Go-Betweens and Reciprocal Patrons: Protestant Missionaries and the Making of Treaty Six

Go-Betweens and Reciprocal Patrons: Protestant Missionaries and the Making of Treaty Six

Tolly Bradford (Concordia University of Edmonton)
 

This paper challenges the assumption that missionaries were active collaborators with the Canadian government in the negotiation and signing of Treaty Six in 1876. Instead, it argues that missionaries operated on the fringe of the political and diplomatic networks in the Canadian northwest plains, and thus their influence on treaty-making was reduced to that of reciprocal patrons of Indigenous leaders and go-betweens for the Canadian government; leaving them a step removed from the brokering of the treaty. This conclusion offers new understands of both the treaty-making process and the meaning of Christianity in the plains during the 1870s.

Details of image above:
Title: Treaty 6 with Saskatchewan Cree. Date: 1876
Image No: NA-1315-19 (Glenbow Museum Archives, Calgary)
Illustrator: McIntyre, A. C., Brockville, Ontario.
Remarks: Copy of PB-48-1. See also NA-606-1.
Commissioners at Carlton. Drawn by M. Bastien.