Indigenous peoples and the politics of land use

Question 1

Indian Act 1876

Answer 1

• Document of disenfranchisement, displacement and assimilation
• Structures the live of indigenous people
• Origin: the Bagot report 1844
• Limits who can be classified as an Indian
• Highly invasive and Paternalistic
• Enables the federal government to administer the day to day lives of Indians and reserve communities

Question 2

The Bagot report 1844

Answer 2

Recommended
- Centralized control over Indian matters
- Children be sent to boarding schools away from the influence of their communities
- Indians be encouraged to adopt European ideas of free enterprise
- Land individually owned under an Indian land registry system which could be sold to Indians but not non-Indians

Question 3

Brtitish North America act

Answer 3

• Gives jurisdiction over Indians and their lands to the federal government.

Question 4

Status Indian

Answer 4

A person registered under the Indian act and to whom the laws of the Indian act apply

Question 5

Non-status Indians

Answer 5

A person whose ancestors were never registered or who lost their status later through other means and therefore are legally the same as any other Canadian.

Question 6

Treaty Indians

Answer 6

Signed one of 11 treaties which were established in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

All treaty Indians are status Indians but not all Status Indians are treaty Indians.

Question 7

Urban living

Answer 7

• 53% of Métis live in cities (Thunder Bay, Winnipeg, Kamloops)

Question 8

Shifting geographies of indigenous people

Answer 8

• Landscapes have materiality (Morphology)
• Landscapes are representational (Convey meaning, reflect interpretations, not just what lies before our eyes also comprises what lies in our heads)

Question 10

Creating landscapes of lines

Answer 10

• How did the imposition of an agricultural grid happen on indigenous lands?
• How did landscapes demarking privatized spaces for white settlers emerge as dominant?

Question 11

Indigenous subsistence

Answer 11

Settlements
- Domestication of plants and seeds, the base of Indigenous culture (1500 BCE)
- Cultivation of corn (1100-1400)
- Agricultural intensification enables more stable agricultural based village environment

Question 12

Mobility

Answer 12

• Indigenous agriculture is also marked by patterns of periodic relocation
• Search for more fertile land

Question 13

Indigenous land use

Answer 13

• Landscapes where Indigenous people secured their material livelihood were inscribed with a fundamental principle of land tenure (right of usufruct)
• While land was conceived as a common resource of the village community, individual families or households had rights of use

Question 14

Right of usufruct

Answer 14

Right of using and enjoying profit of something that belongs to another.

No one owned land, they had rights of use.

Question 15

Contact: evolving patterns of subsistence and landholding

Answer 15

Trade and Exchange
- Result in a number of fatal problems for indigenous societies
- Disease carried by Europeans, leads to demographic shock
- Growing dependence on goods that gradually assumed role of necessity in indigenous societies (market based exchange)

Question 16

Differences in land ideology

Answer 16

• Two groups (European and Indigenous) had different meanings of right to land
• English evaluated individual ownership of plots of land
• Indigenous had no real concept of owning and alienating pieces of land

Question 17

Land improvement

Answer 17

• England’s notion of owning land as an incentive for improving it as a reward
• Where property rights come from
• English considered Indigenous land to be waste land (land to be improved)
• English belief that they owned land once they improved it

Question 18

Enclosure

Answer 18

Practice resulting in the transfer of land from one group of people to another and establishment of exclusionary spaces on territorial landscapes.
- Creates strong material changes to land structure
- Construct entirely different culture on the landscape
- People redrawing boundaries on the land designate enclosed areas as spaces of belonging for those doing the enclosing
- Presence in spaces of enclosure regarded as trespassing and subject to removal

Question 19

Imagined geographies of improvement

Answer 19

• Enduring discourse about virtues of improving land
• Land lying empty could be improved and redeemed
• Improvement of land characterized by being cultivated and being enclosed by fences, walls or hedges

Question 20

Imagined geographies of improvement: John Locke (1690)

Answer 20

• Land that is poorly cultivated is like waste land
• Violates enlightenment spirit of rationality
• Laws of God that humans should subdue the earth for their subsistence
  Indigenous land seines unimproved, thus without owners

Question 21

Justifications for sovereignty and possession: The discovery doctrine

Answer 21

• Spain and Portugal
• Discoverers of places populated by “infidels” could claim territories on the basis of being there first
• Relied on notion that invention of technologies needed for discoverers of distant territories (maps, ships) deserved compensation
• Linked to Christianity

Question 22

Justifications for sovereignty and possession: Agriculturalist argument

Answer 22

• England
• Legitimize claims to territory through practices of occupation on the landscape
• Common law: established a condition for possession (improvement through cultivation)