Gendered Identities

possible northern encroachment of American settler violence; on this basis, only male leaders or represent- atives were asked to participate in treaty negotiation and the signing away of land (Schmalz 1991, 120–22).

In negotiating only with men, the British deliberately cut out the stabilizing presence of older women and the general authority that was given to their voices in major decisions concerning the land. As Kim Anderson has written, traditional Native societies were often matrilineal in very balanced ways (2000, 66–68). Even in societies where men made the decisions about which lands to hunt on each year, clans organized along the female line frequently controlled land inheritance. To bypass older women in traditional societies effectively removed from the treaty process the people centrally responsible for regulating land access.

Moreover, the British were confident in their knowledge that, as Major Gladwin articulated, “The free sale of rum will destroy them more effectively than fire and sword” (Schmalz 1991, 82). The “chem- ical warfare” of alcohol, deliberately introduced north of the Great Lakes after the Pontiac uprising of 1763, had an immediate and devastating effect on Ojibway communities in the Toronto and southwestern Ontario region, whose social disintegration and their resulting dependency on the British were devastating (Schmalz 1991, 87). In such circumstances, as the abilities of the men to make good choices for the future were increasingly destabilized by alcohol, it was frequently the women whose decision-making capabilities became crucial for the survival of the society as a whole. The fact that the women invariably spoke with the future of the children always in mind meant that “choices” being forced on the men, such as surrendering the lands they could no longer hunt or trap on in exchange for the promise of assistance in the transition to farming (or later, of jobs in resource development), were most strenuously resisted by the women, who saw holding on to the land base as the only way in which the social fabric of the society to nurture the next generation would survive at all.

Finally, as Kathleen Jamieson has noted, most of the early land treaties and Indian legislation were premised on the Indigenous peoples the English were most familiar with—the Anishinaabe (Ojibway) and Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) peoples. Especially in Haudenosaunee society, female-led clans held the collective land base for all of the nations of the confederacy. Removing women, then, was the key to privatizing the land base. For all of these reasons, a central aspect of the colonization process in Canada would be to break the power of Indigenous women within their nations (Jamieson 1978, 13).

It is also important to take into account not only the concerns of British colonial administrators, for whom Indian administration was but another post of the empire, but the fears of the growing body of white settlers, where colonial anxieties about white identity and who would control settler societies were rampant. As Ann Stoler has noted, the European set- tlements that developed on other people’s lands have generally been obsessed with ways of maintaining colonial control and of rigidly asserting differences between Europeans and Native peoples to maintain white social solidarity and cohesion (Stoler 1991, 53). Colonial societies have had to invent themselves as new groupings of individuals with no organic link to one another, in settings that are often radically different from their places of origin. They have had to invent the social institutions that will then define them as a society—and they have to be capable of rationalizing or justifying their existence on other people’s lands and the brutality through which their presence is maintained. The very existence of white settler societies is therefore predicated on maintaining racial apartheid, on emphasizing racial difference, both white superiority and Native inferiority.

This flies in the face of the actual origins of many white settlements in Canada—which frequently began with displaced and often marginal white men, whose success with the fur trade or settlement, and often their very survival, depended on their ability to insin- uate themselves into Indigenous societies through

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Gender and Women’s Studies, Second Edition : Critical Terrain, edited by Margaret Hobbs, and Carla Rice, Canadian Scholars, 2018. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/umanitoba/detail.action?docID=6318365. Created from umanitoba on 2020-11-15 22:29:39.