10 Feb 2016
School
Department
Course
Professor
Global Development Second Semester Textbook Readings
Chapter 1: Indigenous Peoples, Colonialism and Canada
• past continues to shape the present daily indigenous experience
• historical inequalities born out of the colonial project
Global Imperial System
• 10,000 years before any european contact
• 2-10million indigenous people in Canada
• Canada very diverse languages, social customs etc.
• climate deterioration caused disease
Christopher Columbus
• 15C
• found societies with complex domestic cultural, social relations
• kidnapped Taino people to Spain
• Norse vikings of Newfoundland were the first to Canada
• Canada exists cause of european exploitation and colonization
• European Colonial Empires thought this colonization would bring new commerce
and trade
• stalled economies
• international competition
• comparable resources to maintain balance between empires
• Immigrants from Europe were promised private property and new opportunities
Exploitative Colonialism
• closely related to imperialism
• viewed Canada as a place to rule and generate wealth (not for living)
• extracting resources for cheap
• slavery
• “Transatlantic Slave Trade”
• indigenous black men and woman slaves in Montreal's commercial district
Fur trade
• signalled the begging of sustained commercial relations between indigenous
and europeans
• social, political, cultural, spiritual changes
• indigenous adopted tools and technologies from europeans
• fur traders relied on indigenous knowledge
• high death rates due to new diseases
• use of aboriginal medicine
• aboriginals assisted newcomer adaption
• allied during French-Brit wish warfare and wars (especially in eastern woodlands)
• power for control of the St. Lawrence river destabilized intertribal Indigenous
alliances
• 1870-1945 Colonial wars
• Hudson’s Bay Company
Settler Colonialism
• 17C Europe permanent settlement
• opens up new markets for domestic good
• new technologies brought over and developed
• overpopulation in Europe
• to transform Indigenous into modern subjects
• dispassion of land from Indigenous
• violent attacks, negotiation, forced relocation, policies (of european values)
• limit cultural and biological pluralism
• universalized capitalism
• treaties and formal agreements
Land and Settler Colonialism
• relationship of land development an private ownership
• using the land “properly”
• new rules of law as a tactic for lan control
Orientalism
• Edward Said
• reproduce discourse and imagery
• binary attitudes that reduced groups of people to a number of essential
characteristics
• Frantz Fanon
• colonial domination
• internalized sense of inferiority
• treaties: formalized records of negotiated agreements between parties, states or
people
Indian Act
• engaged legal act
• seizure of land
• Hudson’s Bay Company as a commercial compact in exchange for material goods
• formalized military agreements
Royal Proclamation of 1763
• King George III
• system of surrender by treaty
• treaties transferred land to the Crown
• John A MacDonald: west is the source of Canada future prosperity
• in exchange for land Indigenous receive socio assistance
• negotiating with unequal forms of power
• Cede: the sharing of non reserve land for hunting and gathering activities
• cede was interpreted as total surrender in exchange for small reserves
• reserves segregated europeans from Indigenous
• protected the inferior from being annihilated
• Indians were to be eliminated through gradual assimilation