Big Bear, also known as Mistahi-maskwa, was a powerful and popular Cree chief who played many pivotal roles in Canadian history. He was appointed to chief of his band at the age of 40 upon the death of his father, Black Powder, under his father's harmonious and inclusive rule which directly impacted his own leadership. Big Bear is most notable for his involvement in Treaty 6 and the 1885 North-West Rebellion; he was one of the few chief leaders who objected to the signing of the treaty with the Canadian government. He felt that signing the treaty would ultimately have devastating effects on his nation as well as other Indigenous nations. This included losing the free nomadic lifestyle that his nation and others were accustomed to. Big Bear also took part in one of the last major battles between the Cree and the Blackfoot nations. He was one of the leaders to lead his people in the last, largest battle on the Canadian Plains.
Edgar Dewdney, was a Canadian surveyor, road builder, Indian commissioner and politician born in Devonshire, England. He emigrated to British Columbia in 1859 in order to act as surveyor for the Dewdney Trail that runs through the province. In 1870, Dewdney decided to take up a role in Canadian government. In this year, he was elected to the Legislative Council of British Columbia as a representative from the Kootenay region. In 1872, he was elected as a member of Federal Government for the Yale region representing the Conservative party. He was reelected to this position in 1874 and again in 1878. Dewdney served as Lieutenant Governor of the North-West Territories from 1879 to 1888, and the fifth Lieutenant-Governor of British Columbia from 1892 to 1897. Additionally, he served as the Indian commissioner in the North-West Territories from 1879 until 1888. In 1897, Dewdney retired from politics and began working as a financial agent until his death in 1916.
The Cypress Hills Massacre occurred on June 1, 1873, near Battle Creek in the Cypress Hills region of Canada's North-West Territories. It involved a group of American bison hunters, American wolf hunters or "wolfers", American and Canadian whisky traders, Métis cargo haulers or "freighters", and a camp of Assiniboine people. Thirteen or more Assiniboine warriors and one wolfer died in the conflict. The Cypress Hills Massacre prompted the Canadian government to accelerate the recruitment and deployment of the newly formed North-West Mounted Police.
Dammed: The Politics of Loss and Survival in Anishinaabe Territory is a 2020 book by Brittany Luby, Associate Professor of History at the University of Guelph. The book charts the impacts of the damming of the Winnipeg River in the Lake of the Woods region on the local Anishinaabe population, focusing in particular on the Dalles 38C reserve located downstream from Kenora, Ontario.
Treaty Five is a treaty between Queen Victoria and Saulteaux and Swampy Cree non-treaty band governments and peoples around Lake Winnipeg in the District of Keewatin. Much of what is today central and northern Manitoba was covered by the treaty, as were a few small adjoining portions of the present-day provinces of Saskatchewan and Ontario.
The Canadian Historical Association is a Canadian organization founded in 1922 for the purposes of promoting historical research and scholarship. It is a bilingual, not-for-profit, charitable organization, the largest of its kind in Canada. According to the Association, it "seeks to encourage the integration of historical knowledge and perspectives in both the scholarly and public spheres, to ensure the accessibility of historical resources, and to defend the rights and freedoms of emerging and professional historians in the pursuit of historical inquiry as well as those of history degree holders who utilize the analytical, research, communication, and writing skills they acquired during their studies to pursue a variety of career paths inside or outside of academia."
The Numbered Treaties are a series of eleven treaties signed between the First Nations, one of three groups of Indigenous Peoples in Canada, and the reigning monarch of Canada from 1871 to 1921. These agreements were created to allow the Government of Canada to pursue settlement and resource extraction in the affected regions, which includes the entirety of modern-day Alberta, Manitoba, and Saskatchewan, as well as parts of modern-day British Columbia, Ontario, the Northwest Territories, Nunavut, and Yukon. These treaties expanded the Dominion of Canada with large tracts of land in exchange for promises made to the indigenous people of the area. These terms were dependent on individual negotiations and so specific terms differed with each treaty.
Post-Confederation Canada (1867–1914) is history of Canada from the formation of the Dominion to the outbreak of World War I in 1914. Canada had a population of 3.5 million, residing in the large expanse from Cape Breton to just beyond the Great Lakes, usually within a hundred miles or so of the Canada–United States border. One in three Canadians was French, and about 100,000 were aboriginal. It was a rural country composed of small farms. With a population of 115,000, Montreal was the largest city, followed by Toronto and Quebec at about 60,000. Pigs roamed the muddy streets of Ottawa, the small new national capital.
The 1837 Great Plains smallpox epidemic spanned 1836 through 1840 but reached its height after the spring of 1837, when an American Fur Company steamboat, the SS St. Peter, carried infected people and supplies up the Missouri River in the Midwestern United States. The disease spread rapidly to indigenous populations with no natural immunity, causing widespread illness and death across the Great Plains, especially in the Upper Missouri River watershed. More than 17,000 Indigenous people died along the Missouri River alone, with some bands becoming nearly extinct.
William Andrew "Bill" Waiser is a Canadian historian and author specializing in western and northern Canadian history.
