Art & Artists

“Let There Be Wheat” The Price of Place on the Canadian Plains

Written by Amy Jo Ehman

One day, while scrolling through his social feeds, my husband clicked on a headline so intriguing he shared it with me immediately.

“Who was the richest person in history ever?”

I was rolling cookie dough, flour everywhere, so I gave the question exactly five seconds of my undivided attention. It was December in Saskatchewan, colder than Siberia outside, and I was making sugar cookies in the shape of snowflakes. One tray was in the oven. The timer was counting down.

So, I thought, if it were this century, maybe an investment guru or a wizard of technology. Last century, maybe an oil baron or a captain of industry. Two centuries ago, someone in railways or steel. Earlier than that, a rapacious king or a pharaoh. Someone who claimed to own everything. But then, a pharaoh only had Egypt, which was small potatoes compared to, say, the entire Roman Empire. During which time, Egypt was the personal domain of—

“Probably someone from antiquity,” I said. “A Roman emperor. Augustus.”

Yes! Emperor Augustus topped this particular list of the richest people in history with an estimated net worth, adjusted to US dollars, of $4.6 trillion.¹  When Julius Caesar’s great nephew Octavian (the future Augustus) defeated the coalition of Mark Antony and Cleopatra, he took as his personal domain the entirety of Cleopatra’s realm. Egypt. The fertile Nile wheat fields, golden treasury of the pharaohs. It was, to use a modern metaphor, a licence to print as much money as you could ever need.

And he needed a lot. Augustus ruled the Roman Empire for 45 years (31 BCE to 14 CE), a period of relative peace and prosperity known to historians as Pax Romana. This was achieved in large part by his bottomless ability to feed the teeming population of his capital city, Rome, where bread was basic daily fare. Wheat was doled out free of charge to the needy multitudes and provided at stable, often subsidized prices to everyone else. This was considered essential public policy to prevent hunger riots in the capital. Wheat was the peace and security of Rome.

That put me in mind of something I’d read by historian Anne Applebaum: “Whoever had bread had followers, soldiers, loyal friends.”²

Interestingly, Applebaum wasn’t writing about Augustus or Rome or antiquity. She was writing about Vladimir Lenin, the Russian Revolution and the teeming populations of Moscow and St. Petersburg. Wheat was not roubles; it was better than roubles. It was bread for a rebellious army, a ravening proletariat and a revolution that hung by a thread. The wheat fields that Lenin coveted were not in Egypt; they were in Ukraine.

In 1918, as the Red Army marched on Kyiv, Lenin dashed off a telegram to his man on the ground. “[S]end grain, grain and more grain!!” he bellowed. “Collect and store. Escort the trains. Inform us every day. For God’s sake!”³

Lenin took Ukraine, got the grain and saved his revolution. It was a winning formula for the Bolsheviks—requisitioning enough grain to feed the belly of an industrializing economy while dooming millions in the countryside to death by starvation and disease. Wheat was the reason for the New Economic Policy, the first Five Year Plan, the collectivization of Soviet farms and the terrible Holodomor famine that killed millions in the 1930s, especially in Ukraine. This was not a new playbook for rulers of the Russian Empire. The czars also caused starvation in the pursuit of wheat, though the Bolsheviks did it more ruthlessly.

Fortunately for me, my farming ancestors had already left the wheat fields of Ukraine for the wheat fields of Canada. For almost a century, from 1804 to 1903, they lived in an ethnic-German village called Klosterdorf on the Dnipro River near the Black Sea (now Zmiivka, Ukraine), in what was then the Russian Empire under the czars. They went there on the invitation of Czar Alexander, grandson of Catherine the Great, whose armies had seized the steppes of the Black Sea from the Ottoman Empire. The goal was to settle the land with farmers and reap the benefits of wheat.

Thousands of German-speaking families answered the call. Their villages sprang up across the Black Sea steppe, where the deep chernozem soil (cherno = black + zem = earth) is considered the most fertile farmland in Europe. Wheat flowed through the port city of Odesa, founded in 1794. Thanks to Black Sea wheat, Odesa grew fast and prospered. After 1815, the end of Napoleon’s wars, Black Sea wheat was feeding Europe.

Historically, things had come full circle. More than 2,000 years earlier, the steppes of the Black Sea were the breadbasket of ancient Greece. Greek colonies rimmed its shores, from which wheat flowed by ship to the mother city-states. In ancient Athens, its navy, alliances, trade and laws were dedicated to protecting its vital source of Black Sea wheat. Just as in Rome and Moscow, a secure supply of wheat was essential to peace and security on the home front at a time when bread was the most essential food of all.

By the 1890s, Canada was calling on European farmers to settle the great northern plains of North America—today’s provinces of Saskatchewan, Manitoba and Alberta. Promotional advertisements painted a picture of a farming utopia: a pretty white house, healthy and happy children, contended cattle in the pasture, golden fields of wheat. As a young country, still closely tied to Britain, Canada was not yet an economic powerhouse on the world stage. The goal was to populate the land with farmers and reap the benefits of wheat.

Sensing better opportunities, my ancestors left their village on the Black Sea steppe and sailed to Canada. My grandfather’s parents, the Ehman side of my family, came to Canada from Klosterdorf in 1891, followed soon after by four generations of extended family. They homesteaded southeast of Regina in a settlement they called St. Mary’s colony. My grandmother’s parents, the Fahlman side of my family, came to Canada from Klosterdorf in 1903 and homesteaded at what became the town of Holdfast. My great-grandfather Ehman went into ranching, opened a butcher shop in Regina, then bought a farm not too far from Holdfast. The Fahlman daughter married the Ehman son. Thanks to them, I grew up in a big old farmhouse surrounded by wheat fields to the wide blue horizon.

Thousands upon thousands of immigrants did the same—from the Russian Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the British Isles, France, northern Europe and Scandinavia, Mediterranean lands, the United States and more. The population of Saskatchewan tells that story: it grew from approximately 42,000 in 1891 to 91,000 in 1901, to 492,000 in 1911, to 758,000 in 1921. Most of them lived rurally as farmers or in work that supported the farming community. The reason for Saskatchewan was wheat, and wheat was the Canadian dream.

In 1890, Canada’s largest export sector was forestry, including timber, paper, planks and related products, followed by cheese, cattle and fish.⁴ The value of forestry products was almost $24 million, while wheat and flour exports were less than $1 million. Ten years later, in 1900, the value of wheat and flour surpassed $14 million. In 1910, wheat and flour exports totalled $67.5 million, surpassing forestry exports. In 1920, wheat and flour exports exceeded $279 million. In the wake of World War I, when Europe’s fields and farmers were devastated, Canada provided almost half of the world’s exports of wheat. By 1930, wheat and flour accounted for one-third of Canada’s total exports. Until the rise of the petroleum sector, the most lucrative export from Canada was wheat.

