the Crown, as they
had responded to earlier government laws. They argued for a nation-to-nation understanding of
respecting their sovereignty. When this failed to produce the desired result, Haudenosaunee
leaders found other means to insist on their sovereignty and no longer participated in the Grand
General Council after 1882. Anishinaabe leaders in subsequent councils used their own
jurisdictional understandings of the autonomy of local councils to ensure that the decision to
adopt enfranchisement provisions remained a local decision.
Chapter Three examines another case within the Council where Southern Ontario
delegates were willing to adopt aspects of the Indian Act, specifically the 1884 Indian
Advancement Act, that slightly expanded the municipal-style powers of band councils while
consolidating increased controls over these by the DIA. I argue that their support should be
contextualized within the generational histories of a number of delegates– all descendants of
early Anishinaabe Methodist converts and missionaries. I focus specifically on the work of Peter
E. Jones of the Mississaugas of the Credit– in council, in his newspaper publication, and in his
rewriting the law at the request of John A. Macdonald. I argue that rather than accepting the
limited municipal vision of the government, the work of Jones might more closely resemble the
work of his father in establishing a legal code for the Credit River reserve in 1830 that enshrined
aspects of Anishinaabe governance within settler electoral law and can be understood as another
example where the local jurisdiction of councils was emphasized in decisions about accepting
the law. This chapter places the work of the Jones’ within their respective generations of
Christian-Anishinaabe leadership, while tracing the different legal context that each responded
to, showing how state recognition of sovereign Indigenous local governance was not recognized
in the latter period.
Chapter Four focuses on inheritance clauses in the Indian Act, and the subsequent
gendered impacts of their development and enforcement in the years from 1884 to 1900. As
93
John S. Milloy “The Early Indian Acts: Developmental Strategy and Constitutional Change” in eds.
Getty, Ian A. L., and Antoine S. Lussier. As Long as the Sun Shines and Water Flows: a Reader in
Canadian Native Studies (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1983): 56-64.
41
wills have not been examined in the literature on the Indian Act in any great detail, this chapter
provides an important first study of this subject that was crucially important for both the Grand
General Council, the DIA, and the families who lived with the results of these new restrictions
on their lands and family lives. One of the Council’s few successes in having the Indian Act
amended was in the descent of property clauses. Status Indians gained the right to write wills in
the Indian Act of 1884 and in 1894 the descent of property clauses expanded beyond a second
cousin. However, this latter change was accompanied by greater control over the administration
of wills by the DIA. By looking at the estate files and correspondence to the DIA of female
testators and inheritors, this chapter contrasts the approach of band councils and the Department
of Indian Affairs to this change in law. This chapter examines women’s history and family law
through the consolidation of jurisdiction over descent of property in the hands of the Department
where issues such as illegitimacy of children and marriages were scrutinized to a much higher
degree than by band councils. Jurisdiction exerted by Indian Agents can here be understood as
asserting control over increasingly intimate spheres of life on reserves.
The role of Indian agents is expanded on in Chapter 5. Here I examine the period
between 1880 (when Indian Affairs was given Department status) and the Revised Statute of the
Indian Act in 1906. Over these years, the law was amended thirteen times, and through these
amendments Indian Agents gained significantly greater jurisdictional authority on reserves
including the ability to act as justices of the peace. By examining the DIA headquarters records
files that deal with amendments to the law over these years, I show that the expansion of the
Indian Agent system and feedback from agents in the field influenced these amendments towards
greater power for Indian Agents. How the Grand General Council reacted to this expanded
authority is addressed in the second section of this chapter. Some Council delegates were willing
to accept greater Indian Agents enforcement over alcohol and family morality issues. However,
their willingness to accommodate Indian Agent enforcement was within broader political goals
of enhancing local authority over schooling, easing enfranchisement provisions, giving bands the
power to opt out of the Indian Act, and participation in Parliament. While the Department of
Indian Affairs and the Indian Act both moved towards greater and more fine-grained control of
reserve life by Indian Agents, the Grand General Council (despite their adoption of Victorian
morality and willingness to have Indian Agents intervene on reserves) demonstrate a vision that
escaped these controls and sought full participate in Canadian political life.
42
The contestations over jurisdictional authority described by these chapters show that both
the DIA and Grand General Council delegates attempted in various ways to assert authority over
multiple aspects of life on reserves. These many acts of attempted and actualized control can
show how the Indian Act was struggled over by these two groups in nineteenth-century Ontario.
Through the Indian Act, the government attempted to neatly divide life on reserves into the
restrictive areas of regulation described in the clauses of the law; through the law they asserted
authority over all aspects of reserve economies, lands, governance, and family structures. As the
following chapters will show, this often had material benefits for the Department itself in terms
of generating revenues and maintaining authority over reserve lands resources. Because the
Grand General Council structured their meetings by responding to the various sections of the law
itself, their engagement in council is somewhat dictated by the laws’ terms. However, taken as a
whole, their desire to retain and expand the material and governance authority over reserves
elides the strictures of the Indian Act and points to a much broader vision for local jurisdiction
and political power to maintain the conditions for their communities to thrive.
Chapter 1
“The said Sacred Friendship is not held so sacred”: Timber,
Resource Regulation, and Shifting Alliance Relationships on
Manitoulin Island and the Lake Huron Region, 1850-1869.
Things were not going well for George Ironside, the Indian Superintendent for Manitoulin
Island, in March of 1862. He had recently, on instruction from his superiors in Quebec, posted
notices printed and sent to him by Indian Affairs, in each village on the island– Manitowaning,
Little Current, Sheshegawaning and Wikwemikong among these. 1 The notices announced a
prohibition on the sale of wood cut on Indian lands to whites. Frustrating Ironside, these notices
were “with two exceptions only” returned to him “by [those] who would not suffer them to be
exposed on any part of the Manitoulin.”2 This was the latest in a series of conflicts the agent
had been having with Anishinaabek leadership on the island, in particular with the
Wikwemikong Ogimaag, over their right to sell timber in the lucrative new markets that were
opening up in the North Lake Huron and Georgian Bay region. The Ogimaag’s goal was to
harvest 600-700 cords of wood, to be sold to American boats en route from Collingwood in order
to finance the purchase of materials to expand agricultural development on the reserve. 3 The
summer before, a wharf had been built by the community to sell logs directly to American ships,
circumventing Ironsides’ authority. In a petition sent later that summer, one of many sent over
the 1860s, the Wikwemikong leaders state succinctly: “I do not view it favourably when
someone forbids me the use of my own property.”4
1
George Ironside to C. T. Walcot, March 16 1862, LAC RG10, vol. 291, pp. 194977-194987, reel C-
12668.
2
Ibid. The exceptions were perhaps Manitowaning and Little Current, locations Ironside notes in his
letter as being amenable to both a survey and treaty negotiation.
3
David Layton to George Ironside, Statement of George Obodosaiwai, Feb. 26 1862, LAC RG10, vol.
291, pp. 194985-194987, reel C-12668.
4Shelly Pearen, Four Voices: The Great Manitoulin Island Treaty of 1862 (S. J. Pearen, 2012): 42, citing
Petition 29 August 1862, LAC RG10, Vol. 292, reel C-12669 (Trans. S. Pearen).
43
44
This conflict over who had the right to collect and manage revenues from timber sales
exemplifies wider conflicts over resource regulation on Manitoulin and the Lake Huron region in
the 1860s. This chapter looks at these struggles over jurisdiction in the field of resource
regulation and lays out the legal responses the Department of Indian Affairs and Indigenous
leaders each took. For timber, the position of the Department was clear– all logs cut on Indian
lands should be sold through the Indian Agent with funds generated to be administered through a
fund to “benefit the Indians.” The jurisdiction over protection and management of Indian Lands
had long been part of the legislation governing the DIA but attempts in the 1860s to more tightly
control resource revenues brought Indigenous timbering (and other economic activities such as
fishing and petroleum leasing) more explicitly within the concerns of the Department. The
regulation of the fishery, and later of oil deposits at Wikwemikong would provoke similar
contestation. The Wikwemikong chiefs had a different view. For them, and other leaders in the
region, these expanded efforts to regulate reserves was in clear contravention of alliance
relationships that granted them jurisdiction to manage their lands as they saw fit. Three of the
signatories to the 1862 petition insisting on property rights to wood were Thomas Mokomanish,
Louis Wakegijik, and Jacko Agatewenini. These Wikwemikong leaders were some of the most
active working against Ironside’s efforts to have the island ceded, surveyed and made available
for white settlement– as well as Ironside’s efforts to bring the Anishinabek in line with
Department policy of managing all revenues from reserve resources. These leaders, or their
sons, also in later years became delegates to the Grand General Indian Council of Ontario. 5
5 Thomas (or Tomah) Mokomanish (c1826-aft 1891) was also known as Thomas Genoshameg or
Kinoshameg and was a Grand General Council delegate in 1882. Thomas Mokomanish and William
Kinoshameg (who was also a Grand General Council delegate in 1882) were the grandsons of the War of
1812 veteran Mokomanish (see Alan Corbiere, “Mookomanish: The Damn Knife (Odawa Chief and
Warrior),” Active History, October 8 2014, https://activehistory.ca/2014/10/mookomaanish-the-damn-
knife-odaawaa-chief-and-warrior/.) Louis Wakekijik or Wakegijig (c1802-1889) was the son of Vincent
Paimosegai/Bemassige or Essiban (1780-10 Aug 1859). Louis Wakekijik had a son Vincent born 21 Sept
1846 (email correspondence with Shelley Pearen). “Vincint Wakegeghek” was a delegate to the 1882
Council. Jacko Agatewenini (also known as Jako, Jaquo, Joseph Jacko Tagewinini or Tagwenene c1816-
+1881) was the son of JB Tahgaiwenne (c1792-1867). Jos. Jaquo and Jos. Jaquo Sr. are listed as Grand
Council delegates from Nahnahbedabing (post office Wikwemikong) in 1884. At the 1900 Grand
General Council held at Wikwemikong, delegates include Vincent Wahkegeshig, William Genoshameg,
and Chief Joseph Ozawanimiki, and Joseph Jacquo from Wahnatabung. William Kenoshameg attended
the small council at Saugeen in 1904. All genealogical information unless otherwise noted from Shelly
Pearen, Four Voices, footnotes 112-116, p. 184.
45
Who could regulate and ultimately profit from trees, fish and oil deposits on the island
became, over the next decade, a primary site of conflict between the Department of Indian
Affairs and the Wikwemikong leadership. William McDougall, Commissioner of Crown Lands
and Superintendent General of Indian Affairs, signed the Manitoulin treaty of 1862 on behalf of
the Province of Canada, but contestations by Anishinaabek signatories over its legitimacy and
meaning for land and sovereignty were immediately brought forward.6 The Wikwemikong chiefs
had refused to sign the treaty, leaving the large eastern peninsula of the island unceded to this
day. Simultaneous to these concerns, political positions were also articulated about the right to
control resource revenues. Manitoulin leaders protested the treaty itself, but likewise protested
the contemporaneous regulatory regime that was put in place by Indian Affairs. How to
actualize this regulation was a matter of primary concern to both Ironside, his successor Charles
Dupont, the Department of Indian Affairs, the Wikwemikong Ogimaag and their Jesuit ministers.
Conflicts around the regulation of resource use fit into a pattern of similar contestations on
reserves in the region, as this chapter will demonstrate.
The refusal of the Wikwemikong Ogimaag to submit to the authority of the Superintendent’s
direct control of resource revenues was concerning for the Department, and generated an
evaluation of legal measures available to them. As the government responded to the loss of the
Imperial grant financing Indian Affairs, expanding settlement, and expanding commercial
timbering in the region, Indigenous resource use gained administrative visibility. Resource
revenues were a part, alongside with revenues from the sales of Indian lands, of how the
government was to replace the Imperial Grant and to fund the operations of the Department–
including salaries for DIA staff. This context generated clarification by DIA officials and
reinterpretation of protectionist legislation written in the 1850s in order to better regulate
Indigenous timbering and “protect” the prerogative of the government to control reserve resource
6
See Pearen, Four Voices for a comprehensive account of protests against the treaty. The work of Alan
Corbiere is foundational in outlining the history of the Anishinaabeg leadership on the island and the
context for their understandings of treaty. See Alan Corbiere, “Anishinaabe Treaty-Making in the 18th
and 19th Century Northern Great Lakes: From Shared Meanings to Epistemological Chasms” PhD diss.
(York University, 2019) and “Exploring Historical Literacy in Manitoulin Island Ojibwe,” Papers of the
34th Algonquian Conference, ed. H. C. Wolfart (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba, 2003): 57-80. I am so
grateful for the thorough archival work that these scholars have completed. Their work became an
essential roadmap for me in understanding events on Manitoulin as I worked to understand the many
petitions from Indigenous leaders and records of the Department of Indian Affairs during this time.
46
revenues. The re-evaluation of what “protection” meant to the government, in this increasingly
tight fiscal reality, away from protecting Indian lands and towards protecting the government’s
ability to exclusively manage these is an important intervention that this chapter makes into the
historiography of Indian Affairs. Over this decade, the Province of Canada and later the
Dominion government attempted to also control revenues from fishing and oil speculation. The
first section of this chapter examines the legal and administrative context of the DIA in the 1860s
to situate its efforts to regulate Indigenous resource use.
On the other hand, Indigenous leaders insisted on and acted through pre-existing legal
and governance frameworks to assert their jurisdiction over these matters. I argue that while the
government changed its administrative and legal tools during this era to expand its assertion of
jurisdiction over reserve resource use, Indigenous leaders continued to operate within and to
assert rights under pre-existing legal frameworks of land management and alliance with the
Crown that asserted their jurisdiction over these same resources. On the part of the Anishinabek
chiefs at Wikwemikong, these conflicts provoked sustained and coordinated efforts to contest the
asserted authority of the DIA. They also show continuity with historic Anishinaabek modes of
political organizing in regional councils. They insisted on their autonomy to make decisions
about land and its wealth under historic diplomatic alliances with the Crown. Tensions arose on
the ground due to the violation of what Anishinaabe leaders explained as a sacred friendship 7 –
agreements that had left Indigenous jurisdiction over resources largely undisturbed. This is the
focus of the second section of this chapter. The arguments deployed by the Wikwemikong
leaders help us understand the legal context within which they were operating prior to their
involvement at the Grand General Council later in the nineteenth century.
Other leaders from the broader Lake Huron region also participated in the later meetings
of the Grand General Council during the following decade. In attendance were Solomon James
of the Shawanaga Reserve, who served in the role as vice president of the Council, and Chief
Augustine Shingwauk of Garden River. 8 The second section of this chapter also looks at the
7
Petition to the Governor General, July 25 1870, LAC RG10, vol. 380.
8
Solomon James attended the council in 1882, where he was elected the Vice-President of the Council,
and both chiefs attended in 1884. Minutes of the 7th Grand General Indian Council, held upon the New
Credit Indian Reserve, Near Hagersville, Ontario, From September 13th to September 18th, 1882
47
parallel struggles over timber use these leaders faced in the region and traces their meetings in
council. Historically part of council fires in the region (at Manitoulin, Parry Island, and
Bawating) that were linked to broader networks of Anishinaabeg governance, 9 during the 1860s
leaders from Manitoulin, Garden River, Shawanaga and other reserves continued to meet in
councils to deal with these laws and policies. It was a tumultuous time for the region, and the
primary focus of these councils were concerns around the 1850 Robinson-Huron and the 1862
Manitoulin Island treaties. A key part of these contestations, though, was their right to use the
fish, mineral and timber wealth of their lands, all of which were imposed upon through recent
government laws and policies.
These leaders forged links through their individual struggles over resource regulation in their
respective communities, and took action to address these in councils in the Lake Huron region.
Although “latecomers” to the subsequent Grand General Council in the following decade
(attending after the initial Grand General Council had been established), these leaders had long
been linked to each other through their participation in regional councils over the 1860s. In the
case of Garden River, they were also linked through participation at a broader Grand General
Council held at Sarnia in 1860 where over 150 chiefs and warriors from across Canada West
gathered to respond to the Prince of Wales’ visit by insisting on fishing and land rights. 10
Collectively, they had vast experience in negotiating strategies to deal with government laws and
policies. They brought this expertise in negotiating with each other and articulating how
government policies violated pre-existing Anishinaabe land and alliance laws to the later Grand
General Council.
(Hagersville, ON: Hagersville Book and Job Rooms, 1883) and Minutes of the Eighth Grand General
Indian Council held upon the Cape Croker Indian Reserve, County of Bruce, From September 10th to
September 15th, 1884 (Hagersville, ON: The Indian Publising Company).
9
For a history of Anishinaabe council governance in the region see Heidi Bohaker, Dodem and Council
Fire: Anishinaabe Governance Through Alliances (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2020).
Bohaker’s description of the speech of Musquakie at the council gathering in 1840 at the Credit River is
particularly relevant, as he names Manitoulin Island and Parry Island as fires whose embers had been
“uncovered” (reinstated as seats of council governance) and the council at Bawating which had been
established since time immemorial, Bohaker, 107-108. See also Phil Bellfy, Three Fires Unity: The
Anishinaabeg of the Lake Huron Borderlands (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2011).
10
Petition to the Duke of Newcastle, LAC RG10, vol. 266, pp. 163, 028-163, 378.
48
1.1. Government Assertion of Control Over Resources:

From Protection of Lands to Protection of Jurisdiction
During the 1860s, the administrative and policy contexts of the Department of Indian
Affairs changed, generating increased attention on Indigenous resource use. These changes
frame events on Manitoulin and the surrounding areas during the 1860s. As the authority for
Indian Affairs transferred to the colony from Britain at the beginning of the decade, the financial
structure of Indian Affairs was rearranged. From its new position under Provincial Crown
Lands, Indian Affairs attempted, largely unsuccessfully, to replace the imperial grant which had
previously funded Department operations, with funds from land and resource sales.11 Thus, the
role of Indian Agents also changed, moving further away from their role as distributor of
presents and annuities (a shift that had been occurring since the 1830s), and towards being the
local financial administrator where they served expanded roles in the regulation of reserve
resource economies. With Confederation in 1867, the federal government assumed jurisdiction
over “Indians and lands reserved for Indians,” but Indian Affairs remained under Crown Lands
and underwent little administrative change. However, the financial restructuring that happened
with the transfer of Indian Affairs to the Province brought scrutiny of Indigenous resource use,
which became increasingly policed, and brought Indigenous leaders into conflict with the DIA.
Attempts on the part of the Department to assert jurisdiction over the revenues from
Indian lands ultimately generated a re-interpretation of 1850 laws designed to protect Indian
lands from trespassers,12 making Indigenous people subject to fines and thus “protecting” the
right of the government to generate income from lands, rather than protecting them for the use of
Indigenous communities. This focus on reserve resources changed the focus of enforcement of
timber violations from protection of lands (agreed to by Indigenous leaders in some cases as a
11
For a description of the limitations of the Indian Land Management Fund see David Shanahan, The
Indian Land Management Fund: Financing the Indian Department, 1830-1914, A Report prepared for
Treaties and Historical Research, Department of Indian Affairs (Ottawa: Treaties and Historical
Research, 1991).
12
An Act for the Better Protection of the Lands and Property of the Indians in Lower Canada, S. Prov. C.
1850, c. 42. and An Act for the Protection of Indians in Upper Canada from Imposition and the Property
Occupied or Enjoyed by them from Trespass and Injury, S. Prov. C. 1850, c. 74.
49
practical measure under alliance relationships) 13 to active monetization (with the goal of
capitalizing on resources to fund the Department itself, and to establish the “band funds” which
were kept out of communities control–both of which undermined these relationship agreements).
This provides important material context for the conflicts between leaders and the Department
during this decade and Department’s increased concern over controlling reserve governance
through the 1869 Gradual Enfranchisement Act at the end of the decade, which I discuss in
Chapter Two.
A short overview of the Department of Indian Affairs financial and administrative

structure from the mid 1840s to the 1860s shows the significant changes that Indian Affairs
underwent over these decades. As outlined by J. E. Hodgetts, between 1840 and 1860, when
Indian Affairs was under the control of the Imperial Parliament, administrative costs were
covered by five sources. The largest of these was an annual grant from the Parliament, which
covered salaries of Indian agents, pensions of former officers, and some missionaries and
teachers.14 In 1839, the Parliamentary grant was £20, 000 (with £15, 850 going to presents and
£4,150 to salaries).15 The second (smaller) source of income was the General Fund made up of
the sale of Indian lands, timber seized after being unlawfully cut, and interest money “held by the
provincial Receiver General to the account of the Indians.” 16 This second fund paid for the small
headquarters staff and contingencies there, as well as a special allowance to the Deputy Receiver
General.17 The third source of income was the Land Fund, which was generated by sales of
Indian Lands by the Crown Lands Department. 18 After 1841, this fund paid ten percent of the
cost of operating the Crown Lands Department itself (previously Crown Land agents had
13
For Indigenous involvement with the passing of these laws see Maxime Gohier, “La pratique
pétitionnaire des Amérindiens de la Vallée du Saint-Laurent sous la Régime britannique: Pouvoir,
representation, et légitimité (1760–1860)” (PhD diss., Université du Québec à Montréal, 2014) and Ted
Binnema, "Protecting Indian Lands by Defining Indian: 1850-76," Journal of Canadian Studies/Revue
d'études canadiennes, vol. 48, no. 2 (Spring 2014): 5-39.
14
Hodgetts, 217.
15
Shanahan, 9.
16
Hodgetts, 217.
17
Ibid.
18
Hodgetts, 218.
50
deducted “management” costs at the source), and these costs were thus born most heavily by
bands who had more of their lands sold by the Department.19 The estate of the Six Nations was
a separate, fourth source of income that was used to pay for the management of that reserve (this
fund was merged with the other DIA funds in 1860).20 Finally, each tribe had local band funds
generated mainly from the annuity payments made to them in perpetuity for land cessions, from
which salaries for tribal chiefs, interpreters, missionaries, surgeons and schoolmasters were
paid.21
The Imperial Parliament was constantly looking for ways to alleviate its expenditures in
the colony over these years, and the annual grant to Indian Affairs was frequently challenged in
the House of Parliament. 22 The Bagot Commission was set up in 1842 to investigate the
Department “with a view to its diminishment and eventual extinction.”23 After the Bagot
Commission’s report, which found the accounts of the Department in disarray, the position of
Chief Superintendent was abolished in 1845 when the Civil Secretary became responsible for
running the Department until 1860.24 Separate accounts were also created this year for various
tribes to keep track of income and annuity payments. 25 By 1851, the Imperial Parliament
announced that they would end diplomatic presents beginning in 1858, and by 1856, they
announced that Parliament would also end all payments to support Indian Affairs (although this
19
Hodgetts, 218. This formula was worked out by Lord Sydenham, and also stipulated that fifty percent
of Crown Lands costs would be drawn from the sales of Crown Lands, and forty percent against Clergy
Reserves. Hodgetts, 217-218.
20
Ibid.
21
Hodgetts, 218.
22
Shanahan, 21.
23
Shanahan, 21.
24
Shanahan, 24 and 31.
25
Shanahan, 31. Against Bagot recommendations that the 10% management fee should be changed to a
percentage of the funds actually received by individual bands, the 10% management fee to Crown lands
was kept. Shanahan, 26 and 30. By 1855, the Department was administering the sale of Indian lands and
maintaining their own accounts, with funds paid directly to banks (going to the account of the Receiver
General), Shanahan, 32.
51
was alleviated by an annual grant of $3000 until 1860).26 This temporary grant from imperial
parliament reduced by half in 1858, when notice was given that it would be cancelled entirely in
1860.27
In response to the announcement of the end of the imperial grant, the Pennefather
Commission was struck in 1856 to deal with the question of how to arrange Department
finances.28 Pennefather found that there were not enough revenues to replace the imperial grant,
and recommended that ten percent of land sales be put into an Indian land fund for this
purpose.29 Pennefather also recommended that the Provincial government should pay all
expenses not covered by the ten percent of land sales, with a grant of $2000.00 for ten years, and
that they also pay the pensions of DIA officers. 30 In 1858, the Indian Land Management Fund
was created, with Pennefather ordering that ten percent of all monies in trust accounts be
transferred to this new account, as well as ten percent of any future land sales. 31 By 1864, this
account was used to pay for salaries for many Visiting Superintendents and Commissioners,
Clerks, and some schoolmasters, missionaries, and surgeons.32
In 1860, Indian Affairs was transferred to the Province of Canada, and placed under
Crown Lands. The Commissioner of Crown Lands for the Province of Canada became the
Superintendent General of Indian Affairs. In this new administrative and financial context, all
revenues to the Department were being closely monitored, as the Provincial government was
anxious that the Department finance itself without the aid of a grant from them. By the early
1860s it was becoming clear that the overly ambitious goals the Indian Land Management Fund,
26
Shanahan, 29, 35, and 41.
27
Shanahan, 41.
28
Shanahan, 37.
29
Shanahan, 38. Pennefather also advised that a “sinking fund” be created from 10% of land sales and
invested in order to generate revenue for the Land Fund. This was created in 39 and 41.
30
Shanahan, 41.
31
Shanahan, 44. The “sinking fund” was transferred to the Land Management Fund in 1861, Shanahan,
46.
32
Province of Canada, Indian Affairs. Report for the Half-year ended 30th June 1864 (Quebec: Hunter,
Rose and Co., 1865).
52
established only two years before to replace the imperial grant in funding the operations of the
DIA, were not viable.33 The fund was supposed to finance, through sales of surrendered
Indigenous land, the working of the Department, including the administrative costs, specifically
salaries, as well as annuity payments.34 Initially land sales in the Saugeen Peninsula, after the
controversial 1854 treaty, added significantly to the fund– but by 1864 expenditures exceeded
revenues by $2000.00.35 Resource revenues from reserves (although much less than the land sale
component of DIA funds) increased in importance in this context. During this time timber sales
made up a significant portion of revenues for the Department. For instance, in the 1864 Annual
report for the Department of Indian Affairs, Superintendent General William Spragge notes that
land sales were falling after the initial rush on lands in the Saugeen. However, of the $38,907.78
generated in the first half of the year from lands and timber sales, $4699.87 came from timber
sales.36 This amounted to twelve percent of the revenues for the first half of the year from lands
and timber, a very significant proportion. Percentages from these revenues were also taken by the
Department, presumably to the Indian Land Management Fund although this is difficult to trace
directly through the Annual Reports.37
In the early 1860s, the Department was actively pursuing resource revenues on reserves.
For instance, in November of 1861 Charles T. Walcot, the Accountant for Indian Affairs, sent a
notice to Indian Superintendents to convene councils with reserve leaders in order to obtain their
permission to grant licences for cutting timber on reserves, and to explain how interest payments
from the proceeds would then be allocated to them. 38 At the same time, he sent out a notice that
all Oak, Elm, Pine and Walnut timber on Indian reserves should be assessed with trees “most
liable to decay” to be culled and requested a report by Superintendents on all revenues taken
33
Shanahan, The Indian Land Management Fund, 44 and 52.
34
Ibid., 50.
35
Shanahan, 52.
36
Province of Canada, Indian Affairs. Report for the Half-year ended 30th June 1864 (Quebec: Hunter,
Rose and Co., 1865).
37
Ibid.
38
Circular from C. T. Walcot, Nov. 15 1861, LAC RG10, vol. 520, reel C-13348, Pearen, 11.
53
from Indian land.39 Walcot was attempting to more precisely take stock of resources and
potential income generated from reserve lands as the Department struggled to meet its goals of
financing itself through the Indian Land Management Fund, just one year after the transfer from
imperial control.
Issues around Indigenous timbering garnered even greater attention at the DIA in 1862,
where William Spragge, the Superintendent General of Indian Affairs, received complaints from
across Ontario. Multiple Indian Agents wrote to the Department about their inability to police
Indigenous sales of timber resources. The duties of their position within the Department had
expanded from their initial role as distributor of presents in the early nineteenth century to
include the sale of Indian lands, collection of monies for rents and fines as well as overseeing the
investment of these monies to generate the revenue that would fund the Department. 40 In terms
of collecting fines against timber infractions, in particular against Indigenous timbering (in a
context where their power to grant timber licenses was being more vigorously asserted), Agents
lacked clear legal and enforcement tools to make the Department’s intentions actionable.
George Ironside was one of the Agents who complained to his superiors. Tensions were
particularly high on Manitoulin Island, because of Ironside’s ongoing conflict with the
Wikwemikong Ogimaag against their wharf and timbering operations. Since January of 1862,
Ironside had been meeting with the chiefs on the island to assert his exclusive authority to grant
timber licenses and had been encountering increasingly hardening resistance to this claim. In
March, the tearing down of the Department’s notices prohibiting the sale of wood to whites was
the latest iteration of this conflict. Sixty cords of wood, cut the summer before, already awaited
American ships at the Wikwemikong wharf. People continued to harvest timber, disregarding
Ironside.41 In his letter to the Department about the removal of the notices, he notes: “I fear the
Indians will sell the wood to [the ships] in spite of all I can to prevent it particularly as I have no
39
Ibid. For the development of ideas around scientific management of forests see Richard S. Lambert,
Renewing Natures Wealth: A Centennial History of the Public Management of Lands, Forests and
Wildlife in Ontario, 1763-1867 (Toronto: Ontario Department of Lands and Forests, 1967).
40
Shanahan, 7.
41
George Ironside to C. T. Walcot, March 16 1862, LAC RG10, vol. 291, p. 194983, reel C-12668.
54
assistance.”42 He was stationed alone on the island; the local doctor, who served as the justice of
the peace, could hardly be expected to provide adequate help if a confrontation was to ensue.
The most serious aspect of his letter included a statement made by a Wikwemikong band
member alleging threats against Ironside’s life had been made, should he attempt to confiscate
the timber.43 Ironside was not confident about his ability to enforce the prohibition on wood
sales to American ships.
Ironside’s problems were not isolated, and Spragge received multiple other complaints
the same year. A letter came to the Department written by Colonel Prince, the first judge for the
district of Algoma, who periodically held court on Manitoulin.44 He had, according to his letter,
had some success in reigning in the efforts of Chief Augustine at Garden River in relation to
selling timber, and in his view a stronger hand was necessary at Wikwemikong to ensure that
Indigenous peoples felt the force of the law and that leaders were made to abide by it. 45 At Six
Nations, enforcement against Indigenous timbering was likewise becoming a more pressing
issue. Spragge received letters from J. T. Gilkison, the Indian Superintendent there complaining
that the Crown Lands Agent was unable to properly enforce timber regulations on reserve and
requesting more direct management from Indian Affairs.46 Finally, W. R. Bartlett, the
Superintendent at the Bay of Quinté also wrote about Indigenous timbering, specifically noting
the shortcomings of the 1850 Protectionist legislation: “This wood business is a difficult matter
42
Ibid.
43
David Layton to George Ironside, Statement of George Obodosaiwai, Feb. 26 1862, LAC RG10, vol.
291, pp. 194985-194987, reel C-12668.
44
R. Alan Douglas, “PRINCE, JOHN,” in Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 9, University of
Toronto/Université Laval, 2003–, accessed March 13,
2020, http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/prince_john_9E.html. Prince was appointed judge for the district in
1860.
45
John Prince to Commissioner of Crown Lands, March 19 1862, LAC RG10, vol. 295, pp. 197765-
197767, reel C-12671. The imposition of the law on Indigenous people had become a growing concern of
his. In his last court session on Manitoulin, as there were no cases to be heard, he spent the time
travelling to various bands to lecture them about the changes in the law as related to them.
46
For Spragge’s response see Memo Relative to Timber Depredations and Timber Cutting on Indian
Lands, William Spragge, January 14 1862, LAC RG10, vol. 722, pp. 59-62, reel C-13412.
55
to deal with. Had it been the white people who had cut the timber the law might reach them.”47
The law as it stood was ambiguous when it came to Indigenous timbering, the history of which
will be discussed in the following sections.
Consequently, William Spragge was under pressure from multiple directions to better
regulate Indigenous timbering and sought clarification around what his Superintendents were
allowed under the law. Spragge, as a long-time employee of Crown Lands would have been
familiar with the overlapping regulations around trespassing and cutting timber on both Crown
and Indian Lands,48 but how to regulate Indigenous timber cutting was less clear to him. Spragge
sought to resolve the ambiguous position of Indigenous timbering under the law. He wrote to the
Solicitor General in late July to clarify whether “persons of Indian blood” could be charged with
illegally cutting timber.49 Spragge’s inquiry represents one way that the Department was seeking
to define its jurisdiction more clearly over resource management on reserves. The Solicitor
General answered that Indigenous people could in fact be charged as trespassers on their own
lands. The following sections expand on and contextualize this by first examining why
Indigenous resource use would have been important to the DIA in the 1860s (the financial
context) as well as how ideas of “protection,” and thus jurisdiction over reserve lands, had
developed leading up to the 1860s (the legal and administrative context). The evidence
presented below demonstrates how the DIA’s interpretation of protectionist legislation shifted
from protection of Indigenous communities against outside incursions by settlers stealing
resources to protection of their own jurisdiction over managing reserve resources.
47
W. R. Bartlett to William Spragge, March 31 1862, LAC RG10, vol. 274, pp. 185009-185017. Here a
petition from band councillors listing names of reserve residents who had sold timber to whites was
attached. Bartlett notes that Pennefather had previously withheld annuity payments as punishment, and
cites a letter from him noting the ambiguity in law. Bartlett’ full quote is: “This wood business is a
difficult matter to deal with. Had it been the white people who had cut the timber the law might reach
them. The only way the Indian can be punished is by the Department stopping his annuity for one year,
under the instructions before mentioned- but even this measure will not stop him from cutting and selling
wood, for the proceeds of the wood is much more than his annuity.”
48
Lambert, Renewing Nature’s Wealth.
49
Solicitor General to William Spragge, August 5 1862, LAC RG10, vol. 297, pp. 198776-198777, reel
C-12672.
56
1.1.1. Commissions of Inquiry, Financial Restructuring in the

Department of Indian Affairs, and Ideas about Indigenous
Resource Use
Why did Indigenous resource use become important in the 1860s and what is the history
of ideas within the Department about the earning capacity of reserve resources? As discussed
above, Indian Affairs underwent significant changes in the late 1850s and 1860s. Primary
among these were the transfer from Imperial to Provincial control in 1860, and the corresponding
loss of the imperial grant that had thus far made possible their operations. Britain had long been
attempting to have Indian Affairs become self-supporting after the decline of its military
importance post-1812, and multiple commissions were called to address this problem between
1828 and 1858.50 However, the transfer, the end of the Imperial grant, and the creation of the
Indian Land Management Fund in 1858 (as a solution to generate money from land sales to fund
the Department) together marked a new era of concern in land and resource management which
brought to fruition earlier ideas which originated through these commissions. Although
ultimately unsuccessful, schemes for self-financing the DIA through land sales and, to a lesser
degree resource revenues, were very important to the DIA over the 1860s.51 Indigenous resource
use thus came under increasing scrutiny by the Department, perceived as an incursion on their
asserted jurisdiction to exclusively manage the wealth generated in order to finance the
Department itself.
Before 1860, while Indian Affairs was still at least nominally under British control, the
imperial government was constantly looking for ways to alleviate its financial responsibilities.
They completed six commissions dealing with this between 1828 and 1858. 52 Many of the ideas
50
These include reports by Major General Henry Charles Darling in 1828, by the Executive Council of
Lower Canada in 1837, by Justice James Buchanan Macaulay in 1839 for Upper Canada, another in 1840
by a legislative committee of the Upper Canada Assembly, the 1844 report commissioned by Governor
General Sir Charles Bagot, and the report of Civil Secretary Richard Pennefather in 1858. See John
Leslie, Commissions of Inquiry into Indian Affairs in the Canadas, 1828-1858 (Ottawa: Treaties and
Historical Research Centre, Research Branch, Corporate Policy, Indian Affairs and Northern
Development Canada, 1985), 1-5.
51
Shanahan, 52.
52
See John Leslie, Commissions of Inquiry into Indian Affairs in the Canadas. These reforms should also
be understood within the broader administrative shifts in the state, coming out of the post-rebellion era of
state reorganization and bureaucratic reform. For more on state formation and structure in these years see
57
from these commissions laid the foundation for the development of both the administrative
structure and legal frameworks for managing Indigenous peoples and their resources in the
Canadas post-1860s. The commissions were conducted to envision the transition of Indian
Affairs away from its military role, traditionally understood in the historiography as defunct after
the war of 1812.53 This transition has been most commonly understood as establishing a
“civilization” program focusing on conversion, schooling and agricultural development.
Another, less examined aspect of these commissions dealt with finances– and how this transition
would be managed while alleviating imperial expenditures.
In 1844 the Bagot Commission suggested that Crown Land Agents selling the timber on
Indian Lands could be a substantial source of revenue for the Department. 54 Following Bagot’s
recommendations, parallel legislation in Canada East and Canada West in 1850 allowed for
Crown Land Commissioners to grant licences to cut timber on Indian lands, and also allowed for
fines against trespassers (defined as white settlers in the law) cutting illegally. 55 The revenues
from these fines and licenses would go into a fund to “benefit the Indians” which meant, largely,
to finance the operations of the Department as well as provide much smaller interest payments to
bands. We can see here ideas developing about using reserve resources, as well as land sales, to
fund the Department itself. Although anchored in ideas of reserve improvement and creating
funds for the operations of schools and agriculture, in reality monies generated
disproportionately went towards financing Department operations.56
Alan Greer and Ian Walter Radforth, eds. Colonial Leviathan: State Formation in Mid-Nineteenth
Century Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992) and J. E. Hodgetts, Pioneer Public Service.
53
Nathan Ince examines the military role for the DIA in Upper Canada during the rebellions. See Nathan
Ince, “‘As Long As That Fire Burned’: Indigenous Warriors and Political Order in Upper Canada, 1837–
42.” The Canadian Historical Review (2021), https://doi.org/10.3138/chr-2020-0039.
54
John Leslie, Ron. Maguire, and Robert G. Moore. The Historical Development of the Indian Act
(Ottawa: Treaties and Historical Research Center, P.R.E Group, Indian and Northern Affairs, August
1978): 20.
55
This follows from the differentiation between “persons” and “Indians” in the law. An Act for the Better
Protection of the Lands and Property of the Indians in Lower Canada, S. Prov. C. 1850, c. 42, 10 and An
Act for the Protection of Indians in Upper Canada from Imposition and the Property Occupied or Enjoyed
by them from Tresspass and Injury,” S. Prov. C. 1859, c. 74.
56
J. E. Hodgetts, Pioneer Public Service, 217-218.
58
Although these early commissions and policies laid some of the groundwork for how land
and timber were sought to be managed, the announcement by the Imperial Government that they
would end support payments to Indian Affairs for its operations spurred an increased evaluation
of the place of land and resources in Department financing. 57 The 1858 Pennefather
Commission’s recommendations facilitated the transition of authority from Britain to Canada by
examining this financial context in detail. It was the most comprehensive study of Indian Affairs
to date, and re-evaluated earlier commissions’ findings on land sales and finances. 58 In fact,
figuring this out was the second stated goal of the Commission. 59 The idea of controlling
revenues from Indian lands in an Indian fund while serving also to fund the Department, initiated
by Bagot, can be traced through the Pennefather recommendations. 60
In Pennefather’s final report, however, Indigenous timbering was explicitly discouraged, as it

was seen as a diversion from the primary policy goal of establishing reserve agriculture. 61
Moving away from resource-based economies (traditionally hunting and fishing and, more
recently, lumbering) also allowed, on paper, for a much smaller land base to support reserve
communities and opened up the “extra” land both for settlement and for lucrative large corporate
timber leases to be granted (managed by Crown Lands), generating government revenues.
Manitoulin Island and the North Shore of Lake Superior were prime sites for both of these
lucrative endeavors for the government as land was becoming scarce in the south of the province,
57
The end of presents in 1858 was announced in 1851. By 1856, the Imperial government had announced
that it would end all payments to support Indian Affairs (although this was alleviated by an annual grant
of $3000 until 1860), Shanahan, 29, 35, and 41.
58
Leslie, Commissions of Inquiry into Indian Affairs, 129-185.
59
John F. Leslie, The Report of the Pennefather Commission: Indian conditions and administration in the
Canadas in the 1850s (Ottawa: Treaties and Historical Research Centre, 1983): 30.
60
Province of Canada, “Report of the Special Commissioners Appointed on the 8th of September, 1856, to
Investigate Indian Affairs in Canada,” Appendix 21 in Journals of the Legislative Assembly, Sessional
Papers, 6th Parl. 1st Sess. Vol. 16 (25 February-16 August 1858).
61
Karl S. Hele, “Conflict and Cooperation at Garden River First Nation: Missionaries, Ojibwa, and
Government Interactions, 1854-1871” Journal of the Canadian Church Historical Society, XLVII (2005):
103.
59
in particular after treaties opened up the land for settlement. 62 This consolidation of thinking
about the importance of resource revenues within the imperial transfer coincided with changes in
DIA administration precipitated by this transfer, as the Province of Canada placed Indian Affairs
under Crown Lands.
1.1.2. The Legal and Administrative Contexts of “Protection”

Alongside the financial restructuring examined above came administrative re-
organization. Under Provincial authority, Indian Affairs was placed under the Crown Lands
Department,63 with which it already shared legal precedents on the management of land
classified as “public” and “Indian.” Indian Affairs remained under Crown Lands until
Confederation. Crown Lands was the largest government department between 1841 and 1867
and remained fairly decentralized as it gained authority over Mining Claims in 1846, Woods and
Forests in 1852, Fisheries in 1857 and, finally, Indian Affairs in 1860.64 Indian Affairs was no
exception to this decentralization and maintained a high level of autonomy within the
Department,65 in particular after 1862 when William Spragge was appointed the Deputy
Superintendent General of Indian Affairs. 66 The administrative structure under him transferred to
the federal government with Confederation, and Spragge remained as head of Indian Affairs until
his death in 1874. Spragge himself was a long-time Crown Lands employee prior to his
promotion to Deputy Superintendent, and he would have developed a familiarity with the logic
62
On the settlement of Manitoulin after the 1862 treaty see W. R. Wightman, Forever on the Fringe: Six
Studies in the Development of Manitoulin Island (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982).
63
When the transfer of Indian Affairs to the Province took place, it was placed under the authority of the
Commissioner of Crown Lands, who also assumed the position of Superintendent General of Indian
Affairs.
64
Richard S. Lambert, Renewing Natures Wealth: A Centennial History of the Public Management of
Lands, Forests and Wildlife in Ontario, 1763-1867 (Toronto: Ontario Department of Lands and Forests,
1967): 101.
65
Lambert notes that Andrew Russell, the Assistant Commissioner (whose position was equivalent to a
Deputy Minister) “found that the various branches [of Crown Lands] (notably Surveys, Ordinance Lands
and Indian Affairs), that prided themselves on their antecedents as original agencies of the Imperial
Government were not at all disposed to subordinate themselves to centralized administrative control.”
Lambert, 115-116.
66
Spragge was also a Treaty Commissioner for Manitoulin in 1862 in this position.
60
of securing government revenues through the management of resources under Crown jurisdiction
in this context.
There are important parallels in legislation as well as logics of land management that
made Indian Affairs a coherent fit for Crown Lands. Crown Lands and Indian lands had long
been legislated together under similar “protectionist” frameworks– where government
jurisdiction over the sale and management of land wealth was asserted through penalties against
trespassers and over the right to assign leases for timber removal. 67 Over the 1840s and 1850s,
Crown Lands developed a system of licensing and management of Public lands that would
remain largely unchanged until the 20th century.68 Through this, Crown Lands developed a
framework to protect lands under its jurisdiction from trespassers and timber poachers and to
generate revenues through timber licensing and the collection of fines. Likewise, Indian Affairs
developed a Protectionist framework for Indian Lands and timber that was linked to Crown land
legislation.
In 1839, lands “appropriated for the residence of certain Indian Tribes” in Upper Canada
became, alongside unsurveyed lands and lands of the Crown, under the purview of the Act for the
Protection of the Lands of the Crown in this Province from Trespass and Injury.69 This allowed
for the Lieutenant Governor to appoint two or more Commissioners to inquire into complaints of
illegal occupation and unlawful cutting or removal of “any timber, trees, stone or soil” on these
67
An Act for the Protection of the Lands of the Crown in the Province from Tresspass and Injury, R. S. U.
C.,1839, c. 15.
68
This included regulations issued in 1842 and 1846, and finally the Act for the Sale and Better
Management of Timber upon Public Lands in 1849 which organized revenue collection licenses and
timber rates controlled through the Governor in Council. In the early 1850s, a ground rent system was
established to generate revenues from unused timber limit lands, as well as in 1852 the division of the
Province of Canada into ten timber agencies with the hope of establishing full-time agents responsible for
managing timbering in each section. See Lambert p. 125-140.
69
An Act for the Protection of the Lands of the Crown in the Province from Tresspass and Injury, R. S. U.
C.,1839, c. 15. For Crown lands this included only those lands “ungranted and not under location, or sold
or held by virtue of any lease of license of occupation.” Ibid, s.I. Parallel legislation was also passed for
Lower Canada.
61
lands,70 for the application of fines or jail time, 71 and for the seizure of illegally cut timber. 72
This framework of regulation was re-inscribed in the 1850 Act for the Protection of the Indians
of Upper Canada.73 Here a written license from the Commissioners was required in order to
remove “trees, saplings, shrubs, underwood or timber” on reserves. 74 Notably, in both laws
Indigenous individuals are always described as “Indians,” whereas perpetrators are described as
“persons,” making clear that white settlers were the target of the law. The 1850 law, as noted
above, makes explicit that settlers were who land and timber were being protected against. 75
The right to impose fines, seize logs and collect money into an Indian fund was repeated in
the 1859 Consolidated Statutes of Upper Canada through the Act to prevent trespasses to Public
and Indian Lands.76 Here Crown Lands and Indian lands are again legislated together, although
a separate section deals with Indian lands and includes other measures including regulating the
sale of these lands only to the Crown, freedom from taxation, and barring those without Indian
status from settling on reserves.77 Again, however, at no point in this legislation does it
70
Ibid. s.I.
71
Ibid, s. IV. Fines would not exceed twenty pounds, and jail time would be limited to three months.
72
Ibid, s. V.
73
An Act for the Protection of the Indians of Upper Canada from imposition, and the property occupied
or enjoyed by them from trespass or injury, S. Prov. C. 1850, c. 74.
74
Ibid, s. XII. Fines would vary depending on worth from 1-5 pounds for every tree, with jail time for
non-payment of fines not exceeding three months. Due to difficulties in enforcement, knowing the proper
name of the offender was not required. In the 1839 law, fines were to be paid to the sovereign, while in
1850 these would be paid to the sovereign or “some officer acting under her authority, to be disposed of
for the use and benefit of the Indians.” An Act for the Protection of the Indians of Upper Canada, S. Prov.
C., 1850, c. 74, s. XII.
75
Ibid., s. 1. In the preamble to the law it notes that reserve lands “are expected to be imposed upon by
the designing and unprincipled” specified as “other inhabitants of Upper Canada.”
76
An Act to prevent trespasses to Public and Indian Lands,” C. S. U. C., 1859, c. 81.
77
Ibid. For the purposes of this law, the definition of “Indian” was drawn from the Gradual Civilization
Act, 1859.
62
specifically mention the necessity for Indigenous people to acquire licenses from the Indian
Agent.78
The ambiguity of Indigenous timbering within the law became a problem for enforcement, as
we have seen above in the letters to Spragge. Concern over Indigenous timbering intensified
under Spragge’s leadership, in particular how these protectionist frameworks were interpreted
and enforced within the context of Indigenous resource use. Spragge sent his inquiry to the
Solicitor General at the end of July of 1862. It was clear to him that licences were required for
cutting trees on reserves, but whether Indigenous people could be charged for cutting wood was,
as outlined above, unclear. He inquired whether “any saw logs-staves cut upon an Indian
Reserve… without license may be seized and sold as cut contrary to law understanding the
cutting removal of timber may be the work of persons of Indian blood.” 79 The Solicitor General
quickly responded on August 5th: “Indian lands seems [sic] to be public lands,” referencing the
1839 Act for the Protection of the Lands of the Crown in this Province from Tresspass and
injury.80 He also noted that as there was no specific exclusion of “Indians” under the 1850
Protection Acts that they may be charged as trespassers under the law.81 Drawing on the
common logics in Crown Land and Indian Protectionist legislation, the Solicitor General
interpreted the “protection” the laws not as protecting resources for Indigenous people, but as
protecting the jurisdiction of the government to have the sole authority to manage the wealth
generated by these. This marks a turning point in how Indigenous rights to resources on reserve
were interpreted.
Spragge wasted no time in letting his Superintendents know. On August 9, four days after
the Solicitor General’s letter, he sent a letter to his agents advising them that a license would now
78
It did allow the Governor-in-Council to extend any clauses of the Act respecting the Sale and
Management of Timber on Public Lands to Indian reserves.
79
William Spragge to Andrew Wilson, 28 July 1862, LAC RG10, vol. 297, reel C-12672, emphasis in
original.
80
Andrew Wilson to William Spragge, August 5 1862, LAC RG10, vol. 297, pp. 198776-198777, reel C-
12672.
81
Ibid.
63
be required for all Indigenous timber removal, and that the point of this was to “‘impress forcibly
upon the Indians …the right to sell which (for their own benefit) was neither their Grandfathers,
nor theirs, nor their children, but [timber, as land, would be sold to yield] a permanent Fund for
the support, education, and advancement of their and their people for all time to come.’”82
Spragge also had new notices printed and circulated via newspaper on August 9 and had
circulated a notice on Manitoulin two days before. 83 According to Reverend Choné of
Wikwemikong this notice read: “Cutting timber, staves or wood for any purpose upon Indian
lands, has been rendered unlawful … any persons whether Indian or others …offending against
the said statute will be prosecuted with vigor.” 84 This was stronger wording and a much clearer
statement on the part of the Department on their jurisdiction than the prohibition of selling wood
to whites they had attempted previously. It was this notice that had been torn down and returned
to Ironside.
On Manitoulin, the response to this was swift. Attaching petitions from the Wikwemikong
chiefs, the Catholic Reverend Choné outlined what the stakes were for the Wikwemikong
community: “C'est leur dire: Mourir de faim et de froid, se mettre …les fers aux pieds et aux
mains…leur bois pourira, et leur membres grelotterant en le regardant…On ne traite pas ainsi les
esclaves.” (“This amount to telling them: Die of starvation and cold, put…shackles on their feet
and hands…their wood will rot and their limbs will shiver while they watch…slaves are not
treated so.”)85 Missionaries like Choné were particularly concerned with the effect that
restricting timbering would have on Anishinabek communities. 86 Invested in developing
82
Hele, 105-106. Hele quotes Spragge to [?], 9 August 1862, Band History Correspondence 1860-1869,
Box 4381, File no 1-1-2, Wawanosh Family Papers. Hele also mentions that an Order in Council was
referenced by Spragge, which I have yet to track down, and that the Lands Agent would be responsible
there for granting licenses. Hele 106.
83
Pearen, Four Voices, 15.
84
Reverend Choné to William Spragge, August [15?] 1862, LAC RG10, vol. 292, pp. 195634-196637,
emphasis in original according to Choné’s transcription.
85
Ibid. p. 195636. Translation mine.
86
Choné, although a tireless advocate against the treaty and against the treatment of the community by
Ironside and the Department of Indian Affairs framed this in racialized protectionist terms, calling
Wikwemikong residents “minors of the lowest degree.” Reverend Choné to His Excellency the Governor
General, LAC RG10, vol. 280, p.189796, reel C-12662.
64
Christian farms around mission sites, they saw timber as a key aspect of raising revenues for the
purchase of agricultural instruments and other material goods. Choné was not the only
missionary in the region concerned about this. James Chance, the Anglican minister at Garden
River also protested the 1862 laws, 87 and succeeded in raising international concern about
timbering at Garden River though missionary networks.88
The escalation of tactics against Indigenous timber cutting was also met with deep concern
by the Wikwemikong Ogimaag. They contested their right to sell timber commercially in their
strongly worded petition attached to Choné’s. More urgently they protested the fact that all
timber to be cut on reserves was to be licensed through the Indian agent. Their fury at this
imposition is felt through the strong and tense language of the petition; the new framework
relegated them to be treated “like an animal.” 89
The above change in policy was the context within which Thomas Mokomanish, Louis
Wakegijik, and Jacko Agatawenini asserted their rights to timber by reminding the Crown of pre-
existing obligations under treaty law, undermined by Indian Affairs’ efforts to usurp resource
regulation rights. However, wood regulation was but one field that brought Wikwemikong
leaders into conflict with the Department. Although beyond the scope of this chapter to examine
87
Pearen, 86 quotes Chance: “As a Missionary and one who has devoted his life to promote civilization
and Christianity among the Indians I cannot but regret that a Prohibition should have been issued by the
Indian Department that interferes with their habits of industry and cuts off their chief means of
subsistence (during the winter) and has driven several families away from the village beyond the reach of
religious instruction to resume their old occupation of hunting.”
88
A New England Company report to the Duke of Buckingham explains: "In 1860 one half of the Garden
River reserve was surrendered to the Indian Department of the Canadian government for the settlement of
white people, and in 1864 the privileges of Indians were curtailed by an Act of the Legislature
empowering the Governor General in Council to deal with Indian lands and Timber as with the Crown
Lands and Timber. Indians at Garden River are now consequently required to pay all the dues and taxes
imposed upon Lumbermen on the Crown Lands; and a license is insisted upon before the Indians can cut
Timber on their own reserves. Very recently the local agent in the Indian Department has apprehended
several Garden River Indians for falling pieces of wood called "knees" used in boat building, and these
poor Indians have been imprisoned for 21 days.” James Heywood, New England Company Treasurer to
the Duke of Buckingham, August 31 1868, RG10, Vol. 327, pp. 218980-218997. See also Hele,
“Conflict and Cooperation.”
89
Petition from the villages of Michigiwatinong and Wikwemikong, July 21 1862, LAC RG10, vol. 292,
pp. 195687-195690, reel C-12669.
65
extensively, it is important to note that other resources such as the fishery and oil resources were
also being regulated in the 1860s.90 The next section explores how contestations around these
issues also played an important part of the struggle over local jurisdiction on Manitoulin in the
1860s. A fisheries agent was appointed in 1859, and the severe conflicts that resulted from this
will be briefly examined below. Likewise, conflicts around the Department attempting to obtain
control of oil licenses on reserve generated conflict. We can see here the broader drive of Indian
Affairs to gain control over resource revenues and the backlash that such unilateral actions
created as it was contrary to prior agreements under alliance with the Crown.91
1.2. “We do not want our land regulated as Crown Land:

The Response of the Anishinaabek leadership
Leaders such as Louis Wakegijik, Thomas Mokomanish and Jacko Agatawinini resisted
new resource regulations, drawing on many generations of Indigenous land management law
regulated through councils, and many decades of alliance and treaty law with settler governments
to protest the impoverishment of their communities. Concerned with their community’s
potential for generating wealth to ensure success in the changing settler colonial landscape, they
were active in both petitioning the government and in directly asserting resource use rights over
timber, fisheries, and oil deposits. They continued to honour historic agreements with the
Crown, and to honour historic connections with regional leaders through council gatherings. The
struggles of the Wikwemikong leadership as the Department asserted the Indian Fund model, and
jurisdiction over resource use management– as well as the premises on which they disputed these
incursions– is the subject of the first sub-section below. Following this, I look to how leaders in
the broader region faced similar struggles with the Department, and how these struggles were
responded to through regional councils. As leaders met to deal with resource and treaty issues,
links began to be forged with the broader network of the Grand General Council, called in 1870
by the Six Nations to respond to a new threat to the jurisdiction of reserve leaders, the 1869
90
On the history of mineral regulations see Rhonda Telford, “’The sound of the rustling of the gold is
under my feet where I stand; we have a rich country’: A History of Aboriginal Mineral Resources in
Ontario” (PhD diss., University of Toronto, 1996).
91
Alan Ojig Corbiere, “Anishinaabe Treaty-Making in the 18th and 19th-Century Northern Great Lakes:
From Shared Meanings to Epistemological Chasms” (PhD Diss., York University, 2019).
66
Gradual Enfranchisement Act. These were alliances and political relationships of long standing,
as I will discuss in the next chapter, but these networks were reinvigorated in order to respond to
the 1869 Act.
1.2.1. Resource Contestations on Manitoulin Island

The Wikwemikong leaders continued to assert rights to resource use throughout the
1860s. Beyond the practical goal of supporting their communities, the reaction of the leadership
to restrictions on their economic activities also importantly demonstrates how the resource
impositions of the Department were understood as a violation of pre-existing diplomatic
agreements. It was on the basis of these rights that they petitioned the Department, protested the
changing regulations it imposed, and continued to actively assert their right to manage timber,
fish, and oil resources on their territory.
This section focuses on Louis Wakegijik, Jacko Agatawenini, and Thomas Mokomanish
as they were leaders named in all of the major contestations around timber, fishery and oil
conflicts that are examined below. My focus on these leaders is with the recognition that there
were others among the Wikwemikong leadership, but my focus on them in particular because
they or their sons also participated in the later Grand General Council of Ontario Indians. 92 The
political history of these leaders in their struggles with the Department is important to understand
to contextualize their involvement in the Grand General Council, and the political and legal
histories that they brought with them there.
From the perspective of leaders at Wikwemikong the ability to control resources already
operated within the context of the relationship between Indigenous nations and the Crown as
guaranteed they would live comfortably and be provided for on their lands. This relationship had
been significantly altered since the 1760s and was being actively rearranged by new treaty
processes and the emerging administrative and financial structure of Indian Affairs as discussed
previously. However, for the leadership these treaty relationships and agreements had not been
abrogated. The new regulations were not drawn on an empty slate, but rather were imposed
upon decades of alliances that were still being honoured by Indigenous leaders and understood as
92
See footnote 5 in this chapter for genealogical information.
67
the organizing principle of governance and local authority. Through their councils and petitions,
they affirmed their position as British allies, their specific rights to the land under the 1836 treaty
and how they viewed Ironside’s actions to enforce Department policy as violating these
agreements.
The foundational treaty with the Crown for Anishinaabe in the region was the 1764 Treaty of
Niagara.93 Here, relationships of care and alliance had been agreed to by both sides, and the
Anishinaabe on Manitoulin continued to assert their rights under this agreement as the regulatory
agenda changed. Their rights to the land were also protected under the 1836 Bond Head Treaty.
The 1861 treaty had initially been refused on the grounds of this earlier agreement, with leaders
present at the 1836 agreement recounting promises made at Niagara. 94
The years 1861 and 1862 were a hugely politically active time for Manitoulin leaders.
Following the failed treaty attempt of 1861, councils were organized throughout the following
year in order to galvanize the multiple communities on the island against signing a treaty. The
treaty was ultimately (and controversially) 95 signed in October of 1862, after which it was
immediately contested. However, the Wikwemikong leaders refused to sign, leaving the eastern
portion of the island unceded. Through this time of massive political upheaval, Manitoulin
leaders regularly petitioned the government. Through these petitions, it is clear they understood
their rights to the land and waters had been affirmed through previous alliances. The right to
manage timber, fish, and later oil deposits were part of their understanding of their jurisdiction
over the land. Their petitions demonstrate that these rights were understood as part of this
agreement, and that Ironside’s actions to enforce new Department policies was a clear
contravention of these. More broadly, a council was held in 1860 at Sarnia in response to the
93
John Borrows, “Wampum at Niagara: The Royal Proclamation, Canadian Legal History, and Self-
Government.” In Aboriginal and Treaty Rights in Canada: Essays on Law, Equality, and Respect for
Difference (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1997): 155-172.
94
Alan Ojiig Corbiere, “Exploring Historical Literacy in Manitoulin Island Ojibwe,” Papers of the 34th
Algonquian Conference, ed. H. C. Wolfart (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba, 2003): 69-70 and
“Anishinaabe Treaty-making in the 18th and 19th Century Northern Great Lakes: From Shared Meanings
to Epistemological Chasms,” PhD Diss., (York University, 2019).
95
The circumstances under which the treaty was signed were suspect, and were immediately protested by
many Island leaders. See Pearen, Four Voices.
68
visit of the Prince of Wales. Although it is not clear if leaders from Manitoulin attended, it is
clear that fishing rights in the Great Lakes were a concern here. 96
Concurrent to this flurry of broad political activity, the more specific conflict over the
Wikwemikong wharf also unfolded. After the Wikwemikong leaders built their wharf in the
summer of 1861, the government posted notices prohibiting the sale of wood to whites. They
also had these notices printed in local newspapers in the fall. 97 Over the winter, Ironside was
tasked (as we have seen through the request of Walcott above) to convene councils to assert his
authority to manage the sale of all timber sales from reserves. As we have also seen, after
Spragge’s inquiry to the Solicitor General the government posted new notices, on the 7th of
August 1862, this time much more strongly worded to specify that Indigenous people were also
targeted by the law: “Cutting timber, staves or wood for any purpose upon Indian lands has been
rendered unlawful…any persons whether Indians or others offending against the said statute will
be prosecuted with rigor.”98 This limited all Indigenous timber use, not just trees cut
commercially, and caused grave concern and protest from both missionaries and the Indigenous
leadership on Manitoulin. They had long been voicing their concerns over both the regulation of
timber and Ironside’s actions.
The leaders were staunchly opposed to Ironside even before building their wharf in the
summer of 1861. In May, two conjoined petitions were sent to the governor general complaining
of Ironside’s actions and demanding his removal. He had been disrespectful to the chiefs and
suspect in his financial dealings with them. 99 They complained of his interference in their
attempts to have a sawmill built, and that Indigenous efforts to sell wood at Little Current were
96
Petition to the Duke of Newcastle, September 14 1860, LAC RG10, vol. 266, pp. 163,028 -163, 378.
97
Pearen, 63 quoting Reverend Choné, Wikwemikong Diarium, Nov. 26 1861.
98
Reverend P. Choné to Superintendent General of Indian Affairs, August 15 1862, LAC RG10, vol. 292,
pp. 195634-195637, reel C-12669. Emphasis in original according to Choné
99
Petitions from Michigawatinong and Wikwemikong, 23 May 1861, LAC RG10, vol. 259, no. 1001-
1100, pp. 156713-156722 (trans. Francis Assiginack). Translation from W. R. Bartlett to Charles
Walcott, June 11 1861, LAC RG10, vol. 259, no. 1001-1100, pp. 156695-156710 (Petition in Ojibwe with
French translation attached).
69
tightly regulated.100 It is clear from their correspondence that they were carefully keeping track
of the implications of the band fund model, and they complained specifically that Ironside
provided no transparency or accountability to them with regards to their community’s wealth
under this system. Janet Chute has noted Ironside’s complicity in turning a “blind eye” to
Hudson’s Bay Company sales of liquor to Indigenous individuals, while leaders note how fines
from Americans traders (presumably selling alcohol) were never received by the band, and that
rents from the fishery (although leased without their consent) were never communicated to
leadership.101 It is clear here that community leaders did not see any benefit to having their
finances out of their control, despite the Department’s rhetoric. Claims by the Department of
Indian Affairs of band funds “benefitting the Indians” were directly challenged by the Manitoulin
leadership through the petitions.
These complaints against Ironside are framed according to alliance agreements with the
Crown. In the first petition, the alliance relationship is implied: “This conduct of his makes us
think he is not discharging his duties according to the wishes of the Governor General. He takes
100
Ibid. “It is not permitted for any Indian to sell his cord of wood (at the Little Current) in order to
supply his ordinary wants, but it is sold for him by a white man who takes a portion of its balance. We
were made to understand that Indians would be permitted to cut wood and from each cord there would be
a deduction of two shillings, which would go to the government until the amount was fully refunded
which had been paid to the Hudson Bay Company for the house and wharf; that after this the Indians
there were to [have?] to sell their wood, in the meantime no one would be allowed to buy it from them.
When the wood was sold fifty cents were deducted from each of those Indians who cut it.”
101
Ibid. On the fishery: “He went on to lease a certain fishery to a yanke in the name of the Indians, he
told them that the leassee would give a large amount of money for it, and that it would be given to the
Indians, but he has not as yet given me copper to the Indians on account of the rent.” Janet Chute, The
Legacy of Shingwaukonse: A Century of Native Leadership (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017),
148. On Ironside and liquor sales by the Hudson’s Bay Company, see Janet Chute, 148. She also notes
his personal ties to Wemyss Simpson, in charge of the Hudson’s Bay Company post at La Cloche: “In
1852, Wemyss Simpson became Ironside’s son-in-law, and these two, along with Joseph Wilson, John
William Keating, and Keatings associates, Arthur Rankin, James Cuthbertson, and Arthur Maitland,
formed a powerful clique hostile to all organizations, particularly missions and Native bands, which
challenged their economic and political hegemony along the north shore of Lakes Huron and Superior.
This group sough to make the coastal bands into wage labourers economically dependent on the Hudson’s
Bay Company and the mining enterprises.”
70
no trouble to promote our welfare”102– a duty of the Crown under alliance. In the second, these
obligations are laid out in explicit terms: “You said to our forefathers, ‘if at any time you should
feel aggrieved I myself will look after your grievances, my arms are powerful and my heart is big
and it is white,103 you have a place in my heart and you shall be under the protection of my hand,
and no one should be allowed to oppress you.’”104 Ironside, in enforcing Department policy,
was in clear contravention of these agreements of protection.
As the tensions grew, additional councils were held which continued to assert rights to
resource management. In 1862, leaders held a council at Wikwemikong in late winter to deal
with the treaty issue. They also focused on the issue of wood regulation, which became folded
into the issue of treaty. The severity of this issue is demonstrated by reports that violence was
threatened against Ironside should he attempt to confiscate the timber. 105 Over the summer more
petitions were written as a result of further councils at Michigiwatinong in June of 1862, and at
Wikwemikong in July.106 The issue of timber remained front and centre for the Wikwemikong
leadership. In the July petition the leadership’s first demand, among many other pressing
concerns, is that “They desire to sell wood to the steamboats and to make the wharf profitable to
them which they built last summer.”107
102
Ibid.
103
Meaning having good and peaceful intentions.
104
Ibid.
105
Colonel John Prince to Commissioner of Crown Lands, March 19 1862, LAC RG10, vol. 295, 197764-
197767: “It seems that a large meeting of the Indians took place a short time since at Wikwemikong, near
[Mahnetooakning?] on Mahnetoolin Island- the object of which was to [?] the government scheme (as
reported) of forcing the Indians to surrender their Interest in that island, and to resist any interruption
whatsoever to their cutting down and selling timber and firewood at their free will and pleasure- and my
informant states that positive declarations were made by the leading men at the meeting that they would
shoot down all who interrupted them in the service of their assumed rights, and that they, particularly,
maintained Captain George Ironside, their visiting superintendent, as an object of their vengeance!”
106
Michigiwatinong is now M’Chigeeng First Nation.
107
Petition from Mitchikiwationong and Wikwemikong the 21st of July 1862, LAC RG10, vol. 292, pp.
195687-195690. This is followed by complaints that Ironside was recognizing illegitimate chiefs in order
to have the island surrendered, and that the Medical man was not performing his duties. They also
demand payment for fishing islands leased in their territory: “The fishing locations are our own property
in as much as they are our Islands. They told us that the Indians would receive payment, but we have not
71
The leaders’ rights to resource use under alliance relationships, and how they understood
Ironside’s actions to be violating these, is made clear through the petition written from the June
council. Bemigonesshkong, the petitioner, whose letter is signed by the leaders of
Michigiwatinong and Wikwemikong (including Mokomanish, Agatawenini and Wakegijik)
recounts in metaphoric language the promises made to them by the British: to keep a tree on the
island that would provide them shade, a fire to provide them warmth, and a vessel that would
always be full and would be replenished should they require aid. 108 These guarantees of care
were being violated. They state clearly in the following passage that is was “those to whom you
have given charge,” (i.e. the Indian Superintendent) who was to blame:
It is not we who deprived it of its leaves this tree, our mind would not be so stupid as to
do such a thing, it is those to whom you have given charge over our persons, those are
the persons whom we blame for having deprived the tree of its leaves.
Again it is not we who have extinguished the fire at which we were warming ourselves,
our mind would not be so stupid as to put out the fire at which we were warming
ourselves. It is those to whom you have given the charge of it those only are the cause
that our fire went out.
Again, this vessel that you have promised us that you have said shall never be
empty…We have not destroyed that vessel, we have not emptied it, those who were in
charge of our business those alone destroyed the vessel, now therefore we say to you:
fill the vessel tie a rope to it but a strong one and when you have filled it, we will draw
up the vessel.109
This petition was written within the context of the second treaty negotiation brewing on the
island and maintains clearly that the island and surrounding small islands were never ceded.
Depriving the tree of leaves, allowing the fire to go out, and not only emptying but destroying the
vessel that was to provide aid were all metaphors used by Bemigonesshkong to describe the
severe neglect of care obligations through treaty represented by Ironside’s actions. However, the
focus on the oversight of the Indian Agent, the regulation of the fishery (mentioned specifically
received any. We demand payment forthwith for we don’t know what that promise will amount to. Now
that the lease of the location is over, we require that they be not leased any more. This is what we have to
say.”
108
Petition Michigiwatinong, June 27 1862, RG10, Vol. 292, 195678-195682, reel C-12669. Translation
from Ojibwe, original in RG10, Vol. 292, 195683-195687, reel C-12669.
109
Ibid., pp. 195680-195681 (emphasis added).
72
at the end of the petition), as well as the surrounding petitions from the missionaries and
Wikwemikong leaders, demonstrates that the Crown’s insistence on resource regulation was a
key contention of their concerns about the violation of alliance agreements.
The Department’s August notices (that restricted any woodcutting on Indigenous lands
without a license) further provoked enraged correspondence from both the Catholic missionaries
on the island and the leadership. A letter from the missionaries on the island in early August
outlines the terms of understanding that the leadership had over their lands and rights to its
resources, supporting and advocating for their understanding of property rights. 110 They attach a
petition from the June council here, quoted above. In late August, another petition was sent by
Choné, as well as one signed the 25th of August at Wikwemikong by Thomas Mokomanish,
Jacko Agatawenini and Wakegijik. The August notice had been covertly posted at
Wikwemikong the night before, and the leaders were furious. They write:
For my part, I do not view it with a good eye that I am forbidden the use of my property.
You want to treat me as an animal. If we take an animal and tie it, it cannot go anywhere:
it will die of hunger. And if it is cold, it will freeze in place.
This is how you want to treat me. It does not have to be so. Do not forbid the steamboats
to buy wood where I built a wharf, at Pointe aux Crânes. So that I am able to sell them
wood to procure agricultural implements and clothing.111
110
Catholic Missionaries of Manitoulin Island to His Excellency the Governor General of Canada, August
9 1862, LAC RG10, vol. 292, pp. 195674-195677, reel C-12669. The terms of this are outlined in many
ways. A document affirming the status of Little Knife (Chief Mokomanish) and the rights of his heir,
Thomas Mokomanish as British allies is quoted, and frame the clear title to the island through the 1836
treaty. They also discuss natural rights: “Besides these titles to gratitude they have also rights acquired of
which the law can take no hold, natural rights as possessors of this Island from time immemorial, rights
recognised by the solemn treaty of 1836 of which we have a copy near us. Would not the nonrecognition
of these rights be the oppression exercised by the strong over the weak, which is apt to provoke the
vengeance of heaven, and the indignation of all honest hearts.”
111
Reverend P. Choné to Superintendent General of Indian Affairs, August [?] 1862, LAC RG10, Vol.
292, pp. 195638-195639, reel C-12669, my translation. Choné’s French translation from the attached
Ojibwe petition reads as follows: “Toi, Grand Chef, je te demande: que penserais-tu si on te défendais de
toucher à ce qui t’appartient? Si on t’es interdisait l’usage, que penserais-tu? Par exemple si on mettrait
ton lit en pieces? Que penserais-tu de celui qui en [agissait?] ainsi? Réfléchis à cette question que je t’[?]
Pour ma part, je ne vois pas dutout du bon oeuil qu’on m’interdise l’usage de ma propriété. Tu veux me
traiter en bête. Si on prend un animal, qu’on l’a[?] il ne pourra plus aller nulle part: il [?] de faim. Et si il
fait froid, un grand froid, il gêlera sur place. Voilà comme tu veux me traiter. Il ne doit pas en etre ainsi.
En consequence ne defends pas aux steamboats de m’acheter du bois là si j’ai fait un quai, à la Pointe aux
73
The issue of timber regulation did not go away after the government’s decision to prosecute
Indigenous individuals. At the treaty negotiations in the fall of 1862, Agatawenini made clear
the importance of being able to use timber resources on their land: “I do not envy the good
payment you make them [treaty payments]. What I ask is that you take away the obstacles which
prevents me drawing profit from what is on my land, so that I may sell firewood to procure the
things which I have need. That is the thought of my Chiefs, for whom I speak.”112
Timber was not the only resource that was a site of conflict in the Department’s push to
secure revenues from resources on reserves, and two dramatic incidents, leading later in the
1860s to the arrest of several Wikwemikong leaders, bear this out. These struggles again
demonstrate the tensions between the Department asserting jurisdiction over resource use
management and the understanding by the chiefs of their rights to manage and draw profit from
these. I will briefly discuss these incidents in order to flesh out the complicated matrix of
regulations the leaders were dealing with alongside the treaty upheaval and timber conflicts,
before expanding the study to the broader region in the following sub-section.
The fishery on the island began to be regulated through the Crown Land fisheries agent in
1859, and this also provoked responses within the petitions sent by the Manitoulin leadership.
The issue came to a head in 1863 when William Gibbard, the Crown Lands fisheries agent,
leased Lonely Island, a key part of the Wikwemikong traditional fishing territory. This provoked
an eviction of the lessees by Wikwemikong’s leaders, followed by the arrest of Ogimaa
Ozawanimiki of Wikwemikong in response.113 Gibbard, after Ozawanimiki was released on bail
at Sault Ste. Marie, disappeared on the return boat voyage. Ozawanimiki and the accompanying
Crâne. Que je puisse donc lui vendre du bois pour me procurer des instruments a culture et de quoi
m’habiller.” For the Ojibwe petition see LAC RG10, Vol. 292, pp. 195640-195644, reel C-12669.
112
Pearen, 111.
113
Ozawanimiki was arrested at Bruce Mines after a failed attempt by Gibbard and 21 deputized
constables (including, according to Pearen,“a grocer, a shoemaker, a blacksmith and assorted fishermen.”)
Pearen, 129.
74
priest were under suspicion of murder. His body was later discovered in the water, but a lack of
evidence meant no convictions were made.114
In the wake of these incidents, an inquiry was held at Quebec, and Choné, Mokomanish,
Wakegijik, and Agetawenini travelled to there to address the fishery issue. 115 The group returned
to the island having won certain concessions from the government. First, they secured a promise
“to leave the fisheries in the neighbourhood of Manitoulin Island ‘free for the use of Indians and
others in common’.”116 Their continued concern with the issue of timber is also made evident
through their negotiations. They were not successful in gaining the right to sell wood
commercially but, importantly, did have the restrictions on the cutting and selling of wood
limited to “merchantable” timber only. 117 They would again be free to harvest logs for their own
use on reserve without interference from the Superintendent.
Limited in their ability to profit from wood, the leaders also turned to managing the oil
reserves on their land. A short-lived petroleum boom on the island beginning in 1864 garnered
huge interest from speculators, and in 1865 the chiefs granted William Baby a lease to begin
exploratory drilling.118 This interest in drilling for petroleum on Manitoulin was sparked by the
broader transition to oil as a source of energy, with Canadians first oil boom happening at Oil
Springs in Ontario in 1857.119 The actions of the government to control the revenue from oil
114
For an overview of the fishery affair see W. R. Wightman, Forever on Fringe: Six Studies in the
Development of Manitoulin Island (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982): 48-56 and Pearen, 125-
138.
115
Pearen 134. Pearen also lists Charles De Lamorandière as travelling in the party. Wightman, 52, lists
“four senior chiefs.”
116
Pearen, 134-135, citing the Quebec Mercury, 29 August 1863.
117
Ibid.
118
Reverend Choné, Source D’Huile de Charbon sur L’île Manitoulin parti reserve aux sauvages, August
22 1864, LAC RG10, vol. 278, p.188481-188482, reel C-12661. For an overview of the contestations
over petroleum leasing see Rhoda Telford, “The Wikwemikong First Nation and the Department of
Indian Affairs’ Mismanagement of Petroleum Development,” in Anne Lorene Chambers, ed., Ontario
Since Confederation (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000): 40-54.
119
Telford, "The Wikwemikong First Nation,” 40. On the history of energy transformation in Canada’s
history see R. W. Sandwell, ed. Powering up Canada: A History of Power, Fuel, and Energy from 1600
(Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2016).
75
leases again demonstrates their investment in managing the entirety of wealth generated from the
land.
Oil revenues were much less clearly within the Department’s asserted jurisdiction, as
Wikiwemikong remained unceded. Due to this the rights to minerals would have been retained
with the land, as they did not involve the “royal minerals” of gold and silver that would have
fallen under Crown jurisdiction. Nonetheless, the Department prioritized securing its ability to
manage revenues themselves by filtering them through the Indian fund, rather than have the
money flow directly to the reserve.
Charles Dupont, the successor to George Ironside, received orders from his superiors to
negotiate the surrender of the right to grant licences for oil drilling to the Department in early
1865.120 As Rhonda Telford has argued, the eventual wresting of this power by the Department
from the band was both illegal and mismanaged, with Department-negotiated leases leading to
very little benefit.121 However, the Wikwemikong chiefs continued to assert rights to grant
licences (although this became less of an issue over time as the oil industry did not take off as
hoped for by Baby and the other numerous speculators who applied to the Department for oil
leases.)122 Multiple leases continued to be signed by the Wikwemikong chiefs between May and
April of 1866 to various parties. 123 In March 12 of 1867, the lease to Baby was extended by 20
years. The document was signed by Wakegijik, Thomas Mokomanish and others. 124
Woven into the conflict over oil leases was another point of conflict between the sovereignty
of the Wikwemikong chiefs and the assertion of DIA power over them. In the wake of the treaty,
120
Ibid., 42.
121
Ibid., 44. Telford compares the pricing of twenty-five cents per barrel at Wikwemikong to the oil
fields at Bothwell, Ontario, which were twelve dollars a barrel.
122
LAC RG 10, vol. 359, pp. 667-671, reel C-9595.
123
Pearen, Four Voices, 156. Pearen details that thirty-two requests were made in March 1866 alone. For
another overview of oil leases on Manitoulin during these years see Wightman, Forver on the Fringe, 72-
74 and 144-146.
124
Wikwemikong Chiefs to the Superintendent of Indian Affairs, March 12 1867, LAC RG 10, vol. 359,
pp. 670-671, reel C-9595.
76
three band members had been evicted from the reserve over their position of accepting the treaty
of 1862,125 and had been living on the ceded part of the island. These were Tekummah,
Assiginack and Kitchi Baptiste. 126 Dupont, who struck up a friendship with Baptiste, facilitated
his reinstatement on the reserve in 1866. His reinstatement both heightened the conflict over the
oil lease issue and served as a bargaining chip for Dupont in his efforts to secure agreement for
the right to negotiate oil leases on behalf of the band.
Dupont held a disastrous council to deal with the oil issue, where the chiefs primary
concern was the reinstatement of Kitchi Baptiste. The council meeting got off to a bad start as
Dupont caused offence by not first visiting the chiefs, going instead to stable his horse with
another reserve resident (presumably Baptiste although not named).127 The weather was also so
adverse that the meeting was postponed, although one chief did not get the message and he and
the translator were kept waiting. 128 Despite the council being ostensibly about oil licences, it
became about the authority of the band to regulate who could live on their territory. Before
getting to the oil lease issue, the chiefs wanted to discuss the issue of the reinstatement of Kitchi
Baptiste.
Baptiste, according to the reverend Ferard in a later letter, was not unwelcome on the
reserve. By following the correct protocols, discussions were being held around how to maintain
a relationship with him, and for him to be potentially welcomed back to the community. 129
Douglas Leighton, “IRONSIDE, GEORGE (d. 1863),” in Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 9,
125
University of Toronto/Université Laval, 2003–, accessed November 7,

