Fifty years ago, a group of Indigenous leaders from the Yukon arrived in Ottawa to meet the prime minister and make a bold proposal. The meeting would effectively set the country on a new course, by opening the era of modern land claims.

CBC News: To Chief Elijah Smith, it was the construction of a highway that marked the turning point. 

Before that, he recalled to CBC radio in 1974, things had been different for Indigenous people in the Yukon. Non-Indigenous settlers had been coming and going since the previous century, but in Smith’s younger life — he was born at Champagne, Yukon, in 1921 — they seemed to him a relatively small and benign presence. 

“I remember my old man looking after a bunch of white fellas [in the 1930s],” Smith would explain.  “He had taught them how to trap, and looked after those that didn’t have jobs. There was only a handful of white people here then, so I can’t see where that we had any fight, with anyone.”

The Yukon was unceded land. The Klondike Gold Rush had brought a mass of new settlers in the 1890s, but within a few years, most of them had given up their dreams of getting rich quick and headed back south.

Then came the construction of the Alaska Highway in 1942.

“That’s when everything started changing. Before that, we shared everything,” Smith recalled. The highway essentially opened the territory to rapid development. More people arrived to stake claims, build homes and settle what many of them saw as a wild frontier ready for the taking.

Three decades on from the Alaska Highway construction, Smith took himself to Ottawa as head of a delegation of Yukon Indigenous leaders to meet with the prime minister and deliver a landmark document about the Indigenous experience in the Yukon, describing how they’d become increasingly marginalized in their homelands, and also laying out an ambitious plan for a better future. That position paper, and that meeting, would open the door to the era of modern treaties in Canada.

‘He was given a task’

The document — titled Together Today for our Children Tomorrow — is now widely considered the first comprehensive land claim accepted for negotiation by Canada, and represents “one of the most important turning points in Canadian history,” according to Yukon-born historian Ken Coates. “It actually changed the trajectory of Indigenous rights across the country as a whole … and it made it clear that the future didn’t have to be a mere extension of the past — that you could rewrite the rules of Canadian law.”

Elijah Smith, as chief of what was then the Yukon Native Brotherhood, was instrumental. Today, there’s both a school and a government office building named after him in Whitehorse.

“He was given a task,” said Steve Smith, Elijah’s son and the former chief of the Champagne and Aishihik First Nations. He describes his father as a somewhat reluctant leader, who nonetheless felt a sense of responsibility. “And it goes to our family, his lineage, especially on his mother’s side of, you know, being a part of the chieftain’s family from Hutchi. You know, there’s certain responsibilities that come with that.”

Things were changing quickly in the Yukon through the 1950s. By the 1960s, Elijah Smith and others were increasingly disturbed by what they saw and experienced. Indigenous people were being driven off their traditional lands by resource development, their children were being taken away to residential schools and there was a growing dependence on welfare. 

In 1968, a group of chiefs organized themselves into what they called the Yukon Native Brotherhood (YNB) with Smith as chief. Its constitution states that it would, among other things, “protect the civil rights of all Yukon Indians” and “assist all Indians in determining their legal status in reference to the natural resources of Canada.”

That’s when the statement that became Together Today began to take shape. Smith and others with the YNB would spend the following years travelling up and down the territory, by road or water, meeting with Indigenous leaders and community members, finding a common voice and purpose as they talked about the idea of a land claim settlement.

No treaties had ever been signed in the Yukon, and there was a growing sense of urgency as more and more land seemed to be slipping away to mining development and oil and gas leases. There was also talk of a pipeline.

Then came the Calder case and a landmark 1973 decision from the Supreme Court of Canada. Frank Arthur Calder and the Nisga’a Tribal Council brought an action against the B.C. government for a declaration of aboriginal title. They lost the case, but the court’s decision marked the first time it recognized that aboriginal title to land predated colonization.

“Yukon First Nation people realized, and certainly my father as a leader realized, that there was an opportunity to open up this discussion,” said Steve Smith.

They took it.

In January 1973, the YNB already had a draft position paper ready and so organized a five-day meeting with more than 100 community representatives to finalize it.  Together Today for our Children Tomorrow is both a damning outline of grievances and a forward-looking and detailed proposal for a comprehensive land claim settlement. It is a lament and a statement of purpose, spelling out in plain language how Indigenous Yukoners see themselves and their history since colonization.

“In 1973 the picture of the Yukon Indians is not a pretty one. The Yukon Indian people are not a happy people,” it reads. “Both the Whiteman and the Indian are becoming more and more disgusted with each other. The communications gap, the social gap, the education gap — all these are widening.”