By 1905, when Saskatchewan became a province, it was proudly calling itself the Breadbasket of Canada and the World’s Granary. The boast was more aspirational than actual, but it held up over time: Saskatchewan had 40% of Canada’s farmland and grew almost half the nation’s wheat at a time when Canada was the largest exporter of wheat in the world. As the Canadian humourist-economist Stephen Leacock wrote in 1937 in My Discovery of the West, “The Lord said ‘let there be wheat’ and Saskatchewan was born.”⁵

But this is also a tragic story. Throughout its history, wheat has been a catalyst for conflict, power and greed. Before the industrial era, wheat was the most valuable sector of the economy in the agrarian nations of Europe, the Near East and Mediterranean lands. Fortunes were made on wheat, even as people starved without it. Wheat brought peace and security, but it also brought exploitation and suffering. Even on the great plains of Canada, the pursuit of wheat had winners and losers, victors and victims. That troubling legacy still haunts the land.

As a farmer’s daughter, I have studied the path of wheat from the floodplains of the Nile to the far reaches of ancient Rome, from the rise of Athenian democracy to the battlefields of Ukraine, all the while unaware this tragic path would lead me home.

In 1869, Canada was two year old and still quite small—parts of Ontario, Quebec and the Maritimes—but its farmlands were already densely populated. So populated that young farmers were moving south to the United States in order to acquire homesteads of their own. This was very unpopular with their parents, who appealed to their elected representatives in Ottawa. Everyone agreed, Canada needed room to grow, it needed Rupert’s Land.

For 200 years, the territory known as Rupert’s Land was under control of the Hudson’s Bay Company, which had been granted a charter in 1670 by the British king. The HBC had a string of fur trading posts along the river systems, primarily for the acquisition of beaver pelts and other furs, as well as the pemmican that fed the voyageurs as they paddled long distances. Rupert’s Land was immense: from the Rocky Mountains to the far side of Hudson Bay, from the USA border to the Arctic Ocean. In between lay a vast grassland that could accommodate all of Canada’s young farmers, and many more farmers from elsewhere, too.

A deal was struck between the Hudson’s Bay Company and the British Crown. The HBC gave up its claim to Rupert’s Land for £300,000 plus 5% of the farmland, which it would sell for an additional profit. The following year, Britain transferred the territory to the Dominion of Canada. Neither the charter of 1670 nor the transfer of 1870 took into account the First Nations and Métis communities whose ancestors had lived on the land for generations, and whose cultural knowledge and hunting skills had made the fur trade immensely profitable.

Two years later, in 1872, Canada passed the Dominion Lands Act to get western settlement rolling. The Dominion Lands Act stipulated that the plains be surveyed in a grid of squares. The basic square was one mile by one mile, equalling 640 acres (260 hectares) of land. Each square was further divided into four homesteads or “home quarters” of 160 acres (65 hectares) each. Settlers were offered a free homestead for a registration fee of $10 and the promise to build a house, plow the land and plant it. Overall, 200 million acres (80 million hectares) were surveyed into an estimated 1.25 million homesteads. It’s the largest single survey grid on the planet.

Having set out a blueprint for settlement, the Dominion of Canada turned its efforts to dispossessing the Indigenous people of their inherent rights to the land. This was undertaken through a series of treaties between the British Crown (on behalf of Canada) and Indigenous leadership. Two treaties covered most of Saskatchewan’s farmland: Treaty 4 in 1874 and Treaty 6 in 1876. For federal officials, the goal was to secure the land for peaceful agrarian settlement. For First Nations chiefs, the goal was to permit that peaceful agrarian settlement, while more crucially, safeguarding their survival in the face of profound cultural and economic changes on the plains.

By 1870, the great herds of bison were almost gone, brought near to extinction by sport and commercial hunting, particularly south of the border in the American West. This was devastating for Indigenous communities on both sides of the border who relied on the bison for clothing, shelter, tools, traditional lifeways and especially food. Just as my childhood was governed by the annual cycle of farming, the bison hunt had governed the cycle of life for First Nations families for thousands of generations.

As the bison disappeared, a gnawing hunger crept over the land. Hunting for smaller game grew intense. Famine and malnutrition brought sickness and death. In the words of Chief Sweetgrass in 1871, as interpreted and provided to Crown negotiator Alexander Morris, and included by Morris in his account, The Treaties of Canada with the Indians of Manitoba and the North-West Territories:

“Our country is getting ruined of fur-bearing animals, hitherto our sole support, and now we are poor and want help—we want you to pity us. We want cattle, tools, agricultural implements, and assistance in everything when we come to settle. Our country is no longer able to support us. Make provision for us against years of starvation. We have had great starvation the past winter, and the small-pox took away many of our people, the old, young, and children. We invite you to come and see us and to speak with us. If you can’t come yourself, send some one in your place.”⁶

In the fall of 1874, Morris met with Indigenous leaders at Fort Qu’Appelle, in what is now southern Saskatchewan, to negotiate the terms of Treaty 4. Chief Pasqua expressed their collective anger over the deal with the Hudson’s Bay Company. They felt the cash payout was rightfully theirs as the true inhabitants of the land; the HBC had no right to sell the land to anyone.

At the same time, they saw the troubled writing on the wall. Their children were sick and hungry. The bison were all but gone. Soon, the settlers would arrive to plow the land and plant it to a sea of wheat. It stood to reason that if farming could support the settlers on the land, it could support their families, too. They could augment traditional hunting, fishing and food gathering by raising cattle, planting gardens and participating in the new agrarian economy of the plains.

At Treaty 4 talks, First Nations negotiators asked not for huge sums of money nor for huge tracts of land, but that select reserves of land be set apart from prairie settlement for their unfettered usage “as long as the sun shines, the grass grows and the rivers flow,” and to be provided those things they would require to start farming the land from scratch. In this sense, the treaty was an agricultural document. Provisions included farming tools such as plows, scythes and harrows, livestock such as yoke oxen, pigs and milk cows, potatoes for planting, seeds for garden vegetables and grains such as barley, oats and wheat.

For every family of five, one square mile of land would be set aside and held collectively as their reserve. Chiefs could select the location of their reserved lands to include a mix of woods, water and prairie grassland to their liking. As soon as they started the work of farming, the agricultural provisions would arrive. Farm instructors would be assigned to help with the learning curve.

Treaty 6, negotiated two years later at Fort Carlton, in central Saskatchewan, had expanded agricultural provisions plus the addition of medical assistance. Diseases of malnutrition, hunger and weakened immune systems were taking a toll: smallpox, tuberculosis, cholera, typhus. The losses were devastating.

