Let’s begin with a clear statement: when Europeans arrived in North America, the land was occupied.

In what is now called Canada, from the high Arctic to the Great Lakes, from Newfoundland to Haida Gwaii, scores of Indigenous peoples and nations existed in clearly defined and in some cases shared territories.

There was no vacant land, no land undiscovered.

Over the centuries since contact with European settlers, the rights of Indigenous people to their land were first respected, then curtailed, and ultimately denied. This course is about how modern treaties serve as a mechanism to restore those rights.