Boundaries of Person, Boundaries of Place: Wilderness, "Indians" and the Mapping of Canada's Northwest Interior, 1857

Abstract

This essay identifies the creative and often divergent constructions of place and race in one document, the proceedings from a Parliamentary Select Committee in 1857, which empowered officials three thousand miles across the Atlantic to make varying claims to a vast and diverse expanse of Aboriginal lands and peoples in Canada. I apply theory from existing scholarship about the “mutually imbricated” nature of place and race in the making settler-colonial worlds to find how six hundred pages of testimony from white men with only marginal experiences on the land itself legitimized the dispossession and marginalization the original inhabitants of those territories.[1] I focus mostly on the lands between the Great Lakes and the Rocky Mountains, the bulk of which were fashioned in distant, imperial imaginations as “wilderness,” unfit for or in need of settler “civilization.” In conjunction with wilderness discourses, speakers defined the Indianness of the northwest interior. Mostly Plains peoples, the indigenous groups discussed in this document were universally painted as one with their environment: wild and uncivilized. They were, according to the commission, incapable of governing themselves responsibly, and were, worst of all, the sure victims of the “onslaught of colonization,” should they not become in some way transformed.

The document provides some fascinating divergences in the mindsets of different colonial powers: the HBC, British settlers in Canada, and humanitarians. These divergences reflect how, as Bronwen Douglas suggests, “within colonial regimes and contexts […] the efflorescence of racially charged utterances and practices betrays an astonishing variety, fluidity and internal contradiction.”[2]During the sessions of testimony and debate for this enquiry, constructions of land and Indianness in the northwest interior came together to justify variant and often contradictory solutions to the “problems” colonizers identified in the “unsettled” territory. All discourses that produced, and produced by, colonialism could be harnessed to dispossess Aboriginal peoples; the means and justifications for doing so in this document varied.[3]

[1] Tracey Banivanua-Mar and Penelope Edmonds, eds., Making Settler Colonial Space: Perspectives on Race, Place and Identity (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2010), 3.

[2] Douglas, “Race,” 245.

[3] Cole Harris, Making Native Space: Colonialism, Resistance, and Reserves in British Columbia (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2002), 48.