2022, http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/ironside_george_1863_9E.html.
Corbiere, “Exploring Historical Literacy,” p. 28. In Tekummah’s account of the evictions he lists
126
Wakegijik, Thomas Kinoshameg and Jacko Agatawenini as carrying this out: Statement of Frances
Tekummah, David Layton (Justice of the Peace), November 18 1862, LAC RG10, vol. 291, pp. 195022-
195033, reel C-12668.
127
Reverend M. Ferard to William Spragge, January 20 1866, LAC RG10, vol. 336, pp. 266-273, reel C-
9584.
128
Ibid.
129
Reverend M. Ferard to William Spragge, March 31 1866, LAC RG10, vol. 336, pp. 311-319, reel C-
9584: “The Indians bear no personal animosity against Tekoman and Kitchi Baptiste A proof of it is that
they are perfectly free to come over to Wikwemikong to attend the church, or to visit their friends, and in
fact they and their children and wives (who have never been removed from the village or annoyed in the
least) are seen here frequently, and come often to pay friendly visits also to us. And when last fall, Kitchi
77
However, Dupont’s insistence that the chiefs either submit to the reinstatement– or agree to
transfer the authority over oil leases in exchange for his not pushing the Baptiste issue– led to the
council being dissolved without any headway being made on the oil question. 130
After this, Dupont went on the offensive against the Wikwemikong Ogimaag. He writes
to his superiors that a “riot” had occurred at Wikwemikong, and that “these Indians entertain the
idea that this reserve is not British Territory but that they are the Sovereign owners of it– that
they are not subjects of Her Majesty and not amenable to the Laws of the Land.” 131 However,
Reverend Ferard of Wikwemikong contested that a riot had occurred at all: “When the news of
the pretended Rebellion came here, when they heard that Mr. Dupont had been soliciting the
government for sending soldiers and putting the village under martial law, they took it for a
joke.”132But when the Catholic Missionary at Manitowaning went to visit Dupont, he was
informed by the Superintendent that:
His Excellency the Governor General, would soon issue a proclamation, for the purpose
of reinstating Kitchi Baptiste, in his house, and that in case the Indians would refuse to
receive him, one of the Chiefs and 5 others would be arrested and sent over before a
judge, to be sentenced and dealt with according to the law.133
An Order in Council was approved to publish and circulate a Proclamation “to bring to
the notice of these refractory Indians that they are amenable to the laws of the province in
common with Her Majesty’s subjects and that any infraction of them will be persecuted and
Baptiste expressed his desire to be allowed again to return to and live again in the village, some of his
friends and relations applied to us to help them to obtain the consent of the chiefs. This we did willingly,
but we advised him first to return quietly to Manitowaning, and that in a few days we hoped the Indians
would recall him.”
130
Ibid.
131
Order in Council, Authorizing the issue of a Proclamation re disturbances on the Manitoulin Island,
March 6 1866, LAC RG10, vol. 371, pp. 177-179, reel C-9599.
132
Reverend M. Ferard to William Spragge, March 31 1866, LAC RG10, vol. 336, pp. 311-319, reel C-
9584.
133
Ibid. Ferard goes on: “Mr. Dupont fancies perhaps that a little intimidation will do good: but I am
afraid this gentleman shall be disapointed in his expectations. The Indians have no greater desire than to
have their case thoroughly examined before an impartial tribunal, "we shall have at least, they say, a
chance to explain to the public at large our grievances, it is fall time, that matters here, should be known
as they are in reality, we are willing to abide by the verdict of public opinion, when all the facts shall have
been submitted to its impartial examination." I quote the Indians words.”
78
punished.”134 By May of that year, Dupont reports that he had carried out orders from the
Superintendent General to lay information before Judge Prince at Sault Ste. Marie “against the
principles in the riotous proceedings at Wikwemikong last winter.” 135 A warrant was issued and
a sheriff arrested 5 chiefs, with their trial to be held at the Quarter Sessions the following
month.136 It is likely that Wakegijik, Agatawanenini and/or Mokomanish would have been
among those arrested. These arrests, largely for asserting their jurisdiction and the idea that “this
reserve is not British Territory but that they are the Sovereign owners of it,” as Dupont
complained, are significant in terms of thinking through the changing relationship between the
government and Indigenous leadership. While this sovereignty had long been understood by the
Anishinaabeg leaders as being assured under earlier treaties, four years later the government
passed the Gradual Civilization Act that attempted to significantly, and permanently, change the
structure of band governance.
Conflicts over resource use on Manitoulin in the 1860s demonstrate the leaderships’
understanding that resource management fell within their jurisdiction. Further, the conflicts
demonstrate the Department’s investment in asserting jurisdiction over all resource revenues
originating from the lands and waters around reserves. In the case of the fishery and oil
regulation, these conflicts resulted in leaders being arrested. This was the context from which
Thomas Mokomanish, Jacko Agatawenini, Louis Wakegijik brought their concerns to regional
councils, as well as to the later Grand General Council. The following section examines the
broader regional history of political action in the lead-up to the establishment of the Grand
General Council in 1870.
134
Order in Council, Authorizing the issue of a Proclamation re disturbances on the Manitoulin Island,
March 6 1866, LAC RG10, vol. 371, pp. 177-179, reel C-9599.
135
Charles Dupont to Superintendent General of Indian Affairs, May 28 1866, LAC RG10, vol. 753, p.
314.
136
Ibid.
79
1.2.2. Regional Council and Links to the Broader Grand General

Council Network
Resource contestations were not isolated to Manitoulin, and conflicts around the sale and
regulation of timber on reserves were also happening during the 1860s at Garden River, on the
North Shore of Lake Huron, and at Shawanaga, across the Georgian Bay in the Parry Sound area.
Leaders from these reserves also became entangled with the DIA over these disputes. They also
met in council with each other and with Manitoulin leaders, voicing grievances over timber
regulation as well as treaty issues, and later through the Grand General Council, to protest their
treatment under the law. Chief Augustine from Garden River and Solomon James from
Shawanaga both also later became delegates to the Grand General Council. Chief Augustine had
also participated at the large council held at Sarnia in 1860, which resulted in delegates there
sending a petition the Duke of Newcastle asking for a “thorough investigation…into the charges
which we bring against the Indian Department and Canadian Government,” which included the
loss of revenues from land sales, the leasing of the fisheries, the survey and sale of unsurrendered
lands as well as reserve lands. 137
Historians Karl Hele and Janet Chute have described the continued efforts of the band
and missionaries at Garden River, on the North Shore of Lake Huron, to secure access to
revenues from lumbering, and the ensuing response of the Department in the 1850s and
1860s.138 Hele describes how Anishinaabe engagement with the timbering industry at Garden
River had been longstanding, selling wood to steamboats on the St. Mary’s River, and was
encouraged by Anglican, Catholic and Methodist missionaries. 139 In the 1860s, arrests were
made after the change in law. 140 A petition sent from the chiefs there in 1866 demonstrates their
137
Petition to the Duke of Newcastle, September 14 1860, LAC RG10, vol. 266, pp. 163,028-163, 378.
138
Janet Chute, The Legacy of Shingwaukonse and Karl S. Hele, “Conflict and Cooperation at Garden
River First Nation: Missionaries, Ojibwa and Government Interactions, 1854-1871,” Journal of the
Canadian Church Historical Society, XLVII (2005): 75-117.
139
Hele, 104. “The passing steamers would stop alongside wharfs erected by the Ojibwe to purchase
produce, cordwood for their boilers, or knees and other forms useful for ship construction and repair.”
140
Hele, 109, Chute, 183-190. Colonel Prince would have been active in these arrests, and part of his
ongoing concern with enforcing timber laws as outlined in his petition to Spragge, see John Prince to
80
ongoing dissatisfaction with the regulation of timbering,141 and the missionary James Chance
succeeded in having international attention brought upon the issue through the New England
Company in 1868.142
On the Shawanaga reserve, across the Georgian Bay north of Parry Sound, conflict over
timber demonstrates the importance for the Department in maintaining authority over timber
leases these years. This was a much less confrontational incident than in Wikwemikong or
Garden River, but nonetheless shows the frustration of leaders subjected to having their revenues
passing through the Indian fund, whose disbursement the government controlled without any
transparency on earnings or spending to the band. In 1868 Chief Solomon James granted
permission to the local lumbering operation of Clark White (an American operating a sawmill on
a timber limit on Crown Lands adjacent to the reserve) the right to harvest timber on the
Naishcouteyoung and Magnetawan reserves.143 This was to harvest trees that had been
damaged by a fire. The sawmill operators’ timber limit had also been affected and he was
coordinating with James to salvage what they could on both pieces of land.
Initially, James asked the Department for permission to allow White to harvest the logs.
After obtaining their approval, James himself signed a letter granting to the lumberman the right
Commissioner of Crown Lands, March 19 1862, LAC RG10, vol. 295, pp. 197765-197767, Microfilm
reel C-12671.
141
James Chance to William Spragge, 20 June 1868 (copy of Petition signed 1868 at Garden River), LAC
RG10, vol. 326, pp. 218433-218444, reel C-9579. The petitioners state: “Having been prohibited for a
long time from cutting wood logs etc. until we had come to extreme poverty, we assembled in Council to
consider the prohibition and we came to the unanimous conclusion to [express] an appeal to remove the
prohibition. In answer to this appeal, our Missionary allowed us that you had given [instructions] to the
local agent at the Sault to issue the necessary [licenses] to enable us to follow our industrial pursuits. But
when the agent was applied to and he said that he could not give these licenses … Mr. Wilson the agent
came down to Garden to inform is that he had the power to issue licenses but when Augusta one of our
chiefs said that he did not want a license. Mr. Wilson said that he could not give a license to anyone else
and so we are... prevented from working to provide for the wants of ourselves and our families…therefore
the undersigned chiefs and headmen of the bands on this reserve beg of you our great father to overrule
Mr. Wilson's de... and to instruct him to issue a license to us so that we may follow our industrial pursuits
in cutting wood logs steam boat ... etc. and ... provide for our families.”
142
Duke of Buckingham and Chandos to Viscount Monck about complaint of New England Company
against Garden River, 10 September 1868, LAC RG10, vol. 327, pp. 218980-218997, C-9579.
143
I believe these were reserves that were not occupied but a part of the territories of Shawanaga.
81
to remove the trees for a payment. 144 This caused great consternation among Department
Officials. It is clear from James’ correspondence with the Department that what he wanted was
to secure a direct payment for the logs– which would better provide for his community– rather
than have the timber dues be paid to the Department and administered through them, as the
interest payment on the logs would be minimal. 145 Instead of having the Department deposit the
money into his specific band fund, James desired to receive a payment directly in order to raise
the capital for agricultural developments on reserve, much in the same way that Wikwemikong
leaders hoped to do.
Supporting Clark was desirable to the Department: “I am aware that Mr. Clark’s operations
are on a very large scale and I believe it would greatly advance the interest of that section of the
country to grant him every facility for carrying out his plans” Dupont wrote to Spragge in 1868
after Whites initial request to harvest the timber. 146 He notes that Clark was a man of
“considerable means,” already having established a mill and a “nucleus of settlement” employing
many people on the Magnetawan River. His operations, were, then, doing the work that the
government, in particular Crown lands desired– clearing lands, taking advantage of American
markets, and in the process building up a small community around the mill which would attract
labourers and settlers. Dupont notes glowingly “His operations are of such a bone fide nature
and so conducive to the advancement of settlement, and the progress of this vicinity– that I
would most respectfully recommend that his application should be granted.” 147 It is unclear
whether James was able to secure any direct payment from White, but the Department did take
over managing the removal of the timber, reducing dues due to fire damage,148 and punishing
144
William Plummer to H. L. Langevin, September 13 1869, LAC RG10, vol. 327, pp. 218890 -28977.
145
Soloman James to W. R. Bartlett, August 12, 1868, LAC RG10, vol. 327, pp. 218890 -28977.
146
C. T. Dupont to William Spragge, [?] 22 1867, LAC RG10, vol. 327, pp. 218967-218968.
147
Ibid.
148
[James Little] to Secretary of State, May 20 1867, LAC RG10, vol. 327, pp. 218919-218920.
82
White for circumventing their authority by attempting to charge him for trespassing for the 443
saw logs removed before negotiations were completed with the Department. 149
James, the Garden River and Wikwemikong leaders, and other Anishinabeg continued to
meet in council over these years to deal with the erosion of their sovereignty through the
regulation of their resources and to deal with issues of treaty. Two councils were held in the
summers of 1869 and 1870. The first, hosted at Garden River, resulted in a petition sent July
12.150 In attendance were Solomon James and other chiefs from Parry Island, as well as Garden
River, French River and Shebaunoning. 151 The context of their complaints was that despite
“revenues derived from the territory… ceded from timber dues and the sale of lands,” the
escalator clause of the Robinson treaty had not been “honoured as promised.” 152 The injustice of
timber lease revenues generating wealth for the Crown on ceded land, while treaty promises of
support remained unfulfilled should be understood within the context of thwarted efforts at
Garden River to engage in the timber industry on their own terms and the arrests several years
before, as well as the ongoing issues over timber at Shawanaga. Reminding the Governor
General of their status as loyal allies, they also asserted their right to the fisheries. 153
The following year, another council was held at Little Current on Manitoulin the 25th of July.
Solomon James was again in attendance, as well as the Garden River leadership and
Wakegijik.154 The purpose of their meeting was to have the sacred friendship between them and
149
William Plummer to H. L. Langevin, September 13 1869, LAC RG10, vol. 327, pp. 218901-218-902.
When confronted about this by the Department, White claimed, however that he was not liable for
trespass, and had indeed received permission from James, signed with his x mark. James told Clark at the
time that he had received a letter from the Department giving him the authority to do so.
150
The Memorial of the Ojibwe Indians to the Governor General, June 12 1869, in William Plummer to
Joseph Howe, December 23 1870, LAC RG10, vol. 380, pp. 258-261, reel C-9608.
151
Ibid.
152
William Plummer to Joseph Howe, December 23 1870, LAC RG10, vol. 380, pp. 256-257, reel C-
9608.
153
The Memorial of the Ojibwe Indians to the Governor General, June 12 1869, in William Plummer to
Joseph Howe, December 23 1870, LAC RG10, vol. 380, pp. 260, reel C-9608.
154
Chiefs of the North of Lake Huron and the Great Manitoulin Island to the Governor General, in
William Plummer to Joseph Howe, December 23 1870, LAC RG10, vol. 380, pp. 262-264, reel C-9608.
83
the Crown evaluated, and they had present at their assembly “a wampum belt … given by the
British Government as an emblem of that sacred friendship” in 1786.155 Referencing their
commitments of alliance, they “entreat [the Governor General] to have the said sacred friendship
renewed (as we do in our part) by respecting our rights to the land.”156 “We sometimes think”
they continue “that the said sacred Friendship is not held so sacred as when first made as we
have some grievances.”157
The first three of five grievances relate directly to the imposition of resource regulations:
1st That the Indian Department are often sent commissions to disturb our rights by
inducing us to surrender our property in our reserves which was intended for our
children.
2nd That the Game and Fishery Acts now existed are not begin [sic] to make us liable
to suffer with punishment as being fined or imprisonment
3rd That when any of us is removing anything from our reserves to be sold we are also
liable to the same punishment158
These grievances were clearly framed as a violation of existing law. The sacred friendship
referenced were the duties and obligations the Crown had assumed through alliance and later
through treaty, and their actions over the preceding decade were understood in clear violation of
this. The diplomatic law that these Ogimaag assembled in council insisted on to the Governor
General was one where their rights to land, fish, and decision-making authority over how to
manage forest and other resources through their councils was honoured. In direct violation of
this, the government’s agents were (as they had been delegated to do under settler law) cleaving
off sections of reserves, arresting people over fisheries, fining, confiscating timber and arresting
Indigenous people over the removal of timber.
155
William Plummer to Joseph Howe, December 23 1870, LAC RG10, vol. 380, pp. 262, reel C-9603.
156
Ibid.
157
Ibid.
158
William Plummer to Joseph Howe, December 23 1870, LAC RG10, vol. 380, pp. 263, reel C-9603.
84
The fourth grievance looked towards new strategies of control the Department was
implementing and dealt with the recently passed Gradual Enfranchisement Act and read as
follows:159
4th That the Act relative to the gradual enfranchisement of the Indians in Canada is not
suit us although some of its clauses are suitable to us.
The council’s engagement with the Gradual Enfranchisement Act demonstrates a keen sense that
any expansion of Department powers was being carefully monitored– and by and large
rejected.160
Concerns around the expansion of Indian agents’ powers through the 1869 Act were also
not restricted to the Lake Huron region and formed the basis of the initial meeting of the Grand
General Council to be discussed in the following chapter. Chiefs at Six Nations had called a
broad-based Grand Council to provide a multi-reserve, coordinated Haudenosaunee and
Anishinaabek response to the Enfranchisement Act. This was held June 10th of 1870, just before
the July council at Little Current, and this meeting became the foundation of the Grand General
Council of Ontario Indians. Chiefs from Manitoulin and elsewhere in the Lake Huron region did
not attend this initial council, but DIA records demonstrate that they were in communication with
each other. In July, J. T. Gilkison, the Indian Superintendent at Six Nations, sent a telegram on
behalf of the chiefs to the Department requesting an advance $250.00 from the Six Nations
“chiefs money” to finance them to attend the Manitoulin Council. 161 I have not found an
official response to this request, and the Six Nations leaders were not on the petition from the
159
The fifth grievance had to do with the cession of islands: “that the Islands of the North Shore of the
Georgian Bay and Lake Huron which many of us does not believe that they were properly surrendered
as it has been done for the mainland.”
160
My guess, similar to the consensus of the Grand Council at Six Nations discussed in the following
chapter, would be that the alcohol clauses within the act would have been acceptable to them.
161
Telegram from J. T. Gilkison, July 15 1870, LAC, RG10, vol. 347, C-9590.
85
1870 Little Current Council.162 However, Augustine, Solomon James, Wakegijik,

Agatawaninini and Mokomanish all become later delegates to later Grand General Councils,
with James becoming the vice president of the organization. This was a new chapter in
Anishinabek and Haudenosaunee nineteenth century political organizing– one marked by even
greater changes to the legal context imposed on their nations.
Lumbering continued to boom in the region through the 19th century in both commercial
and independent forms. Anishinabek men and women found means to support themselves and
their families as loggers, log drivers, cooks, and washerwomen in the seasonal logging camps
around Lake Huron and Parry Sound that continued to grow and thrive into the 20th century.
Alongside this, their leaders continued to assert their rights to the land– and for the jurisdiction to
deal with local resources and decision-making there, through individual efforts but also
collectively through the Grand General Council. Leaders on Manitoulin and the Lake Huron
region had been clear in drawing on alliance relationships and gatherings in council to assert
their jurisdiction over how timber, fish, and oil should be managed on their territories and
reserves. As the government continued to alter its legislative agenda to control reserve
governance more tightly at the end of the 1860s through the Gradual Enfranchisement Act,
Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee leaders continued to draw on networks of alliance and council
gatherings to respond to these new threats to local jurisdiction.
1.3. Conclusion
Timber regulation is one way to understand the clash between the Department of Indian
Affairs and Indigenous leaders over who had the authority to control communities’ wealth and
resources during the 1860s. Over this decade, the government of the Province of Canada (and
later the Dominion) sought to solidify their asserted authority over resources on reserves and
more broadly over Indigenous lands and waters. Anishinaabek leaders disputed this assertion of
authority and insisted that the trees on their land were theirs to manage and use as they saw fit to
best benefit their communities. As this chapter has shown, clashes around resource use
162
William Plummer to Joseph Howe, December 23 1870, LAC RG10, vol. 380, pp. 263, Microfilm reel C-
9608.
86
manifested on Manitoulin Island and the Lake Huron region more broadly in jurisdictional
disputes over who should control the use of, and revenues from, timber, fish, and oil leases.
Through these disputes, two divergent interpretations of local jurisdiction over resource use
are made clear. On the part of the Department (and more broadly the Provincial government),
within the context of the increasing importance of land and resource revenues after the end of the
imperial grant, their jurisdiction to enforce protectionist legislation against Indigenous
individuals was clarified. Laws that had been initially made to protect reserve resources from
outsiders, as paternalistic as these laws had always been, were further elucidated to include
Indigenous use of trees. Laws that had initially been designed to protect Indigenous resources
were used by the D.I.A. to more assertively protect their own jurisdiction to manage, sell, and
ultimate benefit the Department itself– through funding salaries and other costs drawn from a
percentage of land and resource revenues. On the part of Anishinaabek leaders, their jurisdiction
over the use of their lands and waters was derived from historic governance practices that
recognized the autonomy of local councils but was also clearly affirmed through guarantees that
they would be able to live comfortably on their lands through their alliance with the Crown. For
these leaders, these agreements continued to be valid, and they held the Crown to account to
maintain their obligations under this sacred friendship. They clearly understood their rights had
been affirmed through these alliances, as their petition from Little Current in 1870 demonstrates
when they “[entreated the Governor General] to have the said sacred friendship renewed…by
respecting our right to the land.”
Leaders from the Manitoulin and Lake Huron region gathered in councils to dispute the terms
of recent treaties over the 1860s– but primary among the other concerns they expressed at these
gatherings was their rights to resource use. Through these councils, they affirmed each other’s
sovereignty to manage their own lands and waters, as had historically been the practice in
Anishinaabek governance, and made claims to the Crown to recognize their jurisdiction over
these decisions. As we will see in the next chapter, similar gathering had long histories both
regionally as well as in larger inter-national gatherings with the Haudenosaunee and other
neighbouring nations. These networks were reinvigorated in 1870 as the Grand General Council
was established to deal with further changes that the Canadian government imposed that altered
the constitutional relationship between their nations and the Crown to an even greater extent
through the government’s subsequent legislation in 1869 and beyond.
87
Chapter 2
Council, Delegation, Deliberation: Enfranchisement, State Law,
and Indigenous Law in the Early Years of the Grand General
Council, 1869-1885.
The years between 1869 and 1885 saw a massive transformation in how the government
understood and enacted their relationship with Indigenous peoples, both legally and politically.
The restructuring of authority after the formalized transfer of Indian Affairs to Canada in 1860,
the consolidation of federal authority over “Indians and Lands reserved for Indians” under
section 91 of the British North America Act, and the 1868 Indian Lands Act laid the foundation
for this change. The 1869 Gradual Enfranchisement Act, the resistances in and expansion to the
Northwest, bureaucratic growth and treaty signing, the first Indian Act, and granting Indigenous
men the vote in the 1885 Franchise Act are but some examples of the proliferation of activity
over these years, consisting of what historian John Milloy has labelled a “constitutional change” 1
in the Crown’s relationship with Indigenous people away from recognizing self-governing
nations in alliance with the Crown. Indigenous leaders provided feedback on these changes
through many channels to the Government, rejecting and proposing revisions to legislation
through continuing long established political practices of meeting in councils (both local and
international), sending delegates to present their views to Ottawa, and deliberating the
complexities of engaging with settler colonial law to negotiate future possibilities for their
communities.
Indigenous leaders in Ontario expressed widely divergent views in the 1870s and 1880s
on the great changes that Gradual Enfranchisement Act and the Indian Act brought to their
relationship with the Crown. The first Grand General Council was called in 1870 where the
1
John S. Milloy, “The Early Indian Acts: Developmental Strategy and Constitutional Change” in As Long
as the Sun Shines and Water Flows: A Reader in Canadian Native Studies, eds. Ian A. L. Getty and
Antoine S. Lussier (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1983), 56-64, and in Sweet
Promises: A Reader on Indian-White Relations in Canada, ed. J. R. Miller (Toronto: University of
Toronto Press, 1991), 145-156.
88
Enfranchisement Act was rejected in council. A delegation of Anishinaabe leaders from the
Grand General Council to Ottawa accepted the Indian Act six years later (and later successfully
advocated that the law be adopted in council). The law was rejected by other Anishinaabe leaders
in subsequent councils and the Haudenosaunee continually advocacy against it. The Indian
Act was not met with any clear consensus by Indigenous leaders in the initial years of its
existence. Their varied perspectives on what the law offered, what it sought to do, and what
constitutional relationships it sought to replace and rearrange offer a means of interrogating the
varied ways Indigenous leaders viewed their relationship with the Crown in late nineteenth-
century Ontario and how they envisioned the future for their communities. Despite these varied
views, continuities exist in both the form of Indigenous political response (through gathering in
councils and petitioning to the Crown) as well as in the content of political principles for earlier
alliances. This chapter analyzes these negotiated continuities; I argue they demonstrate how the
struggle over jurisdiction in an important area of Crown-Indigenous relations–enfranchisement–
was fought.
Between 1869 and 1885, the federal government selectively opened dialogue with a few
Indigenous leaders in Ontario about the laws they passed. The Canadian government was
undergoing a significant re-evaluation of Indian Affairs after they acquired jurisdiction over this
government agency with the transfer from imperial control in 1860. Policies that had been
worked out since the 1840s on enfranchisement, including the recommendations of the 1844
Bagot Commission,2 were incorporated into the 1857 Gradual Civilization Act. Initial resistance
2
John Leslie, Commissions of Inquiry into Indian Affairs in the Canadas, 1828-1858: Evolving a
corporate memory for the Indian Department (Ottawa: Government of Canada, Treaties and Historical
Research Group, 1985) 92-93. The 1839 Commission on Indian Affairs (the Macaulay Commission) had
varying views on land ownership. Justice Macaulay recommended replacing communally held reserve
lands with fee-simple tenure, but Chief Superintendent Jarvis was opposed to granting individual land and
favoured a land grant in perpetuity with the title held by the Crown and not transferable to white men.
The Bagot Commission of 1844 recommended individual land tenure, as according to Leslie, “The
Commissioners felt that the “peculiar” Indian title kept Indian people in a sheltered state and excluded
them from the political franchise, statutory labour, taxation, and debt liability. These were all vital
elements of full citizenship.” Leslie, 92. Leslie quote the commissioners on this matter: “distinct ideas of
separate property…must necessarily precede any considerable advancement of industry and civilization;
because no man will exert himself to improve his lands and procure the comforts of life unless his right to
enjoy them is exclusive and secure.” Leslie, 93.
89
to these changes by Indigenous leaders, as well as their resistance to the subsequent 1869
Gradual Enfranchisement Act spurred the government to engage with them over this law and
subsequently the Indian Act in hopes of having these policies adopted at the local level. Through
this engagement, Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee leaders made clear their opinions on what
constitutional grounds the relationship with the Crown should unfold; the government had access
to a large body of evidence of their opinions of the law through letters, petitions, direct
correspondence to Indian Agents, and council minutes. Now contained in the Department of
Indian affairs records at the Library and Archives of Canada, these records are the key records
examined for this chapter. The concept of enfranchisement legislation became a primary
“lightening rod” through which all the nations involved struggled over defining the constitutional
relationship between them– both inter-Indigenous and through individual and collective
relationships with the Crown.
As the last chapter demonstrates, the 1869 Gradual Enfranchisement Act came out of an
era following intense disputes around resource management on reserves and assertion of
government authority over these. The Act was designed by the federal government (after
Confederation enshrined federal authority over “Indians and Lands reserved for Indians”) in
large part to consolidate government control over band council governance. I have argued that
this effort to more tightly regulate band governance should be placed within the material context
of the D.I.A. asserting jurisdiction over resources on reserves– a process that sought to resolve
the longstanding issues of Department finances and one that had been met with stiff resistance in
the 1860s. As discussed in the last chapter, Anishinaabe leaders from the Lake Huron region
were actively involved in disputing these incursions on their jurisdiction, had assembled in
regional councils to address these, and had sent a delegation to Ottawa in 1863 after the fisheries
dispute, in order to remind the Crown of their obligations to respect Anishinaabe local
jurisdiction under historic treaty relationships. They were resolute in their insistence that they
held jurisdiction to decide on questions of the wealth generated from reserves. Concerns about
what the passing of the Gradual Enfranchisement Act meant for this jurisdiction at the end of the
decade were voiced by the councils we examined at Garden River and at Little Current in 1869
and 1870. These concerns were echoed throughout Southern Ontario in the summer of 1870.
Concerns over the Enfranchisement Act in the South were similarly dealt with in council,
through an international convergence that formed the beginning of the Grand General Indian
90
Council of Quebec and Ontario in 1870, a group that would engage with legislation on
Indigenous communities for the next several decades.
Through the Enfranchisement Act, the Department entrenched their policy of eroding
local governance over reserves; they also sought to erode the very need for reserves themselves
as sites of administration and government responsibility through enfranchisement processes that
allowed a pathway for individual land tenure leading to citizenship. In response to this law, and
later the Indian Act that reinscribed these processes, Indigenous leaders in Ontario continued to
enact traditional governance through councils, delegations, and sustained deliberation over how
to approach this massive shift in how the government was dealing with their communities. The
fundamental rearrangement of historic relationships, laid out in the Gradual Enfranchisement
Act, provoked an immediate, coordinated, and broad-based response from Indigenous
communities in Ontario with the calling of the first Grand General Indian Council at Six Nations
in 1870. As described below, this coordinated response was not new, and built on previous inter-
national council-based responses to government attempts to rearrange alliance relationships in
1840 and 1858. The 1870 council reignited historic and sometimes challenging alliance
relationships between the Anishinaabe and the Haudenosaunee. Over the next decades the
network of the Council would expand across Southern Ontario and Quebec and broaden to
include communities from the Lake Huron region. It would also include intense debate about
how to move forward in relationship with the Crown as the very ground of this relationship
shifted under their feet. After 1882, the Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee found different paths
and strategies to do this, with the Haudenosaunee no longer participating in the Grand General
Council after this date.
The position of Indigenous communities in the Ontario and Quebec had a special place in
government policy– held to be examples of what could happen under their central “civilization”
and assimilation policies. The government had a vested interest in having these policies
successfully adopted there as proof of policy success, especially as provisions such as
91
enfranchisement were only designed for communities in the east. 3 Due to this, the Department
of Indian Affairs, between the passing of the 1869 Gradual Enfranchisement Act and the 1885
Enfranchisement Act (an era that included the original Indian Act in 1876 and amendments in
1879, 1880, 1883, and 1884 as well as the 1884 Indian Advancement Act), demonstrated a
willingness to engage with Indigenous leaders in council and individually that dissipated in later
years. This consultation happened in limited ways with select Indigenous leaders. Through this
process of engagement, the D.I.A. slightly softened their stance on enfranchisement clauses
within the Indian Act by their allowing bands to retain certain control over enfranchisement
provisions to allow band leadership a role in the process.
In this chapter, I argue that councils, who sent multiple delegations and petitions to the
government, demonstrate a continuation of historic governance practices and articulate on what
terms jurisdiction over enfranchisement decisions were conceptualized by Indigenous leaders.
They demonstrate how, despite the goals of the Department to eliminate Indigenous governance
and promote assimilation, Indigenous political leaders continued to practice historic forms of
governance and engaged in defining how their relationship with the Canadian state and its laws
should unfold through them. To situate this, I first examine the place of Enfranchisement within
the broad constitutional changes that took place in this era, looking to the specifics of D.I.A legal
and political developments. I next look to how the broad change in relationship was dealt with
by Indigenous leaders, and how these responses demonstrate a plethora of legal responses, in
council and otherwise, by Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee leaders over the 1870s and early
1880s. As will be discussed below, the first Grand General Council, called by the Six Nations in
1870 was grounded in the alliance between the two nations often known as the Dish With One
Spoon, and I place this gathering within the history of similar councils in 1840 and 1858. 4 These
3
An Act to amend and consolidate the laws respecting Indians (The Indian Act), S.C. 1876. c. 18 . An
Act for the gradual enfranchisement of the Indians, the better management of Indian Affairs, and to
extend the provisions of the Act 31st Vict., Chapter 42, S. C. 1869, c. 6.
4
On the history of the alliance, see Lytwyn, Victor P. “A Dish with One Spoon: The Shared Hunting
Grounds Agreement in the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence Valley Region,” in Paper of the Twenty-Eighth
Algonquian Conference, edited by David H. Pentlant, 210-27. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press,
1997 and Dean Jacobs and Victor P. Lytwyn, “Naagan ge bezhig emkwaan: A Dish With One Spoon
Reconsidered,” Ontario History, Vol. 112, no 2, (Fall 2020): 191-210.
92
earlier meetings clearly articulate the two nations’ alliances with the Crown and the expectations
of autonomy and protection that came with this. Subsequent changes to enfranchisement laws
through the Indian Act were negotiated by Anishinaabe leaders and their Haudenosaunee
counterparts in divergent ways. I next examine the Methodist-affiliated Anishinaabe leaders
who were amenable to ideas of enfranchisement and Haudenosaunee leaders who remained set
against it.5 The final section examines differing perspectives from various communities within
later Anishinaabe led councils in the 1880s after the Haudenosaunee no longer participated in
them. The deliberation in these later councils demonstrates how Anishinaabe governance
principles of maintaining local council autonomy were used to overcome differences of opinion
on enfranchisement. Collectively, these sections show that the ways Indigenous leaders reacted
to the imposition of the Gradual Enfranchisement Act and the Indian Act drew on multiple
Indigenous legal frameworks to dispute the change in relationship that enfranchisement
represented. As the government moved away from treaty relationships through the legislation,
Indigenous leaders continued to assert their rights to autonomous decision-making at the local
level congruent with these earlier agreements and congruent with their own constitutional
understandings of how governance should rightly be organized.
2.1. Changes in Law and Constitutional Change

Integration into settler society was not a new idea in policy or even in law within the
Province of Canada; it had long been a government goal as a cornerstone of the assimilation
agenda which first surfaced in the 1820s. 6 The idea of reserves themselves as protected areas
where Indigenous people could be educated in Christianity and agriculture as a “stepping stone”
to Canadian society came from recommendations in the Darling commission of 1828, and was
confirmed through the reports of the Executive Council of Lower Canada and the Macaulay
5
It is important to note that just because leaders were Methodist-affiliated does not mean that religious
practice was uncontested on Anishinaabe reserves. For an overview of community responses to the
imposition of Christianity, see Edmund Jefferson Danzinger, Jr. Great Lakes Indian Accommodation and
Resistance During the Early Reservation Years, 1850-1900 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,
2009), Chapter 5 “Traditional Spirituality versus Christianity: Finding a Balance,” 156-186.
6
On the history of Indian Affairs policy development through Commissions of Inquiry see Leslie,
Commissions of Inquiry into Indian affairs.
93
commissions of 1837 and 39.7 However, a change in this policy came from the Royal
Commissions of the 1840s and 50s (the Bagot and Pennefather Commissions) where, as we have
seen in the last chapter, fiscal rearrangement for the Department was necessary with the looming
end of the Imperial grant.8 The 1857 Fisheries Act, the 1859 Act to Prevent Trespasses to Public
and Indian Lands, and the 1860 Act Respecting the Management of the Indian Lands and
Property are also pre-Confederation legislation that were key pieces of this fiscal rearrangement,
giving the government the power to license fisheries, as well as to set out the processes whereby
Indian lands could be sold to generate income for the operations of the Department.9 Having a
means to break up reserves and create individual citizens that the Department would no longer
have financial obligations to was in line with this rearrangement.
John Tobias points to the “paradox” of the legislation the government first passed to
facilitate the new push for assimilation, The Gradual Civilization Act of 1857: “the legislation to
remove all legal distinctions between Indians and Euro-Canadians actually established them.”10
Tobias describes how beginning with the Gradual Civilization Act of 1857 the government
moved to promote pathways for Indigenous men to free themselves from the legal disabilities
(imposed through Indian Status which their new laws created) through the acquisition of
individual property title on reserves:
After stipulating in the preamble that the measure was designed to encourage
civilization of the Indian, remove all legal distinctions between Indians and other
Canadians, and integrate them fully into Canadian society, the legislation proceeded to
define who was an Indian and then to state that such a person could not be accorded the
rights and privileges accorded to European Canadians until the Indian could prove that
he could read and write either the French or English language, was free of debt, and of
good moral character. If he could meet such criteria, the Indian was then eligible to
7
Ibid., 2-3.
8
Ibid.
9
The Fishery Act, S. P. C. 1857, c. 21, An Act to prevent trespasses to Public and Indian Lands, C. S. C.
1859, c. 81, An Act respecting the Management of the Indian Lands and Property, S. Prov. C. 1860, c.
151.
10
John L. Tobias, “Protection, Civilization, Assimilation: An Outline History of Canada’s Indian Policy”
in As Long as the Sun Shines and Water Flows: a Reader in Canadian Native Studies, eds. Ian A. L.
Getty and Antoine S. Lussier (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1983), 42.
94
receive an allotment of twenty hectares of reserve land, to be placed on one year

probation to give further proof of his being civilized, and then to be given the
franchise.11
Importantly in this initial legislation, the local councils were required to approve of
enfranchisement applications.12 The law failed to meet its stated goal, with both individuals and
bands resistant to taking up enfranchisement. 13 Due to this resistance, the government

strengthened their commitment to enfranchisement policy by consolidating much greater control
for themselves over the process in the 1869 Gradual Enfranchisement Act.
Under the 1869 law, enfranchisement decisions were the sole decision of the Governor in
Council on the report of the Superintendent General of Indian Affairs. 14 Band consent, or a
probationary period, were no longer requirements for enfranchisement. Additionally, the
government gave themselves the power to impose elected governance on reserves under this law.
Indigenous leaders at the Grand General Council and elsewhere reacted immediately and
strongly against this encroachment on their jurisdiction, as we will see in detail below. The
government did not give up on the idea of enfranchisement, and seven years later,
enfranchisement provisions were incorporated into the Indian Act in 1876. However, they
reinstated band approval as a precondition of enfranchisement under the Indian Act (albeit still
requiring the authorization of the Superintendent General and probation period of three years).15
The consent of the band over enfranchisement was a stipulation that had been pushed for
vigorously through the Grand Councils.16
11
Ibid.
12
An Act to encourage the gradual Civilization of the Indian Tribes in this Province, and to amend the
Laws respecting Indians, S. Prov. C. 1857, c. 26. s. 10.
13
Only one man had successfully enfranchised by 1876. Milloy, 150.
14
An Act for the Gradual Enfranchisement of Indians, the better management of Indian Affairs, and to
extend the provisions of the Act 31st Victoria, Chapter 42. S. C. 1869, c. 6, s. 13.
15
The Indian Act, S. C. 1876, c. 18, s. 86-87.
16
The Indian Act, S.C. 1876. c. 18.
95
The broad changes to governance authority on reserves represented by the Indian Act and
its precursors, of which enfranchisement was one important part, represented a fundamental
change in relationship between the Crown and Indigenous people. John S. Milloy has described
the development of the Indian Act and the earlier laws on which it was founded as a
“constitutional change” in government-Indigenous relations.17 This altered the nation-to-nation
relationship, borne out of military alliance and solidified through Indigenous treaty-making
processes, that had held from 1793 to the War of 1812 (and largely continued under British
administration of Indian Affairs until 1860) where “Indian tribes were, de facto, self-governing.
They had exclusive control over their population, land, and finances.”18 Instead, as Milloy
articulates, “federal control of on-reserve governmental systems became the essence of
Canadian-Indigenous constitutional relations.”19 This framing is productive, as it allows for
treaty history and later legislative history, often dealt with in isolation, to be understood
comparatively and chronologically, allowing Indian Act policies of the late nineteenth century to
be directly contrasted with earlier alliance relationships that remained the interpretive framework
of relationship for many Indigenous communities. The policies of enfranchisement were a break
from the past, part of the cohort of legislative changes that sought assimilation as the ultimate
goal of the Indian Department. Milloy, however, falls into the trap of conflating legislative aims
with what was happening on the ground. For instance, Milloy makes statements such as “the
destruction of native self-government was completed in the Enfranchisement Act of 1869.” 20 In
reality, self-governance continued in many communities. Also, in privileging D.I.A. records, his
17
John S. Milloy, “The Early Indian Acts: Developmental Strategy and Constitutional Change” in Sweet
Promises: A Reader on Indian-White Relations in Canada, ed. J.R. Miller, ed. (Toronto: University of
Toronto Press, 1991), 145-157.
18
Ibid., 146. Milloy describes the period between 1830, which saw the beginning of civilian control, and
1860 thus: “Despite the influence of Indian Department agents, now dedicated to social engineering, or of
God himself represented by Methodist, Baptist, and Anglican missionaries, it was tribal councils who
decided the degree and direction of culture change: whether schools would be allowed on the reserves, the
rate and type of agricultural or resource development, and the extent to which Indian finances, composed
of the annual payments received by the tribes for lands surrendered to the crown, would be devoted to
projects of development.” 145.
19
Ibid., 151.
20
Ibid., 147.
96
interpretation lacks engagement with how Indigenous interpretations of the ongoing treaty
relationship continued through this constitutional rearrangement. Both aspects of his work create
the impression that the law caused more of a clean break with the past relationship of alliance
between Indigenous nations and the Crown than was actually the case during this time period,
despite being the goal of the government. His work is a short overview, and he includes in his
analysis various petitions sent in protest of the law, but does not engage with the specifics of
their content.21 How Indigenous communities protested the law is crucially important to
understanding that the constitutional rearrangement was deeply one sided. Indigenous nations
held their own constitutional understandings of their relationship with the Crown, agreed to by
historic alliance treaties, and continued to assert these understandings in their dealings with the
government.
Building on Milloy, the idea of constitutional change through the Indian Act, particularly
through enfranchisement, has also been taken up in two articles by Coel Kirkby. 22 Kirkby
productively argues that enfranchisement processes, and the later adoption and then revocation
of the 1885 Franchise Act by the government (which, over its thirteen-year standing, granted the
right for Indigenous men to vote without losing Indian status), altered the constitutional
relationship and then “re-constituted” it after the revocation of the Franchise Act as a uniquely
white settler democracy. Kirkby does important work in centralizing Indigenous framings of the
constitutional relationship with the Crown, contrasting the approach of Anishinaabe and
Haudenosaunee political leaders, and he includes the work of the Grand General Council in this
analysis. However, he makes several errors in his description of Anishinaabe history. 23 Kirkby
also frames his article around contrasting Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee responses, and in so
21
Ibid., 148-149.
22
Coel Kirkby, “Reconstituting Canada: The Enfranchisement and Disenfranchisement of ‘Indians,’ Circa
1837-1900” University of Toronto Law Journal, vol 69 (Fall, 2019): 497-539 and “Paradise Lost? The
Constitutional Politics of ‘Indian’ Enfranchisement in Canada, 1857-1900” Osgoode Hall Law Journal
56.3 (2020): 606-658.
23
For instance, Kirkby claims that the Odawa and Ojibwe were concentrated on three large reserves
around Lake Huron and Superior. Kirkby, “Reconstituting Canada,” 504. Kirkby also incorrectly claims
Anishinaabe delegates approved of enfranchisement provisions at the 1870 Grand General Council,
Kirkby “Reconstituting Canada,” 506.
97
doing is not attentive to the long histories of alliance between these two nations, claiming that
the 1870 Grand General Council was the first inter-national meeting after the 1764 Treaty of
Niagara.24 As we will see below, these nations met at least twice in large councils in both 1840
and 1858. There was also a small Mohawk delegation from the Bay of Quinté at an 1846
Council at Orillia.25 I will also discuss the significant divergences between Anishinaabe and
Haudenosaunee responses to the law in this chapter, but the history of council governance
between them was quite extensive and is central to understanding the very foundations of treaty
making in the region with significant implications for each nations’ relationship with the
Crown.26 My work is aligned with Kirkby’s in the goal to make clear alternate constitutional
understandings of the past rooted in Indigenous legal orders that can be instructive for the
present,27 but I elaborate in greater detail the roots of Anishinaabe constitutional thought in
relationship to their (often fraught) alliance with the Haudenosaunee. I move away from
emphasizing the conflicting positions on enfranchisement between the two nations, and instead
focus on processes of governance that were congruent with past practices– including the alliance
itself. Avoiding a simplified dichotomy between the two nations as a frame of analysis also
allows me to make clear the nuances in inter-Anishinaabe deliberations that I explore below.
The concept of enfranchisement, within the Indian Act and precedent legislation, is an
important site to examine this changing constitutional relationship. It was the area within the law
that generated the most controversy and debate among all nations involved during the years this
24
Kirkby, “Reconstituting Canada,” 505.
25
The Mohawk delegates were Chief Paulus Claus and warrior Seth Powles of the Bay of Quinté.
Minutes of the General Council of Indian Cheifs and Principal Men held at Orillia, Lake Simcoe Narrows
(Montreal: The Canadian Gazette Office, 1846).
26
Heidi Bohaker, Doodem and Council Fire, Alan Ojig Corbiere, “Anishinaabe Treaty-Making in the 18th
and 19th Century,” Susan Hill, The Clay We Are Made Of: Haudenosaunee Land Tenure on the Grand
River (Winnipeg, Manitoba: University of Manitoba Press, 2017), Victor Llytwyn, “A Dish with One
Spoon,” Dean Jacobs and Victor Llytwyn “A Dish With One Spoon Revisited.”
27
In his article on the Indian Franchise, Kirkby states “By recovering the story of Indian enfranchisement
and disenfranchisement, we can see how the successful imposition of a singular vision of a white
democracy silenced alternative visions of constitutional coexistence.” Kirby, “Reconstituting Canada,”
500.
98
relationship was being redefined and solidified in law. As has been widely understood in the
historiography, the policy was not largely followed by government actors, nor taken up by
Indigenous communities; it had been introduced in the 1857 legislation and Elias Hill of Six
Nations was the only individual enfranchised before 1876.28 There are various reasons why so
few Indigenous men enfranchised. Jean Barman, in her Abenaki Daring, points to how the
Department was reluctant to grant the enfranchisement claim of Noel Annance, an Abenaki man,
and how five other Mohawk applicants were rejected at the time of Hill’s enfranchisement. 29 As
she also explains, band resistance to enfranchisement was also a political factor in the case of
both Annance, and even ultimately Hill as he was denied land by the band after his
enfranchisement.30 More research is needed to determine why the policy was so rarely taken up
by Indigenous individuals, and why the Department demonstrated reluctance to put it in place. It
is clear, however, that in some cases there was a tension between a desire on the part of the
Department to have Indigenous individuals no longer be wards of the state, but that they also
believed a strictly controlled gatekeeping process was necessary to ensure that only those
considered the most likely to “succeed” in settler society be allowed to enfranchise. Despite
these tensions in the application of the law, the idea of how the relationship between Indigenous
individuals and the Canadian state should be arranged was central to how enfranchisement was
debated on all sides. Enfranchisement became the primary “lightning rod” for how the
constitutional rearrangement was understood, discussed, and debated for all involved– the
Canadian government, the Anishinaabe and the Haudenosaunee.
On the part of the government, due to the previous failure of the 1857 Gradual
Civilization Act, officials were anxious that Indigenous nations support the new incarnations of
this cornerstone of assimilationist policy represented by the 1869 and then the 1876 legislation.
This desire led them to engage in selective ways with Indigenous leadership in Ontario over
these years. The government understood that band councils were resistant to having their
28
Milloy, “The Early Indian Acts” in Getty and Lussier, 61.
29
Jean Barman, Abenaki Daring: the Life and Writings of Noel Annance, 1792-1869 (Montreal: McGill-
Queen’s University Press, 2016), 231-254. On the Mohawk case see Barman, 234.
30
Barman, Abenaki Daring, 252-253.
99
members enfranchise– the initial law was met with a strong response from Indigenous leaders
who sought to maintain their reserve land bases. The DIA likely considered that removing this
“hurdle” of local consent in 1869 would be a means to open the door for Indigenous men to
make enfranchisement applications directly to the government. Indigenous men did not do so,
and instead of facilitating enfranchisement it entrenched the resistance of many Indigenous
leaders. The government’s subsequent move to reinstate a role for bands in enfranchisement
decisions in 1876 represents an effort to sway the leadership into accepting the law at large.
Members of the House of Commons debated enfranchisement in the context of passing the law.31
Government officials focused efforts on Indigenous leaders who were amenable to the idea of
enfranchisement– many of whom as we will see below were influential at the Grand General
Council and who themselves enfranchised.
It is also crucial to recognize that it would have been essential, from the government’s
perspective, to retain authority over the process (which they did through keeping the approval of
the Superintendent General a necessary precondition of enfranchisement). Their reluctance to
approve enfranchisement applications has been noted, as being contradictory to their stated
policy goals.32 If enfranchisement was central to their policy of assimilation, why were they
reluctant to grant applications? Part of the answer, alongside the deep racism of the day, was to
maintain control of resources on Indian reserves. At Confederation, Crown lands became a
provincial jurisdiction, whereas “lands reserved for Indians” were under federal authority. These
were small but significant land bases that were expropriated for uses such as building railways.33
Also, as has been shown, the Department sought to control reserve resources in order to fund the
operations of the Department and provide “benefit” to the Indians until they were considered
capable of entering settler society without becoming a further “burden” on government
resources. For these reasons, retaining the jurisdiction to decide on a case-by-case basis on how
31
For an overview of the debates on the Indian Act in the House of Commons see Joshua Hazelbower,
“Allies or Subjects? Shifting Canadian-Indigenous Political Relations from Treaty Six to the Electoral
Franchise Act” (MA Thesis, University of Victoria, 2017): 53-81.
32
Barman, Abenaki Daring, 231-254.
33
Janet Chute, The Legacy of Shingwaukonse: A Century of Native Leadership (Toronto: University of
Toronto Press, 1998) 208.
100
much land could be lost to Crown control was, ultimately, more important than the limited
concession to band consent.
Members of the Department were present at most of the councils that I examine in this
chapter before 1870. However, Shields draws our attention to the fact that as the Grand General
Council became established, government officials most often would decline invitations to attend
or merely send local Indian agents in their place, demonstrating their removal from direct
involvement in council-based governance.34 However, many individual Indigenous leaders were
consulted on the law, for instance David Laird, the Superintendent General of Indian Affairs,
invited members of the Grand General Council to consult on the Indian Act before it was passed
in 1876, and later John A. Macdonald requested Peter E. Jones to rewrite the Indian Act.35
Mohawk Grand Council member and medical doctor Peter Martin, or Dr. Oronhyatehka, was
another example of a leader asked directly for feedback on the law. Oronhyatekha in 1872, as
chairman of the Grand General Council held at Sarnia, sends the council’s suggested
amendments to David Laird, and notes “When last in Ottawa, I had the honour to mention the
subject in conversation with you, and you were good enough to request me to put the subject
matter in writing.”36 These individual consultations seem congruent with the general emphasis
at the macro-level of the shift from formalized alliance between nations to individualized
subject-relations with the state as conceived of by enfranchisement. The Department was no
longer willing to participate in councils but was willing to engage selectively with individual
leaders– especially those willing to consider adopting aspects of the Indian Act for themselves or
their communities.
For many Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabek communities, one way they dealt with this
constitutional change was through deliberating in council. The Grand General Council was born
of the response to the 1869 law and enfranchisement remained a central area of debate in their
34
Norman Shields, “Anishinaabek Political Alliance in the Post-Confederation Period,” 85-86.
35
Allan L. Sherwin, Bridging Two Peoples Chief Peter E. Jones, 1843–1909 (Waterloo, Ont: Wilfrid
Laurier University Press, 2012).
36
Dr. Oronhyatekha to Minister of the Interior, June [11] 1872, LAC RG10, vol. 1934, file 3541.
101
subsequent gatherings. As discussed, the most complete accounting of the Grand General
Council’s activities is the Master’s Thesis by Norman Shields, “Anishinaabek Political Alliance
in the Post-Confederation Period: The Grand General Indian Council of Ontario, 1870-1936” and
he is attentive to the importance of enfranchisement for council delegates. 37 Shields’ analysis of
the Council minutes provides an excellent overview of their content, in some cases in greater
detail than I am able to do here, and convincingly argues for the continuation, through the Grand
Council, of Anishinaabe historic governance practices well into the twentieth century. He
advances the argument that the enfranchisement provisions of the Act were a central reason for
the council’s acceptance of the Indian Act in 1876 (as the government here reinstated a role for
band councils in enfranchisement decisions). I agree with him in this interpretation, as I will
elaborate below, while demonstrating how this decision relates to earlier councils and networks
of political organizing between the Haudenosaunee and the Anishinaabek.
Indigenous nations rightly understood the rearrangement of constitutional relationship to

be a bold step away from historic alliance agreements; many demonstrated deep resistance to
government aims of breaking up the political body of their nations as well as their small reserve
land-bases– both primary aims of enfranchisement. Other leaders saw enfranchisement within
the law, after the 1876 changes, as an opportunity for inclusion within the new nation, a foot in
the door to pursue greater political equality and participation. Delegations to the government
were sent by both Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabe nations, and leaders wrote petitions and
letters to the Department of Indian Affairs and the Governor General with strongly worded and
clearly articulated positions on the change in the law. Ultimately, as I demonstrate below, both
Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabe positions should be understood as an articulation of who should
hold the jurisdiction over the right to decide who could enfranchise, and both insisted on
previous constitutional frameworks based in Indigenous laws of governance in order to validate
this (either through the complete autonomy of bands as recognized through alliance with the
Crown– the Haudenosaunee position most generally, or through the assertion that the decision to
adopt the law should be one taken at the local level– the position of many Anishinaabe Grand
Council members and one that is consistent with the historic autonomy of individual council
37
Norman Shields, “Anishinaabek Political Alliance in the Post-Confederation Period.”
102
fires38). Both the methods and the content of the response of Indigenous leaders around the
question of enfranchisement reflect the constitutional order they were operating within and
attempting, in various ways, to preserve.
2.2. The First Grand General Council of 1870: Historical

Networks in a New Configuration
The Grand General Council assembled at Six Nations in 1870 was attended by multiple
nations and instigated a series of councils that met regularly over the next two decades, reigniting
and regularizing the historic process of meeting in council. These types of international council
gatherings were not new; they built on longstanding treaty relationships between the Anishinaabe
and the Haudenosaunee as well as the internal council governance of both nations. Following
Confederation, these long-standing polities agreed in 1870 to meet every two years to overview
and coordinate challenges to settler government legislation, an agreement that was largely
followed. In the ensuing Councils, as well as through the letters and delegations to the
government that were instigated by council members, different perspectives emerged regarding
how the laws imposed by the government affected the constitutional relationship between their
nations and the Crown.
This section interrogates the historical roots of these varied responses by tracing the
multiple networks of political alliances and involvements tied to the 1870 Council that stretch
back, at least, to the 1840s. I begin in 1870, to examine how the alliance relationship between
participating nations was framed at the first Grand General Council through wampum belt
readings by the Haudenosaunee hosts who sought to activate the alliance relationship with the
Anishinaabe to counter government incursions on their sovereignty. This shows the foundation
of Indigenous law on which the Grand General Council was initially built. I next examine two
earlier councils in 1840 and 1858 to demonstrate how the alliance between the two nations had
previously been enacted, and how concerns about the policies of the government were voiced
through these earlier gatherings. These earlier councils show continuities as particular delegates
who were present at these earlier councils were also involved in 1870. After describing the
38
Bohaker, Doodem and Council Fire.
103
earlier councils, I return at the end of this section, to the 1870 Grand General Council to discuss
specifically how enfranchisement was dealt with there. These councils, as well as the
delegations and petitions sent to the government that resulted from them, demonstrate how
various communities and leaders presented their views on the rearrangement of the constitutional
relationship through changes in the legislation over the years.
Enfranchisement was a central area of debate within Grand General Councils, and
divergent positions on the matter became entrenched in the 1880s, as will be examined later in
this chapter. Differing views on enfranchisement provisions ultimately sent Haudenosaunee and
Anishinaabe leaders on divergent paths of engagement with the government. In 1870, however,
there was a remarkably unified position that emerged, and this political cooperation, too, had a
long history in Southern Ontario that is important to situate the initial response to the law within.
The political crisis that the 1869 Gradual Enfranchisement Act brought forth sparked an
escalation of concern over government legislation that had already been voiced to the
government in an 1858 council, and had ties to an earlier 1840 council that affirmed their
alliance together and questioned their respective nations’ relationship with the government. 39
By 1870 this alliance was again invoked to challenge the Gradual Enfranchisement Act.
The Six Nations of the Grand River were successful in assembling a formidable group of
communities in June of 1870. The gathering lasted from the 10th to the 18th of June.40 In order
to respond to the threat that the 1869 legislation posed to their sovereign right to govern
themselves, the Haudenosaunee called on historic alliance relationships with the Anishinaabek,
39
As the work of Heidi Bohaker and Victor Lytwyn demonstrate, the 1840 council was both an important
site for affirming the constitutional arrangement of Anishinaabe council fires, as well as for renewing
their alliance with the Haudenosaunee. Donald Smith provides a different interpretation of the council in
1840, stating that the alliance was broken as will be discussed below. Heidi Bohaker, Doodem and
Council fire, 103-112, Victor P. Lytwyn Lytwyn, “A Dish with One Spoon: The Shared Hunting Grounds
Agreement in the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence Valley Region,” in Paper of the Twenty-Eighth
Algonquian Conference, edited by David H. Pentlant, (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 1997):
221-223, and Donald Smith, Sacred Feathers the Reverend Peter Jones (Kahkewaquonaby) and the
Mississauga Indians, 2nd ed. (Toronto, Ont: University of Toronto Press, 2013): 173-176.
40
104
reminding them that their communities were stronger when they worked together, and insisted on
their rights under the centuries old treaty relationships that they had long nurtured with the
Crown, which had subsequently extended to the Anishinaabeg at Niagara in 1764.41 Leaders at
Six Nations expressed deep concern over how the 1869 law violated their historic agreement
with the Crown which ensured the autonomy of their governance. They were actively trying to
gather an international response with Indigenous nations across southern Ontario and Quebec.
Nations came from as far away as Kahnawake, and included Anishinaabe, Muncey, Delaware,
and Haudenosaunee communities across Southern Ontario and into Quebec. There were almost
ninety delegates in attendance from these communities.
Communities on Manitoulin and the surrounding area did not attend this initial meeting,
although as noted in Chapter One, they held similar concerns about the 1869 legislation. As
discussed, the Six Nations chiefs attempted to attend a council held in July of 1870 on
Manitoulin Island.42 This was one month after the large Grand General Council held at Six
Nations, and suggests they were interested in expanding their network of political organizing
further north as well. While I have not found evidence that they attended the gathering,
communities from Manitoulin and the Lake Huron region did participate in later councils.
At the 1870 Grand General Council, leaders from Six Nations were clear that the
Gradual Enfranchisement Act infringed on existing constitutional relationships, where autonomy
of governance for their nation was the foundational concept of alliance; they had recently
presented these views to the Dominon government. In April of 1870, delegates from Six Nations
went to Ottawa to discuss their relationship with the Crown and to remind officials there of their
duties towards them as allies, bringing the wampum belts on which this relationship was
inscribed. John Smoke Johnson, a Mohawk Pine Tree Chief and leader of the Lower Mohawks
41
Corbiere, “Anishinaabe Treaty-Making,” John Borrows “Wampum at Niagara: The Royal
Proclamation, Canadian Legal History, and Self-Government” in Michael Asch, ed. Aboriginal and
Treaty Rights in Canada: Essays on Law, Equity, and Respect for Difference (Vancouver: UBC Press,
1997): 155-172.
42
J. T. Gilkison to William Spragge, July 15, 1870. LAC RG10, vol. 347, pp. 317-318, C-9590, image
419.
105
who had joined the British in the War of 1812, was one of these delegates.43 The delegates
deemed the trip to Ottawa a success, according to the Six Nation Council minutes, as Joseph
Howe the Secretary of State and Superintendent General of Indian Affairs had received them
“courteously.”44 The interaction between the delegates and Howe, as described in the Council
minutes, is worth quoting at length, as it shows how the relationship between treaty alliances
enshrined in wampum and the new legislative agenda were discussed together:
Mr. Howe asked them, what parts of the Indian Acts they objected to, they replied, the
whole Act, which, they were not consulted in reference to it. Mr. Howe, on hearing the
Act not agreeable to the Six Nations, asked, if they did not want any laws for their
guidance and government, to which they answered, The Six Nations had already rules
and regulations under which they had ever acted.
Mr. Howe remarked, that the Legislature had passed the Acts with the best intentions.
They then intimated to Mr. Howe, that they had brought their wampum belts– in which
Mr. Howe appeared to take much interest, and explained them, as their ancient treaties,
handed down from past years. Mr. Howe made reference to a book, and well understood
the use of wampums. One of the belts with a chain of figures, illustrative of the treaty
between the Six Nations and the British Government, and another of the belts
represented twenty-two tribes.
Mr. Howe observed, he was of opinion, the Indians should be consulted, on any measure
for their good government. The Deputation pointed out to Mr. Howe, a clause in the
Act of 1868, which gave power to the Governor in Council, to enact rules and
regulations for the Indians, and that was all required, in which, Mr. Howe appeared to
concur. Mr. Howe, indeed, expressed the opinion, the Indians should have some one
[sic] to represent their views in Parliament. Their interview lasted about an hour, and
they were perfectly satisfied, as Mr. Howe appeared to sympathize with the object of
their visit.45
The delegates also met with the Governor General, who expressed his “pleasure” that they felt
the meeting with Howe had gone well, and visited the House of Commons, presenting a cane
carved by John Carpenter to the Speaker there. 46 Despite this tacit acknowledgement of their
Susan Hill, The Clay We Are Made Of, 153. Hill notes that Johnston’s willingness to support the British
43
was due to treaty obligations.

