The violent rhetoric of settler colonial peace: Éléna Choquette, Land and the Liberal Project Canada’s Violent Expansion, UBC Press, 2024 | settler colonial studies blog

The violent rhetoric of settler colonial peace: Éléna Choquette, Land and the Liberal Project Canada’s Violent Expansion, UBC Press, 2024

23May24

Description: In 1867, Canada was a small country flanking the St. Lawrence River and Great Lakes, but within a few years its claims to sovereignty spanned the continent. With Confederation had come the vaunting ambition to create an empire from sea to sea. How did Canada lay claim to so much land so quickly? Land and the Liberal Project examines the political, legal, and rhetorical tactics deployed by Canadian officialdom in the cause of nation making, from the first articulation of expansionism in the 1857 Gradual Civilization Act to the consolidation of authority over the prairies following the North-West Resistance of 1885. Drawing on numerous archival sources, Éléna Choquette contends that although the dominion purported to favour a gentle absorption of Indigenous lands through constitutionalism, administration, and law, it resorted to police repression and military force in the face of Indigenous resistance. She investigates the liberal concept that underpinned land appropriation and legitimized violence: Indigenous territory and people were to be “improved,” the former by agrarian capitalism, the latter by so-called protection and enforced schooling. By rethinking this tainted approach to building a transcontinental state, Choquette’s clear-eyed exposé of the Canadian expansionist project offers new ways to understand colonization. This challenge to nationalistic narratives will find a keen audience among scholars and students of political science and political theory, Canadian history, and Indigenous studies.

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