Video shows alternative interpretation of Treaty 9

Oral Promises/Broken Promises, an alternative interpretation of Treaty 9 based on the diaries of a third treaty commissioner, is posted on the MiningWatch Canada website.
“Those diaries, which have been lost for a hundred years, were found and they tell a dramatically different story than everything the government has been saying for 100 years,” said Murray Klippenstein in the video, which is posted at www.miningwatch.ca.
“The government negotiators and the bureaucrats in Ottawa wanted a written treaty that was signed by the First Nation representatives. The problem was the written version of the document was written in English and legalese, which the First Nation’s people in northern Ontario certainly did not understand.”
A Toronto-based lawyer who has been working with Mushkegowuk Council, Klippenstein said he doesn’t understand what the government negotiators were thinking when they told First Nations representatives to sign a document they could not read or understand and then expected the document to mean something.
“They knew (the First Nations representatives) couldn’t read it; they knew they couldn’t understand it,” Klippenstein said.
The video features Klippenstein speaking at a November meeting of the Ontario Mining Action Network, hosted by MiningWatch Canada and the Canary Research Institute in Thunder Bay.
“The First Nations representatives were reluctant to sign the treaty document which they could not read and asked questions as to whether their fishing and hunting privileges would be (protected),” Klippenstein said.
Klippenstein said Chief Missabay was suspicious of the written treaty.
“I think Chief Missabay was smart – his instincts were right,” Klippenstein said.
Klippenstein said the diary of the third commissoner, Daniel (George) MacMartin, contained some “very good evidence” of the treaty negotiations.
“This is what they were told,” Klippenstein said, quoting the dairy. “They were also allowed as of yore to hunt and fish where they pleased.”
Klippenstein said he almost fell out of his chair when he read another comment in MacMartin’s diary.
“This says that ‘Angus Weenusk of New Post replied that they accepted the terms as stated,’ not as written, as stated,” Klippenstein said.
Ramsay Hart, MiningWatch Canada’s Canada program coordinator, said the video shows how the oral traditions of many northern Ontario First Nations jive very closely in many ways with the written diaries of someone who was participating in the treaty process.
“And those two versions of the history vary considerably from what is in the written documentation of the physically-signed treaty,” Hart said.
Hart said MacMartin’s diary changes the landscape in how traditional territories should be perceived in Treaty 9 territory.
“It also then raises the question about how other treaties were communicated and understood,” Hart said. “It should give First Nations a much stronger voice in resource development in their territories.”