Categories and Terrains of Exclusion: Constructing the Indian Woman in the Early Settlement Era in Western Canada

In 1884 Mary E. Inderwick wrote to her Ontario family from the ranch near Pincher Creek, Alberta, where she had lived with her new husband for six months. 1 The letter provides a perspective on the stratifications of race, gender, and class that were forming as the Euro-Canadian enclave grew in the district of Alberta. Mary Inderwick lamented that it was a lonely life, as she was twenty-two miles from any other women, and she even offered to help some of the men near them to get their shacks done up if only they will go east and marry some really nice girls. She did not consider the companionship of women such as the squaw who is the nominal wife of a white man near us, and she had dismissed her maid, who had become discontented with her position as a servant. Inderwick had disapproved of a ball at the North-West Mounted Police (NWMP) barracks at Fort Macleod, despite the fact that it was the first Ball to which the squaws were not allowed to go, but there were several half breeds. Commenting on the Aboriginal population that still greatly outnumbered the new arrivals, Inderwick wrote that they should have been isolated in the mountains, rather than settled on nearby reserves, and that the sooner they became extinct the better for themselves and the country