Indigenous leaders asked for food assistance in the transition to agriculture, knowing they could not become self-supporting farmers in a single season. They were granted transitional food provisions for three years, and additional food assistance in times of dire circumstances such as a famine or a pestilence. Among the terms of Treaty 6, as Morris wrote in his account, was a provision “for each band four oxen, one bull, six cows, one boar and two pigs. After a band has settled on a reserve and commenced to raise grain, we will give them a hand-mill”for grinding wheat into flour.⁷

There were many skeptics among Euro-Canadians who doubted Indigenous people could farm successfully, labelling them “lazy,” “restless” or “uncivilized.” These chauvinistic attitudes ignored human history. Who were the first farmers the world over but Indigenous men and women who discovered something so good to eat, they learned how to grow it themselves? The first wheat farmers were nomadic hunter-gatherers in ancient Mesopotamia (today’s Iraq, Iran, Syria and eastern Turkey), who knew that if they dropped seeds of wild wheat onto the soil, they could return later to pluck the grains. Eventually, they settled down by these patches of wild wheat and built communities.

Indigenous farmers around the world created the domesticated varieties we know today. Wheat and lentils from the Middle East. Rice and bananas from Asia. Apples and broccoli from Europe. Corn and tomatoes from Mexico. Potatoes, beans and chillies from South America. Coffee and watermelon from Africa. These few examples barely scratch the surface of the average kitchen. Walk through the produce section of any grocery store and say “amen” to Indigenous farmers and ancient agriculturists.

Nor was farming unknown to Indigenous people living on the northern plains. Long before Europeans arrived—bringing wheat to the Americas—trade routes connected the continent. Farmers on the Missouri River (in today’s North Dakota) grew the Three Sisters of corn, beans and squash, as well as sacred tobacco. North of there, corn was grown along the Red River in present-day Manitoba. There is evidence that corn and tobacco were grown centuries ago in isolated pockets on the prairies, where favourable micro-climates existed. When they weren’t grown, they were traded for.

Fur trading posts had grain fields, milk cows and gardens, where Indigenous and Métis people were engaged as labourers. The first prairie settlement scheme, the Selkirk Settlers, grew wheat with some success in the 1820s in what is now Manitoba. In 1859, explorer Henry Hinds described the abundant garden of Charles Pratt, an Indigenous man living in the Qu’Appelle Valley, where he grew corn, potatoes, beans and more. Pratt’s Indigenous name was Askinootow, meaning “Worker of the Earth.” As bison declined, some First Nations communities augmented their traditional diets by growing root vegetables and raising cattle. Agriculture was no mystery to the First Nations of western Canada, but they needed assistance transitioning, in a short timeframe, to a new agrarian economy based on the cultivation of grains such as wheat.

In negotiations for Treaty 1 in 1870-71, covering lands south of Lake Winnipeg, Indigenous negotiators presented their conditions for sharing the land with the newcomers, including the provision of farming tools, livestock and seed. When they learned that those terms had been omitted from the written text of the treaty, they refused to accept it, until the farming provisions were added as a memorandum of “outside promises” in 1875. Farming provisions were also added as “outside promises” to Treaty 2 and included in Treaties 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7, which together covered most of the farmland from Lake Superior to the Rocky Mountains.

Treaty 7, negotiated in 1877 at Blackfoot Crossing in southern Alberta, leaned more toward cattle ranching. Reserves with suitable farmland for growing grain could opt for one fewer cow per family, more farming implements and enough wheat, barley, oats and potatoes for the land that was readied for planting.

“Farming implements, educational assistance, as well as supplies for hunting and fishing were all introduced by Indigenous Peoples and only grudgingly included by Canada in the treaties after difficult negotiations,” wrote Sheldon Krasowski in his study of Treaty 1–7 negotiations, No Surrender: The Land Remains Indigenous.⁸ Indigenous leaders believed they were negotiating terms by which they would share the land with the settlers “to the depths of a plow.” Government officials considered the treaties to be terms of land surrender, using words like “cede,” “transfer” and “relinquish.”

“Our family oral history consistently stressed that our people agreed to share the land, to the depth of a plow, in exchange for gifts, rents, and assistance when in need and when we were ready to make the transition to a new way of making a living,” wrote Winona Wheeler in a foreword to No Surrender. Her great-great-grandfather Charles Pratt, the man called “Worker of the Earth,” served as an interpreter at Treaty 4 negotiations, and her great-grandfather Josiah Pratt was in attendance.¹⁰  

Meanwhile, the government was buying heaps of meat and flour to prevent a famine on the plains. This was both a moral and a treaty obligation, but not too moral. There were unprosecuted reports of kick-backs and profiteering on food contracts, primarily with a big company south of the border in Montana. Provisions were often of dubious quality: rancid lard and bacon, heavily salted pork, yellow or bug-infested flour. When fresh meat was provided, it was sometimes culled from diseased and dying cattle, sickening those who ate it. These provisions were never enough—not in nutritional, palatable or caloric requirements.

Early in 1879, a teepee village appeared at Battleford, the territorial capital, as hungry families came in search of something to eat. Winter was the hungriest season. As the Saskatchewan Herald reported, there was nothing to give them, not until fresh supplies arrived that spring: “There are now here about a thousand Crees, Blackfeet, Sarcees and Stoneys,” the newspaper reported in June. “[T]he condition of these Indians is deplorable in the extreme. Accustomed all their lives to a diet consisting largely of animal food, the rations of flour and tea they receive here leave them but one remove from starvation.”¹⁰

Later that summer, farm instructors arrived from Ontario. Among them was James Scott, who was assigned to several reserves near the Touchwood Hills in Treaty 4 territory. He saw the problems immediately. Each reserve had one pair of oxen; for every 10 families, there was one plow. This was totally inadequate, as every farmer needed a plow and every plow needed oxen to pull it. He found the implements were of poorer quality and even missing parts. In some instances, the oxen provided were unbroken and refused to be hitched to a plow. With summer waning, Scott engaged the men of the reserves to work on his farm, building a shelter and gathering hay so he could settle in by wintertime.

In Ottawa, the government had decreed a work-for-rations policy. Farm instructors could distribute food only in exchange for labour. By January 1880, the only food Scott had to give out was pork he described as “both musty and rusty and totally unfit for use—although we are giving it out to the Indians, in the absence of anything better, but we cannot use it ourselves.”¹¹ Scott was so disillusioned he went home to Ontario in 1881.

