No Surrender: The Land Remains Indigenous

Publisher's Abstract:

"Between 1869 and 1877 the government of Canada negotiated Treaties One through Seven with the Indigenous peoples of the Great Plains. Many historians argue that the negotiations suffered from cultural misunderstandings between the treaty commissioners and Indigenous chiefs, but newly uncovered eyewitness accounts show that the Canadian government had a strategic plan to deceive over the “surrender clause” and land sharing. According to Sheldon Krasowski’s research, Canada understood that the Cree, Anishnabeg, Saulteaux, Assiniboine, Siksika, Piikani, Kainaa, Stoney and Tsuu T’ina nations wanted to share the land with newcomers—with conditions—but were misled over governance, reserved lands, and resource sharing. Exposing the government chicanery at the heart of the negotiations, No Surrender demonstrates that the land remains Indigenous." 

This book discusses the numbered treaties throughout Canada including treaties 2, 4, 5, and 6,  all of which Saskatchewan forms a province on. Krasowski highlights, through the use of oral history, that there was no surrender of land through the treaty processes of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In fact, the dominant narrative surrounding the relinquishment of Indigenous land through treaties is a product of the colonial point of view. Lands were never surrendered, merely, Indigenous peoples intended to allow settlers to share the land with them, to the depth of a plow, but never ceded their territories, laws, governments, and cultures. An imperative work of scholarship that outlines the sinister intentions which belied the Federal Government's Treaty making process, and the active roles and resistance of Indigenous peoples within this history.