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This post is part of a short series on the environmental history of the Indian Act in collaboration with Active History’s Indian Act 150 series.

“Sir, We are looking anxiously for your report as to Indian titles both within Manitoba and without; and as to the best means of extinguishing [terminating] the Indian titles in the valley of Saskatchewan…We should take immediate steps to extinguish the Indian titles somewhere in the Fertile Belt in the valley of Saskatchewan, and open it for settlement.”

-Prime Minister Macdonald, 1870, a letter1

Adorned in ancient ripples and sedimentary patterns, Nepean Sandstone warms underneath the morning sun2

Excavated, dislocated, transformed.

On April 12, 1876 the stone swallowed 206 settler Men gathered within its, now, parliamentary shaped walls3

In loud, rumbustious voices the Men declared: THE INDIAN ACT HAS PASSED4

quietly, the stone objected… quietly the stone protested

“the language of stone is difficult, Rock mumbles”5

Unaware they had been swallowed,

the stone spat them out

We are civil Men and a mission of civility has been bestowed upon us,6 they conferred.

But, “whatever settlers may say-and they generally have a lot to say…territoriality is settler colonialism’s specific, irreducible element”7

It was decided how the Act will govern Indian Status and Reserve lands:

“Reserves [are] to be held for the use and benefit of Indians”8

“The Governor in council may determine whether any purpose for which lands in a reserve are used or are to be used is for the use and benefit of the band”9

So, it was written: the Crown adjudicates reserve land and deems the lawful possession of land.

Permission must be granted for the removal or transportation of mineral, stone, gravel, clay, soil, trees, saplings, shrubs, underbrush, timber, and cordwood10

Anyone in possession of “anything removed [CONTRARY TO THIS SECTION].. is guilty of an offence” and liable to a fine or imprisonment.11

“We are no longer the sole possessors of our ancestral lands taken by conquest, cessation or as terra nullius…these lands are appropriated in the name of the Crown”12

In whispered voices the 206 parliamentary Men discussed their secret: the settler sense of belonging is tied to a fiction- “the legal regime has reproduced the doctrine of terra nullius in order to give place and a sense of belonging to itself”13

The nation has been created “as a white possession”14

And so, settler parliament responded to MacDonald’s letter:

“Settlers would bring civilization to the Indians”15

They would go everywhere, do everything, be anything.

Every rock, creature, river and tree, theirs to command, to own, unless otherwise expressed.

So, it was written:

Sir, we’ve passed the Indian Act,

we will clear the plains

And we “keep time with the westward march of the nation”16

To the west, there is a river that runs in a dry land17

Where prairie sage carries in the wind

and, after a period of three years, Meadow Blazingstar blooms

782 reserves are established in Saskatchewan between 1874-190618

By the 1880s the last wild buffalo will be hunted until only “a small remnant” remain19

And so it was written by generations of settlers:

We send you this post card from oskana kâ-asastêk

(“Bison bones were placed [here] by the local Cree and Saulteaux people, who believed that the bison would return to the bones of their dead ancestors, therefore always bringing subsistence for their people” )20

We’ve made new piles: for export, sport, fertilizer and chinaware.21

We’ve ensured that following the Indian Act, the lands have been cleared and “government policy encouraged the death of all bison in order to starve Indigenous people”22

We erected cities and turned grassland to agriculturally productive fields

“These cities signify with every building and every street that this land is now possessed by others; signs of white possession are embedded everywhere in the landscape”23

We’ve destroyed the bison to replace them with cattle and canola

We’ve made “glimpses of wild prairie flowers in bloom… rare”24

150 YEARS LATER a young Indigenous woman walks barefoot along a river bank in Treaty 4 territory

It was written that in life she was a runaway, she looked for trouble. She was lost.

150 YEARS LATER, settlers still declare: she was never where she should be.

The Indian Act says so!

And to the east, that great and ancient Nepean sandstone laughed upon hearing this

Buffalo are back on the prairie

“This special moment marks a significant milestone for our Nation and represents strength, resilience, renewal, and our deep connection to the buffalo. The return of the buffalo is more than conservation it is the restoration of culture, tradition, and a sacred relationship that has sustained our people for generations”25

The woman watches across a sea of grass and the wind embraces her, gently lifting her long hair. She returns everyday and stays until the sky fills with colour

Under the stars she turns back into spirit and instead of writing, she tells the stones “we will create a new world”, so they may mumble her message

With her every footstep the earth recognizes her

every stone, blade of grass, tree and river

And so, it was written: she had never been out of place

no matter how settler doctrine claimed it so

and the buffalo are returning

Photo by author.