“Farming at this time in the Territories was a dubious, precarious undertaking for anyone, even an experienced Ontario farmer,” wrote historian Sarah Carter in Lost Harvests: Prairie Indian Reserve Farmers and Government Policy. “Prairie farming demanded new methods of ploughing, seeding, cultivation, and summer-fallowing to preserve moisture. For many of these operations, implements in common use in the East were found to be unsuitable to the prairie soil. The brief growing season required new, early-maturing varieties of seed, as well as the most efficient, time-saving machinery [. . .] Ontario methods could not simply be transplanted with success. None of this evidence, however, was taken into account. The Indian farmers and their instructors were simply expected to produce, and quickly.”¹²

Despite the difficulties, some reserves got their farming operations off to a fine start. Carter cited several examples. For instance, Chief Day Star at Touchwood Hills (today’s Day Star First Nation) was awarded a medal in 1881 for having the most advanced farm operation in the territory of Treaty 4. They sold seed potatoes and wheat. The chief requested and received a revision to the reserve boundary so that it took in more farmland.

Near Fort Qu’Appelle, the community of Chief Pasqua (today’s Pasqua First Nation) was so successful they purchased more oxen so they could plow more land. This was possible because they lived close enough to settlements to engage in commerce and paid labour, investing their earnings in their farm operations. They had 28 oxen in 1884, according to Carter.¹³

A number of chiefs requested reserves in the region of the Cypress Hills, a hilly wooded upland near the USA border, where game was hunted. By 1880, early efforts at farming in the Cypress Hills had impressed the government-appointed Indian Agent. Carter again:

“Some of the Indians were reported to be working at their farms remarkably well; they took considerable pride in their gardens and were annoyed that more seed was unavailable. A number planted wheat for themselves and the agent recommended that a portable grist mill be supplied, as he believed that if the Indians could grind their grain, many more could be induced to break up the land for the following year. The agent was confident that the Indians could be self-sustaining in another year.”¹⁴

As Carter pointed out, not all chiefs and their followers wanted to farm, and they were not required to do so by the treaties. For those who chose to farm, they were not expected to do so exclusively as a means of providing for their families. Quite the contrary, they were free to hunt, fish and gather as they always had, and to sell their labour or the produce of the land. Nor was it required that they grow wheat; however, wheat was the commodity of the new cash economy on the plains. If they wanted to participate in that economy, they grew wheat. That was the intention of many First Nations communities and the farm instructors sent to assist them.

Initially, there was no urgency in Ottawa. The government was slow to survey reserve lands, to provide the seed and implements or to assign farm instructors. But with time, attitudes hardened. Budgets were tightened. Food provisions were denied to those who had not signed a treaty or had not moved onto a reserve, in the explicit hope that acute hunger would force compliance. It worked. What was negotiated as a means of support and survival was turned into an instrument of control. The agrarian option became official Canadian policy.

The first Prime Minister John A. Macdonald lost the election of 1874 (amid a railway bribery scandal) but was re-elected in 1878 on a platform he called the National Policy. The aim of the policy was to grow the economy, unify the sprawling country (which now included British Columbia) and populate the prairies with thousands of settlers. At its base, the National Policy was predicated on a windfall of wheat.

Here’s how it worked: a) impose high tariffs on manufactured goods from the United States, so that machinery and household goods made in Canada and Britain would have the consumer advantage; b) populate the prairies with thousands of farm families to buy those goods; c) build a national railway to move those settlers, their grain and their goods; d) sell the grain on the international market; therefore xyz) produce wheat and lots of it.

Three years later, in 1881, the government contracted the Canadian Pacific Railway. The CPR received $25 million plus 25 million acres (10 million hectares) of farmland along the rail line. Before work began, the route for the railway was redrawn—from a northern route via Prince Albert and Battleford to a southern route closer to the USA border and the new territorial capital of Regina. At the same time, the government decided to disallow Indigenous reserves south of the rail line, including in the Cypress Hills. Whether farming or not, they were ordered out.

Among them was Chief Piapot, signatory to Treaty 4. He was assigned a new reserve more than 400 kilometres across the prairie as the crow flies. That winter, about 40 of his followers died of scurvy. The attending doctor recommended more fresh meat and vegetables. Fresh meat, especially organs and bone marrow, is sufficiently high in vitamin C to prevent scurvy. After that tragic winter, Piapot and his people returned to their place in the Cypress Hills.

The next winter, the government halted all food provisions to anyone defying the order to leave. Starving people had little choice. Come spring, they relented, and according to historian Bill Waiser in Saskatchewan: A New History, “they left for their new homes to the east and north under police escort.”¹⁵

Chief Piapot refused to accept the assigned reserve. Instead, he chose land on the Qu’Appelle River (today’s Piapot First Nation) next to the reserves of Chief Pasqua and Chief Muscowpetung (today’s Muscowpetung Saulteaux Nation), both of whom were engaged in farming. In Regina, Commissioner Edgar Dewdney sent the Mounted Police to stop him, but the Mounties negotiated and Chief Piapot won that battle of wills.

By now, Indigenous leaders were aware they had not received the agricultural assistance they had requested in treaty negotiations. They had asked to be equipped for prairie farming. What that required was not their expertise to say. If the itemized list in the treaties proved to be inadequate and the equipment not up to the task, it was a deficiency not of their own making. Yet, even the items listed in the treaties had not been fully provided.

In 1883, Chief Pasqua recorded in pictures his understanding of Treaty 4, indicating what had been promised and what had been received. He drew Commissioner Morris and the chief. A book on a table and a medicine bag. A man hunting and various farming tools. An ox and a pig. Sacks of seed. He used a series of dashes and dots to indicate the shortfalls. Though the full meaning of Chief Pasqua’s pictograph is still under consideration, it has been read as a statement of unfulfilled promises.

As for Commissioner Dewdney, he preferred to attribute any shortfall in reserve farming to the farmers, labelling men like Chief Pasqua as lazy complainers. Budgets were cut. Food rations were reduced to near starvation levels. This was evident in April 1882 during budget deliberations in the House of Commons in Ottawa. When Prime Minister Macdonald was pressed to cut the budget even more, he responded:

“When the Indians are starving they have been helped, but they have been reduced to one-half and one-quarter rations; but when they fall into a state of destitution we cannot allow them to die for want of food. It is true that Indians so long as they are fed will not work. I have reason to believe that the agents as a whole, and I am sure it is the case with the Commissioner [Dewdney], are doing all they can, by refusing food until the Indians are on the verge of starvation, to reduce the expense […] We hope that the Indians will now settle down; but Indians are Indians, and we must submit to frequent disappointments in the way of civilizing them.”¹⁶

Macdonald also stated that reserve farmers would plant about 4,000 acres (1,600 hectares) of cropland that spring. At the time that my ancestors arrived in 1891, as per the Dominion Lands Act, homesteaders had two years to plow 15 acres (6 hectares) of cropland. Even that 15 acres was not an easy task. Many of the early homesteaders asked for extensions on the timeframe, and some gave up homesteading altogether. But for those who stayed and got it done, 15 acres was considered successful farming and proof of good intent.

