How Should the Treaties with the Indians be Interpreted?

There is a profound difference between what the Government of Canada and its lawyers believe was accomplished through the treaties and what First Nations believe their forebears agreed to.... it was not until the 1980s that the Supreme Court of Canada insisted that, in interpreting the treaties, an effort had to be made to probe beyond a literal reading of the written text to make it possible "to choose from among the various possible interpretations of common intention the one which best reconciles the interests of both parties at the time the treaty was signed." The trouble is that, on fundamental issues of rights and title to land, there probably was no "common intention."

--Peter H. Russell, Canada's Odyssey: A Country Based on Incomplete Conquests (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017), 185.