Sweet Grass was a chief of the Cree in the 1860s and 1870s in western Canada. He worked with other chiefs and bands to participate in raids with enemy tribes. While a chief, Sweet Grass noticed the starvation and economic hardship the Cree were facing. This propelled him to work with the Canadian and eventually sign Treaty Six. Sweet Grass believed that working alongside the government was one of the only solutions to the daily hardship the Cree were faced with. The Sweet Grass Reserve west of Battleford, Saskatchewan was named in his honor and is still functioning today.
The pass system was a segregationist policy by the Canadian Department of Indian Affairs (DIA), first initiated on a significant scale in the region that became the three prairie provinces in the wake of the 1885 North-West Rebellion—as part of a series of highly restrictive measures—to confine Indigenous people to Indian reserves—newly-established through the numbered treaties. The "Indian pass system"—introduced as a temporary emergency measure to quell First Nations resistance—was formalized and became permanent under successive federal governments. In archived correspondence between the three federal officials who were the "most prominent in the development and implementation of Indian policy" in the 1880s and 1890s—John A. Macdonald (1815–1891), Edgar Dewdney (1835–1916), and Hayter Reed (1849–1936), it was evident that they were all cognizant of the lack of a legal basis for the pass system, and that it did not respect treaty agreements.
Carmen L. Robertson is a writer and scholar of art history and indigenous peoples. She was born in Balcarres, Saskatchewan, of Lakota and Scottish ancestry. She is Canada Research Chair in North American Art and Material Culture in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at Carleton University. Before joining Carleton, Robertson was an associate professor in the Faculty of Media, Art & Performance at the University of Regina (2006-2012). She also served as the Indian Fine Arts department head at the First Nations University of Canada where she taught from 2000-2006. A number of Robertson's writings focus on the Aboriginal Canadian artist Norval Morrisseau. She is past president of the Native Heritage Foundation of Canada.
Lawrence Vankoughnet was an agent with Canada's Department of Indian Affairs in the late 19th century. Vankoughnet moved quickly up the ranks of the DIA, beginning as a clerk with family connections to prime minister John A. Macdonald. From chief civil servant to deputy superintendent, Lawrence accomplished a lot when he was present. After a 3-month sick leave for a "disordered nervous system", he wasted little time picking up where he left off. Vankoughnet was noted by many historians to be the man who cut costs on the rations the government supplied to the reserves. Despite only visiting the reserves once, where he was reluctant to socialize with the chiefs, Vankoughnet announced his change of policy plans in Battleford shortly afterwards: Indians would only be supplied with rations if they were unable to sustain themselves. Vankoughnet’s goals as deputy superintendent of the DIA was to keep costs to a minimum. He thought that so long as they were supplying reserve peoples with rations, they would remain dependent on the government and therefore a significant burden to their expenditures.
William Tomison was a Scottish fur trader who helped found and build a number of trading posts for the Hudson's Bay Company such as the Edmonton House. He was involved in the fur trade for over thirty years, during which time he served in York Factory and the Severn House. During his fifty years of service with the Hudson's Bay Company, Tomison worked his way through the ranks.
The CHA Best Scholarly Book in Canadian History Prize is an annual book prize awarded by the Canadian Historical Association. According to the CHA, the award is for the "non-fiction work of Canadian history judged to have made the most significant contribution to an understanding of the Canadian past." Recipients may be either English or French language works. First awarded in 1977, the prize was originally named for Canada's first Prime Minister, Sir John A. Macdonald. However, in 2017, the CHA council proposed changing the name of the award given Macdonald's contentious legacy, particularly in relation to Indigenous peoples. In May 2018, a significant majority of CHA members voted in favour of the change at the Association's annual meeting.
Sarah Alexandra Carter is a Canadian historian. She is Professor and the Henry Marshall Tory Chair at the University of Alberta in both the Department of History and Classics and the Faculty of Native Studies with noted specialties in Indigenous and women's history.
Wet Prairie: People, Land, and Water in Agricultural Manitoba is a 2011 book by Canadian historian Shannon Stunden Bower. The book examines the history of settlement and farming in the unique landscape of southern Manitoba, notable for its poor drainage and thus high levels of moisture that contrast with the aridity of much of the Great Plains. Stunden Bower uses this unique context to focus on the development of liberalism on the Prairies, from the late nineteenth into the twentieth centuries, highlighting tensions between private property and state intervention and between agricultural development and wetland conservation. The book uses the term "colloquial liberalisms" to describe how variable landscapes shaped local interpretations of liberalism, highlighting the ways in which ideologies interact with the environment. In this case, drainage needs and policy created "differing understandings of the appropriate interplay of individual land rights with government tax or environmental policies." Wet Prairie ultimately demonstrates "that Canada’s political history cannot fully be understood without paying attention to the environment."
Shirley Tillotson is a Canadian historian, who studies the relationship between Canadians and the Canadian state in the 20th century, and has published widely on the history of taxation in Canada. She is currently a professor emeritus at University of King's College. Her published work has won several awards, including the Governor General's History Award for Scholarly Research, François-Xavier Garneau Medal, and the Canadian Historical Association, Clio (Ontario) Award for Excellence.
Imperial Plots: Women, Land, and the Spadework of British Colonialism on the Canadian Prairies is a 2016 book by Sarah Carter, professor of history at the University of Alberta. The book documents the history of female homesteaders on the Canadian Prairies and the relationship between that history and Canadian colonialism.
