White settler death drives: settler statecraft, white possession, and multiple colonialisms under Treaty 6

ABSTRACT

This article analyzes histories of white settler colonial violence in Treaty 6 territory by arguing that the 1870 Hudson’s Bay Company charter and transfer of Rupert’s Land and the North-Western Territory to the Dominion of Canada helped to make past imperial violence an ongoing settler colonial terror structure into the present. It argues that this transition from imperial to settler colonial control of territory is best understood by using a multiple colonialisms framework, to examine the ways in which heteropatriarchal family structures transitioned from Indigenous-European to white settler kin networks that crystallized whiteness as a racialized means to control land as private property. Following Kanien’kehá:ka feminist scholar Audra Simpson’s work, I suggest that this territory’s multiple and overlapping colonial histories (French, English/British, and Canadian) are a crucial lens through which to understand the historical and ongoing formation of Canada as a white settler state, and that these histories still relationally drive anti-Indigenous violence and the settler killing of Indigenous peoples today. The essay concludes by arguing that the seeming daily placidity of white settler violence against Plains Indigenous peoples under Treaty 6 ultimately supports a relational violence that supports a killing state and its armed citizens in the name of protecting private property for white settlers.

KEYWORDS:

• Violence
• whiteness
• settler colonialism
• Hudson’s Bay Company
• heteropatriarchy
• private property

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Erin Morton is a white settler scholar who lives and works in Wolastoqiyik territory. She has published two books with McGill-Queen’s University Press on art and culture, Negotiations in a Vacant Lot: Studying the Visual in Canada (co-edited with Lynda Jessup and Kirsty Robertson, 2014) and For Folk’s Sake: Art and Economy in Twentieth-Century Nova Scotia (2016). Her third book, Pioneer Lies and Propertied Lives: Cultures of Colonial Unknowing on Turtle Island, is under advance contract with McGill-Queen’s University Press.

Notes

1. This phrase was first used in section 91 of the British North American Act, later known as the Constitution Act, in 1867, which dictated that the Crown, on the advice of the Canadian Senate and House of Commons, could enact laws ‘for the Peace, Order, and good Government of Canada.’ Subsection 91.24 noted that this principle of enacting laws could be applied to ‘Indians, and Lands reserved for the Indians.’ The BNA Act is available in its entirely through Government of Canada, Department of Justice, ‘British North American Act, 1867,’ http://www.justice.gc.ca/eng/rp-pr/csj-sjc/constitution/lawreg-loireg/p1t13.html.

2. Colten Boushie’s family is currently building an appeal case and has launched lawsuits against the federal Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) and Stanley.

3. Boushie’s family has made it clear in public statements to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and on social media that academic treatments of his murder are triggering and traumatizing for them (see Piapot 2019). For this reason, I point to the available accounts in the media of Stanley’s crime that the Boushie family participated in and has consented to rather than outlining its details here. Further descriptions of Indigenous death and violence against Indigenous people in an academic paper (or otherwise) does little to destabilize white settler power and instead may reproduce particular narratives of Indigenous death and taken-for-granted disposability. Here I am echoing Black feminist scholar Saidiya Hartman’s work (1997), which asks what does the display of a violated Black body accomplish for those who witness routinized violence? As an exercise in harm reduction to Indigenous communities who have suffered white settler violence in many forms, white scholars such as myself need to think about our use of Indigenous death and suffering for academic advancement in similar terms.

4. The six Cree warriors from Mistahimaskwa’s (Big Bear’s) band that the settler state tried and murdered by mass hanging for their participation in the ‘Frog Lake Massacre,’ where Indigenous men attacked settlers in a district of Saskatchewan known as Frog Lake. They were: Papamahchatwayo (Wandering Spirit) for the murder of T. T. Quinn, Indian agent; Papamakesick (Round the Sky) for the murder of Père Léon-Adélard Fafard, a Catholic priest; Manichoos (Bad Arrow) for the murder of Charles Govin, Quinn’s interpreter; Kittimakeguh (Miserable Man) for the murder of Govin; Napaise (Ironbody) for the murder of George Dill, free trader; Apischiskoos (Little Bear) for the murder of Dill. The two Assiniboine warriors hanged were: Itka (Crooked Leg) for the murder of Payne, farm instructor of the Stoney Reserve south of Battleford; Waywahnitch (Man Without Blood) for the murder of Tremont, a Battleford rancher. See Stonechild and Waiser (1997, pp. 211–12, 223–5); Gavigan (2013, p. 12).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada under the Insight Grant programme.