Harold Cardinal was an influential Cree writer and political organizer who, along with the Indian Chiefs of Alberta, opposed the Canadian government's assimilationist White Paper with the Red Paper (or Citizens Plus). He controversially opposed the 1975 Dene Declaration, since he considered it a white marxist document, and the use of court cases invoking the Bill of Rights to address Indigenous women's struggle against exclusion under the Indian Act, since he thought it would open the door to the privatization of reserve property, and its loss to settlers. Instead he advocated a longer process of amending the Indian Act, pending its abolition and replacement with a new framework centering Treaty rights.

From the Zinn Education Project: On Jan. 27, 1847, several hundred citizens of Marshall, Michigan, helped Adam and Sarah Crosswhite escape from being kidnapped. The Crosswhites had escaped from slavery in Kentucky and were living in Marshall with their four children when slave catchers came to kidnap them. The townspeople detained the slave catchers while the Crosswhites fled to Canada. Learn more about their story from the Seeking Michigan archives. Also, the National Archives has papers related to their case, including a deposition given by the Crosswhites in Canada, as described in a National Archives Researcher News (Fall, 2016) article. This is considered to be one of the cases that led to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850.