CNST 361

Jan 10
Paradoxes of Liberal democracy
- All exist w/legal theoretical formal equality
- In practice as George Orwell noted “all animals are equal, some animals are more
equal than others”
- Suppose to have what it says on formal paper (equality) but not the true case
- Universal values why aren't they upheld
Socially Constructed
- If these categories we live w/are simply constructed, why are they so powerful?
- Why do these articulations exist now? Then?
- How do we change them? Should we? Can we?

Hegemony: Antonua Gramsci

- From Greek for “dominance over”
- Coercion and consent
- Create voluntarily cooperative population through the acceptance of aa social
structure based on inequality
- Hegemony acts as default and become accepted by certain amount of population
- Defining Canadian
Jan 12
Myths
- Instrument for national self-identification drawing justification from ideological
interpretation of past
- Using the past to justify the present
- Search for ‘usable past’
- Invented tradition
- Social cohesion
- Legitimize power and institutions
- Concretize beliefs and value systems
- Imagined communities
- Elite manipulation
- Myths require
- Historical vision of history
- Based on one version of history that justifies goal they are trying to
achieve
- Essentialist definition of things
 - Essentialism: permanent essence/character forever, that some things have
permanent objective thats measurable of character that doesn't change
- Ex. Being a man is this… something may change but the core of it
is this (essentialist)
- Not at the core of whos being identified
Daniel Francis’ National Myths
- Canada as a “Northern People”
- CPR
- RCMP
- British master race
- Canada as cultural mosaic

Articulation
- Process of articulation that changes across time and space
- Articulation
- How ideological elements come to forman interlocking set of connections of
which we are subject to in material world
- Why did being white get linked to superiority
- How certain discursive formations come to define our ability to understand world
- Enforced by customs and traditions by people

Intersectionality
- Mutually constructing categories underlie and shape intersecting systems of power
- Categories reflect and create complex social inequalities that cannot be
understood from only one categories’ perspective
- These inequalities are inherently unjust and need to be opposed

Jan 17
Power
Structure and Agency
- Karl Marx (1852): “Men make their own history, but not of their own free will: not under
circumstances they themselves have chosen but under the given and inherited
circumstances with which they are directly confronted
- Structuration

- Includes state, but is not limited to state

- Michel Foucault (1926-1984)
- Power is not just imposed vertically; exists horizontally
- Timothy Mitchell (1955-)
- Ideological and physical elements are mutually constitutive
 - Legitimation
- People have power but power is not evenly distributed throughout society
- Elites hold the most power
- Social status/structure determines how much power you have
- We behave to avoid consequences/punishments
- Governing each other even tho we know we’re not being watched

Categories in this class

- Gender, race, ethnicity and sexuality are hegemonic
- Thy operate coercion and consent
- Reinforce status quo through the internalization of norms that are created by those
w/most power who themselves are products of particular internalized social relations
- Creates common sense behaviour and thought

The Indian Act

1876:
- Indian act
- Created status (who was Indian and who was not)
- Enfranchisement
- Give up Indigenous status to be treated as equal but lose all traces to their
Indigenous identity and cannot associate with their Indigenous community or
ideology
- Enforced patriarchal social relations
- Recognized only band councils as legitimate governments

C. 1878-1890s:
- Widespread famine on the Prairies
- 1885 Northwest Resistance
-

Jan 19

- 6(2) women who lost their status or regained their indigenous status from
enfranchisement is labelled as 6(2)
- Cannot pass to their children
Indian Act
Content
1876
- Indian Act
- Created Status (who was Indian and who was not)
 - Enfranchisement
- Enforced patriarchal social relations
- Recognized only band councils as legitimate “governments”
C. 1878-1890s
- Widespread famine on Prairies
- 1885 Northwest Resistance

1880s-1950s
- Outlawed all traditional cultural ceremonies
1890s
- Enforced some attendance at residential or day schools
1900s-1910s
- Easier to take reserve land and remove Indigenous peoples
1920s
- Enforced compulsory attendance as residential or day schools
- Prohibited Indians from raising money to make land claims in court
- Sero v. Gault (1921)
- R v. Sylliboy (1928)
- Court cases used to justify this

