Robinson Superior Treaty: Literature Review (2019)

Topic of Research

The question I propose to consider is fairly straight forward: Is the Robinson Superior Treaty of 1850 valid?

This question immediately raises additional ones. Valid in what terms, legally valid, politically valid, culturally valid? The goal of this proposal is to lay out a viable path through the issues which emerge in attempting to answer this primary question.

Objectives

Ideally, the objective would be to determine definitively whether the Robinson Superior Treaty of 1850 is valid or not and upon making such a determination draw the most significant implications. Despite the question being fairly simple, the answer is likely to be anything but simple. Thus, the more reasonable objective for this project will be to simply lay out reasonable criteria for validity and attempt to assess their possible implications for the treaty without presuming to decide definitively the status of the treaty on those grounds.

Methodology

The methodology will be to work from the most immediate artifact of the treaty negotiation (although the last consideration of this literature review), William Benjamin Robinson’s written document which purports to record the terms of the treaty agreement.

The document itself raises many questions. Is it the complete agreement? Are the terms written properly reflective of what was orally discussed and agreed upon? Who were the participants? Were the participants legitimately authorized to negotiate the terms of the treaty, ex., land surrenders?

The treaty purports to forge an agreement, however it is an agreement that crosses different systems legal, political, cultural, linguistic, even oral and literate systems of communication. How will we be able to forge an intelligible basis for determining a coherent and cohesive concept of ‘validity’ in such a potentially indeterminate and potentially conflicted context of meanings?

Robinson’s document is, on its face, also straightforward. However, to understand the context of the document that will give it its meaning requires going well beyond it. Given that the context involves different cultures and societies, one of which is very different than the one which produced the written document, recovering context creates special challenges.

Let me just anticipate and say that recovering context, outside the legal language of the document itself, will mean recovering story. The context that will give meaning to the document and test its validity will be provided by narrative accounts. Story will function as a kind of testimony to bear witness to the reliability and believability of the document and what it purports to record.

Therefore, while we will offer some legal context for understanding the document, for the purposes of this proposal it will be the literacy of storytelling which will draw us into the deeper regions of meaning which surround the document and, one might say, provide it with its depth of being. This depth of being, which I will only anticipate here, will provide us with our ultimate tests of truth and validity.

Anticipated Outcomes

At this early stage of research, the anticipated outcomes are fairly bare in their outlines. However, we can anticipate some logical implications. For example, what are the consequences if the Robinson Superior Treaty of 1850 is simply valid as it is, i.e., as it is as a written document. The terms of the written document are fairly clear regarding land surrenders, reserves and annuities, so if valid the document itself attempts to outline some of its own consequences.

On the other hand, if the treaty of 1850 is not valid then consequences may multiply rapidly after more than a century and a half since its ‘signing’. If the Robinson Superior Treaty of 1850 is not valid, then its key provisions are presumably not valid. And the chief provision is arguably the claim of a legal land surrender to the Crown. If this surrender fails, because the treaty fails to be valid, then the territory prescribed by the treaty as surrendered would presumably remain unceded territory. The presumption by the Crown of its successful assertion of sovereignty in the treaty territory would thus be put in question, as would be the other key provisions of the treaty, ex., reserves and annuities.

As a result a great deal turns on the treaty being valid. But what does valid mean here?

Validity

The idea of validity can be approached from various directions. I will begin by considering logical and legal validity, in order to lay a foundation for other considerations. It is important to keep in mind the cross-cultural context of the Robinson Treaty.

Logical Validity

Logical validity is perhaps the most straightforward. Here is a standard account.

A deductive argument is said to be valid if and only if it takes a form that makes it impossible for the premises to be true and the conclusion nevertheless to be false. Otherwise, a deductive argument is said to be invalid. Validity and Soundness

We might note the correlative concept of soundness.

A deductive argument is sound if and only if it is both valid, and all of its premises are actually true. Otherwise, a deductive argument is unsound.

The important consideration here is the difference between the truth or falsity of individual statements and the logical relationship between them, their logical form. However, while logical validity may play a role in analyzing the validity of the Robinson Superior Treaty 1850, this is not the most meaningful concept of validity relevant to our task given that the written document does not present an argument structure of premises and conclusions. At best the document contains numerous implicit arguments supporting the stated assertions or agreed upon promises contained within it.

What logical validity does suggest, however, is the importance of the form a collection of statements takes. Validity concerns the logical relation between statements, not the truth of individual statements. It will be such notions regarding the form of statements which will be the focus of our considerations of validity, although logical validity will not be our primary focus. In the case of the Robinson Treaty the document purports to be an agreement regarding the contractual claims it contains. Thus, we can ask what is the appropriate form an agreement must take in order to be valid?

Legal Validity

Legal validity draws us closer to the immediate considerations relevant to evaluating the Robinson Superior Treaty 1850. Here is a brief resumé of general notions of legal validity by Tyler.

Legal validity governs the enforceability of law, and the standard of legal validity enhances or restricts the ability of the political ruler to enforce his will through legal coercion. Legal Validity

This account offers us a key consideration regarding legal validity, the “enforceability of law”. Tyler is describing the Western legal tradition for which “legal coercion” is an essential element. As we will see, this is not standard for Indigenous law, nevertheless, it is useful to understand the Western legal tradition for comparison with Anishinaabe cultural norms to better understand the context in which the Robinson Superior Treaty as a cross-cultural agreement was undertaken.

Tyler goes on to describe three standards of legal validity in Western law: legal positivism, natural law theory and historicism.

Legal positivism recognizes political rulers as the only source of valid law and adopts the will of the political ruler as its validity standard…

Natural law theory recognizes universal moral principles as the primary source of valid law. These moral principles provide a standard of legal validity that imposes moral limits on the ruler’s coercive powers…

The historicist school recognizes legal custom as the primary source of valid law. Legal custom provides a standard of legal validity that imposes customary limits on the political ruler’s coercive powers…

With these competing standards of legal validity within the Western legal tradition, it is evident that depending upon which standard one chooses, our assessment of the validity of the Robinson Superior Treaty 1850 may change. If we add in Indigenous cultural principles, as we will later, it is likely to become a contentious question as to whether the Robinson Superior Treaty 1850 is in fact a legally valid treaty.

However, to anticipate some possible consequences of these different standards for our project, we might consider some implications of each. Legal positivism might draw us into asking whether the process whereby the treaty was negotiated and executed (‘signed, sealed and deliver’) was followed correctly. Were all participants and signatories embodied with the authority, representing the “will of the political ruler”, the treaty assumed and required?

Moral standards clearly change over time, yet according to natural law theory, we might ask does the Robinson Superior Treaty 1850 meet the standards of universal moral principles? Are universal moral principles, or at least the ‘universal’ moral norms of the cultures party to the agreement, violated by the terms of the Robinson Superior Treaty 1850?

Finally, from a historicist perspective, what role would legal custom play in interpreting the treaty at the time and over time since it was signed? Has time and history affected our interpretation of the legal validity of the Robinson Superior Treaty 1850? How do we address the cross-cultural legal customs historically at play in the 1850 treaty?

For the purposes of this thesis proposal, I will not be pursuing the details of such concepts of legal validity. Rather, as noted above, the focus will be on story. And although storytelling is doubtless an important aspect of legal testimony, that will not be the focus at this stage.

Narrative Validity

Beyond issues of logical and legal validity, I intend to focus for this proposal on another form of validity having to do with the broader cultural context which supported the treaty agreement. That is the context of storytelling and narrative comprehension.

With the concept of narrative validity we are taking a more speculative turn. Nevertheless, I will argue that the validity of the treaty is conditional upon the believability and agreement regarding the stories within which the treaty document, the treaty negotiations and the treaty testimonies were embedded. In certain respects, as noted, such narrative validity is not so far removed from legal validity insofar as the legal proceedings involve the assessment of the reliability of testimony.

Just as logical validity addresses the logical relations between statements, and just as legal validity addresses either the legitimate authority of rulers, universal moral principles or the role of legal customs, narrative validity, I will argue, addresses the relationship between teller and listener at the time and over time, regarding the intelligibility, believability and normative reproducibility of a particular story. In other words, narrative validity draws us into issues of community consensus and a community’s willingness to reproduce itself according to recognized norms of legitimacy. It is in terms of discernible norms of legitimacy that I intend to address the issue of narrative validity.

The question of narrative validity takes on added importance regarding the Robinson Superior Treaty 1850, when it is realized that the written document effectively disappears Anishinaabe people from being seen, as Anishinaabe, within the document. The document appears to be entirely the product of the culture on the colonial side of the treaty table. Logical and legal validity may not adequately address the consequences of this absence, especially, if the legal context for the evaluation of legal validity maintains the same absence. Thus, it will be through the concept of narrative validity that I will attempt to restore the presence of Anishinaabe people as full participants in the purported agreement which the document claims to record.

With this background tentatively established, I will begin by introducing the Anishinaabe ethical principle of Mino-Bimaadiziwin. Sometimes translated as living a good life, or walking a good path, Mino-Bimaadiziwin draws us into the intersection of stories, of living well, and of participating in community.

If we return to the question of the validity of the Robinson Superior Treaty of 1850, the narrative validity of the treaty might be assessed in terms of its presumption to promise Mino-Bimaadiziwin for its participants and their descendants. The question of narrative validity will draw us more deeply into this entanglement of promises and into the cultural and political communities on whose behalf the promises were being made. It is in this wider ethical context that I hope to find the basis for evaluating narrative validity.

Stories and Narratives

So to review, regarding the Robinson Superior Treaty 1850, I want to ask the question: Is this treaty valid? And following that, what are the consequences if it is valid or if it is not valid.

My particular reason for picking this treaty is because it is my treaty. I was born and raised in the territory prescribed by the Robinson Superior Treaty 1850. I am a child of this treaty. It applies to me as a descendent of its consequences. So I have a personal and not simply an abstract interest in answering the question: Is the Robinson Superior Treaty of 1850 valid? If it is valid or invalid determines my own cultural, legal and political status. Treaties creating relationships between participants at a particular time and place, also bind their descendants’ relationships. Therefore, when we ask is the Robinson Superior 1850 valid, we not only address the past, but also the present and the future.

Literature Review: Executive Summary

While the Western notions of legal validity discussed above will be relevant to researching this proposal, the current state of the literature review focuses on addressing the idea that the Anishinaabe people are largely absent, culturally and politically, from the written document. Therefore this summary will address writers who help us understand the Indigenous and more particularly the Anishinaabe context of treaty-making.

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Tanya Talaga: All Our Relations

Talaga, Tanya. All Our Relations: Finding the Path Forward. House of Anansi Press, 2018.

Tanya Talaga is Anishinaabekwe of Fort William First Nation heritage. In All Our Relations: Finding the Path Forward, Talaga draws us quickly into the central issue of stories with four essential questions.

There are four questions every Indigenous person must answer in order to understand who they are…Where do ​​​​​​I come from? Where am I going? What is my purpose? Who am I? [1]

In order to answer these questions we hear, keep, share, and ultimately, live inside stories. Thus stories and storytelling become central to questions about identity, individual and collective. The Anishinaabe person is connected to the Anishinaabe community through stories. And as noted, I am connected to the stories of the Robinson Superior Treaty 1850.

Stories and storytelling always begin with the here and now in which the stories are told and received. The here and now for Talaga cannot be understood without understanding the story of colonialism. For this purpose, Talaga turns to Thomas King. Talaga references King’s The Truth About Stories, his 2003 Massey Lecture, where he deconstructs the colonial “narrative imposed upon Indigenous people by settlers in North America”. Indigenous peoples have been trapped inside someone else’s story about them.

The Story of Colonialism

The story of colonialism is one of imposition and entrapment. The idea that someone else is telling your story, that someone else is speaking for you, and in the process, distorting your individual and collective identity is key to understanding the Anishinaabe interpretation of our shared historical context.

The story of colonialism provides us with a framework for understanding the absence of the Anishinaabe voice in the agreement to which they are purported to be participants. In effect, the story of colonialism becomes a grand or meta narrative within which smaller stories or episodes can be organized. In our case, the story of colonialism will provide a narrative for making explicable the apparent absence of the Anishinaabe voice and vision from the treaty to which they are purportedly a party.

So where do we go for the authentic story of who the Anishinaabe people are?

Elders are the knowledge keepers of ceremonies, rites, and laws — traditions that form the core of a society’s culture, history, and identity. [2]

From here Talaga follows the lecture of Jim Dumont who connects his story to that of the Shawanaga First Nation.

“The very first concept at the centre of everything is the spirit,” he says. “I am a spirit who is walking through this world. That is who Anishinabe is.”[3]

In other words, there is an oral tradition which can be called upon through elders to fill in the absent voice in the treaty document. Furthermore, there is the world which the Anishinaabe inhabit which can be accessed through Anishinaabe cultural expressions of it.

Competing Creation Stories

Talaga contrasts the Indigenous belief in universal connectedness with the Western worldview where human beings are at the top of a hierarchy in the Judeo-Christian creation story. In the colonial story Indigenous culture and people have been pushed to the bottom of this hierarchy. The Indigenous story has been submerged, transformed and disfigured inside this colonizing narrative.[4]

It is a very interesting question as to whether we can detect the contrasting values found in these differing cultural creation stories as also operating within the terms and negotiation of the Robinson Superior Treaty 1850.

We might also consider, that if one society is imposing their narrative on another, are they also imposing their model of narrative validity? How are we to adjudicate such a conflicted process in the context of a purported agreement? It is entirely conceivable that one culture might construe the process as valid, while the other construes it as not. If so, how do we evaluate the purported claim of an agreement?

Talaga recounts how residential schools and the Indian Act were and continue to be instruments of colonialism. By isolating children from their families, communities and culture, the colonial system sought their Christian conversion and colonial cultural assimilation. At the heart of the colonial project was the Indigenous peoples’ close relationship to the land which colonialism sought to disrupt and transform. Talaga links this continued process of colonial disruption to the contemporary threat to our collective survival by modern society’s ongoing damage in its relation to the land. [5]

Talaga’s story of colonialism and de-colonization joins Christian conversion and creation stories with the economic and political stories of capitalist resource practices which ultimately threaten our contemporary ecological survival. Fur traders transformed the Indigenous relationship to the land, based upon need, into one based upon competition, of taking more for profit. The Christian church changed the relationship through residential schools and papal bulls which asserted the land was empty, unowned and could be taken by European Christians, separating Indigenous peoples from their sacred relationship to the land.[6]

For our purposes, can we detect whether and how these stories played a role in executing and interpreting the Robinson Treaty?

Agreement: Oral vs Written Interpretations

Regarding Treaty 9 (1905), Talaga notes there is a tension between what was understood and what was written down. Ojibwe and Cree had traded with the Hudson’s Bay Company for centuries through treaties and relationships seen as sacred. According to the MacMartin diary,

“When it was explained to them that they could hunt and fish as of old and they were not restricted as to territory, the Reserve merely being a home for them where no white man could interfere or trespass upon, that the land was theirs for ever, they gladly accepted the situation”[7]

As late as 1905, the oral understanding of treaty making involved unrestricted hunting and fishing and an exclusive reserve void of trespassers. Talaga notes the written document speaks differently, business and settlement would take precedence over Indigenous hunting, fishing and land rights. She notes that the MacMartin diary corroborates the written misrepresentation of the oral agreement.

Is there a similar tension between the document and the Indigenous understanding of the Robinson Superior Treaty 1850? If so, is the written document still a valid treaty?

The sacred connection to the land lives in storytelling ceremonies which begin before birth. It is this sacred relationship which Talaga sees as being violated by treaties in the names of colonial capitalism and Christianity. If the treaty violates the fundamental norms of a society, what is the likelihood that the agreement was in fact a valid agreement? Was this prospective violation assented to?

