Dominating a Continent: Retribution and Forcible Confinement in North America

Benjamin Hoy, University of Saskatchewan

Research Grant, 2020

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The “Dominating a Continent” project aimed to understand the following dynamics:

1. the ways state-sponsored violence impacted the transnational mobility of Indigenous people in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries;

2. how changes in military infrastructure impacted day-to-day violence in areas that recently experienced warfare; and

3. the ways that violence impacted patterns of incarceration in Saskatchewan following the 1885 Resistance.

The project found that in both Canada and the United States throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, inadequate infrastructure around food, water, and housing left both the Canadian Northwest Mounted Police and the American army ill-equipped to exert authority over long distances.

[Limitations] encouraged both governments to rely on the threat of violence to shore up their power when they were unable to patrol the wide swaths of land their governments claimed authority over.

Persistent infrastructure and supply chain problems hampered both organizations’ ability to control the mobility of Indigenous people or to limit the violence between Indigenous people and settlers. These limitations encouraged both countries to rely instead on hunger and deprivation to confine Indigenous people to reserves/reservations, where they could concentrate their authority and power. They also encouraged both governments to rely on the threat of violence to shore up their power when they were unable to patrol the wide swaths of land their governments claimed authority over.

Finally, this project found that, contrary to expectation, Indigenous people do not appear to have been given disproportionate prison sentences in the Prince Albert and Regina Jails in the years and decades that followed the 1885 Resistance. This is surprising because Cree and Métis communities experienced significant reprisals through other avenues of government control including the distribution of food, annuities, farming support, etc. This finding is also notable because prison records indicate that jail time was disproportionately given to Indigenous community members near the Kamsack region in the 1920s and 1930s to force residential school attendance.

These patterns emphasize that Indian agents and federal personnel had a wide range of coercive tools at their disposal to punish recalcitrance and break resistance and that they relied on jail sentences only sporadically to enforce their conceptions of order.