Enlightened Colonialism by Damien Tricoire

Author:Damien Tricoire
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

The Royal Proclamation of 1763 is clearly one of the key documents in Britain’s policy regarding Aboriginal peoples after the Conquest of New France in 1760. As the Proclamation provided specific protection for Aboriginal land, it was hailed in the nineteenth century as the “Indians’ Charter of Rights.” The Proclamation also reflected the central view of British colonial policy regarding the Aboriginal peoples of North America: segregation. By prohibiting colonists from settling on the vast swaths of land temporarily reserved for the Aboriginal nations, the Proclamation drew a precise line of demarcation between the colonial world and that of the Aboriginal peoples. Creating this reserved land stemmed from a political desire to appease the Aboriginal peoples of the continent’s interior who had just begun to take up arms (Pontiac’s War), but it demonstrated how little importance the British at the end of the eighteenth century placed on integrating the Aboriginal peoples into the colonial world.1

The policy, however, changed rapidly and radically in the early nineteenth century. The new official objective of Britain’s policy quickly became civilizing the Aboriginal peoples. This article analyzes the process leading to this new policy. Focusing particularly on the period during which the civilization program emerged, it situates the military, economic, political, and ideological factors that initiated the change and influenced its specific form. The analysis integrates the sometimes discordant views of the metropolitan and colonial actors. Indeed, the implementation of the civilization project took place amongst intense discussions between the metropolitan and colonial authorities. Colonial inquiry commissions were charged with examining the administration of Indian affairs and making recommendations, which would have critical influence on the concrete implementation of the project.2

The analysis encompasses the period from 1815 to 1857. The first date marks the beginning of a series of proposals for reforming Indian Affairs. The second date is when the Parliament of the United Provinces of Canada formalized the civilization project as law, associating it with emancipation. A reflection of increasingly direct interventions by the colonial authorities in defining the Aboriginal policy in Canada, this law was the prelude to the official transfer of responsibility on this issue from London to the colony, in 1860.

This article focuses more specifically on Lower Canada, one of the five British colonies in North America.This colony was created in 1791 by the Constitutional Act, which divided the Province of Quebec into two parts, Lower and Upper Canada (Map 1).3

Map 1Lower and Upper Canada, 1791

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