Database management system handout

The pass system was a segregationist policy by the Canadian Department of Indian Affairs (DIA), first initiated on a significant scale in the region that became the three prairie provinces in the wake of the 1885 North-West Rebellion—as part of a series of highly restrictive measures—to confine Indigenous people to Indian reserves—newly-established through the numbered treaties.
The Indian pass system—introduced as a temporary emergency measure to quell First Nations resistance—was formalized and became permanent under successive federal governments.
In archived correspondence between the three federal officials who were the most prominent in the development and implementation of Indian policy in the 1880s and 1890s—John A.
Macdonald (1815–1891), Edgar Dewdney (1835–1916), and Hayter Reed (1849–1936), it was evident that they were all cognizant of the lack of a legal basis for the pass system, and that it did not respect treaty agreements.