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Wikipedia has indicated that publishing the Haldimand Proclamation is a copyright violation. It is not. This proclamation was published in 1784 and has appeared in books published before 1923 and is now in the public domain. Suggestions? BradMajors 01:43, 24 October 2007 (UTC)
Wikipedia has reversed the claim of copyright violation. BradMajors 06:57, 25 October 2007 (UTC)
An excellent source of information regarding this whole topic can be found in the book:
The Valley of the Six Nations : a collection of documents on the Indian lands of the Grand River / edited with an introduction by Charles M. Johnston. Toronto : Champlain Society for the Government of Ontario, University of Toronto Press, 1964. xcvi, 344 p.
It consists of a compilation of the text of many of the original documents dealing with the subject, including transcriptions of the correspondence between the principle parties involved, as well as several maps. It is still consulted as a useful reference at hand during the current ongoing legal disputes involving the legal ownership of sections of the Grand Valley. My comments all rely on this book as their source and the page numbers cited refer to that volume. My main concern with the neutrality and accuracy of the article in its present form revolves around the definitive statement:
"The extent of the lands in the proclamation are not clearly defined and could encompass some 570,000 acres at the least and 675,000 acres at the most."
To the best of my knowledge it has never been disputed by anyone that the Six Nations have always taken the wording of the Haldimand Proclamation in a literal sense, "[...] allotting to them for that purpose six miles deep from each side of the river beginning at Lake Erie and extending in that proportion to the head of the said river [...]". My understanding is that what *is* disputed is whether or not the upper reaches of the valley had been legally acquired by the Crown from the Mississauga nation prior to Haldimand's granting of the valley as a whole. That argument puts forward the notion that if the Crown had not already taken full possession of the most northerly part of the valley from the Mississauga, previous to the issuance of the Haldimand Proclamation, that it had no legal right to grant that portion to anyone else. This is viewed in the sense that you cannot legally sell or give away something that you do not already legally "own". Aspects of the current dispute are not centred on what the proclamation itself actually said, in terms of the extent of the land that it describes, which seems quite clear in the original document, but rather whether or not Haldimand had a legal right to dispose of the *entire* valley in the way that he did. In my opinion this point is not clearly reflected in the current version of the article.
The other problem I have with the current version is the definitive statement that the lands *in total* consisted of "675,000 acres at the most". That figure appears to be exclusively derived from a map [1] reflecting the results of a survey conducted by Thomas Ridout for the Crown in 1821, which appears in reproduction form as an insert between page 128 and 129 of 'The Valley of the Six Nations : a collection of documents on the Indian lands of the Grand River'. On that map, which is labeled "Plan showing the lands granted to the Six Nation Indians situated on each side of the Grand River, or Ouse, commencing on Lake Erie, containing about 674,910 acres", the northern limit of the survey is clearly shown as being near the current location of the present day community of Elora Ontario, which is situated a full 25-30 miles south of the actual source of the Grand River. This map and its claimed total acreage figure, appears to consist as exclusively a reflection of the Crown's interpretation of the total area involved in the debate and entirely excludes the Six Nations literal interpretation of the proclamation as granting them the land from Lake Erie to the source of the river. Quite obviously, if the "final" acreage figure of 675,000 is obtained by the exclusion of the most northerly 30 miles of the river from the calculation, then that figure is bound to be too low, having only been achieved by completely disregarding the historic Six Nations interpretation of the proclamation. In the end, I am not attempting to make a final declaration of who is "right" and "wrong" in this situation, but rather I'm suggesting that the matter is not nearly as 'cut and dried' as the current version of the article seems to suggest. cheers Deconstructhis 20:37, 12 November 2007 (UTC)