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Article Excerpt
Introduction
The excitement occasioned by the trial of the case of Foss v. Pelly seems to have been very great, but as all the inhabitants thought it proper to expose one side or the other and regard the verdict as a personal triumph or a personal injury it is not to be wondered at (George Simpson 1850, 571). (1) THE GREAT TRIAL IS OVER ... a clergyman of previous high character and a great usefulness the person accused-an attempt to procure the miscarriage of a girl the crime charged ... The Trial has created a profound sensation in the Settlement (The Nor'Wester, 3 March 1863). (2)
In 1670, Prince Rupert, a cousin of the King of England, signed a Charter granting the British Hudson's Bay Company (HBC) all the rights and privileges in all lands in the drainage basin of the Hudson Bay (Oliver 1914). This area corresponds to two-thirds of present day Canada. For almost 200 years the Company occupied this territory, which it named Rupert's Land (Dickason 1997). The Montreal-based North West Company (NWC), administered primarily by Scottish Highlanders, also represented a significant presence in the region. The diffusion of the fur trade throughout the region meant that European men regularly encountered First Nations groups. (3) Consequently, a mutual dependency evolved between them creating cultural forms 'driven by complex sets of social relations' (Van Kirk 1980, 12). During the initial stages of settlement Rupert's Land did not have a large European population (Thompson 1998). Fur trading companies permitted their employees and White European men only to live in this place. (4) Each Company had a policy that constructed Rupert's Land as a 'manly space' and 'no place for a White woman' (Cavanaugh 1997, 494). The absence of White women meant that European men had sexual partnerships with First Nations women.
However, the HBC and NWC attitudes to interethnic partnerships differed. Administrators for the NWC claimed that close links between the First Nations and its employees would ensure its survival and economic success in the territory (Foster 1994). Scottish enthusiasm for interethnic partnerships or marriage a la facon du pays (as it was referred to in Rupert's Land) may be linked to marriage customs in eighteenth century Scotland. 'It was possible for a legal marriage to be contracted with the sanction of either civil or religious authorities' (Van Kirk 1980, 55). Eventually, intermarriage created a new ethnic group particular to the fur trade. French Canadians referred to the French-speaking and predominantly Roman Catholic offspring of there partnership as the Metis or Awp-pee-tow-koosons (Cree for half people). Conversely, the HBC forbade sexual relations, including common-law partnerships, between First Nations women and European men. Nevertheless, HBC men of all ranks ignored the regulations and had partnerships with these women. This resulted in a second intercultural group in Rupert's Land, the English-speaking and mainly Protestant children of First Nations women and HBC employees. I refer to this group as the Countryborn. This term was used to describe these individuals in the nineteenth century fur trade (Foster 1974). By the end of the eighteenth century, a new generation of Metis and Countryborn women grew up in Rupert's Land and many European fur traders favoured these women as wives over fully First Nations women. As the wives and daughters of Company officers, Countryborn women fully participated in the social life of the posts, as 'fitting' their fathers' or husbands' stations.
During this time, increased competition from the NWC forced the HBC to expand its franchise further west into Rupert's Land (Binnema 2001). In 1811, the HBC established its entrepot the Red River Colony (present-day Winnipeg, Manitoba) at the confluence of the Red and the Assiniboine Rivers or 'The Forks' (as it was commonly called). The settlement represented a 'contact zone' (Pratt 1992, 6) between several groups in the territory. This was particularly the case in 1821 when after years of fierce competition the HBC and the NWC amalgamated under the auspices of the HBC. By 1830, concerns about miscegenation in the colonies of European nations diffused across the Atlantic Ocean. Both companies permitted White women to live in Rupert's Land as the wives of Company men, administrators and military officers (Brown 1976; Van Kirk 1980). Certain British men now 'turned-off' their interethnic wives. This became a euphemism at the time, when White men returning to Britain abandoned their local families, but typically arranged to have them looked after by another officer or Company employee. This tradition evolved in part due to First Nations groups' understanding of these relationships, which Van Kirk (1980) argued they did not perceive as binding. Despite these incidents of European men's exploitation of First Nations customs, the evidence suggests that many White men took their partnerships with First Nations and interethnic women seriously (Van Kirk 1980). When British women arrived in the Red River Colony, they were horrified by the presence of women of colour in positions they believed to be theirs by right of their racial 'superiority'.
