The Maritime Treaty Context of #IdleNoMore

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

On January 17th the students and faculty at Acadia University invited historian John G. Reid to provide historical context to the #IdleNoMore movement.  This hour long lecture builds on Reid’s forty-year career as a historian of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century northeastern North America and expert witness in a number of court cases involving Treaty and Aboriginal Rights. It situates #IdleNoMore within the eighteenth-century Peace and Friendship treaties struck between the British and the Mi’kmaq, Wulstukwuik and Passamaquoddy.  In drawing out the significance of these treaties today, Reid contextualizes Maritime treaty-making in its oral and broader historical context, comparing them with treaties made elsewhere in Canada and the British Empire.  This talk was sponsored by the Indigenous Students Society at Acadia, and the Departments of Politics and History and Classics.

John Reid is a professor of history at Saint Mary’s University.  He is the author of numerous books including Acadia, Maine and New Scotland: Marginal Colonies in the Seventeenth Century and The ‘Conquest’ of Acadia, 1710. In the past decade, he has also authored two persuasive journal articles in The William and Mary Quarterly and Acadiensis that encouraged scholars to re-evaluate the place of Native people in Maritime Canada. He is a member of the Royal Society of Canada as well as numerous other scholarly associations and editorial boards. Over the course of his career he has also served as an expert witness in a number of cases involving aboriginal and treaty rights.