Canada's Indigenous Peoples

We are most grateful to be able to reproduce here material from Jane Rupert's edition of Letters of a Distinguished Physician from the Royal Tour of the British North American Colonies 1860 written by Henry Wentworth Acland. The whole edition is available on the web by clicking here.

r Henry Wentworth Acland, Regius Professor of Medicine at Oxford University, wrote twelve letters to his beloved wife, Sarah, while accompanying the Prince of Wales as physician during the royal tour. Amongst much else, he recorded meetings with Indigenous peoples from the Atlantic colonies, and painted portraits that include the Maliseet, Mi'kmaq, Mohawk, and Cayuga. The condition of the Indigenous Peoples had become a last minute matter of investigation during the tour.

This unofficial matter for investigation resulted from a request made by Queen Victoria personally to the Duke of Newcastle, concerning the particular plight of some Indigenous people caught in an impasse by a recent Indian Act. Aggressive or restrictive policies towards Aboriginals had been a subject of protest both in Britain and by Aboriginal people themselves. As pressure from immigration led to the acquisition of more land through treaties in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, the treatment of Aboriginals had become a concern to British missionary and humanitarian lobbies. Hence, for example, was the Aborigines' Protection Society, established in 1837. In the same year, a British Parliamentary Select Committee on Aboriginals provided a devastating description of the situation of Aboriginal peoples and made recommendations which were largely ignored. The report protested against the theft of lands, asserted the legal right of Indians to private ownership of land, and suggested the need for urgent intervention in Upper Canada. It also recommended that Aboriginal policy was better under British rather than colonial control, which allowed colonial self-interest to prevail. The granting of Responsible Government to the colonies in the following decade shifted colonial power and opened the way to the kind of consequences for Aboriginals that the British Parliamentary Committee had warned against.

Mrs Thomas Thomas, Micmac woman, Prince Edward Island, 11 August 1860.

The plight of Catherine Sutton, expressed in an audience with Queen Victoria, was an instance of the looming legal problems for Aboriginals regarding land tenure. Shortly before the departure of the royal party from England, in the presence of the Duke of Newcastle, Catherine Sutton (Nahnebahwequay, or Upright Woman) had represented to the Queen the impossible entanglements visited upon her and others by an act drawn up by the governor general's secretary who was responsible for the Indian Department. It was entitled "An Act to encourage a Gradual Civilization of the Indian Tribes in this Province, and to amend laws respecting Indians." Its aggressive assimilationist policy, passed by the colonial legislature of the united Canadas in 1857, was effected in particular through regulation of the legal right of Aboriginal ownership of land, the legal regulation of reserves, and the government control and manipulation of annuities owed in return for the acquisition of land.

Caught in a predicament that foreshadowed further legal restrictions, Catherine Sutton explained to the Queen that more than a decade before the enactment of the Gradual Civilization Act she had been granted 200 acres of land at Owen Sound near Georgian Bay by the Newash Band. She and her English husband had cleared forty acres of land, built a barn and a stable, and then left for Methodist missionary work elsewhere. On their return, they found that through a questionable treaty negotiated with some members of the Newash Band their land had been surveyed into town lots and offered for sale at public auction by the government. She was informed that her written grant to the land was invalid because reserve land was communally owned and the chiefs had no power to dispose of it to private parties. When she attempted to buy back her ceded land at public auction, she was told that in accordance with the Gradual Civilization Act she could buy back ceded land only if she gave up her Indian status. Because she was married to a white man, her request for her accumulated share in the band's annuities promised from the sale of the land was turned down. As for legal recourse, the Gradual Civilization Act also stipulated that Aboriginals could neither sue nor be sued.

After her fruitless petition to the colonial legislature for either compensation for her loss of land or for title to the land, with Quaker help and the assistance of the Aborigines' Society she journeyed to England to present personally to the Crown her plight and that of others in similar circumstances. The Queen was sympathetic to Catherine Sutton and her particular case was later resolved. However, just two days after her audience at Buckingham Palace and ten days before the departure of the Prince of Wales for the royal tour, Britain handed over responsibility for the Indian Department to the Province of Canada leaving Aboriginals at the mercy of the colonial legislature, the very people who had much to gain from this power.

The Prince of Wales received a group of Mi'kmaq on the lawns of the lieutenant governor's residence. Although the Mi'kmaq had inhabited Prince Edward Island for 2,000 years, after the British assumed control they had neither treaties nor land set aside for them. Moved by their dire poverty, the gathering had been organized by one of the colony's two commissioners of Indian Affairs who asked that land be granted to them with full title so that they could farm. The woman in Acland's portrait wears a white scarf typical of Acadian dress and a traditional Mi'kmaq hood, a reflection of the mutual cultural influence between Mi'kmaq and Acadians from the time when French settlements were first established around the Bay of Fundy in the early seventeenth century. A remnant of Acadians among those who had escaped or returned after their expulsion by the British in mid eighteenth century survived along with Mi'kmaq in a poor corner of Prince Edward Island.

Material relating to Dr Acland

Related Material (general)

Bibliography

Acland, Henry Wentworth. Introduction and Letter 5: "Prince Edward Island" in Letters of a Distinguished Physician from the Royal Tour of the British North American Colonies 1860. ed. Jane Rupert, web janerupert.ca (Other illustrations and references to Indigenous peoples are found in all the letters from British North America.)

Comeau-Vasilopoulos, Gayle M. "Oronhyatekha." In Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 13. 2013. University of Toronto/Université Laval, 1994. Http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/oronhyatekha_13E.htm. Web. 4 December 2013.

Francis, Daniel. The Imaginary Indian. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 1992.

Hall, Anthony J. "Treaties with Indigenous Peoples in Canada." In Canadian Encyclopedia. 2017, 2011. Web. 12 December 2019.

Radforth, Ian. Royal Spectacle: The 1860 Visit of the Prince of Wales to Canada and the United States. Toronto Buffalo London: University of Toronto Press, 2004.

Smith, Donald B. "Nahnebahwequay (Catherine Sutton)." In Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol.†9. University of Toronto/Université Laval, 1970. Web. 15 May 2015.

Created 2 July 2023