Imperial Plots

Sarah Carter

• Publisher: University of Manitoba Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780887555305
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Frauen in der Geschichte

Sarah Carter's Imperial Plots: Women, Land, and the Spadework of British Colonialism on the Canadian Prairies examines the goals, aspirations, and challenges met by women who sought land of their own.

Supporters of British women homesteaders argued they would contribute to the "spade-work" of the Empire through their imperial plots, replacing foreign settlers and relieving Britain of its "surplus" women. Yet far into the twentieth century there was persistent opposition to the idea that women could or should farm: British women were to be exemplars of an idealized white femininity, not toiling in the fields. In Canada, heated debates about women farmers touched on issues of ethnicity, race, gender, class, and nation.

Despite legal and cultural obstacles and discrimination, British women did acquire land as homesteaders, farmers, ranchers, and speculators on the Canadian prairies. They participated in the project of dispossessing Indigenous people. Their complicity was, however, ambiguous and restricted because they were excluded from the power and privileges of their male counterparts.

Imperial Plots depicts the female farmers and ranchers of the prairies, from the Indigenous women agriculturalists of the Plains to the array of women who resolved to work on the land in the first decades of the twentieth century.

CHAPTER ONE

NARROWING OPPORTUNITIES FOR WOMEN

FROM THE INDIGENOUS FARMERS OF THE GREAT PLAINS TO THE EXCLUSIONS OF THE HOMESTEAD REGIME

Often in summer I rise at daybreak and steal out to the cornfields; and as I hoe the corn I sing to it, as we did when I was young. No one cares for our corn songs now.”1 These were the words of Hidatsa farmer Buffalo Bird Woman (Maxi’diwiac) around 1912, when she was a resident of the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation in North Dakota. There she farmed a small plot of corn according to ancient methods. By that time there were very few Indigenous people who retained knowledge of their crop production methods, and fewer still who continued to practise them. In Indigenous America, women had been the farmers wherever there was agriculture, including on the Great Plains and in what is now Ontario.2 They were far more than “gardeners”—the crops of women farmers of the Great Plains were the main economic drivers of their region’s economy. These same crops continue to play a major role in the economies of Canada and the United States.3 The example of the ancient women farmers of the Great Plains demonstrates that it was not natural or inevitable that women were to be virtually excluded from that occupation in Western Canada as intensive settlement and the homestead regime took root. Nor was it inevitable that Indigenous people too were almost completely excluded from the new agricultural economy; both processes took work.

This chapter begins with Plains women agriculturalists and ends with the narrow and confined opportunities for immigrant women to obtain land and practise agriculture that were in place in Western Canada by the mid-1870s. It argues that gendered and racialized visions were at the heart of ideas, policies, and laws about property rights and land apportionment and improvement in Western Canada. Some were borrowed from the United States while others reflected the practices of the British imperial world. Yet women’s access to land varied widely in these locations. Ideas, laws, and policies about which categories of women should have land and which could farm land were cultural constructs; they were not shared by all, as the example of homesteading single women in the U.S. West demonstrates. Canada made a very deliberate decision to depart from the U.S. model and ultimately excluded virtually all women but widows from the land grant of the homestead system.

The survey of the land into square homesteads covered and smothered Indigenous ways of living in the West, and it was intended to do so; those defined as “Indian” were denied the homestead land grant and instead relegated to reserves. The rights of immigrant women to homestead in Western Canada changed over the 1870s: single women could file on land until 1876, when the legislation was deliberately changed to exclude them. A significant number of women filed on land in Manitoba in the early 1870s and were more successful than their male counterparts at “proving up” and earning patents to their land. After 1876 there remained only one category of women who could homestead: widows with children. A short-lived opportunity to acquire a small grant of land was extended to all migrant women (regardless of marital status) in the late 1870s under the Forest Tree Culture legislation, but this window too was soon shut, as tree farming proved impractical on the prairies. In a few short years the Great Plains were transformed from a land where women had been the farmers to one where agriculture was overwhelmingly masculine, as was the ownership of land that was the foundation of this economy.

