Rupert's Land - Aboriginal People

Aboriginal People

In 1857, a British parliamentary select committee investigated the Hudson's Bay Company. In the course of its hearings, the committee often directed its attention to Rupert's Land's First Nations. Despite an obvious polarization between supporters and opponents of the company on many issues, a consensus emerged on the fate of Rupert's Land's indigenous citizens in what all presumed to be the inevitable European settlement of the Plains and adjacent woodlands. Hudson's Bay Company officials and their opponents shared the paternalistic assumption, based on 19th-century liberalism, that the Native peoples would be unable to cope with the onslaught of a supposedly superior, modern and educated population. Without consulting the objects of their concerns, the participants at the committee's hearings agreed that it was the task of the state and church to protect the aboriginal nations and educate them into the new order. On this point, the committee's report was an important omen for the subsequent history of western Canada's Native inhabitants.

Although it is widely assumed that the royal charter that granted the land to the Hudson's Bay Company in 1670 encompassed the entire territory, international law supports the argument that the company only had sovereignty over the relatively small portion it actually possessed and controlled. Court cases in the following centuries involving continuing aboriginal claims to the land reflected the government's view that the Indians had no sovereignty rights. Latter 20th-century rulings, however, have held that the Hudson's Bay Company never had the rightful sovereignty to return the land to the British government, which in turn gave it to Canada. The key question is whether the Crown gained sovereignty of the land in 1670 or later in a series of treaties signed between Canada and the aboriginal nations from 1871 and 1921. The problem of aboriginal claims is further complicated by the fact that the aboriginal nations that occupied the land involved in the treaties were not the same ones that occupied it in 1670 when the British initially claimed sovereignty.