Status as Property: Identity, Land and the Dispossession of First Nations Women in Canada

In the mid to late nineteenth century, as English and French settlers were in the process of consolidating their colonial Dominion over vast First Nations’ territories in the form of a Canadian federal state, the government enacted legislation to create the juridical category of the Indian. Binding together identity with access to land, Indian status and the Indian reserve would come irrevocably to define and regulate the lives of First Nations people in Canada from the mid-nineteenth century until the present. The creation of the “Indian” as a juridical category, along with the Indian reserve as a space of domination, marks a specific historical conjuncture—one in which identity (or indeed, subjectivity itself) and property relations were bound to one another, creating an apparatus [2] of colonial knowledge and governance that structures the ongoing dispossession of First Nations women