Policing the Boundaries of Racial Formations in - PowerPoint Presentation

Slide1

Policing the Boundaries of Racial Formations in

Colonized

SpaceSlide2

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? Slide3

How did the government construct ideas of

Indian-ness

?Slide4

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. Slide5

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.Slide6

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:BloodIntermarriageResidenceAdoption Slide7

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:Being over age of 21Ability to read and write (in French or English)Education

Freedom from

deby

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.Slide8

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 Slide9

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 personSlide10

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 childrenIndian 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 scriptSlide11

How did the government regard racially hybrid (mixed race) populations?Slide12

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.

Slide13

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.Slide14

“

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.”Slide15

“[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 AgentSlide16

In what ways were mixed-race peoples legally and spatially regulated and displaced? Slide17

Schemes to Prevent

M

iscegenation

Increased regulation on Indian women’s movementIncreased immigration of white women to ensure that white men are able to effectively couple within the raceExpanding the legal status of “Indian” to include “half-breeds”Slide18

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). Slide19

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.Slide20

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.Slide21

They were also:

E

xcluded 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”