Damaging Mino-Bimaadiziwin & Kinship Relations

At the heart of the Indigenous understanding is relationship and kinship, captured with the Anishinaabe principle of Mino-Bimaadiziwin, governed by ceremonies which bind the individual to the community and its cultural ancestors through networks of kinship relations.[8]

If treaties foreseeably damaged these fundamental relationships, damaged Mino-Bimaadiziwin, what is the likelihood that such a treaty interpretation was what the agreement actually was for all the parties to it.

Along with residential schools, the Sixties Scoop, the colonial child welfare system and Indigenous over-representation in the colonial prison system, Talaga recounts how colonialism continuously violated and continues to violate Indigenous relationships and networks.

How sharp a role did the treaties play in transforming these relationships? If the transformation was very sharp and the violation of the relationships very severe, is it truly believable that this is what was being agreed to at the treaty negotiations? Is a treaty which fundamentally damages Indigenous relations also violating the implicit narrative validity requirement of any Indigenous treaty agreement?

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Thomas King: The Truth About Stories

King, Thomas. The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative. New York: House of Anansi Press, 2011.

Conflicted Creation Stories

As we might expect from Tanya Talaga’s references, Thomas King draws us deeper into a Native appreciation of stories. He also delves into creation stories and the differences between the Euro-Christian creation story and those of Indigenous peoples. In Biblical Genesis creation begins with a single all-powerful deity. By contrast Native creation, like the Earth Diver story, features a relatively lowly creature, a muskrat in the Anishinaabe version, who helps Nanabozho create land on a turtle’s back.

In this Native world, creation is a shared responsibility rather than monologic. Also unlike Genesis, in the Native creation story, there is no fall from an original perfection where life is a process of suffering and penance to regain perfection. Furthermore, there is no war on evil that must be defeated in order to regain that perfect order. Rather in native stories typically the goal is regaining balance. [9]

Given these differences, King ask some basic questions about creation and the spiritual world, what if the creative process involved spiritual beings who needed help rather being omnipotent?

What if the creation story in Genesis had featured a flawed deity who was understanding and sympathetic rather than autocratic and rigid?

We need to ask if such grand narratives should play an interpretive role in understanding the assumptions underlying the Robinson Treaty? Is the goal of the treaty to gain balance through mutual assistance? Or is the goal to gain autocratic, rigid control by one party over the other?

Treaties & Colonial Capitalism

As did Talaga, King emphasizes the roles of capitalism and Christianity.

“The central character in economics is Homo Economicus, the human prototype, who is pretty much just a walking set of insatiable material desires. He uses his rational abilities to ensure the satisfaction of all his wants, which are the key to his motivation…"[10]

Again, can we see the themes of Christianity and capitalism operating within the Robinson Superior Treaty 1850? As we are going to see, economic motives were an important impetus to the treaty for the colonial government.

Native vs Settler Colonial Stories

And again, King draws us into the importance of stories for gaining understanding. “The truth about stories is that that’s all we are.” King quotes Anishinaabe writer Gerald Vizenor: “You can’t understand the world without telling a story”.[11]

Recall Talaga’s story of colonialism and the imposition of a story about the colonized by the colonizing culture drawn from King. King considers various images of the Indian in settler society. He discusses the photography of Edward Curtis, constructed to satisfy settlers’ imaginary Indian, dying due to inferiority, but with an air of nobility.[12]

So we might ask did treaties involve an attempt to impose an imaginary story upon Indigenous peoples? Can we see in the Robinson Superior Treaty 1850 assumptions about protecting the dying Indian?

King tells another story of the Indian, the Puritan story of a war between good and evil, a militaristic story about land acquisition, individualistic and private, a story where Puritans are threatened by Indians.[13] From a Native perspective, trying to destroy evil is seen as misguided and likely to only end in disaster. A native perspective would seek an ethic of survival, in which survival, respect and balance are all interconnected.[14]

Will we find different ethics at work in the Robinson Superior Treaty 1850? As we will discuss, the written document has little evidence of the Anishinaabe worldview, therefore unearthing conflicting ethical norms will likely require going outside the document to the context of its negotiation.

Treaty Story: An Insatiable Appetite

King then considers treaties. He tells a Coyote story about Ducks where the Ducks have to keep giving up their feathers to satisfy Coyote’s insatiable appetite for them.[15] Besides treaties, settlers sought through legislation to rid themselves of Indians, in Canada through the 1876 Indian Act and the termination plan, the 1969 White Paper.

Is the Robinson treaty consistent with the Ducks and Coyote story? Is it an episode in this story of an insatiable and ultimately destructive appetite? And again, was this insatiable appetite in fact just what Anishinaabe representatives were agreeing to participate?

Les Canadiens: Another Story?

King goes on to make some remarks about the similarities between the situation of Native peoples and the French in Canada. They float like Indians in a “sea of English influence”.

The only obvious difference between the French and the Indians is that the French represent a formidable voting block, which can decide who comes to power and who does not.[16]

However, there is another difference and that is there is no presumption on the part of the Crown of sitting down at a treaty negotiation table with la nation canadienne. Why? Could a First Nation sit down and do a treaty with la nation canadienne, for example, a treaty of peace and friendship? And what forms of validity, logical, legal and narrative, might be in play in such a nation-to-nation negotiation? At any rate, the story of les canadiens offers an alternative narrative, a counterpoint, to consider when accounting for the narratives which swirl around the Robinson Superior Treaty table in 1850.

Ethics: Living Inside Stories

King closes with a discussion of ethics and stories, and offers this observation: “Want a different ethic? Tell a different story”.[17] This remark suggests a direct link between evaluating the ethical grounds of treaty making, the norms of legitimacy I alluded to earlier, and stories. In order to evaluate the narrative validity of the treaty we will need to understand its ethical underpinnings. To pursue this link further, we will turn to a discussion of McPherson and Rabb’s Indian From The Inside.

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McPherson & Rabb: Indian From The Inside

McPherson, Dennis H., and J. Douglas Rabb. Indian from the inside: Native American Philosophy and Cultural Renewal. 2nd ed. Jefferson, N.C: McFarland, 2011.

McPherson and Rabb’s book, Indian From the Inside, will form a key study for my purposes. They offer crucial insights into the ethical role of stories, but also philosophical foundations for understanding the cultural underpinnings of treaty-making from an Indigenous perspective. Treaty-making is about expressing and forming relationships. And as McPherson and Rabb show, stories represent a world of relations substantially different than those found on the settler-colonial side of the treaty-making relationship.

Other-Than-Human-Persons

Anishinaabe narratives present “the natural world as a world of other-than-human persons organized into a congeries of societies”. Such persons and the relationship between them must be “evaluated morally”.[18]

So we might ask, how would such notions affect the treaty-making relationships? In the Anishinaabe world, plants and animals are “more like other tribes and nations”. It is possible to have treaty relations with any of these nations through kinship and gift exchanges.

How might all this affect a colonial interpretation of treaty-making? If one side of a treaty negotiation is seeking to economically exploit resources which have no ethical status and the other is seeking a reciprocal gift-giving relationship which might include non-human-persons, are we dealing with radically different models of narrative validity and norms of legitimacy?

McPherson and Rabb speak about the Anishinaabe narrative tradition embodying “an attitude of respect toward nature, toward plants and animals and their shared homeland”. In fact, they speak about such attitudes making a “home of the land” with deeper levels of meaning than merely affording the exploitation of economic resources. These deeper levels of meaning are made available culturally through stories.

Narrative vs Kantian Ethics

The authors develop a distinction between a narrative ethics versus a Kantian or principlist ethics where the former is more compatible with Indigenous perspectives.[19] This narrative ethic is typically rooted to place through stories and events. Furthermore, narratives are linked to transformative ceremony and ritual.

This ties narrative to the transformative nature of ceremonies like the vision quest…confirming, we contend, how very un-Kantian the Native American narrative traditions really are.[20]

If a treaty is understood as transformative ceremony and ritual rather than simply as a document of written promisorial statements, how might agreement be appropriately formed and expressed?

The authors explore the transformative character of Native storytelling as embodying a non-intrusive form of moral learning which they oppose to a Kantian ethic of instruction in principles. Rather than instruction in moral laws or ethical principles, moral modelling is the means of Native learning, which they call an “ethic of interventive-noninterference, the very opposite of a Kantian ethic”.[21]

This modelling approach is clearly at odds with the written content of a treaty document, where the goal is to produce explicit binding statements which leave as little room as possible for freedom and autonomy of interpretation. A European treaty typically attempts to explicitly state the primary principles to form the agreement and subsequent relationship.

Treaties & Narrative Ethics

How might storytelling incorporating McPherson and Rabb’s narrative ethic of freedom and autonomy, self-reliance and independence, affect the treaty-making relationship and the interpretation of treaty documents? Given that such stories are typically not recorded in treaty documents, what are the implications for using contextual stories to interpret such documents? Would the oral communications have been more important to Native participants than the documents? In order to understand the treaty documents do we need to understand the life-world of stories that surround such documents?

McPherson and Rabb borrow an image from Wright for understanding rights as establishing “rights of way on a forest path”. In other words, once again, we are dealing with relations within the forest and not an effort to lay claim to owning the forest. From a Native perspective, does it even make sense to attempt to own or claim sovereignty over the forest? Is it akin to trying to destroy evil?

Outside View Predicates

As in Talaga’s story of colonialism imposing European prejudices on Indigenous worldviews, the authors develop the idea of “outside view predicates” to explain European attempts to describe Native cultures in terms familiar to Europeans but which failed to understand, as the title of their book suggests, the ‘Indian from the inside’.

Perhaps we should allow for degrees of understanding and misunderstanding which emerged between new arrivals and those born and raised in cultural proximity to Native societies. What for example was the role of Métis societies in navigating such cultural encounters? Again pursuing the alternative story of les canadiens may prove instructive for such comparisons of degrees of understanding-misunderstanding as well.

Polycentrism (& Interpreting Treaties?)

McPherson and Rabb emphasize another relatively unique characteristic of Native worldviews which they call polycentrism where the goal is to hear and balance differing perspectives rather than hammering them into a single truth.[22] They note sympathetically Ignatieff’s account of nation states harbouring “incompatible visions of the national story” without need of reconciliation beyond maintaining an ongoing dialogue. McPherson and Rabb see such a “respect for difference” as in keeping with traditional Native American values.[23]

The authors’ account of polycentrism, incompatible stories, unreconciled differences, offers valuable insights as we approach the tensions surrounding treaty-making and treaty interpretations. An obvious question, if a treaty is an agreement which incorporates incompatible stories and unreconciled differences, how are treaties to be validly applied as law? Especially if we keep in mind the tension between a narrative and a Kantian ethic when interpreting narrative validity and norms of legitimacy.

Orality & Literacy

Beyond polycentrism, McPherson and Rabb discuss orality and literacy and the history of the beginnings of phonetic literacy as marking a process of increasing alienation from the land. Following Abrams, they develop the idea that literacy is bound to a notion of abstraction from, to the point of exile, from “the very possibility of being placed, from the very possibility of being entirely at home” which emerged with the Hebrews’ alphabetic literacy. McPherson and Rabb note certain similarities with Native cultures in the transition from orality to literacy.[24]

The culture significance of the shift from orality to literacy is highly relevant to our discussion of the Robinson Treaty insofar as the Anishinaabe representatives utilized interpreters to translate the written document. Again models of narrative validity and norms of legitimacy may differ sharply across this cultural divide, and may play an important role in interpreting the Robinson Treaty.

In this process of linguistic abstraction from the land, McPherson and Rabb also consider urbanization, capitalism and technology, and how such historical processes enable “the wilderness to fall silent to our ears” by virtue of separating us more and more from the Earth in which we are otherwise immersed.[25]

As with Talaga and King, McPherson and Rabb discuss the damage done my missionary-run residential schools seeking to convert Native children to Christianity by utilizing the technologies of literacy.[26]

The authors see any form of abstract symbols as violating indigenous relations.

…any representation of sound by arbitrary abstract symbol runs the risk of separating language from the living land, from place…[27]

Writing Language Back Into The Land

In order to reverse this process of separation from the land and the attack on indigeneity which the phonetic alphabet represents, again following Abram, they call for writing language back into the land.[28]

These remarks are very suggestive for interpreting treaty-making, especially insofar as treaty-making tended toward an emphasis on the written document and a Kantian emphasis on an ethic of stated principles. Is writing language back into the land a possible formula for an ongoing interpretation of treaties and ongoing treaty renewal? Does it suggest a particular model of narrative validity, and norm of legitimacy, for measuring the ongoing validity of a treaty?

Place & Story

McPherson and Rabb then go on to discuss telling stories about place in a way that links them in a special way to the land. They describe a media event involving singers, visual representations and storytelling in order to exemplify the experience of writing language back into the land. The story of Nanabijou, a legendary figure in Anishinaabe culture and a rock formation on the shores of Lake Superior forming Thunder Bay, formed the basis of the media event.

Can we draw from such observations a model of how to write the land back into treaties by telling stories which are immersed in the ongoing relationship to place, to a ‘home’ inhabited and shared with other-than-human persons, past, present and future?

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Abram: The Spell of the Sensuous

Abram, David. The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-Human World. New York: Vintage Books, 1997. (Amazon e-book edition)

Our discussion of Abram will take us into the deepest and widest discussion of the role of stories and culture, and their philosophical foundations. We had a hint of these foundations through McPherson and Rabb’s use of Abram.

Shaman Intermediaries

Abram begins with a general observation that shamans and sorcerers act as intermediary voyageurs between the human and more-than-human worlds by negotiating with these Others who form part of the “earthly web of relations in which that community is embedded”.[29]

Abram draws a broad distinction between Western industrialized societies and animistic Indigenous societies. Massive, centralized, industrial economies have no special relation to any particular landscape or ecosystem, engaging as they do the generalized biosphere, they have perpetrated violence, physical and psychological, on the ecology of the planet. This violence calls for a re-attunement of a systemic imbalance.[30] Human society must regain its “delicate reciprocity” with the animate earth, with the “expressive and sentient landscape”.[31]

If we keep in mind Talaga and King’s comments on colonialism and the violence done to Indigenous relations to the earth, we can hear in Abram a similar call to retune and rebalance our relationship to the living earth. What will be of importance for our purpose is to listen for, in Abram’s remarks, a model for evaluating treaties, particularly in terms of narrative validity and norms of legitimacy.

Healing: Reciprocity & Balance

Abram sets out to answer the question “how had Western civilization come to be so exempt from this sensory reciprocity?” which reciprocity he sees as normative amongst Indigenous societies.[32] By virtue of this exemption, Nature has become simply a stock of resources for human exploitation. Abram sets out to get behind this process of the commodification of nature by civilization whereby animals and the earth became objects for humans to manipulate.[33]

Phenomenology: the Subject-Object Separation

Abram’s sees in Phenomenology the most forceful challenge within the Western philosophical tradition to the modern assumption of a “single, wholly determinable, objective reality”. He sees this assumption operative in Descartes separation of thinking mind from a material world of objects and in Galileo’s assertion that the material world was amenable to mathematical measurement versus the more subjective qualities of the illusory senses. The book of nature came to be seen as written in the language of mathematics alone.[34]

Absolute Subjectivity vs Life-World Intersubjectivity

Phenomenology would turn back to immediate experience, to the world of things as they appear to consciousness.[35] The problem Husserl’s story ran into, however, was other people beyond the realm of his methodologically solitary, transcendental (Kantian) ego.[36] Phenomenology now sought consensus amongst a multiplicity of sensing subjects and became immersed thereby in issues of language and interpretation. In the course of this transition, Husserl’s original transcendental consciousness, opposed to the objective matter of the natural sciences, led him to an intersubjective world, a “life-world” of shared immediate and lived experience, prior to any thought we might have about it.[37]

Domination of the Life-World

Following Husserl, Merleau-Ponty identifies the subject, the experiencing self, with the bodily organism. It is the breathing, sensing body which is immersed in the earthly world. This philosophical re-immersion with the life-world allows Abram to challenge ideologies of hierarchy, separation and domination.[38]

It is not difficult to hear the voices of Talaga and King, as well as, McPherson and Rabb, lamenting the colonial domination, transformation, and violation of Indigenous societies’ relation to the land through the enforcement of such colonial hierarchies.

