Colonialism's Currency: Money, State, and First Nations in Canada, 1820-1950 (Volume 39)

by Brian Gettler

Money, often portrayed as a straightforward representation of market value, is also a political force, a technology for remaking space and population. This was especially true in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Canada, where money - in many forms - provided an effective means of disseminating colonial social values, laying claim to national space, and disciplining colonized peoples. Colonialism's Currency analyzes the historical experiences and interactions of three distinct First Nations - the Wendat of Wendake, the Innu of Mashteuiatsh, and the Moose Factory Cree - with monetary forms and practices created by colonial powers. Whether treaty payments and welfare provisions such as the paper vouchers favoured by the Department of Indian Affairs, the Canadian Dominion's standardized paper notes, or the "made beaver" (the Hudson's Bay Company's money of account), each monetary form allowed the state to communicate and enforce political, economic, and cultural sovereignty over Indigenous peoples and their lands. Surveying a range of historical cases, Brian Gettler shows how currency simultaneously placed First Nations beyond the bounds of settler society while justifying colonial interventions in their communities. Testifying to the destructive and the legitimizing power of money, Colonialism's Currency is an intriguing exploration of the complex relationship between First Nations and the state.

Genres: Canada

336 pages, Paperback

Published July 16, 2020

Reviews

[David Nichols · Rating 4 out of 5]

While classifiable as Native American history, this book is mainly what its title implies: a study of money as an instrument of settler-colonialism in Quebec. Brian Gettler argues that in the context of Indigenous-settler relations, money performed three tasks: instructing its users, claiming territory, and “disciplining colonized peoples” (43). It performed the first two functions through its iconography: images of Indian men, beavers, and urban coats-of-arms linked banknotes to traditional commerce, particular places (like Montreal), and Canadian distinctiveness. The Canadian Indian Office used money as a disciplinary mechanism primarily by restricting its use. Officials worried that Indigenous Quebecois would use cash imprudently (e.g. to buy alcohol), and that relief payments in currency would make First Nations people dependent and demoralized. During the First World War the Canadian government began paying indigent Indians in “nontransferable vouchers” (171), and in the 1930s, when increasing numbers of Native people applied for aid, the Indian Office raided Native Americans’ cash-based pension and veterans’ funds to finance relief vouchers. Money, the author concludes, was a colonial technology, and colonized peoples weren’t supposed to use it.

Which is not to say Native Americans didn’t want or use cash. Gettler does not focus on Indigenous Canadians’ actions or desires, but he doesn’t ignore them. Nations with treaty relationships, like the Iroquois or the Cree, wanted their promised cash payments because these reified sovereign commitments made to their peoples by the King. The Cree and Innu (or Montagnais) wanted state currency to undermine the economic power of the Hudson Bay Company, whose credits and debts weren’t convertible; the HBC was consequently running a company-store operation, overcharging Native customers for merchandise (115). Indigenous Quebecois used a variety of means to get their hands on hard cash: collecting compensation owed under treaties, selling game caught on state-owned preserves to the provincial government, renting land on their reserves to whites, and, in the case of Wendat chiefs in the community of Wendake, selling Native names to white locals. Indigenous Americans usually found a way to obtain technology that they wanted, even if white settler governments restricted or banned its distribution. Money, which is designed to circulate, proved a particularly difficult technology to proscribe, and Native Quebeckers’ experiences with it show us both the imperatives and the limitations of colonialism.