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) Blood
2) Intermarriage
3) Residence
4) 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)
2)
3)
4)
5)
Being over age of 21
Ability 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.
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 colonizedcolonizer. 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 “halfbreeds”
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”