2 - Reconnaissance Discourses for Colonial Law

Summary

This Chapter offers an analysis of two influential, intelligence reports – authored by military officers William Butler and Patrick Robertson-Ross. They were instructed in 1870 and 1872 respectively by the Dominion of Canada (North-West Territories Council) to reconnoitre the North-West Territories in preparation for colonial settlement. Both reporters identified Alberta’s supposed lawlessness as requiring colonial intervention. It describes the socio-politics implied by the reports, detailing their race-tinted assessments, and how they divided an assumed population into racially conceived forms of life. Replicating popular imperial supremacist opinions, the reports egregiously placed ‘white’ settlers at the pinnacle of evolutionarily imagined notions of social progress. Both relied on rumour to recommend that law be used to enforce relational orders conducive to colonial settlement. This was to be achieved without provoking wars against Indigenous peoples.