A Moving History

The impulse to shift people from where they are to where the government wants them to be is a recurring motif in Canadian history. On the prairies, to cite an extreme example and the one that I know best, an official program of relocation lies at the very heart of nation building. The formative gesture of the young Dominion was to clear the ­territory — ­forcing Indigenous peoples to abandon their lands and settle on reserves and filling the emptied space with incomers, themselves uprooted and displaced from elsewhere. Once the players were in position, the new arrivals were assigned the challenge of creating a market economy, while the Aboriginal people were expected to modernize and retool. Apart from brief spasms of violence in the late nineteenth century, this transformation was accomplished in the quintessentially Canadian way, through the hushed power of bureaucracy.

Fast forward to the mid- to late twentieth century, where the University of...