16The Quest for Secure Land Tenure

In 1831, Peter Jones wrote to the British secretary of state for the colonies on behalf of the Indians of Upper Canada:

I wish to say something about our lands. My Indian brethren feel much in their hearts on this subject. We see that the country is getting full of white people, and that the hunting will soon be destroyed . . . It is our desire that whatever lands may be marked out for us, to keep the right and title ourselves, and not be permitted to sell them, not to let any white man live on them unless he is recommended by our council, and gets a licence from our father the governor. But we wish to feel that we stand on our own lands that our fathers left us.¹

Jones had visited many Indigenous communities and understood that their hold on their lands was exceedingly precarious. In 1828, he learned the Credit Mississaugas had only 200 acres of unceded land and that their village was not part of that holding, even though the Mississaugas had tried to put their lands in trust for their children forever. In 1828, he visited the Mississaugas of Scugog and commented in his journal: “The Schoogog Indians in surrendering up their lands to the Government, made no reservation, as other tribes did; and therefore were dependent on the Government for the land on which they dwelt, and in which they laid the dead.”² He was also aware of the Haldimand Tract land issues, as he had spent several years living with his father’s Mohawk family at Grand River. He had been given explicit direction by the Anishinaabek of Lake Simcoe and Matchedash to speak on their behalf.

Jones’ letter was forwarded to the lieutenant-governor. Sir John Colborne did not consider Indigenous peoples sufficiently advanced in colonial ways to be granted individual deeds for their lands: “I strongly recommend that in their present state His Majesty’s Government should continue to act as their guardian.” He stated that the lands set apart for them should be protected by the government “for the benefit of the Indians and their posterity.” Large tracts of land had been reserved “by recorded agreement,” and “they are all confident that their lands will never be taken from them.”³

But Indigenous peoples were clearly not as confident in the security of their land tenure as Colborne believed. In 1832, T.G. Anderson sent an urgent message to Givins that a messenger from the Mississaugas of the Credit had delivered the following message to the Chippewas of Coldwater and the Narrows: “I have been sent by our Chiefs to request the immediate attendance of your principle men at the Credit—a large assemblage of Indians will be there for the purpose of making some arrangements relative to their present situation. I am not at liberty to tell you what the subject is—that you will hear when you get there,—All I can say at present is, that we are poor and miserable, we have very little Land, in a few Years our children will not have wood to burn.”⁴

Assance and the Potagunasees asked Anderson if the governor had ordered this Council or been informed of it. On being told that he had not, they said they wouldn’t go or have any connection to it unless “their Father at York” wished them to attend. This decision likely reflected their dependent position, as they were still waiting for houses to be built. Givins replied to Anderson that the lieutenant-governor desired Anderson “to acquaint the Indians under your superintendence, that they have done perfectly right in not going to the Council at the Credit, that they well know that at the Credit, the Indians have more land secured to them than they can cultivate, and that the Tribes under your charge will also have as much land as they require, and that it will be duly set apart for their use and finally that all applications from their own Chiefs will be fully attended to without assembling at a distance from their homes.”⁵

Yet, in September 1833, Chiefs Musquakie, Assance, and Taugaiwinini met with the lieutenant-governor’s representative and called for deeds to their lands. Chief Musquakie stated: “Our Father [lieutenant-governor] likewise promised on your return from Coldwater to have two Deeds made out for our Lands one to made out on Parchment and the other on Common paper to be lodged in our hands before the Cold weather begins.”⁶ Chief Assance explicitly linked the fulfillment of government promises to his people’s commitment to the reserve: “Father, you saw on the road our houses and our Lands I do not wish to abandon them I wish to improve them. Father if you give us what you have promised us our young Men will be very glad and will work hard.”⁷

The precariousness of their tenure was driven home by the arrival at Coldwater of Mississaugas from the Lake Scugog area. The Mississaugas had been forced to relocate after settlers depleted game and a miller dammed the Scugog River, raising the water level by ten feet and flooding wild rice beds on Lake Scugog. In 1830, some Mississaugas followed Chief Jacob Crane to Mud Lake (present-day Curve Lake, near Peterborough) and, later, Balsam Lake, but others relocated to Lake Simcoe and the Coldwater Reserve.⁸

Considering the Creation of a Single Anishinaabe Territory

Because of ongoing encroachment on reserve lands and the diminishment of game and fish, many Anishinaabe Chiefs of central Upper Canada explored the possibility of one large settlement to protect their way of life. This was a new incarnation of the old dream of a protected homeland articulated in the Royal Proclamation of 1763. It had also been the goal of Britain’s Indigenous allies during the American Revolution and later conflicts in the Ohio Valley. This vision had motivated Tecumseh to form his confederacy, ally with the British, and fight in the War of 1812.

