The permit, 1881–2014
An amendment to the Indian Act, assented to on 21 March 1881, introduced the permit system: a First Nations person in Manitoba, Saskatchewan or Alberta required an Indian agent's permit to sell "cattle or other animals, grain or hay, whether wild or cultivated, or root crops or plants or their products." The 1951 Indian Act extended it to all First Nations. The provision stood until 2014. (Bob Joseph, Indigenous Corporate Training, drawing on Sarah Carter, Lost Harvests: Prairie Indian Reserve Farmers and Government Policy.)
This is the law that governed exactly the trade the warm version of the story describes: one neighbour selling grain to another. A friendly account of the Prairies that leaves it out is describing a country that did not exist.
The pass, 1885 onward
After 1885 Indian Affairs instituted a pass system in selected areas of the prairie west: where it applied, leaving the reserve meant obtaining a pass signed by the agent or farm instructor, stating how long and why. The historian F. Laurie Barron is clear on two things. It had no basis in law — he calls it "a form of local administrative tyranny, informally endorsed at the ministerial level of Indian Affairs." And it failed: "from the beginning, the system was ineffectual," people "either ignored or openly defied the restrictions," and by the early 1890s passes were "granted almost on demand and for every conceivable purpose." The record shows defiance. (F. Laurie Barron, "The Indian Pass System in the Canadian West, 1882–1935," Prairie Forum 13:1, 25ff.)
The St. Peter's surrender, 1907
In 1911 a commission of three county court judges declared the 1907 surrender of St. Peter's Reserve invalid. Residents "had been given only one day's notice"; the meeting "was held at a time when people were out on Lake Winnipeg fishing and could not attend"; "the terms were not translated or explained in Cree or Saulteaux"; Deputy Superintendent General Frank Pedley "had $5000 in a satchel which it was made clear would be distributed if the surrender carried"; the vote was 107 to 98 with no record kept. The commission's findings "were totally ignored," and in 1916 the St. Peter's Reserve Act confirmed the purchasers' titles. Canada agreed the surrender was void and legally invalid on 29 June 1998; the settlement was ratified on 4 October 2010. That is a ninety-one-year gap between the finding and the acknowledgement. (Sarah Carter, Manitoba History No. 18, 1989; Peguis Surrender Claim Trust.)
The internment, 1914–1920
Canada interned 8,579 people classified as enemy aliens between 1914 and 1920, the majority of Ukrainian descent, and required roughly 80,000 more — again mostly Ukrainians — to carry identity papers and report regularly to local police. Internees were paid $0.25 a day, "far less than that offered to labourers of the time period," and worked on projects including the development of Banff National Park. (Canadian War Museum, "'Enemy Aliens' — The Internment of Ukrainian Canadians.")
One thing this project says in its own voice, because our sources insist on it: this history does not make the two experiences equivalent. Shtykalo and Legault, citing Tuck and Yang, put it plainly — "Ukrainian-Canadians, like many non-Anglo settlers, did experience discrimination, but this does not exempt them from their complicity in the ongoing colonization of Indigenous lands." (CJIS 1(1) 2025, 112.)
The marriage and collaboration we can name
The Ukrainian-Canadian photographer Sandra Semchuk and the Rock Cree artist, writer and negotiator James Nicholas were married and collaborated for fifteen years, from their first meeting in 1993 until Nicholas's accidental death in 2007, on photo-installations and videos they described as "an opportunity to make political, social and psychological structures created by histories of colonialism, occupation of the land and racism visible to ourselves and other through our art practice." Semchuk has "worked to disrupt myths that have shaped settler relations to First Nations," and received a Governor General's Award in Visual and Media Arts in 2018. (MacKenzie Art Gallery; Rungh; Canada Council for the Arts.)
This is our honest answer to anyone who asks for intermarriage and collaboration between the two communities: what we can document is recent, named, and co-authored.
What the memorials leave out
Myrna Kostash: "As far as I know, there is no public acknowledgement at Ukrainian-Canadian memorial sites that the free land offered by the Canadian government to landless Galicians had been traditional Indigenous territory. Nor any account given or acknowledged that the Canadian plains had been cleared for railway and settlement by systematic starvation of the Indigenous population until they submitted to confinement on reserves." ("Baba's Other Children," Alberta Views, 1 September 2017.)
Her observation is partly about the silence at the memorial sites, and that is the part which explains why this page exists.