L19(b) - Indigenous Politics in Retrospect: Historicizing Contemporary Contexts and Issues
Date: Jun 4 | Time: 01:30pm to 03:00pm | Location:
Chair/Président/Présidente : Chelsea Gabel (McMaster University)
Extinguishing the Dead: The Grotesque Contours of Historical Canadian Policies and Approaches to Métis Land Rights: Jennifer Adese (University of Toronto Mississauga)
Abstract: On July 20, 1885, Virginie Gariepy. Adelaide Dubé, and Olive Desrochers were issued promissory notes by the Northwest Halfbreed Scrip Commission for cash totaling $160. Each of the three was entitled to one equal share amounting to $53.33, as heirs to their late mother Marie Suprenant, who had passed away fifteen years earlier at the age of 30 years old. As Scrip historian Frank Tough notes, “Coupons of less than the normal value were issued to heirs who shared in the award to a deceased claimant.” Yet the deceased could not be claimants. Deceased infants, deceased toddlers, deceased children, deceased teenagers, deceased parents – none of them could, technically, be claimants. However, their heirs could, make claims on their behalf. This paper engages with this troubling dimension of Canada’s colonial land regime – the extinguishing of the Indian title of deceased Métis people. What are the political implications of extinguishing the Indian title of the dead? I argue that the extinguishing of the dead through Canada’s extension of extinguishing process to the dead tells us much about the country’s fears of Indigenous life. Canada's extinguishing of the dead’s theoretical claim to land also translates to extinguishing their very existence on the land, thus enabling Canada to cast itself as a nation born unto its own – with no Indigenous present, future, or past – revealing perhaps one of the most insidious aspects of Canadian settler colonialism and its move toward transforming Indigenous homelands into Canadian property.
Screaming at Your Kin: How Yelling at your Relatives Helps Reject Sectarian Division: Daniel Voth (University of Calgary)
Abstract: In 1869/70 Canada sought to expand its territory westward into the Red River Valley. In that act, the settler state encountered indignant Indigenous peoples who called themselves Métis and Halfbreeds. Scholars have struggled to know if these people were a single, unified Indigenous people, or if the Métis and Halfbreeds should be seen as two distinct, and divided Indigenous peoples. Research conducted by scholars in the 19th and 20th centuries focused on the sectarian differences between the Catholic Métis and Protestant Halfbreeds. This research privileged the perspectives settler male elites, settler clergy, and European notions of societal cleavages. This presentation argues that when one focuses on the way Métis and Halfbreeds debate and talk with each other in political institutions of their own making, one can see a rich tapestry of kinship relationships that transcend sectarian cleavages. This framework shifts the orientation of Indigenous research to take into account within-community conversations to deepen our understanding of the Red River community’s opposition to the expanding settler state, while weakening the importance of the Catholic and Protestant churches in Métis lived experiences.
The Royal Proclamation and Settler Colonial Political Development in Canada: Daniel Sherwin (University of Toronto)
Abstract: The Royal Proclamation of 1763 has long been at the centre of scholarly and jurisprudential debate about the scope and nature of Aboriginal Rights in Canada. The document clearly recognizes some degree of Indigenous authority over land, and if interpreted alongside its ratification at the treaty of Niagara in 1764, it provides a “positive guarantee of First Nation self-government” (Borrows 1997, 155).
A different picture emerges, however, if one attends not to the normative constitutional content of the Proclamation, but to its institutional role in settler state formation. The Royal Proclamation consolidated a system in which the Crown holds a monopoly on the formation of legitimate formation of land title. By asserting a Crown monopsony over the purchase of Indigenous land through treaty, the state acquired the ability to regulate settlement through land policy. It also acquired a fiscal interest in Indigenous dispossession. These developments, I argue, were crucial in structuring the political development of the settler state in Canada.