The Primacy of Animism (vs Dualism)

Abram draws from Merleau-Ponty the idea that prior to all verbal reflections we participate in a world of spontaneous, sensorial engagement in which “we are all animists”. As a result, Abrams adopts the language of participation, reciprocity, intertwining, interweaving, to address such fluid relationships.

From this discussion of the fluid reciprocities of the sensuous life-world, Abram turns to issues of language. It is the role of shamans and medicine persons to remember the primordial sacred language and converse with the non-human persons with which we share the sensuous speaking world.[39]

The Alphabetic Transformation

Abram then turns to the transformation of animism with the creation of the phonetic alphabet in order to account for the break with the life-world’s primordial sacred language. He considers the role of the otherworldly God of the Jewish and Christian traditions and the influence of the Greek transformation of that Semitic script.

It was the Greeks who solidified the abstraction of language from things. With this transformation the oral epics of the Greek tradition became the first written Greek texts [40] which could now be fixed, examined and questioned. Language itself was beginning to separate from the world of sensuous immersion and become some thing to reflect upon.[41]

Ideas became fixed, essential and eternal, and thinking mind becomes the detached contemplation of such ideas. This transition to a world of fixed ideas is facilitated by a shift in focus from the expressive earth of the senses to the written characters of a fully detached language.[42] This fully detached language will make possible the printing press, the dissemination of texts and ultimately usher in the Enlightenment.

Animistic Recollection: Recalling Spirits of the Land

Abram’s goal is to reconstitute our understanding of the time before the detached language of texts.

Indigenous peoples speak of stories which require proper etiquette to deal with the spiritual presences, the kinships to be celebrated and the taboos to be respected, in order that the land and community be mutually sustaining. Furthermore, since other animals speak and can hear and understand human talking, care must be taken when speaking about them, especially if they are nearby or during the hunt.[43] This reminds us, suggests Abram, of Merleau-Ponty’s idea of perceptual reciprocity, where we not only listen to the forest but the forest is listening and watching us.[44]

This is not an image of the forest easily amenable to buying or selling it, of owning it by one of its inhabitants. Again, how might such a cultural understanding be heard at the negotiations for the 1850 Robinson Superior Treaty?

Dreamtime: the Land as Storyteller

The ancestral wisdom of a community is kept in stories “but the stories — and even the ancestors themselves — reside in the land”.[45] Places are active participants in human events through stories.[46] In this context, Abram considers the Dreamtime of Australian Indigenous peoples, a time before the world’s awakening, a time which continues to exist below wakeful awareness.

Unlike the biblical Genesis, the Dreamtime is not a finished event, nor like the Big Bang, in the distant past. It is an ongoing perpetual emerging from silence into song and speech.[47]

Renewal and Rebirth

The land as dreamer is continually renewed as an Indigenous person walks the Ancestor’s trail of dreaming, singing and renewing the Ancestor’s journey, “thus the storied earth is born afresh”. Similarly community rituals are held at specific Dreaming sites, “an unsung land is a dead land”.[48] Here, Abram attempts to capture the role of language, story and song in the primordial relationship to the land.

The Violation of ‘Home’

The land speaks through the native person as that person journeys across the land. As such stories are written down the vital oral connection to the land is violated, “cut off from that sensuous reference…the ancient stories begin to lose their Dreaming power”. Similarly forcing Indigenous peoples to relocate from their local earth, the ‘home’ that forms their source of meaning, is to “dislodge them from the very ground of coherence”. In this way, Abram construes the violation of speech into text as the violation of ‘home’ as the ecological source of coherent meaning. “It is the animate earth that speaks ; human speech is but a part of that vaster discourse”.[49] Such remarks speak to the ‘depth of being’ I referenced at the outset.

This account by Abram is very suggestive, if appropriate, to understanding what was at stake in treaties (land surrenders, reserves, traditional hunting and fishing practices) like the Robinson Superior Treaty 1850. Did that treaty transform the Anishinaabe peoples relationships to the land? And was that transformation what was in fact agreed to by them?

Creations Stories, Time & Space Re-Organized by Texts

Abram’s comments on creation stories carry potential significance for how we should approach treaty making. He notes, that unlike the creation stories of text-based cultures where events happened in a far-off past, Indigenous creation stories require renewal and participation. Ceremonial re-enactments re-create those stories such that they recur in the present. In re-enacting the events of Mythic Time, present beings become the ancestral being rejuvenating the “emergent order of the world”.[50]

With the alphabetic cultural order, cyclical earthly time is displaced by an “irreversible and rectilinear progression”.[51] Abstract and homogeneous time and space reorganizes our sense and perception of experience by separating us from the time and place of the sensuous earth. Abram calls for reconstituting that renewal process of continuous creation in actions, dreams and ceremonial performance.[52]

Hebrew Text as a ‘Portable Homeland’

At this juncture Abram focuses more sharply on the shift in language between the ancient Hebrews and the Greek philosophers. The Hebrew nation came to exist within this non-repeating modality of time, of history. They are the first “People of the Book”. Hebrew scribes fix events in an unchanging past and story. A non-repeating sequence of events displaces the idea of the ceaselessly cyclical cosmos. The Hebrew bible, suggests Abram, afforded the Hebrews a “portable homeland”.

A “portable homeland”? Is this what treaties afforded the colonial society from the distant imperial centre, the abstract idea of an ever-expanding ‘portable homeland’? Is this a helpful way to understand colonial charters like that of the Hudson’s Bay Company? How do such colonial charters relate to colonial treaties?

A Textual Story of Exile & Promised Land

A Hebrew notion of exile emerges, of being that is beyond a particular place, to being displaced from any place, from the ground of being itself, from ever “being entirely at home”. Abram argues that this sense of displacement is directly linked to alphabetic literacy. This story of exile is then counterbalanced by the “promised return from exile, the coming of the Messiah, and an end to separated time”. The “promised land” is a future promise of peace and reconciliation between all nations.[53]

Is there an image of a ‘promised land’ to be found in the Robinson Superior Treaty 1850, or is there only an act of separation and removal? Is there a promise of ‘being at home’ at the heart of the treaty, or merely its illusion?

Abstracted Text: Objective Time & Space

Abram argues it was the Greeks who first began to “objectify space and time as entirely distinct and separable dimensions”.[54] Euclid’s space where parallel lines never meet or Aristotle’s time as a “continuous linear series of points” underwrite classic Western science. However, the latter world of homogeneous space and sequential time is only really perfected as objectively separate with the invention of the printing press and Newton’s clockwork universe outlined in his Principia Mathematica of 1687.

Science & the War on Witches

As this new sensibility emerges, Abram notes that the concurrent era of burning thousands of women as witches, often peasant herbalists and midwives, can be understood as an attempt to exterminate “the last orally preserved traditions of Europe”.[55]

What Newton does for science building upon a foundation of an objective time and space as an independent reality underlying all material and perceivable events, Kant rebuilds for philosophy by discovering the “necessary forms of human awareness”.[56] It is Phenomenology which will challenge this worldview from within the European philosophical tradition.

Animistic Breath: Calling The Four Winds

Abram returns to consider the Indigenous understanding of such matters.

The role of the four winds in ritual, the pipe smoke which makes the invisible breath visible, the pipe’s circular movement following the circles of space and time “being offered to all the times”, contribute to such understandings. The wind within is continuous and wholly a part of the “Holy Wind itself”.[57]

The air as the invisible medium of our bodily immersion enables “conscious thought” and does so in all beings. This connection between mind, wind and breath is found in many ancient languages.[58]

The Broken & Separated Spirit

At this point Abram asks the question, how did the air come to lose this significance?

How did the psyche, the spirit, or the mind retreat so thoroughly into the human skull, leaving the air itself a thin and taken-for-granted presence, commonly equated, today, with mere empty space ?[59]

To answer that question he returns to the Hebrew and Greek scribes. The ancient Hebrews rejected the idolatry of natural forms of the land for immersion into written letters which would now carry ancestral wisdom. Textual interpretation and commentary became the route to knowledge. And yet, by virtue of not having letters for vowels, and thus allowing the role of the breathe to inform the text from outside, the Hebrews retained some connection to the animate air.[60]

It is to the Greek scribes that Abram turns to understand the real break with “oral awareness of the invisible depths that enfold us” and into a world of abstract symbols by introducing written vowels.[61]

Jewish vs Christian Traditions

On the basis of these observations, Abram challenges those who appeal to Judeo-Christian tradition as singular, failing to appreciate the profound distinction between the ancient Jewish and Christian faiths based upon their very different writing systems. Unlike the Hebrew Bible, Abram contends the Christian New Testament, primarily in the Greek alphabet, incorporated a sharp “dualistic sensibility” into Christian doctrine.[62]

Abram goes on to draw a connection between Christian missionaries and the advancement of alphabetic literacy in medieval and modern periods. He also links textual literacy with the internalization of human awareness.[63]

As we shall see, 19th century treaty making would occur under the influence of Christian missions and fur trade posts, both advancing the tools of alphabetic literacy. Is the sharp break which Abram is attempting to comprehend at work across the negotiating distance between the parties to the Robinson Treaty of 1850?

Recalling, Breathing Primordial Air

Abram calls for reconnecting with the primordial air of sensuous immersion in a living, breathing world of intelligent beings. In so doing he turns his attention to considerations of our contemporary world. He judges a community’s living in truth not in terms of “a set of finished reasons, but to tell a story”. A story is judged as to “whether it makes sense” where “to make sense is to enliven the senses”.[64]

Such remarks approach something of what I intend with the idea of narrative validity incorporating norms of legitimacy.

Local Life-World vs Global Techno-World

Abram opposes the global technological world to the local life-world where the enlivening of the senses is to be found in the local immediacy of non-technological experience.[65] It is through such immediate experience of our sensing bodies that we begin to engage the “subtle logos of the land”.[66]

What is needed, according to Abram, is to renew the reciprocity of literate abstraction and oral experience, as he says, of “writing language back into the land”. It is the ability to share "stories that have the rhythm and lilt of the local soundscape.[67] Recall McPherson and Rabb’s discussion of a media event they saw as intended to achieve such a re-immersion.

Abram closes by describing his book as “a book about animism”.[68] By this he means a participatory perception that draws no significant distinction between animate and inanimate. “Everything is animate”. He extends this animism to the digital world and to the internet of things and ubiquitous computing that embeds microprocessors in everyday objects. "…there’s no radical otherness involved…it’s basically all a big extension of the human nervous system.[69]

Just to note in passing, this latter remark regarding technology as an extension of the human nervous system is very reminiscent of Marshall McLuhan. Another possible path we might follow.

Renewing Encounters: Mino-Bimaadiziwin?

Only by rejuvenating the immediate experience of place and of others in face-to-face encounters, “do we have a chance of maneuvering wisely, and well”.[70] Can we see in these last remarks something of the sensibility of the Anishinaabe ethical norm of Mino-Bimaadiziwin?

If so, does this allow us to import into our discussion of the validity of the Robinson Superior Treaty 1850 the ideas which Abram has offered regarding orality and literacy, sensuous life-world and abstracted text, survival and capitalist habitat destruction? In order to understand the agreement the Robinson Superior Treaty purports to record, do we need to see it as part of these larger stories and then to evaluate its narrative validity accordingly?

Abram has allowed us to consider the widest purview for consider the context of stories which might be brought to bear upon evaluating the narrative validity of the Robinson Superior Treaty 1850. We now turn to writers who address more narrowly the immediate context of that treaty. We begin with a discussion of forms of Anishinaabeg leadership.

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Miller: Ogimaag

Miller, Cary. Ogimaag: Anishinaabeg Leadership, 1760–1845. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2010. (Kindle edition)

Consensual Decision Making & Councils

Miller argues that Ogimaag (plural of Ogimaa) as representatives did not make unilateral decisions rather they had the authority to deliver a community’s consensual decisions to treaty negotiations.[71]

The Eastern Woodlands communities had three governing councils: the women, the warriors (young men or braves), and the old men (headmen or chiefs). An ogimaa could represent any one or combination of such councils. Nevertheless they were not mere representatives but had authority as individuals which arose from two sources “an inherited or hereditary claim and a charismatic religious claim”.[72]

Charismatic and Hereditary Leadership

Miller’s book attempts to make up for a gap she sees in scholarship regarding the role of charismatic religious authority in the influence of hereditary leadership.[73] Miller also confronts the general anthropological misunderstanding of Anishinaabeg societies as atomistic involving mere band-level decision-making that is egalitarian but weak and fluid.[74] She argues that they were “highly organized and deliberate”. The flexibility involved she sees as a strength, to deal with complex and dynamic societal and environmental circumstances, or intertribal conflict.[75] She seeks to overturn the view that the Anishinaabeg were isolated individualists living in minimal extended family structures where meetings in larger aggregates were rare.

Miller acknowledges that Richard White changed the scholarly perspective with his book The Middle Ground.[76]

She challenges the Western assumption that belief systems can be divided between the sacred and the profane because it prevents a proper understanding of the role of religious power as inseparable from political power in Anishinaabe societies.[77] Religious communication, through dreams and visions, with spiritual powers (manidoog) who shared their special gifts with Anishinaabeg peoples, would help them survive.[78]

Christianity factionalized Indigenous communities but it was able to do so by offering alternative pathways to power for “ambitious individuals” within such communities.[79] In keeping with such an understanding of power, she notes that alliances for the Anishinaabeg not only enlisted economic and military assistance, but spiritual assistance also.[80]

Midewiwin & Political Power

Miller notes that most village leaders were also members of the Midewiwin, the traditional spiritual practice and organization of the Anishinaabeg.[81]

Religious ceremonies had a practical aspect in that seasonal rituals were meant to encourage life-renewing harvests and hunting. The Midewiwin was political in that ceremonies united communities with the largest gatherings in the spring and fall.[82]

Miller’s Methodology

Miller’s methodology is to combine Western archival sources, ethnographic data and Anishinaabeg oral tradition literature in order to form a triangulated interpretation of practices and institutions. However, she acknowledges that such cross-referencing only partially improves a “clouded historical lens”.[83]

Fur Trade Era Norms: Gifts & Kinship

Miller notes that as late as the 1830s Anishinaabeg leaders still negotiated using the “language, customs, and political forms developed during the height of the colonial fur trade”.[84] Such negotiations involved gift-exchange diplomacy in order to secure the “widest possible alliance network as the strongest economic and political position”.[85]

From the viewpoint of Anishinaabeg leadership, annual gifts “created a fictive kinship relationship” between newcomers seeking to share land compensated by gifts in exchange for giving up hunting and gathering sites.[86] Miller, who concentrates on the American context, notes that the Americans “gradually withdrew from gift- and kin-based diplomacy” through the 1830s and 1840s which undermined Anishinaabeg leadership & negotiations.[87]

Miller in effect is tracing the period of transition from the treaties negotiated with the French during the fur trade era, who participated in gifts including those that would “cover the dead”, to that of the Americans who did not.[88]

Power: Independence via Alliance Networks

Miller then turns to a discussion of power within Anishinaabeg society. Power was demonstrated by a lack of dependence, and yet paradoxically, humans were very dependent on plants and animals for their food, clothing, shelter and medicines.[89]

Thus the Anishinaabeg sought greater independence but did so by establishing “the widest possible networks of mutual obligation with both human and manidoog partners”.[90] Thus, leaders were leaders through demonstrating the “grandest of these networks” that gave access to both physical and spiritual resources.