44
Minutes of the Six Nations in Council, 26 April, 1870, RG10, vol. 347, pp. 126-131, C-9590, image
234.
45
Ibid.
46
Ibid.
106
historic alliance relationship by Howe, the support he voiced that the community should be
consulted on laws affecting them, and their generally positive reception in Ottawa, the new
legislation continued to threaten these historic alliance relationships. The Six Nations were
looking to establish a more powerful, coordinated statement to the government to be made in
conjunction with other nations. On the first day of the 1870 Grand General Council, after initial
greetings and taking down of names of the delegates, John Smoke Johnson reported what had
happened in Ottawa, signifying the meeting’s importance. While details of this meeting are very
sparse in the meeting minutes, the fact that it was overviewed before the official ceremonial opening of
the council seems to signify its central importance. Johnson then proceeded to tie his reading of the
wampum belts in council to their relationship with the Crown.
Wampum belts were at the centre of the opening of the 1870 Grand Council, laid out on a
central table and explained to the council one by one to establish the grounds on which they
met.47 After the initial greetings on June 10, and the ceremony conducted to clear the minds of
council participants the following day, 48 on the 13th of June at eleven in the morning, when the
Council reconvened after a Sunday break, John Smoke Johnson began his reading of the belts to
the Council. He began, according to the meeting minutes, by declaring that the “position of the
Confederacy of Six Nation Indians was the firekeeper in his proper place, the door-keeper in his
proper place, and the door properly tiled, yet the firekeeper has noticed that a great monster has
crept in; he finds he cannot eject the monster or whip him alone; he calls delegates together to
assist him in ejecting the imp or monster.” 49 Given the context of the council, this “monster” was
likely a reference to either the 1869 law specifically, or more generally the other deep changes in
relationship that the Government imposed through their laws. The reference to the firekeeper
47
Canada, June 10, 1870 (Hamilton: The Spectator Office, 1870): 7.
48
This would have been a condolence ceremony, as noted by Susan Hill, 227. For a description of the
importance of this ceremony see Hill, 39-42.
49
Canada, June 10, 1870 (Hamilton: The Spectator Office, 1870):
107
and the door-keeper are references to political roles within the Haudenosaunee Confederacy. 50
In using these metaphors, the speaker is making clear that the confederacy is active and ongoing,
and yet were dealing with a threat that they could not deal with alone. He went on to recount the
history of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy in adopting the Great Law of Peace among their
nations,51 and the importance of wampum in this process of alliance: “the policy of their
forefathers was, when they were unanimous they were stronger,” making the argument for a re-
activation of the Haudenosaunee-Anishinaabe alliance. Johnson continued: “The wampum was
handed down to posterity to show the treaties made by their forefathers. It has done a great deal
of good, kept them together and brightened their eyes.”52 After continuing to discuss several
wampum belts that were foundational to the Confederacy, 53 Smoke Johnson, after citing historic
concerns that “it was always feared that they would come under the rule of their white friends,” 54
introduced the belt that represented their first treaty with the British Government:
The Wampum having two men standing one at each end, represents the first meeting or
treaty with the British Government. It represents the Six Nations and the British
Government. They stand on their own rules, which they laid down…The marks worked
on the wampum shows the British and Six Nations had united by treaty. They were each
to have their own way; not hurting their customs or rules or regulations. If the Indian
50
Hill describes how the Peacemaker designated that the Onondagas would be the Firekeepers of the
Confederacy, and that the “easternmost and westernmost nations” (the Mohawk and the Seneca) would
have the responsibility of serving as Doorkeepers, “guarding the Confederacy against outside hostilities.
The Doorkeepers were also given the responsibility of escorting those who sought to council with the
Confederacy to the place of the Firekeepers, following the paths of peace depicted in the Ayenwahtha
Belt.” Hill, The Clay We Are Made Of, 33-34. In the Council minutes, John Smoke Johnson details the
responsibility of the Onondaga as firekeepers to call on allies in times of danger: “He still occupies [the
position of firekeeper] and keeps everything in order, and persuades his brethren to overcome any
difficulty between them and being in nothing to mar the welfare of the house.” Describing the process of
peacemaking in creating the council, he notes that “a great bird’s wing [was left] with the fire-keeper to
sweep the floor, keep clean the house and remove any evil that might creep in; and any evil he could not
remove alone, he called on the tyler to spring his bow, and if they could not together, they called on all
the brethren to assist.” The General Council of the Six Nations and Delegates from different Band in
Western and Eastern Canada, June 10, 1870 (Hamilton: The Spectator Office, 1870), 7-8.
51
On the Great Law of Peace see Hill, 27-52.
52
53
Ibid., 9.
54
Ibid.
108
had his bark canoe, let him have it, let the British have his large vessels. The British
gives the wampum to confirm the rules and regulations of the Confederacy.”55
As Susan Hill explains, the agreement that was being referenced was the Two Row Wampum
and the Covenant Chain treaty belts, and the “relevance of these belts to the 1870 situation was
clear and simple: the basis of the peaceful and friendly relationship between the Haudenosaunee
and the British was grounded in the agreement of non-interference in each other’s internal
affairs.”56 As had recently been presented to the government of Ottawa, the Six Nations
reminded the council that their treaty was with the Crown– and that the basis of this agreement
was one of non-interference in Haudenosaunee governance. Both the transfer to Canadian
control and the subsequent 1869 Act that sought to control reserve governance violated this
agreement.
The next belts that Smoke Johnson read made explicit the history of alliance with other
nations present, including the Dish With One Spoon wampum belt that outlined their historic
alliance with the Anishinaabe. He began here with a belt that was “a token of all tribes from east
to west. It confirms what has been done by the Six Nations. All the nations where this wampum
has been, have combined with the ideas expressed by the Six Nations.”57 What followed was “a
speech from the different bands who were in friendship with one another, it confirmed all that
had been done, it showed there was no disturbance not handed down to posterity to show what
they had confirmed.”58 The Dish with One Spoon, discussed in greater detail below, was read
next, described by him as
wampum worked with white beads, it denotes peace. Any tribe having united, pass this
to show and hand down to prosperity, to show their friendship; grasping their arms it
showed the strength of their friendship, even a pine tree falling could not break the
friendship of united bands. This wampum applies to all– it combines all Indians. The
55
Ibid., Emphasis added. This is an explicit reference to the law of the Two Row. See Jon Parmenter,
“The Meaning of Kaswentha and the Two Row Wampum Belt in Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) History: Can
Indigenous Oral Tradition Be Reconciled with the Documentary Record?,” Journal of Early American
History 3, no. 1 (2013): 82–109, https://doi.org/10.1163/18770703-00301005.
56
Susan M. Hill, The Clay We Are Made Of, 227.
57
Ibid.
58
Ibid., 9.
109
work denotes a dish with a beavers tail in it– it is full. It was when game was plenty,
no knife was allowed for fear it might cut some brother– they eat with their fingers, all
was harmony and quietness, all was free to use.59
He next showed a belt that came from the Ottawas with 22 marks on it, “they united to show
their appreciation of the Six Nations…It is a memory, and they hope it may continue for ever.” 60
He showed another from the Sauk Indians, who had left white wampum after they had assisted
the Six Nations in battle. 61
The final belt of the day that Johnston read was one given by Joseph Brant to the Six
Nations, a reminder that the alliance relationship with the Crown that designated jurisdiction
over governance should not be broken. The belt was presented after he had attempted to have
the Six Nations “become as whitemen; then rules were shown to him, to show how he had
broken the rules.” He repented and delivered this wampum to the Six Nations. 62 At this point the
meeting adjourned until the following morning. The meeting minutes do not account for all of
the hours that the gathering would have taken, although extra time would have also been needed
for the many translations needed between the various languages spoken at council. 63
Despite the presence of translators, the reason for the wampum belt reading was not clear
to all delegates; the following morning William Wawanosh, the delegate from Sarnia voiced his
frustration at the length of the reading, not seeing how it was relevant to the Anishinaabe
delegates. He rose just before Johnson was to begin reading the belts again to demand to know
when they would be discussing government legislation– the reason they had assembled to
discuss four days earlier. 64 To demonstrate that he was, in fact, dealing with the relationship with
the government, Smoke Johnson reminded Wawanosh that the belts had recently been presented
59
Ibid., 9-10.
60
Ibid.
61
Ibid.
62
Ibid., 10.
63
Ibid., 7. Anishinabemowin (Chippewa) translation was supplied by Rev. George Baker, and translation
into French by Lake of Two Mountains delegate Louis Kanerakentuate.
64
Ibid., 11.
110
in Ottawa, and that Mr. Howe “found that they were correct.”65 He placed the importance of the
belts in direct relation to the new legislation, in the hopes that Wawanosh would see their current
political relevance due to how the belts authenticated the treaty relationships between their
nations and the Crown that enshrined the sovereignty that the new law undermined:
The Six Nations well understood the influence of the belts when they had an interview
with the Secretary of State, the deputation raising the argument when the Six Nations
had rules the Legislature should not pass an Act which would be injurious to our race.
When our forefathers planted their lofty trees with roots extending from east to west,
when any nation attacked or assaulted us, we all felt it and should combine. It is now
the same, this shows we should combine to reject the Act which is distasteful to us. This
is one reason why this explanation is given us that we may unite.66
As he explained to Wawanosh, the contemporary relevance of these agreements was that through
the alliances that they enshrined, they also offered protection through “combining” to resist
attack or assault.
Throughout his speeches over these two days, Smoke Johnson continued to reference the
long history of alliance between the Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabe nations that predated
British law. This alliance, known today as the Dish With One Spoon, was a treaty that had
existed between the two nations before European contact, and had been renewed in the 17 th
century as well as at the Great Peace of Montreal in 1701.67 Although this agreement continues
65
Ibid.
66
Ibid.
67
For an overview of the agreement, see Victor P. Llytwyn, “A Dish with One Spoon: The Shared
Hunting Grounds Agreement in the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence Valley Region,” in David H. Pentlant,
ed., Paper of the Twenty-Eighth Algonquian Conference (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 1997):
210-27. For an overview of recent literature on the agreement see Dean Jacobs and Victor P. Lytwyn,
“Naagan ge bezhig emkwaan: A Dish With one Spoon Reconsidered,” Ontario History, Vol. 112, no 2,
Fall 2020: 191-210. Hayden King discusses the agreement in his overview of Anishinaabe international
diplomatic relations “Discourses of Conquest and Resistance: International relations and Anishinaabe
diplomacy” in Randolph B. Persaud and Alina Sajed, eds. Race, Gender, and Culture in International
Relations: Postcolonial Perspectives (New York: Routledge, 2018): 135-150. See also Leanne Simpson,
“Looking after Gdoo-naaganinaa: Precolonial Nishnaabeg Diplomacy and Treaty Relationships,” Wicazo
Sa Review, 23:2 (Fall 2008): 29-42. For insights into the importance of the Dish With One Spoon
agreement, both historically and in the present, I am indebted to the work of Alan Corbiere and Richard
Hill at their talk “First Law of the Land: Sharing from the Great Dish,” University of Toronto, September
28, 2019.
111
to be valid today, most historical accounts have focused on the earlier eras of this alliance
relationship. For instance, in his 1997 overview of the 19th century history of the belt, Victor
Llytwyn only mentions the 1840 meeting at the Credit River discussed below. 68 A council
gathering in 1858 between the two nations, as well as the 1870 Grand General Council where the
alliance was again invoked suggest that more work needs to be done on the late-nineteenth
century history of this alliance between the two nations. The earlier gatherings in 1840 and 1858
show the importance of the Dish With One Spoon in positioning their confederations together
against the changes that the Crown was attempting in imposing laws, an important precursor to
the 1870 meeting. As John Smoke Johnson noted at the 1858 council, from his perspective
“unity [was] strength.”69 I will now elaborate on the content of these earlier gatherings, as they
provide important context of the relationship between the two nations, before returning to the
1870 Council to discuss how the Gradual Enfranchisement Act was debated.
2.2.1. Precursors to the 1870 Grand General Council: The Councils of

1840 and 1858
Over the nineteenth century, there were several international meetings between
Indigenous leaders in Canada West prior to 1870. Here I examine the councils held in 1840 and
1858 specifically. It should be noted, however, that there were other large gatherings that dealt
with government policy and relationship with Indigenous nations: the 1846 Council at Orillia
(which was comprised of mostly Anishinaabe delegates, with a small Mohawk delegation from
the Bay of Quinté),70 and the Royal tour of the Price of Wales in 1860, where Anishinaabe and
Haudenosaunee met largely separately at Sarnia and Brantford, 71 are other examples of
68
Lytwyn, “A Dish with One Spoon,” 221-224.
69
John Smoke Johnson, Speaker, in “Minutes of a Grand Council of the Six Nations to give their
Brethren of distant tribes an opportunity to meet them,” RG10, vol. 245, pt.1, no 11401-11500, C-12638,
p. 61.
70
Minutes of the General Council of Indian Chiefs and Principal Men, held at Orillia, Lake Simcoe
Narrows on the proposed removal of the smaller communities and the establishment of Manual Labour
Schools (Montreal: Canada Gazette Office, 1846).
71
Keith Jamieson and Michelle A. Hamilton, Dr. Oronhyatekha: Security, Justice, Equality (Toronto:
Dundurn, 2016): 77. The authors describe how poor planning resulted in a last-minute meeting with
Haudenosaunee (and perhaps Mississauga of New Credit) chiefs at Brantford on September 14th. The list
112
Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee nations presenting their views on the continuing alliance
relationship with the Crown. At the 1846 gathering, schooling was the primary aspect of the
relationship that was debated. 72 At the 1860 gathering at Sarnia, the council petitioned the Duke
of Newcastle with multiple grievances against the Indian Department.73 I focus here on the
meetings in 1840 and 1858 as they held important parallels and connections to the first Grand
General Council of 1870, in particular as they reaffirmed alliance relationships between the
Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee, as discussed below.
The 1840 council was held at the River Credit. The council primarily concerned matters
important to the Anishinaabe communities involved, including land rights, but also included two
days of meetings with Haudenosaunee delegates who wished to reaffirm their treaty alliance with
the Anishinaabe. Chairman Joseph Sawyer on the first day of the gathering describes inviting the
Haudenosaunee to attend: “as they the Mohawk Chiefs had expressed a wish to meet their
Chippewa brethren, he had sent for them in order to smoke the pipe of peace with the chiefs of
the Six Nations and thus to renew the Treaty of friendship which had been made by our
forefathers.”74 At this gathering, the parties reaffirmed the treaty relationship after wampum belt
readings by Onondaga Chief John Buck (who “kept the Council fire or the “talks” of the Six
of which chiefs would receive royal medals was not compiled until two weeks later, on September 27 th.
They note: “Such last-minute and inefficient planning resulted in a much briefer and less elaborate
ceremony than that at Sarnia between the prince and numerous Anishinaabe (Ojibwa) groups.”
72
Minutes of the General Council of Indian Chiefs and Principal Men, held at Orillia, Lake Simcoe
Narrows on the proposed removal of the smaller communities and the establishment of Manual Labour
Schools (Montreal: Canada Gazette Office, 1846).
73
Ian Radforth describes the complaints in the petition as follows: “It began by asking Newcastle to
undertake a thorough investigation of the conduct of the Indian Department. The petition then referred to
specific grievances: the loss through fraud and carelessness of several hundred thousand dollars received
in payment of lands; the loss of islands used as fishing stations and the government’s imposition of new
charges for fishing rights long guaranteed by treaties; the illegal sale of Indian lands without the
permission of bands or compensation paid to them; the forcible confiscation of large tracts without
adequate compensation, and government plans that would make possible the alienation of reserve lands
without prior consent from bands.” Radforth, Royal Spectacle: The 1860 Visit of the Prince of Wales to
Canada and the United States (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004): 231. For the original petition
see Points of Grievance Complained of at Sarnia, September 1860, LAC RG10, vol. 266, pp. 163, 028-
163, 378.
74
General Council, Sunday Jan 21 1840, LAC RG10, vol. 1011, p. 80.
113
Nations and who would speak on their behalf” 75), and Chief Yellowhead of Lake Simcoe the
following day.76 In the text of the meeting minutes, the following is noted at the end of the two-
day gathering before the Haudenosaunee departed:
Yellowhead presented the Six Nations with two strings of white wampum as a memorial
of pledges at this Council to which had been transacted between the two parties. The
Six Nations chiefs then returned the wampum belt to Yellowhead and so parted by
shaking each other by the arm, which was the method adopted by our forefathers when
the Treaty of friendship was first formed. Thus ended the renewal of the Treaty with
which all present were [most] pleased.77
The minutes make clear that by the end of the gathering the alliance was reaffirmed.
The 1858 council more closely resembled the 1870 council in that the nations gathered to
jointly respond to government legislation, policy, and plans for Indian Affairs: specifically, the
1857 Gradual Civilization Act, the Pennefather Commission of 1858,78 and the transfer of
authority over Indian Affairs from Britain to the Provincial Government. Department of Indian
75
Ibid., 81-82.
76
Donald Smith has interpreted this gathering as being a failure in reaffirming the treaty, saying that on
the second day of the gathering “talks collapsed, and it proved impossible to forge a pan-Indian front in
1840.” Donald Smith, Sacred Feathers, 176. After examining the records that he cites, which are the
minutes of the 1840 council, I disagree with this interpretation. My interpretation of the council minutes
aligns with that of Victor Lytwyn: that the treaty relationship was re-affirmed in 1840. Lytwyn, “A Dish
with One Spoon,” 221-223. Smith’s interpretation, I believe, is based on the fact that Buck and
Yellowhead present different interpretations of the treaty: where Buck describes the treaty as an
agreement where “The Belt represented a dish or bowl in the centre, which the chief said represented that
the Ojibways, and the Six Nations were all to eat out of one dish. That is to have all the game in
common,” (General Council, Sunday Jan 21 1840, LAC RG10, vol. 1011, 82) Yellowhead notes that “At
the Narrows our fathers placed a dish with ladles around it, and a ladle for the Six Nations, who said to
the Ojebways that the dish or bowl should never be emptied, but he (Yellowhead) was sorry to say that it
had already been emptied, not by the Six Nations on the Grand River, but by the [Caucamawaugas]
residing near Montreal.” (General Council, Sunday Jan 22 1840, LAC RG10, vol. 1011, 86). He also
presents a more specific claim to Anishinaabe land rights at the River Credit: “That the right of hunting
on the North side of the Lake was secured to the Ojebways, and that the Six Nations were not to hunt here
only when they came to smoke the pipe of peace with their Ojebway brethren.” (89). However, the clear
agreement that the treaty was reaffirmed in the meeting minutes demonstrates that these issues were not
seen to abrogate the alliance. Ibid., 89.
77
General Council, Sunday Jan 22 1840, LAC RG10, vol. 1011, p. 89.
78
Province of Canada, Journals of the Legislative Assembly of Canada, Sessional Papers, Appendix 21,
“Report of the Special Commissioners” (Toronto, 1858).
114
Affairs personnel were present here, but the meeting was directed by Six Nations protocols. The
Council in 1858 comprised an extensive gathering of communities from Kahnewake to Walpole
Island, fifteen in total who met from the 20th to the 29th of September at the Tuscarora
Longhouse.79 Council delegates voices sharp opposition to government legislation and policy,
ending with the strong political gesture of presenting the government with a string of black
wampum, a symbol of war or discord.80
The link between these earlier councils and the 1870 council went beyond similar council
content (namely the affirmation of alliance between the nations and dealing with government
policy)– there were also direct connections between delegates who attended in 1840, 1858, and
1870. Despite the 30-year time span between the gatherings, there were political and familial
connections between 1840 and 1870, as well as delegates who were present at both. In 1840,
John Smoke Johnson, who introduced John Buck at the beginning of the council, was present. 81
Additionally, John Sunday of Alderville and George Copway of Rice Lake attended, both men
having longstanding connections to the Methodist church and other delegates present in both
1840 and later councils through these networks.82 Sunday himself was a delegate from Rice
79
David Thorburn to R. T. Pennefather, Superintendent General of Indian Affairs, 13 October, 1858,
RG10, vol. 245, pt.1, no 11401-11500, C-12638.
80
Ibid.
81
Minutes of a General Council held at the River Credit community on January 16th 1840, LAC RG10,
vol. 1011, 69.
82
For instance, both men were Methodist ministers and had been stationed at multiple participating
communities– Sunday worked at Alderville, Rice Lake, Mount Elgin, and Muncey, and Copway at
Saugeen and Rice Lake. Copway was married to a friend of the wife of Peter Jones. For a biography of
each of these men see Donald B. Smith, Mississauga Portraits: Ojibwe Voices from Nineteenth-Century
Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013), as well as Donald B. Smith,
“KAHGEGAGAHBOWH (Kahkakakahbowh, Kakikekapo) (George Copway),” in Dictionary of
Canadian Biography, vol. 9, University of Toronto/Université Laval, 2003–, accessed February 10,
2022, http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/kahgegagahbowh_9E.html , G. S. French, “SHAH-WUN-DAIS,”
in Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 10, University of Toronto/Université Laval, 2003–, accessed
February 10, 2022, http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/shah_wun_dais_10E.html and “John Sunday,”
Alderville First Nation, https://alderville.ca/alderville-first-nation/history/pride-in-our-people/john-
sunday/. Sunday started the missionary settlement at Grape Island where Henry P. Chase and Allan Salt
were raised, with Sunday regarding Chase as a “young man of exemplary conduct,” see Donald B. Smith,
“CHASE, HENRY PAHTAHQUAHONG,” in Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 12, University of
Toronto/Université Laval, 2003–, accessed February 10,
115
Lake (alongside H. P. Chase and Alan Salt) in 1870. 83 Close family ties also connected the two
councils. Joshua Wawanosh represented Sarnia in 1840, and the Reverend Peter Jones
represented the Credit River. Connected to each other and to Sunday and Copway through
Methodist networks, their sons, William Wawanosh (whose voice in council we have heard
already above) and Peter Edmund Jones, became two of the most vocal delegates involved in
enfranchisement debates in later councils, as we will see below.
The connections between the 1858 and the 1870 councils are even stronger. Held only
twelve years apart, many of the same communities participated in both councils. Here John
Smoke Johnson was the Speaker, expertly articulating the position of the Six Nations and giving
time for all other delegates to respond and elaborate on their positions. Communities attending
included the Anishinaabe communities of Rice Lake, Alnwick, Munceytown, Owen Sound
(Cape Croker), and Walpole Island, and Haudenosaunee communities included the Oneida of the
Thames (Oneidas of Muncey in the council minutes), St. Regis, the Bay of Quinte and
Caughnawaga. Delegates were also present at both councils, including Henry P. Chase of
Alnwick/Alderville, (who later becomes the chairman of the Grand General Council in 1870),
Seneca Johnson and George H.M. Johnson of Six Nations, David Sawyer of Nawash/New
Credit, Peter (Kegedonce) Jones of Owen Sound/Cape Croker, John P. Henry of
Munceytown/Chippewas of the Thames, John Wampum and Charles Halfmoon of the Delawares
of Muncy/Muncy of the Thames, and David Wawanosh (son of Joshua) of Sarnia attended in
1858, and his brother William in 1870. 84
2022, http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/chase_henry_pahtahquahong_12E.html, and Smith, Mississauga

Portraits, 226. John Sunday and Allan Salt were delegates together from Rice Lake at an 1846 council
held at Orillia, Minutes of the General Council of Indian Chiefs and Principal Men, held at Orillia, Lake
Simcoe Narrows On Thursday the 30th and Friday the 31st of July, 1846 (Montreal: Canada Gazette
Office, 1846).
83
84
See “Minutes of an Grand Council of the Six Nations Indians to give their brethren of distant tribes of
Canada an opportunity to meet them,” 20 Sept. 1858, RG10, vol. 245, pt.1, no 11401-11500, C-12638 and
Canada, June 10, 1870 (Hamilton: The Spectator Office, 1870). As the meeting minutes of 1858 are
difficult to read, there might be additional overlap in delegates. Communities are listed according to the
116
The Grand General Council of 1870 was therefore not a new and unique phenomenon, as
has been suggested by Kirkby, 85 but was in fact a continuation of the longstanding practices of
alliance between the Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabek, as well as their Muncey and Delaware
Southern Ontario reserve neighbours. At the 1840 Council, the Anishinaabe delegates met
separately with Superintendent General Colonel Jarvis to engage with government policy, and
with the Haudenosaunee to renew the alliance between their nations. 86 The Six Nations brought
four belts to read in order to renew the alliance, read by Onondaga chief John Buck, and Chief
Yellowhead of Lake Simcoe.87 Buck described their powerful alliance, that the “Treaty of
friendship was made so strong that if a tree fell across their arms it could not separate them or
cause them to loose [sic] their hold.”88 In terms of their relationship with the government, both
nations expressed concern at the meeting around obtaining land titles to their reserves, as well as
having their relationship with the British clearly defined.89
minutes from 1858/1870. The delegate from Rice Lake is listed as Chief Potash in 1858, and M. G.
Pundush in 1870.
85
Kirkby erroneously states that the 1870 council was “the first major pan-national meeting since the
Treaty of Niagara over a century earlier.” Kirkby, “Reconstituting Canada,” 505.
86
For additional discussions of this council see Bohaker, Doodem and Council Fire, 103-112, Lytwyn,
“A Dish with One Spoon,” 221-223, and Smith, Mississauga Portraits, 62.
87
Bucks reading of the Dish With One Spoon Wampum reads thus in the minutes of the Council: “This
Treaty was made many years ago, and the great council was held at the end of Lake Ontario. The Belt
represented a dish or bowl in the centre, which the chief said represented that the Ojibways, and the Six
Nations were all to eat out of one dish. That is to have all the game in common. In the centre of the bowl
were few white wampum which denoted a beavers tail the favorite dish of the Ojibways. At this council
the Treaty of friendship was formed and agreed to call each other forever after "brothers." That this
Treaty of friendship was made so strong that if a tree fell across their arms it could not separate them or
cause them to loose their hold.” Minutes of a General Council held at the River Credit community on
January 16th 1840, LAC RG10, vol. 1011, p. 82. John Smoke Johnson notes that it was the goal of the
Haudenosaunee to renew their alliance relationships with all of the “Indian Tribes in the domain of Her
Majesty the Queen” including the Huron at Amhearstburg.
88
Ibid.
89
Ibid.
117
The Anishinaabe presented the land title question directly to Jarvis and pushed for
clarification on the Crown’s understanding of status as subjects or allies. 90 The Haudenosaunee
were en route to Toronto to demand title to their land from the Governor General, and noted that
“That they called the Governor "brother" and not "father" as the Ojebway do: the reason why
they called the governor "Brother" was that they might feel themselves equal with the Governor,
and so speak more freely to him, which they could not do if he was their father.”91 Although the
two nations did not present a unified response to the government at this council, the meeting
demonstrates how they were affirming their sovereignty through maintaining alliance. They
were also each doing so in their respective negotiations with the Crown.
The 1858 meeting more closely resembles the initial Grand General Council Meeting in
1870 Council than does the earlier 1840 council, as here the nations involved present a unified
response to the government on the laws they had passed. This gathering was held in direct
response to the 1857 Gradual Civilization Act (the first law that introduced enfranchisement), the
“Commissioners Report on Indian Affairs” (known as the Pennefather Commission of 1858),
and the transfer of authority over Indian Affairs from Britain to the Provincial Government that
the Commission suggested.92 Here the historic alliance between the Anishinaabe and
Haudenosaunee was enacted to articulate a common position against these laws and policies.
The government at this time was making significant changes to how it dealt with Indigenous
nations, and they mobilized through alliance, as well as demanded their treaty relationship with
the British be respected in order to reject these changes. Enfranchisement was first among the
government policies that were rejected by these nations in council.93
90
Ibid.
91
Ibid.
92
An Act to Encourage the gradual Civilization of the Indian Tribes in this Provice, andto amend the laws
respecting Indians, S. Prov. C. 1857, c. 26 and Province of Canada, Journals of the Legislative Assembly
of Canada, Sessional Papers, Appendix 21, “Report of the Special Commissioners” (Toronto, 1858).
93
D. Thorburn to R.T. Pennefather, S.G. Indian Affairs, 13 Oct 1858, RG10, vol. 245, pt.1, no 11401-
11500, C-12638.
118
The 1858 Council took place over nine days and ended with a striking and strong
message sent to the Government demonstrating the deep unhappiness the delegates felt towards
the government. Their concerns included the threat to their land base that enfranchisement
processes posed, as well as concern that the “Protection Acts” would be repealed.94 They also
vigorously protested the transfer of control over Indian Affairs to Canada and the “Report of the
Indian Commissioner” (the Pennefather Commission completed in April of that same year) that
proposed this.95 The nations present were unanimous in protesting against this significant
rearrangement of the constitutional structure that had thus far governed their alliance with
Britain. Echoing the Six Nations Speaker, multiple chiefs spoke of how they had been noticing
“dark clouds” gathering on the horizon. 96 H. P Chase was the most explicit about this metaphor,
stating that his community of Alnwick had “observed Dark clouds rising on the horizon which
threatened entirely to overwhelm them– that dark cloud is act of same 1857– past[sic] by the
Canadian Parliament.”97
Using the potent metaphor for discord or war represented by black wampum beads, the
Council presented David Thorburn, the Indian Superintendent for Brant with a string of wampum
beads, as well as a petition to the Governor General. 98 In his letter to the Department about the
94
The council desired that the Act be retained as it was helpful in evicting white squatters from reserve
lands. “Minutes of an Grand Council of the Six Nations Indians to give their brethren of distant tribes of
Canada an opportunity to meet them,” 20 Sept. 1858, RG10, vol. 245, pt.1, no 11401-11500, C-12638, p.
28.
95
John Leslie, Commissions of Inquiry into Indian Affairs in the Canadas (Ottawa: Department of Indian
Affairs Treaties and Historical Research Centre, 1985): 142. It is interesting to note that the report on the
council was sent by David Thorburn to Pennefather himself. D. Thorburn to R.T. Pennefather, S.G.
Indian Affairs, 13 Oct 1858, RG10, vol. 245, pt.1, no 11401-11500, C-12638.
96
This metaphor, first used by the Speaker, Johnson is echoed by delegates from the Muncey Chippewa
and Wawanosh of Sarnia. “Minutes of an Grand Council of the Six Nations Indians to give their brethren
of distant tribes of Canada an opportunity to meet them,” 20 Sept. 1858RG10, vol. 245, pt.1, no 11401-
11500, C-12638, p. 43, 44 and 48.
97
“Minutes of an Grand Council of the Six Nations Indians to give their brethren of distant tribes of
Canada an opportunity to meet them,” 20 Sept. 1858RG10, vol. 245, pt.1, no 11401-11500, C-12638, p.
58.
98
Ibid., 62 and D. Thorburn to R.T. Pennefather, S.G. Indian Affairs, 13 Oct 1858, RG10, vol. 245, pt.1,
no 11401-11500, C-12638.
119
meeting, Thorburn emphasized this gesture, underlining its significance: “They complained of
breaches of faith and became alarmed for… guidance of their affairs and hence they presented
with a Bunch of wampum the end of which is all black. They desire I do not return it until I
remove the Black with White in its place.”99 The Council was demanding that the government
come up with a new plan to set their relationship back on track.
It should also be noted that a further council took place in the spring of 1860 at Sarnia,
held alongside the gathering to greet the Royal Tour of the Prince of Wales. 100 This council was
attended by Anishinaabe communities, with many of the same delegates as in 1858 including H.
P. Chase, David Wawanosh, and John Sunday, 101 and the meeting of two years previous would
have been on their minds. Grievances that were presented here included fisheries, unsurrendered
lands and “old defalcations” of Indian Agents. 102 The council produced a petition to the Duke of
Newcastle that clearly voiced their anger at the how the Department of Indian Affairs was
managing their finances, controlling the fisheries, surveying and selling both unsurendered and
reserve land, and obtaining surrenders under the threat of forced removal. 103 They also
specifically note that the Department had been granted “authority to alienate our reserve lands,
without obtaining our consent, and even against our will and remonstrance.” 104 This was perhaps
a reference to the clauses within the Gradual Civilization Act of 1857 that granted the
Superintendent General the power to alienate parts of the reserve up to 50 acres for those who
99
D. Thorburn to R.T. Pennefather, S.G. Indian Affairs, 13 Oct 1858, RG10, vol. 245, pt.1, no 11401-
11500, C-12638.
100
On the Royal Tour and Indigenous involvement, see Ian Radforth, Royal Spectacle: The 1860 Visit of
the Prince of Wales to Canada and the United States (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017).
101
Memorandum of the proceedings of an Indian Council held at Sarnia on the 12 Sept. 1860, RG10, vol.
256, no. 401-600, 156965-13980, C-12645.
102
Ibid. Janet Chute, The Legacy of Shingwaukonse, 176. This was after rejecting to support the land
claim of Mrs. Catherine Sutton, as it was seen as too specific and “did not affect the Indians generally.”
Memorandum of the proceedings of an Indian Council held at Sarnia on the 12 September, 1860, LAC
RG10, vol. 256, no. 401-600, 156965-13980, Microfilm C-12645.
103
104
Ibid.
120
enfranchised.105 A complete list of signatories is not included in the copy of the petition held in
the records of the DIA, but it was signed by Chief Henry Madwayosh and 49 other leaders. 106
Madwayosh was at the inaugural gathering of Grand General Council, and consistently
participated in at least five Grand General Council gatherings in the following decades,
becoming the second Vice-President in 1888.107 Madwayosh’s presence in 1860, as well as the
presence of Chief John Sunday of Alnwick, Ogista of Garden River, and David Wawanosh at
the gathering demonstrate the connections between this gathering and later Grand General
Councils.108
As the Grand Council convened in 1870, this political background would have been
familiar for many delegates, and echoes of the deep frustration expressed in 1858 and 1860
continued. Leaders had also witnessed, in the preceding twelve years, continued reductions to
their land base, for instance with the 1858 Pennefather treaties and the 1862 treaty of Manitoulin
Island.109 The land base of Six Nations had been reduced from 55, 000 acres to 44, 000 acres in
1867.110 I now turn in the next section to how enfranchisement was deal with in 1870, which
posed another threat to reserve land bases. Alliances between the two nations remained
important at the 1870 Council: after the reading that Smoke Johnson provided of the wampum
belts it was agreed that they should be present at all future gatherings, an acknowledgement of
the foundation of Indigenous diplomatic law upon which the Grand General Council was built.
105
An Act to Encourage the gradual Civilization of the Indian Tribes in this Provice, andto amend the
laws respecting Indians, S. Prov. C. 1857, c. 26, s. VII.
106
107
Of the council minutes that I have seen, Henry H. Madwayosh was a Grand General Council Delegate
in 1870, 1882, 1884, 1888, and 1894. “W. H. Madwayosh” is listed as a delegate in 1906.
108
Memorandum of the proceedings of an Indian Council held at Sarnia ont he 12 Sept. 1860, LAC
RG10, vol. 256, no. 401-600, 156965-13980, C-12645.
109
Janet Chute, The Legacy of Shingwaukonse, 169-176.
110
Deborah Doxtator, “What Happened to the Iroquois Clans? A Study of Clans in Three Nineteenth
Century Rotinonhsyonni Communities” (PhD Diss., University of Western Ontario, 1996), 219. This was
a further reduction from original boundary of the reserve of 600,000 acres in 1784, reduced to 220,000
acres in 1798 and 55,000 acres in 1847.
121
As the council continued over the next several days, the focus turned to how the allies would
deal with the legislation itself.
2.2.2. Enfranchisement at the 1870 Grand General Council

After careful review of the legislation section by section, the 1870 Council firmly
rejected the 1869 Gradual Enfranchisement Act. The first twelve sections of the law were read,
explained, and interpreted into Anishinabemowin and “the Six Nations languages” over the
remaining days of the council. 111 Allan Salt, the secretary of the council, did not record the
details of the discussion on each section of the law, but almost all were unanimously rejected
when they were voted upon. 112 The one exception was that delegates voted to keep the 3rd
clause, which dealt with liquor restrictions on reserve. Delegates voted to reject the rest of the
law that infringed on their jurisdiction over reserve lands and band membership. The rejected
sections included those that gave authority to the Superintendent general to grant locations on
reserves (and his related authority over inheritance of these locations); that imposed a one-
quarter blood quantum requirement for annuity payments; that removed annuities payments for
those convicted of a crime or for those who abandoned their wives or children; that removed the
status of women marrying non-band members; that gave the Superintendent General power to
use band funds to care for the sick and aged or repair bridges or roads; and that allowed elections
to be imposed on reserves. The remaining sections of the law (sec. 13-24) appear not to have
been discussed directly, but the letter from the Council to the Governor General makes clear that
the legislation was in near totality rejected by the council. They demanded “at [the hands of the
111
Canada, June 10, 1870 (Hamilton: The Spectator Office, 1870), 18. Translation at the council was a huge
job and required several individuals to carry it out. Initially Peter Smith was appointed as the interpreter,
but in the following days Joseph Fisher was appointed as assistant interpreter, and Fisher was later
replaced by Wawanosh as the burden of translation the previous week had been heavy. Ibid., p. 16, 17,
21. It is also noted that the wampum belt reading that opened the council was translated into French by
Louis Kanerakentuate from Lake of Two Mountains, Ibid., 7.
112
The only disputed section was section 8, which dealt with the Superintendent General’s ability to use
band funds to provide for the sick and aged if the band was not doing so. Allan Salt was in favour of
keeping this section. The General Council of the Six Nations and Delegates from different Band in
Western and Eastern Canada, June 10, 1870 (Hamilton: The Spectator Office, 1870), 18-19.
122
Governor General], as the Representative of our Gracious Queen, different legislation from that
shown in the last act of Parliament affecting Indian interests.” 113 In the petition to the Governor
General, the delegates are clear in their position vis-à-vis any future legislation: “The Council
demands that proper consultation with the Indian people should be had, when any Act of
Parliament is proposed which may affect them, and not left to subordinates who have no true
knowledge of Indian advancements or requirements.”114
Delegates also proposed a path forward to the government; motions passed at the council
demonstrate how they imagined a more sustainable position for their communities in relation
with the settler state. Their proposals show a willingness on the part of some council participants
to participate in Canadian political life, while retaining local control of their sovereignty. The
proposals demonstrate a clear desire to retain control of their small remaining lands. In response
to the first section of the law (that gave the Superintendent General jurisdiction over locations on
reserve), multiple delegates list the ways that they were legally in possession of reserve lands.115
The council minutes show how delegates describe a variety of legal bases for land ownership on
their reserves:
The reason for objecting to Section 1st…was given by William Fisher of Walpole Island.
Saying, that they had never surrendered their land to the government, which they are
now occupying. P. Crow, Mississauga tribe, said that his reason for objecting to Section
1st was that it was contrary to the Royal Proclamation of 1763. N. H. Burning, of the
Six Nations, objects…because they have Deed or Grant of Land, dated the 30 th March,
1795 (which is registered in the Indian Department,) signed by General Frederick
Haldimand, which may be seen in Lib. A., Vol. viii. Joseph Sky of Caughnawaga,
objects…because they have a Title dated 1750. W. J. W. Hill, Bay of Quinte, gave his
113
Copy of Petition to His Excellency Sir John Young, Governor General of Canada, The General
Council of the Six Nations and Delegates from different Band in Western and Eastern Canada, June 10,
1870 (Hamilton: The Spectator Office, 1870), p. 27. Here they position name both the “increasing
position” of the “Indian people of Western Canada” as well as the “large amount of money in the hands of
the Trustees for Indians.”
114
Canada, June 10, 1870 (Hamilton: The Spectator Office, 1870), 27.
115
Canada, June 10, 1870 (Hamilton: The Spectator Office, 1870), 20-21.
123
reason for objecting…said that they had bought their land with a more precious thing
than money, which was with their own blood, by assisting the British; and we have
Letters Patent for the land in our possession. Oneidas, of Muncy, bought theirs.116
Whether unceeded, through title deeds, or understood otherwise, delegates were clear about
naming the settler forms of property that established them as owners of their lands, and were
clear that they held jurisdiction over what decisions should be made about land there.
Delegates approved other motions that demonstrate how they envisioned increased
control over decisions on reserve: that there should be greater transparency in the use of band
funds by the department, that they be able to nominate their own “Commissioner” (or Indian
Agent, the Six Nations also desired to appoint their own Justice), that no land be sold without the
consent of male members of the band, that they be exempt from Game and Fishery laws, and that
their bands should control the cutting of timber. 117 They also voted to go to the House of
Commons and “press for justice when the Indian Bill was being read” and that “a liberal
provision be made by the Dominion Government to allow four natives in the House of Commons
in Ottawa to represent the different tribes.”118 These motions demonstrate a radically different
imaginary of what governance should look like in relation to the settler government than had
been presented in the Act of 1869. They demanded that their sovereignty over their own
communities be recognized, as it had been through historic alliance relationships.
The gathering in 1858 was invoked at the 1870 council, and the anger at the government
that had been expressed there was remembered. The Reverend H. P. Chase, when the council
agreed “that the different Acts of Parliament concerning Indians be read over, and afterwards
116
Ibid.
117
Ibid., 21-22. The motion that “no land reserved for Indians be sold, unless surrendered by consent of
all male Indians, of bands or tribes, of 21 years” was proposed by Chief Johnson of Six Nations. Deborah
Doxtator outlines how after the 1847 land consolidation at Six Nations, womens roles in the economy and
landholding changed. The royaner council allocated plots of land to adult men in 1847, and that
“patrilineal land ownership and inheritance was already being practiced among the Six Nations long
before the Canadian government passed its legislation in 1869.” Doxtator, “What Happened to the
Iroquois Clans?”, 227 and 229. Doxtator also explains women’s continued role in the agricultural
econmomy, and as owners of plots of lands themselves, 230-231.
118
Ibid., 22.
124
discussed paragraph by paragraph,” had recalled the council of 1858: "He called to mind the
General Council of 12 years ago, we then declared when the Indians came under the control of
the Canadian Government, efforts would be made to encroach upon them and drive them away;
it is now coming to pass- the late Act shows it. Let the Indians show the Government they have
mind [sic] and are no longer children.”119 His position sums up the general mood of the council
as it ended. Delegates elected Chase and Chief Simcoe Kerr of Six Nations to present the views
of the council to the Governor General. 120
It is difficult to ascertain the weight that the government placed on these types of gatherings.
The wampum belt readings, as received by Joseph Howe, might have been easily disregarded,
but unified opposition from the most “civilized” (in the government’s words) of the tribes that
were supposed to be the cornerstone of their enfranchisement policy– in particular within the
context of the expansion to the West and the beginnings of the resistance to their rule that were
beginning there– would pose a real challenge to policy implementation. If the federal
government could not make enfranchisement policy work in Southern Ontario and Quebec, they
were facing an entrenchment of responsibility for reserves that they were hoping to avoid. Over
the next several years, up to when they passed the Indian Act, the government tried to appease
these leaders, forming relationships with several leaders most amenable to the law, and carefully
attempting to alter the legislation to accommodate their views without losing ground on their
policy of assimilation. As the following sections demonstrate, for some Anishinaabe leaders,
who wanted to build a new place for their communities in the emerging nation, this offered an
opening and they saw enfranchisement (as the processes became redefined in law requiring band
consent in 1876) as a pathway to greater political participation. Haudenosaunee leaders
continued, by and large, to insist on the independence of their governance and after 1882 no
longer participated at the Grand General Council. Enfranchisement as a policy generated heated
debate within the remaining Anishinaabe dominated council. But the 1858 and 1870 councils
should be recognized for their historic significance as moments where the alliance between
119
Ibid., 16.
120
Ibid., 24.
125
Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabe nations was unified. Together, they were deeply involved in
tracking and responding to the legislative changes made by the government, and a firm position
was presented by them against the legislative and constitutional changes the government was
proposing.
2.3. The Approval of the Indian Act in 1876:

“Accommodationist” Leaders and the Idea of Dual
Citizenship through Enfranchisement
“We liked the bill, and thought the Indians would like it”
-Diary of Alan Salt, delegate from the Grand General Council to Ottawa invited to review
the Indian Act, Monday February 14, 1876
The Grand General Council met again in 1872, and met at Sarnia in 1874. I have not
located the minutes of the 1872 Council, but enfranchisement in the 1869 legislation again
dominated the debate in 1874. 121 However, the legislative landscape would again change, and in
February of 1876, another delegation of Indigenous leaders went to Ottawa. This was two
months before the Indian Act would be passed by Parliament in April and the delegation went
with the express purpose of reviewing the law; this was at the invitation of David Laird, the
Minister of the Interior. This meeting resulted in a very different outcome than the rejections of
state law in Council in 1870 and by the Haudenosaunee delegation that year. The delegates from
the Grand General Council, Allan Salt, William Wawanosh, and John Henry ended their visit
with Laird by agreeing that the Indian Act was a good law. They returned to the Grand General
Council in 1876 to successfully champion it there. From today’s perspective, considering the
notoriously repressive history of the law, as well as considering the recent council-based history
described above, this acceptance is surprising. This section provides some context for their
position. Although it remains unclear why these delegates would have accepted many parts of
the law, the change to enfranchisement legislation that had been advocated for at the 1874 Grand
121
The Grand General Council of the Chippewas, Munsees, Six Nations, etc. etc. held on the Sarnia
Reserve, June 25th to July 3rd, 1874 (Sarnia: The “Canadian” Steam Publishing Establishment, 1874).
The 1872 meeting is referenced in Doctor Oronhyatekha to Minister of the Interior, June [11th] 1872,
LAC RG10, Vol. 1934, file 3541.
126
Council (examined below) and accepted by the government was a primary reason that they did
so. This change reinstated band authority over enfranchisement processes (while still requiring
the ultimate consent of the Superintendent General). In this section I provide context for their
approval of the law by first looking at the personal and political histories of these leaders. Their
histories of religious affiliation and common histories of advocacy for acceptance into Canadian
society can explain their accommodationist tendencies. However, the positions expressed in the
debates on enfranchisement at the 1874 council nuances this. I next look to how
enfranchisement was envisioned at this council. The position that was accepted there was that
bands should have the authority to decide who could enfranchise, and that enfranchisement
should be a means to strengthen local communities by having members participate in Canadian
political life, all the while retaining annuity payments and strong ties to their bands. In this way,
I argue that their vision was not aligned with state goals of eroding reserve land bases and
government responsibility through creating citizens. Rather, as their correspondences to the
Governor General (also sent in 1874) and the position they took in council demonstrate, they
were interested in maintaining their position as allies of the Crown while also gaining the
financial and political advantages of escaping from the Indian Act. This might be considered a
“dual citizenship” model of enfranchisement rather than a capitulation to state demands of
assimilation.
Salt, Wawanosh, and Henry, leaders from Rice Lake, Sarnia and Chippewas of the
Muncytown, respectively, came to Ottawa to review the new Indian Act on short notice, a
telegram requesting their presence arriving on the 13th of February and Salt left for Ottawa the
following day.122 Details of the five-day visit itself are scarce, but the relationship between the
men was longstanding. The men were old friends– in his diary Salt calls them “my esteemed
friends and brothers in the church”– and he met Henry on route to Ottawa to travel together. 123
In Salt’s account of the five-day visit, they did their “duty” after being instructed by Laird to
122
Donald B. Smith fonds, 2013.08, Box 25, file 13, Allan Salt Diary, Sunday February 13 and Monday
February 14, 1876.
123
Ibid., Monday February 14 1876 and February 22 1876.
127
“look over the Bill and to make notes on the margins,” and he mentions the legislation itself only
briefly: “We liked the Act. We thought the Indians would like it.”124
The delegates were connected through their involvement in Methodist-led missionary

networks of the mid-nineteenth century and had become prominent voices within the Grand
General Council. The history of early Methodist political involvement and influence on Grand
General Council thought is explored to a greater degree in the following chapter, but I will go
over some of the leaders’ connections here, as they represent an important body of political
thought within the council. Indeed, the advocacy of these leaders in the Grand General Council
of 1876 seems to have led to the acceptance of the law by the delegates there.
Prominent Anishinaabe Methodists were integrated into Anishinaabe political networks

of council-based governance over the nineteenth century. Many of the most notable voices in
early Grand General Council politics were leaders involved in Anishinaabe politics who had
deep connections to Methodist Church networks, whose alliances, and ideas of relating to settler
society stretched back a generation and intertwined many of their lives’ trajectories. Salt,
Wawanosh, and Henry were exemplary of these networks of connection, having all three been
raised within them. William Wawanosh was the son of Methodist convert Joshua Wawanosh,
who had a long friendship with Peter Jones. 125 Salt, for his part, had been adopted by the
prominent Missionary William Case as a child and raised at the mission that Case had
established at Grape Island. Despite this adoption, he retained Indian status until 1889 when he
enfranchised, alongside his wife and children. 126 Salt had a long and wide-ranging career as a
missionary himself, working at the St. Clair Mission at Sarnia in 1853, ordained as a deacon in
Toronto in 1854, serving as a missionary at Rainy River until 1857, and at Garden River in 1858
and 1859, Christian Island from 1860-1867, St. Clair (again) from 1868-1871, Muncey from
124
Ibid. Monday February 14 1876. Salt’s use of ‘the Indians” should not be taken as a differentiation
between himself and other leaders, depite his adoption he maintained Indian status until 1889 when he
enfranchised. Kirkby, “Paradises Lost?”, 630.
125
Peter Jones to Chief Wawanosh, dated Credit River, Dec. 7 1838, Box 4382, no. 6, UWO, E. J. Pratt
Library, Donald Smith Fonds, 2013.08, Series 7, Box 34.
126
Kirky, “Paradises Lost?,” 630.
128
1872-74, Christian and Beausoleil Islands until 1882, and from 1883 onwards at Parry Island. 127
He had also worked as an interpreter in many earlier councils, including at Orillia in 1846 and as
a government interpreter.128 John Henry was the son of George Henry, or Mungwudaus, another
influential Methodist missionary who eventually left the church and travelled with his family
across Europe, the young Henry included, but whose life interconnected in multiple ways with
other leaders.129
Other prominent members of the early Grand General Councils also had strong
connections to the Methodist church. They included Dr. Peter Edmund Jones, son of the
influential Methodist missionary Peter Jones, and Henry P. Chase, who like Salt had been raised
by William Case and had been an interpreter for the Indian Department for the Lake St. Clair
Ojibwe at Sarnia, and a Methodist missionary at Muncey and Michipicoten on Lake Superior
before later becoming an Anglican deacon. 130 John Sunday, another Mississauga convert, had
established the mission settlement at Grape Island in 1826 with Case (and knew Chase as a
youngster there, considering him a “young man of exemplary conduct”). 131 He served as a
missionary along Lake Superior and at Alderville, where he helped to expand the industrial
school (where Allan Salt taught), 132 and was involved in establishing the Mount Elgin Industrial
127
Parry Sound North Weekender, The Parry Sound North Star, Thursday August 16, 1990, E. J. Pratt
Library, Donald Smith Fonds, 2013.08, Box 25, file 2.
128
Minutes of the General Council of Indian Chiefs and Principal Men Held at Orillia, Lake Simcoe
Narrows, On Thursday the 30th and Friday the 31 July, 1846 (Montreal: Canadian Gazette, 1846) and
“Jubilee Anniversary of Parry Island,” E. J. Pratt Library, Donald Smith Fonds, 2013.08, Box 25, file 2.
129
On the life of George Henry see Donald Smith, Mississauga Portraits: Ojibwe Voices from
Nineteenth-Century Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013): 126-163 and Cory Wilmott,
“Object Lessons: An Ojibwe Artifact Unraveled. The Case of the Bag with the Snake Skin Strap.” Textile
History, 34 (1, 2003): 74-81.
130
Donald B. Smith, “CHASE, HENRY PAHTAHQUAHONG,” in Dictionary of Canadian Biography,
vol. 12, University of Toronto/Université Laval, 2003–, accessed March 1,
2022, http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/chase_henry_pahtahquahong_12E.html.
131
Ibid.
132
Smith, Mississauga Portraits, 238. Salt and Sunday also attended
129
School.133 Sunday was another Grand General Council member who had a long career as a
Methodist Missionary, an advocate for Mississauga rights, and a Grand Council delegate.134 As
this brief overview demonstrates, through these networks their relationships with other
Anishinaabe leaders involved in the Grand General Council would have been long established
across Southern Ontario. This was also the case through their missionary involvements further
North, for instance with the leadership at Garden River, or with the Shawanaga leader Solomon
James who we met in the last chapter and who was also a Methodist convert, a teacher at
Beausoleil Island, and in Grand General Council participation into the 1880s. 135 Networks of
mobility and exchange of ideas would have been facilitated through these missionary postings,
involvements in establishing schools, and through common religious concerns. These group of
leaders also shared similar experiences of education, travel, and deep engagement with settler
politics, some at very high levels: for instance Henry P. Chase had delivered the address on
behalf of delegates at the 1860 to the Prince of Wales, and had been received by the lord mayor
of London and had an audience with the Prince of Wales on his third trip to London in 1885. 136
Their connection to each other through council gatherings continued during the 1870s and 1880s,
both for those who remained involved in the church and those who had left.
In many ways these leaders were aligned with government ideas of religious conversion,
residential schooling (albeit prior to the large-scale expansion of state and church run schools),
and assimilation into settler society. They were themselves also professionally successful, for
133
Ibid.
134
G. S. French, “SHAH-WUN-DAIS,” in Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 10, University of
Toronto/Université Laval, 2003–, accessed March 1,
2022, http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/shah_wun_dais_10E.html and Smith, Mississauga Portraits, 212-
244.
135
Minutes of the Eighth Grand General Indian Council held upon the Cape Crocker Indian Reserve,
County of Bruce, From September 10th to Sept 15th, 1884 (Hagersville: The Indian Publishing Company,
1884) and E. J. Pratt Library, Donald B. Smith fonds, 2013.08, Box 25, file 15, copy of RG10, vol. 564,
C-13370 “Annual Report, 1884-85, xxxvi-xxxvii.”
136
Donald B. Smith, “CHASE, HENRY PAHTAHQUAHONG,” in Dictionary of Canadian Biography,
vol. 12, University of Toronto/Université Laval, 2003–, accessed November 12,
130
instance Peter E. Jones being the first Indigenous doctor in Canada, and Chase owned property
off-reserve, noting in council enfranchisement debates that he already paid taxes due to
properties he owned in Sarnia.137 They were used to engaging with the common law, were part
of a broad historical trajectory of attempting to influence these laws– both locally and in Britain–
that stretched back to the attempts of Peter Jones and John Sunday to obtain land titles in the
1830s, and had seen great changes during their lifetimes in terms of their own family history and
community trajectories. The speech of John Sunday in the 1870 council represents the attitude
of these leaders to the changes in the law due to their specific histories of long effort to engage
with government officials in the hopes of getting the relationship back on track to what they
perceived as a much more positive relation with the Crown There, Sunday “[called] to mind the
necessity of consulting wisely together, and his visit to England when the authorities there
received him with courtesy and kindness and granted his request to allow the Indians to remain
where they were. He was sorry when he heard of the present Act having been passed, but called
upon the Chiefs to consider it carefully, reject what is bad and keep what is good.” 138
It is also of great significance that leaders from this background were the only Indigenous
men to enfranchise in the nineteenth century. 139 Kirkby found in his study that all successful
enfranchisement candidates were Methodist converts, and came from either the Wawanosh
family at Sarnia, or the Salt and Chase families at Alnwick including William Wawanosh, Allan
Salt and Henry P. Chase. 140 From Kirkby’s study the exact numbers of total enfranchisements
137
Reserve, June 25th to July 3rd, 1874 (Sarnia: The “Canadian” Steam Publishing Establishment, 1874), p.
20.
138
139
Kikby provides a table of all enfranchise applications from 1857-1900, both successful (numbering 57)
and rejected (numbering 25). Kirkby, “Paradises Lost?” 619.
140
The full list of enfranchises Kirkby lists are all three of William Wawanosh’s children and their
families (Edward Wawanosh Wells, his wife, and two children, Reverend Charles P. Wawanosh Wells,
his wife and child, and Augusta Wawanosh Wells), Allan Salt and his brother Wellington Salt (with their
wives and children) and Henry P. Chase’s two daughters, Mary Margaret Ann and Elma Eliza. Ibid., 630-
631.
131
are unclear as a table lists eight successful applicants from each community, and yet he later
claims that there were only seven Anishinaabe men and women from the two bands that
enfranchised in total.141 However, the enfranchisement of Wawanosh, Salt, Chase and their
families makes clear that these leaders should be understood as having longstanding personal as
well as political commitments to the idea of enfranchisement.
However, these leaders were not strangers to the impacts of the deep racism and
economic pressures of the mid-nineteenth century, where expanding settlement threatened the
existence of their small communities. Alan Salt had worked as a translator during the tense
negotiations at Garden River over land and resources there in 1858. 142 Racial categories
enshrined through the Indian Act would have brought up deeply personal family questions of
membership for those with one white parent or who were married to white women. 143 Their
arguments demonstrate a desire to protect community interests as they understood them. It was
from this position that these leaders were working out how to best carve out a place for
themselves and their communities within settler society. Within the deep constraints placed on
them by the encroachment of settlement on their lands, and the restrictions through government
legislation on how to control this, how were their community members to engage and benefit
from the private property regime while maintaining the limited land base of reserves? How were
they to participate fully in political systems alongside their settler counterparts to have local
issues accounted for by the settler government?
The delegates personal lives and histories thus positioned them regarding the question of
integration and enfranchisement in certain favorable ways, but their approval of the Indian Act in
1876 should also be contextualized in terms of the political discussions that arose in council after
141
Ibid., 619 and 629.
142
Janet Chute, The Legacy of Shingwaukonse: A Century of Native Leadership (Toronto, University of
Toronto Press, 1998), 170.
143
Peter E. Jones, William Wawanosh and Allan Salt were all married to white women, and all rejected
section 4 of the Enfranchisement Act at the 1874 Council. The Grand General Council of the Chippewas,
Munsees, Six Nations, etc. etc. held on the Sarnia Reserve, June 25th to July 3rd, 1874 (Sarnia: The
“Canadian” Steam Publishing Establishment, 1874), p. 14-15.
132
1870. In the council leading up to 1876– at Sarnia in late June of 1874– how to negotiate the
terms of enfranchisement with the government remained a central question for council delegates.
The role of band councils was central here. William Wawanosh, now the Vice-president of the
council, introduced enfranchisement as the “first topic of business.”144 Unlike the clear rejection
of new laws that we saw above in the councils of 1858 and 1870, some leaders advocated for a
more accommodationist approach at this meeting, although not without great controversy among
delegates. Some leaders made clear that there was interest in their communities in adopting the
law. For instance, John Henry “fully believed when a competent Indian was enfranchised he
would prosper,” and Chief Moses Brown of Oneidatown stated that “In his tribe there were
young men who were educated. He will not keep them back from becoming enfranchised,”
considering that “the educated were those who were elevating his tribe.” 145 Other leaders
cautioned against it, including James Asquabe, of Snake Island, who stated “None of my people
… wished for enfranchisement. They think it would be the means of bringing them to
poverty.”146 Chief Burning of Grand River voiced concern about the loss of reserve lands,147 and
presented an account of a member who had enfranchised, moved to the United States and
returned to the reserve destitute. 148 The Rev. Abram Sickles of Oneidatown acknowledged the
divisions in the council: “We are of different opinion. Some wish to take the advantage of the
Act for enfranchisement, others strongly oppose it. Let us grant the privilege of enfranchisement
to those wishing for it, and those opposed to it let them remain as we are now, as long as they
wished. Let us hear each other, and let no one act rashly.”149 The council was in need of a way
to accommodate the various positions on enfranchisement that delegates ardently presented.
144
Reserve, June 25th to July 3rd, 1874 (Sarnia: The “Canadian” Steam Publishing Establishment, 1874) p.9.
145
Ibid., 12 and 19.
146
Ibid., 18.
147
Ibid., 12 and 18.
148
Ibid., 18-19.
149
Ibid., 12.
133
Peter E. Jones of New Credit presented a third option altogether– that the council create
an entirely new law and not be bound by the existing Enfranchisement Act. In advocating for
this he alludes to the government wanting to ensure that Indigenous leaders would accept the
law: “The present Government are not favourable to the Act before us. They give us the
privilege of discussing, and making new regulations. We ourselves make an Act of our own.
The New Credit Band reject Section 1 [the section laying out enfranchisement processes]
altogether. Let us make something new.” 150 Section 1 of the Enfranchisement Act was rejected
unanimously; however new proposals were made over the days of the council gathering which
demonstrate the continued debate and negotiation between council delegates and their desire to
reframe the law to better suit community needs. 151
During the debate in council, Wawanosh pushed for a model of enfranchisement quite
similar to the government’s– but where individuals would obtain permission from the tribal
council (instead of the Superintendent of Indian Affairs) to be granted a plot of land for
enfranchisement, as had originally been the case in the 1857 legislation. The applicant would
then, according to Wawanosh’s plan, be cut off from all further privileges of band
membership.152 Chief John Henry, challenged this, stating that under Wawanosh’s proposal
“only one in a thousand would accept enfranchisement. The terms were too severe.” 153 Henry
was also in favour of enfranchisement, drawing a comparison to the position of emancipated
African-Americans in the United States: “As soon as he was emancipated, he began to fill
important positions; and his voice was soon heard in the Legislative Assembly and in
Congress.”154 Henry also argued for the retention of annuity payments– which he considered “a
birthright to the Indian and his family, whether he remained a minor or was elevated to the
position of a citizen,” and which would provide a “link between himself and the reserve to which
150
Ibid., 11.
151
Ibid., 13.
152
Ibid., 9.
153
Ibid., 17.
154
Ibid., 9.
134
he formerly belonged.”155 The importance of maintaining a “link” to the reserve was

contextualized with the expectation that enfranchised men would fully participate in Canadian
politics. Henry goes on: “If afterwards he was elected to sit in the Municipal council or County
council, or was even elected as a member of Parliament he could thereby do a great deal for the
good of his tribe.”156 He also argued for not enfranchising wives and children for this reason:
that the enfranchised “be the advocate for the rights of the Tribe to which his family
belonged.”157 Through Henry’s proposal you can see his focus on maintaining tribal unity
alongside participation in Canadian political structures.
Enfranchisement was clearly a contentious issue at the Council, but it was also
understood to be essential to resolve, as many communities expressed an interest in adopting it
for their communities. The Council struck a committee to “draw up a plan or scheme for
enfranchisement” to lay before the Grand Council, composed of 17 delegates. 158 This committee
resulted in two proposals. The first was from Reverend Allan Salt, who proposed a non-
transferable deed to reserve land be granted to those who enfranchised. 159 This was to retain
reserve unity and ran contrary to the government’s framework of piecemeal land erosion to
dissolve reserves. Salt’s proposal was withdrawn in favor of a proposal put forward by Dr. Peter
Jones.160 This proposal was quite similar to the government’s– with two important exceptions.
The first, adopting Wawanosh’s vision, was that tribes would control enfranchisement
155
Ibid., 10.
156
Ibid.
157
Ibid., 17.
158
This committee included Peter E. Jones (New Credit), John Jacobs (Rama), Allan Salt (Alnwick),
William Wawanosh (Sarnia), John Henry (Munceytown), Charles Halfmoon (Lower Muncey), William
Jacobs (Cayuga), Charles Kiyosk (Walpole Island), Joseph Sky (Caughnawaga), James Snake
(Moraviantown), James Ashquare (Snake Island), Adam Shawnoo (Kettle Point), John Sickels
(Oneidatown), P. J. Kegondonce (Cape Croker), Simpson Quan[?] (Saugeen), J. Porter (Grand River).
James Johnson (Sauble).
159
Ibid., 22.
160
Ibid.
135
decisions.161 Secondly, enfranchisees would retain “their rights to participate in the annuities
and interest money, and rents and councils of the Tribe, band or body to which they belong is
concerned.”162 The Council passed this proposal unanimously and sent it to the government with
the meeting minutes, concluding the debate within the council on the question of
enfranchisement. Jones’ emphasis on maintaining annuity payments and participation in the
political life of the Band suggest a very different vision than the assimilationist goals of the state
through the law that sought to chip away at tribal land bases and membership. This is a
significant departure from the government’s assimilation project and demonstrates how delegates
saw enfranchisement: gaining a right to participate in settler government and society without
losing their connection to, or authority over, over their own communities. Their vision for
increased political participation, while retaining and strengthening their own communities, can
perhaps best be understood as akin to an idea of “dual citizenship.” Rather than having to lose
their own authority and communities through subjecthood and incorporation into the Canadian
body politic, this would be retained, and their interest in enfranchisement was to further advance
community prosperity as they understood this.
The approval of Jones’s proposal was not universally accepted by the communities who
were represented at the Grand Council. A January letter from Indian Agent Livingstone to David
Laird the following year, written at the request of the chiefs of the Chippewas and Munceys of
the Thames, stated that “they are opposed to the Resolution about, as they understand, to be
presented by a deputation from the Grand General Council of Indians held at Sarnia last June and
that they are prepared to enter a formal protest against the same should it be deemed expedient
and necessary to do so.”163 Shields notes that goals of the deputation referenced here were
merely to ask the government not to pass enfranchisement legislation until further community
discussions could be had, and that the Liberal government acted on this, delaying moving on
161
Ibid.
162
Ibid., 23.
163
LAC, RG10, vol. 1948, file 4292, W. Livingston to David Laird, January 15 1875. See also Shields,
55-56.
136
enfranchisement until the following year. 164 However, the resolution is an important reminder
that even positions agreed upon through voting in council were contested.
Additionally, in the summer following the 1874 council, another form of political
communication to the government was made in the form of three addresses sent directly to the
Governor-General by several members of the Council. One of these addresses was written in
August from Sarnia, for the Governor General’s “first visit to this part of the Dominion,” three
months after the June council had been held there. 165 The similarity in content between the
documents suggest perhaps a coordinated effort on the part of these leaders. As had been done in
addresses to the Prince of Wales in 1860, these documents confirm the continued and important
relationship with the Crown for their communities. They are beautifully illuminated and
illustrated, signifying the great care that these leaders placed in maintaining this relationship with
the Crown. The letters came from New Credit, signed by Peter E. Jones (who was the author of
the enfranchisement provision presented by the Council in 1874), from Wawanosh and other
Sarnia leaders, and from Shawanaga, signed by Solomon James, a leader discussed in the last
chapter through his engagement in timbering disputes, who was also connected through
Methodist networks and would in 1882 become the vice-president of the Grand General
Council.166 All three of these letters contain a declaration of continued alliance, but also offer
clues as to their political positions as they declare their desire for greater inclusion in settler
society.
Enfranchisement was central in two of these addresses. The address from Sarnia
emphasizes their Christianity and states “we are doing what we can to imitate our white fellow
164
Shields, 56.
165
LAC, Frederick Temple Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood, 1st Marquess of Dufferin and Ava fonds, Box
BK-319, Address to the Governor-General, Lord Dufferin, from the Grand General Council of the Indians
of Canada, Sarnia, August 20, 1874. Although it is listed as being from the Grand General Council, the
document itself only lists Sarnia chiefs.
166
Room, 1883).
137
subjects in industry, economy, and education,” before going on to say “we still pursue and look
to the time as not far distant when we shall hold our land in our right, and exercise our franchise
and all other privileges common to our white fellow subjects.” 167 The chiefs at New Credit, in
their address also mention enfranchisement specifically: “We trust that the signs of loyalty,
education, and prosperity you see amongst us may induce you with us to desire the speedy
enfranchisement of those of Her Majesty’s Indian subject in Canada who are deserving that then
a great number of us might as fellow citizens welcome you and not be obliged by an unfortunate
circumstance to address you as children.”168 The letter from Parry Sound does not address
enfranchisement, but does say that they are pleased with British justice and hope “that the same
just spirit will prevail in future.”169 It is of note that in the letter from New Credit, the image of
an eagle, the doodem of Peter E. Jones through his father, is labeled “totem or crest” and the
signatures of the Sarnia address include doodem images as well, referencing their authority and
responsibilities grounded in Anishinaabe governance practices. These addresses provide more
insight into how these delegates understood their relationship with the Crown; they were
expecting to be respected as allies, to have their desire for incorporation into society met.
How was the government responding to all of these various forms of communication
about the law? David Laird, who had met with Salt, Wawanosh, and Henry in mid-February,
introduced the Indian Act in the House of Commons on March 2, two weeks later. Here he
stated that the main goal was consolidation of previous legislation but noted that the “principal
amendment” to these laws related to enfranchisement.170 The changes he highlighted here had to
do with how property could be passed on to children under the new law, in what he considered
167
Ibid.
168
Ibid., Address from the Mississauga Tribe of Ojibwe Indians, New Credit, Brant County. Emphasis in
original.
169
Ibid., Address to the Governor-General, Lord Dufferin from the Ojibwe Indians of Parry Sound
District, probably in 1874.
170
Debates of the House of Commons of the Dominion of Canada: Third Session, Third Parliament,
March 2 1876, p. 342.
138
would be an “inducement” for enfranchisement to be adopted. 171 In the second reading,

however, it is evident that the reaction of Indigenous political leaders had been considered. Laird
here states, regarding enfranchisement, that “it had been deemed advisable to obtain the consent
of the band, and unless this was done it was considered that there would be a great deal of
trouble, and discontent would result.”172 The awareness of enfranchisement clauses previously
being rejected by Indigenous leaders is also apparent in an exchange between Laird and Hector
Langevin, the architect of the 1869 law. Langevin states: “The intention of the Minister of the
Interior was no doubt good in proposing to enfranchise the Indians, but the hon. Gentlemen
would fail as he (Mr. Langevin) had done in 1869. The Act of 1869 was framed to prevent
jealousies by keeping the land in the hands of the tribe, merely giving the enfranchised men a life
interest in it. That did not succeed, and the same cause would make the Bill before the House
inoperative.”173 To this Laird replied that the Bill was “framed to meet the views of the Indians
expressed at their grand council in Sarnia the summer before last. If they did not carry it out the
fault would rest with themselves and not with the Government.” 174 This makes clear that that
the inclusion of band consent in the new law was a direct result of the Council insisting on this at
their 1874 meeting, and the government was aware of the importance of convincing these leaders
that the law was worth their approval if it was not to fail as Langevin’s law had done.
The Grand Council at Saugeen in July of that year approved of the legislation after it had
been passed in Parliament. This meeting was attended by Anishinaabe delegates only. 175 The
minutes for this meeting are missing or were never taken, as far as I have been able to find, a
huge loss considering the importance of understanding what might have been debated the year
171
Ibid.
172
Ibid., March 21 1876, p. 749.
173
Ibid., p. 752-753.
174
Ibid., p. 753.
175
LAC, RG10, vol. 1994, file 6829, H. P. Chase to David Laird, July 12, 1876. Bands represented
included: “Rama, Saugeen, Walpole Island, Kettle Point, Sauble, Snake Island, Georgina Island, Scugog,
Garden River, Muncytown, Cape Croker, New Credit, Alnwick, Rice Lake, Sarnia, Christian Island and
Shawanaga.”
139
that the law was passed. This is especially true considering a “lengthy and interesting discussion
ensued” after the various sections of the Indian Act were read.176 However, the council did send
a letter to the David Laird that the Council approved the legislation by a vote of sixty-six
delegates in favour and one against, with the motion to approve the Act put forward by John
Henry.177 William Wawanosh next put forward a motion, carried unanimously, that “That this
Grand Council assembled at Saugeen, desire to express its gratitude to the Hon. D. Laird…and to
other members of the present Dominion Government for the Indian Act of 1876, passed at their
last session, and hope to see the Indians of Canada elevated and benefitted by the
enfranchisement therein permitted, and have no doubt that many of our people will avail
themselves of its advantages.”178 Enfranchisement was the highlight of the Indian Act for
Wawanosh and those who supported his movement. To them it represented a way to strengthen,
not erode, their communities.
Dr. Jones’ suggestions from the 1874 council around the continuation of annuities and
other tribal benefits for enfranchised men had not been included in the law, but his insistence that
that the approval of enfranchisement applications be controlled by the band was– an important
difference from the 1869 law. Thus, in 1876 it was likely that the Council saw this as a “backing
off” by the Canadian state, at least in terms of reinstating jurisdiction over enfranchisement. For
some, the authority that bands gained over enfranchisement decisions might have signified
returning their relationship with the Crown to something closer to their autonomous governance
under prior alliance relationships with the British. For others, the prospect of having their
members more fully integrate and hopefully benefit from settler society was desirable, and the
law allowed for this process to be more carefully managed by them.
176
The letter notes that “J. Henry, Puhgwujenene, William Wawanosh, Lamorandiere, Waucaush, J. L.
Kerby, Rev. H. P. Chase, Rev. J. Jacobs, J. B. Nanigishkung, Andrew Jacobs, D. Sawyer, Sumner,
Mahsegeshig, Kabaosa, Wahbemama, Menace, J. Fisher, Paudauch etc. etc.” participated in this
conversation or debate. LAC, RG10, vol. 1994, file 6829, H. P. Chase to David Laird, July 12, 1876.
177
Ibid.
178
Ibid. Emphasis added.
140
For leaders such as the three delegates to Ottawa, as well as many of other leaders who
participated in the Grand General Council, the changes made to the Indian Act in order to
reinstate band consent over enfranchisement processes must have been understood as a
significant victory. Perhaps the leaders understood the new powers outlined in the Indian Act to
be additive to the powers that they already exercised over their communities. They were, after
all, meeting in council as their communities had done historically, and at the time band council
governance was not mandatory: the Indian Act in 1876 allowed for maintaining hereditary
leadership. The harsher controls over reserve governance that came with the 1884 Indian
Advancement Act had not yet been imposed, nor had the increase in Indian Agent involvement in
enforcing the many repressive terms of the law. The concession made by the government to
enfranchisement processes was, for these leaders, an important victory in having their local
rights acknowledged in the evolving constitutional relationship. Framed within continuing
loyalty to the Crown, as was espoused through the 1860 and 1874 addresses to the Prince and to
the Governor General, these leaders were continuing their alliance relationship with the Crown
and wanted to have the full protections and rights under this. On the part of the government, the
law was intended to break down the local governance and land bases that the Grand General
Council sought to maintain and their engagement with the council should be seen as strategic in
order to push assimilationist policy goals further ahead.
As the Council continued to meet over the years, the approval of the Indian Act was neither
universally maintained, nor was it straightforward. Leaders such as Wawanosh, Salt, Henry,
Chase, and Jones might have been optimistic that the government had listened to them in 1876,
but the councils’ relationship with the Indian Act was complicated by many subsequent debates
both with the Haudenosaunee as well as between Anishinaabe delegates who were far less
favorable to the idea of enfranchisement, and other provisions of the law more generally.
2.4. Haudenosaunee Assertions of Sovereignty and Their