What varieties of wheat did they grow in those early days, and what were the barriers to a successful harvest? By the 1870s, the dominant wheat across southern Canada and northern USA was Red Fife, a variety developed by the farmer David Fife of Ontario. In the 1840s, Fife was given a handful of wheat seeds that had been plucked from a shipment in Glasgow, Scotland, his country of birth. He chose the most successful plants and grew the seeds year to year, until he had enough wheat seed to share with his neighbours.

Red Fife wheat had many favourable qualities. It was tall and sturdy, resistant to rust (a fungal disease of cereal grains) and gave a good yield at harvest time. The seed was hard, milled nicely into flour and made excellent bread. It did well in the growing conditions of the 40th latitudes, from Ontario to New York, to Nebraska and Idaho. But north of the 49th parallel, on the Canadian plains, Red Fife was hit and miss. It suffered in a hot, windy, rainless July. It wasn’t yet mature by the first frosts of autumn. Harvest was a race against time. When conditions were good, Red Fife produced a fine crop of wheat. When conditions were bad, it could be a total loss.

By the 1890s, government agronomists were working to find varieties of wheat that did better on the northern plains. They tried wheats from cooler climates in northern Europe, Russia and the Himalayan valleys of India. A wheat called Ladoga grew as well as Red Fife, but in milling and baking, it produced an inferior loaf of bread. Hard Red Calcutta matured 10 days earlier than Red Fife, but also made a poor loaf of bread. A wheat called Galicia performed identically to Red Fife, leading agronomists to conclude it was the same wheat given to David Fife. Galicia was the name of a wheat-growing region in the Austro-Hungarian Empire that included parts of Poland and western Ukraine.

Though the mysterious origins of Red Fife may have been solved, agrologists were no closer to a better wheat for the northern plains. So they changed tactics. They began crossing varieties of wheat, hoping the best traits of each parent would emerge in the next generation. It was a meticulous process that required test plots in varied locations and a decade of selecting and growing the most promising cultivars. Success came with a cross of Red Fife and Hard Red Calcutta. It had the baking traits of Red Fife but matured seven-10 days earlier. This wheat was called Marquis. Mass distribution to farmers began in 1909.

Farmers faced other challenges with the land itself. The prairie was composed of a thick, tough sod, formed by millennia of matted grasses with deep, drought-tolerant roots. To “break” the sod, it was plowed twice: first to cut through the sod, then a second time to turn the sod so the soil underneath was exposed for planting. The task required a sturdy plow with a sharp blade, compliant work horses or oxen, and a farmer with grit. There were few trees to remove, but a lot of rocks to dig out and cart away. After a crop or two of wheat, the land required a fallow year to restore its moisture and nutrients. The first farmers of the northern plains learned to do by doing—how to till the land and coax from it a bounty of wheat.

Conditions for farming had also improved in the 1890s. New and better machinery did the work in a fraction of the time. More railway tracks carried more grain to market. The climate improved after several years of drought through the 1880s. And settler fears of a First Nations uprising had been allayed by bloody force.

In 1883, a massive volcano erupted in the Dutch East Indies (today’s Indonesia), sending enough ash and toxic gas into the atmosphere to lower the temperature on the North American plains. Frost hit early and hard. Winter was longer and harsher than usual. The following year was even worse, a “disastrous farming season,” wrote Carter.¹⁷ The 1880s were drought years, plagued by grasshoppers, prairie fires and unseasonal frosts. It was a difficult time to be a farmer on the Canadian plains. As Carter noted: “[W]hile the newcomers had the option to leave and try their luck elsewhere, the reserve residents had little choice but to persevere.”¹⁸

In February 1884, men of Chief Sakimay’s reserve (today’s Zagime Anishinabek First Nation) appealed to their farm instructor for food for their hungry families. When the answer was no, they pushed him aside, opened the shed and took it. No one was hurt, but several men were arrested. In their defence, they argued the food was there for them and they needed it. The true crime, from a humanitarian standpoint, is that the farm instructor had reported, a month prior, having 12,400 lbs of bacon and 5,200 lbs of flour in store.¹⁹ (5,600 kg and 2,300 kg, respectively.) 

It’s quite amazing there weren’t more incidents like this, or more violent. History is full of uprisings inflamed by famine, when desperate people have nothing to lose by fighting for their lives. There are two ways to stop an angry, starving crowd, other than actual food: starve them harder or use superior force.

As James Daschuk wrote in Clearing the Plains:“Things appeared quiet on reserves at the beginning of 1885, but tension seethed beneath the surface. Just days before the outbreak of violence in the spring of 1885, the Saskatchewan Herald castigated the government in its misguided ration policy and its role in making the Indigenous people sick [. . .] ‘Their policy seems to be comprised in these six words: feed one day, starve the next.’^”20  

There are several ways to tell the story of the conflict of 1885, when Métis clashed with federal troops at the Battle of Batoche. Themes include colonialism, political power struggles, military strategy and cultural identity. But at its base, the conflict was rooted in agrarian policy. Who gets to farm, where, and how, on the Canadian plains?    

In bison-hunting times, a community of Métis lived at Petite Ville, a village on the South Saskatchewan river south of present-day Batoche. As the bison dwindled, they decided to leave Petite Ville and move to better farmland so they could make a living and feed their families by other means. Batoche was one of their new communities.

As descendants of Indigenous women and Canadiens of the fur trade, the Métis staked their farms in French-Canadian fashion—long, narrow strips of land running up from the river. This assured each farmstead had access to water, woods and prairie grassland. The problem was, the Dominion Lands Act stipulated that farmland be surveyed in a grid of squares. Even-numbered squares for homesteaders, odd-numbered squares for sale.

The Métis asked for title to their land before the settlers flooded in, so that no one could inadvertently stake a claim to their farms. The answer was no. They were told to go to the Land Titles Office and apply for homesteads like everyone else. Whether they did or didn’t, the outcome was the same. They would lose their river-lot farms.

They sent letters and petitions to Ottawa but were ignored. After a decade of frustration, in 1884, they asked Métis advocate Louis Riel to press their cause. Fifteen years earlier, Riel had led a fight for Métis land rights at Red River after the sale of Rupert’s Land, resulting in the creation of the province of Manitoba. He came to Batoche to lead that fight again.

Riel saw a political solution: the farmers of the district should band together in their common grievances and demand action from Ottawa. He met with Treaty 6 chiefs, but they declined to join the Métis cause. Chief Big Bear and Chief Poundmaker were actively forming a coalition to press Ottawa to honour the food and farming provisions of the treaty. They didn’t want to jeopardize that process.

