Referring to the unsatisfactory state of the Indian question in British Columbia, in an address which he delivered there in 1876, the Earl of Dufferin, then Governor-General of Canada said: —
“Most unfortunately, as I think, there has been an initial error,
ever since Sir James Douglass quitted office, in the Government
of British Columbia neglecting to recognize what is known as the
Indian title. In Canada this has always been done; no Government,
whether provincial or central, has failed to acknowledge that
the original title to the land existed in the Indian tribes and the
communities that hunted or wandered over them. Before we touch
an acre we make a treaty with the chiefs representing the bands we
are dealing with, and having agreed upon and paid the stipulated
price, oftentimes arrived at after a great deal of haggling and
difficulty, we enter into possession; but not until then do we consider
that we are entitled to deal with a single
acre.”[1]
I have quoted these remarks from a most honored and
well-informed official of the British crown, simply as an
emphatic statement of the prevailing view already referred
to. I have no intention of making a special challenge of
the correctness of his Lordship's assertion. Only as it
conforms in letter and spirit with the terms of very many
similar assertions from a large number of persons whose
words have not the weight which attaches to his, do I use
it as a sort of text to be commented upon with frankness,
as it stands in the light of facts in the past and in the
present.
Great Britain, as a government, first gained dominion here by invasion and conquest, after her colonists had independently of her patronage secured a footing on the soil. She acceded also by conquest to the territory which had been held by France, precisely as our Government afterwards did to what had been held by our mother country. At the time of each transfer from the French to the English, and from the English to the United States, the natives who had
- ↑ Speeches and Addresses by the Earl of Dufferin, p. 209. London, 1882.
