An Intrusive and Corrective Government: Political Rationalities and the Governance of Plains Aboriginals 1870-90

In this work I have applied post-colonial theory and Foucault's ideas on government to analyse colonial governmentality and its impact on the Aboriginals of the Canadian prairies. Most often, historians who have undertaken work in the field of AboriginaVGovemment relations have attempted to unravel the ideological representations which constnicted the Aboriginals as other, dong with highlighting how State policy marginalized Canada's indigenous people. My research has endeavoured to move the analysis of Aboriginal govemance beyond ideology and centralized State power by considering how the indigenous peoples were defined, divided out, and excluded fiom Euro-Canadian society. More specifically, 1 have tried to reveal how the traditional modes of Aboriginal life were structured in diverse ways by both the political rationality of the Hudson's Bay Company and the 19" century Canadian liberal rationality of government. In so doing, 1 endeavoured to discem how law and practices of govemment, such as, techniques to govern consumption and agricuitural programmes, intruded into the lives of the Aboriginal peoples. By interrogating the practices and programmes by which the rationality of 1 9 century likral government stmctured the modes of plains Aboriginals life I have attempted to corne to a unique understanding of AboriginaYgovernrnent relations.