The self-loathing historian

Vincent J. Curtis

27 Feb 21

RE: Why history in our schools still matters.  Hamilton Spectator 27 Feb 21, by Craig Wallace.

The author, who calls himself a historian, falls into error when he gets into matters of law.  He also seems strangely unaware of the historical research on the Caledonia land claims that was published in the Spectator last year.

Let’s begin with his assertion that “It is recognized law in Canada that all land was owned by Indigenous (First Nations) peoples.”  Actually, no.  That’s ahistorical muddle.

Mr. Wallace is imposing on Aboriginal North America concepts and a legal structure of land ownership and sovereignty that was developed in the feudal period in Britain.  The nomadic peoples who lived in longhouses had no conception of private land ownership or sovereignty.  Even today, private ownership of land on reserves by individuals is forbidden; the band holds title to the land, period.  Original First Nations peoples, having no concept of land ownership or sovereignty, could not own land as understood in British and International law.  The very idea of a ‘Nation’ is itself of European origin.  Canadian law doesn’t suggest this.

“Before Canada can rightfully claim the land, it has to take ownership of it through negotiations with the First Nations.”  This assertion is wrong and ahistorical.  For example, HM King Charles II simply granted Rupert’s Land in 1670 to the Hudson Bay Company on the strength of his sovereignty, without negotiating with anybody.  Canada purchased Rupert’s Land from HBC in 1869 and formed the Northwest Territories, without negotiating with anybody else.  The land retained an underlying Crown sovereignty through the transfer of ownership.

“Did Canada obtain [the Haldimand Tract] via treaty – as the law states they must?”  British authorities of Quebec (as that part of British North America was then known) acquired land around the Grand River from the Mississauga First Nations in 1785 in a straightforward commercial transaction.  That land was then granted to the Iroquois bands who had been loyal to Britain during the American Revolution.  As European settlement increased, and individual Indians were selling land they privately owned to white settlers, the idea of a band reserve developed.  A central redoubt, called the reserve, was organized, and the band sold parcels of land not part of the reserve back to the Crown, then in Right of Upper Canada or Canada West.  The Crown gained sovereignty over the territory of New France as a result of the conquest of 1759, and the Quebec Act of 1774 organized the territory of southern Ontario into a new legal entity called Quebec.  Ontario and Canada are simply the latest in a line of legal authorities that exercise the uninterrupted sovereignty of the Crown over the territory in question in Caledonia.  Hence, the question, did Canada obtain the Haldimand Tract via treaty is kind of nonsensical, unless the Treaty of Paris of 1763 satisfies as answer.

Historical research published in the Spectator establishes that the Hereditary Chiefs of the Seneca surrendered title to the Foxgate property in 1844 - that “title” being derived from an underlying Crown sovereignty.  Six Nations hold title to the present reserve under Crown sovereignty.  The issue at Foxgate is whether or not a transfer of title did or did not take place.  All the evidence is on the side that it did, the Ontario law courts agreed and issued orders based upon that conclusion. 

The idea has become popular that the settlers of North America acquired a blood-guilt as a result of their settlement and their treatment of the Indigenous peoples, and that this blood guilt in their successors might be expiated by the latter’s frequent, ritual denunciations of the past.  Mr. Wallace’s article rests on this thesis.

The Enlightenment implanted in Western Civilization a tiny element of self-loathing, and this element seems to have engrossed modern progressivist thinking.  Denunciations of tiny aspects of Western Civilization are meant as a condemnation of the whole thing.  But nothing better than Western Civilization has yet been thought of, and until something better comes along (and Marxism isn’t it) we ought simply to accept it warts and all.

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