THE NUMBERED TREATIES

Treaty One and Treaty Two are the first of eleven numbered Treaties that represent the source of the unique nation-to-nation relationship between the Crown and the First Nations peoples living within a vast crescent of land that stretches from James Bay in the east to the Rocky Mountains in the west, from the forty-ninth parallel in the south to the Arctic Ocean in the north.

Treaty One relates to the land and peoples within an area of approximately eighteen thousand square kilometres to the south and southwest of Lake Winnipeg and Lake Manitoba. Treaty Two covers an area of approximately eighty-seven thousand square kilometres directly to the north and west of Treaty One territory.

The oral tradition states that the Treaties were seen as reiterating peaceful alliances, securing assurances for both parties to share the wealth associated with First Nations’ ancestral lands, and ensuring the respectful right for each party to retain its own way of life.

The written preamble to Treaties One and Two states that the purpose of the Treaty negotiations was “to deliberate upon certain matters of interest” to both the British Crown and the First Nations peoples. It was “the desire of Her Majesty [Queen Victoria] to open up to settlement and immigration a tract of country … and to obtain the consent thereto of her [Indigenous] subjects inhabiting the said tract, and to make a treaty and arrangements with them so that there may be peace and good will between them and Her Majesty.”