- Aggressive civilization
- If you did not send your children to residential/day schools you can get punished
- Govt. prohibit outlaw organization of political organizations or joining political parties
- Lawyers barred from taking on Indigenous clients to prevent them from making
land claims against the government (could not do it)

Jan 24

- Scott’s argument ideological/financial

- Need more power to make them (Indigenous) listen

Onion Lake Residential School 1923

- Duncan Campbell denies the representation of what was going on in residential schools
and denies Indigenous children trauma and calls them dramatic (reporter)
- Children are overfed Campbell says and claims Indigenous people are just
dramatic and ungrateful and that is their nature
1951
- Unprecedented consultation between Indigenous leaders and federal officials between
1946-1949
- Indian Act, 1951 amendments:
- Women could vote in and run in band council elections
- Prohibitions on cultural ceremonies repeated
- Status Indians could hire lawyers to pursue claims against govt.
- Created double mother rule
- Downloaded responsibility for child welfare etc. onto provinces

Amendments
- Save money, federal govt. Obligated provinces pay for services for status Indians that
govt. Was not supplying
- Canadians had to pay for services they never had to before
- Child Welfare
- Status Indian children skyrocketed within decade (for troubled children)

- Indigenous community adoption was prohibited after 1950s by the state

- When parents pass or are unfit to care for child

- Indigenous children that do well in Residential schools are permitted and sent to “White”
schools
- BC first to offer Status Indian right to vote without giving up status

The Franchise
- Voting was privilege not a right
- American chaos and violence cause by republicanism and too much democracy
- Voting a heavy responsibility only some ppl are ready for
- Canada:
- History of voting characterized by jurisdictional disputes, half measures and
combination of de facto (in practice) and de jure (in law) exclusion

Feb 2

Sterilization and Eugenics

Sexual Sterilization Act (Alberta) (1928-1972)

- United Farmers of Alberta govt.
- Created the Eugenics Board of Alberta
 - Inmates of institutions were subjected to exams to determine whether they should
be sterilized
- 1937:
- Consent requirement removed for mentally defective persons

Dr. John MacEchran (1877-1971)

- Chairman of the Alberta Eugenics Board, 1928-1965
- Co-founded the Canadian Psychological Association
- Co-founded the Psychology and Philosophy Department at University of Alberta

Sexual Sterilization Act (BC) (1933-1973)

- 1933, Conservative govt. BC passed legislation allowing sterilization of those living in
govt. Run institutions
- Had to get consent of patient or guardian, spouse or family member
- Almost all paperwork was destroyed unlike Alberta
- Roughly 330 ppl sterilized

Feb 9

Midterm Review
- Dont cite lectures
- Cite readings if used
- Any citation format but use for every citation
- Upload pdf/word doc
- Paragraph response

White Slavery, the Yellow Peril and Immigration

First-wave Feminism
- Maternalist
- Women deserved formal equality because they were (or had potential to be)
mothers
- Equal Rights
- Womens deserved equality because they were human beings
- Socialist or Radical
- Capitalism as true oppressor of women behind the scenes of patriarchal social
relations
- Essentialist definitions of race, gender and sexuality
- Common in first-wave (and second wave) feminist circles
Feminism and Eugenics
- Some were beyond the pale and were to be condemned, opposed, institutionalized and
even scientifically regulated
- Eugenics posited that one could breed out negative aspects of humanity, such as
criminality and imbecility
- Positive eugenics
- Encourage the fit to breed to create a perfect population
- Negative Eugenics
- Prevent the unfit from breeding through sterilization to prevent the continuation of
social problems

- Fit overwhelmed from pressure to do horrible things such as women working making
them not wanting to have families
- Fit become materialistic and turn their back on their divine purpose of raising fit
and healthy families
- Unfit people were uncivilized and could not control sexual urges which is why they had
so many kids
- Saw Fit people as responsible

