Views from Fort Battleford
Views from Fort Battleford

Author: Walter Hildebrandt

Publisher: University of Regina Press

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 212

ISBN-13: 9780889772205

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The myth of the Mounties as neutral arbiters between Aboriginal peoples and incoming settlers remains a cornerstone of the western Canadian narrative of a peaceful frontier experience that differs dramatically from its American equivalent. Walter Hildebrandt eviscerates this myth, placing the NWMP and early settlement in an international framework of imperialist plunder and the imposition of colonialist ideology. Fort Battleford, as an architectural endeavour, and as a Euro-Canadian settlement, oozed British and central Canadian values. The Mounties, like the Ottawa government that paid their salaries, "were in the West to assure that a new cultural template of social behaviour would replace the one they found." The newcomers were blind to the cultural values and material achievements of the millenia-long residents of the North-West. Unlike their fur trade predecessors, the settler state had little need to respect or accommodate Aboriginal people. Following policies that resulted in starvation for Natives, the colonizers then responded brutally to the uprising of some of the oppressed in 1885. Hildebrandt's ability to view these events from the indigenous viewpoint places the Mounties, the Canadian state, and the regional settlement experience in an entirely different spotlight.

Fragile Settlements
Fragile Settlements

Author: Amanda Nettelbeck

Publisher: UBC Press

Published: 2016-03-20

Total Pages: 337

ISBN-13: 0774830913

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Fragile Settlements compares the processes by which colonial authority was asserted over Indigenous people in south-west Australia and prairie Canada from the 1830s to the early twentieth century. At the start of this period, there was an explosion of settler migration across the British Empire. In a humanitarian response to the unprecedented demand for land, Britain’s Colonial Office moved to protect Indigenous peoples by making them subjects under British law. This book highlights the parallels and divergences between these connected British frontiers by examining how colonial actors and institutions interpreted and applied the principle of law in their interaction with Indigenous peoples on the ground. Fragile Settlements questions the finality of settler colonization and contributes to ongoing debates around jurisdiction, sovereignty, and the prospect of genuine Indigenous-settler reconciliation in Canada and Australia.

Westward Bound
Westward Bound

Author: Lesley Erickson

Publisher: UBC Press

Published: 2011-08-01

Total Pages: 362

ISBN-13: 0774859954

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In the late nineteenth century, European expansionism found one of its last homes in North America. While the American West was renowned for its lawlessness, the Canadian Prairies enjoyed a tamer reputation symbolized by the Mounties’ legendary triumph over chaos. Westward Bound debunks the myth of Canada’s peaceful West and the masculine conceptions of law and violence upon which it rests by shifting the focus from Mounties and whisky traders to criminal cases involving women between 1886 and 1940. Lesley Erickson reveals that judges’ and juries’ responses to the most intimate or violent acts reflected a desire to shore up the liberal order by maintaining boundaries between men and women, Native peoples and newcomers, and capital and labour. Victims and accused could only hope to harness entrenched ideas about masculinity, femininity, race, and class in their favour. The results, Erickson shows, were predictable but never certain. This fascinating exploration of hegemony and resistance in key contact zones draws prairie Canada into larger debates about law, colonialism, and nation building.

Hunger, Horses, and Government Men
Hunger, Horses, and Government Men

Author: Shelley A.M. Gavigan

Publisher: UBC Press

Published: 2012-10-24

Total Pages: 305

ISBN-13: 0774822554

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Scholars often accept without question that the Indian Act (1876) criminalized First Nations. In this illuminating book, Shelley Gavigan argues that the notion of criminalization captures neither the complexities of Aboriginal participation in the criminal courts nor the significance of the Indian Act as a form of law. Gavigan draws on court files, police and penitentiary records, and newspaper accounts and insights from critical criminology to interrogate state formation and criminal law in the Saskatchewan region of the North-West Territories between 1870 and 1905. By focusing on Aboriginal people’s participation in the courts rather than on narrow categories such as “the state” and “the accused,” Gavigan allows Aboriginal defendants, witnesses, and informants to emerge in vivid detail and tell the story in their own terms. Their experiences stand as evidence that the criminal law and the Indian Act operated in complex and contradictory ways that included both the mediation and the enforcement of relations of inequality.

Cowboys, Gentlemen, and Cattle Thieves
Cowboys, Gentlemen, and Cattle Thieves

Author: W. M. Elofson

Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP

Published: 2000

Total Pages: 236

ISBN-13: 9780773521001

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Prostitution, gunfights, barroom brawls and cattle rustling - while prevailing images from the American old West - have typically been absent from histories of the Canadian frontier. In Cowboys, Gentlemen, and Cattle Thieves Warren Elofson demonstrates that the Canadian frontier was less restrained, law-abiding, and insulated from death and violence than has been believed. He challenges traditional views that Canadian ranching society was a microcosm of the "Old World," arguing that the greatest influence on ranchers and settlers was the need to deal with the frontier environment.

