Everything Promised had been Included in the Writing: Indian Reserve Farming and the Spirit and Intent of Treaty Six Reconsidered

Excerpt from Introduction, Page 25:

"In the mid-1880s, the Department of Indian Affairs launched an investigation into claims by Indian signatories to Treaty Six that the government was not honoring its treaty commitments. Because its own records were flawed, the department instructed its employees to gather Indian recollections and oral testimonies and relied on this information when it concluded that some treaty obligations did remain unfilled. However, when Indian signatories in the same period claimed that the text of Treaty Six did not accurately reflect the spirit and intent of the negotiations and did not record all the obligations that they had extracted from the government, the department did not seek Indian testimony to verify or refute the charges; rather, it relied solely upon its written records and it rejected the claims outright. Analyses of the spirit and intent of Treaty Six must recognize that the Department of Indian Affairs’ selective use of Indian recollections and oral testimonies in the late nineteenth century reinforced both contemporary and current divergent understandings and perspectives about the spirit and intent of that document." (25).