No Surrender: The Land Remains Indigenous

Abstract

As a scholar who frequently relies on a microhistorical and biographical approach to Indigenous history, I often marvel at the ability of other historians to synthesize and build on previous scholarship to develop broad narratives that span political, cultural, and temporal borders. One of the perils of such an approach is that a cohesive argument can often become lost as data and sources multiply and become unmanageable. Despite these challenges, in No Surrender: The Land Remains Indigenous historian Sheldon Krasowski has succeeded in producing an innovative and cohesive account of the first seven numbered treaties negotiated between the Canadian government and western First Nations between 1871 and 1877.Drawing from his work with Indigenous elders and academics in the province of Saskatchewan, Krasowski implements an Indigenous “Treaty Bundle” approach. By recognizing treaties as sacred undertakings enacted through ceremony, this approach draws on Indigenous oral histories that understood the treaties to be a cumulative, interrelated whole rather than isolated instances of policy negotiation. Through this approach, No Surrender builds on previous scholarship that focused on individual treaties to step back and identify the larger patterns that ran throughout the negotiations of the first seven numbered treaties.By writing largely in response to what he terms the “misunderstanding thesis,” Krasowski has made use of previously overlooked eyewitness accounts and Indigenous oral histories to reexamine the veracity of the published records of government operatives. Beginning in 1936, historian George F. G. Stanley promoted the interpretation that the ill effects of the numbered treaties were largely the result of misunderstandings arising from the interaction of two deeply different cultures and that the government negotiators, though confused and misguided, acted honorably and in good faith. This “misunderstanding thesis” has had a pervasive influence on twentieth-century Canadian treaty scholarship. While acknowledging the complex cultural interactions that pervaded treaty negotiations, Krasowski argues that negotiators on both sides understood each other to a much greater extent than was previously thought. In light of this, No Surrender concludes that the representatives of the Canadian government acted duplicitously by downplaying the significance and meaning of the “surrender clause,” which was intended to forfeit Indigenous lands to the Canadian government. Krasowski points out that in four of the seven sets of treaty negotiations, despite the centrality of land surrender to the Canadian government’s goals, the surrender clause never appeared in recorded translations or proceedings. The swiftness and opacity of the government’s negotiations were sometimes so apparent that they were critiqued by missionaries and traders whom the government relied on as witnesses, translators, and Indigenous liaisons. This theme connects all seven of the treaties studied in No Surrender and is supported by Euro-Canadian eyewitness testimonies and Indigenous oral histories alike.No Surrender will be an invaluable text for undergraduate students of Canadian and Indigenous history because of both its comprehensive analysis of the first seven numbered treaties and its modeling of fundamental historical methods. By carefully walking the reader through the construction of his argument, Krasowski provides a clear discussion of the different kinds of sources used by historians and their associated challenges. In addition, the historiographical passages are straightforward models of how aspiring historians should grapple with previous scholarship. Additionally, future scholars of Indigenous peoples’ dealings with the Canadian government, Canadian settler colonial policy, and the history of western Canada will need to engage with No Surrender. New research on treaties in particular will benefit from Krasowski’s synthesis and reinterpretation of previous scholarship through the lens of Indigenous oral histories and the Treaty Bundle framework.