Photo courtesy of Manfred Joehnck
AFN Chief Perry Bellegarde went back in time today as he examined the only known First Nations artifact depicting the signing of Treaty 4, 143 years ago.
Bellegarde made a stop at the Royal Saskatchewan Museum in Regina where he talked about the significance of the document and the vision of the First Nations leaders who signed it.
It is a penciled pictograph, putting into images what the treaty signing meant to the First Nations leaders at the time. You can see promises of clothing, farm implements, animals and other things that formed part of the 1874 treaty.
AFN leader, Perry Bellegarde, says when it was signed, First Nations people were suffering through starvation, disease and the loss of the buffalo, but they had the vision to include things like: health care, education and hunting rights in the treaty.
“I always say, I hold our people up because they were visionaries,” he said. “They knew that we had to adapt as Indigenous people to something different — to something new and how to blend in and walk in both worlds.”
Evelyn Siegfried is the curator of Aboriginal Studies at the museum. She says the pictograph was created nine years after the treaty was signed. She says things were not going that well for First Nations people at that time.
If you look closely at the pictograph, you can see some words written in English, among them, “No good ass.” This is likely referring to a donkey that turned out to be not such a good donkey. The notation was apparently written by an Indian agent in Winnipeg, who attempted to translate the images into words.
“I have no idea what he might have been writing that for,” she said. “When I read it, I thought, what, that doesn’t make any sense.”
The pictograph changed hands several times and was sold at auction for more than 200 thousand dollars before it ended up in the museum, but it still belongs to the Pasqua First Nation.
The museum says its role is preserving and safe keeping so it last hundreds more years, but nothing happens to it without the permission of the Pasqua First Nation.