1. Executive Overview
This paper, issued under the authority of the Mohawk University and published through the Crown Plus initiative at SixMilesDeep.com, seeks to restore clarity and lawful continuity to one of the most enduring, yet misapplied, constitutional instruments in the history of the British Crown in North America: the Haldimand Proclamation of 1784.
The Proclamation, issued by Governor Frederick Haldimand on October 25, 1784, was not a treaty in the sense later understood by the numbered treaties under Canadian law. It was a royal instrument of conveyance — a deed of honour and compensation for the Mohawk Nation and its posterity, recognizing the losses suffered during the American Revolutionary War and fulfilling a prior promise made by the Crown in 1779.
This Proclamation granted lands “for the use of the Mohawk Nation and their posterity forever.” Those words — exclusive use and enjoyment forever — have profound legal and constitutional implications. They establish an inheritable, exclusive right of possession, occupation, and governance that survives both Confederation and the creation of Canada’s statutory Indian Act system.
Yet the fatal flaw, as many historians have noted, was the absence of named individual beneficiaries. This omission enabled later colonial administrators to misapply the Proclamation’s intent — conflating Mohawk Loyalist rights with those of other Haudenosaunee nations and, later, with the generalized collective “Six Nations Band” created under the Indian Act.
This paper contends that this misapplication represents an ongoing breach of the Crown’s fiduciary duty, a distortion of constitutional reality, and a continuing injury to the Mohawk Loyalist posterity whose rights were, and remain, sui generis — unique, inheritable, and extraterritorial to Canada’s domestic jurisdiction.
Through this document, the Mohawk University, acting through the Crown Plus Initiative, sets out to reassert the proper legal standing of the Mohawk Loyalist posterity, examine the Crown’s corrective mechanisms (such as Lord Dorchester’s “Mark of Honor”), analyze the unlawful conflation of the Proclamation under Canadian institutions, and call for the immediate incorporation of these principles into public, academic, and corporate policy.
2. Historical Context and Legal Foundation
2.1 The Haldimand Pledge of 1779 and the Proclamation of 1784
Before the Proclamation, there was the Haldimand Pledge of 1779, a wartime assurance that the Mohawk and other Haudenosaunee allies displaced by hostilities would be restored to the same state as before the war. When their ancestral lands in New York could not be recovered, the Crown substituted lands along the Grand River — extending six miles deep on either side — as compensation for the loss.
This substitution was not a gift in the feudal sense but a lawful exchange of sovereign obligations, reaffirming the Crown–Mohawk alliance as a partnership between equals under the Two Row Wampum principle. The phrase “for the use of the Mohawk Nation and their posterity forever” was meant to create perpetual inheritance, not collective Aboriginal title.
2.2 The Dorchester Correction (1789)
Recognizing the ambiguity created by the absence of named grantees, Lord Dorchester (Sir Guy Carleton) in 1789 established a registry of Loyalists and their descendants, granting them the hereditary suffix “U.E.” (Unity of Empire). This registry served as a mechanism to identify lawful Loyalist posterity — both Indigenous and non-Indigenous — entitled to the rights and protections affirmed under Crown Proclamations.
Governor Simcoe continued this practice in Upper Canada, formalizing the Loyalist registers that survive today under the United Empire Loyalists’ Association of Canada (UELAC). The existence of these registries shows that the Crown corrected its administrative flaw by establishing a verification system independent of the later Indian Act.
2.3 Crown and Mohawk as Constitutional Pillars
Historically, the Crown–Mohawk alliance is unique within the Commonwealth. Since the 1710 visit of the Mohawk delegation to Queen Anne — who presented the Mohawks with a silver communion set as a symbol of nation-to-nation covenant — the Mohawk have not been subjects under protection but partners attached to the Crown.
This relationship was reaffirmed in 1984 when Queen Elizabeth II visited the Her Majesty’s Chapel of the Mohawks in Brantford and unveiled a plaque explicitly stating that the lands were granted to the Loyalist Mohawks. In 2010, she completed the 300-year circle of alliance by presenting the Mohawk community with silver bells to accompany Queen Anne’s original communion set — a ceremonial act of constitutional continuity and recognition.
Thus, the Crown itself — through both the 1784 Proclamation and these later royal acts — has repeatedly confirmed that the Grand River lands are extraterritorial to Canada’s domestic law and remain bound to the indivisible Crown–Mohawk covenant.
