In Land and the Liberal Project, Éléna Choquette engages in a much-needed exercise of truth-telling. Her meticulous use of archival material allows her to construct a compelling narrative that spans from 1857, when Canadian authorities first set their sights on the western colonies of Rupert's Land and North-West Territories for territorial expansion and nation-building, to 1885, when the Canadian settler-colonial state used judicial and military force to suppress the North-West Resistance and claim complete sovereignty over the Indigenous lands and peoples of the prairies. Choquette's argument that Canadian expansionism was a project rooted in a particular strand of liberalism that she terms “colonial liberalism,” an ideology based on “the concept of improvement, which applied to both land and people” (p. 7), is a significant contribution to our understanding of Canada in its formative years and the contemporary legacies of settler colonialism. She shows how, during this period, Canada used the imperative to improve as a justification to appropriate Indigenous lands for agrarian capitalism and to mistreat Indigenous Peoples under the guise of moral protection and proper schooling.
By drawing on extensive literature from Indigenous and intersectional scholars, especially those in Canada, Choquette expands on ongoing debates concerning the nature of Canadian settler colonialism and the decolonial means of contesting it. She effectively exposes the violent ways Canada built a continental empire of the north via ideologies and institutions and challenges Canada's pervasive foundation myth of a peaceful genesis. Notably, her work reveals that the peaceable kingdom narrative, which stipulates a historical interpretation of the “gentle” absorption of Indigenous lands and the country's preference for peaceful diplomatic resolutions, often contrasted with US expansionism, sanitizes Canadian history by concealing the violence of Canadian colonization and its associated colonial liberal ideological structure.
Land and the Liberal Project as a whole accomplished in reflecting on building solidarities with Indigenous Peoples through decolonial scholarship. As Choquette details the thoughts and discussions of Canadian authorities in the nineteenth century, she informs the reader of the multilayered absences that allowed for the discursive and material violence against Indigenous Peoples. These absences, predominantly racial and gendered, lead readers to question the tenuous roots of the settler-colonial state’s claims to Indigenous lands that have continued to justify the institutionalized dispossession and dislocation of Indigenous Peoples. Her work could aid in resisting liberal notions of improvement that persist, in some form, in contemporary national and international development projects on Indigenous lands, globally maintaining what Australian historian Patrick Wolfe deems as the settler-colonial structure of Indigenous elimination (Wolfe, Reference Wolfe2006).
Aside from its scholarly rigour and well-written chapters, the book could benefit from contextualizing the shifting attitudes of Canadian authorities towards the prairies and their relatively sudden need to assert sovereignty over it with the broader political and economic changes caused by the nineteenth-century global restructuring of empires and nations. Further incorporating discussions such as the solidification of racialized subjectivities relative to the changing dynamics of Canada's staples economy due to global economic pressures (Evans, Reference Evans, Lafrance and Post2019) could elaborate on the expansionist mentality—or anxiety—of a developing Canadian state attempting to negotiate its relationship with an increasingly industrialized and liberalized international economy. That is to say that the book leaves much to wonder about the multidirectionality of the Canadian strand of colonial liberalism at a time of immense political and economic changes in Canada, the British Empire and the world.
The book also provides some evidence that the Canadian settler government initially encouraged Indigenous Peoples to adopt Western sensibilities relatively autonomously. Indeed, the 1857 Gradual Civilization Act, in its preamble, saw it desirable “to encourage the progress of Civilization amongst the Indian Tribes in [the Province of Canada],” primarily through economic incentives (pp. 34–36, 39). The 1858 Pennefather Report also recommended settlement patterns close to Indigenous Peoples to establish authority and incite by example a life of industry among them (pp. 36–42). While Canadian authorities also championed other genocidal tactics, these discussions on autonomous assimilation suggest that, in nineteenth-century Canadian settler society, there was a modicum of recognition, albeit wrongly, that Indigenous Peoples could or even desired to relinquish their Indigenous identities in favour of becoming self-realizing Canadian citizens.
However, the book nominally engages with this point. It only suggests that, more or less from the onset, the settler government assumed a racial imperative to eradicate Indigenous Peoples, whom it saw as a morally fallible and childlike race, in order to usurp their lands for capitalist and cultural gains. This viewpoint appears to be common in settler-colonial studies. That is not to say that the Canadian settler-colonial state did not endeavour to do this. Rather, my point denotes a perspective among nineteenth-century Canadian authorities that initially saw Indigenous Peoples as potential adults or adolescents rather than as a priori children. Although later events illustrated in the book would describe a marked departure from this perspective, it indicates a more complicated understanding within settler society concerning the assimilative capacity of Indigenous Peoples to become Canadian citizens by themselves.
In subsequent work, the concept of colonial liberalism could facilitate further discussion on reconciliation in Canada, namely by outlining the role of myths and ideologies in maintaining settler colonialism and questioning the effectiveness of reconciliation without addressing the ideological foundations of a society fundamentally built on discursive and material violence. Ultimately, Choquette succeeds in providing a convincing historical analysis of the foundations of Canadian colonization and its contemporary legacies. This book could be an excellent addition to undergraduate and graduate courses on Canadian development, history and politics, especially ones that wish to expand on the ideological structure that supported/s Canadian colonization domestically and abroad.
