Quote:
“Negotiated in London under British law, the transfer paved the way for Canada to populate the region with its settlers and to act as the territory’s primary political authority. In exchange for transferring these rights, the Company was paid £300,000 and received a one-twentieth of the land of the “fertile belt” in this newly Canadian territory… This claim reaffirmed the imperial logic of the day that Indigenous assertions of territoriality were secondary to European claims of sovereignty.” Page 46
The idea that Canada exercises exclusive jurisdiction over the “Canadian West” is premised largely on a fantasy that Europeans found a continent full of primitive peoples who receded from the advance of a politically sophisticated civilization, rather than complex Indigenous polities with intricate political institutions capable of controlling political events in their territories.” Page 47
“Thus, for Canada to be able to sweep aside pre-existing Indigenous political authority, it must rely on a fantasy of sovereignty, predicated on an inherent inferiority of Indigenous political formations that could easily be unhinged from their territories and replaced by foreign systems of power. Yet, long after the arrival of French and British empires to the continent, Indigenous peoples retained control of the region.”page 47 – 48
Discovery is a European legal convention that allowed European empires to imagine possession of “new” territories already inhabited by other people, establishing property and sovereignty over lands previously unknown to European empires… Their land was considered terra nullius, “legally ‘vacant’ and ‘unused,’ and open to appropriation by Europeans.” Page 48
“From an Indigenous standpoint, however, Canada’s claim was just as fantastical as the Company’s, since it was entirely divorced from the reality of Indigenous political authority as it existed in the North-West. A few fur trade posts, regardless of who operated them, could not create a broad claim to the territory superior to those who lived there—or more important the right to re-populate it with settlers. Nor could these claims compete with Indigenous political independence, which had very different standards of territorial legitimacy.” Page 60
“Despite its shortcomings, the Canadian fantasy of discovery in the North-West remained a powerful narrative for Canada’s increasing settler-colonial drive. It allowed all manner of rationalization for annexation, and even provided rationale for the belief that the territory was already part of Canada and thus under the scope of Canadian government.” Page 61 – 62
“Even though the transfer agreement satisfied British and Canadian legal necessities, the transfer’s legislative package did little to transform actual political authority in the lands it claimed to annex, or the opinions of the people who lived there. They were, in reality, unilateral acts by a foreign power, which at the time had little substantive effect on still-independent Indigenous peoples.” Page 66
“In general, Indigenous people did not recognize the legitimacy of the Charter, the transfer agreement, or other unilateral pronouncements of governance by outsiders. They looked instead to their negotiated agreements— the treaties and the Manitoba agreement between the Provisional Government and Ottawa—that established a Canadian presence in the region.” Page 66
“However, from a perspective based on justice, settler and military control of a region does little to establish the legitimacy of a government. It is in this sense that the series of events described above does not adequately explain how Britain, the Company, or Canada gained possession and political control over the North-West. Presuming that discovery underwrote British sovereignty and land title, the Crown and Canada consistently acted as if they were already the sole lords and proprietors of a region controlled by Indigenous polities, and indeed this mentality was what justified Canadian settlement and even military occupation on Indigenous lands. ” Page 68