Riel found more common ground with Euro-Canadian settlers of the Prince Albert district. They had established their farms along the proposed path of the railway. Then the land was surveyed and the railway moved far to the south. How would they get their wheat and cattle to market? If they farmed on an odd-numbered square, were they expected to buy it? Or move? Like the Métis, they wanted political representation and a clear title to their land.

Riel drew up a list of grievances and a bill of rights.²¹ It demanded land ownership for all “who have fairly earned the right of possession of their farms.” That government jobs be filled by local men, not “disreputable outsiders,” and be “administered for the benefit of the actual settler.” That Métis customs be respected, such as their traditional river-lot farms. “That better provisions be made for the Indians” so that settlers were not compelled to provide food, “partly to prevent them from dying at their door, partly to preserve the peace of the Territory.” It called for the creation of two new provinces, Saskatchewan and Alberta, with elected legislatures to represent local interests. To that end, Riel declared the provisional government of Saskatchewan based at Batoche. That was too much for politicians in Ottawa. They sent in the troops.

(Tangent: I am thinking of ancient Athens in its first measured steps toward democracy, when it was seen as right and proper that farmers should have a say in governing because they lived on the land, grew the food, particularly wheat, and if threatened, turned out to fight for it. The famous hoplite fighters were ordinary farmers who voted on affairs of state based on their vested interests. However, this historic precedent seems to have been far from the political mindset in Ottawa.)

The first clash came in March at Duck Lake with a Métis victory. The final battle was at Batoche in May, when Canadian troops out-gunned the Métis (with an American-made Gatling machine gun) and took Riel into custody. You can still see the bullet holes in the facade of the church, now a national historic site. Métis fighters and their families dispersed into the countryside. Riel was tried for treason and executed that November.

The government had mobilized a force of more than 5,000 troops across the prairie west, fearing a much larger uprising of First Nations people unified in frustration and hunger. But a mass uprising didn’t materialize; the treaty pledge of loyalty and peaceful coexistence largely held firm. There were a couple of bloody but isolated events (known as the Battle of Cut Knife Hill and the Frog Lake Massacre) that reflected local grievances and did not escalate. Both Chief Big Bear and Chief Poundmaker tried to intervene and prevent further bloodshed, but they were the very “agitators” the government wanted to neutralize. Both were arrested, tried and incarcerated. Eight Indigenous men were hanged at Battleford that November, the largest mass execution in Canadian history.

After that, things got really bad for First Nations farmers on the plains. During the North-West Resistance in 1885, a pass system was imposed requiring permission to leave a reserve. Ostensibly, this was to prevent any confusion over who was a combatant and who was not. Now that the conflict was over, the government decided to keep the pass in place. A pass was required, for instance, to go fishing, pick berries or work for a neighbouring farmer off the reserve. Though restricting movement was illegal under both the treaties and the law, the Mounted Police generally enforced it when called upon.

Permission was also required to sell the produce of reserve farming. Initially, this policy was meant to prevent Indigenous communities from selling the agricultural items provided to them through the treaties. Now it was applied much more broadly to include anything they grew, raised or harvested as a result of their farming activities. To enforce compliance, it was also made illegal to buy those goods. Settlers who purchased, say, bucket of potatoes, a cartload of hay or a bushel of wheat were also breaking the law, unless it came with the required permit. This applied equally to cash, barter, gifts and trade.

Farm instructors were accommodating, for the most part. Their success as instructors was based on the success of their assigned reserves. But as profits accrued, government officials decided that reserve farmers couldn’t be trusted to handle money responsibly (such as buying on credit and paying installments), or to purchase the “right” kinds of goods. So, farm instructors were given that power, too, with final say over what was bought and sold. But that success was problematic, too.

Settlers began to complain that reserve farmers had an unfair advantage because they received assistance in farming and got food rations if things went badly. It didn’t matter that this “assistance” was the deal made for sharing the land with the newcomers, nor that First Nation farmers were hampered by other “assistance” they did not want or need. Settlers resented the competition in the local market and accused reserve farmers of selling below the market price. They especially resented the competition of reserve-grown wheat, since that was the most valued commodity of prairie agriculture at a time when market access was still quite limited. And the government agreed: reserve farmers did not belong in the wheat economy. If they grew wheat, they should eat it themselves.

In 1889, the government introduced its most draconian policy yet. Known as the peasant farming policy, it required that reserve farmers operate like European peasants of yore: to live an Old World yeoman self-sufficiency, using only rudimentary hand tools and producing only what was needed to feed their own families on small, individual plots of land. An acre or two of wheat, a plot of potatoes, a vegetable garden, a couple of milk cows. No herds of cattle. No cash crops. No surpluses to sell. No need for sums of money or commercial markets.

This policy was based on a pseudo-Darwinian notion of social evolution and survival of the fittest. It held that Indigenous farmers must evolve from one agrarian stage to the next, as European farmers had done over the centuries. They could not be expected (nor expect) to jump right into late 19th-century farming on the cusp of labour-saving machinery and global markets. Farming communally as a reserve was bad; individual achievement was good. In time, successful reserve farmers could participate in the wheat economy if they renounced allegiance to a treaty, to a chief, to their community. Assimilation was the underlying goal of the peasant farming policy.

Reserves were surveyed and subdivided into 40-acre parcels assigned to individual families. Large families were permitted a maximum of four parcels, or 160 acres (about 16 hectares and 65 hectares, respectively). Since the original treaty allocation was 640 acres (260 hectares) per family of five, a good deal of land remained unallocated. Farming on unallocated reserve land was prohibited. Subdivision began on those reserves most advanced in farming. This effectively removed the most successful farmers and the most productive farmland from the wheat economy.

Farm instructors protested. Reserve farmers had used factory-made implements from the start. Many used their profits to purchase new mechanized machinery that made the job faster and easier. They plowed more land to harvest more grain. What now? To seed by hand, harvest with a scythe, thresh with a flail? Grind their wheat with—what? The promised hand mills never arrived, in large part, according to Carter, because it was already old technology. Farmers took their wheat to commercial flour mills. This was barred to reserve farmers by the pass and permit system and by the peasant farming policy. If they couldn’t grind their wheat into flour, they should stop growing it. Plant potatoes instead.

Indigenous leaders protested, too. They appealed to reason with local officials and sent delegations to Ottawa pleading for common sense. Carter told the story of the Dakota of Oak River Reserve in Manitoba (today’s Sioux Valley Dakota Nation) who farmed successfully without government assistance. In 1888, a government inspector had the highest praise for the quality of their wheat fields as “equal to any white man’s crop.”²²    

The Oak River Reserve was assigned a farm instructor in 1891 whose job was to enforce the pass and permit system, impose peasant farming and take control of the finances. Of course, the Dakota resented this sudden intrusion into their lives. They went to Ottawa to plead their case, but were told, “It’s for your own good, so stop complaining.” When they ignored the policy and sold their wheat without a permit, the milling companies that bought the wheat were fined.