“You cannot talk to us about the ‘bright new tomorrow’ when so many of our people are cold, hungry and unemployed,” it reads. “A ‘bright new tomorrow’ is what we feel we can build when we get a fair and just Settlement.”

The paper then lays out proposals for land rights, royalties and a cash settlement, and concludes by asking the federal government to immediately set up a negotiating committee “who will study this paper and draw up the framework for the necessary legislation.” A few weeks later, Smith along with Dave Joe and Allen Lueck of the YNB were getting ready to leave for Ottawa to deliver the document in-person to then-minister of Indian Affairs and Northern Development, Jean Chrétien.

Meantime, Lloyd Barber — Canada’s Indian Claims Commissioner — was trying hard to broker a meeting with Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau. Barber already had a copy of Together Today, and was “enthused” by it, according to YNB adviser John Hoyt in an unpublished memoir now held at the Yukon Archives. 

“Just before they were scheduled to depart … they learned from Lloyd Barber that he had been able to set up a meeting with the Prime Minister,” Hoyt wrote. It was set for Wednesday, Feb. 14, at 3:15 p.m., and the group heading to Ottawa decided the 12 other Yukon chiefs should go too. They quickly made it happen. 

There’s an iconic photo of the chiefs, all men, standing outside the Parliament buildings. For some of them, it was the first time they’d ever been outside the Yukon. Sam Johnston, former chief of the Teslin Tlingit Council, is one of the few in that photo who are still around. He remembers how some of the group initially had trouble navigating the city. 

“But after a while … you use landmarks. So to us, it was the high buildings,” Johnston said. “We called them concrete mountains,” he laughed.

There’s another oft-told tale about some of the chiefs scrambling around Ottawa to find suits, ties and shoes ahead of meeting the prime minister, and how one of the larger members of the group had a hard time finding something that fit. 

Hoyt also describes a minor kerfuffle between Smith and Barber over media coverage, and whether or not to hold a press lockup the night before the formal presentation so reporters could get an early look at the document. Smith, Hoyt writes, had a long-standing distrust of the media and was against it. One of his concerns was that alcohol would be available for the reporters in the lockup, according to Hoyt. 

Barber, however, “was disinclined to compromise. He felt a lockup was critical to get as wide press coverage as possible,” Hoyt writes. Smith eventually gave in, and Hoyt describes the lockup as a “great success,” with about eight to ten reporters asking questions of Barber, Joe and Lueck. Smith, meanwhile, had gone to visit with George Manuel, chief of the National Indian Brotherhood, who would join the next day’s big meeting.

‘We’re here to talk about our future’

The next morning, hours before the meeting, Hoyt asked Smith what he was going to say at the formal presentation. Apparently, Hoyt recalled, nobody had given that much thought. Hoyt said he quickly drafted something up and Smith stuffed it into his pocket without looking at it. 

Smith later took his seat at a table at the front of the Senate Banking Committee room. To his left was Manuel, while Trudeau and Chrétien sat together off to the right. The room was full of the other Yukon chiefs, reporters and Ottawa officials. Trudeau introduced the federal officials and then turned the floor over to Smith who quickly cut to the chase and described the need for a land claim settlement. 

“We’re here to talk about our future,” said Smith. “This will be a future that will return to us our lost pride, self-respect and economic independence. We are not here looking for a hand-out. We are here with a plan that will cost the Canadian taxpayer much less than the present government policies and programs.”

Then it was Trudeau’s turn to speak. He confessed he hadn’t had the brief long enough to read it through, but said he understood the general thrust. He liked it. “It appears to be one of the most constructive briefs which we have received yet,” Trudeau said. “Because it does look forward, and it does take a position of suggesting not legal actions, not confrontation, but negotiation, together as Canadians.”

Trudeau said he wanted to receive the document in person from Smith, “to let all Canadians know that we think this is a very constructive approach.”

The prime minister also committed to “quick action” and — crucially — agreed to set up a negotiating committee. “I think you have been patient for 100 years,” Trudeau told the chiefs. “I hope you don’t mind being patient for a few weeks more while we study this brief. “On principle, I think that there is not a great distance between us.”

Sam Johnston later described how he and the other chiefs didn’t quite know what to expect from the meeting or how their bold proposals would be received. They came away feeling confident. “Trudeau and his bunch were very impressed with the Yukon document,” Johnston later recalled.