Wider Networks Represent Greater Power

Miller claims that understanding Anishinaabeg concepts of power is essential to understanding Anishinaabeg leadership systems.[91] Power, in the oral tradition she says, flows from entity to entity as gifts or blessings. The more powerful provide for those with less.[92] Because the distribution of power was not always apparent each was encouraged to treat others with respect.[93]

Miller summarizes power according to Mary Black-Rogers.

i) power is necessary to live and all living things have some; 2) there is no division between natural and supernatural power, or sacred and ordinary, although there are specific kinds; 3) the source of power is different for human beings, who must derive or receive it from inherently powerful nonhumans; 4) however derived, power is unevenly distributed, both as to kind and as to amount; the intersection between these is elusive and ambiguous-and must remain so for the system to work; and 5) validation of power rests with the observation of events consequent to its use, thus it exists only in concrete actions and is not dealt with in the abstract.[94]

Should we consider such criteria of power when assessing the narrative validity of the Robinson Treaty from the Anishinaabe side of the negotiations? If the treaty can be shown to violate these norms of power, from an Anishinaabe perspective, is it a basis for determining the treaty is invalid, in that no Anishinaabe would agree to such a violation?

Managing Dependencies vs Domination

Individuals were not perceived as self-sufficient therefore managing dependency relations was the goal.

This view represents a complete inversion of the sense of human domination over the natural world presented in western religion and philosophy.[95]

Again, as we approach the Robinson Superior Treaty 1850, in order to assess its validity, must we keep in mind the fundamental cultural goals operating on each side of that agreement?

Mino-Bimaadiziwin: Gifting & Living Well

For the Anishinaabeg outward form is deceptive whether human, animal or plant, for changing shape is common to power in oral traditions.[96] In the distribution of powers the Anishinaabeg receive four: language, choice, purpose and a personal spirit name.[97] In these relationships of power human beings were more conduits than the holders of power.[98] The goal of such gift exchange between human and manidoog was to achieve Mino-Bimaadiziwin, a life well lived, of longevity, good health, free of misfortune.[99]

Here again, we have an allusion to Mino-Bimaadiziwin, which Miller suggests is the goal of gift exchange between humans and manidoog. What role would treaties have in such exchanges to achieve Mino-Bimaadiziwn?

Blessings, Dreams, Visions

Living well required good relations of interdependency spread as widely as possible among extended family, neighbour communities and manidoog through requests for pity and blessings.[100] Blessing most often arrived in the form of “dreams, fasting visions, or encounters”.[101] Unlike western cultures which make a sharp distinction between dreams and wakeful experiences, the Anishinaabeg used the same word, inaabandamowin, for both, an indication of their being treated as of equal value.[102]

If we recall Abram’s discussion of Western cultures separation of body and mind, and the subjectivisation of dreams and imaginings, we have another powerful image of the differing goals coming to the treaty negotiations apparently in order to seek agreement.

Manidoog & Family Networks

Blessings often arrived with conditions, meaning they needed to be exercised properly within a kinship network of exchange.[103] Human and manidoog communities share the same social structures.[104] Kinship terms such as brothers and sisters typically referred to animals and plants and their manidoog[105] Leadership in either human or manidoog communities did not involve the possession of coercive powers or authority but the persuasive powers associated with intimate relatives.[106]

The more formal term aadizookaan for grandfather (pl., aadizookaanag) was used to address a manidoog through fasting or dreaming than the more common mishomis. However the term also referred to stories in which such manidoog appeared, suggesting the stories themselves were “conscious, powerful beings”.[107]

This is an important point for us to remember, for Anishinaabeg, stories are themselves powerful beings. Thus, their narrative validity would be approached differently than for someone who thought they could be manipulated without significant ethical considerations ‘if no one was the wiser’. We might say, the story would always be the wiser.

Maintaining Reciprocity in Relationships

Maintaining reciprocity was the guiding principle of such relationships, maintained through the attuned senses, always accessible in the enveloping natural world.[108] Knowledge is never permanently lost since it will return at the appropriate time through dreams, visions and everyday lived experiences. Like Abram, Miller notes that this cyclical or concurrent concept of time differs sharply from Western perceptions of time and tradition as single points passed down through successive ages.[109]

How might such notions of reciprocity with manidoog in concurrent cyclical relations shape treaty making negotiations?

The defining element of tradition then ceases to be a continuity of doctrine over time and instead becomes a continuity of contact with the sacred.

These remarks suggest that rather than a “continuity of doctrine” across a textual tradition, negotiations involved a “continuity of contact with the sacred”. How would such differing forms of continuity be tested for validity around a treaty negotiation?

Politics: Kinship, Gifting, Non-Coercive Reciprocity

Gift exchanges, Miller argues, are the basis of kinship and kinship is the basis for all interactions real or fictive, from marriage to adoption.[110] Respect and obligation orient such exchanges and reciprocity kept the system going.[111] Such foundational principles are key to understanding political relationships as well in that agreements require continual renewal, reciprocity, and respectful gift exchange.[112]

The model of leadership was drawn from the manidoog.

…the ogimaag and council who together made decisions for the community were modelled on the council Gichi-Manidoo organized with the manidoog to address dress conflicts and issues of concern.[113]

Non-coercive reciprocity was the ethic which operated across all levels of society. Gift exchange involve a request and an obligation.[114]

Doodemag, Pictographs, Treaties & Wampum

Doodemag identified community members and distinguished individuals through pictographic representations. Such representations were used in treaties as well as daily communication.[115] Similarly political agreements amongst Eastern Woodlands communities might be confirmed with a wampum belt.

Doodemag representations function to communicate more than just identity, but also ties of kinship, relations between villages, relations of reciprocity between larger social units and lineage.[116]

Here is Miller’s account of the doodem.

Each Ojibwe doodem bears the name of an eponymous ancestor that emerged from the Great Water to originate the doodemag. These animal, fish, and bird clans told the creator that they would take care of the Ojibwe, and oral tradition teaches that the doodem spirits teach and protect each person from birth to death. Ojibwe give all individuals from other villages or even other tribes who bear the same doodem the same hospitality as close relatives, and they refuse to marry people of the same doodem. Assumed relationships with doodem members are established based on generation. When two or more doodem members meet; those of the older generation become fathers and those of the same generation brothers and sisters.[117]

I should add here that although historical treaties of peace and friendship often incorporated doodem symbols, the Robinson Superior Treaty 1850 did not.

Villages as Primary Organizations

Despite the roles of doodemag, Miller suggest the village was the largest and most meaningful organization for social, political and economic purposes. The village council of headmen, and each hunting group had a headman, along with the ogimaag, allocated hunting, fishing and gardening resources among families.[118]

The average Ojibwe village contained 100–150 members; in dangerous areas, they might be larger. Households were not politically autonomous but tied to villages for land use. Villages were interdependent socially and politically for marriage, gift exchange and defence. “The village also served as the locus for the celebration of full Midewiwin ceremonies”.[119]

Villages & Doodem (Clan) Relations

Gifting relationships between extended families between villages involved regular visits. Furthermore, consensus, as the basis of political decision making, required families, clans and villages maintain continuous contact.[120] Villages, as political units, formed alliances as was the case in the Great Lakes area during Pontiac’s Revolt.[121] The expression “to eat from a common dish” was often used to signify peace, friendship and alliances.[122] Peoples who share the Algonquin dialects intermarried, shared information and resources, and forged alliances.[123]

Three Fires Network: Shared Stories & Kinship Exchanges

In this context, Miller describes The Three Fires of Ojibwe, Odawa, and Potawatomi who had shared origin stories and were bound in a complex web of symbolic kinship relations. She suggests that the terms confederacy or league would be inappropriate as they imply an alliance more formal or with a more permanent structure of leadership than characterized The Three Fires.[124]

Miller indicates that by the late eighteenth century the Anishinaabeg had incorporated fur trade activities[125], market forces and diplomatic exchange into their seasonal subsistence economy and alliance systems.[126] She notes that treaty annuity distributions by the United States agents disturbed Indigenous power balances.[127] Power in the Anishinaabeg world is manifest in gifts and blessings shared between family members, leaders, humans and manidoog, and all ‘persons’ in the Anishinaabeg universe. “Gifts wove the fabric of society together.” Relations with Euro-Americans would eventually disturb these relations by no longer reproducing them.[128]

It would be another interesting point of comparison to consider how the The Three Fires was similar or different from the relations which the Robinson Treaties sought to establish.

Europeans Misunderstand Anishinaabe Leadership

Leaders always consulted the village, the constituencies of women, warriors and chiefs. Women had leadership roles not found in Western societies in political affairs and treaty meetings.[129] Along with hereditary and lineage leadership, there were leaders associated with particular tasks where such leadership ended with the completion of the task, ex., rice harvesting.[130] The Anishinaabeg used different terms for different kinds of leadership, distinctions which Europeans “did not grasp”. Ogimaa referred to hereditary leaders, headmen or elders were gichi-anishinaabeg, mayosewinini was a war leader, and a gechi-midewid was a high degree Midewiwin.

When chief became the general term that Europeans used for any individual in any tribe or culture group who exercised influence, it masked the rich variety of leadership structures developed by the original peoples of North America.[131]

Here we might note the Robinson Treaty will simply refer to “chiefs and principal men”.

The French and English generally viewed Anishinaabeg leadership through their own lenses, typically authoritarian and coercive.[132] We will need to keep this in mind as we engage the interpretation of treaty-making. If ogimaag only used persuasion through oratory and gift-giving and “could not demand compliance” but only represented consultations with village councils[133], how might this affect the validity of the Robinson treaty-making processes?

Village Councils

Village councils included the gichi-anishinaabeg, respected elders who sat in a circle close to the ogimaag, then the warriors. Along with the traditional symbols of their chiefly authority ogimaag often wore military and other apparel they were given by traders and Indian agents. Dressing in the clothing of others, especially if gifted, was often used to indicate alliances, commitments, and fictive kinship obligations.[134]

Council ceremonies often commenced with a recitation of genealogies which indicated the hereditary lineage underlying contemporary ogimaag authority.[135]

European Coercion vs Consensual Councils

…the lack of coercion as a means of social control within Anishinaabeg societies emerged as a bulwark against outside political domination rather than a weakness within the community[136]

Miller indicates that it is not until the introduction of the reserve system that the traditional political system was undermined. She notes that Europeans often misunderstood the structures of Anishinaabeg politics and leadership.

Miller describes different roles such as speakers (ikanootaagwininiwag), pipe bearers (oshkaabewisag) and gechi-midewidijig as participants in village politics.[137] Miishinoo apprenticed and served as an ambassador for the ogimaa, gechi-midewid, or gichi-anishinaabe based upon lifelong fictive kinship akin to adoption.[138] Europeans, who sought to identify the singular leader, misconstrued the giigidowinini whom they often dealt with, as the leader, when this officeholder was typically a messenger or communicator with oratorical skills.[139]

Again, we should note, the Robinson Treaty document shows no awareness of such distinctions.

Balance within Networks of Obligation

Although ogimaag adjudicated intra-village conflicts, communities sought consensual decision of the ogimaag and the council of gichi-anishinaabeg. Traditional Anishinaabeg society constituted a “web of redistributive obligations” often based on lineage which determined judicial outcomes not just the immediate relationship between perpetrator and victim.[140]

The “politics of kinship dominated Great Lakes villages”, however, ogimaag intervened if the kinship process failed.[141] The role of ogimaag in the equitable use of land involved village councils (women and warriors) and outsiders, whether allies, fur traders, or missionaries who sought village membership.[142] The principle involved was to limit conflict through a form of stewardship and not European notions of fee-simple land ownership on the part of the ogimaag.[143]

Ogimaag used similar language regarding original occupancy and lineage when confronting missionaries to justify their authority.[144] At the same time, ogimaag were careful to avoid asserting claims outside their jurisdiction or authority.[145] Land and resource allocation involving outsiders typically required compensation and fictive ties of kinship through gift exchange.[146]

These considerations will be important if we hope to assess the legitimate authority of the “chiefs and principal men” who signed the Robinson Treaty.

Ogimaag Authority & Continual Consultation

Given the emphasis on consensual decision-making, ongoing political discussion was essential. Thus council deliberations often involved already settled questions based upon “prior caucusing, negotiation, and compromise”.[147] Because ogimaag decisions were based upon “consulting the gichi-anishinaabeg of each family lineage”, Europeans were consistently dealing with delays in decision-making which required constant consultations with various village councils. Europeans (fur traders, Indian agents and missionaries) typically saw this as an indication of weak and indecisive leadership.[148]

Did such consultation take place in the context of the Robinson Treaties? As we will see, the Vidal-Anderson commissioners in 1849, and Robinson in 1850, neither engaged in wide consultations, raising serious questions about an agreement which was going to transform so fundamentally the Anishinaabe way of life.

Manidoog & Renewing Relations

Through pipe and tobacco ceremonies of ogimaag and neighbouring oshkaabewis, the spiritual world was directly involved in the renewal of friendships and alliances. Refusal to share the pipe indicated someone was perceived to be an enemy.[149]

Miller notes some protocols associated with such ceremonial political decision-making. Discussion did not occur before the ogimaa smoked his pipe. The party requesting a decision supplied the tobacco and other necessaries. The smoked tobacco created the spiritual connection with the manidoog who guided the decision-making toward a good result.[150] Council deliberations required a gechi-midewid to ritually purify the meeting space, the pipe and fire opened communication with the manidoog.[151]

Here we have some protocols requisite to a legitimate Anishinaabe decision-making process. Will we be able to determine if they were appropriately engaged in with regard to the Robinson Treaty deliberations?

Political Councils & Pipe Ceremonies

According to Basil Johnston, council meetings and pipe ceremonies were linked in the oral tradition. Councils were called Zuguswediwin, ‘smoking the pipe’.

“The significance of this ritual came from the smoking of the pipe performed by the spirit of Nanabush and his father…an act which symbolized the end of conflict and the beginning of peace between them. Thereafter, the ritual of the smoking of the pipe was an essential part of every conference, performed before deliberations began in order to induce temperance in speech and wisdom in decision.”[152]

Did this occur with the Robinson Treaties? If not, what does this indicate about the nature of the agreement? If the manidoog were not properly consulted, how might that affect the narrative validity of the treaty?

Managing Manidoog Communication

In this way, political councils were directly linked to the world of manidoog who directly informed decision-making. The oshkaabewis prepared the pipe, honoured the four directions. The giigidowinini or speaker opened with a recitation of the history of the Anishinaabeg to which participants were connected, as was the Midewiwin.[153]

The ogimaag managed land use and the ceremonies of productivity for land and game.[154] Song and dance rituals demonstrating communication skills with the manidoog was an important element of the charismatic basis of leadership.[155] Collectively, the Anishinaabeg used “tobacco, songs, dance, dreams, feasts and fasts” seek aid and communication with “ever present manidoog”.[156]

Were such protocols followed with the Robinson Treaties? Again, if not, how might this affect the interpretation of the agreement?

War Chiefs & Short-term Leadership

Miller then considers war parties and war chiefs, mayosewininiwag, and the role of charismatic elements in Anishinaabe warfare. Warriors pledged to the war chief’s plan, but this pledge was released upon completion or other conditions, indicating a task specific form of leadership and not a permanent position.[157] Persuasion and reputation, not coercive authority, held the war party together.[158]

Contact with the manidoog was essential to the initiation and the continuous success of a war effort up to the victory celebrations. This contact took the form of prayer and song, dreams and visions. The mayosewinini retired to a separate lodge where a clear or vague dream would indicate the success or failure of the war effort.[159] Like civil leaders, war chiefs had an oshkaabewis who assisted, ex., as pipe bearer or messenger. Tobacco and war drum ceremonies and war dances were performed.[160] Warriors used medicines specific to their task and which connected them with “manidoog power”.[161] Sweat lodges and pipe ceremonies provided continuous guidance.

While we are not dealing with war chiefs and war parties at the Robinson negotiations, it is nevertheless informative to realize the nature of the protocols and continuous manidoog communication involved. If a substantial transformation of Anishinaabe relations (involving land surrenders and reserves) was being undertaken, what protocols would be required. Presumably more than simply those involved with trading a few furs. Although even with the latter, would one assume the beaver nation and manidoog, for example, would likely be consulted in some fashion.