Split with the Grand General Council
“We believe the Act in question will in time deprive us of our liberties, rights, and privileges we now
enjoy under Treaty between Great Britain and the Six Nations Indians.”
141
-Memorial from about 300 Chiefs and Warriors of the Six Nations to the Right
Honourable John A. Macdonald against the Indian Act of 1876, Oshweken Council
House, January 8, 1879179
There are many instances within the Council minutes of disagreements between
Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabe delegates. This ranged from a dispute over having the
Council’s governance structure include elected officials at the Council drawn from council
delegates (which the Anishinaabe desired and almost left the Grand Council over in 1870) to
more substantive questions around how to deal with the controversial laws, in particular
enfranchisement.180 The Haudenosaunee in general, and the Six Nations in particular, did not
waver from their position presented at the 1858 and 1870 councils: that enfranchisement was not
something their communities desired as it was antithetical to their sovereignty as a nation.
The second half of the nineteenth century was an active time politically for the Six
Nations. Susan Hill describes how at Six Nations, communities there were dealing with the
turmoil that the massive loss of Haldimand Tract lands in the 1840s had created, where families
were “dealing with their third (or more) removal in less than seventy years.” 181 These were at
times violent forced removals by settlers. 182 The reduced land base was carefully managed by
the Confederacy Council, and they staunchly resisted any further threat to their lands, including
through enfranchisement.183 Hill describes how the council “developed policies and procedures
to address land issued in key areas including inheritance, marriage disputes, annuity payments,
179
RG10, Vol. 2077, file 11,432, Six Nations Reserve– Petition from Several Indians Protesting the
Indian Act of 1876. Quoted in Mary-Ellen Kelm and Keith D. Smith, Talking Back to the Indian Act:
Critical Reading in Settler Colonial Histories (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018), 53-54.
180
In the end elections were held, with Haudenosaunee delegate Simcoe Kerr being elected as president.
181
Hill, 188.
182
Jamieson and Hamilton, Dr. Oronhyatekha, 45.
Hill, 187. On Six Nations resistance to approving enfranchisement applications, see Kirkby, “Paradises
183
Lost?”, 633.
142
adoption, enfranchisement, band transfers, leases and sales, ‘national parks,’ and communal
property.”184 This is evident through their actions in Council, as well as their many petitions
over the year to the government and the Governor General. As Hill makes clear, despite the
transfer of the Department from Britain “the Confederacy Council was willing to work with the
devolved Indian Department as long as the policies they attempted to enforce did not conflict
with the Haudenosaunee vision for their own community.” 185 She notes that once the
government began to infringe on this jurisdiction, the relationship between the Haudenosaunee
and the Dominion weakened, and the Haudenosaunee directed their attention to the Governor
General as the representative of the British Crown instead.186
There are many instances during this period of the Haudenosaunee presenting their laws
to the government. A detailed examination of this complex and rich legal history is beyond the
scope of this chapter– such as the efforts by John Smoke Johnson to have Haudenosaunee laws
written down, working with anthropologist Horatio Hale, as well as later competing codification
projects by Seth Newhouse (also a delegate to the Grand General Council in 1882) and John A.
Gibson,187 an 1874 rewriting of the Indian Act by Chief Simcoe Kerr,188 as well as the 1874
184
Hill, 187. Hill’s full description of these powers as they relate to landholding is as follows: “As the
community grew, the [Confederacy Council] developed policies and procedures to address land issued in
key areas including inheritance, marriage disputes, annuity payments, adoption, enfranchisement, band
transfers, leases and sales, ‘national parks,’ and communal property. These policies could be deemed a
“code of land rights” for the Grand River Haudenosaunee, but in actuality they represent policies of
responsibility. Through all of these, the council laid out key parameters around the use of land, including
the belief that land was intended to support children and the duty of all landholders to respect their
property and not plunder the natural resources it contained.”
185
Hill, 186.
186
Ibid.
187
Kirkby, “Paradises Lost?” 647-648, referencing Horatio Hale, The Iroquois Book of Rites (DG
Brinton, 1883): 39-47, Duncan Campbell Scott, “Traditional History of the Confederacy of the Six
Nations” (1911) 5 Proc & Trans Royal Society of Canada 195, and Arthur C. Parker, The Constitution of
the Five Nations (University of the State of New York, 1916). For the work of Newhouse see Arthur C.
Parker and Seth Newhouse, The Constitution of the Five Nations; or, The Iroquois Book of the Great Law
(Albany, NY: University of the State of New York, 1916).
188
J.T. Gilkison to Superintendent General of Indian Affairs, April 8 1874, LAC RG10, Vol. 1925, file
3108,.
143
House of Commons select committee for the management of Six Nations.189 This history
deserves greater attention than I am able to provide in a chapter of this length. Nonetheless,
efforts to ensure Haudenosaunee jurisdiction over land and against enfranchisement were
persistent during this era in the face of legal changes imposed by the government.
One exception to the general position taken by Haudenosaunee leaders can be seen
through the work of Dr. Oronhytekha. Oronhyatekha’s life was exceptional in itself. He became
one of the first Indigenous doctors in Canada (just after Dr. Peter E. Jones), the Grand Templar
of the International Order of Good Templars, the supreme chief ranger of the Independent Order
of Foresters, as well as establishing collections of Indigenous material culture and a massive
residence by Tyendinaga where he relocated from Six Nations in 1873. 190 He was also the
nephew by marriage of John Smoke Johnson, and he was a “Grand Council Representative”
(although not a delegate from a specific community) to the Grand General Council in 1874, and
according to his biographers was the chairperson there in 1872.191 Oronhytekha, as a child of six
years old, had also witnessed the burning of the Martin settlement his grandfather had
established through mob violence inflicted by Brantford settlers in 1847, perhaps fueling his
desire for Indigenous property rights to be enshrined in law. 192 However, at Six Nations his
involvement in political life and the question of enfranchisement was controversial.
Orohyatekha participated in the debates around enfranchisement in several ways. In

1870, according to his biographers Keith Jamieson and Michelle A. Hamilton, he was asked by
the New England Company (who had paid for his education), as well as Joseph Howe to attend a
189
Report of the Committee on the Management of the Six Nations Indians, LAC RG10, Vol. 1935, file
3589.
190
On the life of Oronhytekha, see Keith Jamieson and Michelle A. Hamilton, Dr. Oronhyatekha:
Security, Justice, and Equality (Toronto: Dundurn, 2016), Trudy Nicks, “Dr. Oronhyatekha’s History
Lessons: reading Museum Collections as Texts,” in Reading Beyond Words: Contexts for Native History,
2nd ed. Jennifer S. H. Brown and Elizabeth Vibers, eds. (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2009)
and Coel Kirkby, “Paradises Lost? The Constitutional Politics of ‘Indian’ Enfranchisment in Canada,
1857-1900,” Osgoode Hall Law Journal, Vol. 56, Issue 3 (Summer 2020): 606-658.
191
Jamieson and Hamilton, 44 and Oronhyatekha to the Minister of the Interior, June [11?] 1872. LAC
RG10, Vol. 1943, file 3541. There are not printed meeting minutes of this council, as far as I am aware.
192
Jamieson and Hamilton, 45.
144
meeting of the Grand River Council to “explain the new legislation affecting native communities
in Canada and to assess their reaction”193 (remember that Howe had recently been the recipient
of the delegation by John Smoke Johnson to Ottawa to present wampum belts prior to the first
Grand General Council). Oronhyatekha was not well received here.194 As Jamieson and
Hamilton explain, “it is not known what Dr. Oronhyatekha said about the legislation to the
Confederacy Council, both the chiefs and Agent Gilkison objected to his presence. If indeed he
supported the legislation at the council, his opinion would have been unpopular; the chiefs had
protested enfranchisement since its inception in 1857.”195 Whether or not he supported
enfranchisement at the Grand River council, his support for the ideas of enfranchisement is
evident in his support of Elias Hill’s application to enfranchise, as well as his own (unsuccessful)
application in 1872.196 That same year, he became the chairperson of the Grand General Council
and wrote to the Department in response to the Enfranchisement Act that land title should be in
fee simple and a system of land title registration similar to that for settlers should be
implemented. Jamieson and Hamilton point out that this was similar to a scheme he had put
forward at Tyendinaga, and so it is “unclear whether the council had agreed to this policy, or
whether Dr. Oronhyatekha took it upon himself to make this suggestion.” 197 Other proposals for
change in the law from the Grand Council of 1872 that Oronhyatekha brings up in his letter to
the Department are the reinstatement of “protection” clauses, as well as that “Indian women may
marry when and whom they please, without subjecting themselves to exclusion or expulsion
from their tribes,”198 counter to Victorian norms. He also argued for legislation to be tailored to
each community’s needs rather than the singular approach of the 1869 Act. 199 His views on
enfranchisement are also included in the 1874 House Select Committee Report, where he
193
Ibid., 138.
194
Ibid., 140.
195
Ibid.
196
Kirkby, “Paradises Lost?,” 639-640.
197
Jamieson and Hamilton, 142.
198
Doctor Oronhyatekha to Minister of the Interior, June [11?] 1872, LAC RG10, Vol. 1934, file 3541.
199
Jamieson and Hamilton, 142-143.
145
advocated for fee simple ownership, albeit through a land registration system controlled by local
councils.200 Despite his willingness to engage in the idea of enfranchisement, Oronhyatekha was
clear that this would not be successful if imposed unilaterally. In his letter as chairman of the
Grand Council he states: “Should you recommend to the Government in any further Act to adopt
any of the suggestions of the Indians such provisions would certainly be more likely to be carried
out into practical effect by them as having been recommended by the Indians themselves.” 201
Even with these concessions to local control, Oronhytekha’s views on enfranchisement were not
aligned with the general view of Haudenosaunee leaders. This is evident through the positions
they took at the Grand General Council.
At the Grand General Council at Sarnia in 1874, there was considerable tension between
Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee delegates over how to approach enfranchisement. The Six
Nations requested to leave almost immediately over “translation” issues. 202 There was a
unanimous vote against the Six Nations leaving, and the decision by both the seven Cayuga
delegates, and an announcement that the majority of the Six Nations had decided to stay were
met with cheers. However, Norman Shields suggests that the unanimity of the vote was due to
the Six Nations leaders leaving prior to this.203 N. H. Burning, G.H.M. Johnson and Philip
Garlow of Grand River, as well as Joseph Sky of Caughanawaga, were all Haudenosaunee
delegates who remained and spoke out against approving enfranchisement provisions in the
law.204 The enfranchisement provisions in section 1 of the law were unanimously protested at
this council, and this spurred the alternative proposal by Peter E. Jones described above.
However, in an 1875 letter to Laird against the conclusions of the 1874 Grand Council, leaders
200
Ibid.
201
Doctor Oronhyatekha to Minister of the Interior, June [11?] 1872, LAC RG10, Vol. 1934, file 3541.
202
Reserve, June 25th to July 3rd, 1874 (Sarnia: The “Canadian” Steam Publishing Establishment, 1874), p.
7.
203
Sheilds, “Anishinaabek Political Alliance,” 43.
204
Reserve, June 25th to July 3rd, 1874 (Sarnia: The “Canadian” Steam Publishing Establishment, 1874).
146
from Six Nations state that twenty-one of their delegates withdrew from this council on Saturday
June 27, and that those who stayed did not have any authority. They challenged the statement by
G.H.M. Johnson in the printed minutes that “a majority” of the Six Nations had decided to
stay.205 This, they state, was “untrue in fact, and entirely unauthorized.” 206 The Six Nations,
“assembled with the Oneidas of Muncy Town and the Mohawks of the Bay of Quinte” made
clear they “disapprove[d] of the recommendations of the General Council held at Sarnia
particularly with reference to the scheme of enfranchisement.” 207 The communities were
advancing “in civilization and Christianity” under the present system, and they did not want “to
lose the services of our educated young men by enfranchisement.”208 From this letter it is
unquestionably clear that enfranchisement remained the key area of contestation of the Six
Nations against the Grand General Council, as they did not want to lose the political allegiance
of educated men and their families.
Contestations against enfranchisement continued by the Haudenosaunee as other

incursions on their jurisdiction continued. In 1876, they presented a petition to the governor
general against the approval of the Indian Act by the Council at Sarnia, where they protested the
Superintendent Generals’ powers over their “lands, moneys, and properties without first
obtaining the consent of the chiefs of the Six Nations” and that the Act would “in time deprive
[them] of [their] liberties, rights and privileges which we now enjoy under the Treaty between
Great Britain and the Six Nations Indians.” 209 In 1878, they again left the council, after a
disagreement over how to deal with clauses in the Indian Act that dealt with band council
jurisdiction.210 I have not located the minutes from 1880, but Enfranchisement was again a
205
Chiefs A. J. Smith and Josiah Hill to David Laird, received 25 January, 1875, LAC RG10, Vol. 1949,
File 4324.
206
Ibid.
207
Ibid.
208
Ibid. Emphasis in Original.
209
Six Nations Reserve– Petition from Several Indians Protesting the Indian Act of 1876, LAC RG10,
Vol. 2077, file 11,432, quoted in Kelm and Smith, Talking Back to the Indian Act, 53-54. See also
Kirkby, “Paradises Lost?” 642-643.
210
Shields, 60-61.
147
primary area of contention at the last Grand General council that the Haudenosaunee attended at
New Credit in 1882, although this council was considerably less confrontational.211
In 1882, Chief A. G. Smith of Six Nations rejected enfranchisement alongside George

Fisher of the Muncy nation as they thought this “would be the means of breaking up the
Reserves after deeds had been granted.” 212 Dr. Jones, in response, emphasized the ability of
bands to reject this law at the local level (which we will examine in greater detail below). This
allowed the section to pass without proposed amendment by the council. However, Smith
moved to alter subsection 1 which permitted the Superintendent General to enfranchise educated
men.213 This motion successfully passed, seconded by Peter E. Jones. 214 Smith was also
involved in having president-elect H. P. Chase removed from the council, as he had not been
approved as a delegate from his home community. 215 This issue instigated a committee to write
a Constitution for the Grand General, and both Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee delegates were
involved. Chief Sampson Greene of the Bay of Quinté “strongly advised the formation of a
Constitution,” and the committee consisted of Peter E. Jones, Chief A. G. Smith, F.
Lamorandiere and Rev. John Jacobs. Sampson Greene was also elected to be the new president
of the Grand General Council by a wide margin of 46 to 18 votes. 216 It is clear from this
211
Shields, 65.
212
Room, 1883) p. 18.
213
This included Doctors of Medicine, anyone with a University degree, those legally trained (Barristers,
Counsellors, Solicitors, Attorneys or Notary Public), or Ministers. The Indian Act, S. C. 1880, c. 28 (43
Vict.) s. 99.1.
214
Room, 1883), p. 19.
215
Room, 1883), p. 28.
216
Ibid.
148
participation in 1882 that Haudenosaunee delegates were very much engaged in participating in
the structure and the leadership of the Grand General Council.
Despite their participation in 1882, this was the last meeting that they attended. This is
perhaps due to the more accommodationist leaning of the Anishinaabek leaders involved, but it
is unclear to me exactly why they ceased participating. Despite this split, there is evidence in
these early councils for a desire to resolve differences and continue the cooperation that had been
present between the two nations in the councils of 1858 and 1870. After all, the Haudenosaunee
did continue to return to multiple councils before 1882, despite the ongoing conflicts over
enfranchisement and the jurisdiction of band councils. On the part of the Anishinaabe, there is
also evidence that they valued the participation of the Haudenosaunee and wanted them to
remain as part of the council. For instance, Shields notes how the option of nominating the 1 st
Vice President was offered to Haudenosaunee delegates in 1874 after their stated desire to
leave.217 The decision of some delegates to stay in 1874 was met with cheers noted in the
minutes.218 Further accommodation of Haudenosaunee positions can perhaps be seen that year
when Allan Salt passed a motion to exclude the Six Nations from the vote on section 10, which
dealt with elections on reserve– perhaps a recognition of their desire to retain their own
governance system. As this was carried unanimously it suggests that this was an acceptable
measure for the remaining Haudenosaunee delegates.219 Shields also brings our attention to the
fact that for the decade following 1882, the leadership of the Grand General Council “continued
to send invitations and printing assessments to Six Nations reserves in Ontario and Quebec.” 220
Finally, the socializing that took place in the 1882 meeting suggests that relationships between
the two nations, while many times divided and tense, where nonetheless seen as something to
strive towards in many cases. However deep they were at the time, the divisions in the council
217
Shields, 43.
218
Reserve, June 25th to July 3rd, 1874 (Sarnia: The “Canadian” Steam Publishing Establishment, 1874, p. 8
and 9.
219
Ibid., 16.
220
Shields, 71.
149
over enfranchisement and accepting government legislation did not destroy the ongoing
relationship between the two nations nor the Dish with one spoon treaty which continues to
operate to this day.221
The Haudenosaunee continued to press for recognition of their autonomous governance

through other channels after they left the Grand Council in 1882. Hill notes that “in March of
1898, the Six Nations sent a delegation ‘in accordance with long established custom’ to address
the governor general on issues of amendments to the Indian Act, fishing rights along the Grand
River, and other treaty concerns.”222 Connections to other Haudenosaunee communities were
also established and maintained in the latter decades of the nineteenth century. Gerald Reid has
traced the many political connections between the Haudenosaunee reserves of Kahnawake,
Akwesasne, and the Bay of Quinte, supported by chiefs from Grand River, beginning in the
1870s to “rekindle their connection to the Six Nations Confederacy in Canada,” in support of
hereditary governance and against the Indian Act.223 They held their own Grand Councils at the
Bay of Quinte in 1890 and at Akwesasne in 1894 in support of hereditary governance and against
the Indian Act system,224 in an era of overlapping movements that Reid describes as “an
important moment in the modern development of Rotinonhsionni [Haudenosaunee] identity,
political consciousness, and nationalism…that shapes the Mohawk world to the present day.” 225
The Grand General Council had taken on a new direction under the influence of Anishinaabek
leaders, but the Haudenosaunee leaders leaving the council was far from the end of their critical
engagement with government laws.
Alan Corbiere and Richard Hill, “First Law of the Land: Sharing from the Great Dish” (Public lecture,
221
University of Toronto, September 28, 2019).

222
Hill, 193.
223
Gerald Reid, “To Renew Our Fire: Political Activism, Nationalism, and Identity in Three
Rotinonhsionni Communities” in Tribal Worlds: Critical Studies in American Indian Nation Building,
Brian Hosmer and Larry Nesper, eds. (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2013), 37-64.
224
Reid, 48-49.
225
Reid, 59.
150
2.5. Inter-Anishinaabe Debates at the Grand General

Council, 1874-1884: The Importance of Local Autonomy
“Some of you wish to become like white men…If any of my Band wish to become like the white men who
have broken this treaty, you may go, I will give you nothing.”
-Chief Augustine Shingwauk, speech at the Grand General Council, Cape Croker,
September 12, 1884
Enfranchisement remained one of the most controversial aspects of subsequent Grand

Councils, due to the tension between the threat it posed to limited land base and the desire of
some leaders to free their community members from the Indian Act; debate in council on
enfranchisement continued after the Council approved of the Indian Act in at Sarnia in 1876. In
1882, at the large Grand General Council held at New Credit, the changes that the government
had made to enfranchisement clauses (restoring band council approval) were lauded by the
president, William Wawanosh.226 In his opening remarks, Wawanosh included a discussion of
the important change to enfranchisement clauses that the government had made and the role of
the Grand Council in actualizing this: “He referred to the original Indian Act– how in Councils
of his people of time past it was found not suitable to their welfare; that the Government upon
petitions of the Indians had, from time to time, so amended the Act that now we have a law
which though still capable of improvement is far in advance of the former legislation. Prominent
among these changes and additions is that of Enfranchisement.”227 Despite this change, similar
concerns to those raised in earlier councils were brought forward by delegates in debate. 228 In
this section, I argue that the deliberations in council reflect historic Anishinaabe practices of
sovereignty through the autonomy of local councils.
226
Room, 1883), p. 8-9.
227
Ibid.
228
Ibid., 18. Among these were the ability of bands to choose land for allotment in the case of
“professional Indians” as well as the breakup of reserve lands.
151
The evidence from meeting minutes in 1882 and 1884 clearly demonstrate on what
grounds the enfranchisement and stricter governance provisions were approved of, showing that
there was a consensus around the importance retaining local control, even as the content of the
law itself remained controversial. This was especially important as various communities were
dealing with very different political, economic, and treaty contexts as the participation the
Northern delegates in 1884 make clear. This approach to reconciling the problem of varied
positions on enfranchisement demonstrates a continuity in Anishinaabe governance where non-
compulsion and local autonomy were political principles of historic councils. Bohaker explains
that local councils operating through alliance could not compel the actions of others, and that
common council fires “were not…hierarchical jurisdictions. Further, smaller fires did not lose
their autonomy when they joined a larger fire: they maintained their complete independence in
policy and decision-making. At the same time, larger fires could not represent the wishes or
needs of their constituent parts unless permission was granted, again in council, on a very
specific basis.”229 While not an exact parallel to earlier council fire processes, the insistence that
local authority and decision-making were not being infringed upon would likely have strongly
resonated with council delegates.
Dr. Jones emphasized to the Council that the law allowed for the council of a tribe to
reject the application of any member for enfranchisement. 230 He insisted that the proper place
for opposition to such was in their own councils, and he “considered it unwise or unpolitic to
render opposition to it in the General Council where so many tribes might think enfranchisement
as provided in the Act a step towards civilization and independence.” 231 This was an assertion
on the part of Jones of the sovereignty of local bands to choose what was best for their
communities, a longstanding principle of council governance as described by Bohaker. These
comments of Jones effectively ended the debate, demonstrating the importance of the
229
Heidi Bohaker, Doodem and Council Fire, 111 and 150.
230
Room, 1883), 19.
231
Ibid.
152
independent decision-making authority of local councils for council delegates. As long as their
jurisdiction remained intact to decide for themselves in local councils they could accept the law.
This position was emphasized by the Council accepting the section in principle, albeit contesting
the first sub-section of the law (that allowed for the Superintendent General to allot land to those
enfranchised through their professional or educational status) without the consent of the tribe.
Delegates were clear that this too, should be within the jurisdiction of local councils.232
Jones’ emphasis on local decision-making around enfranchisement reverberated again

two years later at the 1884 Council at Cape Croker. Here two new pieces of legislation were
discussed. The first was the Indian Advancement Act– which further consolidated the control of
band councils in the hands of the Department by allowing the Superintendent General to impose
elections, and more tightly regulated the operation of these councils. 233 The reception of this law
will be examined in greater detail in Chapter 4, but here it is important to note that Jones, again,
argued that the decision to apply this legislation would be voluntary at the local level. Jones
states that the law “could not and never would be applied to any Band which had not by petition
asked that it should apply to them. He considered the Superintendent General’s framing of the
Act as a “liberal kindness to those advanced Bands who wished to take the management of their
local affairs more into their own hands.” 234 This interpretation by Jones does not reflect the
content of the legislation. It is difficult to determine if Jones simply misinterpreted the law, or if
it was a reflection of his friendship with John A. Macdonald and the previous willingness of the
government to listen to council feedback. 235 Jones was absolutely influential in the Council’s
decision to approve of the law in 1884 due to his statement that the government would allow
bands to decide to on whether to adopt the law.
232
Ibid.
233
The Indian Advancement Act, 1884. S. C. 1884, c. 28.
234
Minutes of the Eighth Grand General Indian Council held upon the Cape Croker Indian Reserve,
County of Bruce, From September 10th to September 15th, 1884 (Hagersville, ON: The Indian Publishing
Company), 24.
235
On Jones’ relationship with Macdonald see Allan Sherwin, Bridging Two Peoples: Chief Peter E.
Jones, 1843-1909 (Waterloo: Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2012).
153
Many leaders voiced their support of the law in the wake of the interpretation that it
would be voluntary. Chief John French of the Chippewas of the Thames declared: “as there was
nothing compulsory about the Act he thought there was no use discussing it.” 236 Echoing his
colleague, William Elliot of New Credit stated: “This Act is not compulsory. Let it remain as it
is and give those Bands wishing to come under it a chance to do so.” 237 William McGregor of
Cape Croker and Solomon James of Shawanaga were not interested in adopting the law but did
not want to prevent other communities from doing so. McGregor states that “He could not avail
himself of the advantages of the Act at present, but he would not put any obstacles in the way of
other Bands embracing it”238 and James explains that “we the Indians of the North of the Lake,
are not capable of using the Act lately passed. We are ignorant and innocent respecting it. But I
have no objection to the civilized tribes coming under this law,”239 again an example of the
importance of local autonomy in Anishinaabek governance. William Elliot again spoke,
elaborating on his decision by saying “The superintendent General did not wish to force his
measures upon the Indians against their will, and gave us an instance in the provisions of the
enfranchisement clauses of the Indian Act.”240 The fact that the government had reinstated a
measure of band control over enfranchisement processes established (at least tentative) trust, and
was a key to why this later law was deemed acceptable to council delegates.
The sovereign autonomy of local bands would have been especially important at this
meeting, given the presence of delegates from more northern communities who were facing very
different political contexts at home. Delegates attended from Manitoulin Island, along the North
Shore of Lake Huron and Georgian Bay (as well as a letter being sent to the council from
236
Room, 1883), 24.
237
Ibid., 25.
238
Ibid., 26-27.
239
Ibid., 26.
240
Ibid., 27. Emphasis added.
154
Shegwanah (Sheguindah) on Manitoulin).241 Leaders here that were involved in the timber and
treaty disputes from the previous chapter, including Solomon James (who is elected the Vice-
President of the Council), “Jos. Jaquo” and “Jos. Jacquo Jr.” of Wikwemikong, and Augustin
Shingwauk of Garden River. 242 These leaders, as we saw, had been meeting each other in
council through the 1860s and brought their continuing grievances with the government to the
council at Cape Croker. Tensions with southern delegates over their more accommodationist
approach to the law became apparent, as on the second day of the council in a night-time meeting
with the president, William McGregor of Cape Croker, Northern delegates announced their
intention to leave. There is no evidence that I can discern in the meeting minutes around what
specific issue the northern delegates took with the council proceedings; the debates the day
before dealt primarily with women’s loss of status through marriage. They state that they
“thought they were not acceptable in the Grand Council, and that they could not understand the
work of the Grand Council.”243 Their concerns were resolved the following day, with a
resolution that the Northern delegates “have the liberty to speak or ask questions on the matters
before the Grand Council” and that the matters they wished to be raised were to be heard. 244
These grievances involved miners and traders not fulfilling bargains at Garden River, as well as,
according to James, violations of their Robinson Treaty right to hunt and fish, and according to
John Augustine, that the Pennefather Treaty had also been broken. 245 James complained that
“deputations from the Indians to the Government had not been properly received.” 246 The
Council agreed that these significant grievances needed addressing and moved three days later
241
Communities from this region included Parry Island, Shawanaga, Garden River, the “Ojibways of
Lake Superior” (their post office listed as Sault Ste. Marie), the “Ojibways of Lake Huron” (post office
Little Current), the “Ojibways of South Manitoulin Island” and the “Ottawas of Manitoulin” (both post
office Manitowaning) and “Nahnahbedabing Reserve” (post office Wikwemikong). The content of the
letter from Shewanah includes grievances around annuity and interest money, the sale of Strawberry,
LaCloche, Club, Bear and Horse Islands, and the Indian Funds. Ibid., 4 and 29.
242
Ibid., 3-5.
243
Ibid., 17.
244
Ibid., 17 and 18.
245
Ibid., 18-19.
246
Ibid., 19.
155
that the Grand Council “humbly request the Superintendent General of Indian Affairs to order an
investigation as soon as possible into the grievances of the Northern Bands embraced in the
Robinson Treaty of 1850.”247
Enfranchisement was also a point of contention between the Northern bands and their
southern counterparts. During the debate on enfranchisement, Chief Augustine stated that he
was glad to have heard the opinions of other delegates, but “he was doubtful if they would bear
any fruit.”248 He went on to sternly warn about the dangers of adopting settler laws: “Some of
you wish to become like white men. Perhaps you will be like the white man who made this
paper (pointing to the Robinson Treaty) and then broke it. If any of my band wish to become
like the white men who have broken this treaty, you may go, I will give you nothing.”249
However, after the debate on the Indian Advancement Act, where local control was assured, the
leader from Garden River changed his tone. Augustine declared that “he had often heard of the
Indian Acts being discussed by the Eastern Bands, and he was under the impression and fear that
they were endeavouring to include all the Northern Bands in their request to become
unfranchised [sic] also, but now it appeared to him that such was not the case, and he felt more
satisfied.”250 Despite the many deep reservations that he and other Northern delegates, including
James, held and voiced in council, the promise that they would retain decision-making over their
own band was decisive in gaining their support. The importance of autonomous control over
decision-making that had long been a principle of Anishinaabek governance was reaffirmed at
the Grand General Council.
A second piece of legislation was also influential on Council views of the government in
1884. The 1885 Electoral Franchise Act finally granted the vote to Indigenous men without
having to relinquish tribal membership. 251 This Act is celebrated in the preface to the minutes of
247
Ibid., 29.
248
Ibid., 22.
249
Ibid., 22.
250
Ibid., 28.
251
Electoral Franchise Act, S.C. 1885 (c. 40).
156
that year: “Since this last Grand Council the Dominion Government have passed a Franchise
Act…a proper scheme for the right to exercise the Franchise has for many years been the great
object of the Grand Council.”252 Interestingly, here it is contrasted with enfranchisement: “it has
always been unfair to the Indian, for he would, in a measure, be obliged to sever his connection
with his people, and there would be great danger in breaking up the tribal union, which now
exists, and which the Aborigines are anxious to retain.”253 The Council describing the “always
unfair” nature of enfranchisement clauses contrasts with the Council’s earlier approval of the
same and suggests that local decisionmaking– leaving the option for the continuation of
autonomous local Anishinaabe governance and tribal cohesion– was an important structuring
element of their decision.
A decade later enfranchisement was still being debated at Grand Council meetings– so
any pronouncements about a definitive Anishinaabe position on the question should, of course,
be avoided. However, there is much to be gained from understanding the decision-making
processes that brought the Council to agreement on the legislation in earlier meetings. This
demonstrates a continuity in term of Anishinaabek diplomacy where large council gatherings
were not coercive on participating communities. Despite some members being clearly in favor of
enfranchisement largely as the government envisioned it, others were eager to retain tribal
authority over membership and land questions to ensure their small land bases were not
threatened by gradual erosion and their members left without support. Leaders in favour of
enfranchisement for their own communities had to compromise with other leaders whose
communities much more adamantly opposed to the process, and this was done in a way that
reflected traditional Anishinaabek governance.
252
Company), p. 8.
253
Ibid.
157
2.6. Conclusion
Enfranchisement was a central way that the Canadian government, the Anishinaabek and
the Haudenosaunee negotiated the constitutional change imposed by the federal government on
their relationship to Indigenous nations through the Gradual Enfranchisement Act of 1869 and
the Indian Act of 1876. How each of these parties expressed their position on who should have
jurisdiction over enfranchisement decisions can help understand how this constitutional change
was navigated by them. Despite the very low numbers of men who enfranchised over these
years, the idea of how Indigenous individuals should be allowed, or not, to assimilate and what
this meant for the land bases of reserves was central to all parties involved in interpreting the
relationships between their nations. The DIA sought to keep enfranchisement processes in the
law despite the rejection of the 1869 law by Indigenous leaders. They conceded, in the 1876
Indian Act, that bands should regain a limited authority over enfranchisement decisions.
Ultimately, though, the Department’s ability to maintain authority over enfranchisement was
retained by the requirement that the Superintendent General approve these decisions. This
allowed them to tightly regulate on a case-by-case basis who could be considered eligible to
enfranchise.
Indigenous leaders from across Ontario and parts of Quebec met in 1870 to affirm their
historic alliances to each other, and to protest the incursions on their sovereignty to that the 1869
law represented. As the Haudenosaunee clearly outlined in their readings of the wampum belts at
the initial meeting of the Grand General Council in 1870, the right to self-governance had long
been enshrined in diplomatic alliances. Understanding the various political positions
demonstrated by both inter-Anishinaabe as well as Haudenosaunee-Anishinaabe debates on
enfranchisement in subsequent councils is important. It gives us a means through which to
complicate a narrative where the assimilationist terms of the state are the only reference point
that we use to understand the decision-making of the council, which flattens the decision to
accept enfranchisement to a yes or no question around whether to accept law as defined by the
state. This erases the potential to understand the multiple legalities and various political
positions that were voiced through council debates, and the variety of delegations sent to the seat
of government. Instead, we should be attuned to the Indigenous legalities that were also
operational in these spaces, both those of the Haudenosaunee– that were premised on
158
maintaining treaty alliance relationships and traditional governance, and of the Anishinaabek–
who attempted to negotiate a way for some communities to retain their governance and for others
to incorporate aspects of state law in their strategies for survival within the emerging settler state.
Haudenosaunee sovereignty was asserted through their decision to leave the council and pursue
other means to demonstrate to the government their continuing governance authority under
historic alliance relationships. Anishinaabek leaders resolved the conflicting positions on
enfranchisement taken by various individual communities through their own processes of
validating the sovereign authority of local councils to decide what was best for themselves, as
had been done historically. If we take these assertions of sovereignty seriously, then what
becomes visible is not just the varied constitutional understandings of Grand Council members,
some of whom sought the benefits of participation in Canadian politics, but also perhaps a better
understanding of how settler obligations as inheritors of Crown alliances were actively being
undermined by the Indian Act. Enfranchisement was of course not the only issue discussed at
these meetings in negotiating the changes that the government was imposing, and delegates
debated various other aspects of the relationship with the Canadian government in Council. This
included municipal-style governance, as the next chapter will examine, where Methodist-
involved delegates were again central in the direction of the decisions taken in Council.
159
Chapter 3
Methodists and Municipal Codes: Southern Ontario Christian:
Anishinaabe Leaders and Reserve Governance, 1830-1887.
At the 1884 Grand General Indian Council held at Cape Croker on the Bruce Peninsula
(Neyaashiinigmiing) Dr. Peter Edmund Jones adamantly argued that the Council approve the
Indian Advancement Act.1 Echoing his successful negotiation for the Council to endorse the
enfranchisement clauses in the Indian Act examined in the last chapter, Jones again argued that
the law would not be imposed by the government but would be optional for bands to adopt as
they saw fit. The law was meant, according to Jones, “as a liberal kindness” from the
government, and that “the Act could not and never would be applied to any Band which had not
by petition asked that it should apply to them.”2 This was a significant misreading of the
legislation, but it was successful in having the Council approve the law. Despite these
similarities in council negotiation and decision-making, I argue in this chapter that the
foundation of Jones’ and other’s support for the law rested not only with the longstanding
principle of non-coercive inter-community Anishinaabe governance that I examine in the case of
enfranchisement but also within the generational legacies of Anishinaabe Methodism in Southern
Ontario. The political networks created by early Methodist converts and ministers, in addition to
their religious and educational projects, laid a strong foundation for later nineteenth-century
articulations of the relationship between reserve communities and the Canadian government.
Aspects of this early vision for Christian agricultural communities, support for colonial
education, and maintaining autonomy over reserve governance (while adopting aspects of settler
law such as electoral governance for reserves and pushing for the franchise), were rearticulated
1
The Indian Advancement Act, R.S.C. 1886, c. 44 (49 Vict).
2
Minutes of the Eighth Grand General Council held upon the Cape Croker Indian Reserve, County of
Bruce, from September 10th to September 15th, 1884. (Hagersville: The Indian Publishing Company,
1884).
160
by Jones with the support of other council delegates. The Advancement Act, for him, was one
way of achieving these goals.
Like the acceptance of the enfranchisement clauses, the willingness of Jones and other
delegates to accept this Act bears examination, as from today’s understanding of the restrictive
history of band council governance it seems most definitely to operate at odds with community
interests. The Advancement Act consolidated increased controls over electoral governance on
reserves– a process that had been underway since the 1869 Gradual Enfranchisement Act as
previously discussed. Council members from Southern Ontario Christian farming communities
were of course only one faction within the Council, albeit an influential one, and they were in
negotiation with others, particularly Northern Anishinabek leaders who were not interested in
municipal-style electoral governance as they desired to retain existing forms of governance.3
Nonetheless, by understanding these influential southern Anishinaabek delegates’ ties to earlier
forms of political organizing through the Methodist church, we gain insight into their reasoning
for supporting state law.
Many links exist between the delegates of the Grand General Council from Southern
Ontario farming communities (such as New Credit, Alderville, Rice Lake, Munceytown, Sarnia
and Walpole Island) and earlier networks of religious and political organizing based on the
Methodist church from the 1820s to the 1840s. 4 Some of the most influential Grand Council
leaders were directly tied to this network– Dr. Peter Edmund Jones (New Credit), David Sawyer
(New Credit), and William Wawanosh (Sarnia) were all sons of early Anishinaabe-Methodist
converts and missionaries. Others Methodist ministers themselves, such as John Sunday (Grape
Island/Alderville) and the Reverend Alan Salt (Alderville/Parry Sound), had political careers that
3
Haudenosaunee delegates had by this time left the Council, but also remained largely opposed to the
law. For Haudenosaunee reactions to electoral governance see Gerald F. Reid, "'To Renew our Fire':
Political Activism, Nationalism and Identity in Three Rotinonhsionni Communities" in Tribal Worlds:
Critical Studies in American Indian Nation Building, eds. Brian Hosmer and Larry Nesper (Albany: State
University of New York press, 2014).
4
For an overview of missionary activity in these and other Southern Ontario communities see Elizabeth
Graham, Medicine Man to Missionary: Missionaries as Agents of Change among the Indians of Southern
Ontario, 1764-1867 (Toronto: Peter Martin Associates, 1975).
161
spanned both eras. Both men participated in inter-reserve councils in the 1840s as well as the
later Grand General Councils in the later 19th century.
This chapter outlines some of the legacies of these connections, and the continuities and
differences in ideas of how reserve governance was envisioned in both eras. To do so I first
examine Methodist networks of preaching and schooling advocacy, as well as their political
activism around land title and articulations of how community authority would be carved out in
relationship with the settler government. For the latter point I look specifically at how ideas of
electoral governance were first adopted by the Anishinaabe-Methodist community at the Credit
River through the work of the Reverend Peter Jones’ in establishing a written legal code there in
1830, and how the idea of elections for reserves was later taken up by the Methodist conference.
Next, I turn to how the government responded to the political demands of this earlier generation.
The government initially argued against electoral governance on reserves (when it was proposed
by Methodist proponents), however their late nineteenth-century policy changed to include
imposing electoral governance on reserves. This change was to ensure the greatest government
control over political decision-making (most clearly articulated through the Indian Advancement
Act). I next review the main debates around the law at the 1884 Grand Council, as these
demonstrate the reasons why the law was accepted in council there. In the final section I look to
the work of Dr. Jones, who was the first Indigenous medical doctor in Canada and ran the first
Indigenous-owned printing press.5 His efforts at the Grand General Council in advocating for
the Advancement Act were influential– but I qualify this support of the law with his work outside
of council to demonstrate his more nuanced interpretation of what the possibilities for municipal-
style governance afforded. By looking through his political articulations in his newspaper
publication The Indian, the first Indigenous-owned newspaper in Canada, as well as his review
and suggested amendments to the law itself (written at the request of John A. Macdonald) we can
gain a better understanding of his motivations and logic. Both sources reveal that Jones did have
a different political vision than that of the federal government. He clearly hoped and intended
that local autonomy would be maintained and even expanded.
5
For the most comprehensive biography of Peter E. Jones see Allan Sherwin, Bridging Two Peoples:
Chief Peter E. Jones, 1843-1909 (Waterloo, ON: Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2012).
162
The work of Peter Jones and his son, contextualized in their respective historical and
political contexts, can perhaps demonstrate an effort to enshrine aspects of Anishinaabe law
within their acceptance of settler municipal-style legal frameworks. At the very least their
respective visions around the structure of municipal-style governance demonstrate an interlegal
approach that attempted to ensure direct community control of decision-making as the best path
forward within the constraints of settler colonialism. Their work demonstrates a particular
genealogy of legal thought around how to deal with the settler state as Christians wanting to
participate fully in Canadian political life while retaining their jurisdiction as a distinct
community. This vision had appeal for other council delegates as well.
3.1. Early Methodist Networks: Education, Religion, and

Politics
The Methodist Church first began focusing efforts to expand into Upper Canada in the
1790s.6 Beginning in the 1820s, there was a concerted push to focus efforts on Indigenous
conversion, beginning with the mission of Alvin Torry at Grand River. 7 Historian Donald B.
Smtih outlines the intertwined lives of the first generation of Anishinaabe Methodist preachers
and converts from across Southern Ontario in great detail in his Sacred Feathers: The Reverend
Peter Jones (Kahkewaquonaby) and the Mississauga Indians and Mississauga Portraits: Ojibwe
Voices from Nineteenth-Century Canada.8 The Reverend William Case was instrumental in
fostering Methodism among the Anishinaabe, establishing the Missionary Society for Upper
Canada in 1824.9 Peter Jones (Kahkewaquonaby) converted at one of his meetings in 1823 at
6
For a comprehensive overview of the Methodist Church in Canada see Neil Semple, The Lord’s
Dominion: The History of Canadian Methodism (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University
Press, 1996). Semple notes that seventy-six missionaries served terms in the Canadas between 1790 and
1812, 45.
7
Graham, 14.
8
Donald B. Smith, Sacred Feathers: The Reverend Peter Jones (Kahkewaquonaby) and the Mississauga
Indians (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987) and Mississauga Portraits: Ojibwe Voices from
Nineteenth-Century Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013).
9
“The Young People’s Forward Movement, address communications to F. C. Stephenson, Secretary,
Methodist Mission Rooms, Wesley Building, Toronto”, in The Missionary Outlook, November 1924, p.
249-252.
163
Ancaster and was ordained as the first Anishinaabe Minister in 1833. 10 He and another early
convert John Sunday (Shawundais), who also became a missionary, travelled between many
communities both in Ontario and abroad on fundraising tours through the American Northeast. 11
In 1826, Jones established the Credit River community as a Methodist mission village. 12 A
second mission village was established by Case and Sunday, at Grape Island at the eastern edge
of Lake Ontario in 1827, where they led the Methodist community for a decade until it relocated
to Alderville.13 Rice Lake and Lake Scugog were other Anishinaabe communities who had
significant conversions and maintained a connection to Methodism, 14 while Jones’ and Sundays’
efforts to expand the gospel into the Lake Simcoe and Lake Huron regions, Munceytown, Lake
St. Clair, Walpole Island, and Saugeen were met initially with mixed, but ultimately quite
successful long-term results.15
10
Donald B. Smith, “JONES, PETER,” in Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 8, University of
Toronto/Université Laval, 2003–, accessed June 3,
2019, http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/jones_peter_8E.html. And Smith, Mississauga Portraits, 18.
11
Smith, Mississauga Portraits, 226. For an account of Sunday’s missionary travels see Smith,
Mississauga Portraits, Chapter 7 and Reverend John Mclean, “The Life of John Sunday” The Indian,
(Hagersville, Ont: Indian Publishing Co.) Vol. 1, no. 11, June 9, 1886. Jones also travelled overseas, as
did Sunday and other converts such as Nahnebahwequay (Catherine Sutton) to raise support and
awareness of Indigenous political and land rights. Smith, Mississauga Portraits, Chapter 3 and Donald
B. Smith, “NAHNEBAHWEQUAY,” in Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 9, University of
Toronto/Université Laval, 2003–, accessed July 10,
2019, http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/nahnebahwequay_9E.html. For Jones’ missionary travels around
Southern Ontario see Graham, Chapter 3.
12
Donald B. Smith, “JONES, PETER,” in Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 8, University of
2019, http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/jones_peter_8E.html.
13
Smith, Mississauga Portraits, 215. This community was established to serve Indigenous converts from
the Belleville and Kingston areas and become a model for Methodist missions. See Graham, 15.
14
Graham, 29.
15
G. S. French, “SHAH-WUN-DAIS,” in Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 10, University of
2019, http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/shah_wun_dais_10E.html.
164
Known for their itinerant preachers, organizational prowess and bush camp revivalism,
Methodists, including Jones, Sunday, Joseph Sawyer, George Henry, Wawanosh and Alan Salt
participated in establishing networks of missionary postings and preached on circuit routes to
more isolated communities. The Methodist Church, with their willingness to recruit Indigenous
preachers and prayer-group leaders established a more widespread presence on Southern Ontario
reserves than competing Church of England or Roman Catholic missionaries. 16 The involvement
of Anishinaabe preachers in this network created new patterns of mobility and communication
between the historically linked but increasingly isolated reserve communities. While it is not the
only link these communities had to one another it would certainly have been a factor in
communication between them and in, as we shall see below, common histories of political
involvement. The Methodist missionary newspaper, The Christian Guardian (published from
1829 to 1925), enhanced these communication networks by publishing reports from the various
reserve missions, as well as reports on political developments in Indian Affairs and of progress
being made in establishing educational institutions.
Education and educational reform were a significant concern of Methodist networks;

fundraising tours were often conducted with the goal of establishing schools on reserves. A key
tenet of Methodist teachings was promoting direct engagement with scripture; literacy was
therefore central to this project. 17 Anishinaabe Methodists were instrumental in establishing
these early educational institutions. By 1829, day schools were operating at Six Nations, the
Credit River, Grape Island, Rice Lake and at the Narrows and Matchedash in the Lake Simcoe
area.18 By the 1880s, Methodists ran day schools at Alderville, Hiawatha, Georgina Island,
Christian Island, Rama, Saugeen, Garden River, Oneida, Stoney Point, Walpole Island and St.
Clair.19 Peter Jones was a driving force behind the Methodist Mount Elgin Industrial School,
one of the first residential schools in Canada, opened on the Muncey reserve in 1849, going to
16
Semple, 172.
17
Semple, 239.
18
Graham, 20-27.
19
United Church of Canada Archives, 1978.083C, 23-1, Correspondence with the Department of Indian
Affairs.
165
England with his family in 1845 to raise funds. 20 His son, Peter Edmund, briefly attended after
1856.21 John Sunday also supported residential schools. Smith narrates his involvement,
describing how “[Sunday] gave the closing prayer in Ojibwe at the laying of the cornerstone of
the Mount Elgin Industrial School.”22 This was after his being involved for several years with
Case in running a manual labour school at Alderville, and supporting its expansion to become
“the most substantial building in the village.” 23
Egerton Ryerson, the first missionary stationed at the Credit River community, and a
lifelong friend of Jones, was famously the architect of public education policy for Canada West
and infamously influential in developing the system of industrial schools.24 He established the
Toronto Normal School, a teacher training institution where several Indigenous students studied–
some of these men went on to teach in the newly established day schools on reserves.25 Others
attended Victoria College, the Methodist college at Coburg established in 1837. 26 Both John
Sunday Jr. and David Wawanosh attended Victoria College, sons of John Sunday and Joshua
Wawanosh.27 If the older generation of Anishinaabe were the first generation accepted as equals
within the Methodist church, their sons were the first generation to be educated in the institutions
brought into being in part by their fathers’ efforts. Although their experiences were exceptional
20
Smith, Mississauga Portraits, 147.
21
Sherwin, Bridging Two Peoples, 15.
22
23
Ibid. The Alderville “Big School” closed in early 1860s as it was too costly to run.
24
R. D. Gidney, “RYERSON, EGERTON,” in Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 11, University of
Toronto/Université Laval, 2003–, accessed October 7,
2022, http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/ryerson_egerton_11E.html.
25
See Toronto Normal School, 1847-1897: Jubilee celebration (October 31st, November 1st and 2nd,
1897); biographical sketches and names of successful students 1847-1875. Thanks to Donald Smith for
the reference.
26
“The Young People’s Forward Movement, address communications to F. C. Stephenson, Secretary,
Methodist Mission Rooms, Wesley Building, Toronto”, in The Missionary Outlook, November 1924, p.
249-252.
27
166
for Indigenous men of their generation, their common histories are notable in understanding their
later position as drivers of the politics articulated within the Grand General Council.
Quite a number of this younger generation, who later became Grand Council delegates,
were raised in this context. The sons of many of the above-mentioned leaders, including Peter E.
Jones, David Sawyer, and William Wawanosh were all delegates to the Grand Council. Other
delegates such as Kegendonce/Peter Jones (Cape Croker) and M. G. Paudash (Rice Lake) had
either personal or family connections to the Methodist church. Solomon James (involved in the
timber protests in Chapter One) converted to Methodism, and became a lay preacher and
schoolteacher, as well as the Vice-President of the Grand General Council in 1884. 28 Although
it is difficult to quantify the exact number of delegates who would have had ties to these
networks, many of the most active leaders did, among them Jones and Wawanosh. While this
later generation’s political concerns were not the same as their fathers’, the legacy of their access
to education, connections between their respective communities through Methodist networks and
knowledge of their father’s generation of political activism would no doubt have influenced the
structure and content of their own political projects.
To further demonstrate the networks of overlap between education, preaching and

political involvement that I am outlining, the life of the Reverend Alan Salt provides a good
example. As a child he had been adopted by William Case, the influential white missionary
responsible for Jones’ and Sunday’s conversions. When he was nine, he performed on
missionary fundraising tours with the two of them, reciting prayers in Ojibwe to exemplify the
teaching successes of the Grape Island School. 29 He was trained at the Toronto Normal school,
after which he worked as a teacher in the Alderville Industrial school, on his home reserve. He
became ordained as a minister himself, after which he took positions as a missionary at St. Clair,
Garden River, Christian Island, Munceytown and Parry Island– all communities who later sent
28
E.J. Pratt Library, Donald B. Smith Fonds, 2013.08, Series 7, Box 35, Solomon James, Franz M.
Koennecke, “The Wasoksiwunini: A History of the Anishnawbeg of Parry Island from 1850-1920.” M.
A. thesis, University of Waterloo, 1984.
29
167
delegates to the Grand Council. 30 He attended an important early council at Orillia between the
government and Indigenous leaders in 1846 as a translator. 31 Later, Salt was a delegate from
Alnwick to the Grand General Indian Council in 1874, and was one of three Grand Council
delegates invited by the government to consult on the 1876 Indian Act in Ottawa, as we saw in
chapter two.32 Salt’s life, while remarkable, fits within a pattern of this generation of leaders'
lives. In many of these early Mississauga converts life stories you could trace similar links to
educational institutions, to each other, and to involvement in early councils (and in his case also
later councils) negotiating with the government. 33
In addition to their religious and educational efforts, Anishinaabeg involved in the

Methodist Church were involved in the major political responses to the government about what
the relationship with Indigenous peoples should be from the mid-1820s to the 1850s. Primary
among these was the movement to secure land title to reserves. First articulated at an 1828
meeting with the British at Fort York, where Peter Jones, John Sunday and George Paudash (of
Rice Lake who had converted to Methodism the year before) attended, land title was the
preeminent political concern of this generation. 34 Securing land title was a lifelong objective of
Jones. John Sunday appeared in 1837 before a select parliamentary committee to request a
30
“The Reverend Allan Salt.” The Parry Sound North Star, Thursday August 16, 1990. E. J. Pratt
Library, Donald Smith Fonds, 2013.08, Box 25, file 2. Salt was also stationed further west at Rainy River
on a largely unsuccessful missionary posting.
31
Minutes of the General Council of Indian Chiefs and Principal Men: Held at Orillia, Lake Simcoe
Narrows, on, the 30th, and Friday, the 31st, of July, 1846, on the proposed removal of smaller
communities and the establishment of Industrial schools (Montreal: Canada Gazette, 1946).
32
Allan Salt Journal (photocopy),Sunday February 14th, box 25, file 13, Donald B. Smith fonds, E. J. Pratt
Library, University of Toronto. The Grand General Council of the Chippewas, Munsees, Six Nations Etc.
Etc. held on the Sarnia Reserve June 25th to July 3rd, 1874 (Sarnia: Canadian Steam Publishing
Establishment, 1874).
33
For a description of some of these networks in relation to schooling and politics, see Thomas Peace,
“Searching for Order in a Settler’s World: Wendat and Mississauga Schooling, Politics, and Networks at
the Beginning of the Nineteenth Century” in Violence, Order, and Unrest: A History of British North
America, 1749-1876, Elizabeth Mancke, Jerry Bannister, Denis McKim, and Scott W. See, eds., (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 2019), 185-213.
34
For an overview of the council see Smith, Mississauga Portraits, 212-214. Chief Ajetance of the
Credit also attended, Smith, 212. For the conversion of Paudash see Graham, 16.
168
secure title for Alderville. 35 Later that summer, Sunday joined Robert Alder, a member of the
Methodist Missionary Society and others in a delegation to meet Lord Glenelg, to again request
the same.36 Neither of these efforts was successful, 37 but the movement for land title gained
strength and urgency during the 1830s as Lieutenant Governor Francis Bond Head pushed for a
removal policy to Manitoulin Island and as reports of removal from the United States travelled
over the border.38 Both Indigenous and non-Indigenous missionaries were extremely critical of
removal policies set up by Lieutenant-Governor Bond Head in 1836, railing against his imagined
trajectory of Indigenous decline and incompatibility with settlement by emphasizing the work
that they had accomplished in establishing viable farming communities and day schools, and
they published many articles in the Christian Guardian to that effect, including reprinting
excerpts of Bond Head’s correspondence with Glenelg, and detailed rebuttals of his views by
missionaries.39 The well-organized response of the Methodists and The Aboriginal Protection
Society were instrumental in the policy being ultimately abandoned. 40
35
36
Ibid.
37
Ibid., 241. Allan Salt also expressed views on land: “Allan Salt expressed bitterness about the lack of
title deeds and the continued aggression of many non-Aboriginal settlers: ‘You are now getting rich on
their once hunting grounds, they are with few exceptions poor.’ Salt endorsed the first Indian Act of
1876, as it put in place stricter regulations to reinforce the “protection of reserves.”
38
Articles published in the Christian Guardian disputed Bond Head’s removal policy. See “Despatch on
Indian Affairs- Missions”, Christian Guardian,March 21 1838. E. J. Pratt Library, Donald B. Smith
fonds, 2013.08, Box 7, file 11.
39
See for instance “Despatch on Indian Affairs- Missions.” The Christian Guardian, March 21, 1838,
Christian Guardian, March 21 1838. E. J. Pratt Library, Donald B. Smith fonds, 2013.08, Box 7, file 11:
"the principal difficulty with which the instructors of the Indians have had to contend in urging them to
the cultivation of their lands had been, not their distaste for those employments, but the knowledge that
they were in possession of no titles to their lands and were liable to be removed from them at pleasure, as
some of them have been, after expended considerable labour. And since the design to banish them to
Manitoulin has been known, these difficulties have been greatly increased. Their reasonable language has
been- ‘Why should we learn to farm? If we improve our lands, others will be allowed to taken them from
us; and if we go to Manitoulin, we cannot plough the big rocks.’ But the uniform opinion of the
Missionaries is, that if settled on good land and their titles secured, they would become industrious,
comfortable and contented.”
40
John F. Leslie, The Report of the Pennefather Commission: Indian Conditions and Administration in
the Canadas in the 1850s (Ottawa: Treaties and Historical Research Centre, 1983), 5.
169
The political work of Peter Jones was very influential here. He became an advocate for
an alternative relocation, the establishment of tract of land in the Saugeen peninsula where land
title would be guaranteed. He assembled several hundred chiefs and warriors at an 1840 council
at the Credit River to advocate for this. 41 The project was ultimately unsuccessful– as it
coincided with a split in the Methodist conference that also divided Anishinaabe communities,
with Jones and the Credit River community following Egerton Ryerson’s Canadian Conference,
(along with Lake Simcoe (Rama), Mud Lake, Munceytown, and Saugeen), and John Sunday at
Alderville, alongside Rice Lake and St. Clair remaining with the British Conference.42 But by
1846 at Orillia (where Allan Salt translated), the government met with many of the same leaders
to discuss consolidating the isolated communities. Missionaries (both Methodist and otherwise)
attended the council, and delegates decided to accept removal to a large tract of land as well as
reallocating a twenty five percent of band annuity payments towards funding industrial
schools.43 This relocation also never materialized, but how this and other reserve communities
were to be governed became another important concern of the Methodists.
By the time of the Orillia conference, the Credit River community had for many years
been organized under their own codified system of governance. As mentioned above, after being
elected chief in 1829, Jones wrote a legal code for the Credit River community. This was passed
by council in 1830 and outlined the structure and powers of how the community would be
governed.44 At the Credit River, “According to the old customs of our nation” the code reads
“the Chiefs shall be chosen by a majority of our people, and shall retain their office during
41
Smith, Sacred Feathers, 172.
42
Ibid., 178-179.
43
Minutes of the General Council of Indian Chiefs and Principal Men held at Orillia, Lake Simcoe
Narrows (Montreal: The Canadian Gazette Office, 1846). Smith, Mississauga Portraits, 234.
44
Reprinted in Elizabeth Graham, Medicine Man to Missionary: Missionaries as Agents of Change
among the Indians of Southern Ontario, 1784-1867 (Toronto: Peter Martin Associates Limited, 1975).
Graham provides some other examples of codes adopted on reserve communities, but notes that these
were largely written by Missionaries, and were largely about behaviour. Jones is the most extensive legal
code of the period. See Graham, 63 and Appendix III.
170
life.”45 A head chief was to have “supreme authority” but was required “in all cases to govern
according to law, and in no case to enforce any Regulation till it regularly becomes a law by
receiving the sanction of the Council.”46 These chiefs together would hold a judicial capacity,
but the “sentence shall be of a majority of votes.”47 Each year a General Council would be held
“conducted according to our old customs,” where at least two-thirds of households would be
required to be represented. New laws could then be passed by a vote of the majority and when
“for great offences, gross immorality, or notorious incapacity, may by a vote of two-thirds, be
deposed, and a new chief or chiefs chosen.” 48 Occasional Councils, composed of “at least one
chief and ten or more householders” could be called and would have regulatory (but not
lawmaking) power over offences against lands (all of which were held in common), timber use
(to be strictly non-commercial) and residence, among other aspects of “general improvement and
welfare.”49
There exist multiple tensions between Jones’ code and historic practices of Anishinaabe
law and governance, most notably the adoption of majoritarian democracy both in the election of
leaders as well as to organize decision-making in General Council, replacing consensus-based
decision-making that had traditionally been practiced.50 However, as legal historian Mark
Walters notes the ambiguous wording of the code referencing “our old customs” makes it unclear
whether clan-based governance might have continued through these processes.51 In her work,
45
Ibid. Appendix III, 107.
46
Ibid.
47
Ibid.
48
Ibid., 108.
49
Ibid.
50
Bohaker, Doodem and Council Fire, 89, 105, and 135-36.
51
Mark D. Walters, “How to Read Aboriginal Legal Texts from Upper Canada,” Journal of the Canadian
Historical Association, Vol. 14, no 1 (2003): 93-116 and “‘According to the Old Customs of our Nation’:
Aboriginal Self-Government on the Credit River Mississauga Reserve, 1826-1847.” Ottawa Law Review,
vol. 30 (1998-1999): 1-46. Here Walters argues that in the context of the precedent set by the Van der
Peet decision, the sole recognition of Indigenous law as that which existed at the time of contact is too
narrow as it negates the work of Indigenous legal thinkers’ reaction to conditions of colonialism.
171
Heidi Bohaker notes the continued significance of doodem governance at New Credit through
the selection of Peter Jones as leader and his double adoption by his grandfather Wabanose and
Adjutant (hereditary ogimaa of the Eagle doodem) to ensure that his eagle doodem would be
recognized by the wider community. 52 Other continuities include a reflection of traditional
structures of governance through smaller councils being responsible for the day to day decisions
around enforcement, and General Councils where it was necessary for most families to be
present in order for larger decisions about leadership and law to be taken. Another significant
continuity with previous Anishinaabe conceptions of what could be classified as “property law”
were that land, timber and the fishery was held in common. Land itself would be allocated to
particular families by the council, with the power to authorize its exchange or sale also resting
with the council. Finally, a basic but fundamentally important continuity with previous forms of
governance was where authority originated within the code. The position of families remained
central to the functioning of governance, but most importantly decision-making authority was
not delegated from the settler government, it existed based on the Mississauga right to maintain
jurisdiction over their own community.
This jurisdiction was largely respected by the settler government. Walters explains that
the “Mississauga legal and governmental system existed as a functioning legal order and its
existence was no secret to provincial officials,” and that “neither the local colonial legislature nor
the imperial Parliament in London attempted to place Indian reserve law and government on any
legislative foundation.”53 Under this system, “the Credit River chiefs and councils between 1830
and 1847 show that the Mississaugas exercised significant powers of self-government pursuant
to the 1830 code.”54 In Jones’ 1842 testimony to the Bagot Commission, Walters cites the
following: “that provincial magistrates ‘will not act in Indian cases’ and that instead ‘[t]he
52
Heidi Bohaker, Doodem and Council Fire, 185.
53
Walters, “How to Read Aboriginal Legal Texts,” 106.
54
Ibid.
172
Indians have established a code of several Rules and Regulations among themselves,’ a copy of
which was held by the Department” confirms this interpretation. 55
Jones’ testimony to the Bagot Commission also included an emphasis on full civil and
political rights for Indigenous people, as well as rearticulating his longstanding position that land
title should be granted that would be guaranteed in perpetuity. He emphasized the importance of
education and of full financial transparency in terms of annuities and land sales. 56 Education
was the only point from Jones that the Commission ultimately took up, reflecting a shift towards
assimilation in both government and church politics over the 1850s.57
The Methodist Church’s specific focus on advocacy for Indigenous legal issues in
Ontario declined after the 1840s and coincided with their discouraging Indigenous preachers due
to hardening ideas of racial inferiority. 58 They continued correspondence with the government,
but this consisted largely of issues relating to their administration of day schools on various
reserves as well as the Industrial school at Mount Elgin.59 Their newspaper publications focused
primarily on more “exotic” overseas missions in Gabon, China, and Japan.60 In Ontario, the
specific influence of the Methodist church also declined in Indigenous communities, with a split
in the British and Canadian Conferences dividing communities and competition with Anglican
and Roman Catholic missions dividing reserves. However, the idea of electoral governance for
55
Ibid.
56
Smith, Sacred Feathers, 184.
57
Ibid., 193.
58
This era also included a shift away from preaching in Ojibwe and Mohawk, and an increased emphasis
on communities learning English; “Such strategies undoubtedly diminished the status of native preachers;
no new generation of great aboriginal leaders emerged to evangelize the Canadas. Notions of racial
inferiority and the assumption that natives should not minister to their own emerged during the second
half of the nineteenth century. Methodism thereby lost much of its original advantage over other
churches.” Semple, The Lord’s Dominion, 172.
59
United Church of Canada Archives, 1978.083C, 23-1, Correspondence with the Department of Indian
Affairs.
60
See for instance United Church of Canada Archives, The Missionary Outlook: A Monthly Advocate,
Record and Review, vol. IV, no. 5, May 1884.
173
reserves resurfaces in the Methodist conference as it took up advocating for a model of

autonomous electoral governance in their vision for Christian Indigenous communities.
Following the meeting of the Committee on Indian Affairs of the Wesleyan Methodist
Church in 1856, held in Toronto, the assembled delegates sent the Governor General several
resolutions.61 The first was a recommendation for the longstanding idea of consolidating of
smaller tribes throughout the region at Munceytown or in the Saugeen peninsula. Notably,
governance in this community was envisioned specifically as electoral. Chiefs were to be
elected by a majority of electors 21 years of age, and would be elected yearly. 62 The Conference
also recommended that the government “empower [reserves] to make By-laws or Regulations for
the management of their local affairs, subject to the sanction of the Superintendent of Indian
Affairs” through this elected council. 63 This missionary suggestion foreshadows the adoption of
elections as a later government policy, in particular the caveat of the Superintendent being
authorized to sanction these laws– a significant departure from the autonomous model of the
Credit River. Although the government initially rejected their suggestion as will be discussed
below, this rearrangement of the authority over local affairs away from one built on sovereign
Indigenous jurisdiction to one delegated by the state is a marked change from the generation of
early Methodists to that of the Grand General Council. The context in which the Grand Council
were operating was one where, by the 1880s, the municipal model of reserve governance became
central to the assimilation strategy of John A. Macdonald.
3.2. Municipal Governance for Reserves: Government

