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In September 1967, the federal government transferred the Government of the Northwest Territories from Ottawa to Yellowknife. While the transfer brought the machinery of government closer to the governed, it also established settler institutions in the homelands of Dene, Métis, and Inuit peoples. Using the tools of administrative history and settler colonial theory, this article reconstructs the transfer using newly released archival papers of NWT Commissioner Stuart Hodgson, who oversaw the transfer and the development of government in the NWT until 1979. It analyzes the role federal public servants played in facilitating settler colonial development in northwestern Canada and, in turn, how that development affected the structure and work of the federal public service in Ottawa. While the transfer entrenched Westminster parliamentary government in the NWT, it also served as a focal point for Indigenous resurgence and resistance that has remade contemporary governance in the territory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In settler states such as Canada, indigenous peoples' claims for sovereignty in the late twentieth century became matters of intense public and political debate. Provoked by widespread indigenous rights activism of the 1970s, the Canadian state embarked on a large-scale examination of claims for rights and restitution. By focusing on the 1962 case of a duck hunter who insisted on his treaty right to hunt as he pleased in a Canadian borderlands region that was becoming more tightly woven into the fabric of the settler nation, this article argues for the value of recovering the discursive strategies of indigenous peoples in making sovereign claims prior to 1970s activism. I suggest that such claims were effective in bending the "settler contract," which refers to the founding of settler states in dispossession and the silencing of indigenous actors. My approach brings to the fore a distinctive form of non-elite politics, what I call "treaty talk," or the vernacular stories, civic rituals, and political disputes concerning the treaty promises that Canadian authorities made to northern indigenous communities earlier in the twentieth century. Although treaty talk did not break the settler contract, it posed a significant challenge to settler law and led one judge to reinvent a Canadian myth of benevolent empire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]