Similar scenarios played out across the plains. Orders for farm machinery were unilaterally cancelled. Broken plows and metal machinery could not be repaired. Permits for grain and cattle sales were denied. Fields lay fallow and went to weeds. It was impossible to farm efficiently with a hoe and a scythe in the short growing season of the northern plains. No settlers would do it, not if they wanted to survive the winter. Some farm instructors refused to comply, arguing there would be less food produced on reserves, not more. They were replaced with more compliant men. Many reserve farmers simply quit. Younger generations saw no future in farming.

The peasant farming policy lapsed in 1896 after the election of a Liberal government under Prime Minister Wilfred Laurier. The pass and permit system remained in place (for another 50-plus years) and farm instructors still handled the accounts (paying themselves a percentage for the effort). The stage was set for the next aggressive agenda of government officials in Regina and Ottawa: to take “wasted” reserve land and sell it to settlers.

This was a complicated matter. The process of severing and selling reserve land was governed by legislation that required a voluntary majority “yes” vote by the reserve community. However, such legalities were no hindrance to determined bureaucrats who stood to profit personally by acting in cahoots with large land speculators. They concocted various schemes to sever reserve land. For instance:

Set up a meeting to vote on land surrender, but only invite a few men (who don’t farm) and pay them handsomely to vote yes. Convince the reserve to sell some of its farmland so it could use the profits to buy a threshing machine to more efficiently farm the rest of its land—then rig the auction so that the land sells far below market value and the price of the machine. Offer to give a reserve food provisions forever in exchange for its farmland, then renege on the food. Split the reserve, appealing to the hunters over the farmers, that they would be happier living in woodlands and leave the farmland for more deserving settlers. Send in a trusted priest to convince the reserve that severing its farmland was the right and Christian thing to do. Hold multiple votes until you get the vote you wanted all along.

Minutes and records were rarely kept. Who knew about the meeting? Who attended? How many voted (yes or no), and what were they offered if the vote was yes? Regulations required a majority vote, so the bureaucrats decided that “majority” referred only to those in attendance, not the reserve community as a whole. In one instance, the vote of three men was considered adequate to surrender the entirety of the Papaschase reserve (today’s Papaschase First Nation), 40 square miles (104 sq km) that now comprises the southeast quadrant of Edmonton, Alberta.

If the land was along a railway, it was severed. If it was needed for a town, it was severed. If it was next to a city, it was severed. If the population of the reserve had dropped, as many had due to hunger, disease and the peasant farming policy, the recalculated “excess” was severed. During World War I, unfarmed reserve land was loaned to settlers in order to grow more wheat for the war effort. After the war, the land was given to veterans, but not to Indigenous veterans.

These examples and many more were detailed by Saskatchewan historians Bill Waiser and Jennie Hansen in Cheated: The Laurier Liberals and the Theft of First Nations Reserve Land. They concluded: “The sad irony was that there was no need to open up reserves to white settlement in the early twentieth century. Land could easily be secured elsewhere in the prairie west. Nor did First Nations have that much land to surrender. By 1913, 2,722,791 acres had been set aside for reserves. That was one-half of one percent of the total acreage of the three prairie provinces. […] Their collective efforts resulted in the surrender of over half a million acres—21 percent of reserve land. Put another way, one of every five acres set aside under treaty in western Canada was given up.”²³

Meanwhile, isolated on their reserves, separated from society, stripped of economic agency, their children forced into assimilation schools, dehumanized by racist and chauvinistic policies, fenced in by the barbed wire of the pass and permit system, denied equitable pathways to food sovereignty—the first farmers of the Canadian plains were undermined and undone. Robbed of everything they’d hoped for, including hope.

I can imagine a different scenario, in which First Nations farmers were successful on their reserves of land, provided in full the agricultural terms of the treaties, free to farm unhindered by absurd and arbitrary policies. Perhaps they could have worked with government agrologists in the quest to find a better wheat for the northern plains, growing the cultivars on test plots under various conditions on their reserve farms. They could have raised oxen, potatoes and seed grain to sell to the homesteaders as they arrived from afar. They might have invested in a flour mill, selling their wheat and flour to their new neighbours and to the world.

This is not the naive “what if” of a settler’s great-great-great granddaughter. The vast majority of settlers would have been just as successful—or not successful—farming side-by-side with First Nations farmers. The volume of reserved lands was small overall, their populations overwhelmed by the sheer number of newcomers, their grain a drop in the bucket of a cargo ship bound for London or Genoa or Duluth.

In that world, I would not be reading this headline: “Canada makes $1.72 billion cows-and-plows settlement with 14 Saskatchewan First Nations” or “Saskatchewan First Nation awarded nearly $127M in decades-long land claim settlement.”²⁴ Cows-and-plows refers to the agricultural provisions that were included in the treaties but never delivered. Land-claim settlements make reparations for reserve lands fraudulently severed and sold. These headlines are not the first, and will not be the last. The costs keep rising.

The bus stopped at the edge of town, and I hopped out. It was May. The fields along the road were green with young wheat, the seed heads swaying in unison in the breeze. It made a soft, whispering sound that I knew well. It’s the sound of hope, of prosperity, of prayers for rain answered, of ancestors both long gone and living legacy. I was in Germany, travelling the landscape of my Fahlman ancestors.

Before moving to Klosterdorf, they lived in the neighbouring towns of Hopsten and Schapen in the north of Germany, near the Dutch border. In local vernacular, Fahlman was originally spelled Vaalman or Vahlman. Available records of their farm date to 1555. In the 1700s, they built a large timbered bauernhaus (barn and house under one long roof) that still stands. Back then, at 80 acres (32 hectares), it was one of the larger farms in the area. Today, it’s an organic vegetable market garden.

A short distance through the countryside stands a tall, stone-block flour mill, no longer operational, built by another Vaalman in the 1820s, well after my ancestor left for the Russian Empire. At a time of large families and limited farmland, younger generations had to branch out in order to support their families. My ancestor took the offer of free farmland on the Black Sea steppe. When land is your wealth, your independence, your family legacy, such a move is understandable.

A century later, when life under the czars turned oppressive, they took the offer of free farmland in Canada. Of course, the land isn’t free if someone pays the price—in displacement, in war, in starvation, imprisoned and robbed of generational wealth. That is the bitter legacy of wheat. Those who stayed on their land at Klosterdorf faced all of that under the Bolsheviks. Those who immigrated to Canada restored that wealth in land, in purpose, in freedom of action, in food on the table and a safe bed at night.

