"Often the treaties were drawn up before the Indians even arrived for discussions. Tribes negotiated changes anyway, but few of them were ever written dwon, as the Native representatives assumed that verbal agreements would be honored. In much of Canada -- nearly half the total land area in fact -- not treaties were ever signed, and the land was appropriated more by stealth and momentum than by any pretext of legality. In British Columbia, with only a few exceptions, and all of the Atlantic Provinces, and all of Quebec, no agreements were reached.

"At first, the Native groups were allowed to choose their own Reserve lands, but that promise was quickly broken. Good farmland was excluded for the most part, and -- devastating to tribal custom -- large tracts were disallowed. Instead, Indian bands were splintered among small, unconnected plots of land. When they resisted, the government simply withheld food that was promised under the Famine Clause of the treaties. Thus we coerced, shoved, and blackmailed nomadic people into subdivisions and sub-subdivisions.

"What's more, the reserves do not belong to the people living on them. All title and ownership remains in the hands of the federal government, making Native both legally and psychologically charity-case tenants.

"This system of divide and rule did not happen by accidnet; it was all carefully worked out as a matter of policy. The young Dominion of Canada did not consider Natives to be equal citizens, and as the Indian Act of 1876 made very clear, they were to be wards of the state. The paternalism was explicit and unapologetic. The government was to be the guardian of the Indians, who were deemd to incapable of taking care of themselves...."

             --Will Ferguson, Our Home On Native Land, in Why I Hate Canadians (Vancouver: McIntyre, 1997), p.163ff.

Sure sounds like the US...only our reservations are much larger.