Joseph’s accounts of what he had been promised — and what he received instead — were among the most powerful arguments in his public advocacy for his people’s right to return home.

White Bird, who had decided not to trust the promises, did not have to navigate the betrayal of those promises directly.

His exile in Canada was its own kind of punishment, but it was not the specific pain of being promised return to Idaho and receiving Fort Leavenworth instead.

The Buffalo And Why Canada Was Not Safety

The Lakota under Sitting Bull had crossed into Canada after the Little Bighorn in 1876, and by October 1877 — when the nimíipuu refugees arrived — they had been in the Wood Mountain area of present-day Saskatchewan for about a year.

The sanctuary they had found was real in its protection from the American army.