Legislation
The response from Governor General Edmund Walker Head to the Methodist Conference
was lukewarm. He agreed that a consolidated settlement of Indigenous people might be
beneficial. However, citing the failure of resettlement on Manitoulin, he thought the success of
61
“Enoch Wood to the Private Secretary of his excellency the Governor General, Feb. 26, 1856,” LAC,
RG10, vol. 233, no. 8901-9000, C-11529.
62
Ibid.
63
Ibid.
174
“further trials of the same sort” would be “doubtful.” 64 As for electoral governance, his opinion
was firm: “The proposition to enable the Indians by Statute to elect a Council of Chiefs who
should make bylaws or regulations for the management of their local affairs does not seem to the
governor general to be advisable on the following grounds – It is in fact a scheme for forming the
Indians into a complete municipal or corporate body.”65 Head’s reasoning was that “such a
system of electoral chiefs as is suggested would make it difficult to impose a practical check on
any chief who might be guilty of misconduct.” 66 He was also “not convinced that the Indians as
a community are yet sufficiently advanced in civilization and sufficiently familiar with the
workings of municipal law to [exercise] complete corporate rights with advantage to themselves
and others.”67 Municipal powers were a new important site of negotiation within the settler state,
and had only recently been defined in the 1849 Municipal Corporations (Baldwin) Act. 68 In
other words, the Governor General found the possibility of sanctioning municipal-style electoral
governance too much of a risk, especially as it was seen to be a more legitimized form of
leadership (delegated through statute) in which intervention would be more difficult for the
government. This position is surprising, as the imposition of a restricted form of municipal
governance legislated through parliament became a cornerstone of later Indian Act policy.69
Rearranging the operations of Indian Affairs would have been on Head’s mind as the
Pennefather Commission, “the most comprehensive and far-reaching study of Canadian Indian
64
Private Secretary of Edmund Walker Head to Enoch Wood, February 29 1856, LAC, RG10, vol. 233,
no. 8901-9000, C-11529. He also doubted that Munceytown would be a suitable location, and as for the
Saugeen “It appears to H. E. at any rate unadvisable to increase the number of native inhabitants in this
tract of country by artificial means” as the plan was to “throw open for public sale” these valuable lands.
65
Ibid.
66
Ibid.
67
Ibid. He also states that elections would exacerbate “sectarian strife among the individuals of several
bands belonging to different denominations.”
68
For an examination of the operation of the Municipal Corporations Act between 1850-1880 see Mary
Margaret Pelton Stokes, “Law, Autonomy and Local Government: A Legal History of Municipal
Corporations in Canada West/Ontario, 1850-1880” (PhD Diss, York University, 2018).
69
After Confederation, municipalities would also come under control of the Provinces, which is a
difference when the Indian Act was written.
175
administration during the period of Imperial control,”70 was already underway. Lead by Richard
Pennefather, Head’s long-time private secretary who had recently been promoted to Civil
Secretary, the interim report was sent to the Governor General just nine months after his
correspondence with Wood and the Methodist Conference. As was noted in Chapter One, the
Pennefather Report focused on administrative reorganization and the process of selling lands as a
means of financing the transition from imperial control.
The interim report focused primarily on individual land tenure as a means to deal with the
problem of communal ownership. The 1857 Gradual Civilization Act and the final report of
1858 continued this trajectory, with the later rejecting the idea that “Municipal Institutions”
should replace tribal governments, and called instead for the “gradual destruction of the tribal
organization.”71 In the long term, the idea of municipal governance was considered useful as a
means to undermine tribal power, but was considered by the Commissioners to be premature. 72
The Commission marks a shift from a policy focused on civilization to one based on
assimilation, but assimilation would be reconstrued and expanded in later years to also include
electoral governance and municipal powers.
A little more than a decade after the Governor General’s firm rejection of the idea of
municipal-style governance, the 1869 Gradual Enfranchisement Act was passed, the first
legislation dealing with elections on reserves, and the impetus for the first Grand General
Council gathering as we saw in the last chapter. It allowed that the Governor could order
elections, where men twenty-one years and older would elect leaders for a term of three years. It
limited the number of chiefs to one head and two second chiefs for every two hundred people. 73
70
Leslie, The Report of the Pennefather Commission, 15.
71
Ibid., 29. Province of Canada, “Report of the Special Commissioners Appointed on the 8th of
September, 1856, to Investigate Indian Affairs in Canada,” Appendix 21 in Journals of the Legislative
Assembly, Sessional Papers, 6th Parl. 1st Sess. Vol. 16 (25 February-16 August 1858).
72
Martha Walls, No Need of a Chief for This Band : the Maritime Mi’kmaq and Federal Electoral
Legislation, 1899-1951 (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2010), 62.
73
Small bands of 30 people of more could elect one chief. An Act for the gradual enfranchisement of the
Indians, the better management of Indian Affairs, and to extend the provisions of the Act 31st Vict.,
Chapter 42, S. C. 1869, c. 6 (32-33 Vict.), s. 10.
176
Their jurisdiction was limited to creating and maintaining roads, bridges, ditches and fences, and
framing rules on public health, order at councils and other assemblies, repression of
intemperance and profligacy, trespass by cattle, construction and maintenance of schools and
public buildings, and the creation of pounds. 74 This framework was adopted without major
changes into the Indian Act of 1876. Importantly, both Acts included a provision that life chiefs
would retain their position until death, resignation, or their removal for “dishonesty,
intemperance, immorality, or incompetency.”75 This allowed for a great deal of flexibility on the
part of the Department to attempt to replace traditional government without causing the backlash
of removing traditional leaders directly. As discussed previously, this legislation was
resoundingly rejected at the 1870 Grand General Council. Alan Salt was present here as a
delegate from Alderville, and he would have been aware of the changed political tone from the
council at Orillia and the efforts of the Methodists to have electoral governance instituted. Now
electoral governance was rejected by the bands and was being advocated by the government.
By 1880 there had been several amendments to the electoral governance provisions of the
Indian Act. Included were slight additions to the powers of councils, the most significant being
the ability to impose punishments by fine or imprisonment for infractions.76 The most important
change, however, was that in cases where elections were adopted (or imposed), “the life chiefs
shall not exercise the powers of chiefs unless elected under such order to the exercise of such
powers.”77 The government was moving further away from tolerance of traditional leadership.
Concurrently, the idea of establishing municipal-style governance on reserves had gained

in importance for top Department officials. Lawrence Vankoughnet, the Deputy Superintendent
74
Ibid., s. 11-12.
75
Ibid., s. 13.
76
This was a clause introduced in 1879, and in 1880 the clause was expanded to include summary
proceedings by a Justice of the Peace. Fines were limited to $30.00 and imprisonment to 30 days. Other
minor powers expanded were the ability to determine the denomination of schools as long as it was the
majority religion of the band and repression of intemperance and profligacy. The Indian Act, S. C. 1880,
c. 28 (43 Vict.) s. 74.
77
The Indian Act, 1880, s. 72.
177
General, had sent a circular to agents and superintendents the same year as the 1880 amendments
to ask if they considered the bands under their authority capable of adopting municipal
institutions.78 His proposal was that reserves would be divided into electoral districts (called
sections), with the resulting electoral council managing the local affairs of the band, presided
over by a position similar to a reeve or mayor.79 The responses to Vankoughnet’s circular were
largely negative, with the majority of lower-level officials declaring that the bands under their
authority did not have the capacity for municipal-style governance.80 Vankoughnet was not
deterred by this, and sent a positive report to the Superintendent General, John A. Macdonald. 81
Macdonald voiced his support for such a system in the Annual Report for the Department
in 1881. His words demonstrate how the municipal system was now considered to be a part of
the assimilation process:
it is worthy of consideration whether legislative measures should not be adopted for the
establishment of some kind of municipal system among such bands as are found
sufficiently advanced…which will have the effect of accustoming the Indian to the
modes of government prevalent in the white communities surrounding them, and that it
will thus prepare them for earlier amalgamation with the general population of the
country.82
He also ordered that Vankoughnet proceed with drafting new legislation. 83 This was completed
and introduced in Parliament in 1884 as An Act for conferring certain privileges on the more
78
Wayne Daugherty and Dennis Madill, Indian Government under Indian Act Legislation, 1868-1951
(Ottawa: Research Branch, Department of Indian and Northern Affairs Canada, 1980), section 1, p. 10
citing Circular letter from Lawrence Vankoughnet, 19 July 1880, LAC, RG10, vol. 2116, file 27, 155.
79
Ibid., section 1, p. 10.
80
Ibid., section 1, p. 10-12.
81
Ibid., section 1, p. 12. Citing Memorandum to the Superintendent General from Deputy Superintendent
Lawrence Vankoughnet, 9 November 1881, LAC, RG10, vol. 2116, file 22,155.
82
Ibid., section 1, p. 10. Citing Canada. Department of Indian Affairs. Annual Report, 1881, p. XLVIII;
Superintendent John A. Macdonald to Sir John Douglas Sutherland Campbell, Marquis of Lorne,
Governor General of Canada.
83
Ibid., section 1, p. 12. Citing LAC, RG10, vol. 2116, file 22, 155, Memorandum to the Superintendent
General from Deputy Superintendent General Vankoughnet, 9 November 1881.
178
advanced Bands of the Indians of Canada, with the view of training the for the exercise of
municipal powers, or the Indian Advancement Act.84
In the 1884 House of Commons debates dealing with the legislation, Macdonald
explained the intention of the law regarding traditional leaders: “In some of the tribes there are
hereditary and elective chiefs combined. There are great varieties of organizations in the
different bands. It is not proposed in any way to affect the status or the rank of the chiefs; but, as
in the Act of 1880, where an elective system has been adopted, the hereditary chiefs retain their
rank but lose their power.”85 Traditional leadership was now conceived of by the government as
an empty title, with any substantive authority flowing exclusively through either of the two Acts.
The Indian Advancement Act laid out electoral processes in much greater detail than
those in the Indian Act. These comprise a large part of the law. Other notable changes were that
elections would be annual rather than triennial, the language of “councillors” instead of “chiefs”
was adopted, reserves were divided into sections, councillors elected from each section would
elect a head councillor, and meetings of council were limited to between four and twelve per
year.86 Powers of councils were again slightly expanded, including the removal of trespassers,
the making of a lock-up and appointing constables for “general decorum on reserve,” the setting
apart of lands to be held in common for wood or other purposes, “contributions in money or
labour” for roads and bridges, and the ability to raise money for the purposes of bylaws though
taxing enfranchised Indian lands or those under location tickets. 87
Shortly after the law passed, another circular was sent by Vankoughnet to agents and
Superintendents asking them to explain the law to the bands and to report on whether they were
84
An Act for conferring certain privileges on the more advanced Bands of the Indians of Canada, with the
view of training the for the exercise of municipal powers or The Indian Advancement Act, S. C. 1884, c.
28 (47 Vict.).
85
Daugherty and Madill, section 1, p. 14. Citing Self Government among Indian Communities, 29
January 1884, Canadian Parliament, House of Commons Debates, 2nd Session, 5th Parliament, 1884, p. 67.
Emphasis added.
86
The Indian Advancement Act, 1884, s. 4, 6, 7, 9 and 10.
87
Ibid., s. 10. Taxation was limited to one half of one percent on the assessed value of land.
179
willing to adopt it.88 He notably instructs here that the law was not to be imposed. 89 The
response to this circular was, again, largely negative, and compounded by the fact that bands
deemed capable by Indian agents often rejected the law.90 The act was not imposed during this
period, as the circular from Vankoughnet had promised, and in some cases was denied to
Western bands and to at least one band in Quebec who wanted to come under its provisions. 91
The Act was largely unsuccessful, with only seven bands coming under it by 1897, the majority
of these in the West. 92 By 1899, the government decided to impose electoral governance by
Order-in-Council across all reserves in Eastern Canada, however it was the three-year elective
system under the Indian Act, not the Indian Advancement Act that was applied.93 The
Advancement Act was consolidated into the body of the Indian Act of 1906, but retained
separately under its own section of the law. This lead to a system where there were bands under
the three-year system of the original Indian Act, a few bands under the one-year electoral system
88
Daugherty and Madill, section 1, p. 17. Citing LAC, RG10, vol. 3815, file 56, 833, Circular letter to the
Indian Superintendents and Agents from Deputy Superintendent General Vankoughnet, 16 January 1885.
89
Ibid. This was also emphasized by Macdonald in Parliament where he declares “there is to be no force
exercised on the Indians” in the imposition of the law. Ibid., section 1, p. 14, Citing Canadian Parliament,
House of Commons Debates, 2nd Session, 5th Parliament, 1884, p. 67, Self Government among Indian
Communities, 29 January 1884. Because of the wording of the law and later histories of it being imposed
as a strategy to actively replace reserve governance, it has largely been written about as if this was the
intention. See for instance Martha Walls, No Need of a Chief, 65. Walls makes the important point that
the “notion of band council systems as voluntary is a persistent one. It was consistently articulated by
policy makers who failed to see that assertions of voluntariness were incompatible with legislation that
increased the power of the federal government.” Walls, 65, footnote 31.
90
Daugherty and Madill, section 1, p. 17.
91
Ibid., section 1, p. 29. Hayter Reed, the Commissioner for the Northwest was adamantly against both
traditional leadership and electoral governance, arguing instead for the abolition of band councils in
favour of a more aggressive assimilationist agenda. Alain Beaulieu and Stéphanie Béreau examine how
the Innu community of Pointe-Bleue (Mashteuiatsh) were nearly successful in their 1895 attempt to
implement the Act on their reserve, but were ultimately undermined by a change in Indian Agent who
refused to support their bid. Alain Beaulieu and Stéphanie Béreau, “‘Voir par eux-mêmes à
l’administration de leurs propres affairs’: Les Innus de Pointe-Bleue et l’implantation des conseils de
bande (1869-1951),” Recherches Amérindiennes au Québec, Vol. XLVI, no 1 (2016): 97-98.
92
Ibid., section 2, p. 19. These were New Credit, Kahnawake, Cowichan, Kincolith, Metlakalta, Port
Simpson and the St. Peter’s Band.
93
Ibid., section 1, p. 6. Provinces included were Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and
Prince Edward Island. For the impact of this imposition in Mi’kmaw reserves see Walls.
180
(formerly the Indian Advancement Act), and some bands who were under either traditional
governments as provided for through the law (chosen by a majority of bands) or a new system of
“appointments” for bands in the West that had developed in an ad-hoc way and was formalized
in 1905.94 These options allowed the government a flexible approach where cooperative
traditional governments, and those who they considered too destabilizing to replace, were
retained. Additionally, bands who were not deemed advanced enough, such as the Treaty 3
bands, were excluded from the 1899 imposition despite being in Ontario. 95 Although it is
beyond the scope of this chapter, the strategic implementation or withholding of band council
governance from First Nations has been understudied and deserves further examination.
The Indian Advancement Act was largely a failure, implemented in only 9 bands by the
time it was repealed in 1951. 96 However, despite this failure, the idea of limited municipal
governance was largely imposed in 1899 through the three-year system. Through this flexible
legal structure, the Department was able to give the impression of training bands for “municipal”
governance, even as they wielded enormous powers to depose councillors, traditional leadership
and ultimately retained utmost authority over band affairs and band funds, limits no settler
municipal government experienced. Indeed, government officials implementing the law never
considered band councils to be the full equivalent of municipalities. 97
94
Ibid., section 1, p. 64. The appointment system happened in the case of Western Bands who were
neither under the Indian Act nor the Indian Advancement Act but where elections were held under the
supervision of Indian Agents. Ibid., section 1, p. 57.
95
Ibid., section 1, p. 81.
96
Ibid., section 1, p. 78. The last of these was the imposition of the Advancement Act at Six Nations in
1924. Ibid., section 1, p. 51.
97
See Ibid., section 2, p. 28-29 for a summary of the House of Commons debate in 1890 about the
relative position of band councils vs. municipalities.
181
3.3. The Grand General Council Responds to the Indian

Advancement Act
The Indian Advancement Act in 1884, and the possibilities of expanded powers it offered
was, for some Grand Council delegates, well worth considering. At the 1884 Grand General
Council, the debate around the Advancement Act lasted the entire day of September 13,th taking
up one day of the five in which Council met that year. Peter Edmund Jones, at this time the
Secretary and Treasurer, strongly advocated for accepting the law and argued along similar lines
to how earlier enfranchisement provisions were accepted by the Council– that they would remain
optional. In addition to arguing that the law would only be applied to those bands who petitioned
for it, Jones further maintained that local leaders would have the right to decide which aspects of
the law they might adopt. Leaders, he noted, would have the “privilege…to make By-laws for
their local government upon all or any of the 14 different subjects set forth in the sub-
sections.”98 For Jones, the Act provided both the flexibility to opt-in by petition as well as
leaving the option open for bands to selectively apply only those aspects deemed useful for their
community.99 This reflected the authority that local councils held historically in Anishinaabe
governance.
Jones’ emphasis on the power of councils to adopt only the aspects of the Act they
desired was primarily to ease concerns raised by other delegates around the Act. Both Abner
Elliot (Cape Croker) and George Fisher (Chippewas of the Thames) raised concerns around
taxation in the Advancement Act. Elliot “thought the Act was too oppressive in the way of
taxation,” while Fisher was concerned by the carceral powers that were given through the Act for
non-compliance with taxation by-laws.100 Fisher also worried that the Act “would deprive
98
Company), 25-26. Emphasis in original.
99
Although it was not applied widely enough to know if this would have been the case generally, in at
least one instance at the St. Peters Band, the Indian Agent refused to allow the band to implement only
certain clauses of the Act. Daugherty and Madill, section 1, p. 19.
100
Company), 23-24. Section 11 of the law deals with taxation powers and allowed the council to raise
182
members out of the elected council from having a voice in the workings of the local affairs of the
band,” as well the fact that “the Local Agent had too much power and might abuse it.” 101
Other notable concerns came from Northern Delegates, including Chief Augustine of
Garden River and Solomon James of Shawanaga, who were two of the chiefs involved in timber
disputes and regional councils in Chapter One. These delegates, along with other leaders from
the region, generally felt that their concerns were not being met by the Council and had held a
separate council the night before. 102 Here they took the decision to leave but were ultimately
convinced to stay by the Council as a whole. Their primary concerns were about treaty
violations occurring on their territory and they were not interested in discussing the details of
laws they felt should not apply to them. Regarding the Enfranchisement Act, Solomon James,
now the second Vice President of the Council, “considered that all the Indians of the Robinson
Treaty were not capable of coping with its provisions and he would refrain from raising his hand
in favour of it.”103 Chief Augustine’s criticism of the law was more explicit, he said “he blamed
the Indians of the East and South who were educated for having these laws passed, but those of
the North and West would not adopt them because they were awake and not asleep.” 104
Other delegates were much more amenable to the law. In particular, both William
McGregor (Cape Croker) and Charles Herchmer (New Credit) spoke of the similarities to the
pre-existing Indian Act framework, and how through this both of their bands had successfully
adopted by-laws for their communities.105 Herchmer notes that passing further by-laws would
be “of great benefit” as they would have the force of the state behind them: “when confirmed by
money through taxation on reserve lands, subject to approval by the Superintendent General and subject
to his approval of the valuation of lands. Punishment for non-payment included increased taxation and
fines, with the Superintendent being able to pay defaulters sums out of band funds. The Indian
Advancement Act, 1884. S. C. 1884, c. 28 (47 Vict.)
101
Ibid., 23.
102
Ibid., 17-18.
103
Ibid., 24.
104
Ibid., 25.
105
Ibid., 24 and 26.
183
the Government they became law, and any Magistrate could punish any persons who broke such
By-Laws, but they could not act upon rules and regulations made by the chiefs and councils but
not confirmed by the Government.”106 The ability to have laws and regulations enforced,
especially when it came to restricting settlers from poaching timber on reserves was an ongoing
and pressing concern of reserve leaders. 107 This was an especially pressing issue in Southern
Ontario, and leaders saw the benefit of being able to have better means of stopping trespass on
their reserves.
During the debate, the importance of the idea brought forward by Jones that the law
would not be imposed remained central. Over the day, the fact that it was non-compulsory was
brought up again and again. Because “there was nothing compulsory about the Act,” Chief John
French (Chippewas of the Thames) “thought there was no use discussing it.” 108 William Elliot of
New Credit declared “This Act is not compulsory. Let it remain as it is and give those Bands
wishing to come under it a chance to do so.” 109 Abner Elliot, despite his concerns over taxation,
“said that he was surprised to hear some Chiefs say that they spurn the efforts of the Indian
Department to aid the Indians in taking care of themselves. By entirely rejecting this new Act
they can get along well enough with their own rules without submitting to the Department for
consideration.”110
Eventually, this thread of thought became adopted by both those who were advocating for
the law and those who were initially against it, or who did not expect their own communities to
106
Ibid., 26.
107
Peter Jones makes this more explicit later in his newspaper in his discussions of the Advancement Act,
using the example of the Six Nations not being able to enforce timber bylaws that they had passed
without any way to enforce fines or other punishments. Peter Jones, “The Indian Advancement Act,” The
Indian, Vol. 1, No. 2, February 3, 1886, p.5.
108
Company), 24.
109
Ibid., 25.
110
Ibid., 24.
184
adopt the law. Chief William McGregor (Cape Croker), although he felt “he could not avail
himself of the advantages of the Act at present…would not put any obstacles in the way of other
Bands embracing it, and if he saw them getting along well he would imitate them.” 111 His
speech brought applause. Even some leaders who were against the law in the beginning, such as
Solomon James came to agree that as long as the law would not be imposed it would be
acceptable: “we, The Indians of the North of the Lake,” he proclaimed “are not capable of using
the Act lately passed. We are ignorant and innocent respecting it. But I have no objection to the
civilized tribes coming under the law.”112What James meant was that he would respect the
decision of other tribes to make the best decision for their communities, a principle of historic
Anishinaabe governance. The wording of the successful motion to approve of the law at the end
of the day was this: “as ‘The Indian Advancement Act’ is a liberal one and not compulsory this
Council hereby approves of it.”113
The negotiations in council regarding the Indian Advancement Act demonstrate a clear
intention on the part of council delegates to maintain the non-coercive local-level decision-
making authority that was central to Anishinaabe governance. In emphasizing the optional
nature of the law, it allowed the council to mend the relationship with Northern delegates who
were about to leave. Chief Augustine declared that his fears that the Eastern Bands were
“endeavouring to include all the Northern Bands in their request to become unfranchised [sic]”
and adopt the Indian Acts were alleviated. 114 Indeed, the last day of the council was devoted to
addressing their concerns around treaty violations and how to best advocate that the government
address these.
The confidence of many delegates that the Act would not be imposed was not only based
on Jones’ insistence, but also with their own experience in negotiations with the Government.
Bringing up enfranchisement law, William McGregor recalls the limited success of the council in
111
Ibid., 26.
112
Ibid., 26-27.
113
Ibid., 25. Emphasis added.
114
Ibid, 28.
185
having the Indian Act altered, discussed in Chapter Two. It had been “now eight years since he
had heard of the Indian Acts and they were then discussed in the Grand Council. They were of a
compulsory nature and he was one who advocated a change and to have them left more optional
with the Bands. He was glad to know that the Government had listened to the Indians and the
Grand Council. Now every Band was independent of each other.” 115 William Elliot also
references this, saying “The superintendent General did not wish to force his measures upon the
Indians against their will, and gave us an instance in the provisions of the enfranchisement
clauses of the Indian Act.”116 As we saw in the previous chapter, the willingness of the
government to accommodate demands for local control over these processes did much to bolster
the trust the council had in them.
The council had another, centrally important reason to feel optimistic about their
relationship with the Government. That year, the government had passed the Franchise Act
which allowed for adult property-owning status Indian men 21 years and older to vote in federal
elections. To many it was a sign of confidence that the government was willing to take them
seriously as political participants and was much celebrated in the preface to the Council Minutes
in 1884 as well as in Jones’ newspaper. 117 The Franchise Act features prominently in the preface
to the 1884 Council minutes: “Since the last Grand General Council the Dominion Government
have passed a Franchise Act…A proper scheme for the right to exercise the Franchise has for
many years been the great object of the Grand Council.” 118 The minutes go on to say that the
enfranchisement provision already allows voting, “but it has always been unfair to the Indian, for
he would, in a measure, be obliged to sever his connection with his people and there would be
great danger in breaking up the tribal union, which now exists, and which the aborigines are
115
Ibid., 26.
116
Ibid., 27.
117
Company), 8.
118
Ibid.
186
anxious to retain.”119 The Franchise Act was seen as evidence of the potential for progress in the
relationship of Indigenous peoples with the Canadian government.
The continuation of Anishinaabe principles of autonomous local governance and the

tentative confidence in the government is important to understand, in terms of council decision-
making as a whole, but it is nonetheless useful to more deeply understand the logic of the faction
of delegates who were explicitly in support of the law. This is equally instructive as to the
complicated legal dynamics between reserve and state governance that had been developing over
the century. None were so vocal in council as Peter Edmund Jones, and his work outside of
council– to contextualize his firm advocacy for the law– is what I will next examine.
3.4. Peter E. Jones and the Indian Advancement Act

Dr. Jones’ multiple assertions in council that the Advancement Act would not be imposed
was an erroneous reading of the law, as it did in fact allow for the imposition of elections. 120
Later in his newspaper The Indian, Jones corrects his mistake and advocates that the
Advancement Act be amended to be applicable only through the petition from a band. 121 This
was to “do away with the Arbitrary appearance of the Act, which was so objectionable to many
119
Ibid.
120
The section pertaining to applying the law reads simply “Wherever any band or bands of Indians shall
be declared by Order of the Governor in Council to be considered fit to have this Act applied to them, it
shall so apply from the time to be appointed in such Order, which shall not be earlier than the first of
January, one thousand eight hundred and eighty-five.” The Indian Advancement Act, S. C. 1884, c. 28. (47
Vict.) s. 3.
121
On section 3 of the law Jones writes in his paper “There is nothing in this, or other sections of the Act,
to show that it is necessary a Band should ask by petition to have the Act apply to them, but such is the
intention, and the privileges granted by this Act, will not be thrust upon an unwilling Band, nor can a
Band that is willing to have it apply to them, obtain their desire, until they have, in Council, petitioned
that the Act should become law upon their Reserve.” Jones goes on to say that “To avoid the mistake, the
Indian Bands might, and have labored under, on account of the wording of section 3, we would suggest
that it be amended, by adding after the word “Indians,” in the first line, the word “petitioning.” This
would do away with the arbitrary appearance of the Act, which was so objectionable to many in the last
Grand Council.” Peter Edmund Jones, “The Indian Advancement Act” in (Hagersville, Ont: Indian
Publishing Co): 39. Martha Wall notes that the voluntary nature was emphasized in parliament by
Macdonald. It is possible that Jones, in his careful following of political developments related to
Indigenous people would have been aware of this. Wall, No Need of a Chief, p. 65, footnote 31.
187
in the last Grand Council.”122 His comment that the “arbitrary” potential of imposition was a
concern of the council gives a sense of some of the debates around the law absent from the
meeting minutes.
The Indian in general expands on many aspects of legal thought brought up, but not
elaborated on, in the Grand Council minutes. For instance, Jones expanded on other issues of
concern from the Council in his newspaper– specifically taxation and how municipal governance
functioned elsewhere in the province. 123 We also see in his paper a much more critical
interpretation of the Indian Act than is available in the Council records. For instance, in one
issue he remarks: “If the Indian should become a member of parliament, he would be a very
troublesome one, for he would move an amendment to nearly every clause of the “Indian
Act.”124 His biographer, Alan Sherwin, has emphasized his critical views on the law. I believe
his ardent advocacy for the law bears closer examination, in particular the Indian Advancement
Act. His newspaper provided one avenue to do so, and his direct correspondence with John A.
Macdonald another. Both of these can help to situate the influence of his father’s generation in
his own political work in different ways.
Jones’ The Indian was the first newspaper by an Indigenous publisher in Canada. It was
short-lived but expansive in scope. He published one issue in 1885 and published almost bi-
weekly issues over 1886. 125 The paper’s purpose was to provide news to reserves and “to
educate the Indians and by advice and suggestion, to elevate them step by step to the same
position in the social, agricultural, and commercial world, which is now enjoyed by their white
Peter Edmund Jones, “The Indian Advancement Act” in The Indian, Vol. 1, No. 4, March 3, 1886
122
(Hagersville, Ont: Indian Publishing Co.), 39.

“Taxes!,” The Indian, Vol. 1, No. 5, March 17, 1886 (Hagersville, Ont: Indian Publishing Co.) and
123
“The Indian Advancement Act,” The Indian, (Hagersville, Ont: Indian Publishing Co.) Vol. 1, no 2. Feb 3
1886, p. 5.
124
The Indian, Vol. 1, No. 4, March 3, 1886 (Hagersville, Ont: Indian Publishing Co.). Jones goes on to
qualify this, not to “change the intention, though many should be altered, but a motion that section so and
so, be amended to read such and such.”
125
Issues of The Indian are available on Early Canadiana online. Accessed October 7 2022, https://www-
canadiana-ca.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/search/?q0.0=The&q1.0=Indian.
188
brethren.”126 Topics covered included reports directly from various reserves, reports on
schooling, news from the United States and of the expansion to the West and the violence there,
reprinting of House of Commons debates on Indian Affairs, legal decisions affecting Indigenous
people (such as the St. Catherine Milling and Lumber case) and in-depth explanations of the laws
passed regarding Indigenous people including the Indian Advancement Act and the 1885
Franchise Act. This was complemented by other eclectic pieces of writing– on archaeology and
Indigenous history, reprinting excepts from James Fennimore Cooper’s “Last of the Mohicans,”
a section for children and listings of market prices for fish and furs to name a few. As secretary
of the Grand General Council, Jones also used the paper to solicit feedback from the public on
issues to be raised in there.127 Jones owned his printing press and also printed meeting minutes
from the council there.
Jones’ paper in many ways echoes the work of his fathers’ generation, including the
circulation of knowledge and communication between reserves, emphasis on establishing
education, political advancement and finding common political purpose in dealing with the
settler government. The networks of his father’s generation were commemorated by Jones. He
printed biographies of a number of the Anishinabek missionaries of his father’s generation,
emphasizing their political involvement. For instance, in the printed biography of John Sunday
he begins the excerpt with “The temporal welfare of his people greatly interested him. Along
with other Ojibway Chiefs he laid several important matters respecting land and timber before
the representatives of the government.” 128 He also printed the minutes of the early council at
Orillia in the first issue of his paper, where his father and Allan Salt had participated and where
consolidation of reserves and the promotion of industrial schooling were discussed.129 These
stories would have been familiar to Jones, as he and his father were both ill and confined to
126
“Salutory,” The Indian, (Hagersville, Ont: Indian Publishing Co.), Vol. 1, No, 1. Dec 30, 1885.
127
“The Grand General Council of Ontario,” The Indian, (Hagersville, Ont: Indian Publishing Co.) Vol. 1,
no. 1, December 30, 1885, p. 12
Reverend John Mclean, “The Life of John Sunday” The Indian, (Hagersville, Ont: Indian Publishing
128
Co.) Vol. 1, no. 11, June 9, 1886.

129
The Indian (Hagersville, Ont: Indian Publishing Co.) Vol. 1, no. 1, Dec. 30, 1885.
189
home together during the years the elder Jones was composing his memoirs.130 Dr. Jones also
inherited his father’s legal papers. 131 In addition, he continued to emphasize the importance of
the development of schooling, soliciting opinions on successful models of day schools and
advertising early residential schools. 132
The main orientation of his paper was political rather than religious. Jones himself was not a
Methodist, having converted to Anglicanism, 133 and although religious considerations were
important to him, he explains his priorities in an editorial in March of 1886:
Our readers may think we should devote more space to the religious interest of our
people. It is our intention to do so, and to make THE INDIAN as much as we can an
aid to the Indian missionary… The temporal welfare of our people, however, has not
had the proper attention. The laws respecting Indians, their rights to lands, their position
in respect to treaties, and their financial standing with the Government are all subjects
which it is the duty of THE INDIAN to pay immediate attention to. The worldly affairs
of our people, must have the larger part of our attention for several months.134
He focused his attention, through lengthy editorials, on explaining why he thought legislation
such as the Advancement Act and the Franchise Act were essential to advancing these “worldly
affairs.”
In one of his editorial pieces on the importance of the Indian Advancement Act, he ties
this to earlier forms of Anishinaabe law, and in so doing contextualizes some of his reasoning to
push the Grand Council to accept the law. In February of 1886 he writes: “Many years ago the
Indian tribes had their councils, which made certain rules and regulations for the proper
management of the affairs of the tribe– a crude kind of municipality which in those times worked
satisfactory [sic]….But time has changed much of this. The white people have taken possession
130
Sherwin, Bridging Two Peoples, 12.
131
Ibid., 15.
“The Indian Homes,” The Indian, (Hagersville, Ont: Indian Publishing Co.),Vol. 1, no. 2, February 3
132
1886, p. 8, The Indian, (Hagersville, Ont: Indian Publishing Co.), Vol. 1, no. 13, July 7 1886, 156.
133
Sherwin, 41.
134
The Indian, (Hagersville, Ont: Indian Publishing Co.), Vol. 1, no. 5, March 17 1886, 54.
190
of most of our land.”135 Due to this, Indigenous people, as allies of the British “of necessity
must come under the laws laid down in the Empire.” 136 This came with a price: “We can see,
then, how natural it was that the administration of justice in the Indian tribes should rapidly slip
into the hands of the courts of the county…To the older Indians this has always been a source of
grief and anxiety. They thought, and perhaps properly, that they could manage their own people
better than the white law could. They had maintained order and morality before, why not
now?”137 The Advancement Act in this new era, argued Jones, was “the answer.” 138 It allowed
for bands to have their decisions backed up by the force of Canadian law– an important
consideration in Council as we saw.
This enforcement was, to Jones, of particular importance in relation to protecting their

reserve resources against white encroachment, 139 and he was hopeful that their powers would
expand in the future beyond limited bylaws. Jones explains his frustration “The advanced Indian
bands in Ontario and Quebec have for many years been in this awkward position. Rules and
regulations we might make for our own good government have been of no effect in law.” 140 He
gives as an example Six Nations’ efforts to stop white men from removing timber from the
reserve by passing measures in council against this. According to him, as they did not have the
ability to collect fines the law was ineffective. To demonstrate the usefulness of government-
sanctioned laws he devoted space in the paper to outlining how the enforcement of municipal
Peter Edmund Jones, “The Indian Advancement Act.” The Indian, Vol. 1, No. 2, Feb. 3, 1886
135
(Hagersville, Ont: Indian Publishing Co), p. 5.

136
Ibid.
137
Ibid.
138
Ibid.
139
Ibid.
140
Ibid. The rest of the paragraph is again critical of the Indian Act: “a cast-iron act had decided how we
should be managed and anything coming to court was regulated by it, “The Indian Act,” an act absurdly
made in nearly every particular, to apply to the uncivilized pagan tribes, as well as to the civilized and
Christian bands of this Province.”
191
laws operated outside of reserves in the province. 141 The municipal model for him offered
distinct advantages.
Another area where we can see an elaboration of Jones’ views on the Advancement Act is
when, after meeting John A. Macdonald in Ottawa in 1886,142 the prime minister requested that
he go through the law and suggest amendments. This was not his first direct engagement with the
law. He had sent correspondence suggesting changes in 1884.143 Jones sent a detailed,
annotated, and altered version of the legislation in to the prime minister in 1887. 144 His most
significant change is that he writes a “new section and important” into the law. 145 This new
clause required that any important decision taken by the Council be subject to approval by vote
of the majority of electors. These were the expenditure of public money over $150, the location
of land and matters connecting to it (a reference to enfranchisement processes), the making and
amending of by-laws, the appointment of medical officers, and “Any other important business
which the council may consider requires to be approved by the band.” 146 Jones emphasized the
centrality of this change in the margin: “I think that the Band might refuse to adopt this Act
unless the Council were restricted from acting upon these important subjects without appealing
to the people.”147 By adding this clause, he fundamentally reorganizes the decision-making
power of the electoral council away from the government model of council being responsible to
Indian agents and back to greater directly democratic control that more closely resembles his
“The Indian Advancement Act,” The Indian, (Hagersville, Ont: Indian Publishing Co.) Vol. 1, no 2.
141
Feb 3 1886, p. 5.
142
Sherwin, 84. For Jones’ connections to the Conservative Party see Sherwin, 64.
143
In this letter, Jones protests against many clauses in the law, including the number councillors allowed,
the division of reserves into sections, and annual rather than triennial elections. Daugherty and Madill,
Indian Government under Indian Act Legislation, section 1, p. 14-15.
144
LAC, John A. Macdonald Papers, Vol. 152, part 2, Peter Edmund Jones to John A. Macdonald, Jan.
5th, 1887.
145
Ibid.
146
Ibid.
147
Ibid.
192
father’s legal code. If we take this alongside the decision made in the Grand Council that bands
could decide whether to adopt elections, it shows a much closer alignment with Anishinaabe
forms of diplomacy and law. It enshrined the power of bands to maintain their traditional
governance if they did not want to adopt the Advancement Act, while making the Act itself more
directly democratic and responsible to those it governed.
3.5. Conclusion
The mid-1880s were an optimistic time for Jones and other Christian descents of early
Methodists who participated in the Grand General Council. This generation was the first whose
fathers had been accepted as equals in the Methodist church, had themselves been educated in
western schools, and who had already seen some of this earlier generations political desires go
through. The long-held political vision of independent municipal-like communities, although
greatly compromised by the position of the Department of Indian Affairs in their supervision of
these, was partly realized thought the Indian Advancement Act. The residential school system,
embraced by many Methodists as they believed this would help their young people to succeed
under the restrictive conditions of settler colonialism, was being established and was supported
by Jones in his newspaper. They had been able, through the Grand Council, to influence the
government to change the conditions for enfranchisement on reserves. Another huge cause of
optimism was that the right to vote, also long fought for by Peter Jones and others, was granted
to them in 1885 by Macdonald’s Conservatives– a move greatly celebrated by Indigenous
leaders across the province, by the Grand General Council and by Jones in his newspaper. Peter
E. Jones’ confidence that the government would not impose elections on unwilling bands makes
more sense in this context, despite the discrepancy between the legislation and stated government
policy. In 1886, as Peter E. Jones penned his editorials, I believe he and many council delegates
felt a sense of optimism that the Christian-Anishinaabe, educated, farming-based model of
municipal independence they had grown up with and had themselves adopted was, almost, in
reach.
However, comparing the legal code of the elder Peter Jones and the vision of municipal
governance adopted by his son makes visible how the governance possibilities for reserve
communities had changed through the Indian Act’s limitations on what local governance could
be. Both of the Jones’ visions, I have argued, attempted to carve out and maintain a level of
193
autonomy for bands to govern themselves. In the case of Dr. Jones, alongside his crucially
important articulations in council that adopting electoral governance should remain optional at
the band level, he provides a very different vision than that of the government: where bands
would first of all retain their right to traditional forms of governance through the requirement to
opt-in to the law, and further how, if a municipal-style code was adopted, it would be premised
on direct control over decisions by the council from the electors themselves. However, the
differences between the legal frameworks negotiated by him and his father are very significant.
The Reverend Peter Jones was able to carve out an electoral governance system that maintained
an autonomous jurisdiction from the settler government. By the time his son promoted the
adoption of the Advancement Act this type of autonomous jurisdiction was no longer an option
for bands unless they were willing to resist, as in the case of Six Nations, the strong push of the
Department to come under Indian Act governance legislation. The government was invested in
direct control over reserves, with municipal-style government being a “training ground” for
“civilization” and a cornerstone of assimilationist policy, rather than, as Jones envisioned, a
platform from which to expand community authority.
As the century came to a close, the optimism of the second generation of Christian-
Anishinaabe leaders proved unmerited. Through amendments to the Indian Act, band councils
were increasingly restricted under Indian agent’s expanding powers. Some of these powers will
be examined in the following two chapters, where I examine the role of Indian Agents in
inheritance decisions on reserves, as well as how agents’ general powers of enforcement were
expanded through amendments to the law. The Liberal government in 1898 repealed the
franchise for Indigenous men, and in 1899 they attempted to apply the governance clauses of the
Indian Act across the board in the Eastern Provinces. In the limited jurisdiction available to
reserve leaders under the Indian Act and the Indian Advancement Act, the government restrained
Indigenous governance in ways that significantly diverged from either of the Jones’ visions for
retaining local political authority.
194
Chapter 4
Women, Wills, and Family Surveillance: Inheritance and the
Indian Act, 1857-1900
As delegates to the Grand General Council negotiated their relationship with the state
through enfranchisement and municipal-style governance, another aspect of the Indian Act’s
imposed jurisdiction was being expanded, debated, and struggled over that also had significant
repercussions on how land ownership could be organized on reserves. Control over intimate
family decisions and relationships was asserted by the Department through how property was
regulated on reserves, and how this could be passed between generations through inheritance
provisions in the law. The question of jurisdiction over inheritance was consistently raised in the
Grand General Council, and was clearly important to reserve residents through their many
contestations to the Department on these matters. How property could be passed on to loved
ones across generations was both a political and a personal concern for Grand General Council
delegates as well as the communities they represented. Inheritance was an area where the D.I.A.,
the Grand General council, bands, Indian Agents, and families themselves all had investments
and opinions on how ownership and inheritance on reserves should operate. Here norms of
family life, family security, women’s lives and decision-making, marital relations and children’s
rights came to be the terrain on which the struggle over jurisdiction on reserves played out
between Indigenous people and the state in Southern Ontario.
Inheritance was an issue that was repeatedly and persistently raised by delegates at the
Grand General Council. Delegates pushed for important changes to the inheritance provisions of
the law, including the right for Indigenous people to write wills, and for personal property to be
willed to family members who had married off reserve. The Council was able to push the
government to recognize the right for Indigenous people to write wills in 1884, and to remove
some restrictions on who property could be willed to in 1894. These changes to the law are
remarkable as they are some of the few examples in the Council’s long history where the
government acquiesced to their demands for change in the law. In addition to these significant
changes to the law that were advocated through the Grand General Council, delegates themselves
195
were chiefs and councilors in their respective communities and would therefore have been
directly involved in the inheritance decisions there. They were themselves subject to the law’s
clauses in terms of passing property to their own families through their wills. Inheritance was
one of the ways that Indigenous leaders negotiated their relationship with the Canadian state
through the operations of reserve governance under the Indian Act, and one that they
demonstrated ongoing concern about at the Grand General Council.
Inheritance has largely been ignored in the historical literature on the Indian Act.1
However, it is an important field of Indian Act regulation, and intimately connected to other,
more well-researched aspects the law such as enfranchisement and status legislation. The ability
to write wills was initially tied to those who enfranchised in the 1857 Gradual Civilization Act,
with the Department’s original vision being that properties would be passed on to children in fee
simple, who were assimilated and no longer status Indians. Likewise, inheritance is directly tied
to the Indian Act’s impact on women who married either white men or men from other reserves,
who lost the right to inherit reserve properties (and whose parents and family members lost the
right to will property to them). As the many conflicts that arose over property can demonstrate,
however, the messy process of inheritance on reserves reveals much about how the Indian Act
was envisioned, debated, resisted, and ultimately enforced in the late nineteenth century. The
inheritance of reserve property was an important concern at all political levels, from women
fighting for the rights of themselves and their families, to band councils, the Grand General
Council and the Department of Indian Affairs. In this chapter I draw out some of the many
complexities and complications that on-reserve inheritance law posed for those living under it–
as well as those enforcing it.
Family law within the Indian Act has been most robustly understood through the impacts
of the exclusion of women from Indian status, and thus reserves, through discriminatory
marriage clauses.2 This is understandable, as this has had longstanding and violently injurious
1
For the most extensive treatment of inheritance on reserves, see Hill, The Clay We Are Made Of.
2
See for instance Lynn Gehl, “The Queen and I: discrimination against women in the Indian Act
continues,” Canadian Woman Studies, vol. 20, issue 2 (Summer 2000): 64-69, Kathleen Jamieson, Indian
Women and the Law in Canada: Citizens Minus (Ottawa: Advisory Council on the Status of Women,
196
effects on Indigenous women and communities.3 Wills and estate administration are, however,
an understudied aspect of the Indian Act that affected the possibilities for families living under it,
and established increased surveillance of family, parental, and marriage relationships by Indian
Agents.4 Women were disproportionally affected by inheritance laws, as the care of widows,
and judgements about women’s “moral character” in relation to children and marriages deemed
illegitimate by the state came under the law’s purview. This surveillance into family life is
especially important to understand as through the late nineteenth century Indian Agents became
tasked with removing children for residential schools.5 The development of structures of
surveillance at the family level are thus crucial to understand as a political dynamic beyond the
immediate impacts on individual families.
1978), Bonita Lawrence, “Gender, Race, and the Regulation of Native Identity in Canada and the United
States: An Overview,” Hypatia vol. 18, no. 2 (2003): 3–31 and “Real” Indians and Others: Mixed-Blood
Native Peoples and Indigenous Nationhood (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2004), and Genevieve Painter,
“Partial Histories: Constituting a Conflict between Women’s Equality Rights and Indigenous Sovereignty
in Canada (PhD diss., University of California Berkeley, 2015)
https://escholarship.org/uc/item/59c8k7c0. On the effects of the imposition of monogamous marriage see
Sarah Carter, The Importance of Being Monogamous: Marriage and Nation Building in Western Canada
to 1915 (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 2008).
3
Reclaiming Power and Place: The Final Report of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered
Indigenous Women and Girls, vol. 1a (National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women
and Girls, 2019), 251.
4
On inheritance see Mary-Ellen Kelm and Keith D. Smith, Talking Back to the Indian Act: Critical
Readings in Settler Colonial Histories (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018), 5, John Leslie and
Ron Maguire, The Historical Development of the Indian Act (Ottawa: Indian and Northern Affairs, 1978),
62 and 82 and Susan M. Hill, The Clay We Are Made Of: Haudenosaunee Land Tenure on the Grand
River (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2017), 193-197. On the D.I.A. and surveillance see
Jarvis Brownlie, “Intimate Surveillance: Indian Affairs, Colonization, and the regulation of Aboriginal
Women’s Sexuality” in Contact Zones: Aboriginal and Settler Women in Canada’s Colonial Past, ed
Kate Pickles and Myra Rutherdale (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2005), 160-178 and
Keith D. Smith, Liberalism, Surveillance, and Resistance: Indigenous Communities in Western Canada,
1877-1927 (Edmonton: Athabasca University Press, 2009).
5
For residential school history see Canada’s Residential Schools, The History, Part 1: Origins to 1939,
The Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, Volume 1 (Montreal and
Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2015).
197
For this chapter, I examined all of the files I could locate and access in the Headquarters
Records of the Department of Indian Affairs that dealt with estates or wills from 1870-1909.
This included 274 files from across Canada; I focus on the 212 files from Ontario which
represent the large majority of cases in this collection. Women are strongly represented within
these files as both testators and devisees through their relationships as daughters, siblings, and
widows. Of the 212 files I examined, 141 involve women directly. The files also contain a
notably higher volume of direct correspondence by women to the D.I.A. than I have found in
other areas of my research into the nineteenth-century Indian Act. In this chapter, I focus on
cases that deal with women’s property to highlight the gendered context in which the endeavor to
secure control over Indigenous inheritance decisions unfolded. 6 As struggles over control of
inheritance took place between the D.I.A. and Indigenous leaders, women’s property was a
concern for all levels of settler and Indigenous governance involved, and in particular for
Indigenous women themselves.
In this chapter I outline various facets of how Indian Act inheritance law operated and
was responded to in Ontario in the nineteenth century to show the multiple ways the law was
debated, resisted, and enforced. First, by looking at how the Grand General Council responded
to inheritance law we can see a persistent effort on their part to have inheritance provisions in the
Indian Act expanded. They achieved remarkable success on this front, including as mentioned
above having their desire for status Indians to be able to write wills enshrined in the law in 1884.
Despite this, the Department of Indian Affairs undermined band council involvement in
inheritance processes and consolidated enormous power over approving all on-reserve wills in
the hands of the Superintendent General. Examining wills and inheritance on reserve can also
demonstrate how band councils, when they were able to, exerted their own priorities that did not
always align with the Indian Act. The messiness of how inheritance was negotiated between
band councils and the Department also adds to our understanding of Department use of
6
In contrast with the majority of documents examined for this dissertation, which are public and political
in nature, the files examined in this chapter are often personal family records. As I have not consulted
with the many communities and families involved, I have not included names in my descriptions. I
understand that this is an imperfect solution, in that it renders invisible the people involved. However, I
strongly felt that this outweighed any potential harm of using names without consultation or permission of
families, despite these records being available through the Library and Archives Canada.
198
discretionary power. As mentioned above, inheritance laws affected women disproportionately,

and the responses of women themselves demonstrates how they were dealing with the significant
rearrangement of their traditional authority and negotiating multiple layers of paternalistic
authority. Finally, the enforcement of inheritance law provisions in the Indian Act is a locus for
understanding the relationship between Indian Agents, the Department of Indian Affairs and the
Department of Justice in how the law was clarified through its enforcement. Each of these
aspects of inheritance law history is discussed in greater detail below and adds to our
understanding of the complex processes of Indian Act negotiation and enforcement on Ontario
reserves in the late nineteenth century.
Transmission of property on reserves was already greatly constrained by law through the
type of land title the government imposed there. As the government removed Indigenous
communities from their traditional territories and onto small pieces of land over the nineteenth
century, reserve lands were vested in the Crown. Individual properties could be obtained
through a system of “location tickets,” granted by the Superintendent General, which established
a life interest only. The D.I.A., at least initially, only permitted this property to be willed if
individuals enfranchised (gave up their Indian status), and then only to children or lineal
descendants (who would obtain a fee simple title).7 However, within these constraints (which
had already impacted the responsibilities, ownership rights and jurisdiction over land and waters
for Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabe women as will be discussed below), family farms were
established, deep connections to land and place continued to be maintained through generations,
and investments were made in housing and farm buildings that would have had both economic
and emotional importance to those wanting to pass them on to their loved ones. People willed
their real properties (both orally and by wills written in English and Indigenous languages), 8 and
7
An Act to encourage the gradual Civilization of the Indian Tribes in this Province, and to amend the Laws
respecting Indians, S. Prov. C. 1857, c. 26. s. 10. Changes to this law are outlined below.
8
Within the files I found five wills written in Kanien’kéha, all from Kahnawake between 1890 and 1899
(See RG10, vol. 2924, file 190,030, C-9662, RG10, vol. 2849, file 175,826, C-9661, RG10, vol. 2797, file
159,682, C-9659, RG10, vol. 2883, file 179,911, C-9661, RG10, vol. 2887, file 181, 360, C-9662) and
two written in Mi’kmaq from 1892 and 1901(RG10, vol. 2944, file 198,575, C-9663 and RG10, vol.
2971, file 208,628, C-9665).
199
also left their moveable property to others– livestock, farm equipment, furniture, cooking and
household goods, blankets, and other valuables– providing security to their loved ones after their
death.
By contrast, the laws on inheritance for settler families are also important to understand.
British subjects living in Ontario faced very few restrictions on their wills (for property owned in
fee simple), the requirement of Dower being the most significant of these.9 Testamentary
freedom had been a principle of the common law since the eighteenth century, 10 and this was
adopted in Ontario. Primogeniture had been abolished in Upper Canada as of 1852. 11 Dower,
although it had been all but abolished in Britain since 1833,12 was maintained and expanded in
Ontario until the twentieth century. 13 These expanded dower provisions were unique in the
9
Philip Girard, Jim Phillips, and R. Blake Brown, A History of Law in Canada, Volume 1: Beginnings to
1866 (Toronto: Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History and University of Toronto Press, 2018), 355
and 357. Phillip Girard explains other limitations in this way: “the law of entail, conditional estates,
trusts, powers, and mortgages provided landowners the ability to curtail the dispository freedom of their
own and future generations, while the continued existence of traditional rights such as dower, common
right, and customary easements and profits recognized the claims of family and community on privately
held land.” Phillip Girard, “Land Law, Liberalism, and the Agrarian Ideal: British North” in Despotic
Dominion: Property Rights in British Settler Societies, eds. John McLaren, A. R. Buck, and Nancy E.
Wright (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2005), 120-143.
10
Girard, Phillips and Brown, A History of Law in Canada, 355.
A.R. Buck, “‘This Remnant of Feudalism’: Primogeniture and Political Culture in Colonial New South
11
Wales, with Some Canadian Comparisons” in eds. John McLaren, A. R. Buck, and Nancy E. Wright,
Despotic Dominion: Property Rights in British Settler Societies (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2005): 178.
12
Dower was the provision in the law for widows to maintain a life interest in her deceased husband’s
property. See Girard, Philips, and Brown, A History of Law in Canada, Volume I, 357. The authors
describe the functioning of dower in the following way: “It was not generous: the widow would be
entitled to a life interest in only one-third of her late husband’s realty. But it could not be overridden by
will and could be asserted ahead of the claims of creditors. Thus, even where a husband died bankrupt, as
long as he left realty, the widow could assert her claim. Dower also had an impact while the spouses were
alive: it had to be barred every time a husband sought to convey realty during marriage, otherwise his
widow could assert her right against the purchaser. This safeguard gave the wife a notional say at least in
the family economy.”
13
Girard, “Land Law.” 124-127.
200
common law world,14 and included extensions of dower to mortgaged property. 15 Dower was
recognized in Ontario until the 1970s where it was replaced with Matrimonial Property
Legislation.16 Phillip Girard argues that these laws functioned as a “social safety net” in the
development of strong agricultural communities. 17 While this settler colonial imperative of

thriving agricultural families across generations was perhaps well served by these laws,
protections for women’s property were not robust. Married women, for most of the nineteenth
century, were considered to be legally subsumed under the personhood of their husbands. Lori
Chambers in her work summarizes the changes to these laws that slowly granted more rights to
married women cumulating in the 1884 Married Women’s Property law.18 Although this was
passed the same year as an important amendment to the Indian Act, there was little overlap
between the laws as Indigenous women were placed under Indian status clauses and therefore did
not fall under the inheritance laws of the province. Despite these great differences in treatment
for Indigenous and settler families across generations– which Grand General Council delegates
were keenly aware of– inheritance and the attendant possibilities of what could happen to reserve
properties was an area within the law that held deep importance for reserve families, individuals,
leadership and the government officials that sought to govern these decisions.
14
Ibid., 124. Girard calls the expansion of dower by Ontario courts and legislatures “a kind of baroque
exuberance that extended it further than anywhere else in the common law world.”
15
Ibid., 125: Here, in 1879, “Ontario enacted a provision that, where a wife barred her dower in a
mortgage of her husband’s land, she would still be entitled to dower in any surplus of the purchase money
arising from the sale of such lands, after satisfaction of the mortgagee’s claim but ahead of the husband’s
creditors.”
16
Ibid., 127.
17
Ibid., 125. Girard argues that “until about 1920, the liberal fundamentals of the land law were tempered
by the recognition of the needs of farm families for security and stability in credit relations and
intergenerational transfer. This agrarian ideal, particularly evident in Ontario, is an important strand in
the historical role played by property in the Canadian liberal project.”
18
Lori Chambers, Married Women and Property Law in Victorian Ontario (Toronto: Osgoode Society
for Canadian Legal History and University of Toronto Press, 1997) and Constance Backhouse “Married
Women’s Property Law in Nineteenth-Century Canada” Law and History Review, vol. 6, issue 2 (Fall
1988): 211-257.
201
4.1. Inheritance Law and the Grand General Council

Regarding inheritance law and the Indian Act, the Grand General Council, and the
Department of Indian Affairs both struggled to define the legal terrain on which inheritance
decisions would be made. The Grand General Council was concerned about how property could
be managed across generations, and how support for widows and families would operate in the
small, restricted spaces of reserves. Delegates also had their own moral views on women and
marriage, on top of national and regional differences in how these issues were managed. They
were, however, consistent in their push to have the ability to write wills recognized by the
government, and they had some remarkable success in both including this in the law and
expanding the scope of inheritance recognized by the government. The Department was also
concerned about inheritance, initially to support the dissolution of reserve lands in line with
enfranchisement policies, and subsequently to ensure some support for widows and children, in
line with their policies of providing as little financial support to reserve residents as possible. 19
Grand Council delegates’ views on women and families come through in their discussion
of marriage laws and Indian status legislation for women who “married out,” an issue intimately
connected to questions of inheritance on reserve. Norman Shields, in his examination of the
Grand General Council and Indian status legislation during this period, shows the importance of
distinguishing between the various factions of the Grand General Council on the issue of
women’s status. For instance, it was clear that from the beginning Haudenosaunee delegates
refused the idea of loss of status as this fundamentally challenged the matrilineal nature of their
society.20 They clearly opposed loss of status through marriage during their participation at the
Grand General Council, which ended in 1882. Shields also convincingly places the concerns that
Anishinabek delegates had around loss of territory with the marriages of Indigenous women to
white men, and later to “non-treaty Indians,” within the historical context of Pottowatomi
Hugh Shewell, ‘Enough to Keep them Alive’: Indian Welfare in Canada, 1873-1965 (Toronto:
19
University of Toronto Press, 2004).

20
Norman Shields “The Grand General Indian Council of Ontario and Indian Status Legislation,” in Karl
Hele ed. Lines drawn upon the water: First Nations and the Great Lakes Borders and Borderlands
(Waterloo: Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2008): 209.
202
relocation to Ontario reserves from the United States.21 Here the limited land base of reserves
was challenged by white men and, on some reserves, by marriages to Pottowatomi men who had
come from the U.S. and who had neither annuities nor a recognized land base in Upper Canada.
This caused differences in how communities integrated these groups and affected their decisions
on supporting status legislation or not. 22 These “sensitive historic and demographic issues” are
important to consider in the acceptance of the Grand General Council of status legislation that
influenced the possibilities of inheritance for many women.23
It should also be noted that the delegates to the Grand General Council, who were also
chiefs and band councillors in their home communities, were actively involved in inheritance
decision-making there. This front-line experience is evident in the files; the names of Grand
Council delegates such as Chiefs Abel Waucaush and John Henry (both of Chippewa of the
Thames, listed as council delegates from Muncy in 1882), William Wawanosh (Walpole Island,
listed as a delegate from Sarnia in 1882), and Peter Jones (Saugeen, listed as a delegate in 1874)
appear in inheritance cases, certifying wills or writing to the Department from their positions in
local governance.24 Peter E. Jones also appears in inheritance records in the 1890s due his role as
the Indian Agent at New Credit. 25 Their actions in Council were not detached from the realities
of inheritance needs and existing processes within their communities, and their decisions were
also occasionally involved in disputes over wills. 26 Neither were the changes to the law for
which they advocated divorced from their own families’ lives. The files also show how their own
properties were divided after their death, as is evident in the case of John Smoke Johnson (Six
21
Ibid., 212.
22
Ibid., 217 and 218.
23
Ibid, 206.
24
LAC RG10, vol. 2534, file 110,560, C-12785, LAC RG10, vol. 2986, file 213,666, C-9665, LAC
RG10, vol 2713, file 143,926, C-12790.
25
LAC RG10, vol. 2568, file 115,792, C-12787.
26
Francis W. Jacobs to [Secretary?] Aug. 1 1899. LAC RG10, vol. 2974, file 209,900, C-9665. Here two
sisters disputed the property decision of the Indian Agent and Wawanosh.
203
Nations, delegate to the Council in 1870), and dealt with cases that involved their family
members.27
Irrespective of these diverse local contexts and personal experiences, between 1870 and
1894, the Grand General Indian Council as a body fought to have wills and property rights
included in the package of rights accorded by the state to status Indians through the Indian Act
and untangle these rights from enfranchisement processes. Wills and inheritance were a
consistent area of focus in the Grand General Council’s requests to change the law. While they
achieved some notable successes on this front, the legislation consolidated control over
inheritance in the hands of Indian Agents and the Superintendent General. By tracing nineteenth-
century legislation on inheritance that became incorporated into the Indian Act, and the
subsequent amendments to this legislation, we can observe how the Grand General Council
engaged with the law as the government shifted and expanded it to benefit the D.I.A. at the
expense of reserve governance.
Colonial legislators first assumed the right to recognize wills made by Indigenous persons
in The Gradual Civilization Act of 1857.28 They stipulated that limited wills become part of the
package of rights legally accorded to those who enfranchised. Inheritance was elaborated on in
the 1869 Gradual Enfranchisement Act – the law that the Grand General Council first met to
oppose at their inaugural 1870 meeting at Six Nations.29 Property on reserves was held by
individuals through a “location ticket” (which granted a life interest in the property). Those
undergoing enfranchisement processes were allowed to will this property to their children only–
a significant difference than the testamentary freedom discussed above for Ontario residents–
27
Petition to Cameron from Heirs of John Smoke Johnson, Dec. 12 1899, LAC RG10, vol. 2534, file
110,560, C-12785.
28
An Act to encourage the gradual Civilization of the Indian Tribes in this Province, and to amend the Laws
respecting Indians, S. Prov. C. 1857, c. 26. s. 10.
29
An Act for the gradual enfranchisement of the Indians, the better management of Indian Affairs, and to
extend the provisions of the Act 31st Vict., Chapter 42, S. C. 1869, c. 6.
204
and if no will was made, the property would descend according to the Provincial laws. 30 The
beneficiary would obtain a fee simple title to the property, although widows in these cases would
also only obtain a life interest in the property. 31 For those not enfranchising, which was the vast
majority, the property would devolve to the children, with the requirement they care for their
mother. If there were no children, the property would revert to the Crown after undefined
“support” for the widow was granted. 32
At the inaugural 1870 meeting at Six Nations, the Grand General Council resoundingly
rejected the law, as we have seen in Chapter 2. The clause on inheritance was rejected through a
motion by Chief Simcoe Kerr of Six Nations, on the grounds that it “takes away from the Indian
a right which he now enjoys, 33 deprives the widow of her husband’s property and land without
reason, and deprives the Indian of the right to transfer or lease his land.” 34 Kerr also successfully
moved for the Council to reject the clauses granting the Superintendent General the right to
oversee granting location tickets and land transfers, situating their concerns over widows’
support within the broader context of the Superintendent General usurping jurisdiction over
property decisions more generally on reserve at the expense of local governing bodies.35 Here
the clauses were rejected “because they take away from Chiefs and Bands power to look to their
own destitute, and to deal with their own money.” 36
30
Ibid., s. 13.
31
Ibid., s. 13-14.
32
Ibid. s. 9.
33
Kerr is likely referring here to community practice rather than the legislation.
34
35
Ibid.
36
Ibid.
205
The 1876 Indian Act allowed for located land to be transferred more broadly– to a
member of the same band.37 It also provided greater protections for widows than earlier
legislation by standardizing the process through which women could inherit their husband’s
property, thus removing the discretionary aspect of D.I.A. involvement. 38 Wills were not
recognized, but one third of all property would automatically descend to the widow and two
thirds to any children. In cases of death without issue, the entire property would descend to the
widow for her lifetime, and if there were no children or widow, the property would descend up to
a first cousin.
At the 1882 Grand Council held at New Credit, delegates agreed that this prescriptive
inheritance clause did not go far enough and argued for greater testamentary freedom.
According to Council minutes “a long discussion took place, most of the Delegates arguing that
it was very necessary that a provision should be made that a civilized and educated Indian” be
allowed to will property to any family or band member.39 The reasoning in the council minutes
was that the “uncertain and arbitrary provision” over descent of property “had a tendency to
discourage an Indian in accumulating property, as by it he is not permitted to distinguish between
members of the family or relatives who have been friendly and of assistance to him and those
who have been the reverse.”40 The Council passed a motion that “Indians be allowed to make a
legal will.”41 A motion was also carried that a second cousin may be allowed to share in a
deceased relative’s property if this was the closest living relative. 42 The minutes of the council
meetings, as usual, were sent to the D.I.A. by the Secretary of the Grand General Council.
37
Subject to approval of council and the Superintendent General. An Act to amend and consolidate the laws
respecting Indians (The Indian Act), S.C. 1876. c. 18, s. 8.
38
Ibid. s. 9.
39
Room, 1883), 15-16.
40
Ibid. 16.
41
Ibid.
42
Ibid. 17.
206
Both of these suggestions became incorporated into the 1884 Indian Act. The government
here overhauled the inheritance clauses and allowed for wills to be written by status Indians, for
both locations and personal effects, to any member of the owners’ family as long as they were
able to reside on reserve and were no further removed than a second cousin (if no will was
written, the earlier clauses of one-third to the widow, two-thirds to the children would take
effect).43 Importantly, as we will see below, these wills were subject to approval by the band,
followed by approval from the Superintendent General. The requisite approval by bands lasted
for a decade until this clause was revoked in 1894 as the DIA sought to assert greater control
over reserve property. These changes, which largely followed the proposal on wills from their
previous meeting, were approved of by the Grand General Council in their 1884 council at Cape
Croker.44
We can continue to see the Council’s influence in terms of the evolution of the law in the
1890s. The Council’s minutes for 1891 are missing, but their recommendations are outlined in a
letter sent from the Deputy Superintendent General of Indian Affairs, Lawrence Vankoughnet, to
the Deputy Minister of Justice suggesting amendments be made to the law. 45 Vankoughnet notes
here that the Grand General Council proposed to the government that the Indian Act be amended
so that children outside of the reserve be allowed to inherit moveable property. This would have
been an important clause for daughters, in particular those who had lost their band or Indian
status and could no longer inherit property or live on their home reserves. His opinion was that
“The law as it at present stands appears to be rather hard on such parties especially in the case of
daughters who marry members of other bands or white men” and that there “appears to be no
sufficient reason why they should not be allowed to share in the personal property,” though he
disagreed that they should share in real estate on reserves.46 The council also wanted restrictions
removed with regard to who could be the recipient of the land itself, by advocating removing
43
An Act to further amend “The Indian Act, 1880,” S. C. 1884, c. 27 (47 Vic.) s. 5.
44
Minutes of the Eighth Grand General Indian Council held upon the Cape Crocker Indian Reserve, County
of Bruce, From September 10th to Sept 15th, 1884 (Hagersville: The Indian Publishing Company, 1884), 16.
45
Lawrence Vankoughnet to Robert Sedgewick, 11 Feb 1892, LAC RG10, vol. 3947, file 123, 764-1.
46
Ibid.
207
from law that no relative further than a second cousin be allowed to inherit this.47 These
suggestions largely became incorporated into the 1894 Indian Act, which provided that “Indians
may devise or bequeath property of any kind in the same manner as other persons” as long as the
devisee of any property was allowed to reside on reserve. 48
These significant changes to Indian Act inheritance clauses in the late nineteenth century–
greater protection of widow’s property, the ability to write wills, and, finally, the removal of
some restrictions on who property could be willed to – were all amendments to the law
advocated through the Grand Council. They are remarkable in that they are some of the few
areas where the Council was able to have the government align the law according to their
demands.
However, the changes to descent of property laws in the Indian Act also became more
restrictive through these same amendments. The first way this happened is that as legal
protections for widows grew, so did their surveillance. In 1884, a widow’s ability to inherit a life
interest in property became contingent on her “good moral character,” (as determined by the
Indian Agent) as well as living with her husband at the time of his death.49 Her right to keep
land as a guardian for her children’s inheritance was also dependent on these provisions. 50 This
became more strongly worded in the 1894 amendments, where the Superintendent General was
deemed to be the “sole and final judge” of her character, 51 a judgement that would in practice be
decided with input from the local Indian Agent. To obtain this knowledge, Indian Agents, often
at the request of their superiors, became more vested in the surveillance of families, women’s
47
Ibid.
48
An Act to further amend the Indian Act, S. C. 1894, c. 32, s. 1., emphasis added.
49
An Act to further amend “The Indian Act, 1880,” S. C. 1884, c. 27, s. 5.
50
Ibid. This was similar to the Gradual Civilization and Gradual Enfranchisement Acts where it was
stipulated that she “live respectfully” in order to reside on her husband’s property until her children reached
majority.
51
An Act to further amend the Indian Act, S. C. 1894, c. 32 , s. 1.
208
“morality” and questions of illegitimacy. Secondly, the 1894 amendments also removed the
necessity for band consent to be acquired before wills could be approved, consolidating this
power exclusively in the hands of the Superintendent General, who becomes, again, the “sole
and final judge” of any descent of property questions. 52 I take up how these changes impacted
the surveillance of families and women’s property, and the changing role for band councils in
administering wills in the sections below.
The 1894 Grand General Council held at the Moraviantown reserve voted to “take a careful
look” into how the inheritance provisions had been recently amended. 53 A motion put forward
to retain the amendments was lost, and President Albert Tobias of Moraviantown “said that he
disapproved of the Superintendent General assuming all and every responsibility and entirely
ignoring Indian Councils.”54 A second motion was carried, put forward by John Chechock of
New Credit and Scobie Logan of the Munceys of the Thames, that the law be amended so that
“the property of deceased Indians descend to the nearest of kin, if none, then to revert to the
band.”55 Other council members voiced opinions that the Superintendent General’s powers
should be struck from the law and that the band in council should instead be the “final judge” on
decisions conferring property on reserve. 56 These views echo the Council’s work in many other
instances, demonstrated by earlier chapters, to maintain band control at the local level when
dealing with the legislation put forward by the government. In terms of inheritance, their moves
over this period to protect widows’ interests, to have individuals’ wills respected, and to enshrine
in law a measure of flexibility in terms of who could receive property were echoed in many ways
by local band councils, of which some Grand Council delegates were members.
52
Ibid.
53
Minutes of the Thirteenth Grand General Indian Council of Ontario and Quebec, held upon the
Moraviantown Indian Reserve from 16th to 20th of October, 1894 (Wiarton: The Wiarton Canadian Office,
1894), 17.
54
Ibid.
55
Ibid.
56
Ibid.
209
4.2. Inheritance and Band Councils

