How Institutions and Bargaining Power shaped Indigenous Economies and Agriculture

During the 1870s, the Canadian government’s Department of Indian Affairs (DIA) signed various treaties with the Indigenous communities. Functioning as contracts between the Canadian government and the Indigenous nations, the treaty clauses contain several other stipulations, including provisions for agriculture and livestock. Nations under some treaties negotiated a better “bargain” than the nations under other treaties. At the same time, the DIA created “barriers to entry and exit” by regulating any trade and transactions outside the reserve as well as through the Indian Act. While the former can be considered institutional changes across treaties, the latter signals the overall relative bargaining power. Using multiple sources of historical and spatial data, we try to understand the importance of “institutional differences” across treaties relative to the overall bargaining power of the Indigenous nations, by analyzing the long-term effect on economic development and technology adoption. Digitizing multiple sources of archival and spatial data, we show that treaty clauses which ensure food security enabled more modernized economic structures but the overall weak bargaining power of Indigenous nations meant that no robust and substantial economic gains were realized from better treaty “bargains”.