Photo credit: Blaise MacMullin. Winona Wheeler with Ms. Hotrod Rocki, her 12-year-old registered Paint/Quarter Horse mare.

Planting, farming, and reshaping the landscape are practices normally attributed to European colonizers in Canada. However, First Nations oral history and archaeological and archival records demonstrate that First Nations people in present-day Manitoba have a rich and ancient history of farming.

Growing Pains: The Dynamics of First Nations Agriculture in Manitoba, 1850s-1960s is a study of First Nations agriculture covering the era of direct colonial intrusion and indigenous cultural change and adaption in what is now southern Manitoba. Winona Wheeler, associate professor with the Centre for World Indigenous Knowledge and Research at AU since 2006, is the co-applicant on the three-year Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council research project, working with colleague Sarah Carter of the University of Alberta.

"I have been working with the Treaty Relations Commission of Manitoba as their research strategist for almost three years," Wheeler said. "The treaty right to agricultural provisions and the promises of the numbered treaties were identified as one of their priority research areas. First Nations contend that the Crown has not lived up to its treaty obligations in this regard. Growing Pains is one component of a potentially larger research project that will cover all the treaty regions in present-day Manitoba."

Interpretation regarding the intent, nature and quality of the treaty provisions and promises made all across Western Canada has been hotly debated in politics and law since the ink on the treaty documents dried, Wheeler said.

"Basically, there are two understandings of the treaties: a literal reading of the written provisions, which would be the Crown perspective, and the oral history accounts of the spoken negotiations and promises that passed down from generation to generation, which is the First Nations perspective.

"For example, the treaty texts spell out a list of agricultural implements to be provided to First Nations as soon as they were ready to move onto their reserves and farm. But the intent of that provision, as told in historical documents surrounding the treaty negotiations and in First Nations oral history, indicates that they were promised farming support so they could make a living by it. A literal interpretation is that the Crown only promised the list of implements they wrote in the treaty documents - hoes, rakes, one set of oxen, one bull and some cows, etc. - not whether the people were enabled to cultivate their land, but whether the ‘cows and plows' were provided."

The "outside promises" that the research will also cover are those promises made by the Crown's representatives but not included in the treaty documents. In Treaty No. 1, for example, First Nations were promised agricultural support, but the Crown did not live up to that promise because it wasn't written in the text, Wheeler said. The First Nations petitioned the Crown, and a few years later an addendum to the treaty added agricultural support. "It is important to note that the Crown initially refused but was forced to comply when the local newspaper provided documented evidence that those promises were indeed made," she said. "All across present-day Western Canada other outside promises were made, but because of lack of supporting documentation, the Crown refused to live up to them."

Combining oral history and the documentary record, Wheeler said the project will represent a unique scholarly contribution that will be of interest beyond the academic community.

"The oral history component of this research is important because it provides a more human side to the story. Many elderly First Nations (people) experienced the agricultural support and prohibitions implemented by the Department of Indian Affairs, but this material does not form part of the written record. The documents tell us what the regulations, policies and procedures were, and how they were implemented. Oral histories tell us how it all transpired and impacted people on a very personal level."