Band Councils’ involvement in how inheritance decisions were made on reserves in the
late nineteenth century demonstrates two things about the operation of inheritance law
administered through the Indian Act. First, we see evidence that in some cases bands operated
according to their own principles that did not align with the Indian Act’s limitations on
inheritance. Secondly, bands were occasionally able to have their decisions respected, even
when they did not conform to the strictures of the law due to the discretionary flexibility
demonstrated by the Department. Despite the expansion of control over inheritance decisions
asserted by the D.I.A. as outlined above, band councils pushed forward their own interpretations
of who should be recognized as legitimate heirs to reserve property, and the D.I.A. contended
with this. At times the D.I.A. conceded to band wishes, while at others it actively went against
them. This negotiation of decision-making jurisdiction explains how the control of inheritance
decisions operated, and also shows how power was asserted through direct control as well as
discretionary flexibility on the part of the Superintendent General.
As outlined in the section above, Band approval of wills was only required in the law for
one decade after 1884. Between 1884 and 1894, the negotiation between the D.I.A. and band
councils is quite visible in the records, as the requirement for them to approve wills opened
points of contention that the Department had to address in one way or another, whether they
ultimately agreed with council decisions or not. However, it is important to note that band
involvement in inheritance cases did not cease after the government attempted to eliminate their
involvement after 1894. Therefore, I discuss these two eras together in this section. Following
the change in law, band councils participated in inheritance decisions in several important ways.
One example was in their dealing with cases of intestacy, where property was supposed to be
divided according to the Indian Act but would sometimes come before the band council. 57 In
some communities, band governments retained jurisdiction over inheritances, as Indian Act
governance had not yet been applied. For instance, Susan Hill describes how at Six Nations, the
Confederacy Council operated through their own decision-making processes to deal with wills
57
See for example LAC RG10, vol. 2989, file 215,320, C-9666, LAC RG10, vol. 2974, file 209,900, C-
9665, LAC RG10, vol 2946, file 199,050, C-9663 and LAC RG10, vol. 2896, file 182,145, C-9662.
210
until 1912, when the D.I.A. imposed control over these (although, as we will see below Six
Nations jurisdiction was often infringed upon by the Indian Agent prior to 1912). 58 Band
councils also had a say in where on reserve location tickets were granted and this could influence
the outcome of some inheritance cases. 59 Finally if a case came before the council dealing with
a death that had occurred before the change in law their approval was still required. Band
decisions were overseen by Indian Agents, who were responsible for both approving band
council decisions as well as implementing decisions on inheritance that came from their
superiors. When there were questions about the law or its enforcement that they were unable to
answer, the Superintendent General would forward these questions to the Department of Justice.
In examining this process, we can get a sense of how band decisions ended up, in some
cases, influencing inheritance processes. In certain of the cases outlined below we can see
examples of band councils making inheritance decisions that did follow Indian Act provisions.
We can also see how sometimes the discretionary aspect of the Superintendent General’s powers
lead to band decisions on wills that did not align with the Indian Act being accepted. This
“messiness” in terms of following the letter of the law is part of how the Indian Act was
imposed, and discretionary control was one tool that allowed the D.I.A. to assert a flexible
power, an important aspect of Indian Act enforcement in this era. Although they retained
extensive final control over the approval of wills, they did at times work with local councils,
likely to maintain stability and to legitimate their rule. Through these examples we can see how
band councils were negotiating ideas around property transmission and attempting to assert their
own jurisdiction over property decisions on reserve against the efforts by the federal government
to assert sole jurisdiction post-1894.
58
Susan M. Hill, The Clay We Are Made Of: Haudenosaunee Land Tenure on the Grand River (Winnipeg:
University of Manitoba Press, 2017), 196. Most of the cases I found where bands dealt with inheritance
after 1894 were from Six Nations (10 out of 15). Other cases were from Tyendinaga LAC RG10, vol. 2839,
file 172,121, C-9661, Moravians of the Thames LAC RG10, vol. 2896, file 182,145, C-9662 and Sarnia
LAC RG10, vol. 2989, file 215,320, C-9666 and LAC RG10, vol. 2974, file 209,900, C-9665.
59
This too was subject to approval but generally accepted by the Department as far as I can tell from the
records.
211
We see in band council decisions on which wills to approve (or how to deal with property
in cases where no will was written) a willingness to take into account family structures and
relationships that would not have been validated by the D.I.A. and did not align with Indian Act
limitations. Alternative family structures and relations of care outside of the immediate family
were recognized by certain band councils in descent of property decisions. For instance, in an
1883 case from Alnwick, a woman willed her property to a young boy through his father, who
agreed to care for her as long as she lived. 60 They were not relatives by blood. The Band
approved of this arrangement and approved of her will.61 In another example from Walpole
Island in 1888, the band approved a will that left a property to family members from a first, and
(according to his widow), unlawful marriage. The Chief and councillors in this case, with
cooperation from the Indian Agent, made arrangements for this elderly widow to live with the
descendants of this previous union and be provided for during her lifetime, taken to have been
the unwritten desire of her late husband. 62 At Sarnia in 1888 a woman died intestate, but
verbally left her property to her son on the “tradition of the band” (according to the Indian
Agent).63 The band councillors here approved the transmission of property to him without a
will.64 These cases show that in some cases band decisions demonstrated an expanded sense of
who deserved to inherit property, and what procedures should be validated for decisions around
inheriting property and caring for those left behind.
At times council decisions were able to push forward inheritance concerns that would
otherwise have been overlooked at the level of the Department. One example of this is an 1884
case from Six Nations. A woman had died intestate shortly after having ousted a first partner
60
LAC RG10, vol. 2221, file 43, 288, C-12780.
61
Ibid. The Department refused approval on the grounds that other young men on reserve needed the
property.
62
LAC RG10, vol. 2419, file 86,444, C-12783.
63
LAC RG10, vol. 2989, file 215,320, C-9666.
64
Ibid.
212
from her home and married another man. 65 She had built and furnished her house on a forty-acre
property she had purchased in the Tuscarora Concession.66 Her sisters, after her death, brought
the case to the Indian Agent, J. T. Gilkinson, because they worried that her two sons from the
first marriage were not going to receive the property and that the new husband was not leaving
the property or caring for them adequately. 67 When Gilkinson brought the case to the
Superintendent General, he was asked to further investigate the family (an example of how
Indian Agents were employed to investigate family relationships for their Department superiors).
Through this process, he found that the sons were “illegitimate,” and that the second husband
was the father of an infant daughter who should, instead, be the legal heir.68 The case became
further complicated when Gilkinson found out that this daughter had not survived her infancy. 69
The Superintendent General advised Gilkison to defer the case to the Six Nations
Confederacy Council.70 In late April, the Confederacy Council decided that after the second
husband was compensated for any improvements, the two boys should inherit the property
regardless of their status of illegitimacy. The husband, unhappy with this turn of events,
appealed the decision through the Indian Agent, stating “I contend the decision is both unjust and
illegal according to the Indian Act of 1880” and that “the Chiefs had no right to dispute my claim
to heirship through my late daughter.”71 His appeal was successful after the case was verified
through the Department of Justice. However, a recommendation was made by the Department of
Justice that the boys’ interests be accounted for, a desire the husband articulated as well. 72
65
J. T. Gilkison to Superintendent General of Indian Affairs, 23 Sep 1884, LAC RG10, vol. 2273, file
54672, C-12781.
66
Ibid.
67
Ibid.
68
Ibid., J. T. Gilkison to Superintendent General of Indian Affairs, 8 Dec 1884.
69
Ibid., J.T. Gilkison to Superintendent General of Indian Affairs, 15 Dec 1884.
70
Ibid., Superintendent General of Indian Affairs to J. T. Gilkison, 31 Dec 1884.
71
Ibid., A.H. to J. T. Gilkison, July 29 1888.
72
Ibid., George Burbridge to Lawrence Vankoughnet, 11 Oct 1885.
213
George Burbridge, the Deputy Minister of Justice, notes that “he doesn’t desire that the two
illegitimate boys should be deprived of their share of the estate and is willing to pay them off by
installments at a fair valuation. I think some such provision should be made for the boys.”73
Through this case we see the Council’s willingness to grant the property to the boys regardless of
their status of legitimacy according to the state. This recognition might have legitimated their
rights and influenced the eventual recommendation from the Department of Justice to account
for the interests of the boys.74
The above case also reflects the use of discretionary power by the Superintendents
General, which meant that band decisions were at times deferred to. Of course, the possibility
for bands to have their decisions respected was always constrained by how and when the
paternalistic system of D.I.A. approval of inheritance decisions would be implemented. Despite
this, we can see through the examples below how alternative arrangements to the Indian Act
were upheld and approved by councils when they were granted decision-making authority.
The following cases show how, at times, a degree of flexibility within the law was
available when band councils had a role in decision-making around inheritance. In an 1899 case
from the Rice Lake band, a man willed his property to his grandmother. 75 Responding to an
inquiry as to the legitimacy of this by the Department, the Law Clerk at the Department of
Justice advised that the will was not valid because he had no relative closer than a brother or
sister, and determined that the property should revert to the band. 76 He did, however, note that
73
Ibid.
74
Under the common law, illegitimate children were significantly disadvantaged. Girard, Phillips and
Brown explain: “The illegitimate child was filius nulius, the child of no one, with no rights of
maintenance or sucession vis-à-vis either parent. Such children were sometimes recognized and provided
for by will, and in rare cases could be legitimized by Private Act of Parliament…unlike the civil law,
which allowed the retrospective legitimation of children by subsequent marriage of their parents, the
English common law provided no such escape route until amended by the Legitimacy Act 1926.” Philip
Girard, Jim Phillips and R. Blake Brown, A History of Law in Canada, Volume 1: Beginning to 1866
(Toronto: Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History and University of Toronto Press, 2018): 350. The
authors also discuss the impact of unmarried parenthood on women, Ibid., 691-695.
75
LAC RG10, vol. 2987, file 214,399, C-9665.
76
Ibid.
214
they might allow her to stay on the property. 77 The band council did so.78 Similarly, in a case
from Six Nations in 1898, the Confederacy Council decided that a widow’s will granting half a
property to her granddaughter be upheld. 79 The Department refused to approve of the will, as
under the Indian Act the widow would only have been able to inherit one-third of the property.
Ultimately, however, they confirmed the granddaughter’s right to stay there, effectively deferring
to the will of the council. 80 Both cases demonstrate ways, albeit limited, that the Indian Act was
evaded through council’s actions when they were given decision-making power.
Examining inheritance cases that show how bands councils were acting in inheritance
decisions can reveal how they worked to support desires that individuals were putting forward
through their wills. Councils confirmed the legitimacy of partnerships and children born outside
of legally recognized marriages, and processes to pass on property that were outside of the law.
Put another way, local councils moved to ensure that some aspects of Anishinaabe and
Haudenosaunee principles of family law continued to operate as we will see below.
4.3. Women and Inheritance

The inheritance files in in the Department of Indian Affairs records also show how
women living on reserves negotiated the many layers of paternalistic decision-making that were
imposed on their own decisions about property and the lives of their families. The changes
brought by the Indian Act and the reserve system deeply undermined women’s traditional rights
to land, waters, and governance. Within this emerging system of paternalistic law and property
rights, women adopted a variety of strategies in order to maintain their homes and their
livelihoods: sometimes by acting against the Indian Act, sometimes using it to claim rights, by
77
Ibid.
78
William McFarlane to Superintendent General of Indian Affairs, 1 May 1900, LAC RG10, vol. 2987, file
214,399, C-9665.
79
Memorandum to the Deputy Minister, 3 Oct 1894, LAC RG10, vol. 2742, file 146,087, C-12791.
80
Ibid., Hayter Reed to E. D. Cameron, 5 Feb 1894.
215
hiring barristers, and by making appeals to the D.I.A. against decisions of band councils and
Indian Agents they found to be unjust.
4.3.1. Women’s Jurisdiction

Women traditionally held distinct jurisdiction over property and governance in both
Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee communities. Over the nineteenth century these were
significantly rearranged by the physical restrictions of the reserve system and the legal barriers of
the Indian Act. Understanding these roles provides important context for examining the multiple
strategies adopted by women to advocate for themselves and their families in this new landscape
of restrictions and authority over their lives. The late-nineteenth century legal restrictions that
women had to navigate through should be placed within this broader trajectory of erosion of
women’s access to decision-making around families, land, and water. Women did, however,
continue to have important influence over politics on reserve, 81 and their actions were integrated
into webs of care and family responsibilities that were specific to their nations and
communities.82 Their ability to secure their own inheritance rights and the rights of their
families were navigated through these layers of responsibility and restriction.
Anishinaabe women held governance authority, along with pursuant responsibilities and
rights, over water, shoreline areas and sugar bushes. These areas held great economic
importance for supporting wild rice and sugar production and were within women’s exclusive
jurisdiction.83 Anishinaabe historian Brenda Child calls the wild rice harvest “the most visible
81
See Kim Anderson, Life Stages and Native Women: Memory, Teachings, and Story Medicine (Winnipeg:
University of Manitoba Press, 2011), Brenda Child, Holding Our World Together: Ojibwe Women and the
Survival of Community. (New York: The Penguin Group, 2012) and Hill, The Clay We Are Made Of, 53-
76.
82
Hill, The Clay We Are Made Of, 53-76, Madeleine Whetung, “(En)gendering Shoreline Law: Nishnaabeg
Relational Politics Along the Trent Severn Waterway,” Global Environmental Politics, vol. 19, no. 3
(August 2019): 16-32, Deborah McGregor, “Indigenous Women, Water Justice and Zaagidowin (Love),”
Canadian Woman Studies, vol. 30, issue 2/3 (2013): 71-78.
83
Child, 25. For descriptions of wild rice cultivation and sugar bush work see Child and Frances
Densmore, “Chippewa Customs,” Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin 86 (Washington: Smithsonian
Institutions, 1929).
216
expression of women’s autonomy in Ojibwe society.”84 Their decisions determined both access
and production. Women were also responsible for training the next generation of women to
inherit these roles. Children were brought to sugar and wild rice camps and learned from
grandmothers and community members the skills and processes necessary to continue these
rights and responsibilities into the future. Brenda Child provides detailed descriptions of
women’s roles in both rice and sugar cultivation, and Madeleine Whetung outlines how rights
these rights were impacted by colonial incursions on waterways in the nineteenth century, deeply
limiting these governing roles over territory. 85
Another aspect of women’s influence and jurisdiction central to the operation of

Anishinaabe family law was women’s role in maintaining doodem relationships through
marriage. Women were the arbiters of legitimacy in marriage according to Anishinaabe law
(through doodem), with grandmothers in particular being responsible for arranging appropriate
marriages.86 Separation and divorce were acceptable practices, as was remarriage. 87 Women
would maintain their doodem identity after marriage, and Heidi Bohaker describes the
relationship between these decisions over family life and the larger political context of alliances
between communities: “Since women had connections in both their birth community and the
community into which they married, they were well-placed to give advice on the types of
connections that would strengthen the alliances between council fires, as such alliances kept the
regional (general) councils functioning well.” 88 Anishinaabe scholars Heidi Kiiwetinepinesiik
Stark and Leanne Simpson have also shown how women’s roles in intimate Anishinaabe family
84
Ibid.
85
Madeleine Whetung, “(En)gendering Shoreline Law,” 16-32 and Brenda Child, Holding Our World
Together.
86
Bohaker, 85.
87
“Separation and divorce was an acceptable practice when a couple could not get along; the wife simply
returned to her kin group and often married again, as might her husband. Rituals associated with
marriage and divorce varied by region.” Child, 9. Child also notes how “Plural marriage was an
acceptable practice, associated more with the social, political, or economic stability of a kin group than
with sexual indulgence or patriarchy.” Child, 10.
88
Bohaker, 79.
217
relationships extended to conceptualizations of the political realm, and how women were central
in maintaining community balance in this way.89
Anishinaabe women also held (what would be considered by Western standards) more
formal political roles, and Bohaker describes the responsibilities of Anishinaabe women in
political decision-making through the governance body of women’s councils. 90 These councils
would meet alongside men’s councils: “During gatherings, women met in councils to discuss
issues of importance; one woman, an ogimaakwe, or chief woman, then presented the results of
the women’s council findings to the men.” 91 These councils advised on “matters of both peace
and war.”92
Haudenosaunee women, as members of a matrilineal society, likewise held central roles

in politics and family law. Susan Hill describes the roles of Haudenosaunee women in
relationship to land, rights which were especially prominent through their jurisdiction over the
“clearing” areas, large tracts of agricultural land that supported longhouse communities. 93 These
responsibilities extended to landholding rights, and Hill provides elaborate detail in her work
about the relationship of women to land, tracing these responsibilities and rights to Creation
(with the earth as mother, as well as “the identification of important food plants – corn, beans,
89
Leanne Simpson, Dancing on Our Turtle’s Back: Stories of Nishnaabeg Re-Creation, Resurgence, and
a New Emergence (Winnipeg: Arbeiter Ring Publishing, 2011) and Stark, “Respect, Responsibility and
Renewal: The Foundations of Anishinaabe Treaty Making with the United States and Canada,” American
Indian Culture and Research Journal, Vol. 34, Issue 2 (2010). Madeleine Whetung provides an overview
of how these relationships have been theorized: “Connections across the intimate spheres of our lives to
national and international governance are widely recognized within Anishinaabe theory (Borrows 2010;
Simpson 2011, 2014, 2017; Stark 2010). In this way, intimate acts and relationships inform the way
Nishnaabeg engage politically and economically within and across national relationships. This is why
Nishnaabeg have theorized governance through such practices as breastfeeding (Simpson 2011) and
marriage (Stark 2010).”
90
See Bohaker, 141-146.
91
Bohaker, 141.
92
Ibid.
93
Hill, 58.
218
and squash– as female”), 94 as well as describing how women were “holders of the land” under
the Great Law.95 As Hill explains, as the Great Law
established a new system of governance for the Five Nations, it also served to support
older social systems that were given to the people by the Creator in the Original
Instructions and the Four Ceremonies. This included the reinforcement of the roles of
women as cultivators of the soil, as leaders of their families (in partnership with the
men), and as the holder of the future generations. The Great Law recognized their
“clearing” roles, including the primary care giving and educating of young children, the
relationship with the soil as cultivators and sisters to the food plants, and the matrilineal
descent of their families. Connected with the matrilineal descent were the national
territory boundaries. With identity determined through the female line, the national
territories were also determined matrilineally.96
Hill goes on to clarify the relationship of women to land ownership and her description is worth
quoting at length, especially as it elaborates on the relationship of land holding to family
responsibilities:
It is important to note that these statements about women “owning” the land refer to the
matrilineal aspect of Haudenosaunee society and do not exclude the male members of a
matrilineage. Identity and land are intimately connected, so it is only logical that since
identity follows the female line so does land. Women hold their land as they hold their
families. Women do not own their families, but rather they are the carriers of the family
lines…In English, ownership is usually used to convey ideas of “possession” and
“rights” to something, but in Onkwehonwe’neha ownership denotes a connection with
something and a responsibility to it. Similarly, it is often said that as Haudenosaunee,
we do not have “rights” but rather we have “duties”– or things that are “set down” for
us…To summarize, in English we might say “it belongs to me,” but in
Onkwehonwe’neha we are really saying “I have a relationship with it.” That distinction
becomes important in the discussion of Haudenosaunee women (and men) as
landholders.97
94
Hill, 56-57.
95
Hill, 60: “In addition to specific duties for female leaders, women are also discussed in the Great Law
as holders of the land. Several of the written sources on the Great Law discuss women as landholders,
especially those of Thomas and Newhouse. For example, Thomas reiterates the writings of Newhouse in
a section entitled the ‘40th Wampum’: ‘It is provided thus: That the lineal descent of the Five Nations
Iroquois shall run on the female side and the women shall be considered as the progenitors of the Nation,
and the title of ownership of the soil of the Nation’s country shall follow the status of their mothers
‘Ka’nihsten:sera Kahwatsirakwe’ni:io’,’ with respect to the clans, ‘kataratenion,’ which are the
distinguishing marks of families.” Hill is quoting Jacob E. Thomas, The Constitution of the Confederacy
by the Peacemaker, written by Seth Newhouse in 1897. Wilsonville, ON: Sandpiper Press, 1898, p.24.
96
Hill, 58.
97
Hill, 60-61 (emphasis added).
219
Hill’s explanation of women’s responsibilities, or jurisdiction, to “hold” land and family lines is
notable for its contrast with imposed patrilineal ideas of ownership and authority over land and
family. Haudenosaunee women’s political roles were prominent through Clan Mother positions,
which held the title names and controlled decisions over their male representatives in council. 98
They also held responsibility over adoption decisions, a significantly important role in both
family and political life, as this included adopting prisoners as well as refugees and served as an
important means of maintaining population and territory.99
Both Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee women held decision-making power over their
personal and family property. In terms of inheritance, anthropologist Mary Inez Hilger, working
with Anishinaabe communities in Wisconsin and Minnesota, noted women’s roles in property
distribution after a death: “There were no wills, but a woman might indicate before death persons
to whom she wished her personal belongings to be given. If she had not expressed her wish, all
her belongings were placed in a container and at the end of a year distributed either to her
children, near women relatives, or particular friends.”100 For Haudenosaunee women, Hill notes
how Horatio Hale, in the late nineteenth-century, described property relations of women and
inheritance processes:
The household goods belonged to the woman. On her death, her relatives, and not her
husband, claimed them. The children were also hers; they belonged to her clan, and in
the case of a separation they went with her. She was really the head of the household;
and in this capacity her right, when she chanced to be the oldest matron of a noble
family, to select the successor of a deceased chief of that family, was recognized by the
highest law of the confederacy.101
For both Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee women, their rights to property also translated
into larger decision-making about land and through the signing of treaties. Bohaker has found
98
Hill, 59.
99
Hill, 63.
100
Sister Mary Inez Hilger, Chippewa Child Life and Its Cultural Background (Smithsonian Institution
Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 146 (Washington: United States Government Printing Office,
1951): 81.
101
Hill, 54 quoting Horatio Hale, The Iroquois Book of Rites. Philadelphia: DG Brinton, 1883. Rpt. In
Iroquois Reprints Series, edited by Wm. Guy Spittal. Oshweken, ON: Iroqrafts, 1989: 64-66.
220
evidence of women’s council consultation on three early treaties with the British between 1792
and 1796, as well as the presence of three women signatories to the 1784 Mississauga-
Anishinaabe land grant to the Crown for Haudenosaunee resettlement. 102 As a demonstration of
the role that women were understood to play in advocating for land by an earlier Anishinaabe
Council, the case of Nahnebahnwequay (Catherine Sutton) provides an important example. She
was nominated at a council at Rama in 1859 to travel to England in order to bring their land
grievances to the Queen due to her continued advocacy on Anishinaabe land rights, and against
the discriminations faced by women under the law. 103 Hill notes Haudenosaunee women’s
involvement in treaty negotiations in Albany in 1788, and at Buffalo Creek in 1791. 104 Their
political involvement continued after the settlement at Grand River, 105 and under the surrenders
of the 1840s that created the Six Nations Reserve, both men and women received 100-acre
allotments to families, allowing “the position of women as landholders” to continue. 106
In both Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee communities, then, the place of women’s

leadership and decision making was central to how governance processes operated, how
decisions about land were made, and how families were constituted. All of these aspects were
undermined by the imposition of the Indian Act, and the operation of inheritance clauses within
it.
4.3.2. Women’s Actions to Maintain Property

By the late nineteenth century in many communities, particularly in Southern Ontario,
access to land and waters was restricted through the reserve system and the Indian Act. Through
the imposition of the law and its enforcement, women had a complicated web of authority to
work through. Their decision-making roles were seriously curtailed by the imposition of band
102
Bohaker, 141.
103
Donald B. Smith, Mississauga Portraits: Ojibwe Voices from Nineteenth-Century Canada (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 2013): 86-87.
104
Hill, 71.
105
Hill, 75.
106
Hill, 76.
221
council governance on many reserves. As inheritance came under the scrutiny of D.I.A.
officials, agents interpreted who should have access to property through discriminatory gendered
clauses. Throughout all these limitations, women advocated for the rights of themselves and
their families.
Some women presented claims to the Department that protested the discriminatory
clauses in the Indian Act. Women were particularly discriminated against in the Indian Act
through marriage provisions that unequally expelled them from status. Also, they were not able
to vote for or serve as political representatives on band councils. An 1895 letter from a
Tyendinaga woman protested this in a letter against a band decision on inheritance, stating
clearly “my matter is overlooked because I have no vote.” 107 In another instance, a woman from
Caradoc in 1882 submitted a claim through the Indian Agent that she should be allowed to
inherit a part of the 100 acres her late uncle left on the New Credit reserve after having lived
there to care for him during his illness, protesting the residence requirements in the Indian Act
that broke family ties such as her own.108 In 1895, another woman from the same reserve wrote
directly to the band council to fight her loss of inheritance due to her marriage status: “I lived
with and cared for my mother till she died last fall on the Reserve and worked hard” she writes,
noting “I have lived continuously on the Reserve since my childhood excepting about two
years.” 109 She also wrote to the M. P. for the riding in which her reserve was located, who
contacted the D.I.A. on her behalf. 110 In both of the latter cases, the Department dismissed
claims along Indian Act lines, but these examples nonetheless show that women’s ideas of
inheritance were not limited by Indian Act stipulations, and that they advocated for themselves
against these laws.
107
H.C. to Deputy Superintendent General, 11 May 1895, LAC RG10, vol. 2759, file 150,470, C-12792.
108
Thomas Gordon to Superintendent General of Indian Affairs, 7 Sep 1882, LAC RG10, vol. 2194, file
38, 957, C-12779.
109
M. J. T. to the council of the Muncey Reserve, 30 Nov 1895, LAC RG10, vol. 2796, file 158,512, C-
12793.
110
M. T. to W. F. Romm, M.P., 29 Dec 1895, LAC RG10, vol. 2796, file 158,512, C-12793.
222
Wills were written by women that left properties to people outside of Indian Act
restrictions, and earlier than they were officially recognized. Some were written before they
were sanctioned by the Department; the earliest that I found was from a Walpole Island woman
in 1868.111 These wills often articulated desires that were outside of the Indian Act’s limitations,
some examples of which we have already seen in the cases dealt with by band councils. Other
examples are the wills of a woman from Six Nations in 1893, where she left her property to her
youngest son alone, excluding her other children, or of a St. Regis woman in 1884, who willed
her property equally between four daughters, one who had married an “Indian from Wisconsin”
and thus would been ineligible to inherit property on reserve. 112
Women also wrote to the D.I.A. to have their rights under the Indian Act affirmed, using
the law as an avenue to advocate for maintaining property rights. This was the case for a woman
from Tyendinaga in 1888 who wrote directly to Lawrence Vankoughnet, the Deputy
Superintendent General, about her deceased father’s property. She states: “The Chiefs informed
me that in accordance with the Indian Act…I was entitled to two thirds [of the property], which I
expect to get.”113 In a case from Sarnia in 1899, two sisters brought a claim to the D.I.A. to
share in the property that had been granted to their brother alone, implicitly aligning their claim
with the Indian Act’s requirement that property be divided equally among siblings, against the
decision of the band.114
Women additionally hired legal professionals to advocate for their rights during this
period. I found at least eleven examples of barristers and solicitors involved in the inheritance
111
Ebenezer Watson to Superintendent General of Indian Affairs, 21 Feb 1883, LAC RG10, vol. 2206, file
41, 622, C-12780. Another example from 1883 can be found in LAC RG10, vol. 2206, file 41, 622, C-
12780.
112
Will of C.S., RG10, vol. 2667, file 133,648, C-12789 and John Dundurn to Superintendent General of
Indian Affairs, 7 May 1884, LAC RG10, vol. 2257, file 50,659, C-12780.
113
M. L. to Lawrence Vankoughnet, 11 May 1888, LAC RG10, vol 2401, file 83, 326, C-12782.
114
Frank Pedley to Inspector of Indian Agencies, 4 July 1903, LAC RG10, vol. 2989, file 215,320, C-9666.
223
case files I examined, with ten being hired by women.115 This was for multiple purposes. A
Tyendinaga woman did so to obtain rents she believed due to her from her brother’s estate in
1899. In an 1898 case from St. Regis a woman and her husband sent their will through a
barrister to the D.I.A., hoping for an extra layer of protection that their wishes were granted. In
the 1897 case of a woman from Six Nations, she hired a barrister to advocate for her young
nephew who had inherited a property and whose rights she felt were not being adequately
respected. At Six Nations in the 1890s Indian Agent E. D. Cameron held extensive
investigations into inheritance cases in Brantford, and women and families on both sides of
inheritance conflicts would sometimes be represented by barristers here. 116 These files do not
demonstrate conclusively whether legal professionals helped women achieve their goals, as
many final decisions are missing from the files. Generally, barristers were based in towns close
to the reserves, but little information is available as to the process by which they were hired or
what payment was involved. 117 Although it is beyond the scope of this chapter, the involvement
of legal professionals in Indian Act cases deserves further study as it points to strategies families
adopted outside of band council and D.I.A. authority, as well as their engagements at the
intersections of settler and Indian Act property law.
115
John Cameron, Barrister, Notary Public and Commissioner to Thomas Gordon, 15 Aug 1894, LAC
RG10, vol. 2765, file 152,688, C-12793, Report by E. D. Cameron on his investigation, 14 March 1895,
LAC RG10, vol. 2798, file 159, 852, C-9659, G. E. Deroch to George Anderson, 21 Jan 1899, LAC RG10,
vol. 2779, file 156,252, C-12793, George L. Taylor, Barrister, Notary Public to Superintendent General of
Indian Affairs, 18 Feb 1897, LAC RG10, vol. 2896, file 182,145, C-9662, Leitch and Pringle to Deputy
Superintendent General, 12 Dec 1896, LACRG10, vol. 2935, file 195,838, C-9663, Pardee and
Shaughnessy Solicitors for the Bank of Montreal and the Huron and Lambton Loan and Savings Company
to Superintendent General of Indian Affairs, 7 Sep 1899, RG10, vol. 2986, file 213,666, C-9665, E. D.
Cameron to Secretary of Department of Indian Affairs, Dec. 29th, 1898 LAC RG10,vol 2959, file 205,222,
C-9664, In the matter of the claim to the S. E. lot of the S ½ of lot 26 con. 1 Tuscarora, J. W. Bowley for
claimant Frederick John Hill, C. G. claiming for him, LAC RG10, vol. 2918, file 186,830, C-9662. Notaries
were also hired at times for wills to be written, these are not counted here.
116
I found at least 15 files containing these more extensive investigations. For examples see Report by E.
D. Cameron on his investigation, 14 Mar 1895, LAC RG10, vol. 2798, file 159, 852, C-9659, E. D.
Cameron to Secretary of Department of India Affairs, 29 Dec 1898 LAC, RG10, vol. 2959, file 205,222,
C-9664 and E.D. Cameron to Secretary, 31 Jan 1899 LAC RG10, vol. 2962, file 206,213, C-9664.
117
For an overview of the legal profession during the time period see Christopher Moore, The Law
Society of Upper Canada and Ontario Lawyers, 1797-1997 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997),
135-185.
224
A final avenue that women took in advocating for the property rights of themselves and
their families was in appealing to the D.I.A. against band decisions that they found to be unjust.
They also appealed to Department superiors when they found that both the band and Indian
agents were making wrong decisions. For instance, in a case from Sarnia in 1899, two sisters
wrote directly to the Superintendent General, complaining that the band council had undervalued
their late brothers’ property, and that this had negatively affected the fair division of property
between themselves and their remaining siblings.118 According to the sisters, the Indian Agent,
William English, “was a party to the unfair valuation of the estate…And hence our appeal to the
Indian Department for Justice.”119 When the Department would not interfere with the council’s
decision, the sisters hired legal representation to push forward their case. 120 In another case from
Walpole Island (discussed above), where a widow was living with relatives from her husband’s
previous marriage, she wrote to the Superintendent General, after an unsatisfactory response
from the Indian Agent about her complaint, disputing the property division and insisting on her
rights to decide on who could live in the house. 121
Women’s appeals to Indian Agents and the Department in inheritance cases, although a
strategy that could occasionally work in their favour, nonetheless brought increased surveillance
into their families and others involved in their cases. In the case of the widow from Walpole
Island, the Indian Agent’s descriptions of her family members are exemplary of the scrutiny that
women’s lives were under. In looking into the case, he describes one of the women involved and
her family with contempt and disrespect:
she is not entitled to much consideration. She nearly broke her father’s heart a few
years ago by going away from the island with another young woman for immoral
purposes. When she returned she was in the family way and has now got a boy about
six years old as the outcome of her venture. This boy, of course would have to live
118
Mrs. A. R. and Mrs. E. J. to Deputy Superintendent General of Indian Affairs, May 17 1899. LAC
RG10, vol. 2974, file 209,900 C-9665.
119
Ibid.
120
A. Weir to Superintendent General of Indian Affairs, Jan 15 1900, LAC RG10, vol. 2974, file 209,900
C-9665.
121
Widow S. [written by George Liner for her] to Lawrence Vankoughnet, undated, received by
Department of Indian Affairs June 11 1888, LAC RG10, vol. 2419, file 86, 444, C-12783.
225
where she was and I don't blame [the heir] at all for not wanting her and her boy saddled
upon him.122
His description of another woman in the case, living in a relationship outside of marriage, was
likewise disdainful: “She has done wrong and is continuing in wrong doing, and is being made to
suffer for it in so far as being cut off from the annuity money by your order.”123 McKelvey’s
views on the illegitimacy of children and relationships, and the disregard for women’s lives
outside strict moral conventions, were not unique to him in the D.I.A.’s paternalistic culture.
Indian Agent E. D. Cameron at Six Nations, where Indian Act governance had yet to be
imposed, was particularly zealous about asserting his jurisdiction over inheritance investigations
and would hold lengthy investigations on inheritance cases, some brought to him on appeal by
women. In these investigations, he would provide descriptions of evidence, call witnesses by
summons, and hold witnesses in contempt of court if they did not appear, ordering the jailing of
a man in at least one case. 124 He took a very activist role in pursuing questions of legitimacy of
marriages and children here. So, for women, making appeals to the agent was one strategy that
they adopted, however we can see how this was also part of the larger, invasive paternalistic
structure of Indian Agents’ surveillance into family life.
In an 1898 case from Six Nations investigated by Cameron, brought on appeal by the
sister of the deceased, the illegitimacy of the inheritors was a driving factor for his pushing the
Department to overturn the Chiefs’ decision.125 The Chiefs had approved a will, but as the
mother and father were not married when their children were born, Cameron insisted that they
were “not entitled to the property as decided.” 126 The Department was not initially willing to
intervene in the case. This greatly frustrated Cameron and he did not drop the issue, sending five
122
Ibid.
123
Ibid.
124
E.D. Cameron to Hayter Reed, Deputy Superintendent General of Indian Affairs, Dec. 20 1895, LAC
RG10, vol. 2829, file 169,238, C-9660.
125
LAC RG10, vol 2959, file 205,222, C-9664.
126
Ibid., E. D. Cameron to Secretary of Indian Affairs, 29 Dec 1898.
226
letters over the course of several years about the illegitimacy of the inheritors to his superiors. 127
Cameron’s persistence paid off, and the inheritance as it stood was eventually overturned in
1908.128 This case demonstrates tensions between traditional governance and Indian Act
imposition, as well as how Indian Agents could push their own agendas forward. It also shows
how the options available for women to appeal decisions brought increased surveillance into the
legitimacy of marriages, children, and family life.
Women on reserves in these cases, whose traditional jurisdiction over land and family
decision-making had been deeply undermined, were operating through many layers of law that
were largely out of their hands. Despite this, they tirelessly advocated for themselves and their
families. More letters were written directly to the Department in inheritance cases than I have
seen in any other aspects of Indian Act imposition and enforcement that I have looked at.
Women faced increased scrutiny of their marriages and legitimacy of their children, a political
system where they had no direct participation or voice, and layers of paternalism from (at times)
the band council, the Indian Agent and their D.I.A. superiors, a massive contrast with their
historic roles in both Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee family and property law decisions.
4.4. The Role of Indian Agents and Defining the Law:

Internal Negotiations of the D.I.A.
The D.I.A.’s first point of inquiry in their examination of wills was the legitimacy of
marriages and children, and the prioritizing of biological family relationships– which as we have
seen were not always a priority in band council decisions or for women themselves. Surveillance
into family relationships existed prior to the 1894 change in law that removed band council
involvement but did intensify after this point. Even in straightforward cases, where it was clear
who was to inherit a property, the Department would verify family relationships through the
127
Ibid. E. D. Cameron to Secretary of Indian Affairs, 29 Dec 1898, E. D. Cameron to Secretary of Indian
Affairs, 12 Jan 1899, E. D. Cameron to J. D. McLean, 19 April 1898, E. D. Cameron to Secretary of Indian
Affairs, 25 April 1899, E. D. Cameron to Secretary of Indian Affairs, 14 July 1906.
128
Ibid. Frank Pedley to [Gordon?] J. Smith, Indian Superintendent, 6 June 1908.
227
Indian Agent. Indian Agents held a frontline position in bringing cases of concern to the D.I.A.’s
attention, but also provided a surveillance role for family relationships, relying in many cases on
local knowledge.129 The files that show the internal processes between Indian Agents and their
superiors in inheritance cases demonstrate two things. First, they elaborate how Indian Agents
were applying the expanded surveillance required of them over women and families to deal with
inheritance decisions. At times, their moral concerns shaped the outcome of inheritance cases, as
we have already seen. Secondly, the files demonstrate how the D.I.A. worked out details of how
the law should be applied through the cases that came to them when Indian Agents were not sure
how to proceed. The frontline position of Indian Agents brought questions that forced the D.I.A.
to clarify their interpretation of the law’s clauses more specifically. Indian Agents were an
important part of how jurisdiction over inheritance was imposed, and analysis of their work
demonstrates in greater detail how the specifics of this jurisdiction were worked out.
Wills written by reserve residents, and their ability to devise property, were scrutinized by
D.I.A. officials, and their relationships were policed. Frequently, in inheritance cases Indian
Agents would make a recommendation on who should inherit a property to their superiors, and
the Superintendent General (or more usually the Deputy acting on his behalf) would approve
without questioning their decision. At other times, Indian Agents provided additional
surveillance into family relationships at the request of the Department to verify family
relationships. For instance, after a request for information from the Deputy Superintendent,
Indian Agent A. Dingman at Six Nations in 1899 states the following: “they are relatives not
further removed from the testator than nephews and first cousins. I got this information from
Peter Hill, brother of the testator, and I believe it to be correct.” 130 Indian Agents often relied on
local community knowledge in order to make these determinations. It is important to note here
that this opens up questions about resistance through misinformation or silence that might have
been present in some cases.
129
See for instance LAC RG10, vol. 2517, file 106,465, C-12784.
130
A. Dingman to Deputy Superintendent of Indian Affairs, June 18 1890, LAC RG10, vol. 2517, file
106,465, C-12784.
228
Issues of marriage legitimacy and the “good moral character” of women were always
brought up in these correspondences, and the Superintendent would verify this if the Agent did
not mention these details in his initial correspondence. When Indian Agent John Scoffield of
Saugeen recommended a will be approved in 1897, the Superintendent General Hayter Reed
wrote back asking for clarification regarding the relationship between the two women involved.
Was the first married? If not had she left any children? “It would be well,” Reed chided
Scoffield “in any future case of submitting a will to give full information regarding the parties
interested, so as to avoid unnecessary correspondence.” 131 This type of routine bureaucratic
scrutiny into intimate family relationships runs through these files. The surveillance of family
relationships by Indian Agents disproportionately affected women through the requirement that
their “moral character” be investigated. If Indian Agents did not mention the “moral character”
of widows in inheritance cases directly, the Deputy Superintendent General was quick to demand
this information.132
At times, even claims brought by women themselves ended up drawing increased

investigation into family relationships, examples of which we have seen above. 133 This
surveillance might not involve the complainant directly but shows how any push to have these
matters reviewed would bring this type of scrutiny into the lives of women and their families.
The case of a woman from Sarnia in 1899, who had left her husband in 1867 after 5 or 6 months
of “cruel treatment” after marrying at the age of 15 is another example of this. 134 She had
returned to the reserve to care for her estranged husband before his death. When he died his will
left his property to a woman who had been living with him, and a married daughter. 135 This was
131
Hayter Reed to John Scoffield, 13 Mar 1897, LAC RG10, vol. 2899, file 184, 147, C-9662.
132
See for example [Lawrence Vankoughnet] to Matthew Hill, 10 Feb 1888, LAC RG10, vol. 2401, file
83,326, C-12782, Hayter Reed to John Beattie, 19 Jan 1897, LAC RG10, vol. 2895, file 182, 145, and
LAC RG10, vol. 2881, file 179, 003, C-9661.
133
See also LAC RG10, vol. 2986, file 213,666, C-9665.
134
Pardee and Shaughnessy, Solicitors, to the Superintendent General of Indian Affairs, Sept. 7 1899.
LAC RG10, vol. 2986, file 213,666, C-9665.
135
Will of J.B., LAC RG10, vol. 2986, file 213,666, C-9665.
229
approved by the band. The first wife hired solicitors in order to contest the decision. 136 The
resulting investigation found irregularities in the will, and that the property should be divided
according to the Indian Act.137 On the instructions of a Law clerk, the Indian agent was tasked
with investigating the marriages of the husband. 138 The number and persons to whom he had
entered marital relations, the date and “form” of each marriage, the date of death of any wife or
“quasi wife” who predeceased him, and any “misconduct” on the part of any of the persons
“claiming to be wives” were all questions the Department asked for answers to, alongside the
routine questions about children from each marriage and whether there was any kin “not more
remote than a brother or sister.”139 This was the type of scrutiny into family relationships that
Indian Agents were charged with collecting.
Indian Agents were given broad decision-making power in inheritance cases, and their
information on family relationships was relied upon by the Superintendent General in his
decisions around which wills to approve. A straightforward example of one Indian Agent being
granted decision-making power can be seen in a case from Rama on Lake Couchiching in 1897.
Here the Indian agent brought a will to the attention of the D.I.A. where a woman had divided
her 28-acre property between her son and her daughter’s son.140 The Indian agent, D. J.
McPhee, disputed the will as the grandson was illegitimate and not a member of the band, and
asked how to proceed with the property division. Hayter Reed, the Deputy Superintendent
General responded by saying that if her death was after 1894 it was not necessary to consult the
band and asked that McPhee himself resolve the case.141 The grandson’s inheritance was
136
Pardee and Shaughnessy, Solicitors, to the Superintendent General of Indian Affairs, Sept. 7 1899.
LAC RG10, vol. 2986, file 213,666, C-9665.
137
Memorandum of [?] Law Clerk to Department of Indian Affairs, 26 Oct 1899, LAC RG10, vol. 2986,
file 213,666, C-9665.
138
J.D. McLean to A. English, 19 Jan 1900. LAC RG10, vol. 2986, file 213,666, C-9665.
139
Ibid.
140
D. J. McPhee to Superintendent General of Indian Affairs, 13 Jan 1897, RG10, vol. 2896, file 182,029,
C-9662.
141
Ibid. Hayter Reed to D. J. McPhee, 21 Jan 1897.
230
invalidated at McPhee’s recommendation. Despite the law granting “sole and final jurisdiction”
over decisions on wills to the Superintendent General, in practice these decisions were delegated
to Indian Agents.
Family relationships were being interpreted through new criteria, and the moral views of
Indian Agents affected the outcome of some cases. We have seen an example of this in the
investigation of E.D. Cameron in the above section, with his insistence on the illegitimacy of the
heirs overturning their inheritance. Cameron investigated another case from Six Nations in 1898
where he raised the issue of whether “pagan” marriages could be considered legal: “The question
has never been decided as to recognizing pagan marriages, and if a pagan marriage be considered
a legal marriage,”142 he wrote to the Department Secretary. After making inquiries, J.D.McLean
the Secretary of the Department, recommended that the decision of the Chiefs to recognize the
inheritance be overturned.143 In cases such as this one, the Department was still working out the
intricacies of the law, who it would apply to, and how they would enforce it.
If it was difficult for the Indian Agent to decide in an inheritance case, he would inquire
how to proceed to the Deputy Superintendent General. If there was a point of law that was not
clear for them inquiries were sent to the Solicitor general of Indian Affairs or the Department of
Justice. The files that underwent a process of verification through the Department of Justice
show how these government agents were interpreting the law, which aspects of the law they were
questioning and ultimately, demonstrate how through this process their jurisdiction was clarified.
In at least one case the law was altered due to these inquiries. This demonstrates how, through
the process of enforcement, the law was clarified for those who enforced it and their superiors.
Cameron’s investigation into whether “pagan” marriages would be recognized is one example of
this, and other questions that the Department had over the enforcement of the law are present in
the files. For instance, in 1893 Hayter Reed, the Deputy Superintendent General, inquired to the
Department of Justice whether a grandnephew was more remote than a second cousin according
142
E. D. Cameron to [J.D. McLean?] Secretary of the Department of Indian Affairs, 28 March 1898. LAC
RG10, vol. 2939, file 196,761, C-9663.
143
J. D. McClean to E. D. Cameron, 4th April 1898, LAC RG10, vol. 2939, file 196,761, C-9663.
231
to descent of property principles. 144 This demonstrates the high level of bureaucratic
involvement in imposing European ideas of extended family relations onto reserves.
Another example of how the interpretation of the law was clarified through the inquiries of
Indian Agents was in a case from Six Nations in 1894 where the question of whether a will
written prior to the Indian Act granted the ability for status Indians to will their properties should
be considered valid. There were questions over whether the will from 1864 should stand. In the
council minutes from the time, it was stated as follows: “It is the opinion of high authority that
the Will of an Indian has no legal effect, but [?] believed that where one was properly drawn up,
it was the custom to recognize the same and not interfere with the wishes of the deceased.” 145
After the case was reopened due to ongoing family conflict around the property, the Council
cancelled the earlier decision in 1894. 146 When this was investigated by Cameron, he asked the
Department to clarify whether a will from 1864 would indeed be recognized as valid. 147 To him,
the wording of the law from that period was clear that this should be tied to enfranchisement
processes, but nonetheless the Superintendent General verified this through the Department of
Justice.148 The Minister of Justice confirmed that the will should be invalidated according to the
law at the time.149 This shows again the process of clarifying the law through its enforcement, as
well as how old decisions could be revisited and overturned.
The files also give a sense of how women’s right to property was being interpreted by the
Department of Indian Affairs. Aspects of Indigenous women’s property transmission that would
not have been questioned for non-Indigenous individuals also came before the Department. For
144
E. Newcombe, Deputy Minister of Justice to Hayter Reed, 21 Dec. 1893. LAC RG10, vol. 2725, file
144,086, C-12790.
145
Decision of Council, 14 Feb 1865, copied from the minute book by A.G. Smith. LAC RG10, vol.
2798, file 159, 852, C-9659.
146
Ibid. Report by E.D. Cameron on his investigation, March 14 1895.
147
Ibid. E. D. Cameron to Hayter Reed, 14 March 1895.
148
Ibid. Deputy Superintendent General of Indian Affairs [Hayter Reed?] to E. L. Newcombe, Deputy
Minister of Justice. 18 March 1895.
149
Ibid. E.L. Newcombe to Deputy Minister of Justice, 21 March 1896.
232
instance, when a Six Nations woman in 1883 gave away her personal property to the white man
living with her, and her farm to “a young Indian,” this was questioned all the way up through to
the Department of Justice as her ability to dispose of property in her lifetime was investigated. 150
The Department of Justice found that "there is nothing in the Indian Acts to prevent a woman or
man (Indian) from disposing of their personal property as they think proper during their lives," 151
a point that should have been obvious from reading the law. Nevertheless, the fact that both the
Indian Agent and his superiors thought it necessary to have this clarified in law reveals how
narrowly Indigenous women’s rights to property were interpreted. The ability of a woman of the
Sarnia Reserve to will her off-reserve property to her niece in 1895 was also investigated through
the Department of Justice. It was found that the will was subject to the 1894 Indian Act and thus
to the approval of the Superintendent General.152
In one case this process of verification of the legal details likely ended up changing the
law itself. The Chiefs in council of the Oneida of the Thames reserve in March of 1882 decided
to uphold the granting of land by a woman to her niece and two nephews, as her husband “was
never kind to her in health or sickness.”153 She had inherited the house and thirteen acres of
property nine years earlier from her father, and three weeks before her death had made a verbal
statement that the property should go to her young relatives. Tensions over her husband’s refusal
to leave the property brought the case, through the Indian Agent, to the attention of his superiors.
The case ended up being referred by them to the Department of Justice. Upon reviewing the
case, the Deputy Minister of Justice decided that because female property ownership (and thus
widowers rights) was not explicitly dealt with in the Indian Act, the husband had no claim,154
150
LAC RG10, vol. 2238, file 45,797, C-12780. In this case it should be noted that the transmission of
property was initially brought to the Indian Agent at the request of the family through the Chief.
151
Ibid. [A. Power?] to Deputy Superintendent General of Indian Affairs, 28 Sept 1883.
152
E. Newcombe to Deputy Superintendent General of Indian Affairs, LAC RG10, vol. 2803, file 161,186,
C-9659.
153
The Chiefs in Council, Oneida, 28 Mar 1882, LAC RG10, vol. 2184, file 37,004, C-12770.
154
Ibid. George Burbridge to Superintendent General of Indian Affairs, 13 Dec 1882. The legal loophole
was closed in 1894 to cover widowers. An Act to further amend the Indian Act, S. C. 1894, c. 32, s. 20.5.
233
and recommended that the Superintendent General exercise the discretionary powers given to
him in the law to resolve the case. Through this “discretionary power,” the Superintendent
General ended up deferring back to the council to reach a decision. This settled the case in
favour of the niece and nephews after a suitable guardian was selected. The text of the Indian
Act was changed in 1894 to include widowers in inheritance clauses, an intervention that I
believe was likely brought about by this case. 155 All the negotiations of what the law meant, and
how to enforce it, on the part of Indian Agents, their superiors, and the Department of Justice
demonstrate how the law was being “tightened up” and clarified through the process of its’
enforcement.
4.5. Conclusion
Inheritance law in the Indian Act is significant for several reasons. To begin, it is one of
the few areas where the Grand General Council was able to impact the law according to their
demands. Their remarkable gains here in their efforts to organize the jurisdiction over
inheritance decision-making on reserve to best serve their communities should be recognized in
the face of the general unwillingness of the government to listen to their concerns. The Council’s
successful bid to change the law should not be discounted despite the limitations on these powers
placed in the law by the government. It is another area within the law– like resource rights,
enfranchisement and municipal governance– where the jurisdiction to decide on local matters
was a key point of contention by delegates with government legislation, and one that the Grand
General Council continued to try to expand and retain jurisdiction over into the twentieth
century.
Examining inheritance can also show how decision-making authority for reserves
operated within the D.I.A. Within the Indian Act, decision-making power was nominally granted
to the Superintendent General, but in practice this was exercised in most cases by Indian Agents.
In the process of D.I.A. enforcement, in both the relationships between Superintendents and
Indian Agents, as well as the relationship between them and band councils, we see the
155
An Act to further amend the Indian Act, S.C. 1894, c. 32 (57-58 Vict.): s. 1 (replacing section 20,
clause 5 in this).
234
“messiness” of both discretionary decision-making, as well the uncertainty that agents and their
superiors had with the limits of the law. Through the process of questioning the law, they firmed
up understandings of their authority. The themes of Indian Agent authority and the expansion of
the law through its enforcement will be taken up in more detail in the following chapter.
What is also clear through correspondences around inheritance was that there was an
increased involvement on the part of Indian Agents into the surveillance of family relationships,
marriages, and women’s lives. Gathering knowledge about intimate family details, relationships,
children, and relatives became part of the work of Indian Agents through inheritance processes.
This significantly added to the erosion of women’s position in Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee
communities, that was already being undermined through their exclusion in governance roles
under the Indian Act as well as the limiting of access to their areas of traditional authority over
lands and waters. Through the new webs of authority over property decisions that were brought
down on their own and their families’ lives, women and their relatives continued to fight for
themselves, their descendants, and their other loved ones’ right to establish good, secure lives
and pass on all that they worked for despite the limitations of the reserve system and the Indian
Act.
235
Chapter 5
The Expansion of the Indian Agent System, Amendments to the
Indian Act, and the Grand General Indian Council, 1880-1906.
The Indian Act…gives very great powers to an Indian agent. He had large semi-
judicial powers. All appeals from the Indian Council are made to him. He acts as a
justice of the peace in disposing of charges for breach of the liquor clauses of the Act.
He acts as an arbitrator between Indians and settles their disputes. He advises them on
all fence line disputes and family quarrels. He keeps the land register and records all
transfers of land, supervises all testamentary dispositions, and with him are filed all
wills. He prepares all agreements for Government leases of Indian lands to white men.
He presides at all meetings of the Council of the Chiefs, acts as their advisor and reports
all minutes of council…He is also the advisor the Department in regard to all matters
affecting the interior economy of the reserve.1
The sweeping paternalistic powers of Indian Agents were enumerated in a 1907 report
from Gordon Smith, the Superintendent at Six Nations to the Royal Commission on the Civil
Service. By this time, Indian Agents had been granted powers through the Indian Act to
assert control over almost all aspects of life on reserves– as enforcers of the law they were the
instrument of its power. Between the government passing the Indian Act in 1876, and Smith’s
letter in 1907, Indian agents had also been granted additional powers by amendments to the
law to restrict the movement of Indigenous people on and off reserve, and to arrest those who
chose to drink, those non-reserve residents who visited friends of family on reserve, those
who practiced ceremonies, and those parents who kept their children home from day or
residential schools. They were even granted powers to police the behaviour of Indigenous
individuals off reserve, through public order clauses in the Criminal Code and the Act
respecting offences against Public Morals and Public Convenience. Specifically, these
changes to the law began in 1880. This was after Indian Affairs became a discrete
government department for the first time since Confederation (rather than being housed
1
Canada, Sessional Papers (No. 29a) 7-8 Edward VII, 1908. Royal Commission on the Civil Service, p.
276. Letter from Gordon J. Smith, Superintendent Six Nations, Brantford to Thomas S. Howe, Esq.,
Secretary Civil Service Commission, October 29 1907. Cited also in Marion Joan Boswell, “’Civilizing”
the Indian: Government Administration of Indians, 1876-1896” (PhD Diss. University of Ottawa, 1977):
212. Gordon was requesting to the Commissioner that his pay be raised.
236
within the Crown Lands Department or the Department of the Interior). The corresponding
expansion of staff on reserves precipitated increased feedback to the government about the
enforcement of the Indian Act. While the general character of the Indian Act remained largely
consistent, by 1906, three decades after its inception, the law contained twenty-two new
clauses (from 100 clauses in the original law) and had been amended thirteen times. Over
these years the expansion of both the number of Indian Agents and the expansion in their
areas of jurisdiction was central to how the government asserted power on reserves.
Historians to date have documented the tremendous impact the expansive powers given
to Indian Agents had on Indigenous peoples living on reserves in Ontario and across Canada.2
Peter Schmaltz explains, in his overview of Indian Agent powers in Southern Ontario, how this
position was largely responsible for keeping reserve economies stagnant and reserve politics
tightly controlled in the late nineteenth century, against stated goals of assimilation. He outlines
examples of how Agents became a problem for reserve communities due to political
appointments, conflicts of interest, corruption, incompetence, and neglect, and makes clear the
economic impacts on reserves from “the growing dependence on one man, and the failures
2
Peter S. Schmalz, The Ojibwa of Southern Ontario (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991), 208-
218. Jarvis Brownlie and John Steckley, in their respective studies of Indian Agents, likewise provide
historical examples of the great powers that Indian Agents held over reserve communities. Jarvis
Brownlie, A Fatherly Eye: Indian Agents, Government Power, and Aboriginal Resistance in Ontario,
1918-1939 (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 2003), John Steckley, Indian Agents, Rulers of the
Reserves (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2016). See also Jarvis Brownlie, “Man on the Spot: John
Daly, Indian Agent in Parry Sound, 1922-1939.” Journal of the Canadian Historical Association 5, no. 1
(1994): 63–86. Satzewich, Vic, and Linda Mahood. “Indian Affairs and Band Governance: Deposing
Indian Chiefs in Western Canada, 1896-1911.” Canadian Ethnic Studies 26, no. 1 (1994): 40–58 and
“Indian Agents and the Residential School System in Canada, 1946 - 1970.” Historical Studies in
Education 7, no. 1 (1995): 45–69, Satzewich, Vic. “Patronage, Moral Regulation and the Recruitment of
Indian Affairs Personnel, 1879-1900.” The Canadian Review of Sociology 33, no. 2 (1996): 213–34,
Dorothee Schreiber, “‘A Liberal and Paternal Spirit’: Indian Agents and Native Fisheries in Canada.”
Ethnohistory 55, no. 1 (2008): 87–118, Titley, E. Brian. The Indian Commissioners: Agents of the State
and Indian Policy in Canada’s Prairie West, 1873-1932. Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 2009 and
Rhonda Telford, “The Wikwemikong First Nation and the Department of Indian Affairs’ Mismanagement
of Petroleum Development.” In Anne Lorene Chambers, ed. Ontario Since Confederation (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 2000).
237
resulting from that dependence.”3 What has not been studied to date is how these amendments
granting extraordinary powers to Indian Agents came to be. As this chapter will show, while
amendments to the Act were ultimately passed by successive parliaments, ideas for proposed
amendments to the Act were generated in multiple places. Not surprisingly, the leadership of the
Department of Indian Affairs was itself a source of some amendments, but as my research has
found, Indian Agents also advocated for amendments in their correspondence to Ottawa and
changes to the law also originated through these suggestions.
Furthermore, band councils and the Grand General Council also reviewed and
commented on amendments to the law. The Council in the last decades of the nineteenth century
was willing to engage with the Indian Act to selectively grant Indian Agents greater enforcement
powers over their communities. While changes to Indian Agents’ enforcement roles were
designed through amendments to the legislation, the Grand General Council’s delegates were
also making demands to change the Indian Act. Members were still heavily invested in the idea
of Christian co-existence that ran through previous iterations of their reactions to Department of
Indian Affairs policy.4 As we will see below, this increasingly small group of Indigenous
leaders were willing to cooperate with many government laws and policies, but they also wanted
also to fully participate in Canadian political life. They were amenable to some aspects of law
enforcement (including temperance and morality provisions) offered by Indian Agents on
reserves– for many communities a newly expanded presence over these decades– but they also
called for a much more expansive participation in Canadian politics than was delineated by the
Government through the Indian Act. Their engagement with the Indian Act overall in council
minutes demonstrates that they did not wish to surrender jurisdiction over their local matters.
While they accepted the necessity of Indian Agents in terms of enforcement, this was not a
general cession of local control. Leaders of the Grand General Council, who were by this period
largely accommodationist regarding many aspects of the Indian Act, nonetheless remained
deeply critical of how the government was relating to their communities. How council delegates
3
Peter S. Schmalz, The Ojibwa of Southern Ontario, 208-218.
4
For the history of Christian co-existence from see Chapter 3, as well as Donald Smith, Mississauga
Portraits and Sacred Feathers.
238
viewed the role of Indian Agents should be placed alongside how they envisioned their broader
political relationship with the Canadian state.
This chapter looks to two bodies of sources to examine how the expansion of Indian
agent powers was managed by the Department of Indian Affairs after 1880 and reacted to by the
Grand General Indian Council until 1906.5 I first look to the process of legislative change
through records of the headquarters of the Department of Indian Affairs on suggested
amendments to the Indian Act. For this chapter I read all the files on Indian Act amendment that
I could locate, twenty-three files in total from the years between 1877 and 1897, containing 785
pages of correspondence, draft legislation, and briefs for Parliament. These files allow insight
into the internal debates in the Department of Indian Affairs, and their coordination in drafting
the law with the Department of Justice. These files also demonstrate how feedback from Indian
Agents and others, including Hayter Reed as Indian Commissioner in the Northwest, responded
to the law’s enforcement on reserves. This correspondence shows an increased preoccupation by
both field and headquarters D.I.A. staff with regulating reserve life and the role of the Indian
Agent in doing so. Lawrence Vankoughnet, the Deputy Superintendent General (who served in
this role from 1874 to 1893), was often willing to take these suggestions for legal change into
account, and if approved by him, would recommend them to the Department of Justice where
they would be drafted for approval by Parliament. Localized struggles over authority on reserves
made their imprint on the changes to the law. Indian agents desired greater powers of
enforcement, and a number of their specific cases were referenced in the briefs provided to
Ministers before debates in Parliament about amendment to the law. These briefs contained
wording that was drawn directly from Indian Agents’ letters or paraphrased their experiences to
emphasize the reason for the changes being proposed.6 Through closely examining these records
and cross referencing them with the many amendments to the law during this period, I argue the
expansion of Indian Agent jurisdiction through the Indian Act should be understood within the
5
This time period spans from when the Department of Indian Affairs became an independent government
department, to the Revised Statute of the Indian Act in 1906, and the Grand General Council held at
Saugeen that same year.
6
Brief on Proposed Amendments to the Indian Act, Minister’s Copy. LAC RG10, vol. 3947, file 123,
764-2.
239
expansion of the DIA’s use of Indian Agents as strategy of enforcement. While earlier law and
policy developments can be traced to the commissions of the early nineteenth century (such as
the Bagot Commission or the Pennefather Commission), the changes to the law in the 1880s and
1890s can often be traced to suggestions that were coming from agents on the reserves
themselves. The second section of the chapter provides a close reading of the meeting minutes
of the Grand General Council that I was able to locate from 1884 to 1906 to examine how this
specific group of Indigenous leaders reacted to Indian Agent powers and the Indian Act more
broadly over these years. I argue that while they accepted a number of areas of Indian Agent
jurisdiction, this was placed within a broader conceptualization of maintaining autonomous
reserve governance.
For both the Department of Indian Affairs and the Grand General Council, the
jurisdiction of Indian Agents was a leading concern in how the relationship between the
government and Indigenous peoples was imagined the last two decades of the nineteenth century.
These years were marked by a steady expansion of Indian Agent presence on reserves, and a
slow and steady expansion of their powers through a proliferation of Indian Act amendments–
many of which came from their initial, often unsuccessful, experiences of enforcement in reserve
communities. In examining the details of these amendments, this chapter adds greater
specificity to our understandings of how legal change originated from the context of colonialism
on reserves.7 Additionally, in comparing how the government expanded the enforcement
7
The broad aspects of legal change during this time have been covered in various foundational studies of
Department policies and government-produced documents such as work by John Tobias, Douglas
Leighton, John Milloy and the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples. John L. Tobias, “Protection,
Civilization, Assimilation: An Outline History of Canada’s Indian Policy” in J. R. Miller, ed. Sweet
Promises: A Reader on Indian-White Relations in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991),
Douglas Leighton, “A Victorian Civil Servant at Work: Lawrence Vankoughnet and the Canadian Indian
Department, 1874-1893” in Ian A.L. Getty and Antoine S. Lussier, eds. As Long as the Sun Shines and
Water Flows: A Reader in Canadian Native Studies (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2000): 104-119 and “The
Development of Federal Indian Policy in Canada, 1840-1890.” PhD Diss. University of Western Ontario,
1975, John S. Milloy, “Indian Act Colonialism: A Century of Dishonour, 1869-1969,” Research paper for
the National Centre for First Nations Governance (May 2008) and “A Historical Overview of Indian-
Government Relations, 1755-1940,” Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development for the
Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (1992), The Historical Development of the Indian Act (Ottawa:
Treaties and Historical Research Group, 1979), and Looking Forward, Looking Back: Report of the Royal
Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (1996).
240
capabilities of Indian Agents through the Indian Act and the position of the Grand General
Council regarding these powers, the great disparity in how agents’ jurisdictional authority was
conceptualized is evident. For the government, Indian Agents became the primary instrument of
actualizing the law through their expanded powers over reserve life. The Grand General Council
was willing to accept limited Indian Agent jurisdiction over certain areas of law enforcement that
served their own agenda of applying Victorian standards of morality to secure greater political
participation for themselves. Their political vision included greater band control over education,
finances, and having communities be able to opt out of the Indian Act, reinstating the vote,
gaining representation in Parliament– and, if Indian Agents were accepted on reserves to enforce
against alcohol and other moral restrictions, that this position should be closely regulated. Their
broader goal was to fundamentally change D.I.A. policy to expand the jurisdictional control of
band leaders over life on reserves.
5.1. Indian Agents, Legal Change, and the Department of

Indian Affairs
The last decades of the nineteenth-century are a notoriously repressive period in
government-Indigenous relations. The work of Sarah Carter, James Daschuk, Shelley Gavigan,
Daniel Rück, and Hugh Shewell, among others, emphasize the devastating impacts of D.I.A.
laws and policies on reserve communities here, and the final reports of the Truth and
Reconciliation Commission and the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous
Women and Girls link the genocidal policies they name to the entrenchment of the Indian Act
and deeper control over reserve politics, finances, and Indigenous lives during these decades. 8
8
Sarah Carter, Lost Harvests: Prairie Indian reserve farmers and government policy (Montreal: McGill-
Queen’s University Press, 1990) and “Two Acres and a Cow: ‘Peasant’ Farming for the Indians of the
Northwest, 1889–97.” The Canadian Historical Review 70, no. 1 (1989), James Daschuk, Clearing the
Plains: Disease, Politics of Starvation, and the Loss of Aboriginal Life (Regina: University of Regina
Press, 2013), Shelley A. M. Gavigan, Hunger, Horses, and Government Men Criminal Law on the
Aboriginal Plains, 1870-1905 (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2012), Daniel Rück, The Laws and the Land: The
Settler Colonial Invasion of Kahnawàke in Nineteenth-Century Canada (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2021),
Hugh Shewell, ‘Enough to Keep Them Alive’: Indian Welfare in Canada, 1873-1965 (Toronto: University
of Toronto Press, 2004), Canada’s Residential Schools: The History, Part 1: Origins to 1939, The Final
Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, Vol. 1 (Truth and Reconciliation
Commission of Canada, 2015) and Reclaiming Power and Place: The Final Report of the National
241
In 1885, after the Northwest Resistance that shook the foundations of the settler state’s
confidence in their expansion West, Hayter Reed wrote a “Memorandum On the Future
Management of the Indians.”9 Reed, Assistant Commissioner of the Northwest at the time who
would become the head of the Department less than a decade later, suggested drastic measures to
expand control of life on reserves for bands that had participated, including restrictions on
movement through a pass system, and the abolishment of the tribal system so that “instructors
and employees [Indian agents] will not then be hampered by Indian consultations and
interferences but will administer direct orders and instructions.” 10 Reed is clear in his insistance
on authoritarian control by Department officials, and the necessity of breaking down traditional
governance to actualize this. Both of his suggestions became adopted as policies with
implications for communities far beyond the bands that had resisted government expansion in the
prairie region, as did other measures to exert control over life on reserves.
To be sure, the rebellions in the Northwest marked a shift in Department policy (as well
as more generally within the Canadian government), but Reed’s memorandum also demonstrates
other aspects of Department structure, policy, and legal developments that I explore in this
chapter. I do not attend to the specific influence of the rebellions in the West here, as this is
beyond the scope of this chapter and dissertation more broadly, but instead look to many other
suggestions for legal change, small and large, around how to make the law more actionable. The
relationship of the West to the Department, however, in the wake of the rebellions, and
particularly through the strong advocacy for legal change and repressive measures imposed by
Hayter Reed, is important context for Crown-Indigenous relations more broadly during this
period. The background context of Indigenous peoples being a newly actualized threat to settler
colonial state power and expansion undoubtedly changed the stakes of the debates on legal
change for government actors. Reed was certainly not the only outside service official in the
Inquiry Into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, Chapter 4: Colonization as Gendered
Oppression, p. 240-312.
9
Hayter Reed, Memorandum on the Future Management of the Indians, July 20, 1885, RG10, vol. 3710,
file 19, 550-3.
10
Ibid.
242
field making recommendations about how the law should be changed over these decades. The
Indian Agents who Reed mentions in his memorandum had been in working in the West for less
than a decade, and this position had even more recently increased in numbers in Ontario. His
letter exemplifies how feedback about enforcing the law came to the Department, in many forms,
from the field during this era. In this chapter I analyze how these reports were received and
responded to by Headquarters and show how important the role of Indian Agents themselves
were in changing law and policy.
The process of amending the Indian Act took place with great frequency, involved all
levels of the Department of Indian Affairs, and originated in many cases with letters written from
agents in the field to Department headquarters in Ottawa. As outlined above, despite the marked
importance of this era historians have been somewhat ambivalent on assessing the significance
of the many changes to the law that took place over this period, except for sections banning
religious ceremonies and imposing mandatory schooling. Legal scholar Richard Bartlett
describes the many smaller amendments as being notable for “how little, despite their frequency,
they sought to accomplish.”11 It is true, as Bartlett notes, that many amendments were
“preoccupied with the details” rather than large departures in policy. 12 However, how the
wording of the law changed is important in many cases, as these small changes move, for
instance, trespass punishments from being applied from settlers to Indigenous individuals, or the
ability to punish alcohol use for Indigenous individuals who were not legally considered
“Indian.” Small changes in wording dismissed by Bartlett had often in fact significant impact for
people living on reserves. The correspondence suggesting, debating, drafting, and confirming
these amendments demonstrate much about how the Department was attempting to regulate
behaviour, economies, and politics on reserves through the law.
The many amendments to the law made by Department of Indian Affairs leadership, as
was the case with the original legislation, are sweeping in their targets of regulation. The
majority of these, however, can be roughly organized as expanding enforcement and policing
11
Richard H. Bartlett, “The Indian Act of Canada,” Buffalo Law Review, 27 (1977-78): 585.
12
Ibid.
243
powers on reserves. The targets of these enforcement amendments include timber, trespass,
alcohol regulation, the powers of Indian Agents as justices of the peace, as well as the changes to
family regulation through wills examined in the previous chapter. Some of these changes gave
greater regulatory power to the Governor in Council or the Superintendent General, and other
issues were present in the amendments such as “Halfbreeds” lands, elections (as we have seen in
Chapter 3 with the Indian Advancement Act of 1884), and small changes to enfranchisement
processes, but the majority of these changes involved a greater degree of regulating the space of
reserves and Indigenous behaviour there, resulting in a greater role for Indian Agents tasked with
enforcing the law. The more drastic changes to the law of banning ceremonies and imposing
mandatory schooling, entwined in the governments’ desire to break community strength and
resistance, also relied on Indian Agents as enforcers and informants, with their position on
reserves essential to the operation of these deeply repressive legal developments.
The amendments to the law reframed the position of the Indian Agent towards managing
a problem “Indian” subject, transitioning from their historic roles based on maintaining military
alliances, managing reserve land, and administering fiscal responsibilities under treaties. With
the legal infrastructure to take children and arrest parents, police inter-reserve sociability, remove
people from reserves, criminalize timber removal by Indigenous individuals (among many other
forms of regulating the lives of Indigenous peoples), the role of Indian Agents significantly
expanded from the 1880s onward. These regulatory powers were not altogether new, as we saw
in the case of timber regulation on Manitoulin in the 1860s in Chapter 1. However, the
behaviour of Indigenous people and space of Indian reserves became subject to much more
regulation by the state and Indian Agents through these numerous amendments.
5.1.1. Changes to Indian Affairs After 1880

Indian Affairs became an independent Department for the first time in 1880, moving out
from under the Department of the Interior where it had been housed since 1873. A period of
dramatic staffing and budgetary growth followed this change, which reflected the growth in
numbers of Indigenous people that the government put under regulation particularly in the West.
244
However, there was general stability in the upper levels of Department administration during this
time until 1896 when the Liberals swept to power and instigated major changes in senior staff. 13
After 1880, at the top levels of the Department, the structure of authority remained
essentially the same, with the Superintendent General, an elected official often too busy to be
directly involved in operations, being closely advised by his appointed Deputy Superintendent
General. Over the period where the greatest number of amendments to the Indian Act occurred,
only two people held the position of Deputy Superintendent General, which ensured a great deal
of administrative consistency. Lawrence Vankoughnet held the position from 1874 to 1893, and
Hayter Reed from 1893 to 1897 (James Smart and Francis Pedley followed between 1897 to
1902 and 1902 to 1913). The position of Indian Commissioner for the North-West Territories
was also created in 1873, and in terms of bureaucratic hierarchy was placed between the upper
levels in Ottawa and field agents on the ground. 14 Both the political head and the lower branches
of the Department changed with the election of Liberals in 1896 and the political appointments
that followed. Clifford Sifton, as described in Brian Titley’s account of administrative
reorganization, specifically targeted Hayter Reed in his project to “purge the Interior and Indian
Departments of Tory partisans and open positions for his own supporters.”15 Reed was removed
from his position in 1897.16 However, due to the autonomy given by political leaders to the
Deputy Superintendent General, as well as the hierarchical structure of decision-making centred
13
For an overview of this purge see David Vogt, “’In the Best Interest of the Indians’: An Ethnohistory of
the Department of Indian Affairs, 1897-1913,” PhD Diss. (University of Victoria, 2020).
14
This position was held by J.A.N. Provencher (1873-1878), David Laird (1876-1879), Edgar Dewdney
(1879-1888), Hayter Reed (1888-1879), Amédée Emmanuel Forget (1893-1898) and Laird again (1898-
1909). For an overview of the careers of these men see Titley, Brian, The Indian Commissioners: Agents
of the State and Indian Policy in Canada’s Prairie West, 1873-1932 (Edmonton: University of Alberta
Press, 2009).
15
Titley, 116-117. David Vogt’s dissertation, “’In the Best Interest of the Indians’: An Ethnohistory of
the Department of Indian Affairs, 1897-1913,” PhD Diss. (University of Victoria, 2020), examines in
detail the processes of the Liberal purge of the Department, finding notably that investigations focused on
outside service officers considered to be corrupt had deep connections to concerns around Indigenous
men voting for the Conservative party on the Saugeen peninsula. Vogt notes that during the purge “one-
quarter of Indian agents were dismissed, resigned, or retired,” Vogt, 99.
16
Titley, 117.
245
on Vankoughnet and Reed, these men were undoubtedly influential in lawmaking decisions
(only one amendment examined in this chapter, that of 1898, was managed by Smart). Despite
this relative administrative stability until 1896, the arrangement of local Superintendents and
Indian Agents who took their orders from the Deputy Superintendent General changed quite
significantly after 1880, and this too affected changes to the Indian Act due to their expanded
role in enforcement.
The structure of the lower levels of the Department expanded notably during the 1880s.
In her 1977 dissertation, Marion Joan Boswell compares Department records from the years
1876 and 1896 to trace this change. 17 In the Headquarters offices in Ottawa, the number of
clerical workers to aid the Deputy Superintendent General rose from eight in 1876 to forty-six in
1896.18 This change reflected the increasing workload of the Department. Vankoughnet, for
example, had been personally involved in producing or overseeing all correspondence, leading to
his collapse from overwork in 1883. 19 Dominion expansion and the signing of the numbered
treaties in the North-West Territories meant that the Department in Ottawa, originally staffed for
managing the affairs of Indigenous peoples in Ontario and Quebec, could no longer keep pace.
Likewise, the numbers of outside service workers (which included all Indian agents, farm
instructors, physicians, constables, and missionaries employed by the Department) exploded
even more significantly over these years. In 1876, there were only thirty-seven outside service
workers, but by 1896 their numbers had swelled to two-hundred and eighty-two.20 Staffing
17
Marion Joan Boswell, “’Civilizing” the Indian: Government Administration of Indians, 1876-1896.’”
PhD Diss. University of Ottawa, 1977.
18
Boswell, 175.
19
Douglas Leighton, “A Victorian Civil Servant at Work: Lawrence Vankoughnet and the Canadian
Indian Department, 1874-1893” in Ian A.L. Getty and Antoine S. Lussier, eds. As Long as the Sun Shines
and Water Flows: A Reader in Canadian Native Studies (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2000): 106.
20
Boswell, 176. Leighton describes these workers as being in many cases part time, or seasonal workers:
“By 1890, [the Department’s] far-flung operations required the services of some 460 employees in the
field. Many of these people were part-time workers who worked for the Indian Department during its
busy seasons when presents were being distributed or various funds being disbursed.” Leighton, “The
Development of Federal Indian Policy in Canada, 1840-1890” (PhD Diss. University of Western Ontario,
1975): 524.
246
numbers in the Department had fluctuated in the past, as Brian Gettler explains in his
dissertation, with numbers of employees being steeply cut after the end of the War of 1812
before expanding again in the 1840, but by the 1890s the levels of workers employed by the
Department was at an all-time high.21
Much of this growth was to support new operations in Manitoba and the North West,
which had only two Superintendents and one translator in 1876, but had grown to one hundred
and sixty-four employees by 1896 including clerks, farm instructors and many other positions.22
The budget for 1890, as laid out by Douglas Leighton in his dissertation, of $50, 262.81 for
Quebec and Ontario compared to the $940, 261.72 for Manitoba and the Northwest, and $102,
074.44 for British Columbia shows the clear investment that the Department was making in
western expansion and staffing there (consistent with Macdonald’s National Policy upon which
he was re-elected in 1891).23 In the West, by 1896 the Manitoba Superintendency (Treaties 1, 2,
3 and 5) had eight Indian agents, the North West Superintendency (Treaties 2, 4, 6, and 7) had
nineteen.24 But the pattern of Indian Agent growth was consistent across the country. In the
Maritimes, the first introduction of Indian Agents came in the 1870s25, and rose from eight
agents in Nova Scotia and two agents in New Brunswick in 1876 to sixteen and five,
respectively, in 1896.26 Similar patterns for these years are apparent in Quebec (from four to
eleven agents) and Ontario (from seven agents to fourteen agents as well as six land agents). 27 It
is clear from these numbers that the Department was prioritizing the growth of Indian Agents
21
Brian Getter, “Colonialism’s Currency: A Political History of First Nations Money-Use in Quebec and
Ontario, 1820-1950,” (PhD Diss. Université du Québec à Montréal, 2011). Gettler finds that in Upper
Canada, Indian Affairs staff went from 34 in 1815 to 9 in 1835, before recovering in numbers to 19 in
1844, p. 151. For the political and fiscal context of these changes see pages 150-157.
22
Boswell, 181.
23
Leighton, “The Development of Federal Indian Policy,” 525.
24
Boswell, 182.
25
Martha Elizabeth Walls, “Confederation and Maritime First Nations,” Acadiensis XLVI, no 2
(Summer/Autumn 2017): 158.
26
Boswell, 177.
27
Boswell, 179 and 180.
247
positions. The Department of Indian Affairs was deeply invested in having a stronger, more
consistent presence on reserves. 28
The specific changes to the lower levels and outside service of the Department in 1880
also occurred in Ontario and affected many of the reserves dealt with in this dissertation. The
province had been previously divided into Superintendency districts, with five Superintendents
separately responsible for multiple reserves within each of their districts. Some of these
Superintendencies traced their origins to the late 1700s, and many had longstanding
Superintendents responsible for them. The Superintendencies included Central and Eastern (for
the Bay of Quinte, Georgina Island, Scugog, Rama, Saugeen, Christian Island, Alnwick, Cape
Croker, Rice Lake, and Mud Lake), Western (for Walpole Island, St. Clair, Kettle and Stony
Point, Pelee Island, Amherstburg, Moravian and Muncey reserves), Northern (for Manitoulin
Island, Cockburn Island, North Shores of Lakes Superior and Huron, and Georgian Bay),
Montreal (responsible for St. Regis and Golden Lake) and Six Nations (for Six Nations and New
Credit).29 In the early 1880s, this system was rearranged: the Central and Western
Superintendencies were disbanded in 1882 and were replaced by a system of local agents instead
of a regional Superintendent reporting to Ottawa. 30 In many cases these agents lived on or
adjacent to reserve communities. For almost all the Grand General Council communities, this
change rearranged the government representative responsible for their reserves; many had new
28
The government was also interested in providing jobs as political patronage to party members. See
Vogt, “In the Best Interest of the Indians,” 98: “In the Department of Indian Affairs, patronage
determined who earned initiation, who received supply contracts and options to purchase former Indian
reserve lands, and who might be exiled though the Department through dismissal. Patronage
considerations reliably attracted the attention of senior officials. Indian policy –indeed, all government
policy– was at some level a rationale for redistributing resources to partisans, who in this instance were
almost universally settlers.” On the development of a professional civil service see J. L. Granatstein, The
Ottawa Men: The Civil Service Mandarins, 1935-1957 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998).
James A. Wells, “Listing of Indian Agents and Superintendents – Ontario Region” (Indian Affairs and
29
Northern Development Canada, 1993).

