An intrusive and corrective government, political rationalities and the governance of the Plains aboriginals, 1870-1890
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Date
1998-05-01T00:00:00Z
Authors
Hogeveen, Bryan Richard
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Abstract
In this work I have applied post-colonial theory and Foucault's ideas on government to analyse colonial governmentality and its impact on the Aboriginals of the Canadian prairies. Most often, historians who have undertaken work in the field of Aboriginal/Government relations have attempted to unravel the ideological representations which constructed the Aboriginals as other, along with highlighting how State policy marginalized Canada's indigenous people. My research has endeavoured to move the analysis of Aboriginal governance beyond ideology and centralized State power by considering how the indigenous peoples were defined, divided out, and excluded from Euro-Ca adian society. More specifically, I have tried to reveal how the traditional modes of Aboriginal life were structured in diverse ways by both the political rationality of the Hudson's Bay Company and the 19$\sp{\rm th}$ century Canadian liberal rationality of government. In so doing, I endeavoured to discern how law and practices of government, such as, techniques to govern consumption and agricultural programmes, intruded into the lives of the Aboriginal peoples. By interrogating the practices and programmes by which the rationality of 19$\sp{\rm th}$ century liberal government structured the modes of plains Aboriginals life I have attempted to come to a unique understanding of aboriginal/government relations.