Aboriginal Women in Canada

Throughout Canada’s history – and even before Canada became a nation – government officials, social reformers and various middle-class professionals have attempted to regulate the personal lives of individuals in an effort to create a particular version of Canada. Indeed, a major focus of Canada’s colonial project was not simply to dispossess Aboriginal people from their lands, but also to dehumanize them by constructing Aboriginal people as ‘savage’ and the ‘other’, while at the same time normalizing white Europeans as ‘civilized’. Interestingly, the treatment of Aboriginals by Indian agents and European settlers was clearly gendered. The particular means of confining women on reserves and the use of legislation (the Indian Act, 1876) to deny women and their children Indian status if they married a white man, quite clearly demonstrates the gendered regulation of women and the attempts by Euro-Canadians to contain women and remake Aboriginal women according to dictates of Victorian domesticity.

October 1, 2007 | Filed Under Aboriginal Women | Leave a Comment