GO rD hIll 500 Years of Indigenous resistanceand Indian Wars” of the 18th century resulted in the defeat of the French
forces; the subsequent Treaty of 1763 established British rule over New
France (now Quebec). With the Quebec Act of 1774, the province of
Quebec was expanded, British criminal law established, and the feudal
administration implemented by France remained largely unchanged.
Conflicts related to civil matters and property remained regulated under
French civil law. The seigneurial system, a feudal system in which the
land of the province was given in grant from the King to seigneurs (usu-
ally lower nobility and from the Church), who, in turn, rented the land
to peasants in return for an annual rent (called tithes, payable in goods
of products raised on the land), was continued. As with the 1763 Royal
Proclamation, the Quebec Act secured the loyalty of the French clergy
and aristocracy in the U.S. War for Independence.
As a result of the wars of the 18th century, French settlement had
grown to 60,000 as soldiers employed by France swelled the French pop-
ulation. The expansion of the province under the Quebec Act had seized
a large portion of the “Indian territory” and placed it under Crown juris-
diction. Following the U.S. War for Independence, some 40,000 loyalists
fled the former British colonies and settled in Canada, occupying more
Native lands—particularly that of the Haudenosaunee. British colonial
authorities went to some lengths to acquire land while placating the still
geo-militarily important Indians.^32
While the colonialists were busy consolidating the administra-
tion of “British North America”, the Pacific Northwest was coming
under increased reconnaissance.
Beginning in 1774, the first recorded colonizers into the area of British
Columbia came aboard the Spanish ship Santiago. Four years later, an ex-
pedition led by James Cook descended upon the area, leading to the estab-
lishment of a large and profitable fur trade. The dominance of the fur trade
- Negotiations with the Mississaugas of southern Ontario were conducted as
early as 1781, providing land for communities from the Haudenosaunee,
whose lands were supplied to British loyalists in a strategic defensive line
along the U.S. border. Between 1781 and 1836, 23 such land cessions were
conducted. Not treaties but instead “simple real estate deals” in which the
British paid with goods and later money. In 1818 the practise was adopted of
paying annuities. By 1830 these annual payments were directed at building
houses and purchasing farm equipment—in line with changing colonial prac-
tises. “This was then followed by the establishment of the band fund system”,
see As Long as the Sun Shines, op. cit., pg. 9.