FIRST FARMERS

Agriculture long predated the arrival of Europeans on the northern Great Plains, and women were the farmers, raising corn, beans, squash, melons, pumpkins, and sunflowers. They excelled in the art of plant domestication, developing hardy, early maturing varieties of corn that could flourish even in the short growing season of the northern plains, and that could withstand hail and drought as well as early frost.4 Dried produce was made into a variety of products for families and communities, as well as for sale to neighbours and to European traders; the women were commercial farmers. For this time and place and available technology, this was large-scale agriculture and should not be dismissed or diminished as “horticulture.” It was also more than a trade or vocation; sacred songs and ceremonies were a central component that were critical to the work and success of the farmers and were handed down by women over generations. Indigenous women were deeply attached and strongly committed to caring for the land.

European observers wrestled with the sight of women farmers and traders; their comments generally contained a mixture of praise and disparagement. Describing the Arikara, one of the Upper Missouri village people, Scottish botanist John Bradbury wrote in 1810 that “the women, as is the custom with Indians, do all the drudgery, and are excellent cultivators … I have not seen even in the United States, any crop of Indian corn in finer order, or better managed than the corn of their villages.”5

The most northerly of the upper Missouri River village agricultural people have long been assumed to be the Arikara, Mandan, and Hidatsa, but there is archaeological evidence that the village agricultural complex reached farther north into Manitoba. There was an agricultural settlement at Lockport, north of present-day Winnipeg on the banks of the Red River, between 800 and 1700 CE. Archaeology has revealed storage pits, bison scapula hoes, grinding stones for milling seeds, charred corn kernels, and ceramic vessels at this site.6 There are strong archaeological indications of other early agricultural settlements in Manitoba, although much evidence has been lost because of intensive cultivation of the land. An agricultural earth-lodge settlement of Cree in the Touchwood Hills of present-day Saskatchewan in the early nineteenth century grew “considerable quantities of maize and potatoes.”7

Hidatsa farmer Maxi’diwiac was born about 1839 in an earth-lodge village along the Knife River in present-day North Dakota and moved to the new Like-a-Fishhook village established in 1845 by the remnants of the Mandan and Hidatsa. In the mid-1880s the people of that village, including Maxi’diwiac, were dispersed onto individual allotments on the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation. Maxi’diwiac passed along her knowledge of agriculture in meticulous detail to anthropologist Gilbert L. Wilson, who published Agriculture of the Hidatsa Indians: An Indian Interpretation in 1917 (later published as Buffalo Bird Woman’s Garden). Although Wilson’s texts supposedly present the actual words of Maxi’diwiac, this is likely not entirely the case, but her knowledge is there, conveyed in words and sentences that were chosen and written down by Wilson. She did not speak English, so her son Edward Goodbird translated and interpreted her words. The text that resulted from this collaboration provides the most detailed account of Indigenous agriculture ever published, and as Jeffery R. Hanson writes in a new introduction to the text, “One cannot read Buffalo Bird Woman’s Garden without marvelling at the array of technical skills which Hidatsa women developed and applied to everyday life: agriculture, architecture, construction, storage, crafts, and cooking constitute just a few of the dimensions of knowledge which Buffalo Bird Woman and other Hidatsa women contributed.”8 Men played virtually no role in farming aside from assisting with the harvest and cultivating tobacco.

Figure 2. In a field of corn and squash, “Sioux Woman,” the daughter-in-law of Hidatsa farmer Maxi’diwiac (Buffalo Bird Woman), demonstrates traditional farming methods of the Great Plains agriculturalists using a bison scapula hoe, 1912. Photo by Gilbert L. Wilson. Minnesota Historical Society, 9448-A.

Maxi’diwiac explained that farmers preferred the bottomlands of the Missouri, where the soil was soft and easy to work, rather than the open prairies, where the soil was hard and dry. Before the introduction of iron implements, they could not have broken the prairie sod, as they used tools fashioned from the shoulder blades of bison. By Maxi’diwiac’s time, iron hoes and axes were generally used rather than bison scapula hoes and wooden digging sticks, and her grandmother Turtle was one of the last women to use these traditional implements. Her hoe was precious; she kept it under her bed and “when any of the children of the household tried to get it out to look at it, she would cry, ‘Let that hoe alone; you will break it.’”9

Farmers had individual plots, although there were also family plots worked with other women family members, particularly daughters. Maxi’diwiac’s mother died when Maxi’diwiac was six, but she had three other women she called “mother,” sisters of her mother and wives of her father. She was also very close to her grandmother Turtle. These women worked their fields together.10 To prepare a new plot the land was first cleared, a task the men might assist with. The land was then burned, which “left a good, loose soil.”11 Every spring once the frost was out of the ground, the fields were dug up: “Every foot must be turned up and loosened with the hoe—a slow and toilsome operation.”12