The discussion that follows revolves around two case studies of unrelated lawsuits concerning two differently situated Countryborn women. Foss v. Pelly concerned Sarah Ballenden, the Country-born wife of the Chief Factor of the Red River Colony in 1850. The Queen v. Corbett involved a 16-year-old Countryborn domestic servant, Maria Thomas in 1863. The purpose of this study is to contribute to scholarship on women of colour in the Red River Colony. Scholarship on the importance of gender and ethnicity in the fur trade highlights the importance of First Nations and interethnic women's roles as processors of furs and skins, interpreters and liaisons between these groups in sustaining economic networks through marriage and female kinship networks (Ray 1978; Brown 1980; Peterson 1985; Sleeper-Smith 1997). Economic relations and cultural accommodation between First Nations and White settlers continue to be important themes in fur trade research (Innis 1956; Friesen 1984; White 1991; Ens 1996; Perry 1997; Tough 1997). However, I argue that if material relations are the only lens, through which women's experiences in the fur trade are glimpsed, this will perpetuate an economic bias and produce an incomplete understanding of women's lives. Specifically, I focus on the ways in which Countryborn women intervened in the production of their own colonial subjectivity. I invite the reader to re-imagine the contact zones in the settlement as spaces where 'the subaltern may have played a constitutive rather than a reflective role in colonial and domestic imperial discourse and subjectivity' (McEwan 2000, 179).
To theorize subaltern agency in the Red River Colony and demonstrate how interethnic women in the settlement participated in power relations this article analyzes the court transcripts relating to Foss v. Pelly and The Queen v. Corbert. I do not suggest that these cases were typical of Countryborn women's experiences in the settlement, but that as case studies, they facilitate an understanding of the interpersonal and external cultural process at play in 1850 and 1863, respectively, in the colony. A number of scholars have documented Foss v. Pelly (Van Kirk, 1980; Gallagher 1988; Pannekoek 1991; Cavanaugh 1997) and The Queen v. Corbett (Pannekoek 1991; Smith 1996; Bumstead 1999, 2001) to investigate interethnic women's relationships with White men, and the rivalry between British middle class White women and women of colour. I do not begin from the assumption that White women were responsible for increased racial tension and segregation in the Red River Colony. To do so is to miss the 'political chronology in which racist practice arose' (Stoler 2002, 22). Rather, I proceed with the understanding that the arrival of White women in Rupert's Land coincided with threats to British authority involving increased interethnic conflict and nationalist struggles by the interethnic populations against HBC practices (Sprague 1988). These political changes and tensions also highlight internal differences among Whites themselves fought around issues of economic, political and citizenship rights and obligations (Thompson 1996).
What is missing from studies of Foss v. Pelly and The Queen v. Corbett is an analysis of the ways that cultural forms established at the 'centre' of the British Empire, London, were destabilized over colonized spaces as colonists attempted to re-inscribe them in the contact zones in the Red River Colony. To begin my task, I draw on Foucault's (1980a, 1980b) analysis of the proliferation of nineteenth century discourses on sex and power relations to ask: how female agency and resistance to imperial dominance operated in the colony? Particularly important to my argument is Bhabha's (1980) interpretation of hybridity theory. Hybridity theory focuses on how the blending of cultures and all cultural elements (law, religion, codes of behaviour, attitudes, ethnic, gender and class expectations) challenge the authority of the dominant. Feminist postcolonial scholarship will assist me to uncover the ways, in which gender influenced the constitution of imperial spaces. Focusing on women's encounters with difference, feminist critics illustrated the ways in which space and distance from Britain modified colonial subjectivity (Mills 1996). Combining these methodologies, I attempt a more nuanced and gender sensitive interpretation of hybridity theory developed along four main themes: (1) Countryborn women's agency in situating themselves; (2) aversion and desire in the two cases; (3) the ways female participants in these cases aligned themselves in complex and contradictory ways by 'colour'; and (4) the ways that men transgressed gender, racialized and class boundaries.
In summary, the through line of this discussion takes the following trajectory. It begins by situating my argument within its theoretical context. I focus on Michel Foucault's discourse analysis on power relations. To analyze Victorian discourses on femininity, I compare the work of feminist scholars on the ways British women in the colonies deployed this ideology to stratify public and private spaces. I then situate my work within its broader context of postcolonial theory and Homi Bhabha's interpretation of hybridity theory. I critically evaluate this work and link it to feminist postcolonial criticisms of gender and colonialism. This section is followed by a synopsis of Foss v....
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