In January 1836, Musquakie convened a Council at the Narrows to consider the possibility of a single settlement and “devise measures to prevent the ruin and degradation of our descendants.”⁹ The 1836 Council drew Chiefs from the Credit River, Rice Lake, Grape Island, Balsam Lake, Saugeen, French River, and the Coldwater-Narrows Reserve. If the government recommended removal to one settlement, the Council agreed that the only acceptable territory was at Saugeen, on the shores of Georgian Bay. It is not clear that they intended to give up their existing settlements as they also petitioned the lieutenant-governor for title to their lands that would “secure the property to ourselves and to our Children forever.”¹⁰

The Chippewas demanded unilateral control of their mills and schoolhouse in August 1836 and the division of their land into 50-acre lots, each assigned to the head of a family.¹¹ The new lieutenant-governor, Francis Bond Head, agreed to hand over management of the mills and school but not the land division. Unbeknownst to the Chippewas, he was already planning to purchase the reserve.¹² In 2003, the Indian Claims Commission Chippewa Tri-Council Inquiry on the Surrender of the Coldwater-Narrows Reserve noted: “Little more than a year later, the reserve would be surrendered, making irrelevant all the progress that had been achieved there.”¹³

Meanwhile, local settlers were complaining about the state of the Coldwater Road and petitioned Bond Head that the Chippewas should perform statute labour to maintain it, even though it was settlers who made heavy use of it and derived all the benefits. Anderson, to his credit, didn’t think they should be forced.¹⁴

Sir Francis Bond Head and the Threat of Removal

Lieutenant-Governor Colborne’s retirement in 1836 led to a radical change in policy. Bond Head did not believe Indigenous people could be civilized: “I firmly believe every person of sound mind . . . will agree, that an attempt to make farmers of the Red Men has been, generally speaking, a complete failure; that congregating them for the purpose of civilization has implanted many more vices than it has eradicated; and, consequently, that the greatest kindness we can perform towards these intelligent, simple-minded people, is to remove and fortify them as much as possible from all communication with the Whites.”¹⁵

Instead, Bond Head aggressively pursued a policy of “Indian removal,” akin to what was happening in the United States. Believing that Indigenous people would soon die out, Bond Head formulated a plan to relocate those living in central Upper Canada (including the Chippewas and Mississaugas but not the Six Nations) to rocky Manitoulin Island, where they could hunt and live in their traditional way during their final days.

Bond Head ignored considerable evidence of successful transformation, perhaps because of his romantic sensibilities. He exalted the “noble savage” as being unalienated from nature and morally superior to civilized Europeans. He viewed industrial civilization as corrupt and artificial. He sought to preserve this natural man “like a museum specimen” until Indigenous peoples succumbed to extinction.¹⁶

The conviction that Indigenous people would soon disappear was common. British writer Anna Jameson spent a year in Toronto and travelled north to Manitoulin, Sault Ste. Marie, and Michilimackinac in 1837, where she encountered many Indigenous people and attended the annual distribution of presents. She believed that Indigenous peoples could not join modernity: “[They] do strike me as an untamable race,” she wrote. “[T]here is a bar to the civilization of the Indians, and the increase or even preservation of their numbers, which no power can overleap . . . I can no more conceive a city filled with industrious Mohawks and Chippewas, than I can imagine a flock of panthers browsing in a penfold.”¹⁷

“Kindness” was not Bond Head’s only motive for wanting to relocate Indigenous peoples to Manitoulin. He wrote to Lord Glenelg, the colonial secretary:

