Saskatchewan is treaty territory from one end to the other. Eleven numbered treaties, signed between 1874 and 1906, cover every square kilometre of the province, a legal and moral foundation that governments have too often treated as a historical footnote rather than a living framework. Understanding Saskatchewan politics today requires understanding what those treaties promised, what they have delivered, and what remains unfinished.
The Treaties and What They Promised
Treaty 4, signed at Fort Qu’Appelle in 1874, and Treaty 6, signed at Fort Carlton and Fort Pitt in 1876, cover the southern and central portions of the province. Treaty 8 (1899) and Treaty 10 (1906) extend across the north. In each case, First Nations peoples ceded use of vast territories in exchange for specific promises: reserve lands, annual payments, schools, agricultural implements, ammunition, and certain hunting and fishing rights. The medicine chest clause in Treaty 6, which First Nations leaders have long interpreted as a promise of healthcare, was the foundation on which Tommy Douglas’s government built the case that the Crown had already committed to universal medical care.
The Crown’s understanding of what it had committed to in signing the treaties was, from the beginning, narrower than the understanding of First Nations signatories. The gap between those two interpretations has driven legal disputes, political confrontations, and social consequences that continue today.
Residential Schools and the Long Shadow
The residential school system, which operated in Saskatchewan from the late nineteenth century until the last federally funded school closed in 1996, was designed explicitly to separate Indigenous children from their languages, cultures, families, and communities. Schools operated in the province included Lebret, Cowessess, Marieval, and many others. The abuse — physical, psychological, and sexual — that occurred in these institutions has been documented extensively by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
The discovery of unmarked graves at former residential school sites in Kamloops and Cowessess in 2021 brought the scale of the tragedy into the national consciousness in a new way. The Cowessess First Nation in Saskatchewan announced the discovery of 751 unmarked graves at the Marieval Indian Residential School site, a number that reframed the public understanding of what the system had done. The political response — provincial and federal expressions of sorrow, calls for further investigation, debates about the pace of the national Day for Truth and Reconciliation — illustrated how incompletely the country had reckoned with this history.
The Sixties Scoop and Its Continuing Effects
The Sixties Scoop — the mass removal of Indigenous children from their families into non-Indigenous foster and adoptive homes, which accelerated through the 1960s and continued into the 1980s — affected Saskatchewan disproportionately. The province had one of the highest rates of Indigenous children in the child welfare system in Canada, a pattern that Indigenous leaders and advocates have argued represents a continuation of the assimilationist objectives of the residential school system by different means.
The over-representation of Indigenous children in the child welfare system remains a live issue in Saskatchewan politics. Court decisions, federal legislation, and First Nations-led child welfare organisations have created a slowly shifting framework, but the pace of change has been contested and the underlying socio-economic conditions that drive child welfare involvement — poverty, inadequate housing, the intergenerational effects of trauma — have not been adequately addressed.
FSIN, Specific Land Claims, and UNDRIP
The Federation of Sovereign Indigenous Nations (FSIN), which represents 74 First Nations in Saskatchewan, is a political organisation that engages with the provincial and federal governments on a wide range of issues including treaty implementation, land claims, resource revenue sharing, and social services. The specific land claims process — through which First Nations seek redress for the Crown’s failure to provide the full amount of reserve land promised in the treaties — has been active in Saskatchewan for decades, producing settlements that have returned land and financial compensation to First Nations communities.
Canada’s adoption of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples through federal legislation in 2021 created a new framework for assessing government actions affecting Indigenous peoples. The Federation of Sovereign Indigenous Nations has engaged with UNDRIP’s implications for Saskatchewan treaty relationships, arguing that free, prior, and informed consent requirements should apply to resource development and other decisions affecting First Nations territories. The provincial government’s response to these arguments has been cautious, reflecting tensions between development interests and reconciliation commitments that define Indigenous politics in Saskatchewan.