Liberalism, Surveillance, and Resistance: Indigenous communities in Western Canada, 1877-1927 (The West Unbound: Social and Cultural Studies)
Keith D. Smith
Language: English
Pages: 256
ISBN: B00TUKDALW
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Canada is regularly presented as a country where liberalism has ensured freedom and equality for all. Yet with the expansion of settlers into the First Nations territories that became southern Alberta and BC, liberalism proved to be an exclusionary rather than inclusionary force. Between 1877 and 1927, government officials, police officers, church representatives, ordinary settlers, and many others operated to exclude and reform Indigenous people. Presenting Anglo-Canadian liberal capitalist values and structures and interests as normal, natural, and beyond reproach devalued virtually every aspect of Indigenous cultures. This book explores the means used to facilitate and justify colonization, their effects on Indigenous economic, political, social, and spiritual lives, and how they were resisted.
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Special permission in writing from some authorized person, is liable to be arrested on suspicion of being a rebel, and punished as such.”72 By June, with the resistance mostly subdued, Dewdney wrote of the futility of attempting to restrict Indians to reserves “when, if they do leave them, there is no law by which they can be punished and our orders enforced.”73 This does not necessarily mean that he was opposed to restricting Indigenous movement, only that, in his opinion, without supporting.
Be much more fully developed in subsequent years. Still, while not to depreciate the restrictions and prohibitions faced by Indigenous people in British Columbia, this took time to develop, especially away from the coast. As former Sk’emtsin (Neskonlith) chief George Manuel confirmed, “it took the federal government quite a long time to build up an administrative structure to control Indian communities in the interior at all.”137 The still emerging structures of administration and looser weave in.
Permission. While at times agents were assisted in their efforts by the mounted police, operating the permit system until the late 1940s at least, required innumerable hours of surveillance, record keeping, and other permit-related duties on the part of department employees in the Treaty 7 region and elsewhere.48 Agents also had to deal with various settler requests in relation to permits. Settlers sometimes asked that specific reserve residents be given permits to put up hay for them,49 while.
Twentieth century. 101 L I B E R A L I S M , S U RV E I L L A N C E , AND RESISTANCE In Secwepemc territory, the removal and sale of wood came under particular scrutiny. Indigenous people in this area had engaged in logging activities at least since the 1880s when they rafted logs from the Shuswap Lakes to sell at Kamloops. They cut this and other wood under permit, and paid “dues” for the privilege. In addition to surveillance by the local Indian agent, this activity was also observed by a.
Counter to the economic, political, social, and other cultural interests of Indigenous people. It is difficult to know how the Treaty 7 nations would have responded to changing circumstances after 1877 had they not been interfered with by the DIA. Certainly if the massive amounts of money spent to maintain supervision and to reform Indianness had been turned instead to any less paternal and self-serving modes, it is doubtful that the results could have been much worse. As it was, by 1920, after.