The central argument of this ambitious book is that nation building in the Canadian northwest involved imposing the model of monogamous, lifelong, intraracial, heterosexual marriage on the varied population of this territory. Drawing on sources such as administrative and court records, missionary publications, newspapers, and personal papers, Sarah Carter demonstrates how Anglo-Canadian leaders saw this particular form of marriage—and especially the gender order that it created—as key to making this region stable and prosperous.

While this work owes much to scholarship by Nancy Cott, Stephanie Coontz, and Ann Laura Stoler, several aspects make this work and the Canadian context it describes uniquely significant. The remarkably diverse population of Western Canada followed a variety of marriage traditions. Anglo-Canadian settlers from the East were the most likely to accept the government's particular marriage standard, though even they resisted state authority, particularly due to their desire to divorce. Within the population of First Nations people, different ethnic groups had different approaches to monogamy and the dissolution of relationships. Mormon immigrants brought a tradition of polygamy into the region. Contact between Mormons and aboriginal people risked undermining the colonial agenda of monogamous marriage. Authorities had occasionally permitted polygamous arrangements among indigenous people, but Mormons, who began to settle in southern Alberta in 1887, protested this double standard. This prompted a renewed crackdown on polygamy among aboriginal people in the late 1880s. Adding to the complex social mix were Métis (who owed their existence to a tradition of interracial marriage); Ukrainians (of concern to authorities who believed Ukrainian women to be unfeminine and who feared Ukrainian marriages were sometimes forced); Dukhobors (who lived communally and rejected any civil regulation of their relationships); and scatterings of Chinese, Quakers, Arab Muslims, and utopian settlement groups.

A second unique aspect of the Western Canadian story is the near impossibility of divorce in this era. The Canadian government's steadfast insistence that divorce petitions be heard and debated in the national parliament produced the intended result of making divorce expensive, humiliating, and rare. Canadian leaders believed that this arrangement protected marriage while also reinforcing Canada's distinct identity from the United States, where divorce was far easier. Indeed, the immigration of Americans with liberal attitudes toward divorce represented yet another threat to the marriage/social order. Divorce was particularly dangerous because it risked undermining gender arrangements by allowing more female autonomy. Without the option of divorce, some women found themselves in desperate and vulnerable situations— forced to remain with violent spouses or faced with raising children alone due to abandonment.

One of the most subtle but effective means by which the colonial government imposed their marriage ideal on First Nations people was by recognizing aboriginal marriage but not aboriginal divorce. Aboriginal cultures generally allowed for divorce and remarriage, and they chafed at efforts by the government to ban these practices. Carter stakes out the position that formally sanctioned relationships between First Nations individuals constituted marriages—a position that puts her at odds with some other scholars. The fact that the state defined such unions as marriage is the significant issue here, and arguing whether or not these relationships were really marriages serves to perpetuate the myth that marriage is a stable and universal concept. More important, in my opinion, is the fact that colonial authorities conflated aboriginal ceremony with law. On the one hand, giving such ceremonies legal weight offered aboriginal people a kind of cultural validity and a degree of self-determination. But on the other hand, as this book aptly demonstrates, colonial authorities gained significant power by labeling certain rituals “marriage ceremonies”—literally colonizing such ceremonies to benefit the agenda of the Anglo-Canadian state. More critical analysis of the logic and implications of conflating such ceremonies with the civil institution of marriage would have added to this work.

This well-designed book features over a dozen photographs that enhance the text. The text, however, suffers from some typographical errors and editing problems, not the least of which is the overuse of scare quotes and quotes without in-text attribution. At times such quotes lead the author astray, such as with the persistent misuse of the phrase “benefit of clergy” (32, 33, 65).

The strengths of this book far outweigh these details, however. Carter does an excellent job of connecting this study to contemporary debates about marriage and gender. This work offers a case study in how claims by Anglo-European imperialists of aiding women's liberation masked a reality in which women lost power when forced to abandon indigenous traditions—a claim used again recently in service of imperialism in Iraq and Afghanistan. The author also points out that recent opponents of same-sex marriage in Canada have suggested that the “one man, one woman” definition of marriage is not only part of traditional European culture but was also central to Canada's aboriginal traditions. This work correctly counters that this model was alien to many cultures in Canada, and the imposition of this Anglo-European marriage and gender framework was neither easy nor universally beneficial.