On my way to Hopsten, I stopped to visit the European Bread Museum at Ebergötzen. My interest in wheat began many years earlier as an interest in bread. I was particularly fascinated by the great variety of breads distinguished by their unique shapes, methods of baking and folkloric traditions. German pretzels. French baguette. Ukrainian paska. Métis bannock. South Asian naan. Egyptian aish baladi (aish = bread and life, baladi = my country, homeland, homegrown). All unique and different breads, yet made with the same basic ingredients: water, leavening and wheat.

Inside the museum, I was captivated by a small, dark square of bread in a glass case. It was brought to Germany from Russia after World War II. Translated, the label read:

The Last Piece of Bread
1949
Dry black bread from a Russian prison of war

I was so moved by this. I felt a swell of empathy and anger. Empathy for the suffering endured in a Russian prison, embodied in this dark and ugly piece of bread. Anger at Germany for starting the war in 1939 on a slogan of “Lebensraum” or “Room to Live” by invading its neighbour’s farmlands. The war ended in 1945, so the bearer of this bread was imprisoned for four years or more. This dry, dark bread was his daily fare.

And yet, when freed from prison, he didn’t leave the last piece of bread on the floor of his gaol. He put it in his kit and carried it home—not to eat it, it seemed to me, but as a reminder of the daily cruelty and hope embedded in a piece of bread. A kind of “never forget, never again.” Both cruelty and hope are the legacy of wheat. Some have fallen on the side of cruelty; some have risen on the side of hope.

On the museum grounds, I wandered into a quaint little 17th century flour mill. It sat beside a small stream. When engaged, the stream turned a wooden water wheel, which turned the wooden gears, which turned a heavy millstone that ground the wheat into flour. The air inside was warm and dry in filtered sunlight. In the dim, a curious face stared out at me.

It was the face of a kleiekotzer, the spirit protector of country flour watermills. Carved in wood, the face was round, with protruding ears, wide bulging eyes and a mouth carved in the shape of a shout. Literally translated, kleiekotzer means “bran puker” or “bran vomiter.” It was the scuttle through which the bran was removed from the flour, spilling like vomit through the open mouth, cleansing the flour of malevolent spirits along with the bran.

I’d seen other kleiekotzer in folklore museums in Germany and the German-heritage part of France, where kleiekotzer hung on the walls like museum curiosities. Some were very elaborate, with fancy hairdos and remnants of paint, some had wild exaggerated faces like theatre masks and gargoyles, some were calm and realistic. Hanging together on the wall, they looked like the faces of a congregation united in prayer, or a choir swelling in unison, or the rising shouts of a protest march.

I heard their voices. A cry for the ages. A summons to demons and evil doers. A portent of hope. A ring of harmony. A deep resonance of kin, home and community. A whisper of wheat and its long, long shadow on the land.

Amy Jo Ehman
A personal essay written in dialogue with Der Kleiekotzer by Althea Thauberger, my cousin through the Black Sea German settlers of Klosterdorf and St. Mary’s Colony.
Saskatoon, Saskatchewan
Treaty 6 Territory
November 2025

End Notes:

1. Shawn Langlois, “Richest Men In history: Vladimir Putin, Bill Gates and Warren Buffett Aren’t Even Close” Money Matters, August 11, 2017. https://www.marketwatch.com/story/richest-men-in-history-vladimir-putin-bill-gates-and-warren-buffett-arent-even-close-2017-08-09

2. Anne Applebaum, Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2017), 33.

3. Applebaum, Red Famine, 29.

4. Statistics Canada, “Canada’s Leading Domestic Exports, Fiscal Years 1890, 1900, 1910,1920, 1930, and 1936” https://www65.statcan.gc.ca/acyb02/1937/acyb02_19370518000x-eng.htm

5. Stephen Leacock, My Discovery of the West: A Discussion of East and West in Canada (Toronto: Thomas Allen Publisher, 1937), 75.

6. Alexander Morris, The Treaties of Canada with the Indians of Manitoba and the North-West Territories (Toronto: Willing & Williamson, 1880), 171. https://archive.org/details/cihm_14955

7. Morris, The Treaties of Canada, 219.

8. Sheldon Krasowski, No Surrender: The Land Remains Indigenous (Regina, University of Regina Press, 2019), 32.

9. Winona Wheeler, in Krasowski, No Surrender, xi.

10. “Indian Matters,” Saskatchewan Herald (Battleford SK), June 30, 1879, 2. http://pasnewspapers.usask.ca/islandora/object/PAS%3A28041

11. Sarah Carter, Lost Harvests: Prairie Indian Reserve Farmers and Government Policy. (Montreal/Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1990), 89.

12. Carter, Lost Harvests, 94.

13. Carter, Lost Harvests, 111.

14. Carter, Lost Harvests, 112.

15. Bill Waiser, Saskatchewan: A New History (Calgary: Fifth House, 2005), 48.

16. House of Commons Debates, 4th Parliament, 4th Session, vol. 1 (Ottawa: April 26, 1882), 1186. https://parl.canadiana.ca/view/oop.debates_HOC0404_04/1194

17. Carter, Lost Harvests, 125.

18. Carter, Lost Harvests, 161.

19. James Daschuk, Clearing the Plains: Disease, Politics of Starvation, and the Loss of Indigenous Life (Regina: University of Regina Press, 2019), 145.

20. Daschuk, Clearing the Plains, 151.

21. Quotes from both the petition of December 1884 and the Bill of Rights of March 1885: “Petition of December 1884,” Veterans and Families of 1885, https://www.metismuseum.ca/media/document.php/149693.Veterans%20and%20Families%20of%201885%20Low-Res%20(Oct%202017%20Version).pdf; and “Bill of Rights of March 1885” The Plea Revolution, https://teachers.plea.org/newsletter/2018/the-plea-revolution/38.1-3

22. Sarah Carter, “Agriculture and Agitation on the Oak River Dakota Reserve, 1875—1895” Manitoba History, no. 6 (Fall 1983), https://www.mhs.mb.ca/docs/mb_history/06/oakriveragriculture.shtml#31

23. Bill Waiser and Jennie Hansen, Cheated: The Laurier Liberals and the Theft of First Nations Reserve Land (Toronto: ECW Press, 2023), 4.

24. “Canada Makes $1.72 Billion Cows-And-Plows Settlement With 14 Saskatchewan First Nations,” CBC News,  https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/saskatoon/1-72-billion-cows-and-plows-deal-1.7465807

“Saskatchewan First Nation Awarded Nearly $127M In Decades-Long Land Claim Settlement.” Global News,

All links accessed October 15, 2025