It was evident to me that we should reap a very great Benefit, if we could persuade those Indians, who are now impeding the Progress of Civilization in Upper Canada, to resort to a place possessing the double Advantage of being admirably adapted to them (inasmuch as it affords Fishing, Hunting, Bird-Shooting, and Fruit), and yet in no Way adapted to the White population. I feel confident that the Indians, when settled by us in the Manner I have detailed, will be better off than they were; that the Position they will occupy can bona fide be fortified against the Encroachments of the Whites; while, on the other hand, there can be no doubt that the Acquisition of their vast and fertile Territory will be hailed with Joy by the whole Province.¹⁸

Through Bond Head’s efforts in the summer of 1836, the Anishinaabek ceded most of Manitoulin Island and the Saugeen Tract through questionable cessions that did not follow the treaty-making principles set out in the Royal Proclamation of 1763 or Lord Dorchester’s further instructions. The cessions totalled about 3 million acres, including 1.5 million acres of Saugeen Ojibwe territory (Saugeen Tract Treaty 45 ½) and most of Manitoulin Island (Treaty 45).

On the way to Manitoulin Island that summer, Bond Head passed through the Coldwater-Narrows Reserve and met with Musquakie. There’s no surviving record, but given that the bands had recently petitioned Bond Head for control over the reserve, Musquakie likely went into the meeting hoping to ensure the reserve’s future.¹⁹ But it appears the Chippewas were either asked or pressured to cede their lands. In October 1836, Givins wrote to Musquakie that the lieutenant-governor wanted to know “whether you are ready to give him an answer to the matter he spoke to you about when at the Narrows.”²⁰

Although Givins informed Anderson that the bands at the Coldwater-Narrows Reserve would be granted the right to manage their affairs effective March 31, 1837,²¹ the surrender of the reserve was now the main issue. Chief Musquakie replied to Givins’ letter: “As soon as I get an answer from the other Indians I have been consulting . . . I will immediately proceed to Toronto accompanied by three of my Indians and give an answer on the subject.”²²

On November 26, 1836, Chiefs Musquakie and Assance, along with ten principal men from their bands and representatives from Snake’s, signed the Coldwater Treaty in Toronto. Givins and William Robinson were among the witnesses, but Anderson—the official most involved and invested in the Coldwater-Narrows Reserve and directly responsible for it—does not appear to have been present. The financial arrangements were also unusual. The Chippewas of the Coldwater-Narrows Reserve agreed to give up the reserve for sale in exchange for the annual interest on one-third of the proceeds. One-third would be applied for the “general use of the Indian Tribes of the said Province,” and the remainder would be applied “to any purpose (but not for the benefit of the said Indians) as the Lieutenant-Governor may think proper to direct.”²³ First Nations would later assert that the Coldwater Treaty was one of several concluded in 1836 that had either been not agreed to or significantly misrepresented on paper.

A year later, Methodist leaders protested the injustice of these treaties and the attempted removal of the Indians to Manitoulin. In response, Bond Head explained his meeting at the Coldwater-Narrows Reserve the previous summer:

In the course of the inspectional Tour which I last Year made of the Province, I assembled, in the Months of August and September, the Indians, at each of these Places, and after explaining to them how much better, in my Opinion, it would be for them to receive Money for their Hunting Ground than to continue on it, surrounded as it was by the White Population, and consequently deprived as it was of its Game, I left them to reflect by themselves on what I had stated. The Chiefs of the Narrows and of Coldwater, after a long debate, became unanimously of the Opinion, that the Offer I had made to their Tribes was advantageous. They accordingly, on the 26th of November, came down in a Body to Toronto to beg me to carry it into effect.²⁴

In November 1840, Musquakie provided a different view in a letter to the next chief superintendent, Samuel Peters Jarvis: “Sir francis Bond Head came when we lived on Orillia drove us out of it to go and live on some of the island and so we did.”²⁵ Musquakie’s letter indicated that the Chippewas who travelled to Toronto deliberated for two days before coming to what was undoubtedly a difficult decision.