30
Leighton, 526, citing Session Papers, 1883, no. 5. “The Central Superintendency was disbanded by
order-in-council in 1882, and replaced by a system of local agents.”
248
Indian Agents assigned beginning in 1883. The table below shows when agents were appointed
for these Ontario reserves:31
Table 1: Indian Agent Appointments on Ontario Reserves
Reserve Previous Agency Indian Agent Date
(* = first reserve-
specific agent)
Alnwick Central *J. Thackeray 31 January 1883
Christian Island Central *H. H. Thompson 31 January 1883
Caradoc Western Gordon Thomas 1876-1894
(Kept Superintendent
as agent)
Cape Croker Central *W. Bell 20th September 1882
Georgina/Snake Central *J.R. Stevenson 31 January 1883

Island
Garden River Northern Continuous agency

from 1832
Mississaugas of the Six Nations *Peter E. Jones 1887

Credit
31
James A. Wells, “Listing of Indian Agents and Superintendents – Ontario Region” (Indian Affairs and
Northern Development Canada, 1993).
249
Manitowaning Northern Continuous from

1837
Parry Island *Charles Skene 1873
Rama Central *Wm Mcphee 23 March 1883
Rice and Mud Lake Central *Edwin Harris 31 January 1883

(then Thackeray in
conjunction with
Alnwick after 1892)
Scugog (unlisted) 31 January 1883
Sarnia *A. English Continuous since

1820-1860 but new
agent appointed 18th
August 1883
Walpole Island Western *Alex McKelvey 18th August 1883
Saugeen Central *John Creighton 20 September 1882
Greater Indian Agent presence on reserves across the country changed both the nature of
correspondence to the Department as well as the content of this correspondence. With the change
in number of outside service workers there was, according to archival historian Bill Russell, a
“records explosion” at Department headquarters. 32 This explosion consisted of a 119 percent
and 121 percent increase in letters received and sent by the offices in Ottawa between 1880-81
32
Russell, Bill. “The White Man’s Paper Burden: Aspects of Records Keeping in the Department of
Indian Affairs, 1860-1914” Archivaria 19 (Winter 1984-85): 61.
250
and 1889-90.33 In his foundational overview of D.I.A. policy, historian Douglas Leighton
argued that the decisions about policy and laws were firmly within the power of the Deputy
Superintendent General during this period. 34 I have found, however, that government files on
amendments to the Indian Act tell a more complicated story. While it is true that the final
approval of which legal changes to pursue rested with the Deputy Superintendent in his
recommendations to Superintendent, the content of the letters from the field greatly changed
which parts of the law were debated. The changes suggested by Indian agents and the Deputy
Superintendent were also contested, reworked, and reworded by the Deputy Minister of Justice,
Ross Sedgewick, who advised the Deputy Superintendent General on the law and prepared draft
legislation– and at times interjected suggestions of his own. Finally, not all suggested
amendments to the law that were approved by the Deputy Superintendent General were adopted
into the final legislation.35
With more agents on the ground, more problems arose in enforcing the law. This
resulted in more correspondence to headquarters, and, in the end, more legal powers being
delegated to Indian Agents through amendments to the law. The position of Indian Agents had
of course long been instrumental to enforcing government policy, but the proliferation of agents
and the other members of the outside service, as well as the general political context of the post-
rebellion Department after 1885 served to hone attention in on this role. The expansion of Indian
Agent jurisdiction over these years was both a function and a product of the expansion of the
Indian Agent system. This expanded presence on reserves was accompanied by a proliferation of
changes to the law.
33
Ibid.
34
Leighton, “The Development of Federal Indian Policy,” 529.
35
The debates in Parliament around which laws to accept remained outside the scope of this study, but
further work is needed to trace which amendments adopted by Vankoughnet and drafted by the
Department of Justice end up being incorporated into the law. Due to this, I am not clear on the factors
that led to proposed amendments being rejected.
251
5.1.2. Amendments to the Indian Act

As discussed, amendments to the Indian Act exploded over this period, with changes to
the law happening almost yearly in the 1880s and early 1890s. The volume of changes to the law
can be measured, in a general sense, by counting how many sections of the law were changed
through amendments between revised statutes (which periodically consolidated prior
amendments into new, coherent legislation). Revised statutes for the Indian Act were passed in
1880, 1886, and 1906. Between 1876 and 1880, there were six sections changed in one
amendment in 1879. Between 1880 and 1886, however, thirty sections of the law were changed
through amendments in 1881, 1882, 1883, and 1884. During the longer period between 1886
and 1906, there were fifty-three sections amended in 1887, 1888, 1890, 1891, 1894, 1895, and
1898. New sections to the law were also added in these amendments, and by 1906 the law had
grown from 100 sections in 1876 to 122. Of course, the number of amendments to a law does
not signify their individual gravity or scope, but we can nonetheless get a sense of the
proliferation Departmental energy, debate, lawmaking, and change happening over these years
through these numbers. After 1898, the pace of change slowed. Only one section of the 1898
amendment was altered by the 1906 revised statute, and further amendments were not made until
1910. The files that I examined for this chapter are grouped around specific amendments to the
law (and therefore centered on the changes that happened prior to 1898), and so it is difficult to
determine whether Indian Agent correspondence around suggested amendments decreased
during the last years of the nineteenth century from these records. It is also possible that the
Liberal government were satisfied that the provisions of the law that they inherited were
adequate and not in need of further adjustment. What is clear is that the Indian Act remained
much more stable during the years after James Smart succeeded Lawrence Vankoughnet as
Deputy Superintendent General in 1893. 36 By 1897, however, Indian Affairs had formalized the
process of seeking out feedback from the field with respect to the Indian Act. That year, J. D.
McLean, the Acting Secretary, sent a circular “to all Superintendents and Agents in the
Dominion,” requesting that they “look carefully through the ‘Indian Act’ and its amendments,
36
Amendments were made after this in 1910, 1911, 1914, 1918, 1919, 1922, 1924, 1926, 1927, 1930,
1932, 1934, 1936, 1938, 1940 and 1951. L. Van Hoorn, Index to Indian Acts, 1876-1978 (Ottawa: Indian
and Northern Affairs Canada, Treaties and Historical Research Group, 1892).
252
with a view to making any changes therein which [they] may consider necessary,” and providing
the Department with suggestions and reasons for changes to the law.37 The use of a circular
memo makes clear the continuing importance to Headquarters of keeping track of what
enforcement and administrative measures on reserve were not working, but this type of feedback
was hardly new. Suggestions from the field had been a frequent source of legal change in the
preceding two decades. Coinciding with the increased presence of Indian Agents on reserves,
the decades of 1880 and 1890 saw the Indian Act constantly adjusted to meet the enforcement
needs of the Department.
In the amendment files that I examined, letters came from various sources: Indian
Agents, a Senator, police magistrates, mission school leaders, and others inquiring both how the
law should operate and suggesting measures for its “improvement.” Feedback for legal change
came from Indigenous leaders as well. We will look more closely at the role of Indigenous
leaders in discussing the Grand General Council’s work during this era below, as all direct
correspondence about changes to the law came from Indigenous leaders who were regular
delegates to the Grand General Council. 38 The files also contain the correspondence between the
Deputy Superintendent General (Lawrence Vankoughnet until his replacement by Hayter Reed
in 1893) and the law clerks at Indian Affairs, and the Department of Justice (primarily with Ross
Sedgewick, who was the Deputy Minister of Justice after 1888, although some correspondence
was with his predecessor George Burbridge who held the position between 1882-1887).39 These
37
J. D. McClean to A. E. Forget, April 23, 1897. LAC RG10, vol. 3600, file 1635, Microfilm C-10104.
38
See for example letters from Doctor Oronhytekha, LAC RG10, vol. 1934, file 3561, Microfilm reel C-
11114, Peter E. Jones on the Indian Advancement Act, LAC RG10, vol. 2499, file 103,164, Microfilm
reel C-11230, and Scobie Logan, Secretary of the Grand General Council, LAC RG10, vol. 2504, file
104,446, Microfilm reel number: C-11231.
See Desmond H. Brown, “BURBIDGE, GEORGE WHEELOCK,” in Dictionary of Canadian

39
Biography, vol. 13, University of Toronto/Université Laval, 2003–, accessed May 25,
2022, http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/burbidge_george_wheelock_13E.html. and Philip Girard,
“SEDGEWICK, ROBERT,” in Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 13, University of
Toronto/Université Laval, 2003–, accessed May 25,
2022, http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/sedgewick_robert_13E.html.
253
civil servants would comment on the legal viability of suggestions that elected Superintendents
wanted to pursue. Significantly, there are instances in the file of Sedgewick making suggestions
himself on how the law should be changed. 40 Finally, the files include many pages of draft
legislation, comments on this by the Superintendent General and briefs to give to members of
Parliament to explain the proposed changes to the law as they were ready to be introduced and
passed. The amendments themselves demonstrate how feedback from the field was instrumental
in changing the law. Some examples I examine below include amendments on alcohol
regulation, trespassing, and the duties of Indian Agents as Justices of the Peace. I will also
examine the specific role that Hayter Reed had in suggesting changes to amend schooling and
ceremony regulations.
5.1.3. Indian Agents as Justices of the Peace

Enforcing the Indian Act’s many provisions proved difficult on reserves that were
isolated from the legal infrastructure of settler communities. As a solution, in the 1881
amendments, Indian Agents were first given the powers of ex officio Justices of the Peace for the
enforcing the Indian Act.41 Prior to this, stipulations in the acts of 1876 and 1880 required that
violations of the law be brought before a Stipendiary or Police magistrate, and in 1882, the
powers of enforcement given to Indian Agents were expanded, so that Indian Agents would have
the same powers as Stipendiary or Police Magistrates anywhere that appeared in the Indian
Act.42 These powers were further clarified through amendments in 1886, where an amendment
stated that they should have the powers of two justices of the peace for clauses under the law that
required this.43 Indian Agents obtained, through these amendments, powers to impose
40
See for instance Ross Sedgewick to Lawrence Vankoughnet, Feb. 8, 1893, LAC RG10, vol. 3947, file
123764-2, Microfilm reel C-10166.
41
An Act to amend “The Indian Act, 1880,” S. C. 1881, c. 17, s. 12. The ex officio title meant this
appointment was a result of their position as Indian Agents.
42
An Act to further amend “The Indian Act, 1880,” S.C. 1882, c. 30, s. 3.
43
An Act respecting Indians (The Indian Act), R.S.C. 1886, c 43, s. 117. These expanded powers had
previously been assigned to “Any one Judge, Judge of Sessions of the Peace, Recorder, Police Magistrate,
District Magistrate, or Stipendiary Magistrate, sitting at a police court or other place appointed in that
behalf, for the exercise of the duties of his office, shall have full power to do alone whatever is authorized
254
punishments for various offences on reserves: for removal and punishment of trespassers (section
24), for removal of trees, stone, soil, minerals and other valuables from the reserve (section 27),
to conduct summary trials subsequent to timber seizures (section 65), for possessing or selling
intoxicants or being intoxicated (sections 90-92), for keeping a house of prostitution (section 95),
and also for receiving evidence of status Indians in the case of criminal matters. 44 Their powers
were broadened even further in the 1890s, beyond the limits of the Indian Act. This expansion
encompassed powers under certain sections of the “Act respecting Offences against Public
Morals and Public Convenience” in 1890,45 and under sections of the Criminal Code in 1894
and 1895 dealing with “Offences against Morality” (regulating prostitution and “indecency”) and
“Vagrancy.”46 The 1894 powers under the Criminal Code also significantly enlarged the
territorial jurisdiction of Indian Agents beyond reserves, to “anywhere within the territorial limits
of his jurisdiction as a justice, as defined in his appointment or otherwise defined by the
Governor in Council” whether “the Indian or Indians charged” were “within his ordinary
jurisdiction, charge or supervision as an Indian Agent.” 47 The expansion of enforcement powers
for Indian Agents was a significant shift in the law and its application, as many of the other
amendments we will examine below on trespass, alcohol, schooling and dancing were affected
by this expanded power of enforcement.
by “The Indian Act, 1880,” to be done by a Justice of the Peace or by two Justices of the Peace.” An Act
to Amend “The Indian Act, 1880,” S.C. 1881, c. 17 (44 Vict.) s. 6.
44
The Indian Act, S. C. 1880, c. 28.
45
An Act further to amend “The Indian Act,” chapter forty-three of the Revised Statutes, S. C. 1890, c. 29
(53 Vict) c. 9. The powers Indian Agents held here were limited to provisions of chapter 157.
An Act to further amend “The Indian Act,” S. C. 1894, c. 32 (57-58 Vict.) s. 8. The powers Indian
46
Agents held under the Criminal Code was under sections 98 and 199, and part XIII. Jurisdiction over part
XV of the Criminal Code was granted in the amendment of 1895. An Act to Further Amend the Indian
Act, S. C. 1895, c. 35 (58-59 Vict.) s. 7.
47
An Act to further amend “The Indian Act,” S. C. 1894, c. 32 (57-58 Vict.) s. 8. For agents in the North
West Territories and British Columbia, a separate clause extended their power “anywhere in the said
Territories or provinces within which his agency is situated, whether or not the territorial limits of his
jurisdiction as a justice, as defined in his appointment or otherwise defined as aforesaid, extend to the
place where he may have occasion to act as such justice or to exercise such power or authority, and
whether the Indians charged with or in any way concerned in or affected by the offence, matter, or thing
to the tried, investigated or otherwise dealt with, are or are not within his ordinary jurisdiction, charge or
supervision as Indian Agent.”
255
Indian Agents in the field had long advocated for the Department to expand their
enforcement powers. The first suggestion to include Justice of the Peace powers in the Indian
Act that I found in the amendment files was from the Indian agent at Parry Sound in 1878, who
writes to suggest that a clause be added that local Superintendents “have the power and to act as
Justices of the Peace on Indian Reserves on Indian Lands." 48 The agent complained that cases
were “referred to the Superintendent but at present although he [must] give his opinion he has by
the Act no legal status to decide.”49 This suggestion was initially rejected by Department
officials, as the appointment of Justices of the Peace was under provincial jurisdiction– but the
1881 granting of these powers shows that this was not ultimately an obstacle.50 By 1884,
Lawrence Vankoughnet was ready to extend Indian Agent powers well beyond Indian Act
infractions. In his brief to John A. Macdonald on amendments to the law that year, he explains
that “additional power is proposed to be given Indian Agents to act as Justices of the Peace in all
matters affecting Indians that is whether they be violations of the Indian Act or not.”51 The logic
of this, according to Vankoughnet, came clearly from the field: “Our agents report that
frequently in cases of assault and other infractions of the common law of the land by Indians. It
is exceedingly inconvenient for Indians who have to go or be brought long distances for trial.”52
Time and money would be saved by this change, according to the Deputy Superintendent
General. These suggestions were ultimately not adopted into the Indian Act, and the sole
powers of Indian Agents outside of the Act continued to be limited to vagrancy and public order
laws, but we can see in Vankoughnet’s explanation his willingness to consider feedback from
Indian Agents on the application of law on reserves.
48
W. P. L. to E. A. Meredith, Deputy Minister of the Interior, February 5 1878. LAC RG10, Volume
number: 2015, file 8031, Microfilm reel number: C-11134.
49
Ibid.
50
[Lawrence Vankoughnet?] to Charles [Sk?], March 14 1878. LAC RG10, Volume number: 2015, file
8031. Microfilm reel number: C-11134.
51
Lawrence Vankoughnet to John A. Macdonald, [?] March 1884. LAC, MG26-A, Vol. 290, Microfilm
reel number: C-1690.
52
Ibid.
256
A vocal and persistent outside service officer advocating for expanding Indian Agent
jurisdiction was Hayter Reed. Reed was trained as a lawyer, although he never practiced, and
engaged with the Indian Act in detail and breadth during his time as Indian agent, Assistant
Indian Commissioner and then Indian Commissioner for the Northwest. 53 In his letters, he
suggests very specific legal wording in his proposed amendments that closely resemble the draft
legislation prepared by the Department of Justice. 54 We will examine some of Reed’s specific
suggestions in greater detail below, but in terms of Indian Agent powers, Reed took the clear
position that these should be expanded. Reed was an outlier in the Department outside service in
terms of his legal training, advocating that Indian Agents who lacked any formal training in the
law be given extensive powers of enforcement under the Indian Act. His desire for greater
powers of enforcement on reserves, when he was still an Indian agent himself, include his 1881
suggestion that agents or commissioners be able to approve leases or land surrenders from chiefs,
as the law as it stood required that these surrenders be held before a magistrate. 55 In his role as
Commissioner, he expanded Indian Agent presence on reserves after 1885.56 In an undated

memorandum, he calls for increasing Indian Agent powers to include chapter 157 of the Act
respecting Public Morals and Public Convenience, which was adopted in 1890 as previously
discussed. 57 He also advocated that Indian Agents be given greater powers in trespass cases,
53
Reed began his career in Indian Affairs as an Indian agent for Battleford in 1881, and became Assistant
Indian Commissioner in 1884, and Commissioner in 1888. E. Brian Titley, “REED, HAYTER,”
in Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 16, University of Toronto/Université Laval, 2003–, accessed
May 26, 2022, http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/reed_hayter_16E.html.
54
Reed in many cases suggests small changes in wording to clarify the law, adding “aforesaid,” “shall” or
“thereto.” See for instance Memorandum by Hayter Reed on Proposed Amendments to the Indian Act,
RG10, Vol. 3600, file 1635. Microfilm reel number C-10104.
55
Hayter Reed to Lawrence Vankoughnet, April 24 1881, LAC RG10, vol. 2573, file 116, 654, Microfilm
reel C-11241. The requirement for land surrenders, assented to by the chiefs, to be certified by a judge of
a Superior or District Court had been a part of the law since 1868. An Act providing for the organization
of the Department of the Secretary of State of Canada, and for the management of Indian and Ordinance
Lands, S. C. 1868, c. 42, s. 7.2.
56
Titley, The Indian Commissioners, 100.
57
Memorandum by Hayter Reed on Proposed Amendments to the Indian Act, LAC RG10, Vol. 3600, file
1635. Microfilm reel number C-10104. Reed’s wording is as follows: “Section 117 of the said act is
hereby amended by adding thereto the following words: "and in all cases of infractions by Indians of any
257
and that a general delegation of authority from the Superintendent General be created under the
law for these cases (rather than as it stood where agents had to request authority to deal with each
case individually).58 Reed was also very concerned that the jurisdiction of Indian Agents not be
limited by the introduction of the Criminal Code, wanting to ensure their continued enforcement
ability; he wrote both to Vankoughnet and directly to the Department of Justice about this
issue.59 Reed’s advocacy for protecting and expanding of Indian agent jurisdiction extended to
and dovetailed with other aspects of control over life on reserves, including questions of timber
and trespass violations.
5.1.4. Indian Agents, Timber, and Trespass Violations

As I discussed in Chapter 1, the inability of Indian Agents to enforce timber clauses in the
Indian Act had long been a source of complaint and feedback to the Department from the field.
Suggestions for legal change came from Indian agents, who in their letters focused on the
difficulty of enforcing the timber and trespass provisions of the act.60 Likewise, Indigenous
leaders who sought to change the law were often concerned with maintaining timber stocks,
essential for both cordwood and building new structures in the constrained economies of
reserves.61 The Departments’ ability to control revenues generated from timber on reserves
of the provisions of chapter 157 of the Provided statues of Canada, entitled "an act respecting offences
against public morals and public convenience."
58
Memorandum by Hayter Reed on proposed amendments to the Indian Act, LAC RG10, vol. 3600, file
1635, Microfilm reel C-10104.
59
A. E. Forget, Memorandum for the Indian Commissioner, January 16 1893, LAC RG10, Vol. 3947, file
123764-2. Microfilm reel number, C-10166. Reed also wrote directly to the Minister of Justice about this
issue. Ibid, Memorandum from the Indian Commissioner to Department of Justice, Feb 16, 1893.
60
An early example after the passing of the Indian Act is an 1877 letter from J.T. Gilkison. J. T. Gilkison
to Lawrence Vankoughnet, LAC RG10, vol. 2015, file 8031, Microfilm reel C-11134.
61
Scobie Logan, chief of the Munceys of the Thames, writes regarding the early Indian Acts and the
importance of timber use for improvements “The Indian Act in my humble opinion should be amended
slightly on the protection of the forest. To enable the educated Indians who have received their education
in our Industrial Institutions to have a little more freedom and encouragement in the way of clearing their
lands under a new system which should either be an [amendment] to the Act or another way to suit all
parties.” LAC RG10, vol. 3947, file 123764-2, Scobie Logan to Joseph Howe, December 22, 1872.
258
directly impacted the funds collected by them to finance their operations. Certain Indian Agents,
as well, would have been motivated to ensure their direct control of all revenues generated by
timber as some of their contracts included a percentage of timber or land sales. In the examples
below, the only Indian Agent whose salary included a percentage of timber dues (three percent)
was Thomas Gordon.62 While the other examples might not have been directly influenced by
personal gain, they demonstrate how Indian Agents understood enforcing timber violations to be
an important aspect of their work. Although not all the examples below resulted in changes to
the law, they collectively reveal how Vankoughnet was willing to listen to feedback from the
field and tried to incorporate greater enforcement powers for Indian Agents to remedy the
problems they were having.
James Allen, agent on the Saugeen Reserve, wrote in 1891 to have the Department deal with
a weakness he found in the law through his dealings with the local sawmill operator, J.J.
Creighton. As the law stood, status Indians were permitted to use timber on common lands for
their own use. Creighton and other sawmill operators, when they received requests for long
timber that could not be procured from other nearby locations, were “in the habit of getting one
party to cut timber [on reserve] and then employ another to haul it away to market.” 63 Creighton
had found a loophole in the law– by hiring a reserve resident to do the initial cutting and others
to haul it to the mill, he was himself immune from prosecution. 64 Departmental records reveal
that Deputy Superintendent General Vankoughnet, after chiding Allen that he should “take care
to have the law rigorously enforced should any attempt be made to cut any trees on or remove
timber…from the reserve”65 then included Allen’s suggestion in his recommendations for
amending the Act to Ross Sedgewick, the Minister of Justice. 66 Vankoughnet, in his concern
62
Indian Affairs Annual Report, 1890, Return A (2), Officers and Employees of the Department of Indian
Affairs, for the Year ended 30th June, 1890, Outside Service.
63
James Allen to Lawrence Vankoughnet, August 28 1891, LAC RG10, vol. 3947, file 123764-1.
64
Ibid.
65
Lawrence Vankoughnet to James Allen, August 25 1891, LAC RG10, vol. 3947, file 123764-1.
66
Lawrence Vankoughnet to Robert Sedgewick, February 11, 1892, LAC RG10, vol. 3947, file 123764-1.
259
over have the law “rigorously enforced” would have been considering the implications of having
Indigenous timber sales cut into monies through licensing agreements that should, in the view of
the Department, be put into the Indian Fund. 67 His suggestion, however, that anyone who
“employs or deputes” persons or status Indians to cut timber illegally be also liable for
punishment was not ultimately adopted into the law.68
The following year John Thackeray, Indian agent for the Alnwick reserve, also brought
problems with residents selling timber to the Department’s attention. Thackeray suggests an
amendment to the law that would require all residents to obtain the consent of the band before
cutting timber. This was due to problems he was having in enforcing timber regulations against
reserve residents who would “cut timber on the land held in common saying that he is going to
make certain improvements” but would then “get the timber cut into boards and smuggle it away
and it is impossible to find out what he does with it.”69 Thackeray’s inability to police the
behaviour of reserve residents was noted by Vankoughnet in his recommendations to the
Department of Justice. He recommended that status Indians only be allowed to cut timber with
the permission of the Band Council and a permit from the Indian agent “specifying the quantity
and description of timber or wood which they may cut and the locality in which an area within
which the same is to be cut.”70 While Thackery’s change was to recommend that band council
permission be sought, 71 Vankoughnet’s proposed amendment included a further expansion of
the Agent’s powers, by requiring a special permit from the agent as well. This gave Indian agents
additional powers to regulate the behaviour or reserve residents and control the economy of the
reserve. This case demonstrates that Vankoughnet was listening to field agents, but ultimately
went beyond Thackeray’s suggestion to have the law changed to give greater powers to Indian
67
The Indian Act, 1886, R.S.C. 1886, s. 71.
68
Ibid. I have not found evidence as to why this suggestion was not included in the law.
69
John Thakerney to Lawrence Vankoughnet, March 31 1892, LAC RG10, vol. 3947, file 123764-1.
70
Lawrence Vankoughnet to Ross Sedgewick, December 30, 1892, LAC RG10, vol. 3947, file 123764-2.
71
This would have required the approval of the Indian agent but gave some level of autonomy to the
council itself.
260
Agents against reserve residents. As mentioned above, the consequences of timber violations
were a concern of Vankoughnet, as they would cut into monies slated for the Indian Fund.
The Department also exerted expanded controls over Indigenous lives on reserves through
trespass provisions in the Indian Act. From 1879 to 1887, the Act was amended four times to
increase the powers of Agents to power to control trespassers on reserve. These amendments did
not make major changes to the process of trespassers first being removed, and then being fined
upon a second offence. The changes they made are as follows: in 1879 adding that Justices of
the Peace, Police or Stipendiary Magistrates could charge trespassers; in 1881 clarifying the
process of removal by removing the stipulation that a sheriff (if there was one in the county) be
given the order to remove a person and instead that any literate person could be charged with this
duty; in 1884 the only change was to alter the wording from one Justice of the Peace to two; and
in 1887 to clarify that in addition to penalties for removing timber or other valuable material
from reserves, the consent of the Superintendent General and band council would be necessary
for band members use of “pine or large timber for any purpose than for building his own location
or farm.”72 However, a letter from the Indian Agent Thomas Gordon of Strathroy in 1891
complained that the punishment of simple removal on first offence was inadequate deterrence for
hunters trespassing on reserve lands, and this required a more significant change to the law.
Gordon suggests an immediate fine would be a greater deterrent. 73 Both Vankoughnet and Ross
Sedgewick agreed with Gordon’s suggestion, Sedgewick calling the suggestion “a good
one…and advisable to act upon”74 Vankoughnet subsequently referenced Gordon by name in
his Memorandum to Edgar Dewdney of suggested changes to the law that year, when he relayed
72
An Act to amend “The Indian Act, 1876.” S. C. 1879, c. 34, s. 16, An Act to amend “The Indian Act,
1880.” S. C. 1881, c. 17, s. 8, An Act to further amend “The Indian Act, 1880,” S. C. 1884, c. 27, s. 7, An
Act to amend “The Indian Act.” S. C. 1887, S. C. 1887, c. 33, s. 4.
73
Thomas Gordon to Lawrence Vankoughnet, May 30 1891, LAC RG10, vol. 2573, file 116, 654,
Microfilm reel number C-11241.
74
Ross Sedgewick to Lawrence Vankoughnet, [?] 1891, LAC RG10, vol. 2573, file 116, 654, Microfilm
reel number C-11241. Sedgewick proposes that the fine be between five and twenty-five dollars, with
imprisonment for a term up to 30 days if unpaid.
261
the Indian Agent’s experience of enforcement. 75 Section 22 of the law was amended in 1891,
with a fine of five to ten dollars– and imprisonment if it was not paid– for first instances of
trespassing,76 an example of more punitive change to the law that came directly from the field.
The imposition of fines and imprisonment against trespassers were quickly turned against
Indigenous individuals to restrict their movement. In an undated Memorandum, likely from
1893, Reed suggested that section 22 (first amended by Gordon’s suggestion) be again amended
“to empower an Agent in Man. and NWT to order the removal of any person or Indian other than
an Indian of the [Band or reserve] who has come upon such Reserve.” 77 The reason for this,
according to Reed was that “Indians…during critical time in seeding or harvest leave their own
reserves and go to others where they upset their friends in their work and probably begin
gambling and hold “Give away dances.”78 This was an effort to restrict Indigenous people to
working within the limited reserve economies sanctioned by Reed, while further undermining
their own economic systems including give-away feasts.79 Section 22 was not amended in 1894,
but the law nonetheless changed to impose greater restrictions on non-reserve residents being on
reserve. Section 99 in the 1886 Revised Statute (a section that dealt with persons selling
intoxicants or gambling on reserves) imposed fines on “persons” who were on reserve after
sunset and who didn’t leave after being requested to.80 But through the 1894 amendments, a
change was made that allowed “an persons or Indians” to be arrested without warrant and
imprisoned upon summary conviction for up to three months for being found gambling, drunk, or
with intoxicants on reserve.81 This clause dealt with intoxicants, and also covered non-
75
Lawrence Vankoughnet to Edgar Dewdney, June 4 1891, LAC RG10, vol. 2573, file 116, 654,
Microfilm reel number C-11241
76
An Act to further amend the Indian Act. S. C. 1891, c. 30 (54-55 Vict.) s. 1.
77
Hayter Reed, Memorandum [n.d.], LAC RG10, vol. 3600, file 1635, Microfilm reel C-10104.
78
Ibid.
79
Carter, Sarah. “Two Acres and a Cow: ‘Peasant’ Farming for the Indians of the Northwest, 1889–97.”
The Canadian Historical Review 70, no. 1 (1989): 27–52. https://doi.org/10.3138/CHR-070-01-02.
80
The Indian Act, R. S. C. 1886 c. 43, s. 99.
81
An Act to amend “The Indian Act,” S. C. 1894, c. 32, s. 7.
262
Indigenous trespassers, but the expansion within the law to police Indigenous presence on
reserves where they did not reside is notable, especially as Reed who held significant power to
direct policy was explicitly targeting the presence of Indigenous persons who were not from the
reserve.
Cross-reserve sociability and mobility were increasingly seen as a threat by the Department
as undermining their efforts to break traditional modes of governance, especially in the West.
But changes to the law meant that these enforcement mandates were given to Indian Agents
across the country. These changes to trespass laws should be analyzed alongside the changes to
Indian Agent powers in the Criminal Code in 1894 and other measures imposed by the
Department including the extra-legal “pass system,” originally proposed by Reed which required
all reserve residents to obtain permission from the Indian Agent to leave their own reserves. 82
The criminalization of Indigenous ceremonies in 1895, examined below, is yet another example
how the Department attempted to eradicate, through strict controls over who could come and go
from reserves mobility, visiting, and the attendant social and cultural ties that bound various
communities together.
5.1.5. Alcohol Restrictions

The existence and enforcement of alcohol restrictions in the Indian Act were deeply racist
in nature, as no equivalent restrictions existed for white populations, as well as being based in
particular Victorian conceptions about race. Renisa Mawani, in looking at the 1894 The Royal
Commission on the Liquor Traffic in Canada for her study of juridical understandings of race in
British Columbia notes that “Racial populations were thought to manifest not only
distinguishable phenotypical differences but also moral and cultural traits that were exemplified
and animated through the consumption and commodification of intoxicants.” 83 These
82
Reed suggested the pass system in his “Memorandum to the Honourable Commissioner on the future
management of the Indians,” and it was accepted by both Edgar Dewdney and John A. Macdonald. E.
Brian Titley, “REED, HAYTER,” in Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 16, University of
2022, http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/reed_hayter_16E.html.
83
Renisa Mawani, Colonial Proximities: Crossracial encounters and Juridical Truths in British
Columbia, 1871-1921 (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2009), 127. On the history of nineteenth-century
263
conceptions were amplified by the racialized policing and surveillance of Indigenous behaviour
laid out in the Indian Act. However, the provisions of the Indian Act that prohibited
consumption of alcohol and its sale to Indigenous people were in many cases very difficult for
Indian agents to enforce and prosecute, generating complaints from them to their superiors and,
ultimately, changes to the law. Agents wrote about problems in enforcing alcohol provisions, and
problems in figuring who they be should be applied to.84 Agents wrote to Ottawa seeking advice
about how to properly word statements (as they were not legally trained), 85 confusion arose
about whether women could be charged under alcohol provisions due to convoluted wordings in
the law,86 and complaints from police magistrates and even a Senator about the problems of
alcohol enforcement.87 Sections that governed the sale and use of intoxicants were amended six
times over this period.88
One issue Indian Agents brought to the attention of the Department were their difficulties
in obtaining evidence from reserve residents to prosecute sellers of intoxicants. In 1893, an agent
wrote to complain of this.89 Imprisonment for non-compliance was suggested as a remedy by the
agent, and his frustration is palpable through the emphasis in his letter: “As long as the Indian
Act will not permit the imprisonment of defaulters till [sic] they are forced to name the party that
temperance movements see Mariana Valverde, The Age of Light, Soap, and Water: Moral Reform in
English Canada, 1885-1925 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2019) and Jan Noel, Canada Dry:
Temperence Crusades before Confederation (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995).
84
Memorandum from Hayter Reed and Fred White to Lawrence Vankoughnet, February 22 1893, LAC
RG10, vol. 3947, file 123764-2.
85
See for instance J. A. [Marker] to A. E. Forget, April 4, 1896, and A. E. Forget to Indian agent, Birtle,
April 14 1896, LAC RG10, vol. 3600, file 1635, Microfilm reel C-10104.
86
A. E. Forget to Hayter Reed, August 6 1896, LAC RG10, vol. 3600, file 1635, Microfilm reel C-10104.
87
Senator Reid, Amendment Indian Act [n.d.], LAC RG10, vol. 3947, file 123, 764-1. See also Ross
Sedgewick to Lawrence Vankoughnet, June 6 1892, LAC RG10, Vol. 3947, file 123764-2, Microfilm reel
C-10166.
88
These were amendments in 1881, 1882, 1884, 1887, 1888 and 1894.
89
Secretary’s Branch to Ross Sedgewick, January 12, 1893, LAC RG10, vol. 3947, file 123764-2.
264
sells them liquor, the action of the Agent to convict them will be a farce."90 This amendment was
not drafted by the Department of Justice because of a lack of information but demonstrates how
Indian agents sought increasingly repressive legal tactics.91 The Department took a “softer”
approach to resolving the problem of informants in 1894, when the law was changed to stipulate
that informers would receive half of the ten to fifty dollar fine that could be imposed on those
who were found with intoxicants in their possession, funds which would usually be deposited
into band funds.92 Although there is not a clear link to the letter described above, the change in
law demonstrates that having Indigenous individuals provide evidence remained an issue in
enforcing the law that the government sought to resolve.
Problems with the law were also felt in the courts. A case against a brewer, Thomas
Cairns, in Portage-La-Prairie, involved an allegation where an Indigenous man in his
employment was given a beer. Cairns poured the beer for the man and then turned his back, so as
not to “see” that his employee was enjoying his afterwork beverage. As the man himself was the
only witness, and during the appeal changed his testimony to state that he had poured himself the
beer, the judge was forced to quash the conviction. In his frustration, the judge asked the police
magistrate to write to the Minister of Justice to suggest an amendment to the Indian Act that
would prohibit manufacturers of intoxicants from hiring Indigenous individuals “so the mere fact
of their employing them could be punishable whether there was any contravention of other
portions of the Act or not.”93 This repressive suggestion was approved by the Superintendent
General of Indian Affairs and recommended to be added to the Indian Act for the amendments in
1894, although this too did not ultimately go through for reasons I have not been able to
determine.94
90
Ibid.
91
Ross Sedgewick to Lawrence Vankoughnet, January 13, 1893, LAC RG10, vol. 3947, file 123764-2.
92
An Act to further amend “The Indian Act,” S. C. 1894, c. 32, s. 7.
93
W.J. Cooper to Minister of Justice, January 16 1893, LAC RG10, vol. 3947, file 123764-2.
94
Superintendent General to Ross Sedgewick, February 1 1893, LAC RG10, vol. 3947, file 123764-2.
Another amendment that did not go through was an amendment allowing prosecution of status Indians
who could be "proved to have been drunk within two months of the date of the charge” was approved by
the Superintendent General, replacing the existing law that required Indian agents to directly discover
265
Other enforcement problems strengthened how Indigenous individuals themselves could

be prosecuted for alcohol consumption. Increased severity in punishment for intoxication was
suggested by Indian Agent E.D. Cameron, when he wrote to Vankoughnet in 1892 about an
individual being found intoxicated at Brantford, but who was unable to pay the fine. Cameron
suggests that the Indian Act be amended so that if fines were not paid immediately then
imprisonment would be the punishment. 95 This suggestion was too late for the amendments of
that year, but Cameron was assured by the Department that the matter would be duly considered
for the next session.96 Ross Sedgewick seems to have taken up the cause and in June of 1892 he
wrote the following to Vankoughnet: “I propose to make it an offence for anyone to be drunk
upon a reserve, and I further propose that a request to leave a reserve after dark may be made as
well under the authority of an Indian Agent or chief as by his immediate and express
direction,”97 a demonstration of how many forms of Indigenous sociability were viewed as
criminal by government authorities who sought to remove the requirement of proving
intoxication in order to restrict this. In 1894, section ninety-nine of the law was amended so that
anyone found “gambling, drunk, or with intoxicants in his possession on any part of a reserve”
could be immediately arrested without warrant, significantly simplifying the process of
conviction from the 1886 Revised Statute. 98
Also that year, an important change was made to the strict definition of who could be
classified as “Indian” under the law in cases where alcohol was involved. Hayter Reed wrote in a
memorandum that “Great difficulty [had] arisen…in convicting people who have sold
intoxicated individuals. Secretary’s Branch to R. Sedgewick, April 11 1892, LAC RG10, vol. 3947, file
123764-1, Microfilm reel number: C-10165.
95
E.D. Cameron to Lawrence Vankoughnet, April 25, 1892, LAC RG10, vol. 3847, file 123764-1.
96
Lawrence Vankoughnet to E. D. Cameron, May 1892, LAC RG10, vol. 3847, file 123764-1.
97
Ross Sedgewick to Lawrence Vankoughnet, June 6 1892, LAC RG10, vol. 3947, file 123764-2,
Microfilm reel C-10166.
98
An Act to further amend the Indian Act, S. C. 1894, c, 32, s. 7 and The Indian Act, R. S. C. 1886, c. 43,
s. 96 and 99.
266
intoxicants to Indians.”99 To make these convictions easier, he suggests that “clauses … relating
to the sale of intoxicants, the term "Indian" shall... mean any male or female who is reputed to
belong to a particular band, any child of such person, and any person of Indian blood who
follows the Indian mode of life and who has not become enfranchised." 100 This meant that
people who were considered racially, but not legally “Indian” could be targeted by the
legislation– a significant expansion in who the law targeted. This demonstrates how the
Department wielded the legal category of “Indian” in flexible ways to incorporate individuals not
generally subject to its categorizations – when it suited their goals. 101 Reed’s suggestion was
adopted, and in the 1894 amendment a clause was added to the section of the law that dealt with
the sale of intoxicants to include, in the definition of “Indian” for this section “any person, male
or female, who is reputed to belong to a particular band, or who follows the Indian mode of life,
or any child of such person.”102 Although in principle the punishments in this clause targeted
those who sold intoxicants, the change resulted in an expansion of whose behaviour could be
policed without Indian Agents having to verify the specific legal “Indian” status of Indigenous
people involved.
5.1.1. Hayter Reed’s Influence on the Indian Act

As I have demonstrated, Hayter Reed was an active and engaged advocate for stricter
powers of enforcement for Indian Agents on reserves. His deeply racist views on Indigenous
people are well documented, as are the destructiveness of his policies on farming, and rationing
to the point of causing starvation. 103 His disdain for Indigenous leadership is evident in his
99
Hayter Reed, Memorandum, February 9 1893, LAC RG10, Vol. 3947, file 123764-2, Microfilm reel C-
10166.
100
Ibid.
For tensions in the state’s role in creating legal and racial categorizations, see Jennifer Hayter
101
“Racially ‘Indian,’ Legally ‘White’: The Canadian State’s Struggles to Categorize the Métis, 1850-1900”
PhD Diss. (University of Toronto, 2017).
102
An Act to further amend the Indian Act, S. C. 1894, c, 32, s. 6.
103
For the influence of Hayter Reed on Department policy see Sarah Carter, Lost Harvests: Prairie Indian
reserve farmers and government policy (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1990) and “Two
Acres and a Cow: ‘Peasant’ Farming for the Indians of the Northwest, 1889–97.” The Canadian
267
letters to Headquarters. He was in favour of a complete disintegration of Indigenous leadership

and a much more direct role in reserve governance for government agents. This is evident early
in his career through his 1885 “Memorandum on the future of Indian policy,” where he
advocated that “the tribal system be abolished…by doing away with chiefs and councillors” 104 as
well as encouraging the “repression of those that become prominent among them … Medicine
dances and so on” for tribes that had rebelled. 105 “Our instructors and employees will not then
be hampered,” Reed went on, “by Indian consultations and interferences but will administer
direct orders and instructions to individuals.”106 This early example of Reed’s position on
Indigenous leadership and severely paternalistic enforcement of government policy was
maintained throughout his career. Reed later suggested to his superiors to change the Indian Act
to remove Indigenous leadership from smaller bands. In 1892, through his Assistant
Commissioner, he proposes that the word “may”– in the case of bands of 30 being able to have
one chief– was “permissive,” and that “the existence of the clause serves to encourage the belief
among Indians that it is a right.”107 Reed’s imprint on the changes to the Indian Act during this
period is undeniable, due to his many persistent suggestions, but two of these changes stand out
Historical Review 70, no. 1 (1989), James Daschuk, Clearing the Plains: Disease, Politics of Starvation,
and the Loss of Aboriginal Life (Regina: University of Regina Press, 2013), Shelley A. M. Gavigan,
Hunger, Horses, and Government Men Criminal Law on the Aboriginal Plains, 1870-1905 (Vancouver:
UBC Press, 2012) Brian Titley, The Indian Commissioners: Agents of the State and Indian Policy in
Canada’s Prairie West, 1873-1832 (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 2009).
104
This position on Indigenous leadership was not new, and had been advocated decades earlier in the
Pennefather Commission of 1858. Province of Canada, “Report of the Special Commissioners Appointed
on the 8th of September, 1856, to Investigate Indian Affairs in Canada,” Appendix 21 in Journals of the
Legislative Assembly, Sessional Papers, 6th Parl. 1st Sess. Vol. 16 (25 February-16 August 1858).
105
Hayter Reed to Edgar Dewdney, July 20 1885, Memorandum for the Honourable the Indian
Commissioner relative to the future management of Indians, LAC, RG 10, vol. 3710, file 19, 550-3.
106
Ibid.
107
A.E. Forget to Lawrence Vankoughnet, March 21 1892, LAC RG10, vol. 3947, file 123, 764-1. He
also advocated here that the consent of the band be removed for the commutation of annuities for women
who had married out of the band, with this power being granted solely to the Superintendent General as
due to the “prejudice or obstinacy of some of the Band” this should be “put beyond their power.” Reed’s
position on Indigenous leadership needed no introduction, according to his assistant’s letter: “The
Department is so fully aware of the Commissioner’s views regarding the strong desirability of destroying
the tribal system and of the abolition of Chieftainships and Head Men, whose existence greatly tends to
support such systems, that it would be superfluous to enlarge upon the subject here.”
268
in relation to the Indian Act and the place of the law in Canada’s history of cultural and physical
genocide against Indigenous people through the banning of religious ceremonies and the
imposition of mandatory schooling.
Reed was instrumental in having the dancing ceremonies on the Prairies banned under the
Indian Act. His suggestions that the “’Omoskosinmookkwook’ or ‘Grass Dance’ commonly
known as ‘giving away dance’”108 be abolished was taken up in 1895, when the law was
changed to ban “any Indian festival, dance, or other ceremony of which the giving away or
paying or giving back of money, goods or articles takes place” (previously only the Potlatch and
Tamawanas dances were named in the law).109 Reed was also instrumental in having schooling
become mandatory through the Indian Act, and his suggestions to change the law based on cases
from the field serve as a stark reminder of the growing power that Indian Agent gained over the
lives of reserve residents during this period.
Reed began pushing for school to be mandatory in 1892, due to a case from the Carleton
Agency where a man had taken his daughter home from the Industrial School at Battleford,
“after the united efforts of the Principal and Mr. Agent Williams” failed to dissuade him.110
Reed was concerned this would spark a movement of other parents rescuing their own children:
“if the girl cannot be taken back, and apparently nothing but force would enable this to be done,
other Indians, seeing the Father’s success in this instance, will insist upon the withdrawal of their
children, and so all the pupils from the Prince Albert District will be lost.” 111 Vankoughnet
thought that legislation for “the control of the Department… of [Indigenous people’s] children”
was premature– although ultimately desirable– and that as “Indians are particularly sensitive in
108
Memorandum by Hayter Reed on proposed amendments to the Indian Act, LAC RG10, vol. 3600, file
1635, Microfilm reel C-10104.
109
An Act to further amend the Indian Act, S. C. 1895, c. 35, s. 6. The files also show that the original
ban of the Tamawanas dance was made at the behest of another Indian Agent. Lawrence Vankoughnet to
John A. Macdonald, [?] March 1884. LAC, MG26-A, vol. 290, Microfilm reel C-1690.
110
Hayter Reed to Lawrence Vankoughnet, April 8 1892, LAC RG10, vol. 3947, file 123764-1,
111
Ibid.
269
respect to their children, and the Department is preparing them gradually for the more stringent
measures of compulsory education by endeavoring to induce the Chiefs and Headmen of the
different Bands to co-operate with the Indian Agent for the passage of rules and regulations
under the Indian Act rendering attendance of children at school compulsory on the part of Indian
parents.”112 The following year, it seems, Reed went directly to the Department of Justice, as
Sedgewick wrote to Vankoughnet to say that he had, “at the request of…Mr. Reed…prepared a
draft clause giving the power to the Governor in Council to make regulations to secure the
compulsory attendance at school of Indian children.”113 By 1894, the change in law to secure
mandatory attendance was before Parliament and was passed into law in the amendment of that
year. In the law, Indian agents were given the authority, when the Governor in Council made
regulations, to commit children under the age of sixteen to industrial or boarding schools. 114 The
section also contained a clause that the Governor in Council could declare “any existing Indian
school” an industrial or boarding school, a clause that came into the law at the suggestion of
Sedgewick himself, allowing great flexibility in applying the law across the county. 115 The
Governor in Council was also given authority to create regulations to convey truant children, or
children prevented from attending by their parents, to schools, as well as impose fines,
imprisonment or both on any parent who neglected or refused to send their child to school. The
imposition of this summary punishment became the responsibility of Indian Agents, perhaps the
112
Lawrence Vankoughnet to Edgar Dewdney, April 13 1892, LAC RG10, vol. 3947, file 123764-1,
Microfilm reel C-10165. Vankoughnet also wrote directly to Reed. Lawrence Vankoughnet to Hayter
Reed, April 19 1892, LAC RG10, vol. 3600, file 1635, Microfilm reel C-10104.
113
Ross Sedgewick to Lawrence Vankoughnet, July 3 1893, LAC RG10, vol. 3947, file 123764-2,
Microfilm reel, C-10166.
114
An Act to further amend the Indian Act, S.C. 1894, c. 32, s. 11.
115
Ross Sedgewick to Lawrence Vankoughnet, February 8 1893, LAC RG10, vol. 3947, file 123764-2,
270
greatest expansion of their power over residents on reserves of any of the amendments of this
era.116
While the changes to the law during this period range from the ruthlessly repressive
powers of the schooling clauses to those which seem largely unremarkable, many originated
from the field. The expansion of Indian Agent powers within the Indian Act over this period was
due in large part these suggestions. The work of Indian Agents on the ground in relation to the
law, as this position was given expanded reach and proliferated in numbers after 1880,
demonstrate that the position of enforcer of the law also generated legal change. Indian agents
wanted more power to fulfil their roles as enforcers of the Indian Act, and Ottawa was willing to
grant it to them to make the law more actionable.
5.2. The Grand General Council, Indian Agent Powers, and

the Indian Act from 1894-1906
The Grand General Indian Council demonstrated a complicated engagement with the
expanding powers of Indian Agents between 1894 and 1906. While in many ways delegates
supported the use of Indian Agents to enforce morality clauses in the act including temperance
and family law provisions– and in some cases advocated for an expanded role for the state and
its agents on reserves in these areas– they likewise demonstrate a critical engagement with the
position of Indian Agents as well as a broader critique of the powers of the Department of Indian
Affairs vis a vis the powers of band councils and local control of finances. I argue in this section
that their acceptance of Indian Agent enforcement jurisdiction did not represent a wholesale
endorsement of the Indian Act or the government’s paternalistic goals. Although the Grand
General Council members who attended councils during these years demonstrated conservative
views on family life, morality, and temperance clauses of the act (including an expanded role for
state actors in enforcing these), they also continued to advocate for causes that had long been
116
For an account of the development of and harm cause by the residential school system see Truth and
Reconciliation Commission of Canada, Canada’s Residential Schools: The History, Part 1: Origins to
1939, The Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, Vol. 1 (Truth and
Reconciliation Commission of Canada, 2015).
271
important concerns of the council, including pathways to enfranchisement, expansion of wills,

and timber protection. Finally, their engagement with the law through their council minutes
demonstrates that they were far from willing to surrender jurisdiction over their local matters.
While they accepted the necessity of Indian Agents in terms of enforcement, this was not a
cession of local control.
More broadly, the views of the Grand General Council on these matters should not be
understood as a unified Indigenous position. By this point, the council was composed of
Anishinaabe and Muncey delegates, but Haudenosaunee movements, as described by Gerald
Reid and outlined in Chapter Two,117 continued to assert their sovereignty against government
efforts to undermine their hereditary leadership, and a new Anishinaabe organization called the
United Bands Movement found other means to fight for Indigenous rights during this period. As
I will examine briefly below, this new organization, which met in similar councils and even took
the name “Grand Indian Council” at one meeting, had greater support in both participating
communities and the financial contributions these communities made than did the Grand General
Council itself in the early 1900s.
The original Grand General Council continued to engage with the Indian Act through
their gatherings in the late 1880s, 1890s and early 1900s, meeting regularly every two years. In
the previous chapter, the Council of 1884 at Cape Croker was discussed in detail, and here it was
voted to meet at Saugeen in 1886. 118 A different council was also held at Wikwemikong this
year, pointing to the fact that the Grand General Council did not hold a monopoly on regional
council gatherings,119 a practice consistent with earlier forms of council diplomacy. 120 In 1888,
117
Gerald Reid, “To Renew Our Fire: Political Activism, Nationalism, and Identity in Three
Rotinonhsionni Communities” in Tribal Worlds: Critical Studies in American Indian Nation Building
edited by Brian Hosmer and Larry Nesper (Albany NY: SUNY Press, 2013): 37-64.
118
Minutes of the 7th Grand General Indian Council, held upon the New Credit Indian Reserve, Near
Hagersville, Ontario, From September 13th to September 18th, 1882 (Hagersville, ON: Hagersville Book
and Job Rooms, 1883), 33.
119
LAC, RG 10, Vol. 2351, file 70534. Thank you to Alan Corbiere for this reference.
120
See Bohaker, Doodem and Council Fire.
272
the Grand Council met at Caradoc. Delegates voted here to hold the next council at New Credit,
although I have not located the minutes from 1890. Similarly, council minutes are missing from
1892, but are referenced by Scobie Logan, the Secretary to the Grand General Council in a letter
to the Superintendent General.121 In 1894 the council met at Moraviantown. The 1896 and 1898
meeting minutes are also missing, but the 1896 gathering was most likely held at Cape Croker
according to a vote at the 1894 council. The 1900 council was held at Wikwemikong. Here it
was voted to meet in 1902 at Christian Island, and the 1904 Council was held at Saugeen. The
final Grand Council meeting that I examine in this chapter is in 1906, held again at Saugeen.
The meeting minutes of the councils of 1894 (Moraviantown), 1900 (Wikwemikong), 1904
(Saugeen), and 1906 (Saugeen) are examined in this chapter.
Some differences are evident between these later councils and their earlier counterparts.
The meeting minutes in this later era are slightly different in form from previous minutes, and
cover debates in less detail. For instance, the length of the council minutes in 1882 and 1884 are
each thirty-five pages long, whereas the minutes for 1904 and 1906 are eleven and fourteen
pages, despite the length of gatherings remaining between four and six days. The councils
themselves became smaller, with fewer communities in attendance, and became much more
regional. For instance, at the 1888 council held at Caradoc the only communities in attendance
were from south-western Ontario: the Mississaugas of the Credit, Walpole Island, Saugeen,
Oneidas of the Thames, Chippewas of the Thames, and Munceys of the Thames. 122 In 1894,
these communities were joined by Cape Croker, and the Chippewas of Sarnia. 123 The 1900
council held at Wikwemikong was likewise regional but with different bands in attendance,
121
Scobie Logan to Superintendent General of Indian Affairs, March 13 1893, LAC RG10, Vol. 3947, file
123764-23947, Microfilm reel C-10166.
122
Minutes of the Tenth Grand General Indian Council held upon the Caradoc Indian Reserve, County of
Middlesex, from October 3rd to October 8th, 1888 (London, ON: Advertiser Printing Co., 1890).
123
However, in these meeting minutes, the Pottawatomies of Walpole Island and the Pottawatomies of
Caradoc are listed as separate communities with their own delegates.
273
mostly from the North Shore of Lake Huron, Manitoulin Island, and Georgian Bay. 124 The
1904 council was especially small, with only delegates from Cape Croker, Saugeen, and
Wikwemikong in attendance, which would have greatly narrowed the scope and depth of both
debate in council as well as the surrounding activities and visiting that had been such a large part
of the councils in the 1880s. The 1906 council was slightly larger, but still much smaller than
these earlier council gatherings, with delegates present from Cape Croker, Chippewas of the
Thames, Moravians of the Thames, and Muncey of the Thames, Saugeen, and Christian Island.
There is evidence that at least some council delegates’ desired to have the council
become more even official, with the aim of increasing their authority and chances of government
recognition. In the minutes, the constitution of the Grand General Council, is printed at the
beginning, a practice consistent since its adoption in 1884. But there were moves in the last few
gatherings of the nineteenth century to have the council become even more formalized. For
instance, a motion that was ultimately left in abeyance in 1894 sought to have a new clause
added to the constitution that the President should wear some mark of distinction, such as a
badge or a gown.125 During that same council, a motion carried “in order to expedite the
business of the Council” that a committee be appointed by the President to make
recommendations on amendments, with the “conclusion arrived at by the said committee and the
approval of the President to be accepted as final. 126 The goal of this was to end “lengthy and
unnecessary debate,” a stark departure from the goal of early councils to consider multiple
community views and have their questions and concerns about the law explained and addressed.
A motion that suggested delegates from each community should be a part of this committee was
124
Bands who had delegates attend in 1900 include Saugeen, Cape Croker, Stony and Kettle Point,
“Saganook” (Sagamok), Parry Island, White Fish Lake, Christian Island, “Shegoyendey” (Sheguindah),
Sheshegwaning, South Bay, Grondine, Wikwemikong, and Wahnahtabung. Minutes of the Sixteenth
Grand Indian Council of the Province of Ontario, held upon the Indian Reserve at Wikewemikong from
the 7th to the 12th of June, 1900 (Wiarton, ON: Wiarton Canadian Print, n.d.), 2.
125
1894), 24.
126
Ibid., 16.
274
lost.127 In 1900, a draft “Act of Incorporation” was printed in the minutes, which had been
prepared at the direction of the previous council. The motion to approve it failed, but its contents
provide insight into how certain members of the council viewed their relationship with the
government. The unsuccessful “Act of Incorporation,” as printed in the minutes and slated to be
sent to the government for approval by the Queen with the consent of the Parliament and Senate,
contained many of the same clauses as the constitution (for example officers, time and place of
meeting, qualifications, and meeting procedures). But the primary goal was to officially become
a corporate body, in order have government recognition for their ability to pass by-laws for the
group’s “better government.”128 The draft incorporation Act also contained a section where the
Council should have the power to pass a by-law whereby “all Indian Bands in the Province of
Ontario” should be taxed to support the Grand General Council, with funds held by the
Superintendent General until requested by the Council. 129 Many council delegates were willing
to forge a closer relationship with the government to bolster their influence as their numbers
dwindled and they sought to get out of the debts that they had incurred.
The struggling finances of the Council, as well as the alternative movements of cross-
reserve organizing that were springing up during this time demonstrate the political limitations of
the Grand General Council at the turn of the century. Delegates paid one dollar each at the
beginning of the Council, to be paid into the “funds of the Grand Council.” 130 They also
127
Ibid.
128
Minutes of the Sixteenth Grand Indian Council of the Province of Ontario, held upon the Indian
Reserve at Wikewemikong from the 7th to the 12th of June, 1900 (Wiarton, ON: Wiarton Canadian Print,
n.d.), 7.
129
Ibid., 8. The full section reads as follows: “It shall be expedient for the Council to enact a by-law to
the effect that all Indian Bands in the Province of Ontario shall be taxed at the rate of one-half cent per
band of the population, to be retained by the Superintendent General of Indian Affairs once every year,
and forwarded by the Superintendent General, on call, to the Treasurer of the Grand Indian Council of
Ontario, and to be kept by him and disbursed only on an order signed by the President, countersigned by
the Secretary and only applied for the legitimate expenses of the Grand Council, provided however, that
the several Bands interested are agreeable to that arrangement.”
130
1894), 5. This was a part of the Constitution of the Grand General Council and was reprinted in most
meeting minutes examined.
275
obtained funds from the Department out of band funds for delegates to travel to attend. The
declining numbers of the Council meetings over this period affected their finances, that were
primarily used for printing council minutes. The influence of the Grand General Council in the
early years of the twentieth century waned significantly, as other movements demanding
recognition of autonomous governance, land and hunting rights sprung up. As was discussed in
Chapter 2, the Haudenosaunee after their split with the Grand General Council organized to
support hereditary governance across reserves at Akwesasne, the Bay of Quinte, Kahnawake and
Six Nations, and these demands continued after 1914 with the Thunderwater movement. 131
Anishinaabe communities also demonstrated a significant shift both politically and financially
away from the Grand General Council. In 1903, there was a competing “Grand Indian Council”
that gathered at Parry Island in November, that greatly bothered Grand Council delegates who
met the following year.132
At the 1904 Grand General Council, which was exceptionally small and attended only by
twelve delegates in total from Saugeen, Cape Croker and Wikwemikong, the council opened by
passing the following motion proposed by delegates of the two former reserves:
That a printed document having been received by Chiefs of certain bands, that a number
of Indian bands having constituted themselves into a Grand Indian Council and
proceedings thereof having been sent abroad…This present Council being the only
recognized “Grand Indian Council of Ontario” hereby condemns this use of the name
“Grand Indian Council” as being misleading to all Indians and to the general public; and
this Council repudiates all proceedings emanating therefrom as regards resolutions that
were introduced and spoken to and passed in a highly irregular manner by other than
Indians, a thing that is forbidden by the rules of this Council and out of keeping with
Indian usages.133
Gerald F. Reid, “‘To Renew our Fire: Political Activism, Nationalism, and Identity in Three
131
Rotinonhsionni Communities,” in Brian Hosmer and Larry Nesper, eds. Tribal Worlds: Critical Studies in
American Indian Nation Building (Albany: SUNY Press, 2013): 37-64.
132
Minutes of the Eighteenth Grand Indian Council of Ontario, held upon the Saugeen Indian Reserve
from the 9th to the 13th of June, 1904 (Wiarton, ON: Printed at the Office of the Wiarton Echo, n.d.), 6.
133
Ibid.
276
Upon hearing the above, delegates from Wikwemikong “felt offended and could not be
reconciled.”134 They insisted “that the other Council had the same right,” and “took their
departure from the Hall” in protest. 135 The Council went on to consider the Indian Act, but after
the departure of Joseph Pettier and William Genoshameg of Wikwemikong, only four delegates
from Cape Croker and five from Saugeen remained in council. 136 As such, the Council should
not be taken as being representative of a majority opinion in Anishinaabe communities.
The “alternative” Grand Indian Council at Parry Island the year prior was a part of a
movement that became known as the United Bands Movement which organized for land, treaty,
fishing, and hunting rights. It was more widely attended than the 1904 Council, with delegates
from Hiawatha, Christian Island, Mud Lake, Shawanaga, Magnetawan, and Henvey Inlet. 137
Alan Salt, who was a longstanding Grand General Council member now residing at Parry Island
initially served as the translator there but was relieved of this position due to his old age. 138
Other delegates had previously attended Grand General Councils as well– Charles Big Canoe of
Georgina Island in 1882 and 1884, and Peter Megis of Parry Island in 1882, 1884, and 1900.
Various Anishiaabeg communities supported the United Bands movement through subscriptions,
and the collective hired the law Toronto law firm Hunter and Hunter, and later Goodman and
Galbraith, along with G. Mills McClurg to advocate for land claims, monies owed under the
1850 Robinson Treaty (as communities who were signatories to this treaty became involved) and
hunting and fishing rights.139 Communities most involved were Christian Island, Georgina
Island, Rama, Rice Lake, Mud Lake, Scugog and Hiawatha. 140 As Anne Janhunen’s research
134
Ibid.
135
Ibid.
136
Ibid., 5. Remaining delegates included James Solomon, Stephen Elliot, J. W. Keeshig and F.
Lamorandiere of Cape Croker and Solomon Mendowab, David Root, Henry Ritchie, Peter Henry and C.
Kahbuge of Saugeen.
137
Donald B. Smith Fonds, E. J. Pratt Archives, photocopy of Archives of Ontario, F 4337-4-0-9.
138
Ibid.
139
Archives of Ontario, A. E. Williams fonds, Biographical/Historical Sketch, p. 1.
140
Ibid.
277
has demonstrated, the meeting at Parry Island spurred a move to contact leaders along the North
Shore of Lake Huron, with over $100 raised for this trip, and that the majority of bands along the
North Shore and on Manitoulin expressed interest in joining the movement. 141 The meeting
minutes from Parry Island show they planned to contact communities as far as Lake Nipigon. 142
A brief examination of the financial accounts of the United Bands records shows that
there was great interest in supporting the movement financially. The United Bands successfully
raised large sums of money for McClurg to travel to England to obtain treaty documents. For
instance Christian Island sent $50.00 to the movement in 1904, and Wikwemikong passed a band
resolution to send 25 cents a head in 1905. 143 In one case at Garden River, where the band did
not approve contributions, an individual family sent in five dollars of their own. 144 In her
research, Janhunen found that communities sent up to several hundred dollars in their donations
to the movement provoking concern from the Department of Indian Affairs and eventually
charges being brought against McClurg for “illegally collecting money from Indians.”145 This
can be contrasted with the difficulties that the Grand General Council had in raising funds during
this era. Delegates paid one dollar each at the beginning of Council gatherings, and their funds
would have sharply declined alongside their limited attendance, and the Grand Council struggled
to pay for printing costs of their meeting minutes. In fact, in 1900, funds were so short for the
$14.33 costs of printing that delegates moved to require an additional 10 cents a head from
141
Anne Janhunen, “Government Responses to Indigenous Political Organizing and Legal Representation
in Southern Ontario, 1903-1927” (paper presented at the Canadian Historical Association Annual
Meeting, Ryerson University, 2017).
142
Donald B. Smith Fonds, E. J. Pratt Archives, photocopy of Archives of Ontario, F 4337-4-0-9.
143
G. Mills McClurg to Chief J. D. Monague, May 21 1904, Archives of Ontario, A. E. Williams Fonds,
F 4337-3-0-10 Subcriptions/Lists–Christian Island, and William Kinoshameg to G. Mills McClurg,
February 6 1905, Archives of Ontario, A. E. Williams Fonds, F 4337-1-0-45 Wikwemikong.
144
John Corbiere to G. Mills McClurg, June 14 1904, Archives of Ontario, A. E. Williams Fonds, F 4337-
3-0-10 Subscriptions/Lists–Garden River.
145
Janhunen, “Government Responses.”
278
Council members in order to “pay the indebtedness” of the Grand Council. 146 While the content
of the meetings of the United Bands movement is beyond the scope of this dissertation, its
competing existence and tensions it spurred at the Grand General Council, as well as the much
greater financial investment made by Anishinaabek communities in this movement is significant
in terms of the broader context of Indigenous political response to the law and the declining
political clout of the Grand General Council at the time. They were certainly not the only cross-
reserve movement operating and appear to be the less popular option in the early years of the
twentieth century.
Gatherings of the Grand General Council in the 1890s and early 1900s were more
accommodating in their approach to government laws and policies than earlier large councils
such as in 1858, 1860, 1870 or 1882 where there were heated debates about existence of the laws
themselves. The Grand Councils also struggled financially over these years, although the
Department did provide some funding for delegates' travel. Overall, it became less important to
have their support for both the Indian department and the legislature as the Indian Act became
more and more entrenched on Indian reserves. Despite this, the content of the councils can still
be examined to understand their many considerations that continued from the earlier period.
5.2.1. The Grand General Council on Morality and the Law

Throughout these years, the general tone of the Grand General Council was
unambiguously Christian, and in many ways delegates’ views reflected similar Victorian views
on sexuality and morality to that of the state and the settler public. 147 Aspects come through in
the council minutes that demonstrate the deep race and gender hierarchies within this thought,
146
n.d.), 11.
147
On the influence of Christianity on reform movements in the nineteenth-century see Valverde,
Mariana. The Age of Light, Soap, and Water: Moral Reform in English Canada, 1885-1925 (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 2008), Noel, Janet. Canada Dry: Temperance Crusades before
Confederation (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995) and Marks, Lynne Sorrel. Revivals and
Roller Rinks: Religion, Leisure, and Identity in Late-Nineteenth-Century Small-Town Ontario. 2nd ed.
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996).
279
for instance in 1906 when George Fisher requests that the government create legislation that any
Indian marrying a Black woman be removed from status.148 Council delegates at times
demonstrate a willingness to police and punish the choices made by women and families who did
not marry.149 The harm that these positions caused, especially on women or on those who were
criminalized, fined, and incarcerated for alcohol use should not be minimized. In addition, the
prevalence, according to delegates, of behaviour they found to be “immoral” meant that others in
the community had very different ideas about practices such as partnerships outside of marriage,
or the right of women to freely leave marriages. Delegates position on morality, though,
demonstrates that they placed very high stakes on establishing communities that would be
considered morally upright by the standards of the day. These leaders perceived the need to
achieve the standard of Victorian respectability to be able to secure political rights for their
communities.150 Their views on morality are exemplified by a committee report in 1906: “Our
prosperity and happiness depends very largely upon this one phase of our existence– morality.
Socially, Physically, morally, we cannot prosper or attain any degree of mutual happiness of
concord if we are dyed with immorality.” 151 In order to ensure that this “happiness of concord”
within their communities coincided with their views on family life and alcohol consumption
delegates were willing to rely on the punitive power of the state.
Delegate views around restrictions and punishments for alcohol use through the Indian
Act varied greatly. Temperance advocates in the council would certainly have been aware of the
148
Minutes of the Nineteenth Grand Indian Council of Ontario, held upon the Saugeen Indian Reserve
from June 12th to 15th, 1906 (London, ON: London Printing and Lithographing Co. n.d), 6.
149
Ibid., 6-7. Norman Shields provides an important examination of the Grand Council’s position on
women and marriage, contextualizing this with the political context of Pottowatomi migration from the
States and the limitations through the law for “non-treaty Indians.” Norman Shields, “The Grand General
Indian Council of Ontario and Status Legislation,” in Hele, Karl S., ed. Lines Drawn upon the Water:
First Nations and the Great Lakes Borders and Borderlands (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2008).
150
For how Indigenous intellectuals navigated these pressures in the nineteenth-century see Konkle,
Maureen. Writing Indian Nations: Native Intellectuals and the Politics of Historiography, 1827-1863.
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004).
151
from June 12th to 15th, 1906 (London, ON: London Printing and Lithgraphing Co. n.d), 9.
280
political repercussions of positioning themselves as “sober citizens.” 152 White women had long
made claims to participation in the political life of the nation through involvement in temperance
societies, and Indigenous leaders would have been acutely aware of the racialized implications of
their support for the enforcement of prohibitionary measures in the law within the context of
Victorian ideas of morality and citizenship. 153 In 1894, debate “waxed quite warm” on the
subject of alcohol provisions in the law. 154 C.M. Stonefish of the Moravians of the Thames
expressed frustration at the regulations and spoke in favour of being able to make cider for home
consumption, “otherwise his large crop of apples would go to waste.” 155 The divisions created
by white officials enforcing the law was also an area of concern, and Moses Kaikaik of Cape
Croker argued that “a good deal of unfriendliness was created between whites and Indians with
regard to enforcing the Act.”156 He thought that “the sooner the Indians were placed on equal
footing with the whites with regard to obtaining liquor the less drunkenness would be found
among them.”157 His critique points to the negative effects being felt in his community of Cape
Croker through Indian Agents enforcing the law. 158 However, others demonstrated unhappiness
Robert A. Campbell, “Making Sober Citizens: The Legacy of Indigenous Alcohol Regulation in
152
Canada, 1777-1885,” Journal of Canadian Studies, 42, 1 (2008): 105–126.

