Backgrounder

"Come and live under the protection of your Great Father," Chief Superintendent of Indian Affairs Samuel Peter Jarvis urged an assembly of visiting Indian Chiefs and their people on Manitoulin Island in l837, "or lose the advantage which you have so long enjoyed, of annually receiving valuable presents from him."

Jarvis was speaking to Aboriginal military allies living in the United States, including the Pottawatomi, who had helped the British win the War of 1812. The Pottawatomi and other British allies in the U.S., had long received presents of guns, powder, clothes and other things from the British as a matter of diplomacy and commerce.

By 1837, when Jarvis addressed the visiting Chiefs, circumstances in the U.S. favoured the Aboriginal allies to move to Canada. The U.S. government was pushing First Nations west of the Mississippi, requiring First Nations to relinquish their annuities and their rights to land in exchange for new lands in the West. The Pottawatomi were concerned they would lose their traditional lands around Lake Michigan. The British government was concerned that it might still need Aboriginal allies against future U.S. aggression.

The British government, however, was equally troubled about the diplomatic consequences of providing ammunition to First Nations living south of the border and, in the l850s, stopped providing presents to all Aboriginal military allies including the Pottawatomi.

The Commssion's inquiry found that this hurt all Aboriginal military allies, especially the Pottawatomi. It left the Pottawatomi without annuities, a recognized land base and other inducements promised in the l837 speech that had brought them to Canada in the first place. The Pottawatomi had no Aboriginal rights in Canada and, unlike other Aboriginal military allies, were not party to the Robinson-Huron Treaty of l850 or the Williams Treaty of l923. Canada, in fact, did not consider the Pottawatomi eligible to receive treaty benefits. It was only by the intervention of a benefactor that Moose Deer Point Indian Reserve was set apart for the First Nation on the east shore of Georgian Bay in 1917.