Six years after the Coldwater Treaty, a petition concerning the terms of the surrender was signed by the Chiefs of the Rama, Snake Island, and Coldwater Indians and forwarded to the governor general of Canada:

We wish to state to your Excellency that when Sir F. Bond Head insisted on our selling this Land and the bargain he had previously drawn out for us to sign, we were not made sensible of the full purport, so that we knew not the nature of the bargain. It may be proper for us to state to your Excellency . . . that up to the present period we have not received any money from the sale of the said Land . . . We are not fully satisfied that other people should participate in the money arrising from this sale—We conceive it to be our right to reap the benefit and not others. Also, the article of agreement is not satisfactory as it does not specify what the principal of the money comes to . . . In writing to your Excellency we wish to state particularly that the Grist Mill at Coldwater, and the Saw Mill near the Coldwater Road are not included in the Agreement and hence we shall continue to consider them as Indian property.²⁶

That the Chippewa version of these events is closer to the truth is indicated by a letter Anderson wrote three weeks after the treaty was signed. Anderson reported that “the Indians are in a quandary quite undecided where to take up their future residence, they do not know what is best for themselves, and unless the Governor be pleased to direct them, the probability is they will again be scattered about the country, wretched objects of misery.”²⁷

Then they went down to Toronto under the leadership of Yellowhead, and the government told them they were going to sign a piece of paper and give them the rights to their land. Had the Natives sign a whole bunch of papers. They got home and had a lawyer read it, and what the government got them to sign was releasing all the land to the government. It wasn’t a treaty.

—Andrew Big Canoe, Chippewas of Georgina Island²⁸

Indigenous Resistance and Non-Indigenous Allies

Indigenous peoples protested when Bond Head offered them rocky Manitoulin Island rather than the fertile Saugeen Tract, and after he engineered the Saugeen’s surrender by pressuring a few individuals of the band to sign.²⁹ For the first time, they received considerable support from non-Indigenous allies. In April 1837, Methodist missionaries protested the displacement of an unnamed group of Methodist converts who had cultivated and built homes and barns on their land, only to be moved after the surrender: “Justice and humanity unequivocally demand that the Indians be allowed to stay.”³⁰

A few months later, a petition by the “Resident and Ministers of the Wesleyan Methodist Church in Canada,” reported “the strong feeling of dissatisfaction existing among the Indians in some of our Mission Stations.” The petition stated that they had improved the lands in the belief that they’d belong to them and their children forever:

[The] Saugeeng Indians have been induced to surrender certain lands to the Crown, which, in the opinion of the Indians generally, were not at the disposal of the persons who surrendered them,—not only from the fact that they were not the proprietors, but likewise, that a declaration of the Indians in Council had been forwarded to the late Lt. Governor, containing the deliberate, and unanimous decision of the Chiefs, assembled from different Tribes, that no person should have authority to cede or surrender the Saugeeng tract without the sanction of a general Council, and the concurrence of the hereditary and acknowledge Chief, and the late surrender having, in their opinion, been made without such sanction and concurrence, they consider it void, and maintain that the Chief of the said Territory is the rightful proprietor thereof.³¹

Eighty influential British humanitarians denounced Bond Head’s policies in a petition to the governor general sponsored by the newly formed Aborigines Protection Society, a humanitarian organization based in England that declared “the Canadian Indians . . . the Society’s first special care.”³² Protesting Bond Head’s policy of obtaining extensive surrenders of fertile and developed reserves, the petition denounced the intention of exiling the Indians “to the 23,000 rocks of granite, dignified by the name of Manitoulin Island,” which were “perfectly useless as Sir Francis admits, for every purpose of civilized life.”³³ Many Methodists in Canada were active in the society, including Peter Jones, the society’s Upper Canada representative.

