Hybrid Identities in Canada's Red River Colony

The Canadian Geographer/Le Geographe Canadien, Vol. 51, No. 2, pp. 186-201, 2007

16 Pages Posted: 10 Feb 2009 Last revised: 4 Aug 2009

Date Written: February 9, 2009

Abstract

Scholarship on Canada's Metis women has been informed largely by their central economic and reproductive roles in the British fur trade in North America. This article moves beyond these representations and focuses on Victorian discourses of race, class, gender and sexuality in a reconceptualization of women's lives and experiences in territory. The article's primary aim is to evaluate the concept of female agency in Canada's Red River Colony (now Winnipeg, Manitoba) in 1850 and 1863. I use case studies of two unrelated lawsuits, Foss v. Pelly and The Queen v. Corbett, involving two differently situated Metis women. My central argument is that British attempts to translate English law over colonized space provided the 'Other' with a space of resistance and created hybrid socio-legal and cultural forms. My approach questions Western assumptions about discrete colonizer/colonized identities and power relations in those identities, maps the impact of law on social and cultural change in the fur trade and asks whether the Red River Colony was a hybrid place.

Keywords: Hybridity, Agency, Women, The Metis, Geography

Suggested Citation

FitzGerald, Sharron A. and FitzGerald, Sharron A., Hybrid Identities in Canada's Red River Colony (February 9, 2009). The Canadian Geographer/Le Geographe Canadien, Vol. 51, No. 2, pp. 186-201, 2007 , Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=1340069

Sharron A. FitzGerald (Contact Author)

University of Hull ( email )

Cottingham Road
Hull, Great Britain HU6 7RX
United Kingdom

HOME PAGE: http://www2.hull.ac.uk/science/geography/staff/fitzgerald.aspx

University of Hull ( email )

Department of Geography
Cottingham Road
Hull, HU6 7RX
United Kingdom

HOME PAGE: http://www2.hull.ac.uk/science/geography/staff/fitzgerald.aspx

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