Policing the Great Plains
Policing the Great Plains

Author: Andrew R. Graybill

Publisher: U of Nebraska Press

Published: 2007-11-01

Total Pages: 294

ISBN-13: 0803260024

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In the late nineteenth century, the Texas Rangers and Canada?s North-West Mounted Police were formed to bring the resource-rich hinterlands at either end of the Great Plains under governmental control. Native and rural peoples often found themselves squarely in the path of this westward expansion and the law enforcement agents that led the way. Though separated by nearly two thousand miles, the Rangers and Mounties performed nearly identical functions, including subjugating Indigenous groups; dispossessing peoples of mixed ancestry; defending the property of big cattlemen; and policing industrial disputes. Yet the means by which the two forces achieved these ends sharply diverged;øwhile the Rangers often relied on violence, the Mounties usually exercised restraint, a fact that highlights some of the fundamental differences between the U.S. and Canadian Wests. Policing the Great Plains presents the first comparative history of the two most famous constabularies in the world.

Aboriginal People and Colonizers of Western Canada to 1900
Aboriginal People and Colonizers of Western Canada to 1900

Author: Sarah Carter

Publisher: University of Toronto Press

Published: 1999-12-25

Total Pages: 212

ISBN-13: 1442690763

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The history of Canada's Aboriginal peoples after European contact is a hotly debated area of study. In Aboriginal People and Colonizers of Western Canada to 1900, Sarah Carter looks at the cultural, political, and economic issues of this contested history, focusing on the western interior, or what would later become Canada's prairie provinces. This wide-ranging survey draws on the wealth of interdisciplinary scholarship of the last three decades. Topics include the impact of European diseases, changing interpretations of fur trade interaction, the Red River settlement as a cultural crossroad, missionaries, treaties, the disappearance of the buffalo, the myths about the Mounties, Canadian 'Indian' policy, and the policies of Aboriginal peoples towards Canada. Carter focuses on the multiplicity of perspectives that exist on past events. Referring to nearly all of the current scholarship in the field, she presents opposing versions on every major topic, often linking these debates to contemporary issues. The result is a sensitive treatment of history as an interpretive exercise, making this an invaluable text for students as well as all those interested in Aboriginal/Non-Aboriginal relations.

Immigration and Settlement, 1870-1939
Immigration and Settlement, 1870-1939

Author: Gregory P. Marchildon

Publisher: University of Regina Press

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 620

ISBN-13: 9780889772304

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Immigration and Settlement, 1870-1939 includes twenty articles organized under the following topics: the "Opening of the Prairie West," First Nations and the Policy of Containment, Patterns of Settlement, and Ethnic Relations and Identity in the New West. The second volume in the History of the Prairie West Series, Immigration and Settlement includes chapters on early immigration patterns including transportation routes and ethnic blocks, as well as the policy of containing First Nations on reserves. Other chapters grapple with the various identities, preferences, and prejudices of settlers and their complex relationships with each other as well as the larger polity.

Becoming Native in a Foreign Land
Becoming Native in a Foreign Land

Author: Gillian Poulter

Publisher: UBC Press

Published: 2010-01-01

Total Pages: 391

ISBN-13: 0774858796

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How did British colonists in Victorian Montreal come to think of themselves as “native Canadian”? This incisive, richly illustrated work reveals that colonists adopted Aboriginal and French Canadian activities – hunting, lacrosse, snowshoeing, and tobogganing – and appropriated them while imposing British ideologies of order, discipline, and fair play. In the process, they constructed visual icons that were recognized at home and abroad as distinctly “Canadian” national symbols. The new Canadian nationality mimicked indigenous characteristics but ultimately rejected indigenous players, instead championing the interests of white, middle-class, Protestant males who used their newly acquired identity to dominate the political realm. Becoming Native in a Foreign Land demonstrates that English Canadian identity was not formed solely by emulating what was British. In fact, it gained enormous ground by usurping what was indigenous in the fertile landscape of a foreign land. A vital and original study, it will appeal to scholars and enthusiasts of Canadian history, identity, and culture.

Riding to the Rescue
Riding to the Rescue

Author: Steve Hewitt

Publisher: University of Toronto Press

Published: 2006-12-15

Total Pages: 225

ISBN-13: 1442658517

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The Mountie may be one of Canada's best-known national symbols, yet much of the post-nineteenth century history of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police remains unexamined, particularly the period between 1914 and 1939, when the RCMP underwent enormous transformation. The nature of this transformation as it took place in Alberta and Saskatchewan – where the Mounties have traditionally dominated policing – is the focus of Steve Hewitt's Riding to the Rescue. During the 1914-to-1939 period, the nineteenth-century model of the RCMP was evolving into a twentieth-century version, and the institution that emerged responded to a nation that was being transformed as well. Forces such as industrialization, mass immigration, urbanization, and political radicalism compelled the Mounties to look away from the frontier and toward a new era. Incorporating previously classified material, which explores the RCMP both in the context of its ordinary policing role and in its work as Canada's domestic spy agency, Hewitt demonstrates how much of the impetus behind the RCMP's transformation was ensuring its own survival and continued relevance. Riding to the Rescue is a provocative and incisive look behind one of Canada's most enduring icons at the cusp of the modern era.