erican Indians believed in an oral tradition. Indians formed treaties among themselves by conducting ceremonies marked by the exchange of "wampum" or traditional beadwork. The actual treaty was oral and would be passed on through the generations in this way. In the agreements between the Indians and government officials, attempts were made to combine the two traditions, but over time it became apparent that the written word held greater legal weight than the oral tradition.
             Another weakness in the Proclamation of 1763 lies in the nature of the document. Unlike other pronouncements of its stature, it does not have Constitutional status. The Constitutional Act of 1982 contains a schedule of all our constitutional documents, and no materials prior to Confederation in 1867 are included. There is, however, reference to the Proclamation of 1763 in section 25.a of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. It states that the rights and freedoms recognized by the Proclamation fall under the Charter's protection. Given these conflicting interpretations, the strength of the Proclamation remains unclear.
             In other words, The Proclamation gave the King the sole right to appropriate lands from Native people and initiated the procedure of signing land-surrender treaties between the British and the Native peoples in North America. In the late Eighteenth and early Nineteenth centuries, there followed, in Upper Canada (southern Ontario), a series of land surrender treaties that confined Natives to smallholdings and made large tracts of land available to settlers. Natives were then relieved of their lands, through treaties of land surrender through designation of reserves, and through expropriation of reserve lands.
             By 1923, there were more than 50 such treaties. Where the government saw these agreements mainly as instruments for freeing lands for settlers, Natives saw (and still see) them as defining their relationship with the Dominion on a...