While Bond Head was undertaking this program of removal, the British Parliamentary Select Committee on Aboriginal Peoples was also preparing a massive report, published in 1837, that was highly critical of the treatment of Indigenous peoples in Canada and other British colonies. It accused British settlers of treating Indigenous peoples immorally and contributing to their physical destruction and “moral degradation” through land theft, murder, the spread of sexually transmitted diseases, and the deliberate introduction of guns and alcohol.³⁴

The injuries we have inflicted, the oppression we have exercised, the cruelties we have committed, the vices we have fostered, the desolation and utter ruin we have caused, stand in strange and melancholy contrast with the enlarged and generous exertions we have made for the advancement of civil freedom, for the moral and intellectual improvement of mankind, and for the furtherance of the sacred truth, which alone can permanently elevate and civilize mankind . . . Through successive generations the work of spoliation and death has been carried on, until to the colonial possessions of the most religious nation in the world the emphatic language of Scripture may with truth be applied—they are “the dark places of the earth, full of the habitations of cruelty.”³⁵

The report documented that Indigenous peoples had been and were losing their lives in large numbers across the Empire. Only by protecting, Christianizing, and civilizing Indigenous peoples could further deaths be prevented. Missionaries were thus seen as the only allies who could prevent corruption by alcohol traders and dispossession by rapacious settlers.³⁶

The authors of the report assumed publicizing the historical wrongs of colonialism and the desperate situation of Indigenous peoples would outrage the British public and end the atrocities, as had been the case with the slave trade. Unfortunately, the report was opposed or ignored by most settlers and politicians in Upper Canada.³⁷ However, the Christian Guardian, the Methodist newspaper founded in 1829 in Toronto under the editorship of Egerton Ryerson, strongly criticized Bond Head’s removal policy in several articles and challenged his narrative of irreversible Indigenous decline and incompatibility with Euro-Canadian society. The paper countered excerpts of Bond Head’s correspondence with Lord Glenelg by describing the progress that had been made to establish viable farming communities and day schools.

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.³⁸

Largely in response to these well-organized campaigns, Bond Head’s removal policy was abandoned after he was recalled to England in 1838.³⁹ This would not have happened without the involvement of Anishinaabe Methodists.

A key issue for the Chippewas of Coldwater and the Narrows was what would happen to their houses, mills, barns, and other improvements. On February 6, 1837, Chief Assance and twenty of his people seized the gristmill at Coldwater and the fall wheat held there. Assance stated that they wanted to ensure their children had food, but he also wanted to ensure that the mill and the wheat were included in the Coldwater property to be turned over to Indigenous control the following month. Settlers unsuccessfully petitioned Bond Head against letting the Chippewas control the mill.

Givins relayed the lieutenant-governor’s instructions to Anderson: “I am commanded by him to request you to inform the Indians that if they again act in this manner H.E. [His Excellency] will consider them unfit to be entrusted with the management of their own affairs and will annul the directions he has given for that purposes which were to commence after the 31st march next, and further that the L.G.[lieutenant-governor] hereby authorizes you, should you find it necessary, to apply the civil authorities to put an end to similar acts of violence on the part of the Indians.”⁴⁰

The following month, Givins reassured the Chiefs by relaying that Anderson would be instructed to hand over all the property that belonged to them and allow them to do what they wanted with the mill. Anderson reported on April 8 that the property transfer was complete.⁴¹

Chief Assance also claimed the Severn River sawmill under exclusive Chippewa control. Just five days before the outbreak of the 1837 Upper Canada Rebellion, Assance rejected leasing the sawmill to John Cathew, despite the threat of a lawsuit for damages. Anderson suspected Assance’s reason for ensuring control over the gristmill and sawmill was to secure flour for his people over the winter, especially crucial since they had not planted crops.⁴²

Peter Jones visited the Narrows and Coldwater on July 24 and 25, 1837, several months after the land had been ceded. At the Narrows, the Chippewas still occupied their villages, but “I was sorry to perceive that these people have almost wholly neglected their planting. This is some of the fruits of His Excellency Sir F.B. Head’s administration of Indian affairs.” At Coldwater, he wrote: “The Coldwater settlement of Indians appears to be quite broken up, and the fields are growing over with weeds and bushes. Another exhibition of our Governor’s measures with the Indians.”⁴³

In this context of dispossession and removal, the Mississaugas of the Credit sent Peter Jones to London in 1837 to meet with Lord Glenelg and deliver a petition directly to the Queen. They asked for a title deed for their land on the Credit and argued for Indigenous land rights generally. Acquiring secure title to reserves would prove to be the leading political concern of this generation of Anishinaabe Methodists and “a lifelong objective of Jones.”⁴⁴