Railroads, Treaty-Making, and Indigenous Well-Being: Evidence from Canada

Jeff Chan, Wilfrid Laurier University
Azim Essaji, Wilfrid Laurier University
Rob Gillezeau, Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto

The Canadian railway network played a foundational role not just in nation's industrialization, but in enabling westward expansion and crafting a Canadian national identity. While the importance of the railway in these spheres has been well-documented, there is a substantially smaller literature considering its impacts on First Nations and Metis peoples. In this paper, we examine the role that the railroad played in the dispossession and cession of Indigenous lands within the borders of present-day Canada. Using georeferenced data on the timing, content and extent of treaties signed between the Crown and Indigenous nations, we find no evidence that the expansion of the Canadian railroad network hastened the signing of treaties; nor did it increase the area of an Indigenous Nation's homeland ceded via treaty. Given this result, we examine the competing hypothesis that Indigenous land cessions were determined by the pace of American westward expansion and the construction of the US rail network. Similarly, we find that changes in Indigenous nations' proximity to the US rail network did not increase their land area ceded by treaties in Canada. Taken together, the evidence in this paper suggests that the construction of the railroad played a dramatically less important role in the seizure of Indigenous lands in Canada than previously thought and in sharp contrast to the experience in the United States.

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 Presented in Session 35. Land Cessions, Town Settlements, and the Growth of Markets