In my recently published book, Walking the Bypass: Notes on Place from the Side of the Road, I describe standing beside the Regina Bypass, a new (and politically controversial) highway around Saskatchewan’s capital, asking myself how settlers came to own the land that stretched to the horizon in all directions.
Canadian courts have generally treated the numbered treaties as land cessions, though they also recognize them as solemn agreements requiring honourable interpretation.
I recalled what the late Stó:lō Elder Lee Maracle wrote in My Conversations With Canadians: settlers like me rarely get curious about “how the shift from Indigenous authority over the land to Canadian authority over the land occurred.”
