Districts, Documentation, and Population in Rupert’s Land (1740–1840) by Aaron James Henry

Author:Aaron James Henry
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030327309
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

In addition, they wereannually to furnish registers of the number of Indians attached to their respective districts or parts particularizing the tribes, the number of chiefs and followers, with extent of the country they inhabit and hunt in, together with their general character and habits of life.30

This report was to include a more detailed registration of indigenous people in each district. In response to a number of incomplete district reports, Simpson revised the system of registration in 1824 to give clerks a more active role in furnishing this abstract.

The company records indicate that in the first decade or so, clerks were never put in charge of districts. By the 1840s, however, the clerk had displaced the chief factor in the production of the district report. The mode of social vision that had been given solely to the company’s commissioned gentlemen gradually became routinized to the point that it could be socially levelled and, in turn, generalized.31 However, in the initial period following the merger the expectation was that clerks would assist in the construction of an “Indian abstract” by making tabulations of the individual post with which they were charged.

I analyse the effects of the district on the company’s representations of indigenous populations in Chapters 5 and 6. First, however, I will sketch the impetus of rationalization behind the company’s implementation of the district report and account for its gradual codification as a system of documentation throughout the 1820s. A “command” on its own could not produce the relations for a new form of social vision, rather getting the eye, the document, and place to obey a new regimen was a process that was cultivated rather than “commanded”.

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