Most of Maxi’diwiac’s narrative is devoted to the intricacies of corn cultivation. She provides a detailed account of the nine varieties of corn raised in her village, including their uses and characteristics. Corn planting started in May and could continue well into June, depending on the variety of seed. Hidatsa women were up before sunrise in planting season, preparing the hills they returned to each year. Of the varieties of corn that were grow, flint was the hardiest, as it could mature in just ten weeks and escape the early frosts of the northern plains.13

Platforms or stages were built, where girls and women came to watch the crops, scare off predators, and sing. Maxi’diwiac explained, “We cared for our corn in those days as we would care for a child; for we Indian people loved our gardens, just as a mother loves her children; and we thought that our growing corn liked to hear us sing, just as children like to hear their mother sing.”14 Watching began in earnest in August as the corn ripened. The watchers’ songs were usually love songs, as young men of the village would visit the platforms where the girls were stationed.

The corn was threshed in booths, under drying stages. The finest and longest ears of corn were braided, and from these the seed for the next spring was selected, using only the kernels in the centre of the cob for seed. Enough seed for two years was gathered from corn, squash, beans, sunflower, or tobacco, in case of a poor crop the next year. A family’s corn supply usually lasted until August of the next year. Supplies were stored in deep cache pits, dug by the women and accessed through ladders. The caches held not only dried corn but dried meat and pemmican and dried wild produce, including berries and “pommes blanches,” or prairie turnips. Each family might have up to four cache pits. Fur trader, explorer, and writer Alexander Henry wrote in his journal in 1804 that “so numerous about the village are these pits that it is really dangerous for a stranger to stir out after dark.”15

Women raised and dried produce for their families and also for sale. Their villages were visited by neighbouring Plains people, who traded their buffalo robes, skin, and meat for corn and other produce. Sometimes the village people travelled out to the plains to trade. Henry described Mandan women preparing for a trade fair: “We observed the women all busy, taking their hidden treasures and making preparations for the approaching fair. I was surprised to see what quantities they had on hand: I am very confident they had enough to serve them at least twelve months without a supply of flesh or anything else.”16 In 1804 Henry accompanied a party of Mandan and Hidatsa to meet the Cheyenne and Arapaho. Henry wrote that the women “had their horses loaded with corn, beans, etc. themselves and children astraddle all over, like farmers going to the mill.” They exchanged their produce for “leather, robes, smocks—as if at a country fair.”17

The agricultural people of the plains also established trade with Euro-American/Canadian traders and explorers. Henry wrote that “we purchased sweet corn, beans, meal and various other trifles. Having bought all we required, which was 3 horse loads, we were plagued by the women and girls who continued to bring bags and dishes full of different kinds of produce.”18 American explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark in 1804 bought huge quantities of produce from the Mandan, noting on one occasion that “a number of squaws and men dressed like squaws brought corn to trade for small articles with the men.”19 Describing the trade in corn, geologist Ferdinand V. Hayden wrote that the women of one village sold from 500 to 800 bushels in a season to the American Fur Company and that the trade was “carried on by the women, who bring the corn by panfuls and the squash in strings and receive in exchange knives, hoes, combs, beads, paint etc., also tobacco, ammunition, and other useful articles for their husbands. In this way each family is supplied with all the smaller articles needed for a comfortable existence; and though the women perform all the labor, they are compensated by having their full share of the profits.”20

Many ceremonies and rituals, both public and private, were involved in achieving successful crops. The cultivated plots were sacred and thought to have souls that had to be cared for like children. The Goose society of the Mandan and Hidatsa, made up of women farmers, was devoted to the rites required to ensure good crops, including fertility and rainmaking rites.21 The largest and most important ceremony of the society was held when the first water birds arrived; it was believed that corn spirits went south each fall with the water birds, where they were cared for by Old-Woman-Who-Never-Dies.22 Respected members of the Goose society were believed to have corn spirits in th...

Table of contents

• LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
• LIST OF TABLES
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS
• NOTE ON TERMINOLOGY
• INTRODUCTION
• CHAPTER ONE
• CHAPTER TWO
• CHAPTER THREE
• CHAPTER FOUR
• CHAPTER FIVE
• CHAPTER SIX
• CHAPTER SEVEN
• CONCLUSION
• NOTES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY