Canada acquired Rupert's Land in 1870 and secured title to the western interior through eleven Numbered Treaties beginning in 1871, negotiated as the bison herds collapsed and famine spread across the plains. First Nations were settled on reserves whose acreage was fixed per family, and the oral undertakings made at the negotiations, recorded in Indigenous accounts, differ in important respects from the written texts. The Red River Resistance of 1869-70 and the North-West Resistance of 1885 arose from Metis land insecurity and First Nations starvation; after the defeat at Batoche in May 1885 Louis Riel was hanged at Regina on 16 November 1885 and other leaders were imprisoned or executed, dispersing Metis leadership. In the same year the Department of Indian Affairs introduced the pass system, requiring an Indian agent's written permission to leave a reserve; the Canadian Encyclopedia records that its architect Hayter Reed acknowledged it had no basis in law, and it persisted in varying degrees of enforcement into the 1930s and in places the early 1940s. The residential school system, which the Truth and Reconciliation Commission described in 2015 as an instrument of cultural genocide, expanded in the same decades.
The Dominion of Canada took title to the western interior by the Numbered Treaties, confined First Nations to reserves, restricted their movement by an extra-legal pass system and suppressed Metis and Cree resistance in 1885
There was no reliable census of the region before Confederation. Canadian historical demography puts the total First Nations population of Canada at about 125,000 in 1867, including roughly 10,000 Metis in the West; the western interior share is usually reconstructed at 30,000-40,000 First Nations plus 10,000-12,000 Metis from treaty annuity rolls, fur-trade post records and Hudson's Bay Company censuses. The range across authorities is wide, roughly 35,000 to 60,000.
The 1885 fighting was small in scale - the Canadian Encyclopedia records twelve government personnel and six Metis fighters killed at Duck Lake, with heavier losses at Fish Creek and Batoche - and does not account for the period's main mortality, which came from the starvation and epidemic disease that followed the collapse of the bison herds on the plains in the late 1870s and 1880s. That mortality was never counted, and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission's work on deaths in residential schools concerns mainly the twentieth century.
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission documented the removal of children into residential schools and the suppression of Indigenous languages and ceremonies, and the Canadian Encyclopedia documents the pass system's confinement of people to reserves without legal authority.
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