Midewiwin: Songs, Stories & Rituals

The Midewiwin or traditional Anishinaabeg religious organization provided another community connection with manidoog. Membership relied upon having an appropriate dream.[162] The goal of Midewiwin activity is Mino-Bimaadiziwin, living a good life or living well, which involved a wide range of relations.[163] Midewiwin ceremonies were tied to seasonal events and gatherings, as well as life events such as healing, illness or death.[164] Oral tales and traditions were relayed to children at an early age.

Miller notes that the names for healing specialists indicated they were linked to the Midewiwin, “mide-mashkikiwinini (herbal specialist), midenaabe (spirit man), and madwe’ikewinini (drum man)”.[165] Midewid often contributed to hunting by “calling the game” (manidookaazowin).[166]

The Ojibwe drew the mark of their doodem whenever they drew a scroll, made sacred art, or signed a binding agreement with another human.[167]

We might note again that the written document of the Robinson Superior Treaty of 1850 incorporates no doodem symbols. The significance of this will require careful consideration. Miller notes the Midewiwin provided a shared past, heritage and leadership that connected Anishinaabeg otherwise separated by band or lineage. Would the absence of doodem symbols indicate a failure to consult properly and thus a sign of invalidity given the consequences of such a land surrender treaty agreement?

The Midewiwin society had no fixed, hierarchical priesthood but upheld tradition and combated Christianity. Miller notes also that Midewiwin leadership seldom drew the attention of fur traders or government officials because their leadership primarily addressed internal affairs.[168]

Miller indicates that European observers, especially those not fluent in Ojibwe, often misunderstood the councils they observed especially since government officials were often seeking to co-opt the leadership they encountered rather understand its inner workings. [169] One example, shaking tent ceremonies conducted by a jaasakiid invited manidoog to answer specific questions.[170]

Christianity created a double opportunity. A form of power to be challenged by the Midewiwin leadership or to be embraced as another possible route to authority. Christian missionaries and conversion might be opposed, especially if Anishinaabeg protocols, such as gift-giving permissions, were not respected.[171]

Hereditary Authority of Local Ogimaag

In summary, Miller considers that while charismatic leadership provided pathways to authority and prestige, alone it did not match the hereditary lineage authority of the local ogimaag regarding land usage, dispute mediation, or resource allocation. Demonstrating manidoog communication would appear to be a touchstone of authentic Anishinaabeg decision-making in a wide range of areas, according to Miller. Such communication might be manifest in song, dance, tobacco, feasting, fasting, and dreams.[172]

Again Miller emphasizes that fluidity is a sign of strength not atomistic isolation and weakness. Anishinaabe networks of obligation could respond quickly to changing economic and political conditions whether at the level of family and village, or at the level larger alliance systems. Ogimaag were linked to non-coercive village obligations and to building alliances when outside assistance was needed.[173]

Presumably this form of nimble networking required continuous communication. Did this level of communication and protocol occur in the context of the Robinson Treaty?

Before considering the Robinson Treaty more directly, we will consult one more author discussing Anishinaabe general principles of treaty-making.

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Stark: Respect, Responsibility and Renewal

Heidi Stark (2010) Respect, Responsibility, and Renewal: The Foundations of Anishinaabe treaty-making with the United States and Canada. American Indian Culture and Research Journal: 2010, Vol. 34, No. 2, pp. 145–164.

Stark is going to offer us three precise Anishinaabe goals and principles for evaluating treaty-making.

Stories & Treaties: Respect & Reciprocal Relationships

Stark suggests the story The Woman Who Married a Beaver offers lessons in cooperative and reciprocal relations, in this case, between the Anishinaabe and beavers. An exchange of gifts, the beaver’s life for tobacco, the beaver’s bones returned to the water, renewed the relationship and the cycle of the beaver’s life. Stark sees this story as illuminating the relationships and agreements found in treaties. The beaver treaty relies upon mutual respect as the woman warns against speaking ill of the beaver which would lead to beavers no longer offering themselves as food for the Anishinaabe.[174]

Along with the principle of respect, reciprocal relations involve responsibility. The relationship requires cooperation and trust where each party has a responsibility to the other party.

Finally, the third principle of renewal is also in play in the story and in treaties. The treaty must be continually renewed by Anishinaabe and beavers by performing the actions the principles of respect and responsibility call for. The cycle of exchanging gifts, of offering food for tobacco and returning the beaver bones to the water, renews the treaty.

Therefore, when we approach the Robinson Treaty we should be looking for signs of whether the requirements of respect, responsibility and renewal are properly reflected and implemented.

Treaties Tradition

Early treaties between Indigenous peoples and the Animal and Star nations may represent the oldest recorded treaties in the oral tradition and provide foundational principles for treaty-making. Stark looks to the beaver treaty story to understand Anishinaabe political philosophy regarding treaties and alliances, and in particular the principles of respect, responsibility and renewal which guide relation building.

Furthermore, Stark quotes Robert Williams regarding the relationship between treaties and stories, “a treaty itself was a special kind of story”, one in which a “world of human solidarity” was imagined.

Would the Robinson Treaty pass the test of narratively imagining a “world of human solidarity”?

There was a long tradition of treaty-making in the multinational world of Indigenous nations prior to the arrival of Europeans. Europeans arrived to engage an existing world of social, economic and political alliances involving national borders, kinship relations and epistemologies. Long-standing practices incorporating the sacred pipe, the exchange of wampum, and gift-exchange was simply continued in the relations with the newly-arrived European nations, and eventually, the United States and Canada. [175]

The earliest treaties between Americans and Indian tribes, Stark notes, were not written documents but “formal diplomatic ceremonies” involving exchanges of presents, ceremonial objects and promises of friendship. Similarly, in Canada, Stark quotes Slattery, “…historic treaties were profoundly influenced by Indian concepts, procedures and ceremonial…". Oral rather than written, spoken exchanges of proposals and responses, oriented by special rituals leading to a shared understanding of the issues at hand. The shift to written treaties, Stark notes, occurs with the Delaware treaty of 1778.

The Council is the Treaty

For the Anishinaabe the treaty was not exclusively the written document, rather it was the “entire council proceedings” including the events leading to it and the events of implementation which followed.[176]

A serious conflict of interpretation occurs as European political actors turned the focus evermore narrowly on the written document. The Indigenous goal of building and maintaining alliances through consensus involved the entire process of assembling together to make peace, smoking the pipe as a pledge of truthfulness, and exchanging opinions.

U.S. and Canadian treaty commissioners simply perceived the council, the exchange of gifts, and dialogues, as prerequisites to getting the signatures of First Nations leaders. There is a fundamental problem if the goal is to extinguish Indian title through signing names to a treaty document or by ‘touching the pen’. As Stark notes, the written document seldom represents all that was discussed. And most importantly what if questions of Indigenous sovereignty, nationhood or land tenure were expressed in the council process but did not make it into the document? There was often a fundamental misunderstanding regarding the ‘touching of the pen’ between simply validating the entire council discussions and agreeing exclusively to what was written in the documents.

Stark notes the reputation of the Anishinaabe for prodigious and accurate memory. Treaty Three Commissioner Dawson had cautioned other commissioners to take great care when speaking as he noted an earlier experience of an Anishinaabe leader who repeated verbatim all that Dawson and said two years before. Stark sees such statements as part of the understanding that the entire council proceedings constituted the treaty.[177]

The Council vs The Document

The conflict of interpretation of the treaty being the council proceedings rather than simply the written document takes us to the heart of the issue of my proposal. As Stark notes, the written documents did “not always faithfully reflect” what was said in the oral discussions agreed to by the participants. This became evident to First Nations when government responses failed to live up to promises made during negotiations.

Stark then considers the dynamics of the 1846 treaty between the United Nation of Ojibwe, Ottawa, and Potawatomi and the United States where there was concern over misrepresentations. For this purpose the United Nation ensured bilingual “half-breed” Anishinaabe interpreters were present at the treaty and asked for copies of the written documents.[178]

Stark states that the Anishinaabe in Lake of the Woods Treaty Three in 1873 requested a written document on parchment so it would not be “rubbed off”, and requested the names of all the Canadian officials, indications of a concern for the reliability of written documents and of officials.

We might note at this point that interpreters were involved in the Robinson Superior Treaty 1850.

Judicial Canons of Treaty Interpretation

Stark points out that both Canada and the United States have attempted to reconcile the conflicting interpretations of treaty-making by developing judicial “canons of treaty construction” and interpretation. These canons have led to judicial rulings favourable to First Nations. She outlines the canons. 1) ambiguities in treaty language are to be resolved in favour of the Indians; 2) since the wording of treaties was designed to be understood by the Indians, who often could not read and were not skilled in the technical language often used in treaties, doubtful clauses are to be resolved in a nontechnical way, as the Indians would have understood the language; 3) treaties are to be liberally construed to favour Indians.

To the extent that such canons are in play, we would appear to be on more solid ground when we consider Anishinaabe expectations concerning, what I am calling, narrative validity and norms or protocols of legitimacy with regard to treaty-making.

Along with canons, Stark also cites the “reserved rights doctrine” which holds that “all rights not expressly ceded by a tribe in a treaty are reserved”. Furthermore, regarding the American context, the “abrogation doctrine” indicates that any intent to infringe on tribal rights must be “clear and unambiguous”.[179]

Narratives of Indigenous Intent

At the heart of the operation of the canons requires an “examination of the historical record” to determine Indigenous peoples’ intent. The question of Indigenous intent will become very important to our efforts to understand the Robinson Superior Treaty of 1850. This is especially important since the written document contains very little with regard to such Indigenous intent, therefore we are obliged to look outside the document to formulate what the intent might have been.

Journal records become crucial in identifying Anishinaabe conceptions of treaty-making. Any records of formal speeches by Indigenous negotiators become vital to understanding Indigenous intent regarding what they saw as important to building sustainable relationships. And therefore, what Anishinaabe representatives were or were able to agree to.

In the treaty process Indigenous peoples recognized “their sovereign authority to reach agreements” with European sovereigns. In fact they saw the treaty process as a practice “given” to the Crown by the Anishinaabe people.[180] This again suggests that we should not consider treaty-making as a process over which colonial governments had any kind of accepted monopoly of interpretation.

Living Relationships: Respect, Responsibility & Renewal

Treaty negotiations were based upon long-standing Anishinaabe diplomatic practices to forge a “living relationship, not merely an agreement fixed on paper”. This relationship was based upon the three principles of respect, responsibility and renewal. On this basis Treaty Three leaders asserted their Anishinaabe sovereignty and claim to the land connected to their history and memory of living in North America. The relationship with the Canadian government involved shared responsibilities, the government would aid the Anishinaabe and the Anishinaabe would assist Canada.

The Anishinaabe treaty-making intent was rooted in the peace and friendship history for establishing relationships. The principles of respect and renewal were interdependent such that the expectation of “continuous renewal” of the treaty’s mutual responsibilities was emphasized by the Anishinaabe leadership at the close of the negotiation councils for Treaty Three.[181]

Given that treaty promises were not always kept by the government, the Anishinaabe often petitioned the government to uphold their responsibilities and commitments. When promises were broken the Anishinaabe often expressed the three principles of respect, responsibility and renewal in order to reorient the relationship.

For the Anishinaabe nations new agreements were understood to be built upon previous agreements and already established relationships. Renewal was an ongoing process opened by the treaty process. [182]

Therefore in general, Anishinaabe treaty negotiations expressed a principle of trust grounded on respect, responsibility and renewal. Making relationships is more than “mere agreements that ceded one thing in exchange for another. Treaties bound nations to one another”. Stark believes that such treaty-making principles offer a vision for how peoples in a “multinational society” can co-exist.

Stark notes that building relationships often involved building real kinship relationships beyond the fictive relations created by agreements. The practice of creating interconnected families was the model upon which shared treaty relationships were understood by Anishinaabeg.

We will now turn from such general principles of Anishinaabe treaty-making (with which we may hold the Robinson Treaty to account) to a discussion of the specific context of the making of the Robinson Superior Treaty 1850. In particular, Hansen will allow us to begin to formulate, not only in general cultural terms, but in the specific context of the Robinson Treaty, what was, as Stark highlighted, the Anishinaabe intent for doing treaty, and thus, what was in fact the content of the purported agreement.

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Hansen: Chiefs and Principal Men

Hansen, Lise C. (1987). Chiefs and Principal Men: A Question of Leadership in Treaty Negotiations. Anthropologica, 29(1), 39.

Valid Forms of Representation

Government representatives assumed that the ‘chiefs and principal men’ who signed treaties “represented all bands living in treaty areas”. And that they had the authority to sign and negotiate “on behalf of their bands”. However, Hansen argues that this was not necessarily a valid assumption given the ethnohistorical record.[183]

Hansen begins by noting that in the 19th century British Crown representatives dealt with “chiefs and principal men” in treaty negotiations essentially as mirror images of themselves, a delegated form of authority legitimately representing others. Hansen argues such an assumption indicates an “incomplete understanding of the sociopolitical organization” of Anishinaabe people at the time.[184]

Inside & Outside: The Trading Post Band Chief

Band societies did not have formalized leadership, rather leaders were recognized “by group consensus” based upon circumstances. Traditional leadership roles, however, were also influenced by contact with Europeans. Hansen borrows a distinction between “inside” and “outside” leaders to distinguish leaders who dealt with internal or external affairs.

The fur trade had afforded a new form of leader, the “trading post band chief”. This new form of leader was “attached to a trading post and was credited by the trader with having considerable authority over the members of the trading post band”. This “outside” leader’s ability to deal with the non-native traders was “not necessarily recognized by all members of the trading post band, nor did his authority extend to activities outside the trading post”.

Robinson Superior Treaty 1850

Hansen looks specifically at the Robinson Treaties of 1850, where she makes the following point.

…trading post band chiefs were heavily represented among the “chiefs and principal men” who participated in the treaty negotiations

This situation, according to Hansen, raises a number of questions in need of further examination. Who selected such chiefs? What was the extent of their authority? Which groups did they represent?

In order to examine these questions, Hansen consults records of fur traders, explorers and government officials. While recognizing their ethnocentric bias, she attempts to “reconstruct the nature of leadership” among the Anishinaabeg of the day. She draws heavily upon the writings of Hudson’s Bay Company employees.[185]

Subsistence Conditions & Trading Post Activity

The band society of the time included hunting groups usually of extended families scattered throughout their territory. Such groups assembled in the spring and fall when, for example, a productive fishery could support more people. Such occasions often happened near a trading post and involved ceremonies, marriages and opportunities for visiting.

Hansen notes that depleted game meant that drawing subsistence from the land for larger groups was becoming more difficult. Larger game animals, such as moose and caribou, had mostly disappeared replaced by fish and smaller game, such as rabbits, as the basis of subsistence. She notes that this change in subsistence strategies is well documented in Hudson’s Bay Company post journals and traders’ correspondence given that it affected the economics of the fur trade.

Hansen shares a number of such reports indicating that Anishinaabeg were dealing with depleted resources and becoming more reliant on what the posts could provide. However, she does state that Anishinaabeg who visited the Nipigon post were generally faring better with a greater supply of large game, fish and rabbit. There are few references to “starving Indians” in the Nipigon post’s journals compared to other posts.[186]

Trading Post Bands

Generally family territorial divisions were established to define traditional hunting grounds, although poaching did occur creating tensions and family feuds. Vidal and Anderson, Government commissioners, reported in 1849 that the north shore of Lake Superior was divided between independent “trading post bands” with exclusive rights and with chiefs well-known amongst each other. Trespassing to hunt beaver was linked to their depletion and their value to the economics of the fur trade.[187]

Regarding the relationship with the trading posts, Hansen observes that “mainly older men and widowed women” remained at or near the posts throughout the year. Larger numbers did not appear for most of the year “in any grouping remotely resembling a band”.

Larger Spring & Fall Gatherings

Individual hunters, perhaps accompanied by a few relatives, paid irregular visits to the posts to trade or take supplies on credit. Larger hunting groups gathered at the posts only in the spring or fall in order to trade or gather supplies for the winter. However, if hunting was poor they might appear mid-winter to “beg” for food from the trader.

