Sept. 22, 1877: Five First Nations of the Blackfoot Confederacy signed Treaty No. 7 with the Crown at Blackfoot Crossing on the Bow River, ceding roughly 129,500 square kilometres of what is now southern Alberta, according to Parks Canada, which designated the site a national historic site in 1925.
The agreement was negotiated over six days, beginning Sept. 17, 1877, between lieutenant-governor David Laird and North-West Mounted Police commissioner James Macleod on behalf of the Crown, and chiefs representing the Siksika (Blackfoot), Kainai (Blood), Piikani (Peigan), Stoney-Nakoda and Tsuut’ina (Sarcee) nations, according to Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs Canada’s treaty research report and The Canadian Encyclopedia.
Siksika chief Crowfoot, whose Blackfoot name was Isapo-Muxika, was the negotiations’ most influential Indigenous voice. He had watched the bison herds that sustained his people collapse under decades of overhunting and drought, and he told the assembled chiefs, in a passage preserved by The Canadian Encyclopedia, “We all see that the day is coming when the buffalo will all be killed, and we shall have nothing more to live on.” On Sept. 21, the day before signing, Crowfoot credited the newly arrived Mounted Police with restoring order after years of whisky-trade violence, saying “The Police have protected us as the feathers of the bird protect it from the frosts of winter,” and announced he would sign. His endorsement carried the other chiefs, including Kainai leader Red Crow, who had also consulted Crowfoot before agreeing to the terms, according to The Canadian Encyclopedia.
In exchange for the land, the Crown promised reserve lands calculated at one square mile per family of five, an immediate cash payment of $12 per person, annual payments ranging from $5 for band members to $25 for head chiefs, Winchester rifles for chiefs, $2,000 in annual ammunition, farming tools, cattle and teachers’ salaries on reserve, according to Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs Canada.
The two sides did not, by most historical accounts, understand the deal the same way. The Canadian Encyclopedia says Blackfoot negotiators believed they were agreeing to share the land and secure peace and protection, not surrender title to it outright, and that Jerry Potts, one of the treaty’s interpreters, has been described by historians as having limited fluency in the Blackfoot language, raising doubts about how fully the terms were actually conveyed. Government commitments, particularly around rations during the famine years that followed the buffalo’s disappearance, were also inconsistently honoured, a grievance Blackfoot leaders raised repeatedly in the treaty’s early decades.
Crowfoot remained committed to the peace he had negotiated even as conditions on the new reserves worsened. He refused overtures from Louis Riel to join the 1885 North-West Resistance, a decision historians credit with keeping the Blackfoot Confederacy out of that conflict. He died on April 5, 1890, mourned, according to The Canadian Encyclopedia, as a warrior, orator and diplomat, even as his people were left to bear the treaty’s unfulfilled promises for generations afterward.
Treaty 7 remains foundational to the modern legal and political relationship between Ottawa and the Blackfoot Confederacy, Tsuut’ina and Stoney Nakoda nations, whose land and rights claims under its terms continue to be negotiated and litigated today, nearly a century and a half after the signatures were put to paper at Blackfoot Crossing.
