Treaties

The Dish with One Spoon Wampum is an agreement that all who use the land should take care of resources carefully to ensure that the land can sustain life for future generations. The Wampum describes how the land can be shared and respected so all living beings will benefit. We can live by the core values in the Dish with One Spoon Wampum if we take only what we need and consider the living beings on the land in all we do.

The Two Row Wampum Treaty is an agreement between the Haudenosaunee people and European newcomers. The purple lines of the wampum represent two boats travelling down the same river together. The boats carry the people, laws, customs, and ways of each nation. They agree that neither will interfere with the affairs of the other and neither will try to steer the other’s boat. The agreement has been kept by the Hausenosaunee to this date.

The Huron Tract Treaty was signed by 18 Anishinaabek leaders in July 1827 in Amherstburg. The purpose of the treaty was to remove First Nations People from the land, disrupt their traditional practices by settling them on small reserves, and open their land up for European settlement. After signing the Huron Tract Treaty, the Anishinaabeg people lost 99% of their traditional territory. The legal obligations agreed to in Treaty 29 have not been upheld by the Crown.

The Saugeen Tract Agreement was signed in August 1836 at the same time as Treaty 45. To understand Treaty 45 ½, we need to know something about Treaty 45 or the Manitoulin Treaty. Different from most treaties, Treaty 45 ceded Crown land, in this case, Manitoulin Island, to First Nations people. Lieutenant Governor Francis Bond Head’s idea was to make all of Manitoulin Island and the land north of Owen Sound places where First Nations people from all over what was then known as Upper Canada would move. He thought that Indigenous people should live completely separately from settler society. There was no land reserved for First Nations people in the text of Treaty 45 ½.