Hoyt in his memoir describes favourable front-page coverage in the country’s major newspapers the next day.Yukon MP Erik Nielsen, then in opposition with the Progressive Conservatives, also described the meeting as a major milestone for the country.  “[Trudeau] still has not yet recognized the principle of aboriginal rights, but it sure sounds like he’s going in that direction — and I sure hope he is,” Nielsen told CBC News at the time.

Uncertainty and shock

Back in the Yukon, the news landed a little differently.  “People got the wrong idea that we were out there to sell the Yukon,” Johnston said. “We didn’t want to sell the Yukon, our message was we wanted input, to run our own lives.”

Historian Coates, a high school student in Whitehorse at the time, remembers a lot of uncertainty and “shock” after the Ottawa meeting. “The First Nations were setting the country on a journey, but there was no map. There was no clear path, there was no clear destination. Nobody really knew what a modern treaty would look like,” Coates said. “People in the Yukon … were perplexed by what Yukon First Nations people wanted. What did they want, what would the Yukon look like? And there was an enormous amount of opposition.”

A CBC Radio program in February 1974, after negotiations had begun between Canada and the Council for Yukon Indians (an offshoot of the YNB), captured some of the simmering tensions. Referring to Together Today, Norman Chamberlist of the Yukon Territorial Council characterized it as an “attack on the white man,” and accused Indigenous people of seeking to punish.

“Why should the people of today’s generation, and the next generation, and generations to come, be imposed a penalty into perpetuity forevermore? And this is what this paper tends to lead to,” Chamberlist said.

Ken McKinnon, another Yukon Territorial Council member and later commissioner of Yukon when the final agreement was signed, acknowledged the “backlash” in the Yukon, but chalked it up to misunderstanding and crass politics.

“I don’t think that there’s any doubt that it’s going to become a political football,” McKinnon said. “The negotiating procedure wasn’t understood and wasn’t explained to the people of the Yukon. And some politicians are going to use what they feel is this overestimation of a white political backlash and try to use it to their political benefit.”

Over time, the backlash receded while negotiations dragged on. Finally, in 1991 — nearly two decades after Trudeau’s commitment to “quick action” — the Umbrella Final Agreement (UFA) was finalized by Canada, the Yukon and the Council of First Nations. 

It was a pivotal document, serving as the overall Yukon land claim agreement and framework for the territory’s 14 First Nations to negotiate their own self-government agreements, which 11 now have. The UFA covers land, monetary compensation, self-government, and the creation of boards, committees and tribunals to give First Nations joint management in certain areas.

Elijah Smith died in 1991. He lived just long enough to see the final agreement coming together. Speaking to CBC around that time, he admitted that he came away from that Ottawa meeting in 1973 thinking negotiations would take about six months — not two decades. He also reflected on the Together Today document, which started it all.

“You know, it is not only me that put that paper together. There was a good many people that put their heart and soul to see this claim be achieved. And I thank these people. I thank them from the bottom of my heart,” Smith said. “I see it opened the doors. Like in game and wildlife, we’ll be partners in looking after those things, fish, all these things, you know. We’ll have people up there educated to be our game wardens, and one thing or another, who will be partners with the government. That’s what I see coming out of the whole thing. And I think it’s going to work. This is what we’ve been asking for. Now it is up to us.”

Yukon’s UFA was not the first modern land claim in Canada. But Trudeau’s meeting with the Yukon chiefs in 1973 marked the first time the Canadian government agreed to negotiate such a settlement.

Since then, 25 comprehensive land claims have been signed across the North, in B.C., Manitoba and Quebec.  “The country’s legal structure and its relationship with Indigenous people have been turned completely upside down, largely at the instigation of what was then called the Yukon Native Brotherhood,” Coates said. “The country has not only been changed, but quite frankly, it changed dramatically for the better as a result of that process.”

Steve Smith acknowledges that the final agreements in Yukon might not be exactly what his father and others envisioned 50 years ago when they wrote Together Today. But he says the principles, simple in concept, are intact. 

“Yukon First Nations wanted to have a say in their destiny,” Steve Smith said.“And so now today, you know, if you look at that from that very simple approach, it’s pretty much the success that they wanted.”

About the Author

Paul Tukkeris a writer and reporter with CBC News in Whitehorse. Before moving to Yukon in 2014, he worked with CBC in Sudbury and Iqaluit. You can reach him at paul.tukker@cbc.ca.

Further reading 

The original document, Together Today for our Children Tomorrow, can be found here.

Read a brief history of Yukon land claims, by the Council of Yukon First Nations.

Learn more about the Calder case here. 

Read a similar longform article from CBC North about Treaty 11, Canada’s last numbered treaty, and its legacy here.