Policing the Boundaries of Racial

Formations in Colonized Space

How did the government construct ideas of Indian-ness?

How did the government construct racially hybrid (mixed race) populations

as a threat to public order?

In what ways were mixed-race peoples legally and spatially regulated and

displaced?

How did the government construct ideas of Indian-

ness?

race A social construction focused on supposed biological or ethnic differences that is used to produce material consequences for people of supposedly different races. Race is not easy to define as it is often cast in essentialist, natural, or biological terms, or confused with ethnicity and culture. In general terms, race is a collection of ideas and practices through which people have been categorized, most usually relating to skin colour and facial features. This categorization affects how people are treated and shapes their lives in a myriad of ways. Categorization is often essentialist in nature, with the assumed traits of people linked to their supposed race which thus legitimates their treatment.

race Such thinking gained scientific weight with the rise of social Darwinism and eugenics in the 19th century wherein social traits and biological heredity were formally linked, with races placed into an ordered hierarchy of intelligence and cultural sophistication. The notion that there are different races, with different characteristics, has underpinned the widespread practice of racism, and a range of political and economic projects, enforced through violence, … wherein certain peoples were deemed of less worth and had less rights than others. As such, race has been mobilized to produce different geographies such as segregated neighbourhoods and ghettos, restricted access to work, and circumscribed mobility.

1850 Act For the Better Protection of the Lands and Property of Indians in Lower Canada

First legal definition of who was "Indian.” Indians included:1) Blood2) Intermarriage3) Residence4) Adoption

1857 An Act to Encourage the Gradual Civilization of Indian Tribes in this Province, and to Amend the Laws Relating to Indians

Introduced concept of enfranchisement, process whereby Indians lost their status as Indians and became British subjects. Only Indian men could seek enfranchisement, as only men could be considered British subjects. Requirements included:

1) Being over age of 212) Ability to read and write (in French or English)3) Education4) Freedom from deby5) Possessing good moral character as determined by a

commission or British subjects

Enfranchised subjects could receive a personal allocation of land from the reserve, and a per capita share of band monies. Status of the wife and children of men who enfranchised also changed.

1869 Lands and Enfranchisement Act

Revised concept of Indian-ness focusing on blood quantum, and centralized authority over defining Indian-ness in Canadian govt.

It required that “no person of less than one-fourth Indian blood” could share in treaty monies or reserve land rents.

It also limited possession of Indian lands without the approval of Indian Affairs officials.

It introduced the idea of band government, modeled on British governance traditions (in which only men participated).

It introduced marrying out provisions and rendered enfranchisement not a choice but rather the outcome of

1876 Indian Act

Consolidated Indian legislation into a single act, and introduced new patrilineal definitions of Indian-ness.

“The term "Indian" means:First. Any male person of Indian blood reputed to belong to a particular band; Secondly. Any child of such person; Thirdly. Any woman who is or was lawfully married to such person

1876 Indian Act

Provided new means to clearly exclude from Indian-ness. This worked to limit access to benefits distributed via the Indian Act. Excluded were:

• illegitimate children• Indian people who

continuously lived outside of Canada for five years or more

• Indian women who married non-Indians

• Half-breeds and Indian people who had taken half-breed script

How did the government regard racially hybrid (mixed

race) populations?

hybridity A condition arising from the mixing and transcendence of binary opposites such as nature-society, or colonized-colonizer. Hybrids are therefore non-essentialized forms, irreducible to pure states. Although the term comes from plant and animal sciences, meaning the offspring of different species, it has gained wider currency in association with postmodernism, post-colonialism, and other intellectual movements that valorize emergent conditions. In The Location of Culture (1994), Homi Bhabha reverses the stigma once attached to racial mixing in colonial circumstances and describes hybridity as novel, creative, and full of potential for change.

Excluded from Indian-ness, mixed race Indigenous populations were not subject to efforts to control Indian life through the Indian Act

Intermixing in urban space with white populations, they were perceived as a threat to the order of the colony.

Similarly, they were presented as a threat to the moral order of Indians on reserve, although the Indian Act provided provisions to keep them off reserve.

“Many feared that mixed-race peoples, if assimilated into the white population, could potentially pre-empt land like white settlers. If

counted as Indians, however, this expanding

population would financially burden the provincial and federal governments by

placing additional claims on reserve lands. Even worse,

the racial ambiguity of mixed-race peoples raised

the possibility that they could duplicitously claim the

privileges of whites and Indians alike.”

“[A young mixed-race man] has kept up a steady traffic in spiritous liquors. For the past five years he has been driven from one reserve to another. Lately he ostensibly pre-empted a plot of land on the Similkameen, where he and his brother … go through the form of cultivating a small patch of ground; at every convenient opportunity he makes his appearance at some Indian encampment, where there may happen to be no constable handy and in a very short time supplies intoxicants enough to start a riot.”

-Kamloops-Okanagan Indian Agent

In what ways were mixed-race peoples legally and spatially regulated and

displaced?

Schemes to Prevent Miscegenation

• Increased regulation on Indian women’s movement

• Increased immigration of white women to ensure that white men are able to effectively couple within the race

• Expanding the legal status of “Indian” to include “half-breeds”

Liquor prohibitions were integral the

project of maintaining racial and spatial

boundaries, and to keeping racially mixed peoples in their place

Liquor was thought to disrupt the effort to civilize the Indians,

degrade other races, and contribute to

interracial intercourse (and inevitably

miscegenation).

Specifically, targeting mixed-race people was central to the effort to install liquor controls

as they were particularly

constructed as blurring racial boundaries and

profiting by their ability to move

between spaces.

Mixed race people disallowed from being on reserve (although often as the illegitimate children of Indian women and non-Indian men, their only family resided there.

They were also criminalized for the way in which they used they mixed race identity to access whiteness and purchase alcohol which they distributed on reserve.

They were also:

• Excluded from democratic processes on reserve;

• Denied access to Indian education;

• Dispossessed of their families, and fostered into more properly British homes as “a white child”