‘A better citizen than lots of white men’: First Nations Enfranchisement - an Ontario Case Study, 1918-1940

Brownlie, Robin

doi:10.3138/chr/87.1.29

Cited by 8 publications

(3 citation statements)

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“…The term "Indian" was erroneously used by the colonizers to identify Canadian First Nations peoples. It is important to note, each enfranchised male would receive an allotment of 50 acres (~20.2 hectares) carved out from the First Nations communal-reserve lands in a colonial effort to dismantle reserve lands set aside for exclusive use by First Nations peoples [2,[5][6][7]. At confederation, sole jurisdiction over "Indians, and Lands reserved for the Indians" was given to the Dominion of Canada, as described in the Canadian Constitution Act, 1867 [8] (Section 91 (24)).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Canada’s Impact Assessment Act, 2019: Indigenous Peoples, Cultural Sustainability, and Environmental Justice

Tsuji

2022

Sustainability

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It is well documented that the colonizers of Canada have long coveted the ancestral homelands of the Canadian Indigenous peoples for settlement and development. With this end goal in mind, it is not surprising that there exists an extensive history of assimilative efforts by the colonizers with respect to the Indigenous peoples of Canada—for example, legal assimilation through enfranchisement (voluntary and involuntary) and blood quantum requirements, and cultural assimilation through residential schools and the “sixties scoop”. Another form of assimilation is environmental assimilation, that is, colonial development on Indigenous homelands to the extent whereby Indigenous cultural activities can no longer be supported in the development-transformed environment. Herein, I examine Bill C-69, a Government of Canada omnibus bill, through an environmental justice lens in the context of development across Canada on Indigenous homelands and impacts on Indigenous cultural sustainability. Specifically, Part 1 (i.e., the Impact Assessment Act, 2019) and Part 3 (i.e., the Canadian Navigable Waters Act, 2019) of Bill C-69 pose significant threats to Indigenous cultural sustainability. Through an environmental justice lens, procedural aspects include the use of the project list and scheduled waterways, the discretionary decision-making powers of the Government of Canada representatives, and the lack of acknowledgement of procedural elements of the environmental assessment processes that are constitutionally protected in comprehensive land claims. While, distributive justice aspects consist of unsustainable development from an Indigenous perspective, whereby environmental costs and benefits have been (and will be) distributed inequitably. Bill C-69 is a flawed statute that reinforces the colonial policy of assimilation.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Canada’s Impact Assessment Act, 2019: Indigenous Peoples, Cultural Sustainability, and Environmental Justice

Tsuji

2022

Sustainability

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“…22. Brownlie (2006) attributes the low numbers of enfranchised 'Indians' to a certain degree of reluctance on the side of the First Nations, who wanted to keep their special status, and to the reservations of the Canadian authorities. 23.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 97%

Subjects, citizens and others: the handling of ethnic differences in the British and the Habsburg Empires (late nineteenth and early twentieth century)

Gammerl

2009

European Review of History: Revue européenne d'histoire

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This article focuses on the role of ethnic inclusions and exclusions in administering citizenship and nationality within the British and the Habsburg Empires. The analysis discerns three ways of dealing with ethnically heterogenous populations. One follows the nation-state model and aims for internal ethnic homogeneity and legal equality. This model coined developments in Canada and Hungary. The second obeys an imperialistic pattern and implements legal discrimination between different ethnic groups. It played a decisive role in East Africa and in Bosnia to a certain degree. The third model follows a statist logic and enforces either supra-ethnic neutrality or a politics of recognition. It was most influential in Austria and India. In the British as well as in the Habsburg context ethnic differences gained significance around 1900. This ethnicising of law and administrative practice produced different results, though, in both cases, mainly due to the empires' divergent political structures. Whereas within the Habsburg Empire the three models were juxtaposed, British law and administration came to be dominated by the imperialistic pattern of ethnic discrimination against 'non-white' subjects. Thus, the customary distinction between a politically inclusive nationalism in Western Europe and an ethnically exclusive one in the continent's Eastern half -sometimes linked with the difference between ius soli and ius sanguinis -cannot be upheld.

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“…However, a third group consisting of defectives born in Canada could not be deported and, therefore required a different approach to manage (Strange & Stephen, 2010). Eugenicists in Canada during the 1920s began debating sexual sterilization along with immigration control and deportation of undesirables as part of a larger amalgam of eugenic policies that targeted the mental defectives to ensure the production of a prosperous Canadian future rooted in the privileging of narrow and highly gendered conceptions of whiteness, racial purity, and fear of racial mixing (Brownlie, 2006;Pitsula, 2013;Quesnel, 2021;Stote, 2012Stote, , 2015. However, sexual sterilization was itself controversial as a method to deal with the reproductive capacities of mental defectives and only gained substantial and prolonged implementation in Alberta where its program expanded in the late 1930s (Dack, 2020;Strange & Stephen, 2010;Wahlsten, 2020).…”

Section: The Emergence Of the Alberta Eugenics Boardmentioning

confidence: 99%

“Mere guesswork”: Clarifying the role of intelligence, mentality, and psychometric testing in the diagnosis of “mental defectives” for sterilization in Alberta from 1929 to 1972.

Reichardt

Stam

Tan-MacNeill

2023

History of Psychology

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From 1929 until 1972, the Alberta Eugenics Board (the Board) recommended that 4,739 individuals be sterilized. The original 1928 act that legalized eugenic sterilization stipulated that the surgery itself required the consent of the individual or their caregiver; however, in 1937, the Alberta government removed the consent requirement for such cases where the Board determined individual patients to be "mental defectives." By analyzing published reports, case histories, medical journals, and primary sources from the Board, we situate the concept of "mental defective" in a historical context to clarify the Board's diagnostic process. By analyzing how the Board found individuals to be "mental defectives," we challenge a previous historiographic assumption that intelligence tests played a critical or defining role in this diagnostic process. We argue that the notion of the "mental defective" used by the Board had a long history before the advent of intelligence testing and eugenic thought. This history helps to explain how and why the Board relied extensively on the broader examination of behavior, social status, and physical appearance as core evidence in the diagnosis of "mental defect." Intelligence tests were certainly important as they shed light on an individual's academic ability. However, this alone was only one part of "mentality." Defects of mentality were understood to be broad and multifactorial, and included difficult, if not impossible, to measure attributes such as personality, emotionality, and morality. Further research should incorporate the concept of mentality in the history of psychology, testing, and eugenics.

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‘A better citizen than lots of white men’: First Nations Enfranchisement - an Ontario Case Study, 1918-1940

Cited by 8 publications

References 0 publications

Canada’s Impact Assessment Act, 2019: Indigenous Peoples, Cultural Sustainability, and Environmental Justice

Canada’s Impact Assessment Act, 2019: Indigenous Peoples, Cultural Sustainability, and Environmental Justice

Subjects, citizens and others: the handling of ethnic differences in the British and the Habsburg Empires (late nineteenth and early twentieth century)

“Mere guesswork”: Clarifying the role of intelligence, mentality, and psychometric testing in the diagnosis of “mental defectives” for sterilization in Alberta from 1929 to 1972.

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