Yes, there were multiple attempts by settler/colonizer governments to deliberately eradicate Native American groups and their culture. This section of our FAQ goes into much more detail.

In the Canadian West I have yet to find a single instance where Europeans attacked a band of Indians with the intention of exterminating them. Nor have I come across intentional act of spreading diseases among the Indians in order to wipe them out, although the Small Pox epidemic of 1862 is an embarrassment to British Columbia's history.

The first Europeans to venture into the Canadian prairies were fur traders. They used birch bark canoes to carry trade goods to the Indians and carry their furs back east to ship to market.

When the fur traders moved into a region the Indians would soon wipe out most of the fur bearing animals causing the traders to move further westward. In 1792 the traders had reached what is now Edmonton Alberta some 3,500 kilometers away from their base in Montreal. By 1805 the fur traders had advance another 1000 kilometers westward to Fort St James in the heart of British Columbia. Because the distances travelled were so huge the traders built forts and wintered in the west living among the various Indian tribes supplied by one annual brigade that took the furs out in the spring and returned with the next seasons trade goods in the fall. Being outnumbered by the surrounding Indians the fur traders sought to maintain peaceful relations with their neighbors. Recognizing that dead men can not trap furs the traders and enemies can be made by making alliances with one group over another the traders remained neutral and actively discouraged Wars and battles between Indian tribes. Indians wanting gun powder and shot to use in battle were denied and the traders would ban Indians who instigated a battle from their forts.

In Duncan M'Gillivray's journal he tells of a Kootenais war party that attacked and burnt 2 trading posts killing all of the unsuspecting traders in the first post and all but two in the second. These two survivors made it to the next trading post where members of the two competing companies joined together in the better defendable Northwest Company fort. They were able to ward off the attackers who pillaged and burned the Hudson's Bay Company posts and returned to their homelands some 300 miles to the west. Two years later the same Indians sent an emmissary to the traders seeking permission to come to the post and trade their furs for goods. M'Gillivray writes that it is better to maintain peaceful relations with those who outnumber them so agreed to trade with them, but demanded that the Indians provide enough furs to compensate them for the goods lost and lives taken. In his letters to the home office in England Sir James Douglas, the governor of the colony of Vancouver Island, writes that as the colonists were outnumbered by the Indians 100 to 1 they must strive to maintain peaceful relations with all of them.

Douglas did impose English laws on the Indians, whereby a person accused of murdering another would be tried by a court and hung if convicted. Douglas was himself the son of a British merchant and a Caribbean Creole mother. His wife Emilia was the daughter of a Scottish fur trader and his Cree wife. With this background it is easy to understand why he would prosecute a person accused of murdering an Indian and hang him if convicted. One interesting thing about Douglas is that while slavery was abolished in his colony and any slave who set foot in the colony would immediately become a free man he allowed the Indians to maintain their practices of taking slaves and beating or killing them at their whims.

The Canadian West was settled long after the lands South of the border. While the Americans had large river systems and easy ground to build railroads on, access to the Canadian prairies was hamstrung by the endless swamps, bogs and muskeg of the Canadian shield. While rivers were the primary travel corridors in Canada, they were difficult to travel on and the voyageurs made many portages where they carried their goods from one river to the next or over Rapids or waterfalls. Inhabitants of the Red River Colony, the first colony in the northern prairies was reached by travelling through the United States. The first northern transcontinental railroad was not built until 20 years after its American counterparts so settlements in the north were few, tiny and far between.

King George III in his Royal proclamation of 1763 ruled that all of the lands claimed by Britain belonged to the Indians, unless ceded by treaty or sold to the crown. As the settlers moved west in anticipation of the coming railroad the federal government saw the need to make treaties with the Indians to legally gain title to the land. Not trusting the federal government, Peter Erasmus was hired by the Indians to be their interpreter during the negotiations for Treaty 6. In his autobiography "Buffalo Days and Nights" Erasmus tells us what the Indians said during their discussions on whether or not to sign the treaty. During these talks they compared how fairly they were treated to the abuse and killings faced by the southern tribes. Recognizing that the government would protect them from the deprivations occurring south of the border was one of the factors they considered before signing.

There was a major outbreak of smallpox among British Columbia's Indian population in 1862. This outbreak reached almost every band in the province and was said to have caused over 14,000 deaths. This Article provides a very detailed and comprehensive look at the outbreak and the events around it.

If you are interested in Canada's treaty negotiations David Leonard's "Delayed Frontier" gives us readers a detailed look at the conversations between the Indians, the negotiators and members of parliament during the Treaty 8 negotiations in 1899.