Spring and fall gatherings at the trading post brought together the hunting groups of the several bands that frequented the area and formed the collectivity known as a trading post band.

Such occasions involved feasting, visiting and marriages, all adding to the social cohesion of the “trading post band”. Those who lived year round at the post worked with the gardens and livestock, supplying fish and game to the post, making snowshoes, canoes and boats, and transporting goods to other posts.

Leadership & The Trading Post Chief

Hansen then goes on to consider the “nature of leadership” in Anishinaabe society and in particular the emergence of the “trading post band” and the “trading post chief”. She then considers the role of such forms of leadership in the context of the Robinson Superior Treaty 1850.

the periodic meeting of a trading post band provided opportunities for a new leadership role to develop while the traditional roles were still operative. The trading post chief was, because of his association with the trading post, more visible to the traders than the traditional leaders - hunting group headman and band chief - whose influence was felt away from the post.

Hansen speculates that the trading post chief’s “sphere of influence was probably restricted to the activities of the post and it seems unlikely that his authority would have been recognized away from the post.” In other words, when the band split up into hunting groups or larger bodies, other more traditional forms of leadership would likely prevail.[188]

Hunting Group Headmen

Hansen considers the qualities of leadership within a hunting group, “often recognized as the headman of the group”. Leaders emerged on the basis of age, knowledge, skill, and “perhaps also on his reputation as a shaman”. This latter point draws us back to Miller’s discussion of two forms of leadership, hereditary and charismatic. Such considerations also draw us to reiterate that Anishinaabe leadership was not coercive, as Hansen notes, the leader is the leader based upon “his enjoy­ment of the group’s approval”.

Hansen notes a distinction between leaders who emerged “when the band’s hunting groups collected” and members recognized a “single individual headman” whose leadership was “weaker than that of a a hunting group headman” and leaders whose leadership ceased once the band dispersed again. Authority was based upon oratorical skills, age or experience, and the ability to mediate among band members and, once they arrived, with Europeans.

Since the Lake Superior Ojibwa spent most of the year scattered in hunting groups, headmen would have had more influence over their daily activities than did chiefs.

Fur Trade Competition & Trading Chiefs

The competition between fur trade companies led the companies to gain the allegiance of influential Anishinaabe to function as “trading chiefs”.

They were non-traditional leaders, products of the relationship between Indian and trader. Their authority was limited and prob­ably only recognized by their own group.

We might jump ahead here in order to appreciate where Hansen is leading us. The following questions are going to emerge. Who negotiated the treaties on the Anishinaabe side of the negotiations? What authority did they have? Who did they represent? Hansen is laying the groundwork for such questions by drawing out distinctions in Anishinaabe forms of leadership, especially, the role of the trading post chief at the fur trade posts, where, as we will see, the traders influenced the treaty-making process.

Hansen quotes a Northwest Company trader’s description of “trading chiefs” who were

proud of being reckoned great men, but still they have little or no influence over the others, for, after making the father a chief, you are sometimes obliged to do the same with his son in order to secure his hunt, for the former has not power enough over him to secure it for you.

Trading Post Chiefs: Weak & Temporary

In other words, the trading post chiefs represented a relatively weak, temporary and task-specific form of leadership. At issue for the European traders was the competition for furs, therefore in order to secure the product of a good hunter who had cunning skills to negotiate, "you must make a chief of him to secure his hunt, otherwise your opponents will debauch him from you, and you are sure to lose him‘’.

Interestingly, after the 1821 amalgamation, the Hudson’s Bay Company “policy was to discontinue deferential treatment of headmen” and negotiate with hunters individually based upon “his efforts and productivity as a trapper”. Such efforts were not entirely successful and the title of “trading chief” persisted along with the associated “deferential treatment” which included receiving their ‘‘chief’s clothing’’.

Thus, the issues that emerge are the roles of Hudson’s Bay Company traders and of their trading chiefs when it came time to do treaties regarding the surrender of territory. Hansen suggests that over time “trading chiefs were elevated to the position of trading post band chiefs”.[189]

Leadership in Flux Until Indian Act

Hansen notes an HBC trader claiming in the 1830s that chiefs had essentially disappeared. That although there were still influential individuals based upon family, skills, and experience, such influence was highly temporary. What is being suggested here is that leadership was in flux through the period before and after the 1850 treaty negotiations. It is important to keep in mind whose perspective, that of fur trade company traders or Anishinaabe members, we are considering.

Although traders tended to single out prominent persons as chiefs, trading post bands were not political entities with a single chief with political authority over all of the hunting groups associated with the post. Only after trading post bands became treaty bands were single individuals or chiefs recognized as having political authority over an entire band. It is likely that leadership did not become formalized until the later part of the 19th century, when band elections were institutionalized under the Indian Act.

Treaty Bands & Trading Post Bands

Here we have a telling observation. Is there continuity between the individuals singled out by the HBC fur traders for their own purposes and the Indian Act chiefs who are going to emerge later? What are the implications of “trading post bands” becoming “treaty bands” for understanding treaties and treaty negotiations? How closely aligned were treaty negotiations with the fur trade negotiating that went on at the posts?

A “trading chief” would likely be a skilled hunter and spokesperson, and might have been a headman of a hunting group. Hansen notes the characteristics of a fur trade negotiator. Note, when she uses the word “trader” she is referring to a HBC trader.

Traders rewarded good fur hunters by giving them extras such as clothing, liquor, and tobacco. Although hunters were bound by cultural conventions to distribute these gifts among their groups, the gifts could be used to enhance their positions among their followers.

Selecting a Trading Chief

Note Hansen’s description of how a “trading chief” is selected.

A trading chief may have been appointed by a trader because he appeared to be cooperative or receptive to the presence of the trader, or because he could deal with the trader on terms that the trader understood. Extras given to trading chiefs elevated their status regardless of whether or not they were recognized as leaders…

Nevertheless, she observes that it was “unlikely that their influence would have extended much beyond either their hunting groups or the bands with whom they were associated”.[190] Again, trading chiefs were leaders with limited influence, that influence being bound to the fur trade activity itself.

Robinson Superior Leadership

Hansen then turns to consider particular individuals and their leadership credentials prior to and at the time of the Robinson Superior Treaty of 1850. The individuals who ‘signed’ the treaty are Joseph Peau de Chat, John Ininway, Mishe Muckqua, Totomenai, Jacob Wasseba, Ah-Mutchiwagabou, Michel Shebageshick, Manitou Shainse, Chigenais.(see Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada)

l’Illinois or John Ininway

L’Illinois, also known as John Ininway, was a “principal Hunter” at Fort William during the 1820s and 1830s, and was about 70 years old when the treaty was negotiated. Although the Hudson’s Bay Company recognized L’Illinois as the “principal chief” at Fort William, the Jesuit priest described him as a “Fur Trading Chieftain” who did not have “the main authority” to act on behalf of the Indian people, although they ‘‘were willing to consider [him] as Chief’’…L’Illinois status as an elder no doubt afforded him considerable respect. After his death in 1868, he was succeeded as the Hudson’s Bay Company chief by his son Maugadina.

Hansen notes that L’Illinois and Peau de Chat had their own group which may have been based upon the ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ distinction, discussed earlier, as well as religion, Catholics and Methodists. In other words, there are distinctions in play which are simply not apparent in the written document of the treaty.

Joseph Peau de Chat

Joseph Peau de Chat was about 40 years old when the treaty was nego­tiated, and he died the following year. He was described as being ‘‘big and handsome, with a vibrant and sonorous voice.’’ According to the Jesuit mis­sionary, Peau de Chat was chosen by the Indian people as chief because of “his eloquent spirit [and] his vehement impetuosity”…According to John Baptiste Penassie, the first band chief of Fort Wil­liam elected under the Indian Act in 1880, Peau de Chat ’’was the only chief appointed by the government for some time before that [i.e., before Penassie’s election]"

There appears to be some evidence suggesting Peau de Chat’s authority was in question.

When Peau de Chat attempted to declare himself spokesman for all Lake Superior Ojibwa, the Hudson’s Bay Company traders at Fort William and at Nipigon claimed that the Indian people frequenting the posts in the Lake Superior District did not recognize his authority to act on their behalf.

Fort William vs Nipigon

These comments would appear to suggest there also may be some relevant differences between Fort William and Nipigon.

In 1848, Peau de Chat told the Nipigon Indians that the government had made him chief over the entire Lake Superior area from the Pigeon River to Michipicoten. Nevertheless, the Nipigon Indians did not acknowledge this claim because, according to James Anderson, the Hudson’s Bay Company trader at Lake Nipigon, Peau de Chat ‘‘was too well known to the Indians to be believed’’.

What is interesting here is the suggestion that Peau de Chat’s claim as chief was tied to the fact that the “government had made him chief” over the area that included Nipigon. This is 1848, prior to the treaty, and thus prior to any treaty-based interpretation of governance. If Peau de Chat is a government appointed chief, then who is the government negotiating with at the treaty table, itself?

Traders Question Peau de Chat’s Authority

Hansen goes on.

Although Peau de Chat prided himself on his abilities as a pub­lic speaker and wanted to be ‘‘the Great Man,’’ the traders warned the government’s representatives against accepting his pretensions, describing him as a cunning rogue with a dreadful tongue who was also under the influence of the Jesuit missionary…

Traders and Missionaries

These remarks alert us to more distinctions of which we should probably be aware. On the Anishinaabe side we have ‘inside’ and ‘outside’, Fort William and Nipigon, and the various forms of leadership, temporary and permanent. On the European side, we have the government, the HBC traders, and now the “Jesuit missionary”. All may be contending for influence and outcomes. The tension between traders and missionaries is a longstanding one, of course, Hansen offers some details.

The traders’ animosity towards Pean de Chat and their denial of his claims to be a spokesman for all Lake Superior Ojibwa may have been prompted by his association with the Jesuit missionary[191]

Peau de Chat died in 1851, a year after the treaty was signed. His successor, Jacob Wassaba (Waiassabe) was appointed by members of Fort William Indians.

The Nipigon Post

Hansen then turns to consider the Nipigon post.

the trader recognized Mishemuckqua as chief as early as the mid–1830s, and he was still identified as such when the treaty was negotiated

Hansen indicates his mother was described as a “halfbreed” and he was of the eagle totem. Manitoushainse, also signed the treaty as a principal man. He was a Nipigon Ojibwe, of the kingfisher totem.

He was a relative of Peau de Chat, and, according to the Nipigon trader, Peau de Chat wanted to oust Mishemuckqua and replace him with Manitoushainse

These observations lead Hansen to suggest rivalries existed at Nipigon, just like Fort William, “between the two kinds of leaders”.

Pic & Long Lake Posts

Hansen indicates little is known about the chiefs at the Pic and Long Lake posts. Shonshon, Luison and Tabasash are referred to in post journals, variously mentioned as receiving “chief’s clothing” by the trader, as being “considered the Chief”, as being on the treaty annuity pay lists. She notes, regarding Louison and Shonshon, that they were seen as good hunters because they typically paid off their winter debts every spring. She speculates as to whether they were “hunting group headmen (or possibly band chiefs)”.

HBC Gifts of “chief’s clothing”

Hansen notes the HBC policy.

It was Hudson’s Bay Company policy to give clothing to hunters who paid their winter debts in the spring…and Shonshon and Louison ‘s positions were further enhanced by these gifts of ’‘chief’s clothing.’’

Once again we are presented with the HBC involvement in determining Ojibwe persons of influence and leadership in the fur trade.

Michipicoten Post

Hansen then turns to the Michipicoten chiefs who signed the Robinson Superior Treaty.

The Michipicoten chiefs, Michel Totominai and Chiginans, were brothers, Totominai being the elder. Their totem was the pike…They, along with Peau de Chat, L’Illinois, Mishemuckqua and the Pic and Long Lake chiefs, were identified as the individuals who would have to be consulted concerning the surrender of their lands.

This rounds out Hansen’s consideration of individuals who signed the 1850 treaty. The biggest take away here is the question of Hudson’s Bay Company and Jesuit missionary involvement in determining who needed to be consulted when the issue of the “surrender” of “their lands” arose. Were trading post chiefs the figures authorized as chiefs to negotiate such land surrenders? Did they in fact have the authority to surrender land?

Pre-Treaty Events & Petitions: Mining vs Hunting

Given the exploration and mining activity in unceded hunting ground territory, in 1847 the Ojibwe protested and petitioned the Governor General to negotiate a treaty. In 1848 a large gathering occurred at Manitowaning on Manitoulin Island for the “annual present distribution” by the Indian Department in anticipation of a treaty negotiation.

Among them were “nearly all” of the Ojibwa who regularly traded at Fort William, including the "young chief‘’ Peau de Chat and the “old chief” L’Illinois. They had been urged to go to Mani­towaning by Peau de Chat who told them that they would receive a large sum of money for their lands as well as the usual presents [192]

Complaint: Destroying Hunting Grounds

Peau de Chat and Shinguakonce (Garden River) spoke with Thomas Anderson who was commissioned ‘‘to investigate the claims of the Indian people’’. Shinguakonce complained that “miners were destroying their hunting grounds”.

Peau de Chat voiced concern over the demands fur traders and missionaries were making. Nevertheless Peau de Chat indicated a willingness “to sell his land and its minerals” allowing miners and traders access in exchange for reserved land for the Ojibwa.

Anderson subsequently recommended that the Government should extinguish the Ojibwa’s claims by negotiating a treaty that would provide them with a perpetual annuity and reserves…[193]

So to be clear, on one side we have a desire for extinguishment in exchange for annuities and reserves in order to enable mining activities. On the other, a complaint that miners are destroying hunting grounds and therefore a desire to do treaty. So what is the logic here? How does one translate a desire to protect hunting grounds into a land surrender to a government representing mining activity? Unless, of course, the understanding is that the exclusive-use reserve being negotiated is intended to protect those very hunting grounds.

Montreal Delegation 1849 to Remove Miners

However, nothing happened until an Ojibwa delegation went to Montreal in 1849 threatening to remove the miners if claims were not settled. Similarly a delegation from Fort William, Nipigon and Pic Posts gathered in Sault Ste. Marie in 1849 in anticipation of a council in Michipicoten with the Government representative. However, rumours of a cholera epidemic had them returning to their territories.

Vidal-Anderson: Limited Consultation

The Government appointed Anderson and Vidal “to meet with the Ojibwa and ascertain the basis for their claims to, and their expectations concerning the surrender of, their lands.” Their attempt to meet many Ojibwa along the north shore failed insofar as the majority had left for their winter hunting grounds inland.

Consequently, the commissioners were able to hold councils with the Lake Superior Ojibwa only at Fort William and Michipi­coten…

Thus, it would appear that Vidal and Anderson only held councils at the fur trade posts to discuss the surrender of their territory where the majority of Anishinaabe were in fact absent.

Authority of Vidal & Anderson Questioned

They only met people fishing in Nipigon Bay and then at Pays Plat, so they sought the opinion of the HBC trader at Nipigon Post. At Fort William, they held a council which the resident Jesuit priest attended. They were told by Peau de Chat that a delegation intended to go to Montreal to see the Governor General “because Vidal and Anderson did not have the authority to negotiate a treaty”. However, Peau de Chat appeared eventually to be willing to “surrender his land” in exchange for annuities.[194]

Peau de Chat’s Status & Role of HBC

There was some question about Peau de Chat’s status, although the assembly selected him.

Nonetheless, both Peau de Chat and L’Illinois, who was recognized by the Hudson’s Bay Company as chief, were allowed to speak on behalf of the Fort William Indians

The council at Michipicoten indicated to Vidal and Anderson they wanted annuities for their land. Anderson responding that he would return the following year with a treaty.

Report Identified Five Bands

After the commissioners went to Sault Ste. Marie and Lake Huron they prepared a report which identified bands, chiefs, territories and the reserves wanted.