3. Misapplication and Administrative Breach
3.1 The Fatal Flaw and Its Consequences
The absence of named individuals in the Haldimand Proclamation allowed colonial authorities to interpret the grant as a collective one, later assigning its administration to the Six Nations Band under the Indian Act. This administrative convenience transformed a hereditary Loyalist right into a “collective Aboriginal interest” — a legal fiction that has persisted for over a century.
This misinterpretation has since influenced every level of government and academia. The University of Waterloo, for example, relies on this misapplied framework in its land acknowledgements, erroneously stating that the Grand River lands were “granted to the Six Nations under the Haldimand Proclamation.”
In reality, as confirmed by the Crown itself (see plaque at Her Majesty’s Chapel of the Mohawks), the grant was exclusive to the Mohawk Nation and their posterity. The use of “Six Nations” in such contexts introduces a jurisdictional and constitutional error, reviving the same flaw that Dorchester had corrected in 1789.
3.2 Institutional Repetition and Pretendianism
The propagation of this falsehood across universities, churches, and municipalities constitutes more than mere administrative negligence; it is an act of institutional complicity. Research has shown that more than 280 entities across Ontario — including the University of Waterloo — use nearly identical language drawn from Global Solutions (Phil Montour, 1996), a booklet produced in the context of Six Nations litigation.
By adopting this wording, these institutions unwittingly entrench a partisan narrative that denies the distinct identity of Mohawk Loyalist posterity and perpetuates a form of institutional pretendianism — where even other Indigenous groups are miscast as beneficiaries of a right never lawfully conferred to them.
3.3 Fiduciary and Constitutional Implications
In Guerin v. The Queen ([1984] 2 S.C.R. 335), the Supreme Court of Canada affirmed that the Crown owes a fiduciary duty to Indigenous peoples where it exercises discretionary control over their lands. By failing to observe the corrective systems established by Dorchester and Simcoe, and by deferring instead to Indian Act lists, Canadian institutions have breached that fiduciary duty.
Further, the administrative reliance on statutory band lists to determine identity contravenes the principle of lawful continuity and the constitutional protection of vested rights. As the Court held in Harelkin v. University of Regina ([1979] 2 S.C.R. 561), public institutions must exercise discretion in a manner consistent with procedural fairness and constitutional fidelity. The failure to recognize Loyalist verification as a legitimate system of proof constitutes administrative unfairness and ultra vires action.
4. Legal Character of the Haldimand Proclamation
4.1 Distinction from Numbered Treaties
Unlike the numbered treaties (Nos. 1–11), which place signatory nations “under Crown protection” as domestic subjects, the Haldimand Proclamation places the Mohawk Nation “attached to the Crown.” This is an international, nation-to-nation relationship, not a domestic compact.
This distinction is crucial: those under numbered treaties are Crown subjects; those attached to the Crown are Crown partners. As such, Mohawk lands cannot be administered under the Indian Act nor alienated through provincial or federal legislation.
4.2 Judicial Recognition of Exclusive Use
In Wilkes v. Jackson (Dodem) (18th century), early jurisprudence clarified that the phrase “one nation and such others of the Six Nations” did not create a collective political body but rather recognized distinct hereditary rights within a confederation. This principle aligns with the Proclamation’s language granting land for the “use of the Mohawk Nation and their posterity” — an inherently individual, inheritable interest, not a collective right.
The Supreme Court has repeatedly recognized that Crown instruments conferring “exclusive use and enjoyment” create proprietary interests that are sui generis and constitutionally protected (see Calder v. Attorney General of British Columbia [1973] S.C.R. 313).
4.3 The Doctrine of Exclusive Use and Enjoyment
The phrase exclusive use and enjoyment implies total possessory control without the need for enclosure or fence. Under common law, exclusive possession is established by intention and lawful recognition, not by physical barriers. As the Court observed in Southport Corporation v. Esso Petroleum Co. Ltd [1954], even minimal encroachment constitutes trespass.
Accordingly, every unauthorized road, structure, or act of “public use” within the six-mile corridor of the Grand River constitutes ongoing encroachment and breach of constitutional duty.
[End of Part I — Next Section: Part II, Modern Violations, Fiduciary Duties, and Institutional Responsibility (≈2,400 words)]