When you strip away all the legal jargon and colonial dust, the story of the Grand River is actually very simple: the Crown made specific, written promises to the Mohawk Nation and to its Loyalist allies, built a whole framework to honour those promises for “posterity… forever,” then quietly stopped using its own system and pretended it never existed. We live inside the fallout of that amnesia.

It starts in 1779 with what is often called the Haldimand Pledge. Governor Frederick Haldimand acknowledged that Mohawk villages like Canojaharie, Ticonderoga, and Aughugo had been “ruined by the rebels” precisely because those Mohawks stayed loyal to the King and the interests of government. Haldimand recited that his predecessor, Sir Guy Carleton, had promised that when the war ended, those settlements would be restored at the expense of the Crown to the condition they were in before the fighting. Haldimand said clearly that this promise was just, and he ratified it in his own name. In plain language: the Crown admitted a debt. Mohawk loss was not accidental. It was suffered in service to the Crown, and the Crown accepted responsibility to make it right.

In 1784, that promise took concrete territorial form. The Haldimand Proclamation set apart a tract of land “under His protection” along the Grand River, six miles deep on each side from Lake Erie to the river’s headwaters. Haldimand said he had purchased this land from other Indigenous owners, “at the earnest desire” of His Majesty’s Mohawk allies. He then authorized “the said Mohawk Nation” and such others of the Six Nations as wished to settle in their quarter to take possession and settle on the river. Most important is the granting clause: it is this land “which them and their posterity are to enjoy forever.” That is not vague poetry. It is a deliberate choice of words. The beneficiaries are the Mohawk Nation and their posterity. The time frame is forever. The land is Crown-purchased, set apart, and under royal protection. That is a special constitutional posture, not ordinary provincial real estate.

Five years later, in 1789, Lord Dorchester added another layer: the mark of honour for those Loyalists who had “adhered to the unity of the Empire and joined the Royal Standard” before 1783. He wanted to put a visible mark on those families and their descendants, to distinguish them from later settlers. The Council ordered Land Boards to keep a registry of all such people so that “their posterity may be discriminated from future settlers” in parish registers, militia rolls, and other public records.

Attached to this order was a note explaining that those Loyalists, “and all their children and their descendants by either sex,” were to be identified with the capitals U.E. after their names, for “United Empire.”

This is crucial to understand: the U.E. designation is not an “Aboriginal hereditary title.” It doesn’t come from the Indian Act, it doesn’t come from band lists, and it doesn’t come from clan systems, even though it sits alongside and intersects with Mohawk clan law on the Grand River. It is a Crown-created, Loyalist hereditary distinction. In the Canadian context, it is one of the only hereditary post-nominal distinctions that still exists in this way. On one side, you have the sovereign themself – the King or Queen, holding the Crown in right of Canada. On the other, you have the United Empire Loyalist post-nominal. Both are rooted in imperial law and honour. That makes the U.E. designation a very rare thing: a living hereditary Crown dignity that marks certain bloodlines in perpetuity, separate from Aboriginal title doctrine and separate from ordinary citizenship.

Dorchester’s decision means the Crown isn’t only talking about land; it is creating a unique hereditary status. It says that descendants by either sex are to be marked out in the records for future benefits and privileges. That is not how Canadian law normally works. Most honours die with the person. Here the whole point is that the mark runs down the line, just as the Haldimand grant runs down the line. So for Mohawk Loyalist families on the Grand River, there are two tracks operating at once: the Indigenous law and clan line, and this separate Loyalist-Crown hereditary mark that Canada still recognizes on paper but largely ignores when it comes to land and jurisdiction.

In 1796, John Graves Simcoe admitted that the registry Dorchester ordered “has not been generally made.” Rather than abandoning the idea, he said it was still necessary to identify those persons and families, both for the mark of honour and to fulfill His Majesty’s intention of settling them on their lands “without the incidental expenses” of grants. So he ordered all such Loyalists, who had adhered to the unity of the Empire and joined the Royal Standard before 1783, to prove this “upon oath” before the magistrates in Michaelmas quarter sessions.

Those who complied could be confirmed in their possessions by deed under the provincial seal, fee-free. Those who did nothing would not be entitled, “in this respect,” to that particular benefit. Simcoe created a legal process: tell the court who you are, under oath, and the Crown will confirm your lands without charge. It is a procedural bridge between the honour promised on paper and the actual title in people’s hands.

Taken together, these four instruments form a coherent whole. Haldimand’s pledge and proclamation supply the substantive obligation and the territorial grant: a Crown-purchased refuge on the Grand River for the Mohawk Nation and their posterity, forever. Dorchester’s mark of honour and Simcoe’s proclamation supply the hereditary and procedural framework: a class of Loyalist posterity, marked U.E., to be recorded in public registers, and a court-based process to ascertain who they are and confirm their lands. For Mohawk Loyalist families on the Grand River, these aren’t four separate museum pieces; they are one integrated Crown system that was never properly completed.

What went wrong is not that the words on these documents are unclear. What went wrong is that the Crown stopped using its own machinery. The registries Dorchester ordered were patchy. The quarter-sessions process Simcoe set up faded away with constitutional changes. The special category of “Mohawk Loyalist posterity on the Haldimand Tract” was gradually flattened into more convenient labels: “Indian band,” “Aboriginal rights claimant,” “municipal taxpayer,” “provincial resident.” Later institutions – especially the Indian Act and municipal-tax systems – were simply dropped on top of Haldimand lands as if they were ordinary Crown property, while the original grant language, and the Loyalist mark of honour, were pushed into the background as heritage trivia.

Today, this creates a crisis of standing. The very people Haldimand and Dorchester were talking about – Mohawk families whose ancestors lost everything for the Crown, who were settled on Grand River lands to be enjoyed by “them and their posterity forever,” and who fall inside the U.E. Loyalist definition – have no dedicated box to tick in court. They are told to speak only as Indian Act band members, or as generic Aboriginal claimants, or as private individuals. Meanwhile, modern negotiations talk about “settling” the Haldimand Tract by cutting a cheque to a band council, as if that exhausts obligations to the Loyalist Mohawk posterity that the Crown itself promised to distinguish and protect.

If honour is to mean anything, that has to change. Re-activating the Haldimand and Dorchester–Simcoe framework in our time means rebuilding a hereditary registry for Mohawk Loyalist posterity, creating modern procedures to “ascertain upon oath” the very status Simcoe described, and insisting that land, taxation, and jurisdiction along the Grand River be discussed from that starting point, not from whatever administrative shortcuts Canada has grown comfortable with. The promises were written down. The Crown knew exactly who it was dealing with and spoke directly to posterity. We are that posterity. The task now is not to invent new rights, but to insist that the old ones be seen, named, and finally honoured in the way they were always meant to be.