According to this report, there were five bands on the north shore of Lake Superior. These were identified as the Fort Wil­liam, Nipigon, Pic, Long Lake, and Michipicoten Bands.

The Long Lake and Pic Ojibwe were tied through extensive marriages.

Because of their size and the extent of the territory reportedly claimed by each, these bands were no aboriginal bands, but rather trading post bands whose membership consisted of the remains of several aboriginal bands and associated hunting groups that occupied territories in the vicinity of each of the five Lake Superior trading posts.

Thus Hansen concludes that the bands identified by Vidal and Anderson in their report were “trading post bands”.

Report: Reserves for (HBC) Trading Post Bands

The populations Vidal and Anderson were engaging were “trading post bands” and the information provided to them came by way of HBC traders. Of the five bands of the Lake Superior Ojibwa in their report they only set reserves for Fort William and Michipicoten Bands, because councils were only held with the latter.

They noted that Peau de Chat wanted the Nipigon and Pic Indians to reside on the Fort William Reserve, but added that those bands would probably prefer reserves ‘‘at their respective haunts.’’[195]

What becomes unclear here is what the purpose of “reserves” are. Recall that the motivation for treaty for the Anishinaabeg was to protect hunting grounds. Is that the status of reserves in the treaty negotiation?

Also keep in mind that in addition to reserves, the government is offering payments and annuities. Who, amongst the Anishinaabeg, appreciates the value of money? Those living from traditional subsistence activities fishing, hunting moose, rabbits or harvesting wild rice do not need money. Only the folks dealing directly with the fur trade posts have an immediate use for money or money-based credit.

No Consensus Among (HBC) Bands?

Again it appears there was no consensus operating among these band divisions. The report did identify chiefs of the respective bands.

For the most part, these chiefs were identified on the basis of informa­tion provided by the Hudson’s Bay Company traders…

The report noted that these chiefs’ authority involved their “trading post band” and that such authority was not well-defined and was subject to circumstances. They cautioned regarding individual claims to be spokespersons for everyone. For example, they, along with HBC traders, thought Peau de Chat attempted to negotiate terms that ‘‘would not have satisfied those whose sentiments [he] professed to express’’.[196]

Traders Caution: No Chief For All Lake Superior Posts

the Nipigon Post trader had cautioned Vidal and Anderson against accepting Peau de Chat’s claim to be the spokesman for all the Lake Superior Ojibwa…

The same caution came the following year.

The following year, the Fort William trader cautioned Robinson, the government’s treaty negotiator, to take note of what the chief of each post had to say concerning the surrender of their respective territories.

Mica Bay Conflict 1849

In November, 1849, the conflict with miners escalated when about 100 Sault Ste. Marie Ojibwa and “half breeds” seized the Quebec Mining Company at Mica Bay. The leaders were arrested and imprisoned in Toronto where William Benjamin Robinson interceded and “secured their release”. He communicated to the Superintendent of Indian Affairs that the Ojibwa sought a treaty to deal with “their claim”. Robinson was subsequently appointed to negotiate such a treaty with the Ojibwa of Lakes Superior and Huron.

The fact that there was a serious conflict with miners clearly indicates something of the Anishinaabe intent. Mining activity was seen as a threatening activity and thus a key factor in identifying that Anishinaabe intent. What was that conflict precisely about?

Robinson Treaty Commission 1850

Robinson travelled to the Sault in the spring of 1850 and met with north shore Lake Huron chiefs to make arrangements to return in August to negotiate a treaty.

Robinson wrote to the Hudson’s Bay Company traders at Fort William and Michipicoten asking them to convey the arrangements for the meeting to the Lake Superior Ojibwa. When he learned of the arrangements, Peau de Chat was displeased that the Sault Ste. Marie chiefs had not consulted with the others.

Role of the HBC Traders

Again, we should note how directly involved HBC traders were in communications regarding treaty negotiations. Also noted is the tension over process, lack of communication and consultation between the Anishinaabe who would be parties to the eventual treaty.

Despite his misgivings, Peau de Chat

and the other ‘’ influential Indians‘’ at Fort William agreed to go after Chief Factor MacKenzie told them that it would be foolish to refuse since they had been lobbying for a settlement of their claim for a number of years.

The direct involvement of the HBC Chief Factor here is perhaps understandable, from the government point of view, given Hansen’s articulation of the role of the trading post as the economic basis upon which the contextual Anishinaabe leadership structure, with which the Government is attempting to deal, had been developed. Here is a further example.

Some of the Michipicoten Indians had indi­cated to George Simpson, Governor of the Hudson’s Bay Company, that they, too, were disinclined to go. However, they consented after the Hudson’s Bay Company trader, John Swanston, agreed to accompany them[197]

John Swanston will appear as a signatory to the treaty. Robinson returned in August of 1850 to negotiate a treaty at the Sault. Hansen offers a brief account of the participants.

a delegation of about 15 of the “principal Indians” from Fort William arrived together with an unspecified number of “deputies” from Nipigon, six to eight “hunters” from Michipicoten, and the Hudson’s Bay Company trader, John Swanston.

No Pic or Long Lake Posts Representation

Hansen notes that there is no indication of representatives from Pic or Long Lake. The original venue was intended to be Garden River, however, upon hearing Peau de Chat was ill, Robinson accommodated the shorter travel distance of the Sault. Negotiations began on September 5, 1850.

Treaty Translated & Signed

On September 6, 1850, the Lake Superior delegation held a council among themselves to discuss the terms offered by Robinson and told him that they had agreed to sign a treaty ceding their territory. On Sep­tember 7, 1850, the Robinson Superior Treaty was signed by four “Chiefs” and five ‘‘principal men.’’ To ensure that there was no misunderstanding, two interpreters “carefully read over and translated” the treaty for the Lake Superior Ojibwa.

Those translations are presumably not available anywhere. Nevertheless, the very idea that there were interpreters and translations creates questions about how the document was translated. Keep in mind the issues that were bringing the Anishinaabeg to the treaty table. How were those concerns addressed in the text of the treaty document?

Robinson Diary: Peau de Chat as Spokesman

Hansen indicates that Robinson “kept a detailed diary of the negotiations” where he refers to “Peau de Chat and his chiefs and principal men”.

[Robinson] regarded Peau de Chat as the spokesman for the Lake Superior Ojibwa, despite the efforts of Hudson’s Bay Company traders to discredit Peau de Chat…

Hansen indicates that the only other Lake Superior Ojibwa mentioned in Robinson’s diary is Totominai (Michipicoten). Yet, chiefs L’Illinois (Fort William), Mishemuckqua (Nipigon) and principal men Shebageshick, Wassaba (succeeded Peau de Chat in 1851), Ahmutchiwagabow (Fort William), Manitoushainse (Nipi­gon), and Chiginans (Michipicoten) also signed. Louison, Shonshon, and Tabasash, identified as Pic and Long Lake chiefs, did not sign the treaty, nor is there evidence they were present.[198]

Treaty Promises Annuities & 3 Reserves

The Lake Superior treaty “promised an initial cash payment, a perpetual annuity, hunting and fishing rights, and reserves” and the payment of the initial amount “entrusted to the Hudson’s Bay Company traders at Michipicoten and Fort William for dis­tribution”. Similarly the annuities were to be distributed. The treaty annuities were distributed at HBC posts at Fort William and Michipicoten until 1875–76 when an Indian agent was stationed at Port Arthur. Note that Pic and Long Lake ‘Indians’ received equal annuities suggesting they were considered part of the treaty. Three reserves are outlined by the treaty. Later reserves were added for a number of bands.

Hansen’s Conclusions: Levels of Leadership

In Hansen’s account Ojibwa leadership involved three levels, “the hunting group, the band, and the trading post band” and the distinction between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ leaders. The trading post band was “non-traditional and more formalized” than the others, as a result of interacting with the traders’ form of organization. Formalization increased with greater government involvement leading to the current chief and band council of the Indian Act system.[199]

HBC Created Limited ‘Outside’ Trading Post (Band) Chiefs

The hunting group headman had more daily authority given the independence of the hunting group, whereas the band chief and trading post chief were limited to particular assemblies or post activities. The trading post chief was a creation of the HBC and “was elevated to that of trading post band chief when it became necessary to identify a representative of the Indians associated with each post to negotiate the treaty”. The trading post band chief was an “outside” leader with authority limited to the trading post and “other interactions with Europeans”.

Vidal-Anderson Identified Chiefs via HBC

The chiefs identified as such by Vidal and Anderson in 1849 “were so named with the assistance of the Hudson’s Bay Company”. The signatories to the 1850 Lake Superior treaty had typically been represented to Vidal and Anderson as “the chiefs of the trading post bands”. The HBC traders, as did Vidal and Anderson, recognized their limited authority.[200]

‘Inside’ & ‘Outside’ Chiefs Present at Negotiations

Thus Hansen sees the recognition by the HBC traders and the role of trading post band chiefs as interacting with non-natives “ensured their position at the treaty negotiations”. Nevertheless “inside” chiefs were present also (Peau de Chat, Manitoushainse). Hansen notes that while there is no evidence of any councils occurring before the delegates left for Sault Ste. Marie, she considers it likely given the importance of the treaty and that no one native or government representative questioned the authority of the delegates to negotiate the treaty.

Role of Negotiating Councils

Hansen considers the terms of the treaty to be the results of negotiation councils following closely the Vidal-Anderson report. The treaty was the result of “several years of lobbying government to settle their claims” and thus she suggests the Ojibwa participants did not have “only a naive understanding of the immediate implications of the outcome”. Nevertheless a question remains about the Pic and Long Lake chiefs absence and missing signatures from a treaty that would involve the surrender of their land and for which they would receive annuities.[201]

Hansen closes by recognizing the need for more research on the oral tradition and relationships among the hunting groups and the trading post bands.[202]

Hansen has provided us with a significant level of detail but leaves open the question of the precise nature of the Anishinaabe intent before, during and at the conclusion, and subsequently as well, of the Robinson Superior Treaty 1850.

Thus the question of the validity of the treaty will require closer scrutiny of the context and the terms of the written document. I will close this literature review with a reading of the written document.

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Robinson Superior Treaty 1850

https://www.aadnc-aandc.gc.ca/eng/1100100028978/1100100028982

This is an annotated parsing of the text of the Robinson Superior Treaty, 1850.

“This Agreement”

THIS AGREEMENT, made and entered into on the seventh day of September, in the year of Our Lord one thousand eight hundred and fifty, at Sault Ste. Marie, in the Province of Canada,…

The document clearly claims to record an agreement. To what do the words “this agreement” refer, the document itself or an event outside the document which the document purports to record in some manner.

Date: “year of Our Lord”

The document is internally dated to September 7, 1850 and more specifically “in the year of Our Lord”, clearly indicating a particular cultural reference regarding the perception of time.

Location: “Province of Canada”

Regarding location, the document internally provides a description of location as “Sault Ste. Marie, in the Province of Canada”. Again, we are given a specific political reference point of “the Province of Canada” designating a political unit within the colonial system of the time.

Participants: Robinson “on behalf of” the Crown

…between the Honorable WILLIAM BENJAMIN ROBINSON, of the one part, on behalf of HER MAJESTY THE QUEEN,…

Thus, the agreement engages on one side William Benjamin Robinson, here designated as “Honorable”, which we may need to clarify regarding its meaning within the colonial system’s nomenclature. Furthermore, Robinson is participating in the agreement “on behalf of” another, in this case, “her Majesty the Queen”. Again we are operating with a relationship within the colonial political frames of reference. How does Robinson participate “on behalf of” someone else who, in this is case, is a “Queen”. And what, if any, are the implications of the word “Majesty” within the colonial political system?

Participants: “Chiefs…principal men of the Ojibewa Indians”

and JOSEPH PEANDECHAT, JOHN IUINWAY, MISHE-MUCKQUA, TOTOMENCIE, Chiefs, and JACOB WARPELA, AHMUTCHIWAGABOU, MICHEL SHELAGESHICK, MANITSHAINSE, and CHIGINANS, principal men of the OJIBEWA Indians

We are here introduced to the participants on the “Ojibewa” side of the agreement. There are three “Chiefs” and five “principal men” who are designated as “of the Ojibewa Indians”.

Hansen has raised some important questions about what the designations “chiefs” and “principal men” signify within the political culture “of the Ojibewa Indians” and, more specifically, within the terms of this document. For example, are the expressions “chiefs” and “principal men” primarily colonial labels? How do they operate, if they do, as meaningful distinctions within the political culture “of the Ojibewa Indians”?

Who Were The “Ojibewa Indians”?

Furthermore, whom does the expression “Ojibewa Indians” include and exclude? Again, is it a colonial label or an Indigenous designation? In other words, does such language in the document belong to one side of the agreement and not the other, or is it meaningful to both parties? What further information do we have about the individuals named in the document?

Territories & “inhabiting” Peoples of the Agreement

Regarding “the Ojibewa Indians”, the document continues by providing a description of their location and thus the territories covered by the agreement.

…inhabiting the Northern Shore of Lake Superior, in the said Province of Canada, from Batchewana Bay to Pigeon River, at the western extremity of said Lake, and inland throughout that extent to the height of land which separates the territory covered by the charter of the Honorable the Hudson’s Bay Company from the said tract, and also the Islands in the said Lake within the boundaries of the British possessions therein,…

First, we have an indication that the “Ojibewa Indians” who are party to the agreement are “inhabiting” the territories covered by the agreement. We might ask what the term “inhabiting” implies? What relationship actually obtains and what relationship does the document describe regarding the “Ojibewa Indians” and the territories covered by the agreement.

Geo-Political: “Northern Shore”…in the…“, ”Province of Canada"

We are then provided with a general geographical description, “the Northern Shore of Lake Superior”. Again we are provided with a colonial political designation, “in the said Province of Canada”. What meaning does this political designation have for the different parties to the agreement?

We are then given more specific location references, “from Batchewana Bay to Pigeon River, at the western extremity of said Lake”. Again, we will need to inquire how clear these designations are to the various parties to the agreement. This last specification would appear to provide an east-west set of references along the northern shore of Lake Superior. We are then given a north-south reference, “and inland through that extent to the height of land”. Thus the shoreline itself and the height of land become the demarcations of the territories covered by the agreement.

“Height of land” & the Hudson’s Bay Company

The “height of land” is then further described as that “which separates the territory covered by the charter of the Honorable the Hudson’s Bay Company from the said tracts”. This would seem to suggest that the territories covered by the agreement are bounded by the “charter” territories of the Hudson’s Bay Company. This would seem to suggest LAO that the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) may be in some way party to the agreement insofar as its “charter” territories are a reference point for the agreement. As a result does the HBC “charter” become a supplementary document to the Robinson Superior Treaty document?

Islands Within the “British possessions”

Finally, in the segment of the agreement we are considering, we are told the agreement includes “and also the Islands in the said Lake within the boundaries of the British possessions therein”. In 1850, “British possessions” would suggest a distinction from American political territories which results from agreements following the American Revolutionary War and the War of 1812. Again, we might ask, how are such political distinctions understood by the various parties to the Robinson Superior Treaty (RST)?

Two Parties: Crown & “the Ojibewa Indians”?

of the other part, witnesseth:

With the above expression it becomes clear that the Robinson Treaty agreement envisages two parties i) Robinson on behalf of the Queen and ii) three “chiefs” and five “principal men” who are “of the Ojibewa Indians”. Note the expression “on behalf of” is not used to describe the relationship between the chiefs and principal men and the Ojibewa Indians. Which begs the question, what is the relationship between the named individuals and the “Ojibewa Indians” who are “inhabiting” the specified territories along the northern shore of Lake Superior? Given that the signatories of the agreement are not the ultimate parties to the agreement, as Hansen alerts us, how are we to understand these various parties to the agreement?

