Despite the recent proliferation of work around the subject of residential schools, few
analyses have deconstructed the concept of "civilizing the Indian" which animated the
schools' agendas. This thesis examines the discourse of "civilization" as it was expressed
and enacted in two missions in late nineteenth-century British Columbia. Archival primary
sources and published secondary sources are drawn on to provide an understanding of what
"civilization" meant to Euro-Canadians, specifically missionaries, and how it was to be
"taught" to the indigenous peoples they encountered. Colonial images and photographs, in
particular, reveal how missionaries constructed a vivid and compelling contrast between
"civilization" and "savagery." An intersectional framework is employed to highlight the
ways in which ideas about "race," class, gender and sexuality were essential elements of the
"civilizing" project. The goal of the thesis is to show how "civilizing the Indian" was
premised not only on a specifically hierarchical construction of Whites versus Natives, but
also intersecting binaries of men versus women, normal productive heterosexuality versus
deviant degenerate sexuality, bourgeois domesticity versus lower class depravity, and others.
Ultimately, it is argued, the discourse of "civilization" regulated both the "colonized" and the
"colonizers" as it secured the hierarchical foundations of empire and nation.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:BVAU.2429/11294 |
| Date | 05 1900 |
| Creators | Greenwell, Kim |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Relation | UBC Retrospective Theses Digitization Project [http://www.library.ubc.ca/archives/retro_theses/] |
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