Author’s Note

This creative non-fiction was written for the “The Indian Act 150”, an editorial series by Active History and the Network in Canadian History & Environment (NICHE). I use stylized elements to weave theory, legal doctrine and storytelling to explore the environmental dimensions of the Indian Act. These stylistic elements are inspired by Susan Griffin’s (1978) “The Roaring Inside Her: Woman and Nature” which makes a poignant juxtaposition between the dominance of man and science within traditional scholarship and the subjugation of nature.
Thus, the assemblage of text illustrates how the Indian Act entrenched meta-narrativizes of the “white possessive” and results in ongoing Indigenous land dispossession. The text is critically constructed using italics, parenthesis and changing font size to signal the relationship between the Indian Act, the land and Indigenous and more-than-human resistances. The result is a disorienting, and dizzying collection of words that mimic the structure of settler colonialism and moves from East to West across Turtle Island
This work is written in memory of my friend, a young Indigenous woman from Treaty 4, who committed suicide in the summer of 2018. In Canada, Indigenous youth commit suicide at a rate 5-6 times that of the general population. These disproportionate rates are connected to the ongoing historical legacy of settler colonialism and legal doctrine such as the Indian Act, which disrupts Indigenous peoples relationships with land, culture and community.

Notes

[1] John A. Macdonald to Adams George Archibald, Lieutenant-Governor of Manitoba, 18 November 1870, quoted in 21 Things You May Not Know About the Indian Act, by Bob Joseph (2018), Chapter 1.
[2] J.L Kirwan, “Age of the Nepean (Potsdam) Sandstone in Eastern Ontario,” American Journal of Science 261,2 (1963): 108.
[3] The Canadian Encyclopedia, “Timeline: The Indian Act”, Accessed June 16, 2026, https://thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/timeline/the-indian-act.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass (Minneapolis, Minnesota: Milkweed Editions, 2013), 129.
[6] The Canadian Encyclopedia, s.v. “Gradual Civilization Act,” by Amanda Robinson, June 16, 2026, https://thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/gradual-civilization-act
[7] Patrick Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” Journal of Genocide Research 8, 4 (2006): 388.
[8] Indian Act, R.S.C. 1985, c. I-5, s. 18(1).
[9] Ibid.
[10] Indian Act, R.S.C. 1985, c. I-5, s. 93.
[11] Ibid.
[12] Aileen Moreton-Robinson, The White Possessive: Property, Power, and Indigenous Sovereignty (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), xx.
[13] Ibid., 16.
[14] Ibid., 22.
[15] Trevor Herriot, Towards a Prairie Atonement (Regina: University of Regina Press, 2016), 36.
[16] Wolfe, ”Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” 399.
[17] Trevor Herriot, River in a dry land: a Prairie Passage (Toronto: Stoddart, 2000).
[18] Sarah Isabel Wallace, “Reserves in Saskatchewan,” The Canadian Encyclopedia, 2019. Accessed June 16, 2026. https://thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/reserves-in-saskatchewan. para 1.
[19] Herriot, ”Towards a Prairie Atonement,” xiv.
[20] Mary Longman, Ancestors Rising (Regina, SK: MacKenzie Art Gallery, 2006), 1.
[21] Ibid.
[22] Ibid.
[23] Moreton-Robinson, The White Possessive, Xiii.
[24] Bev Lundahl, Saskatchewan Dirt: A Pandemic Quest for Connection (Saskatoon, SK: Your Nickel’s Worth Publishing, 2023), 81.
[25] Cowessess First Nations in Davenport, ”Cowessess First Nation welcomes first buffalo calf”, para 5.
Feature Image: Photo by author.

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Maren Savarese Knopf

Maren Savarese Knopf is an emerging interdisciplinary scholar and completing her PhD at the University of New Brunswick. Her research interests include settler colonialism, more-than-humans, the environment, and interspecies relationships. Maren is a settler originally from Treaty 4 and uses embodied and arts-based methods to understand the ongoing impacts of colonialism/imperialism in a multi-species world.

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