Assumed Relationships to the Agreement

We are then given the word “witnesseth”. This would appear to be a word with a legal set of connotations. Should we distinguish witnessing from contracting parties? Are the witnesses also the contracting parties or are the witnesses acting on behalf of contracting parties who are otherwise not present, as the words “on behalf of” suggest for “her majesty the Queen”? On the one hand, the colonial system being fairly hierarchical, stratified and literate, it is likely possible to find complementary documentation which would help fill in the relationship between Robinson, the Queen and, for example, the Province of Canada. On the other hand, how are we to understand the relationship between witnesses and contracting parties on the “Ojibewa Indians” side of the agreement?

Money Payments & Annuities

The terms of the agreement then follow.

THAT for and in consideration of the sum of two thousand pounds of good and lawful money of Upper Canada, to them in hand paid, and for the further perpetual annuity of five hundred pounds,…

Thus the agreement involves the payment of “good and lawful money of Upper Canada” and a “perpetual annuity”. (Note: Upper Canada was not a political sub-unit of the Province of Canada which was created in 1841 through the merging of Upper and Lower Canada. Canada East and West were the sub-units after 1841 until Confederation 1867.) The expression “to them in hand paid” may indicate that credit would not be acceptable, but this remains to be determined.

the same to be paid and delivered to the said Chiefs and their Tribes at a convenient season of each summer, not later than the first day of August at the Honorable the Hudson’s Bay Company’s Posts of Michipicoten and Fort William,

Recipients: “Chiefs and their Tribes”, Role of HBC

Here it is specified who shall receive payment, as well as, when and where. Payments will be made to “said Chiefs and their Tribes”. It is not clear from the document who the “Tribes” are other than they appear to be associated with the “said Chiefs”. Once again “the Honorable the Hudson’s Bay Company” is implicated in this political arrangement insofar as HBC posts are the designated locations for the execution of official government actions. Given Miller and Hansen’s detailed accounts of leadership, it is evident that the expression “Chiefs and their Tribes” is not a very clear expression of exactly what political entities are being precisely referred to here.

Cede & Surrender to the Crown: “all their right, title and interest”

they the said chiefs and principal men do freely, fully and voluntarily surrender, cede, grant and convey unto Her Majesty, Her heirs and successors forever, all their right, title and interest in the whole of the territory above described,

Here we have the essence of the Robinson Treaty as a cede and surrender treaty, as opposed to the peace and friendship treaties of an earlier era. This section will require more attention but simply to say at this point, the land surrender is apparently between the “said chiefs and principal men” and “Her Majesty, Her heirs and successors” and the time frame is “forever”. We will need to address just what the language means regarding “surrender, cede, grant and convey” with respect to “all their right, title and interest” in the “whole of the territory” in question.

Regarding Anishinaabe intent, how does this statement of a land surrender deal with the desire to protect hunting grounds?

Authority to Cede & Surrender: Validity

The first and obvious question is whether the chiefs and principal men had the authority to perform the surrender described on behalf of the “Ojibewa Indians”. Is there an assumption within the document that the chiefs and principal men embodied the same kind of performative authority that Robinson had “on behalf of” the Queen. If not, how would that affect the interpretation of the document and the performative process in which it was produced? In our terms, what is the answer to the question: is the written document in fact a valid treaty, a valid agreement?

Reservations

save and except the reservations set forth in the schedule hereunto annexed, which reservations shall be held and occupied by the said Chiefs and their Tribes in common, for the purpose of residence and cultivation,

Here we have reference to “reservations” which are to be treated outside (“save and except”) the terms of cede and surrender outlined above. Again we have a reference to “said Chiefs and their Tribes” as the holders and occupiers of such reserved territories “for the purpose of residence and cultivation”.

Given, as we have seen, that the Anishinaabe intent was centred around protecting hunting grounds from mining activity, how are we to understand the Anishinaabe intent in the description of the reserves as “for the purpose of residence and cultivation”. This would appear to describe a settler community, living a sedentary existence with a fixed locale for residence and growing crops, not a hunting, fishing and wild ricing community moving seasonally. In other words, the treaty appears to be calling for a profound transformation in the conduct of the “Tribes” addressed by the treaty. Is the treaty assuming that the hunting bands are going to become simply ‘trading post Indians’ gathered around a Hudson’s Bay post?

Furthermore the territories are to be held and occupied “in common”. How these relations between chiefs, tribes and reserve lands are to be ultimately characterized remains unclear. The document provides no details on such questions. We will need to explore its assumptions.

Selling Reserve Properties (Minerals)

and should the said Chiefs and their respective Tribes at any time desire to dispose of any mineral or other valuable productions upon the said reservations, the same will be at their request sold by order of the Superintendent General of the Indian Department for the time being, for their sole use and benefit, and to the best advantage.

Here we have reference to the selling of reserve properties (ex., minerals) if so desired by, again, the chiefs and their tribes who may request the sale. However, the sale occurs “by order of the Superintendent General of the Indian Department”. Nevertheless, the sale must occur for the “sole use and benefit, and to the best advantage” of the chiefs and their tribes.

Implied Governance Relations

With the above remarks we have the first indication in the document about how the document envisaged governance between the parties to the agreement following the land surrender of “all their right, title and interest”. The chiefs and tribes make a request for sale. The Superintendent General executes the sale, but must do so to the benefit of the chiefs and tribes. How aware were the “Tribes” in question of this new model of governance being created by the treaty?

And the said William Benjamin Robinson of the first part, on behalf of Her Majesty and the Government of this Province, hereby promises and agrees to make the payments as before mentioned;

Here, the relationship between Robinson, Her Majesty and the Government of the Province of Canada is referenced to indicate the relations of responsibility for the payments to be made.

Again it is important to ask, who on the Anishinaabe side of the agreement would most appreciate money payments? In other words, are money payments a measure of who is in fact party to the agreement? Who prior to the treaty were using money payments as a way to conduct their affairs and, more importantly, who was not? What will the answers to such questions tell us about the terms and intent of the treaty document and the treaty negotiations? Do we need to be aware of who was party to the agreement versus who was affected by the agreement, to the extent that they do not align?

“Full and free privilege” to Hunt & Fish

and further to allow the said chiefs and their tribes the full and free privilege to hunt over the territory now ceded by them, and to fish in the waters thereof as they have heretofore been in the habit of doing,

Here we have reference to privileges to hunt and fish in the territories “now ceded” and to do so “as they have heretofore been in the habit of doing”. The document would appear to indicate rights of usage regarding ceded territories. And yet there is also an indication that these hunting and fishing activities continue as before, “as they have heretofore been in the habit of doing”.

It would appear that the document distinguishes use from ownership where the Ojibewa Indians have use rights whereas the Queen and the Province have ownership rights. How clear was this understood by all parties to the agreement? Recall that the Anishinaabe intent, articulated in petitions and protests, to the point of their being arrested, was to protect their hunting grounds from mining activity. Is that what the written document does? “[T]he full and free privilege to hunt over the territory now ceded by them”, is a very ambiguous statement regarding that Anishinaabe intent. The Anishinaabeg have ceded control over the territory they are apparently intending to protect? Has the government therefore committed to acting on behalf of that intention to protect? How are we to understand what is in fact agreed to in the document?

Selling Reserved Lands & “Consent” of the Government

saving and excepting only such portions of the said territory as may from time to time be sold or leased to individuals, or companies of individuals, and occupied by them with the consent of the Provincial Government.

The above right of usage might be restricted if some portion of the ceded land was sold or leased and occupied by third parties provided they have the consent of the Provincial Government. How clear was this in the treaty agreement as an oral performance?

The parties of the second part further promise and agree that they will not sell, lease, or otherwise dispose of any portion of their reservations without the consent of the Superintendent General of Indian Affairs being first had and obtained;

Here the chiefs and principal men of the Ojibewa Indians have agreed to only sell, lease or dispose of reserved lands upon the “consent of the Superintendent General”. Once again, the Superintendent General appears to be inserted as an intermediary authority between Ojibewa Indians and reserve lands. How clear was that in the oral negotiations?

Mineral Exploration & Non-Interference

nor will they at any time hinder or prevent persons from exploring or searching for mineral or other valuable productions in any part of the territory hereby ceded to Her Majesty as before mentioned.

The Ojibewa Indians are not to interfere with mining activity in ceded territory. This presumably gets at the heart of the Government’s motive for doing treaty. Especially given the disruption of illegal mining activity that had taken place at Mica Bay the year before. (see MicaBay) This protects the mining interest. However, how is the hunting ground interest protected? Is it?

The parties of the second part also agree that in case the Government of this Province should before the date of this agreement have sold, or bargained to sell, any mining locations or other property on the portions of the territory hereby reserved for their use and benefit, then and in that case such sale, or promise of sale, shall be forfeited, if the parties interested desire it, by the Government, and the amount accruing therefrom shall be paid to the tribe to whom the reservation belongs.

A curious addition insofar as it covers reserve land already sold by the Government indicating that any proceeds will accrue to the appropriate tribe on the condition that the interested parties agree. It is not clear what happens if the interested parties do not agree. This section will require closer scrutiny.

Escalator Clause

We are then introduced to the so-called escalator clause.

The said William Benjamin Robinson on behalf of Her Majesty, who desires to deal liberally and justly with all Her subjects, further promises and agrees that in case the territory hereby ceded by the parties of the second part shall at any future period produce an amount which will enable the Government of this Province without incurring loss to increase the annuity hereby secured to them, then, and in that case, the same shall be augmented from time to time,…

Here we have the basics of the escalator clause whereby the annuity may be increased upon certain conditions being met. First note that “parties of the second part” are referred to as her Majesty’s “subjects” who she desires to deal with “liberally and justly”. The augmentation of the annuity is tied to the productivity of the ceded territory, and that the Government not incur a loss through the augmentation.

Did the oral negotiations clearly communicate to the Anishinaabeg that they were becoming “subjects” of the Crown and all that that would entail regarding governance relations? And were the folks who were hunting in the bush when Vidal, Anderson and Robinson came calling, were they all consensually aware what was being negotiated on their behalf regarding their ceded land and their status as subjects of the Crown?

Legality & the Gracious Pleasure of the Crown

Further limitations on the amount of the augmentation are provided.

provided that the amount paid to each individual shall not exceed the sum of one pound provincial currency in any one year, or such further sum as Her Majesty may be graciously pleased to order;

In effect, the augmentation appears to be conditional upon the ‘gracious pleasure’ of the Crown. However, we note that this pleasure is afforded some obligation insofar as the words “liberally and justly” might be taken to imply as much.

and provided further that the number of Indians entitled to the benefit of this Treaty shall amount to two thirds of their present numbers (which is twelve hundred and forty) to entitle them to claim the full benefit thereof, and should their numbers at any future period not amount to two thirds of twelve hundred and forty, the annuity shall be diminished in proportion to their actual numbers.

Here we appear to have a condition tying the amount of the annuity to the size of the Indian population relative to the 1850 base line.

“Schedule of Reservations”

The next section, called the “Schedule of Reservations” lays out descriptions of the reserve territories created by the agreement.

Schedule of Reservations made by the above named subscribing Chiefs and principal men.

Again the reserves are linked directly to the “Chiefs and principal men”, thus any ambiguity in their role may have implications for the agreement elements affected. What for example is the precise legal meaning of “named subscribing”?

Fort William First Nation “Tribe”, & HBC

Fort William First Nation is the first listed.

FIRST - Joseph Pean-de-chat and his Tribe, the reserve to commence about two miles from Fort William (inland), on the right bank of the River Kiminitiquia thence westerly six miles, parallel to the shores of the lake; thence northerly five miles; thence easterly to the right bank of the said river, so as not to interfere with any acquired rights of the Honorable Hudson’s Bay Company.

We are provided with a description of the geographic limits of the reserved territory. Again the HBC is implicated in the agreement, in this case, not to interfere with the HBC’s “acquired rights”. Nevertheless it remains unclear how the HBC’s acquired rights intersect with the Fort William reserve.

Michipicoten & Nipigon “Tribes”, & HBC

SECOND - Four miles square at Gros Cap, being a valley near the Honorable Hudson’s Bay Company’s post of Michipicoten, for Totominai and Tribe.

Again the HBC is referenced, however, the reserve appears simply to be near and not in any territorial conflict with the post of Michipicoten.

THIRD - Four miles square on Gull River, near Lake Nipigon, on both sides of said river, for the Chief Mishimuckqua and Tribe.

Here we have the third and final of the three reserve territories, this one near Lake Nipigon. In each case a named chief is aligned with a “Tribe”. Again, there is no indication what the political relationship is between the named chiefs and their Tribes and the respective reserve territories.

Signatures of Parties: “signed, sealed and delivered”

The final section of the agreement involves the signatures of the parties.

Signed, sealed and delivered at Sault Ste. Marie, the day and year first, above written in presence of,

Clearly the expression “signed, sealed and delivered” indicates legal meanings that authenticate the document and the agreement it records. The signatures of the parties to the agreement follow along with X’s and apparently seals (Sceau), the latter largely illegible.

There is some question whether the Indigenous ‘signatures’ are actually legal signatures insofar as they are clearly written by the same hand. What are the implications if they are not in fact signatures? How would legal witnessing and authentication of an agreement be affected?

Role of Interpreters

The signature list includes Geo. Johnston who is labelled as an interpreter. What role did the interpreter play in the shared understandings of the agreement? Why was an interpreter necessary?

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Proposal Conclusion

In conclusion, there are many questions, many avenues for research opened by this proposal and literature review regarding the question: Is the Robinson Superior Treaty 1850 a valid treaty given the agreement it purports to record?

Talaga and King offered important insights into the role of stories, of living inside stories, and of interpreting conflicted creation stories. And in particular, the need to understand the story of colonialism, with its themes of capitalism and Christianity and their potential violations of Mino-Bimaadiziwin, when interpreting the context in which the Robinson Superior Treaty occurred.

McPherson and Rabb also provide useful insights involving other-than-human persons, ‘outside view predicates’, and polycentric perspectives. Especially, their opposition of a narrative ethic to a Kantian ethic of principles, and of modelling versus coercively imposing instructions, all of these considerations may inform our attempt to understand the cultural intentions surrounding and deliberating at the treaty negotiations in 1850.

Abram afforded us the broadest philosophical vision of opposing cultures based on orality and literacy, objective abstraction and life-world immersion, colonial domination and respectful relations, animism versus the global techno-world, all of which may help inform our view of the broad cultural forces surrounding those events leading to the treaty of 1850.

Finally, Miller, Stark and Hansen provide us with crucial details to understand the negotiations themselves. The nature of Anishinaabe leadership, the role of the Hudson’s Bay Company and Christian missionaries, the need to communicate with manidoog in councils, the role of consensual networks in decision-making, are provided by Miller. Stark gives us principles of respect, responsibility and renewal with which to measure and evaluate the negotiations. Finally Hansen’s details about the negotiations themselves, all these many considerations will help us put precise and informed questions to explore the thesis proposal that attempts to evaluate whether the Robinson Superior Treaty 1850 is in fact valid.

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Bibliography

Talaga, Tanya. All Our Relations: Finding the Path Forward. House of Anansi Press, 2018.

King, Thomas. The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative. New York: House of Anansi Press, 2011.

McPherson, Dennis H., and J. Douglas Rabb. Indian from the inside: Native American Philosophy and Cultural Renewal. 2nd ed. Jefferson, N.C: McFarland, 2011.(Kindle edition)

Abram, David. The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-Human World. New York: Vintage Books, 1997. (Kindle edition)

Miller, Cary. Ogimaag: Anishinaabeg Leadership, 1760–1845. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2010. (Kindle edition)

Heidi Stark (2010) Respect, Responsibility, and Renewal: The Foundations of Anishinaabe treaty-making with the United States and Canada. American Indian Culture and Research Journal: 2010, Vol. 34, No. 2, pp. 145–164.

Hansen, Lise C. (1987). Chiefs and Principal Men: A Question of Leadership in Treaty Negotiations. Anthropologica, 29(1), 39.

Robinson Superior Treaty 1850, https://www.aadnc-aandc.gc.ca/eng/1100100028978/1100100028982

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Footnotes