- WWI generation of men wiped out (including Canada)

- Some individuals forced to enlist
- British born men or men of British descent were enlisted in the army
- Sterilization became popular during this era as the men they saw as Fit were lost
which gave inferior people opportunity to populate Canada

Emily Murphy (1868-1933)

- Best selling author writing under name Janey Canuck
- Instrumental in suffrage campaigns
- Helped get Dower Act passed in 1917 in Alberta
- First female judge in British Empire
- Helped initiate the Persons Case in 1920s
- Supported eugenics and helped racialize anti-drug campaigns of 1920s

- White slavery panic

- Lure white women into prostitution

Feminism and Immigration

- Middle class white feminists tended to support the 1906 and 1919 Immigration Acts
 - Allowed barring and deportation of sex workers, pimps, women and girls engaged
in immoral purposes and those w/illegitimate children
- Barred and allowed deporting of feeble minded and those w/ loathsome disease
(STIs)
- Allowed barring and deportation of alcoholics
- Allowed barring of those unsuited to the climate or requirement of Canada

Oklahomans
- Black Americans attempting to escape violence of Jim Crow America migrated to
Prairies (1907-1911)
- Newspapers began printing story after story about Black men raping white
women
- Multiple petitions to federal govt. to block Black migration

Yellow Peril
- Opposition centered in BC
- Language of unfair labour competition
- White fear of racial (and thus national/imperial) degeneration
- White Slavery panic and laws
- 1885, 1901, 103 Chinese head tax

Mar 7
Rights

- Post WWII saw gradual and inconsistent change in attitudes towards rights
- Holocaust
- Japanese internment
- Internationalism, human rights
- Barriers
- Unrestricted freedom of commerce
- Division of powers
- Parliamentary supremacy, the British tradition
- Broad belief that discrimination was on American Problem
- Rights had gone far enough
- Discomfort w/hostility toward addressing Canada’s colonialist violence

- Private businesses were allowed to refuse service to people on prejudices on gender, race,
etc.
- Very difficult to take this reasoning to court and win as no legislations explicitly
protected people from discrimination
 - Dresden, Ontario, one of several small southern Ontario towns connected to the
Underground railroad
- Was heavily segregated along racial lines
- Hugh Burnett and National unity Association challenged this, c. 1943
- Bad publicity, context of postwar civil and human rights activism led to legislative
changes
- Fair employment practices act (ontario 1951)
- Fair accommodations practices act (ontario 1954)

Postwar Change
- Racial discrimination act (ON, 1944)
- Saskatchewan Bill of Rights (1947)
- Barley used but was there
- First bill of rights written from british empire
- Repeal of Chinese immigration act continuous journey clause
- Used to restrict Chinese immigration entirely and restrict Indian immigration
- Bill of Rights (1960)
- Order in council 1967-1616 (1967)
- Immigration points system
-

Apr 11

Take Home Final

Apologia
- Public “revelations” of abuse at residential schools increased in 1980s and 1990s
- Lawsuits launched in the 1980s and 1990s were sometimes successful
- “Vicarious liability” and violation of “fiduciary responsibility”
- Churches begin to apologize
- United Church, 1986 (1998)
- Anglican Church, 1993
- Presbyterian Church, 1994
- Bodies of Catholic Church, 1991-2022

Provide 29 million to survivor fund

25 million to religion services
- Services (not just cash)
Make best efforts to fundraise 25 million dollars
- Distribute to healing foundations
- (2007)

2014
- They raised 4 million of 25 million
- Still owed 1.6 million dollars of upfront cash
- The govt. took catholic church to court
- Proposed instead take 1.2 million dollars
- Govt refused
- Secret court case
- 2015 several judges in saskatchewan ruled federal govt proved

Reconciliation
- Indian residential schools settlement agreement (2007)
- Official govt. Apology
- Common experience payment
- Independent assessment process
- Truth and reconciliation commission (2008-2015)
- 94 calls to action