Taxing settlers: Jeffrey L. McNairn, ‘Negotiating Sovereignty through Taxation: Direct Taxes, Indigenous Peoples, and Settler Sovereignty in Upper Canada to 1850’, Canadian Historical Review, 106, 3, 2025 | settler colonial studies blog

Taxing settlers: Jeffrey L. McNairn, ‘Negotiating Sovereignty through Taxation: Direct Taxes, Indigenous Peoples, and Settler Sovereignty in Upper Canada to 1850’, Canadian Historical Review, 106, 3, 2025

07Oct25

Abstract: Did local taxes levied by the Upper Canadian parliament from 1793 apply to Indigenous communities in the colony? Only in 1850 did colonial legislation give an answer by exempting Indigenous peoples from taxes on real and personal property and from statute labour, provided they resided on “Indian” lands. Yet Indigenous leaders had always denied that the colony’s jurisdiction extended to their communities, which they conceived of as political societies governed by their own customary law. A de facto tax exemption had emerged as a result of their refusal of perfect settler sovereignty, but settler resentment grew in the 1820s and 1830s, often focused on local roads. Prior to 1850, colonial law on the question of tax liability was unsettled. Successive attorneys general offered different answers, and the de facto tax exemption was most often associated with the nature of Indigenous land tenure rather than any recognition of their constitutional status. The 1850 act emerged from two contradictory forces: a renewed empire-wide emphasis on humanitarian “protection” of Indigenous peoples as a strategy of colonial governance and Haudenosaunee demands for protection as a strategy to preserve their collective self-government in the face of increasingly aggressive attempts to tax them. Direct taxes were a technology of colonial rule, marking identities and measuring settler sovereignty and the status of Indigenous peoples and land.

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