153
On the history of temperance movements in nineteenth-century Canada, and the gendered and
racialized conditions of citizenship in relation to ideas of sobriety see Craig Heron, Booze: A Distilled
History (Toronto: Between the Lines, 2003), Renisa Mawani, Colonial Proximities: Crossracial
encounters and Juridical Truths in British Columbia, 1871-1921 (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2009) and
Mariana Valverde, The Age of Light, Soap, and Water: Moral Reform in English Canada, 1885-1925
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008). Veronica Strong-Boas discusses temperance briefly in her
examination of the 1885 Franchise debates, where she examines how claims to the franchise were made
by women, and Indigenous and Chinese men. Veronica Strong-Boag, “’The Citizenship Debates’: The
1885 Franchise Act, in Dorothy E. Chunn, Robert E. Menzies and Robert L. Adamoski, eds., Contesting
Canadian Citizenship: Historical Readings (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2002): 69-94.
154
1894), 11.
155
Ibid.
156
Ibid.
157
Ibid.
158
Ibid.
281
with the limits of legal enforcement as it stood, and eventually “the temperance men got the
better arguments for their cause and completely turned the tables on their friends who showed
inclinations to have the law relaxed.”159 John Henry found that “the temperance part of the
Indian Act was a failure,” that as “On being carried to a higher Court, convictions were
invariably quashed, from the fact also that the Provincial Government had the regulation of the
liquor traffic and the “Act” now under discussion belonged to the Dominion.” 160 Henry and the
other “temperance men” successfully pushed forward motions to expand Indian Agent controls
and punishments under the law. In the Council that year, a motion was carried to give Indian
Agents the power to issue warrants in carrying out the alcohol restrictions of the Act. 161
In subsequent councils, delegates continued to press for an expansion of temperance

regulations. At Wikwemikong in 1900, the council voted to change the wording (from “may” to
“shall”) in section 104 of the Act (that dealt with constables being permitted, without process of
law, to detain any Indian or non-treaty Indian in a state of intoxication to be taken to a common
jail or lock-up to be kept until sober and brought before a judge), hoping to “make it more
imperative for Constables to act.”162 In 1904 at Saugeen, Council voted to increase the fines for
intoxication, as well as extend the provisions of section 114 that “amply covers the ground
against celebrating pagan and other gambling and indecent dances, but does not prohibit…other
nightly immoral festivities and dances where loose characters are admitted.” 163 As it had been
since the inception of the first Grand General Council in 1870 (when alcohol provisions were the
only aspect of the Gradual Enfranchisement Act accepted), alcohol enforcement was by and
159
Ibid.
160
Ibid.
161
Ibid., 23. They also advocate that Indian agents “to be also clothed with the authority to decide cases
of assaults and thefts and impose the necessary penalties.”
162
n.d.), 12.
163
from the 9th to the 13th of June, 1904 (Wiarton, ON: Printed at the Office of the Wiarton Echo, n.d.), 7
and 9.
282
large a widely supported measure at Grand Council gatherings for government interference on
reserves.
The Council demonstrated even more strident positions on using the law to impose
changes in moral behaviour through their willingness to expand legal sanctions around family
life. The inter-related issues (according to delegates) of children being born out of wedlock,
lovers sharing homes without being married, and desertion generated deep and ongoing concern
from delegates at Councils in the 1890s and early 1900s. Two primary sections of the law
pertained to concerns raised by delegates in council. The first was section 9, which dictated that
illegitimate children could be excluded from band membership by the Superintendent
General.164 The other sections that generated debate around family structure and morality were
sections 72 and 73, that respectively allowed the Superintendent General to stop the annuity and
interest payments to any man guilty of deserting his family (with annuities then applied to the
deserted family), and to stop payments to any woman without children who “deserts her husband
and lives immorally with another man” (women with children would retain annuity payments to
ensure their support).165
Delegates raised concerns about the effectiveness of current legal provisions in protecting
vulnerable women and children. George Fisher, a delegate from the Chippewas of the Thames at
the 1894 Council, made a “powerful speech” supporting unwed mothers and their children, “to
protect…women who had no vote in the Grand Council.” 166 Fisher declared that “unprincipled
men were the guilty parties in ensnaring, soliciting and persuading unsuspecting and innocent
girls to do wrong, and would take advantage of their weakness, inexperience in life and under
fair promises of marriage, succeeded too often in their purpose of ruining them for life. He
164
The Indian Act, R.S.C. 1886, c. 43 s. 9. This was unless he or she had (with the consent of the band)
shared in distribution moneys for a period greater than two years.
165
Ibid., s. 73.
166
1894), 7-8.
283
would strongly advocate the severest penalty to be visited upon them.” 167 In agreement with
Fisher, other strong positions were put forward concerning the seduction of young women and
the protection of the children born to them. Suggestions were made that the law be expanded to
protect “pure girls(s) who had been led astray” by not only removing the annuity of the offending
man, but that he also be “expelled from the band and his landed property given to the girl so
ruined.”168 Other positions on section 9 showed a willingness to change the law so that both
unmarried parents “be made to suffer.”169 Rev. W. A. Elias stated, discussing those who did not
marry, that it “would not be giving them too much if they were banished from reserves.” 170
Abner Elliot found that unwed mothers would control the moneys given to their children and
could remarry into the band, thus making it “next to impossible to stop the evil,”171 and Moses
Kaikaik found that the current law “was inadequate to the enormity of the offence against
morals.”172 A committee was stuck to resolve the question on section 9, with John Henry as
chair. The report that the committee presented that day was quickly approved by the Council
with no further debate. They recommend a paragraph be added to section 9, expanding both the
financial punishment as well as the jail time from the current law.173 The council had
abandoned the idea of punishing young mothers in the case of desertion here, but this was not the
last time that punitive measures against women’s perceived immorality were advocated for in
this council.
167
Ibid., 12. The penalty that Fisher sought is not elaborated here.
168
Ibid.
169
Ibid., 11
170
Ibid.
171
Ibid.
172
Ibid.
173
Ibid., 12. The full paragraph reads: that the father of such illegitimate child shall contribute weekly to
the sum of two dollars and fifty cents from his annuity or earnings for the period of five years for his first
child only with the same woman. This money to be retained by the Supt. General and applied for the
support of the child and its mother. In default of complying thereof he shall be imprisoned for period of
not less than six months nor more than twelve at hard labour.
284
Committees were also stuck in 1894 to deal with sections 72 and 73, with the resulting
recommendations again expanding the provisions of the Indian Act as it stood. On section 72,
members proposed a sub-section be added that “any Indian, man or woman, who is found living
in adultery, shall be, on being found guilty before a Magistrate or Indian Agent, committed to jail
for a period of not less than 12 months.”174 This expanded the law well beyond its current form
with the annuity payment being taken from men and applied punishment to both men and
women. On section 73, they proposed a subsection to increase the punishment of women
abandoning their husbands to live with another partner– that she not only would lose her annuity,
but that “she shall be imprisoned for a period not less that 3 months nor more than 12
months.”175 This punishment would also be applied to the man “who is the cause of such
separation or desertion, or is found to be the cause of the breaking up of any family.” 176
Delegates continued to voice punitive positions on the policing of sexuality, in particular

the decisions of women, in later Councils. In 1904, “in view of the increase in immorality
existing in many of the Reserves, of desertion of wives by husbands, and vice versa, and of cases
of illegitimate births” the Council “urges the Department to give instructions to its Agents to
more vigorously enforce … Section 9, 72, 73 of the Indian Act.” 177 Sections 72 and 73 were
again debated two years later, where they were found to be “ineffective in dealing with
immorality.”178 Council members expressed various opinions regarding the sections in question,
but the council minutes make clear that all agreed that sterner restrictions should be put in place:
“The unanimous wish of this Council is that the Indian woman who deserts her husband, without
a just cause, shall be punished in the same manner as the male who deserts his family.” 179 Like
174
Ibid., 20.
175
Ibid., 20
176
Ibid.
177
178
179
Ibid.
285
the action taken on alcohol provisions, the council passed a movement that the words “shall”
instead of “may” be inserted to compel Indian Agents to act on section 73, and a committee was
struck to deal with the same. The committee report recommended
that a sub-section should be added thereto, to deprive the Indians of his annuity and
interest moneys, as well as to deprive him of any participation in the real property of the
Band, who take up and live immorally with married persons; also to punish in the same
way any Indian woman who has deserted her husband, though not actually living
immorally with another man, but publicly prostituting herself.180
These examples demonstrate that Council delegates often saw a role for Indian Agents to enforce
aspects of law to do with temperance and morality. They saw a role for government agents
supporting, with the force of the law, aspects of reserve life that they felt were beyond their own
capacity to enforce. This fits with a long pattern of Indigenous communities asking for
protection against squatters, and against those who were stealing timber and selling
intoxicants.181 During this era they echo the government in directing these more invasive
punitive measures against reserve residents themselves.
It also becomes apparent in the meeting minutes that the Grand General Council’s view
on Indian Agents was that there could be a role for them to act as intermediaries with the
government and to ensure local needs were addressed– if this was done right. This did not mean
a total cession of control, as was envisioned through the legislation, but instead the council saw
Indian agents as a strategic point of pressure in the relationship that Band Councils had with the
government, one that they should have a good deal of control over. 182 This could also be
180
Ibid., 11
181
Indigenous involvement with the passing of laws protecting reserves in 1850, see Maxime Gohier, “La
pratique pétitionnaire des Amérindiens de la Vallée du Saint-Laurent sous la Régime britannique:
Pouvoir, representation, et légitimité (1760–1860)” (PhD diss., Université du Québec à Montréal, 2014)
and Ted Binnema, "Protecting Indian Lands by Defining Indian: 1850-76" Journal of Canadian
Studies/Revue d'études canadiennes, Volume 48, Number 2, Spring 2014, pp. 5-39. The protection of
fisheries under alliance relationships going back to the Treaty of Niagara is discussed in J. Michael
Thoms, “Ojibwa Fishing Grounds: A History Ontario Fisheries law, science, and the sportsmen’s
challenge to Aboriginal Treaty Rights, 1650-1900,” PhD. Diss, University of British Columbia (2004).
182
For instance, in an example from Alnwick, the local council there enlisted the help of the Indian Agent
in their efforts to have band council elections conducted by ballot. Lawrence Vankoughnet to Ross
Sedgewick, 28 December 28 1892, LAC RG10, vol. 3947, file 123764-2, Microfilm reel C-10166.
286
considered consistent with past practices of Indian Agents distributing presents from the Crown,
and hearing grievances in order to maintaining alliances. At some Grand Councils, local Indian
Agents attended or were consulted to clarify aspects of government law and policy. 183 Recall
that by 1894 Indian agents had been directly responsible for many Grand Council reserves only
since 1883, for eleven years, a short period in the long relationships between these communities
and the Crown. Bands ultimately had no other option than to communicate with the Department
other than through their agent, as other forms of communication were ignored, but they
nonetheless expressed hope that Indian Agents might be a way their local concerns be addressed.
Council delegates voiced opinions, during discussions on wills and of schooling, that
Indian Agents might be an authority figure that could be made use of by communities.
Discussing will provisions, Rev. W. A. Elias (of Walpole Island) opined in 1894 that the
Superintendent General “could not form any correct idea with regard to the sentiment of the
Indians and what they thought…unless he had a faithful and conscientious Indian Agent to give
him the necessary information to make a true diagnosis of the wants of the Indians.” 184 Indian
Agents were also seen by council delegates as being more cost-effective than School inspectors
due to their already being present on reserves. In a motion that was lost in 1900, but nonetheless
instructive on how Indian Agents were perceived, F. Lamorandiere and F.W. Jacobs (of Cape
Croker and Moravians of the Thames) suggested that savings to Band Funds could be made if
local Indian Agents be put in charge of school inspection rather than the “large expense” of
183
This was the case in 1904, when Inspector McCrae attended the council at Saugeen. Minutes of the
Eighteenth Grand Indian Council of Ontario, held upon the Saugeen Indian Reserve from the 9th to the
13th of June, 1904 (Wiarton, ON: Printed at the Office of the Wiarton Echo, n.d.), 6. The Agent from
Manitowaning, Mr. Sims, was also asked to come to the council at Wikwemikong in 1900, which he did.
Council delegates asked questions about Robinson Treaty annuities, and those who had been removed
from annuities lists. Minutes of the Sixteenth Grand Indian Council of the Province of Ontario, held upon
the Indian Reserve at Wikewemikong from the 7th to the 12th of June, 1900 (Wiarton, ON: Wiarton
Canadian Print, n.d.), 14.
184
1894), 17.
287
Public School Inspectors.185 (This suggests that bands were getting reports of their accounts,
confirmed perhaps by the 1906 council request that bands receive the Auditor General’s report
earlier.)186 This was again taken up again in 1904, where Stephen Elliot and C. Kahbuge (of
Cape Croker and Saugeen) carried a motion that Indian Agents should take on this role. They
state: “It is thought that he [sic] living at or in the vicinity of would be able to give a good if not
better history of its work than the Inspectors who only come there twice a year and stop and hour
or so, and only entails a useless expense.” 187 In both cases, having a local agent who was
responsive to local needs was seen to ensure the Superintendent General (who held so much
power over their communities) was following local demands. This was, however, with the
understanding by council delegates that bands should have control over the appointment and
behaviour of the Indian Agent.
Critical positions on the role of Indian Agents were also articulated in council, and their
qualifications interrogated. In 1894, a motion passed by a large majority (twenty-two for and
two against) against the “very serious mistake” made by the government in appointing “to guard
and watch over their interest” Indian Agents who were “habitual drunkards.”188 Other measures
raised in council that show concerns include the push to have the term of Indian Agents’
employment be limited to three years, and that all agents be required to write a civil service
185
n.d.), 12.
186
from June 12th to 15th, 1906 (London, ON: London Printing and Lithographing Co. n.d), 8: “The
statements made show that a general feeling of dissatisfaction was current, owing to the diminishing of
Indian moneys or funds of the several bands represented. The Auditor-General’s report is issued
annually, but it is usually about a year after the closing of the accounts that those financial statements
appear. Much assistance would be given the Bands in Council were those financial statement issued ar an
ealier date after the closing of the fiscal year.”
187
188
n.d.), 12.
288
exam.189 The council also critiqued the Department for making political appointments rather
than hiring suitable, competent officials in 1904. They passed a motion that was met with cries
of “shame” when it was declared that these political appointments were “too often disastrous to
the Indians.”190 Indian Agents were perhaps a necessary concession, in the eyes of some
delegates, to have morality laws enforced and ensure that the specificities of their local concerns
were heard by the government. Nonetheless communities kept a close watch on their behaviour,
their politics, and their competencies.
5.2.2. Jurisdiction Beyond Indian Agents

How the council viewed the role of Indian Agents was also articulated in terms of how
band council jurisdiction was vocalized in council. In many cases the council showed a desire to
move control over local matters outside of the reach of Indian Agents and the Indian Act. For
instance, in the case of both wills and schooling, later councils argued for band control of these
issues. As we saw above, in 1904 delegates were willing to have Indian Agents act as school
inspectors. However, at the following council in 1906, the council carried a motion to have
bands themselves approve public school teachers (with the approval of the Public-School
Inspector).191 The motion to have the “appointment of school trustees and the selection of
school teachers” added to the powers of bands in council under section 76 was defeated 192– but
the meeting minutes make clear it was the “unanimous wish” of the council “that the standard of
education among the Indians of the Dominion should be raised, and it is the wish of the Grand
General Council that…the Bands in council have a voice in carrying out this work.” 193
189
190
191
192
Ibid. This was perhaps due to denominational concerns as the meeting minutes note that “Opinions
were various as to the mode of appointment of School Teachers, whether the appointments are made by
the Government or by the various churches having mission work among the Indians.”
193
Ibid., 10.
289
On the question of wills, in 1894, President Tobias “said that he disapproved of the
Superintendent General assuming all and every responsibility and entirely ignoring Indian
Councils.”194 In this council, a motion was eventually withdrawn to have Bands in council be the
final judge on questions of inheritance. 195 However, by 1906 the council took a much more
decisive position and voted to have the properties of those who died intestate decided on by the
Band rather than vested in the Crown. Council found the Indian Act “defective” in the protection
of the property of minor children.196 The council voted to have the consent of the Band be a
requirement in cases involving minors: “The Band in Council understands the situation, or the
needs of the minor children, and should, by the virtue of their being the representatives of the
Band, be in a position to deal with such cases with prudence and wisdom.” 197 Both examples
show how the council continued to advocate for a greater role for band councils in decision
making on reserves and away from the imposition of jurisdiction over these matters to the
Superintendent General and his agents. However, nowhere is their position on local control
more evident than in their articulations of frustration in the lack of control and transparency
around their finances.
In terms of the relationship of Indian Agents to local councils, the Grand General
Councils of 1900, 1904 and 1906 demonstrate clear frustration on how the Department was
administering band funds.198 This was a longstanding complaint of councils since before
194
1894), 17.
195
Ibid.
196
Subsection 7 of section 20 gave the Superintendent General the power to “appoint a fit and proper
person to take charge of [minor] children and their property and may remove such person and appoint
another and so from time to time as occasion requires. An Act to further amend the Indian Act, S. C.
1894, c. 32.
197
198
For work on the extensive history of government control over band funds and other forms of colonial
financial control see Brian Gettler, Colonialisms Currency: Money, State, and First Nations in Canada,
1820-1950 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queens University Press, 2020), Dean E. Neu and Richard.
Therrien. Accounting for Genocide: Canada’s Bureaucratic Assault on Aboriginal People (Black Point,
290
Confederation.199 In 1900, the council passed a motion to amend section 34, and require band
authorization for the Superintendent General to use band funds to maintain roads, bridges,
ditches, and fences within the reserve. 200 Concerns were also brought up at this council around
section 140 that allowed the Superintendent General to transfer capital funds to another band
when band members were there. 201 Similar concerns were again raised on this issue in 1904,
where the “lifting of capital” from one band to another at the discretion of the Superintendent
General.202 The council passed a motion here that “before any removal is made of individuals or
family [sic] from one band to another…the consent of the band who own that capital in common
first be obtained.”203 The council also protested how Band Funds were being managed in ways
that went beyond the Indian Act. In 1904, Stephen Elliot and J. W. Keeshig carried a motion that
advocated for all bands who had a trust or capital funds with “the mode of payment and length of
time to be approved of by the band and the Department” on “purely business-like
transactions.”204
The 1906 council minutes show particular concern with the controls the Superintendent
General and his agents were given over band funds. On the first day of the council, a delegate
demonstrated the type of concerns and frustrations that communities expressed due to the lack of
fiscal autonomy imposed by the law:
N.S: Fernwood, 2003), Shiri Pasternak, “The Fiscal Body of Sovereignty: To ‘Make Live’ in Indian
Country.” Settler Colonial Studies 6, no. 4 (2016): 317–38 and Hugh Shewell, “Enough to Keep Them
Alive”: Indian Welfare in Canada, 1873-1965 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004).
199
Points of Grievance Complained of at Sarnia, September 1860, LAC RG 10, Vol. 256, Reel C-12645,
pp. 153967-153973.
200
n.d.), 15.
201
This motion was lost. Ibid., 12-13.
202
203
Ibid.
204
Ibid., 9.
291
the Reserve …has recently been surveyed at a considerable cost. The Band, in Council,
had selected a surveyor, who was a capable man, and that he would do the work for
$273.00, but the Department selected a man whose salary was $5.00 per day and
expenses, the whole amounting to about $7.00 per day. The cost of the survey of the
Reserve in question was more than $600.00.205
As the council continued, the question of financial management continued to ignite frustrations.
Statements made demonstrated that “a general feeling of dissatisfaction was current owing to the
diminishing of Indian Moneys of funds of the several Bands represented.” 206 Delegates called
for more timely financial statements to be provided to Bands in Council, as the Auditor-
General’s report issued annually was “usually about a year after the closing of the accounts that
those financial statements appear.” 207 George Fisher and John L. Case (of the Chippewas and
Munceys of the Thames) attempted to carry a motion that the Department be required to provide
bands with “a financial statement of their receipts and expenditures,” and a more specific motion
struck a committee to set forth “the reasons why we are not satisfied with the management of the
Indian moneys” in relation to section 70. 208 This sweeping section of the law gave the Governor
in Council power over “moneys arising from the disposal of Indian lands, or property held or to
be held in trust for Indians, or timber on Indian lands or reserves, or from any other source for
the benefit of Indians,” in terms of its management, investment and payments. 209 The
committee’s report stated “dissatisfaction …from the decrease of their interest moneys, and not
being furnished by the Department of Indian Affairs with a detailed account of the cause and in
what channels the money has been expended.” 210 They recommended that a yearly financial
statement be provided to each Band, 211 and made clear that “considerable dissatisfaction arose”
205
206
Ibid., 8.
207
Ibid.
208
Ibid.
209
An Act to further amend the Indian Act, S.C. 1895, c. 35, s. 2.
210
211
Ibid.
292
from the fact that “the Council of the Band having no voice in rents and leases of lands” and a
motion was passed to instate the consent of the Band for any actions that the Superintendent took
under this section of the law.212 While they had accepted Indian Agents’ role in helping them
police aspects of behaviour they found troubling, the control that the government asserted over
their money and lands was clearly seen an overreach in jurisdiction.
5.2.3. Grand General Council Vision for Expanded Political

Participation in Canadian Society
Grand Council delegates articulated their visions of how to open pathways to
participation in Canadian civic and political life over these years, and further frustrations with
the Indian Act was voiced through delegates positions on enfranchisement and political
participation more broadly. Unsurprisingly, the removal of their ability to vote in Canadian
elections after 1898 (originally given through the Franchise Act of 1885) remained a sore point
of contention against the government, and motions were passed to restore this in 1894, 1900, and
1904, where they insisted that the vote “be restored to them with as little delay as possible.” 213
The council discussed other aspects of their relationship to Canadian political life in which
delegates expressed deep dissatisfaction with their current subjugated status under the Indian
Act.
Enfranchisement remained important in council debates, albeit with less controversy than
in the years examined in Chapter 2. In 1904 the Council carried a motion that the probationary
period was too long, and that “short and easy arrangements” should be made for enfranchisement
for those “who own capital and who want to be enfranchised…under one examination by the
212
Ibid., 12.
213
1894), 21, Minutes of the Sixteenth Grand Indian Council of the Province of Ontario, held upon the
Indian Reserve at Wikewemikong from the 7th to the 12th of June, 1900 (Wiarton, ON: Wiarton Canadian
Print, n.d.), 15, Minutes of the Eighteenth Grand Indian Council of Ontario, held upon the Saugeen
Indian Reserve from the 9th to the 13th of June, 1904 (Wiarton, ON: Printed at the Office of the Wiarton
Echo, n.d.), 7.
293
Indian Agent.”214 An almost identical motion was passed in 1906. 215 Perhaps this was another
way that the council saw having a local agent as being useful, narrowing the time frame and
bolstering administrative efficiency to ease the barriers that they understood Indian Status posed
to full political participation.
Criticisms of the government were levied in debates on enfranchisement processes, and

clearly the route to citizenship as laid out through the Indian Act was viewed as deeply flawed.
This is most evident in 1894 through debates on the mass enfranchisement clause that allowed a
band in council to permit all qualified band members who chose to do so to enfranchise (subject
to the same probationary period as individual enfranchisement). 216 Within these debates,
suspicions of government motives reveal that delegates did not view the government as acting in
their best interest. George Fisher (who was one of the delegates in favour of punitive state
measures, and had put forward motions to penalize deserting husbands, those who cut timber
without permission, and doubling jail time for prostitution-related charges), advanced a scathing
criticism of the government here. He viewed the government as the primary obstacle to his
community’s advancement, connecting the financial controls the council despised with
enfranchisement limitations. According to Fisher, the word “may” in the law meant “never”
when dealing with the government allowing communities to enfranchise. 217 He elaborated: “The
Government were masters of the Indians and had control of their money which they would like
to keep in their hands, and probably would like to keep things as they were at present, under their
thumb…Let us go out of bondage in a body; let there be no hanging back.”218 Fishers’ speech
214
215
216
On the decision of the Wyandots of Anderdon to collectively enfranchise, the only case of this
occurring, see Coel Kirkby “Paradises Lost? The Constitutional Politics of ‘Indian’ Enfranchisement in
Canada, 1857– 1900.” Osgoode Hall Law Journal (1960) 56, no. 3 (2020): 620.
217
1894), 21.
218
Ibid.
294
was met with cheers. Moses Kaikaik and George Henry were other delegates strongly in favour
of enfranchisement, with Kaikaik asking rhetorically “why do you send your children to school
and spend so much money to have them educated[?]… to become full citizens of the country and
have them fight the battles of the open world alongside the white population.” 219 John Henry
was less enthusiastic about mass enfranchisement, but was equally critical of the governments’
plans, as he found they would be placed “in no better position than they are now.” 220 Abner
Elliot elaborated on concerns that through the mass enfranchisement scheme, the poorest
community members would be left behind, without good land and without government support,
left to be cared for by their community members. 221 The council was critical of the limits placed
through citizenship, and they desired to free themselves on their own terms from the limitations
of the Indian Act in ways that they thought could strategically help their communities prosper.
The strongest articulation of the Council’s dissatisfaction with the Indian Act came in
1904, when they argued that their communities ought to be able to leave its confines at their will.
They put forth a broad vision for political participation, voting that any “advanced” bands be
vested with the power to “obtain a proclamation by the Governor in Council…exempting them
from the operations of such Section or Sections of that Act as they feel are unsuitable for Indians
219
Ibid., 22. Kaikaik’s full quote is “why do you send your children to school and spend so much money
to have them educated. That was evidence to show that you were [?] preparing them to become full
citizens of the country and have them fight the battles of the open world alongside the white population.
He felt glad when Mr. Elias withdrew his remarks. He saw men from Hagersville who could face open
competition in any capacity, but the stake of probation stopped them from moving out of the old groove.”
George Henry states: “that the rising generation were just as well educated as the average surrounding
whites and showed as much intelligence and ought to be placed on the same level as the rest of the
population of the country.”
220
Ibid. Henry’s full position in the minutes is as follows: “John Henry said that it was impossible for any
band to be enfranchised in a body as some delegates seemed to think. He was not at all in favour of
getting any such deeds as was contemplated to be given by the provisions of the “Indian Act.” They
would be placed in no better position than they were now; he did not see the improvement this change
would make. Having studied the matter thoroughly he had made up his mind that he would accept
nothing less than a free deed (Cheers). If he failed to obtain his rights in the way he was entitled he
would firmly stick to his old homestead. Cheers.”
221
Ibid., 22. As well as critiquing the law here, Elliot demonstrates historic leadership values of caring
for the whole community.
295
in an advanced state of civilization.”222 This was a massive refusal of Indian Act power over
their communities. Delegates also declared their desire to expand their political participation
through direct representation in Parliament, calling for another significant rearrangement of their
relationship to the Canadian government. F. Lamorandiere and Cephus Kahbuge (of Cape
Croker and Saugeen) successfully passed a motion that as Indigenous people did pay taxes, they
“suffer grave injustice intolerable to a free people of taxation without representation.” 223 Citing
the fact that the Parliament of New Zealand had granted representation to the Māori, they called
on the government to permit “one or more members of Parliament in proportion to [their]
numbers.”224 This was taken up again by the same two delegates in 1906, where they expressed
frustration and disappointment that the government had not acted “after being requested to do so
repeatedly by the several Grand Councils in years past,” and they again “beg to…urgently make
the same request in the hope of success.”225 Taken together, these demands show that the
Council wanted not only to be able to rid their communities of aspects of the Indian Act that
served no useful function for them, but also to broaden their ability to fully participate in
Canadian political life and to further advance their concerns in Parliament, an arena they likely
considered would have a much greater chance of political traction being gained for the issues
affecting their communities.226
If we take the political vision council delegates advocated in relation to the accommodations
that the council were willing to grant Indian Agents (around the enforcement of morality clauses
222
223
Ibid., 8. The Maōri were granted four seats in the New Zealand House of Representatives through the
224
1867 Maōri Representation Act. See Moon, Paul. “‘A Proud Thing to Have Recorded’: the Origins and
Commencement of National Indigenous Political Representation in New Zealand through the 1867 Māori
Representation Act.” Journal of New Zealand Studies, no. 16 (2013): 52–65.
225
226
There is no mention, as far as I have noted, in Grand Council minutes about participation in Provincial
Parliament.
296
and in other “protections” such as timbering), it becomes clear that the council was advocating
for much greater political autonomy for their communities and a limited role for Indian agents in
enforcing areas of the law they found difficult to enforce themselves. The above insistences on
financial autonomy, the ability to leave the Indian Act, and broad political participation including
voting as well as direct representation in Parliament outline the contours of their vision for
relationship with the settler state.
5.3. Conclusion
While accommodationist in their leanings, and willing to work within the strictures of the
Indian Act in many ways, to advance their vision of strict Christian Victorian morality that they
ascribed to, the council should not be understood as uncritically accepting the law overall. Far
from that, they insisted on their autonomy to choose how to arrange the best levels of education,
protection of resources, and control of family life and reserve properties in ways that they
thought would best benefit their communities. At times the Council was firmly aligned with the
restrictions placed on relationships, families, and morality that were imposed by the church and
the state, which today we recognize as having had devastating effects on the lives of Indigenous
women whose relationships and parenting were scrutinized, and those who suffered the violence
of arrest and incarceration because of other restriction in the law. However, the Grand General
Councils of this era should not be understood to be satisfied with being “under the thumb” (to
use George Fishers’ words) of the Department of Indian Affairs and Indian Agents.
There were of course great power imbalances between the Grand General Council and
the government, and whether the Grand General Council approved of law or policy was
ultimately irrelevant to the Department of Indian Affairs in their prerogative to have the Indian
Act become actionable. This chapter has demonstrated the important role played by Indian
Agents in actualizing the laws and policies of the Department of Indian Affairs. The investment
that the D.I.A. made both in having these men positioned on reserves and in shaping the law to
expand their jurisdiction over life on reserves is striking. Unlike the concern that officials
showed for Indigenous leaders’ approval of earlier measures such as enfranchisement that were
examined in Chapter 2, by the end of the nineteenth century the government was more interested
in having any local political power subsumed under Indian Agent control; instead of relying on
the political will of local leaders to bring the law to reserves, they invested in further actualizing
297
their control over the economies and exerting extensive controls over life there. This chapter has
also demonstrated that the Grand General Council did not hold a monopoly (despite their
ambitions otherwise) on cross-reserve political organizing. The United Bands movement shows
that Anishinaabeg communities were finding new ways to fight for their land, treaty, and hunting
rights that went beyond the jurisdictional struggles of the everyday workings of reserves and
went to the heart of the jurisdictional authority of law itself– one grounded in treaty law and
rights to the land originating in authority that long pre-dated settler law.
298
Conclusion
The Grand General Council continued to gather until 1936, and subsequently reconvened in 1946
taking a new name to become the Union of Ontario Indians. Council delegates continued to
engage with the changes to the law that were imposed on themselves and their communities
during the three decades after this study ends. Their membership numbers recovered from the
low point of the 1904 council, with slightly larger meetings becoming standard: for instance,
twenty-one delegates from six communities attended in 1910, thirty-three from twelve
communities in 1914.1 They remained largely cooperative with the Department of Indian Affairs
over the final decades of their existence. Whether this was an expression of Anishinaabe
diplomatic political practice, as Shields suggests,2 an outcome of their reliance on the
Department to approve the use of band funds for delegates to travel to council, or simply a belief
that the only strategy that could be effective under the deep paternalism and paralyzing controls
exerted by the Department of Indian Affairs was cooperation and gradual change, further
research into their twentieth century strategies is needed. Despite the government’s
acknowledgement of the Council’s activities and implicit support of their work through
approving funds for delegates to participate, the Department was unwilling to consider most of
their demands, responding by acknowledging and dismissing any recommendations they made.
As the council had long ceased making demands that truly challenged the Department’s
authority, the government had very little need to take their protest into consideration. The
Department, through the expansion of controls that were actualized by amendments to the Indian
Act, controlled life and politics on reserves in much stronger ways than they had when the Grand
1
Minutes of the Twenty First Grand General Indian Council, St. John the Baptist Parish Hall, Walpole
Island Reserve, June 14th, 1910 (Wallaceburg, ON: News Print, n.d.), Abstract of the Proceedings of
Grand General Indian Council of Ontario, June 16th, 1914, LAC RG10, vol. 2640, file 129-690-3.The
1914 council was attended by many delegates from communities who had been involved in the United
Bands Movement a decade earlier. Shields lists the number of communities in attendance at later Grand
General Councils as follows: twelve in 1924 at Sarnia, more than twenty in Chemong in 1926 and Garden
River in 1928, eleven in 1930, sixteen in 1934 and eighteen in 1936. Shields, “Anishinaabek Political
Alliance,” 138.
2
Shields, 137-138.
299
General Council first began to meet: it had no desire to cede any authority back to reserve
leadership.
Within their limited criticism of the government made after 1906, the Grand General
Council put forward demands that demonstrate remarkable continuity with positions that had
been articulated by the Council for decades. These demands show their continued desire for the
expansion of local jurisdiction over governance on reserves, a longstanding political strategy of
the Council. They also continued to press for greater political participation in Canadian politics:
for the vote to be reinstated, and for an Indigenous member of Parliament to be allowed by the
government– a person that they believed the Grand General Council should appoint. 3 In terms of
expanding their own local jurisdiction on reserves, they called for bands to have the authority to
hire schoolteachers, to authorize surveys of reserves and subdivision of lots, and to control
inheritance decisions. 4 Enfranchisement also remained a consistent priority: delegates made
repeated requests that probationary periods be struck from the law.5
New areas of contestation and resistance are also visible in the Council’s gatherings as
the government continued to expand its jurisdiction over reserves through the Indian Act. In
1911 an amendment known as the Oliver Act (named for Superintendent of Indian Affairs
Francis Oliver), allowed the government to appropriate reserves that were adjacent to towns of
8,000 people without consent. This was quickly and consistently rejected by subsequent
councils. A petition against the amendment was sent from the 1914 council, which challenged
3
Island Reserve, June 14th, 1910 (Wallaceburg, ON: News Print, n.d.), 8, Abstract of the Proceedings of
Grand General Indian Council of Ontario, June 16th, 1914, LAC RG10, vol. 2640, file 129-690-3,
Abstract of the Proceedings of the Grand General Indian Council of Ontario, October 2, 1917. LAC,
RG10, vol. 2640, file 129-690-3.
4
Island Reserve, June 14th, 1910 (Wallaceburg, ON: News Print, n.d.), 3-5.
5
Abstract of the Proceedings of Grand General Indian Council of Ontario, June 16th, 1914, LAC RG10,
vol. 2640, file 129-690-3, Abstract of the Proceedings of the Grand General Indian Council of Ontario,
October 2, 1917. LAC, RG10, vol. 2640, file 129-690-3.
300
the legitimacy of the law based on treaty obligations and histories of alliance after the War of
1812.6 The Grand General Council also expressed positions on women’s rights that diverged
from their nineteenth-century views. In 1928, they argued for giving women on reserves the
right to vote.7
A significant change in Grand General Council organizing in the twentieth century is that
they made efforts to coordinate with other Indigenous political organizations that arose during
these years. Norman Shields and E. Brian Titley examine some of these connections in their
work. One example is Henry Abetung (Grand General Council delegate from 1916 to 1928) who
founded the Union Council of Ontario Indians in 1926. This group researched and lobbied for
treaty rights in the Lake Huron region. 8 Although not directly connected to the Council itself,
Abetung’s movement provides an example of other political visions and collaborative political
action that were taken by Council delegates. The Grand General Council also sought to
coordinate with F. O. Loft’s League of Indians, inviting them to collaborate as a “unit of action”
for the advancement of tribes in Ontario after the Loft established the League in 1919. 9 In 1926,
they invited the League of Indians (or perhaps the Thunderwater movement) to their 1928
meeting, which ultimately did not occur but demonstrates their willingness to expand their
political circle.10 The government’s tolerance of the Grand General Council’s milder political
demands can be contrasted with their response to other movements who directly challenged their
authority. F. O. Loft was met with surveillance, an RCMP investigation and efforts to forcibly
enfranchise him.11 As Duncan Campell Scott noted in 1926, “There are several organizations
6
Abstract of the Proceedings of Grand General Indian Council of Ontario, June 16th, 1914, LAC RG10,
vol. 2640, file 129-690-3.
7
Shields, 135.
8
Shields, 127-128.
9
Shields, 125.
10
Shields, 125-126.
11
Shields, 127, Brian Titley, A Narrow Vision: Duncan Campbell Scott and the Adminsitration of Indian
Affairs in Canada (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1986): 94-109.
301
among the Indians of Ontario, some of these are endorsed by the Department: others are not.” 12
The last Grand General Council, which met in 1936, perhaps tested the limits of this
endorsement. Four delegates attended from much further afield: from Nova Scotia, New
Brunswick and eastern Quebec, and the Council renamed itself as the Grand General Indian
Council of Canada. That year, the Department ceased funding for delegates to travel to the
council. This was also the year that the Department underwent a change in administrative
structure, coming under the Department of Mines and Resources, and this change also affected
the willingness of D.I.A. officials to approve of band funds being spent on travel to Councils.
After a break in Council gatherings between 1936 and 1946, due in large part to the
Department cutting off funding for delegates to participate, the Grand General Council
reconvened at Parry Island to take up the work that they had always done– responding to the
government about the Indian Act. The government in 1946 had called on First Nations to present
their positions to a Joint Parliamentary Committee on Indian Affairs. This reassembled council,
also had links to broader-based political movements. Henry Jackson of Christian Island, who
had become the youngest Grand General Council president in 1919 and a vocal critic of the
Indian Act and treaty violations,13 initiated the assembly. Jackson was also the Secretary the
North American Indian Brotherhood lead by Andrew Paull which had been formed in 1945.14 In
his invitation to council, Jackson lists the purpose of the assembly as being to support the North
American Indian Brotherhood, and to organize representations to the government for the Joint
Parliamentary Committee. 15 After the council gathering in 1946 at Parry Island, member bands
made submissions to the Joint Committee.
These connections between the Grand General Council and other Indigenous political
organizations in the twentieth century confirms Sarah Nickel’s argument for the need to expand
12
Deputy Superintendent General of Indian Affairs D. C. Scott to Consul General John G. Foster,
November 4, 1925. LAC RG10, vol. 2641, file 129,690-3B, Cited by Shields.
13
E. Brian Titley, A Narrow Vision, p. 95.
14
Shields, 145. Patterson II, E.P.. "Andrew Paull." The Canadian Encyclopedia. Historica Canada.
Article published February 04, 2008; Last Edited December 16, 2013.
15
Shields, 145.
302
histories of Indigenous political movements to more precisely focus on the early twentieth
century and move away from the “White Paper Dominance” she describes. 16 This study makes
apparent, through the work of the Grand General Indian Council, a much longer history that
connects alliances between the Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabe, their respective alliances and
treaties with the Crown, the initial responses to the Indian Act by nineteenth-century Indigenous
leaders, and later negotiations with the law up to the Joint Committee as the Indian Act was
being re-evaluated in the 1940s. This was of course not an unbroken trajectory, or a unified
vision and the long history of the Grand General Council demonstrates the great diversity of
voices and political positions presented in council, as well as different communities’ rejection of
the Council’s positions on the Indian Act. As this dissertation has made clear, the Council did
not have a monopoly on Indigenous political organizing and was continually challenged by
communities and nations who chose not to participate in its gatherings, and by alternative cross-
reserve movements asserting Indigenous rights. However, the longstanding existence of a
political body that sought to engage with the Indian Act and other government legislation calls
for a re-evaluation of how the application of the law is understood to include the ways the law
was perceived, negotiated, and protested by Indigenous leaders over its long and deeply
repressive history.
As this dissertation has argued, the development of the Indian Act in nineteenth-century
Ontario is best understood as a series of jurisdictional struggles over various aspects of life on
reserves. These multiple struggles over aspects of the law, including resource regulation,
enfranchisement, electoral governance, inheritance, and the powers of Indian Agents,
demonstrate how both the Department of Indian Affairs and Grand General Council leaders
sought to expand their authority over local matters. These struggles show how the government
expanded the law and tightened its enforcement to make it more actionable. They also show the
terms on which Indigenous leaders rejected, negotiated, or accepted aspects of the law to try and
retain as much decision-making power at the local level as possible. This dissertation uses
16
Sarah Nickel, “Reconsidering 1969: The White Paper and the Making of the Modern Indigenous Rights
Movement,” The Canadian Historical Review, 100, 2 (2019): 223–238. https://doi.org/10.3138/chr.2018-
0082-2
303
jurisdiction as a frame of analysis to describe the terms on which these five key aspects of local
control were struggled over.
The first two chapters show how the authority of the Department of Indian Affairs to
enact statutory law that impinged on the sovereignty of Indigenous nations was protested by
them through council. Rearrangements in the relationship of alliance with the Crown that
historically affirmed this sovereignty took place through the government's imposition of
jurisdiction over resources on Manitoulin and the Lake Huron region, as well as through their
subsequent efforts to control local governance and membership status through the Gradual
Enfranchisement Act in 1869. These chapters also outline the developing network of the Grand
General Council that was premised on histories of alliance between Anishinaabe communities
and between Anishinaabek and Haudenosaunee nations. These councils demonstrate a clear
rejection of government attempts to infringe on their local jurisdictional authority in questions of
resource regulation, and later through attempts to impose restrictions on local governance.
Haudenosaunee positions against this imposition on their sovereignty remained consistent and
they ceased participation in council after 1882, as some Anishinaabe leaders were more willing
to engage with the law. However, in later councils, Anishinaabe conceptions of jurisdiction,
where local councils were understood to be the appropriate decision-making bodies in decisions
on whether to accept the law or not, are clear within the later Council deliberations explored in
the second chapter.
Chapter Three further contextualizes the more accommodationist faction of the Grand
General Council and their willingness to engage with the governance stipulations of Indian
Advancement Act. Their focus on local jurisdiction over decisions over whether to accept the
law is again central here, and Peter E. Jones was instrumental in having the law accepted in
council based on his insistence that the decision to accept it would remain a local decision.
However, this chapter also shows intergenerational links between this faction of the Council and
their father’s generation who were centrally involved in the Methodist church and whose ideas
around codifying local law based on Anishinaabe principles should be seen as an influence on
their ideas of the possibilities of accepting settler law. However, as I make clear through
examining the changes to governance legislation through the Indian Act and Indian Advancement
304
Act, the possibilities for the operation of local sovereignty had been greatly limited by the
government by this later era.
Chapters Four and Five both outline ways that the Department of Indian Affairs
expanded its jurisdictional authority over decision-making and law enforcement on reserves.
The DIA assumed control over approving wills to more tightly control reserve land, a power that
was in practice largely delegated to Indian Agents. This increased surveillance of reserve
resident’s personal lives, an intrusion that disproportionately affected women. Through this
imposition, band councils lost the legal authority to approve wills– an area of local jurisdiction
that had long been argued for at the Grand General Council and continued to be articulated into
the twentieth century. The jurisdiction of women, who traditionally held authority over family
decisions and respectively over water and water resources and land in Anishinaabe and
Haudenosaunee communities, was deeply undermined through the imposition of inheritance laws
through the Indian Act, and women found various strategies to counter these impositions to
safeguard their property and families.
The final chapter describes the expansion of Indian Agent jurisdiction through the many
amendments to the Indian Act between 1880 and 1906. These amendments expanded their
jurisdiction through their roles as justices of the peace, through the authority given to them to
enforce tighter controls on Indigenous movement, as well as through deeply repressive
amendments to the law that outlawed ceremonies and made schooling mandatory. During this
time, the Grand General Council was increasingly accommodationist in their approach to state
law. They were willing to accept the authority of Indian Agents to enforce prohibition and
morality provisions in the law. However, their broader political vision included greater band
authority over education, monitoring Indian Agents’ appointments, and giving bands the ability
to opt out of the Indian Act entirely. They were also not the only Anishinaabe cross-reserve
political organization during this era, and wider support for the United Bands Movement
demonstrates greater interest in focusing broad-based efforts on hunting and treaty rights.
Understanding these multiple struggles over aspects of the application and enforcement
of the Indian Act in nineteenth century Ontario as contestations over jurisdiction helps to make
clear both how Indigenous laws of treaty and alliance were called on to assert sovereignty as the
305
Indian Act deeply undermined this, as well as to understand the strategies of 19 th century
Indigenous leaders who attempted to widen their areas of jurisdiction under the Indian Act itself.
Ultimately, though, accepting to be under the delegated jurisdiction of the federal government to
negotiate further rights was a strategy that ultimately failed the Grand General Council in their
project of expanding and strengthening local authority through arguing for greater local
jurisdictional controls. The federal government was simply not willing to respect these leaders’
insistences that they knew what was best for their communities under the extreme paternalism of
the law. But as this dissertation has shown, Anishinaabe individuals, bands, leaders and inter-
reserve Councils continued to find ways to actualize and insist on their right to govern
themselves without paternalistic government interference.
306
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Appendix 1: Delegates to the Grand General Council
All community names, delegate names, and titles appear as they are printed Grand General
Council Minutes. The exception to this is for the 1876 council, where only the names of
communities are included from a document contained in the RG10 files of the Library and
Archives of Canada. Names of delegates appear in the same order that they appear in the original
documents.
1870: June 10-20, Six Nations
Rama
J. B. Angelskin
Rev. John Jacobs
Andrew Jacobs
St. Francis
Chief Jean Harniss

Chief Solomon Benedik
Muncy of the Thames
Charles Halfmoon
Wm. J. Waddelove
John Wampum
Alderville
Rev. John Sunday

John Sunday
Jacob Storm
Peter Crow
Rev. George Blaker
Rev. H. P. Chase
Rev. Alan Salt
Chippewas of the Thames
Chief John Henry

Joseph Fisher
Joseph Fox
Sarnia Reserve
326
327
Chief Nicholas Plain

William Wawanosh
Jonas Henry
John Sumner
Oneidas of Muncey Town
Moses Brown
Augustus Cornelius
William White
Rev. Abram Sickles
Henry Antone
John Sickles
Cornelius Island
William Doxstater
Lake of Two Mountains
Louis Kanarakueyate
Basil Otsik
Caughnawaga
Louis Shatekintun
Joseph Taiorontiotee
St. Regis
Peter Kauearatiron
Wadyans
Saugeen
Chief Henry Medwayosh

John Kadekaguen
Joseph James
John Kabbage
Cape Croker
Peter Jones
Walpole Island
William N. Fisher
John Natawash
328
Rice Lake
M. G. Paudash
John Rice
Sauble
James Johnston
Kettle Point
Adam Shaberahuon
George Munidounce
Bay of Quinte
W. J. W. Hill
J. Claus
Joseph Pim
Thomas Green
James Brant
Snake Island
Chief George Charles

James Asquod
Mississaugas of New Credit
David Sawyer
Chief George King
Isaac B. Henry
James Chehock
John Sterling
George Henry
Moravians of the Thames
Philip Jacot
John Peter
Six Nations
W. J. Simcoe Kerr
Tekarihogea
N. G. Burning
John Smoke Johnson
James Givens
329
G. H. M. Johnson
Isaac Hill
David Hill
Jacob Hill
Isaac Lewis
P. Burning
David Carpenter
David Hill
John Carpenter
J. Seneca Johnson
Joseph Snow
Elijah Johnson
P. John
John Cayuga
John General
John Wampuw
Joseph Porter
William Jacobs
Isaac Jacobs
D. J. Hill
1874: June 25-July 2, Sarnia
Officers:
President: Rev. Henry P. Chase (Munceytown)

1st Vice-President and Treasurer: Chief Wm. Wawanosh (Sarnia)
2nd Vice-President: Chief Peter Edmund Jones (Brantford)
3rd Vice-President: Chief John Hill (Grand River)
General Secretary: Rev. John Jacobs (Sarnia)
General Interpreters: Chief G. H. M. Johnson (Grand River), Chief John Elliot (New Credit),
Joseph Fisher (Munceytown)
Sarnia
Head Chief William Wawanosh

2nd Chief Nicholas Plain
2nd Chief John Sumner
2nd Chief James Menace
2nd Chief Wilson Jacobs
Moses Henry
Silas Waubong
Andrew Nageshig
Benjamin White
Elijah George
Joseph Pedahtig
Joseph Wawanosh
330
Sauble
Chief Thomas Johnson

John Wolfe
James Johnson
James Wandahaega
Kettle Point
Chief Isaac Shawnoo

David Sawpaw
Adam Sawpaw
David Sawyer
Louis Petahnequot
Thomas George
Rama
Chief J. Benson
Nanigishkung
Rev. John Jacobs
General Secretary Andrew Jacobs
Walpole Island
Chief Alex Johnson

Chief Petuhwegeshig
Charles Kiyoshk
Joshua Grownbird
William Kookoosh
Daniel Sands
Philip Kiyoshk
John W. Sands
James A. Elgin
George Naggs
John Chawmie
James Shawanoonce
David Kiyoshk
Pewaumoo
Abdegoonaby
Meesheekoonumum
Snake Island
Chief George McCue

James Asquabe
Mud Lake
331
Chief Joseph Whetung

Jacob Jacobs
Alnwick
Rev. H. P. Chase
Rev. Alan Salt
New Credit
Head Chief Dr. Peter E. Jones

Chief John Elliot
James Cheechock
John Sterling
James Tobeco
Lawrence Herkimer
Chippewas of Muncytown
Chief John Tomego

Chief Joseph Fox
John Henry
Joseph Fisher
Joseph Waucaush
Nelson Beaver
Peter Brigham
George Miskokomon
Abel Waucaush
Elijah Miskokomon
John Chicken
John T. Waucaush
Munsees of Munceytown
Chief Thomas Snake

W. J. Waddilove
Nelles Timothy
P. [F.?] E. Wampum
Charles Halfmoon
Moraviantown
Chief Frederick Jacobs

James Snake
Joshua Jacobs
John B. Wampum
332
Saugeen
Simpson Quakegeshig
Scugog
William Marsden
Charles McCue
Cape Croker
Chief P. J. Kegedoonce
Caughnawaga
Chief Joseph Sky
Oneidas of Oneidatown
Chief Moses Brown

Rev. Abram Sickles
John Sickles
Peter Powlis
Baptiste Skyler
Daniel Kennedy
Augustus Cornelius
Grand Council Representatives
Dr. Oronhyatekha, President

Chief Jacob General, Vice-President
Chief Jacob General, Secretary
Cayugas of Grand River
Cayugas of Grand River
Chief William Jacobs

David John
William Bucke
John Fishcarrier
George Key
P. C. Garlow
Isaac Davis
Six Nations of the Grand River
Chief G. H. M. Burning
Chief N. H. Burning
333
John Carpenter
James Givens
Chief John Hill
David Hill Jacket
Elijah Vickers
Jonas Froman
David Hill Seneca
David Thomas
Richard Hill
Moses Hill
Joseph Henry
John General, Sen’r.
Henry Cleneh
Joseph Porter
John General, Jun’r.
George Bomberry
Michael Anthony
James Jamieson
George Styors
William Martin
Wm. Wedge
Peter Garlow
Anthony Miller
Alexander Smith
David Hill
1876: July 12, Saugeen (RG10, Vol. 1994, File 6829)
Communities present:
Rama, Saugeen, Walpole Island, Sauble, Snake Island, Georgina Island, Scugog, Garden River,
Muncytown, Cape Croker, New Credit, Alnwick, Rice Lake, Sarnia, Christian Island,
Shawanaga
1882: September 13th to 18th, New Credit
Officers:
President: Chief Samson Green (Deseronto)

1st Vice-President: James Styers
2nd Vice-President: Solomon James
334
Secretary-Treasurer: Chief P. E. Jones, M. D. (Hagersville)
Manitoulin Island Reserve
Francis Medosaga, Chief

William Genoshameng, Chief
Chas. Wahbeghighik, Chief
Thos. Genoshameg, Chief
Joseph Tagewenene, Chief
Louis Odjig, Chief
Louis Mendowahbe, Delegate
Alex Wawashkech, Delegate
Vincint Wahkegeghik, Delegate
L. Meshepeneshemah, Delegate
Joseph Agowesay, Delegate
Louis King, Delegate
Saugeen Reserve
Hy. H. Madwayosh, Chief

David Root, 2nd Chief
M.B. Madwayosh, Delegate
John George, Delegate
Fred Waubegee, Delegate
Rev. Wm. Walker, Delegate
John Kewanquon, Delegate
Muncy Reserve
Joseph Fisher, Chief

John Chicken, Chief
John Henry, Chief
Abel Waucaush, Chief
Job Fisher, Chief
Thomas Fisher, Chief
Peter Brigham, Chief
John French, Chief
Sarnia Reserve
Nicholas Plain, Chief

Joseph Wawanosh, Chief
Wm Wawamosh, Chief
Robert George, Chief
Albert Rodd, Chief
James Menass, Chief
Walpole Island Reserve

335
J. Pah-tah-quong, Chief
James Elgin, Chief
James Saugee, Chief
Henry Naggs, Chief
Mo-ke-we-nah, Chief
Joseph Kayoshk, Chief
Cape Croker Reserve
Wm. McGregor, Chief

Wm. Angus, Chief
Fred Lamorandiere, Chief
Abner Elliot, Chief
Wm. Waukay, Chief
Bay of Quinte
Samson Green, Chief

Abrm. P. Brant, Chief
Jas. P. Brant, Chief
Six Nations Reserve
A. G. Smith, Chief
Josiah Hill, Chief
N. H. Burning, Chief
John Fraser, Chief
Elijah Johnson, Chief
Peter Powless, Chief
John Carpenter, Chief
Seth Newhouse, Chief
Richard Hill, Chief
Wm. Wedge, Chief
Moses Hill, Chief
David Hill Sawyer, Chief
Nicodemus Porter, Chief
Joseph Henry, Chief
Henry C. Clench, Chief
George Key, Chief
James Styers, Chief
John A. Beaver, Chief
Delawars of Grand River
Michael Anthony, Chief

Rev. A. Anthony, Chief
Wm. Monture, Chief
336
John Monture, Chief
Oneidas of the Thames
Rev. A. Sickles, Chief

Moses Brown, Chief
John Brown, Chief
Peter Powless, Chief
John Sickles, Chief
Louis Island, Chief
Sauble Reserve
Thomas Johnson, Chief

John Johnson, Chief
Alderville Reserve
Peter Crow, Chief

Thos. Marsden, Chief
Wm. Maker, Chief
Muncys of the Thames
Wm. Waddilove, Chief

James Huff, Chief
John Nicholas, Chief
Messissaugas of the Credit
Dr. P. E. Jones, Chief

C. M. Herkimer, Chief
David Sawyer, Ex-Chief
John Sterling, Chief
Jas. Tobicoe, Chief
Hiram Tobicoe, Chief
Ed. Spencer, Chief
John Cheechock, Chief
Charles Wesley, Chief
Jas. A. Wood, Chief
Wm. Elliot, Chief
Alonzo McDougall, Chief
Jas. Laforme, Sr, Chied
Peter Sault, Chief
George Henry, Chief
Alf. A. Jones, Chief
Wm. Sterling, Chief
337
Shawanago Reserve
Solomon James, Chief
Parry Island Reserve
Peter Negiss, Chief
South Bay Manitoulin Reserve
Chas. Bigcanoe, Chief
Rama Reserve
Rev. John Jacobs, Chief
Scugog Reserve
Chaney Johnson, Chief
Kettle Point Reserve
Isaac Shawahnoo, Chief
1884: September 10-15, Cape Croker
Officers:
President: Chief Wm. B. McGregor (Cape Croker)

1st Vice President: Chief Joseph Fisher
2nd Vice President: Chief Solomon James
Secretary and Treasurer: P. E. Jones, M. D. (Hagersville, Ontario)
Corresponding Secretary for Northern Indians: F. Lamorandiere (Cape Croker)
Interpreter: Able Waucosh
Chippewas of Nawash
Wm. B. McGregor, Chief
Wm. Angus, Chief
F. Lamorandiere, Secretary
Abner Elliot, Delegate
Mississaugas of the Credit
P. E. Jones, M. D., Chief

338
Chas. M. Herkimer, Chief

Wm. C. N. Elliot, Delegates
Jas. A. Wood, Delegate
Munceys of the Thames
Scobie Logan, Chief

John Nicholas, Delegate
Pottawattamies of Muncey
James Fox, Head Chief
Chippewas of Saugeen
Hy. H. Madywayosh, Chief

John Kadahgagewon, Chief
Wm. Walker, Delegate
John George, Delegate
Ojibways of Parry Island
Peter Megis, Chief

James Paguhmegahbowh, Delegate
Ojibways of Shawanaga
Solomon James, Head Chief
Mississaugas of Scugog
Chancey Johnson, Delegate
Ojibways of Lake Superior
Jos. Na-bah-na-go-[chung?], Chief

Mash-ke-yosh, Chief
Ed. Na-bah-na-go-chung, Delegate
Peter Ka-ga-yosh, Delegate
Ojibways of Garden River
Augustin Shingwauk, Head Chief

Buhg-wa-ge-nene, Chief
Jacob Thompson, Chief
John Augustin, Secretary

339
John Henry, Head Chief

John French, Chief
Thos. Fisher, Delegate
Geo. Fisher, Delegate
Abel Waucaush, Delegate
Chippewas of Kettle Point
Isaac Shawonoo, Chief
Ojibways of Lake Huron
John Nahwegabow, Chief

Paul She-nau-guong, Delegate
Ojibways of South Manitoulin Island
Wm. Kenooshamag, Head Chief

Alex Pelkey, Delegate
Lewis Odjig, Delegate
Anth. Agowesag, Delegate
Joseph Sigenock, Delegate
Chippewas of Rama
Joseph B. Naneshkong, Chief
Mississaugas of Alnwick
M. Chubb, Head Chief

Rev. Geo. Blaker, Delegate
Mississaugas of Georgina Island
Charles Bigcanoe, Head Chief
Nahnahbedabing Reserve
Jos. Jaquo, Sr., Head Chief

Jos. Jaquo, Jr., Delegate
Non-treaty Indians of Saugeen
John Kewaguam, Delegate
Honorary Members
340
1888: October 3-8, Caradoc Indian Reserve
Officers:
President: Chief Joseph Fisher, Caradoc Reserve

1st Vice President: Chief John French, Caradoc Reserve
2nd Vice President: Chief Henry Madwayosh, Saugeen Reserve
Secretary: Chief Scobie Logan, Caradoc Reserve
Treasurer: Chief John Chicken, Caradoc Reserve
Interpreters: Chief Able Waucosh, Caradoc Reserve and Elijah Ninham
Mississaugas of the Credit
P. E. Jones, M.D.
Jas. A. Wood, Chief
W. Sterling, Delegate
A. Jones, Delegate
Chippewas of Walpole Island
Joseph Osaugee, Delegate
Chippewas of Saugeen
Henry H. Madwayosh, Chief

Waldron Elias, Delegate
Oneidas of the Thames
Washington Doxtator, Chief

John Hill, Chief
John Brown, Chief
William White, Chief
Moses Brown, Chief
Elijah Ninham, Delegate

John French, Chief,
John Chicken, Chief
Able Waucosh, Chief
Moses Waucosh, Chief
341
John Henry, Delegate

George Fisher, Delegate
Samuel French, Delegate
Munceys of the Thames
W. J. Waddilove, Chief
Scobie Logan, Delegate
Charles Timothy, Chief
Honorary Members
1894: October 16-20, Moravian Reserve
Officers:
President: Albert Tobias, Moraviantown

1st Vice President: A. A. Jones, New Credit
2nd Vice President: John Henry, Muncey
Secretary: F. Lamorandiere, Cape Croker
Assistant Secretary: Scobie Logan, Caradock
Treasurer: Daniel McDougal, New Credit
Financial Secretary: Josiah J. Wilson, Caradock
Cape Croker
W. B. McGregor, Chief
Abner Elliot, Chief
F. Lamorandiere, Delegate
Moses Kaikaik, Delegate
Walpole Island
Joseph White, Chief

Reverend W. A. Elias
James Williams
Joshua Greenbird
Saugeen
H. W. Madwayosh, Chief
John George, Chief
342
Richard Noon, Delegate
Pottawatamies of Walpole Island
Askhebee, Chief
L. Dodge, Delegate
New Credit
D. McDougal, Chief Counc’r

John Chechock, Delegate
Alfred A. Jones, Delegate
Peter Sault, Delegate
Joseph Chubb, Delegate
George Henry, Delegate
John Henry
John French
James Fox
George Fisher
Alfred Tobias, Chief

John R. Nosh
Washington Jacobs
C.M. Stonefish
Muncies of the Thames
Scobie Logan, Chief

John Nicholas, Delegate
[Nebus] F. Timothy, Delegate
Josiah J. Wilson, Delegate
Chippewas of Sarnia
William Jacobs, Chief

James Menass, Chief
Potawatamies of Caradock
Noah Fox
1900: June 7-12, Indian Reserve at Wikwemikong
Officers:
343
President: Chief W. B. McGregor (Cape Croker)

1st Vice President: Chief Wm. Wawanosh (Sarnia)
2nd Vice President: Chief Peter Megiss (Parry Island)
Secretary-Treasurer: F. Lamorandiere (Cape Croker)
Assistant Secretary: F. W. Jacobs (Sarnia)
Cape Croker
Chief W. B. McGregor
F. Lamorandiere
Moses Kaikaik
Abner Elliot
James Solomon
Saugeen
Chief Thomas Solomon

Henry Ritchie
Peter Henry
Cephus Kahbuge
Sarnia
Chief William Wawanosh

Wilson Jacobs
Stony Point
Silas Wahbenung
Elijah George
Kettle Point
Jeffery Bri[sette]
Saganook
Chief Gabo[way]
Parry Island
Peter Megis
White Fish Lake
Joseph Kahpayalte
Joseph [Rins]
344
Christian Island
Thomas Peters
David Assance
William King
Shegoyenday
James Bahbewash
South Bay
David Shawanda
Thomas Gishkahkon
Grondine
J. B. Gabamachewong
J. B. Flamand
Wekwemikong
Chief Joseph Ozawanimiki

Joseph Peltier
William Genoshameg
Isaac Shawana
Charles Wahbegeshig
John Gaboner
Vincent Wahkegeshig
Wahnahtabung
Angus Anderson
Joseph Jacquo
Alexander Jam[?]
Joseph Fisher
George Fisher
Lucius Henry
1904: June 9-13, Saugeen Indian Reserve
Officers:
President: James Solomon (Cape Croker)

1st Vice President: Peter Henry (Saugeen)
2nd Vice President: J. W. Keeshig (Cape Croker)
345
Secretary-Treasurer: F. Lamorandiere (Cape Croker)

Assistant Secretary: Cephus Kabeege
Cape Croker
James Solomon
Stephen Elliot
J. W. Keeshig
F. Lamorandiere
Saugeen
Solomon Mendowab
David Root
Henry Ritchie
Peter Henry
C. Kahbuge
Wekwemikong
Joseph Pettier
Wm. Genoshameg
1906: June 12-15, Saugeen Indian Reserve
Officers:
President: Albert Tobias (Moraviantown)

1st Vice President: Henry Ritchie (Saugeen)
2nd Vice President: Jas. Solomon (Cape Croker)
Secretary-Treasurer: Jno. L. Case (Muncey)
Cape Croker
James Solomon
Stephen Elliot
J. W. Keeshig
F. Lamorandiere
Geo. Fisher
Johnson Grosbeck
Myles McDougald
Francis Deleary
346
Munsees of the Thames
Silas Logan
N. F. Timothy
John L. Case
Walter Tobias
Albert Tobias
Saugeen
Chief W. H. Madwayosh
Henry Ritchie
Wm. Cameron
Cephus Kahbuge
Christian Island
Chief J. Monague
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Indian Act in On, 1850-1906

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Indian Act in On, 1850-1906

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Act to Control: The Grand General Indian Council, The

Department of Indian Affairs, and the Struggle over the

A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements

© Copyright by Chandra Murdoch 2023

Act to Control: The Grand General Council, The Department of

recommendations. Representing various communities, nations, and legal frameworks, the

government in their efforts to entrench control over reserve communities, as well as

over local jurisdiction.

diplomacy which first helped me understand the stakes of nineteenth-century politics.

My writing significantly improved through workshops with other graduate students,

Table of Contents ........................................................................................................................... ix

List of Tables ................................................................................................................................ xii

List of Maps ................................................................................................................................. xiii

List of Appendices ....................................................................................................................... xiv

The Grand General Council ......................................................................................................18

Chapter Overview .....................................................................................................................39

1.1. Government Assertion of Control Over Resources: From Protection of Lands to

1.1.1. Commissions of Inquiry, Financial Restructuring in the Department of Indian

1.1.2. The Legal and Administrative Contexts of “Protection” .......................................59

1.2.1. Resource Contestations on Manitoulin Island .......................................................66

1.3. Conclusion .........................................................................................................................85

Chapter 2 Council, Delegation, Deliberation: Enfranchisement, State Law, and Indigenous

2.1. Changes in Law and Constitutional Change ......................................................................92

2.2.2. Enfranchisement at the 1870 Grand General Council .........................................121

2.6. Conclusion .......................................................................................................................157

Chapter 3 Methodists and Municipal Codes: Southern Ontario Christian: Anishinaabe

3.1. Early Methodist Networks: Education, Religion, and Politics ........................................162

3.2. Municipal Governance for Reserves: Government Legislation .......................................173

3.4. Peter E. Jones and the Indian Advancement Act .............................................................186

3.5. Conclusion .......................................................................................................................192

4.1. Inheritance Law and the Grand General Council ............................................................201

4.2. Inheritance and Band Councils ........................................................................................209

4.3. Women and Inheritance ...................................................................................................214

4.3.1. Women’s Jurisdiction ..........................................................................................215

4.3.2. Women’s Actions to Maintain Property ..............................................................220

4.5. Conclusion .......................................................................................................................233

5.1.1. Changes to Indian Affairs After 1880 ..................................................................243

5.1.2. Amendments to the Indian Act ............................................................................251

5.1.3. Indian Agents as Justices of the Peace .................................................................253

5.1.4. Indian Agents, Timber, and Trespass Violations .................................................257

5.1.5. Alcohol Restrictions.............................................................................................262

5.1.1. Hayter Reed’s Influence on the Indian Act ..........................................................266

5.2.2. Jurisdiction Beyond Indian Agents ......................................................................288

5.2.3. Grand General Council Vision for Expanded Political Participation in

5.3. Conclusion .......................................................................................................................296

Appendix 1: Delegates to the Grand General Council.................................................................326

Jurisdiction as a frame of analysis is central to my argument. Understanding the

accommodationist approach of some delegates is surprising from a contemporary perspective–

Anishinaabe History and Alliances with the Haudenosaunee and

The Grand General Council

This study adds to the history of Indigenous political organizing in Canada by

J. Kēhualani Kauanui’s Paradoxes of Hawaiian Sovereignty: Land, Sex, and the

The Indian Act and Department of Indian Affairs Policy in the

The historical narrative of Department of Indian Affairs policy development is entwined

As Haitian historian Michel-Rolph Trouillot concisely outlines, how archives are

Ontario, 1820-1950” (PhD Diss. Université du Québec à Montréal, 2011), 32-35.

Theoretical Influences: Jurisdiction, Indigenous Law, and Legal

Jurisdiction has proven to be a particularly productive way to analyze the interactions

In Chapter One I examine contestations over resource jurisdiction on Manitoulin Island

Chapter Two examines a dramatic era in the expansion of assimilationist legislation

1.1. Government Assertion of Control Over Resources:

A short overview of the Department of Indian Affairs financial and administrative

1.1.1. Commissions of Inquiry, Financial Restructuring in the