Colonial Testimonial

The return of Donald Trump has reminded many Canadians of our happy differences from our neighbours. We feel that Canada is the peaceable kingdom. We celebrate our state’s formation as a compromise between francophone and anglophone, Catholic and Protestant communities. We recall that when the architects of Confederation planned the westward expansion of the new dominion, they looked to Ottawa to quell the violence that was disfiguring the American frontier.

Yet historians of settler colonialism look askance at the belief that there is anything distinctive or superior in Canada’s origins. They dismiss as trivial the ideological differences between such varied polities as the United States, Canada, Australia, and Israel. What such countries share, they argue, is a determination to displace and if necessary to eliminate the indigenous inhabitants of the lands over which they claim sovereignty, so that they can be handed to new arrivals. Armies, schools, and statutes are just the instruments of a predatory and often genocidal objective.

Éléna Choquette’s Land and the Liberal Project is a relentless though instructive attempt to expose nation building as a front for genocide. Her book concentrates on the western regions of British North America from Confederation to the suppression of Louis Riel’s resistance in 1885, during which time Canada asserted itself over territory while opening it to farmers of European stock. Statesmen often presented this process as a peaceful one. In 1878, Canada’s governor general, the Earl of Dufferin, told Mennonite settlers at Red River, “The war to which we invite you as recruits and comrades is a war waged against the brute forces of nature.” This war would not require them to violate their pacifism by shedding blood: they would “annex territory after territory,” not by burning villages but by plowing virgin ground, so that “corn and peace and plenty will spring where we have trod.”

Dufferin’s martial imagery suggests to Choquette that such chatter about peace disguised violence. It envisaged a land grab “less bloody” than the settlement of the American West but just as ruthless. The existing population in the supposed wasteland must give way to those whose commitment to improvement gave them a title to do so. This was an aggressive approach precisely because it was a liberal credo. Choquette follows fashion in arguing that the liberal tradition of political thought degenerated at the frontiers of the British world into a harder variant —“colonial liberalism”— that concerned itself less with freedom than with property rights. It harked back to John Locke’s argument in the late seventeenth century that a person acquired the right to land by mixing their labour with it. Locke, who promoted plantations in the so‑called New World, had written a charter for the dispossession of hunter-gatherers.

Statesmen anxious about the northward drift of Americans undoubtedly concluded that the only way to retain sovereignty over the West was to fill it with farmers. The Hudson’s Bay Company, which administered Rupert’s Land under a licence from the Crown, had become a liability because it considered agriculture to be a threat to the fur trade. The dominion bought the HBC out for $1.5 million and readied its vast new territories for settlement. The best sections of Choquette’s book discuss the fiscal and scientific technologies the state deployed to do so. Surveyors parcelled out lots and drew grids for townsites that could be bestowed on newcomers. Men of science produced reports that assessed (while inflating) the fertility of the soils while sniping at the apathy of their original inhabitants.

The Métis quickly detected the threat to their existing ways of life. In 1869, Louis Riel disrupted surveyors of the Red River lands, then stopped the first lieutenant-governor of the newly constituted North-West Territories from taking up his post. He and others sensed that the tidy regime the authorities envisaged would not honour their customary understanding of property rights or preference for straggling lots with river frontage. Ottawa responded by dispatching a military force to overawe them. The swashbuckling colonel Garnet Wolseley and his men arrived at the Red River Colony in what Canada now declared to be the province of Manitoba before its lieutenant-governor dared to show up: Canada’s sovereignty here initially derived from the barrel of a gun.

Law rather than the rifle remained, however, the favoured instrument of dispossession. The 1872 Dominion Lands Act emulated Washington’s Homestead Act of 1862, creating the architecture for mass migration even before Ottawa negotiated the treaties that pressured First Nations into swapping territory for reserves and regular incomes. Those reserves capped the amount of territory their people could now hold, making it impossible for them to purchase additional acreage. Under the 1876 Indian Act, Canada granted individual band members tickets for reserve property while ensuring that they lost such rights if they forfeited Indian status.

Having taken lands from Indigenous people, statesmen wanted them to vanish. Commenting on the aversion settlers felt to those they were displacing, John A. Macdonald, who was both prime minister and superintendent general of Indian affairs, reflected that “if the Indians were to disappear from the continent, the Indian question would cease to exist.” Choquette describes the policies such musings generated as genocidal. They would certainly fall under the United Nations Genocide Convention of 1948, which defined genocide as acts “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” Yet Macdonald and his contemporaries were not envisaging physical extermination. They hoped to destroy ethnic identities — what Macdonald called the “tribal system”— by assimilation “of the Indian people in all respects with the inhabitants of the Dominion as steadily as they are fit to change.”

