User:Fhusis/Anishinaabe Nation in Treaty No. 3

The Anishinaabe Nation in Treaty No. 3 is an aboriginal people of Canada. It is by definition the part of the Anishinaabe peoples that entered into Treaty 3 with the Crown in 1873.

The Making of the Treaty
Treaty 3, or the North-West Angle Treaty, is the only one of the eleven Numbered Treaties of Canada that was made by a single nation with the Crown. Reporting on difficult negotiations leading up to its signing, one of the three Treaty Commissioners Alexander Morris wrote of meeting with the "Indian Council": "The nation had not met for many years, and some of [the Chiefs] had never before been assembled together." "I then told them that I ... wished to treat with them as a nation and not with separate bands, as they would otherwise compel me to do; and therefore urged them to return to their council."

Morris recounted that when the Treaty was concluded, the Council's "principal spokesman, Mawedopenais, came forward and drew off his gloves, and spoke as follows: 'Now you see me stand before you all: what has been done here today, has been done openly before the Great Spirit, and before the nation.'"

Correspondingly, the Anishinaabe Nation in Treaty No. 3 is the only one of the aboriginal peoples of Canada whose identity is now defined in part by a Treaty. The making of Treaty 3 constitutionally severed the Anishinaabe Nation in Treaty 3 from its Anishinaabe relatives and set it on a distinct future path.

The Treaty Territory
The Treaty territory extended from Lake Superior in the east into what is now Manitoba to the west. With a stroke of the pen, Treaty 3 extended the area in which the Crown could legitimately assert its sovereignty by 55,000 square miles. Of more immediate strategic significance, it secured friendly passage for Canada to open up the West.

Post-Treaty Experience
Three years after Treaty 3 was solemnly signed, Canada enacted the Indian Act, which provided the legal and administrative basis for more than a century of colonial policies of dispossession, oppression and attempted cultural extinguishment of the Canadian Indian peoples. In 1998, Minister of Indian Affairs Jane Stewart, and in 2008, Prime Minister Stephen Harper, publicly acknowledged and apologised for major elements of these policies.