An Indian Is Almost As Free As Any Other Person

Canada is regularly presented as a country where liberalism has ensured freedom and equality for all. Yet as Canada expanded westward and colonized First Nations territories, liberalism did not operate to advance freedom or equality for Indigenous people or to protect their property, but rather had a markedly debilitating effect on virtually every aspect of their lives. This study explores the operation of exclusionary liberalism between 1877 and 1927 in southern Alberta and the southern interior of British Columbia. The exploration of the extension of liberal colonial rule in these two regions provides the opportunity to illustrate the flexibility, adaptability, plurality and multifaceted nature of Canada's liberal colonial project which incorporated an array of strategies and justifications to meet local conditions and opposition. To facilitate, fashion, and justify liberal colonial expansion Canada relied extensively on surveillance which operated to exclude and reform Indigenous people. In this period surveillance was far more intensive and dramatic in southern Alberta than in the British Columbia interior but in both areas, in addition to inculcating Anglo-Canadian liberal capitalist values, structures, and interests as normal, natural, and beyond reproach it worked to exclude or restructure the economic, political, social, and spiritual tenets of Indigenous cultures. Further, surveillance identified which previously reserved lands, established on fragments of First Nations territory, could be further reduced by a variety of dubious means. While in both regions there was the appearance of consultation, this was limited and designed to be of little consequence. To protect the chimera of what liberalism had to offer First Nations, the general nature of Canada's colonial project, as well as its local specifics and the textual record of its operation, were hidden from Indigenous people wherever and whenever possible. While none of this proceeded unchallenged, surveillance served as well to mitigate against, even if it could never completely neutralize, opposition. Considering Canada's efforts a controlling both information and Indigenous political, economic, and social structures, the degree and variety of the challenge to the imposition of Anglo-Canadian liberal rule is remarkable.