Aboriginal Rights Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

The Royal Proclamation of 1763 is clearly one of the key documents in Britain’s policy regarding Aboriginal peoples after the Conquest of 1760. As the Proclamation provided specific protection for Aboriginal land, it was hailed in the 19th century as the “Indians’ Charter of Rights.” The Proclamation also reflected the central view of British colonial policy regarding the Aboriginal peoples of North America: segregation. By prohibiting colonists from settling on the vast swaths of land temporarily reserved for the Aboriginal nations, the Proclamation drew a precise line of demarcation between the colonial world and that of the Aboriginal peoples. Creating this reserved land stemmed from a political desire to appease the Aboriginal peoples of the continent’s interior who had just begun to take up arms (Pontiac’s War), but it demonstrated how little importance the British at the end of the 18th century placed on integrating the Aboriginal peoples into the colonial world.
During the first half-century of Britain’s presence in Canada, the Aboriginal policy was largely shaped by strategic and military matters. The role of the Department of Indian Affairs, established in the mid-1750s during the war with France, was mainly to ensure military support from the Aboriginal peoples, or at least their neutrality. The American Revolutionary War and the subsequent rivalry between Great Britain and the United States helped maintain this policy, where the promises of protected land and annual gifts (clothing, weapons, ammunition) were a central focus. Although expensive, this policy was still essential because the Aboriginal peoples played a strategic role in North American conflicts.
The policy, however, changed rapidly and radically in the early 19th century. The new official objective of Britain’s policy quickly became civilizing the Aboriginal peoples. “It appears to me,” wrote George Murray, Secretary of State for the Colonies, for example, “that the course which has hitherto been taken in dealing with these people, has had reference to the advantages which might be derived from their friendship in times of war, rather than any settled purpose of gradually reclaiming them from a state of barbarism, and of introducing amongst them the industrious and peaceful habits of civilized life. […] Whatever may have been the reasons which have hitherto recommended an adherence to the present system, I am satisfied that it ought not be persisted in for the future.”
This article will analyze the evolution of Britain’s Aboriginal policy in Canada, focusing particularly on the period during which the Aboriginal civilization program emerged. It will situate the economic, political and military factors that initiated the change and influenced its specific form. Among the factors that played a role in this reform was the decline of the Aboriginal peoples’ military importance after the War of 1812, the final conflict between Great Britain and the United States. After this war, the British authorities prescribed a major overhaul of Aboriginal affairs management, particularly to reduce the costs of this administrative branch. The yearly gifts given to the Aboriginal nations, which were the largest portion of the Indian Affairs’ budget, were increasingly criticized. They came to symbolize Aboriginal dependence, which could only be overcome through civilization.
The appearance of new economic realities also led to a thorough review of the Aboriginal policy. The fur trade, which provided the Aboriginal peoples front-line economic importance, became less important in the colonial economy as of the 19th century. At the same time, the forestry industry, stimulated by the Empire’s needs, was rapidly expanding, leading to the colonization of areas that had previously only been populated by nomadic Aboriginal groups. As a result, Upper and Lower Canada experienced intense demographic growth, thus increasing the colonists need for land. The Aboriginal peoples’ subsistence economy, which relied largely on fishing and hunting, became more precarious. Consequently, talk of promoting their civilization fell on fertile ground: if they didn’t want to be wiped out by colonization, the Aboriginals peoples must imitate the “Whites” and adopt their ways.
The civilization program was also partly inspired by movements in London that were concerned about the fate of the Aboriginal peoples in the British colonies. For example, in 1836, the Aborigines Protection Society was founded in England. It quickly became an powerful pressure group that was particularly concerned with the progression and civilization of the indigenous populations in the British Empire. By casting themselves as the promoters of the grand civilizing design the British inherited, these liberal, philanthropic movements influenced the redefinition of the Aboriginal policy. The link between civilization and responsibility toward the Aboriginal peoples was clearly stated in 1837 by the Select Committee on Aborigines, a special committee established by the British government to address the question of the Empire’s Aboriginal peoples.
The analysis of the context and factors that led to the emergence of this new Aboriginal civilization policy will integrate the sometimes discordant views of the metropolitan and colonial actors. Indeed, the implementation of the civilization project took place amongst intense discussions between the metropolitan and colonial authorities. Colonial inquiry commissions were charged with examining the administration of Aboriginal affairs and making recommendations, which would have critical influence on the concrete implementation of the project. The increasingly direct interventions by the colonial authorities in defining the Aboriginal policy in Canada would, in fact, lead to the official transfer of responsibility of this issue from London to the colony, in 1860.
The article will also examine the ambiguities within the civilization project. Although the three main elements of the project—sedentarism, education and Christianization—were initially intended to fully integrate the Aboriginal peoples into the colonial world, the new program, as it was implemented in the 19th century, instead upheld segregation. The reserves are a fitting illustration, as one of the symbols of the new Aboriginal policy in the 18th century. Originally designed as areas of temporary transition that would promote integration into the colonial world, the reserves rather became, somewhat like the land reserved by the Royal Proclamation of 1763, spaces of segregation where new Aboriginal identities were forged but still distinct from those of the colonial world.
The analysis will encompass the essential period of 1815 to 1857. The first date is when the first questions regarding the Aboriginal policy were raised in Canada. In the beginning, these questions were financial in nature, but they quickly opened the door to the earliest drafts of a civilization policy. The second date is when the Parliament of the United Provinces of Canada formalized the civilization project as law, qualifying it from emancipation. Not only did the law define for the first time the inferior legal status of the Aboriginal peoples, it also established the criteria to escape this condition—criteria that shed light on the ambiguities in the new Aboriginal policy that came into effect in the 19th century.