Talk:Douglas Treaties

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A fact from Douglas Treaties appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know column on 5 August 2009 (check views). The text of the entry was as follows:

Did you know... that in the Douglas Treaties the Chewhaytsum Indian Tribe of Vancouver Island signed away the land rights for the city of Sooke, British Columbia, for £45.10?

A record of the entry may be seen at Wikipedia:Recent additions/2009/August.

Wikipedia

no mention of Royal Proc??

I was surprised by this....and note that the only substantial citation is AADNC and not any current or even historical history of British Columbia; this wasn't simply about fur company priorities or the logistics of settlement (Hauka and others have interesting things to say about how Douglas discouraged settlement by high fees, in order to keep out the riff-raff); it was a legal necessity, which in the end was ignored on the mainland completely. Douglas had been advised - or even already knew about - the need to sign treaties as stipulated by the Royal Proc of 1763, and I believe there was correspondence about this from the Colonial Secretary or another branch of the imperial government. His intentions re the Colony of VI were to cut what treaties he could, and could afford - as always in colonial BC the shortage of funds limited outcomes. But also many peoples were very hostile and no overtures were made. He needed security in the environs of Victoria and the Cowichan, and also re the coal mines on northern Vancouver Island and at Nanaimo.

I don't get what the passage about Blanshard has to do with this, also. I'll re-read but that was my reaction was that it was an historical digression on only a loosely related subject that properly belongs in the colony article and on, perhaps, the Governor of British Columbia article or list.

I'm just noting this for now, in case someone else who knows the Royal Proc and has time and access to the various books and articles about these treaties; the digest of material from AADNC is POV in origin and needs balance both from local historiography and from the accounts of the peoples themselves.Skookum1 (talk) 22:44, 17 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Uncited sentence too contentious to linger

The Treaties remain highly controversial given that it is unclear whether the Aboriginal leaders knew exactly what they were signing over, and given that the HBC took advantage of the recent cultural destruction by offering fairly inconsequential ??? in exchange for large and highly valuable land purchases.

That's far too much judgemental POV to linger with a mere "citation needed" (already flagged since December 2018) and the sentence is also missing the ??? bit.

Everything after the comma trimmed from the article page.

To editorialize somewhat, this is hardly a whole or complete characterization of the negotiation's pre-conditions, which including one side inexperienced in the multi-generational consequences of the Western tradition of property law. As well, there are thousands of years of human history where an ethnic population effectively does not own land they can't defend, and from that lens you're not buying the land so much as buying a formal acknowledgement of the truth on the ground (and the corresponding lessening on ongoing hostilities, in the ideal).

I'm less than entirely keen on the postmodern tendency to whitewash historical Realpolitik with moralizing post hocs. I'm not saying this to lessen that the arrival of western Europeans was cataclysmic for just about every native people in the Americas, nor to evade that any stories "we" tell ourselves about our "civilized" treatment of these peoples at that point in time is unadulterated bullshit, while bearing in mind that—for most of human history—how the cookie crumbles rarely fell far from the tree of red in tooth and claw.

An account taking better stock as the shifting moral sands of time would look more like this:

By the legal standards of the 21st century, these treaties have come to be regarded as shabby documents, undermining the legal pretense of their establishing the present division of land between the heirs descendants of First Nation peoples and the heirs and descendants of the ethnically distinct immigrant populations who began to arrive at that time, and opening the door to legal and political challenges, and the potential for reversion of some territory and land use rights back to First Nations people, or [small edit] other forms of additional compensation.

Of course, that's hardly a POV improvement (as sketched out) over the sentence fragment I just excised (and it's ten times more "citation needed"), but at least it's trying to get there without glossing over narrative frame torque. — MaxEnt 17:05, 2 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Newspaper article as source

Citation #2 states the ledger was blank when signed, the article cited reiterates this claim but has no citation of proof and is therefore no more than hearsay. Better source is needed.

The same issue exists with citation #5 which uses an opinion piece in the same newspaper as #2 to make the claim that the ledger was blank at time of signing. Again with no reference to source of information.