Abstract

Throughout the nineteenth century, the Province of Canada enacted a series of laws in an effort to extend their jurisdiction over the lands and peoples residing in the territory. Even though, in theory, these laws applied equally to everyone, for Indigenous peoples, the impact of state expansion occurred alongside the Canadian government’s assimilationist policies. Conceptualized as an “Indian Problem”, the 1876 Indian Act sought to regulate Indigenous people by labelling them as a separate racial category; thereby creating two types of legal persons: “Indian” and “non-Indian”. Given that this racial distinction was deeply embedded into the colonial structure, it shaped Indigenous people’s interactions with state institutions, including the justice system. This thesis examines the implementation of Canadian criminal law vis-à-vis members of the Wendake First Nation and the different ways in which they navigated the legal system between 1918 and 1939. Drawing from a total of 34 court cases, I argue that the law operated as a tool of colonial control to uphold racial distinctions between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people. At the same time, this study also reinforces the notion that the Wendat were active historical agents who played a role in negotiating and renegotiating their role in the new colonial order. Although these two themes – racialization and agency – seem to contradict each other, this thesis demonstrates that not only can they be reconciled, but twentieth-century court cases provide important historical insights into the origins of today’s Indigenous overrepresentation in the criminal justice system.