Proclamation of 1763: Washington's 20,000 Acres to Canada's Section 35

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After the Treaty of Paris gave Britain all French land east of the Mississippi, a nearly bankrupt Crown faced Pontiac's Rebellion, in which a confederation of tribes captured numerous British forts in 1763. Sir William Johnson, superintendent of Indian affairs, warned that the army could not win a forest war and urged diplomacy and fixed boundaries. King George III's Royal Proclamation drew a line along the Appalachian crest, reserving land to the west for Indigenous nations, and barred private individuals from buying Native land, leaving purchases to Crown officials at public meetings. Settlers, veterans promised land grants and speculators such as the Ohio Company were furious, and George Washington, holding a 20,000-acre grant, called the line a temporary expedient in a 1767 letter to surveyor William Crawford.

Daniel Boone crossed the line in 1769 and James Harrod founded an unauthorized settlement in 1774, while lobbying produced the treaties of Fort Stanwix and Hard Labour in 1768 and Lochaber in 1770 that moved the boundary west. Historians still debate how much the line fed the Revolution. In Canada the document took on a second life as the first Crown recognition of Aboriginal title, with courts reading in a fiduciary duty, and Anishinaabe jurist John Borrows argues that together with the 1764 Treaty of Niagara it preserved Indigenous self-determination. The Constitution Express pressed that case and helped place Aboriginal rights in Section 35 of the Constitution Act of 1982, while the new United States rebuilt the Crown's land monopoly through the Indian Intercourse Acts and Johnson v. McIntosh.

• Washington personally traveled west in 1770 to survey land for himself and fellow veterans while the line was still law.
• George Manuel led activists who chartered trains from Vancouver to Ottawa, then lobbied the United Nations and the British Parliament.
• For the 250th anniversary in 2013, Idle No More held birthday parties for the proclamation across Canada.
• Australia's 1992 Mabo decision on native title cited the proclamation as an early precedent.
• In Johnson v. McIntosh in 1823, John Marshall ruled that only the federal government could buy land from Native nations.