The tools of coercive Canadianization were at first constitutional. In eastern provinces, acts of legislation ineffectually prodded prosperous and sober Indigenous men into accepting enfranchisement and holding property in the way their European peers did. The same tactic did not seem possible in the West, where officials regarded all Indigenous people as “minors”: backward wards of the state rather than equal citizens. Here their target shifted from adult men to children. Although residential schools initially enjoyed support from some tribal leaders, their promoters hoped to obliterate the “simple Indian mythology” of their pupils: “their own ideas of right and wrong.” Some on the Canadian right now quibble at the number of children who died in the residential school system, with a view to disputing its genocidal intention, but the truth is plain enough: “forcibly transferring children of the group to another group” is a crime under the UN convention.

Our attachment to the moral and political principles that make Canada a good place to live should not require us to pretend that they were always or everywhere honoured in its past. An associate professor in the Department of Social Sciences at the Université du Québec en Outaouais, Choquette makes a strong argument for seeing truth as a sounder foundation for reconciliation than the noble lies on which nationalism often rests. It is a shame that she spoils her case through obfuscation and overstatement. The biggest of her confusions involves definitions of violence. To put American and Canadian histories of expansion on an equal footing requires Choquette to claim that violence may be not just physical but “material” (taking land) and “epistemic” (the coercive teaching of different kinds of knowledge). To say they are similar does not make them the same, however. Choquette concedes as much by repeatedly describing the “implicit” violence of policies and by exaggerating the severity of the state’s resort to military force. Wolseley’s expedition was intimidating, but he was right to say that it was “bloodless.” Riel’s troops fled before him. Only a handful of Métis died at the hands of Wolseley’s troops before civil authorities took control of the colony.

The suppression of Riel’s later resistance at Batoche, Saskatchewan, was certainly on a bigger scale. With its authority at stake, Ottawa dispatched 8,000 troops. Choquette quotes the historian J. R. Miller when condemning the “devastating and indiscriminate” violence that the force unleashed. Yet only fifty-three soldiers and twenty-five of Riel’s followers were killed, and a further eight insurgents were hanged, along with Riel himself. The toll calls out for comparison. In 1894, the U.S. Census estimated some 30,000 Indigenous people had been killed during the Indian Wars of the preceding century, with the true number probably 50 percent higher. When France’s provisional government faced rebellion in June 1848, Louis-Eugène Cavaignac’s forces killed 1,500 people on the streets of Paris in four days.

Canada’s expansion was not violent by such standards. Its statesmen meant what they said about keeping the peace. The settler-colonial lens often interprets the capacity building in which all nineteenth-century states engaged as expressions of genocidal intent. Yet in these decades, governments across Europe concentrated on retaining the monopoly of violence and on policing and educating their populations. A Tory like Macdonald lived in that thought world. He aimed at the authoritarian preservation of public order precisely because he disapproved of violence. In creating the North-West Mounted Police, for instance, he explicitly wished to stop “emigrants from the American States, accustomed to deal with the Indians as enemies,” from “shooting them down and causing great disturbances.” Only if we follow Choquette into Foucault’s hall of mirrors and claim that “peace itself is a coded war” does it make sense to see the police as instigators of violence.

A reductive understanding of nineteenth-century liberalism is the other major flaw in Choquette’s account. In settler-colonial studies, liberalism now serves the same purpose that neo-liberalism does for cultural critics of the present: a term for everything they dislike. But liberalism is not a synonym for settler colonialism, and Macdonald was not even a “colonial liberal.” His loyalties were to the law, the monarchy, and the British connection, rather than to dreams of improvement. Overt liberals held the state to higher aims than merely facilitating land grabs. Dufferin saw Canada as a model for transcending sectarian tensions and so as a beacon for Europeans like the Mennonites who faced persecution at home. Dufferin, who later became viceroy of India, appreciated that Canadian nation building still took place within an empire that was ideologically committed to tolerance and equality before the law, not genocide.

Canada can take any amount of demythologizing. Still, the urge to decolonize the past can lead to chasing an impossible dream of sinlessness: Choquette warns us that even the field of settler-colonial studies itself must be decolonialized, participating as it has in the “displacement of Indigenous and Native studies.” To investigate liberalism’s “potential for exclusion” is meaningful only if we share the liberal faith that it is possible to reconcile diverse rights with common goods. Canada needs that faith more than ever if it is to strengthen its confederation, pursue violated promises of equality, and survive the forces that wish to harm it.