Letters to the Editor

This issue relates to Ann Laura Stoler's recent article in the JAH (December 2001), which explores how "intimate domains" shape both the "making of racial categories" and the process of "imperial rule." The argument is wide-ranging and provocative. It interrogates comparative history as lived experience and as method, asking pertinent questions about the politics and mechanics of transnational/colonial relations. Stoler places at the center of her concerns the ways in which colonialism's dynamics encompassed the spheres of intimacy associated with domestic life, education, and sexuality.

To the Editor:

Colonialism, as Ann Laura Stoler and Frederick Cooper have pointed out, is often a multilayered process resisting "Manichean" binaries of the metropolitian masters, on the one hand, and the colonized subjects of the imperial periphery, on the other. Along with the structuring of subordination also come complicating subtleties, including histories of close geographical neighbors in which the dominant and the less powerful necessarily interact along various axes, some of which cut through doubled internal experiences of colonization.

This is most emphatically the case in terms of the United States and Canada. Especially since the 1960s, it has been commonplace for Canadians to critique the ways in which the United States has "taken over" their culture, institutions of higher learning, natural resources, and material life. Such responses to the hegemony of the "Americans" and the peculiarities of the "Canadians" may well err in an overly nationalistic sense of indignation, but there are grains of truth (economic, cultural, and intellectual) in these views.

Certainly academic writing in the United States reflects this. Years ago Ruth Roach Pierson noted in a U.S.-based journal that Canadian women's history contained layers of colonization, one of which was its "colonization" by U.S. women's history. Canadians probably nodded in agreement; U.S. scholars simply did not notice. In various "new" history fields since the 1970s, Canadian graduate students have been required to read extensively in literatures produced in the United States; no such reciprocal imperatives order Ph.D. reading lists in graduate schools south of the border.

Yet as Stoler explores "Comparisons" of "North American History and (Post) Colonial Studies," she largely ignores the extensive land mass now boundaried as the Canadian nation-state. To be sure, Stoler incorporates a phrase from Sylvia Van Kirk's book on the fur trade, Many Tender Ties (1980), and cites this important text. But literatures produced in Canada relevant to the argument, including extensive writing on internal colonization and First Nations, are not cited, nor are the issues they raise grappled with. One might argue that much of the historiography on Canadian colonialism and Aboriginal peoples from the 1600s to 1900 does not so much address nation-states as it focuses on empires, both European and Native. It could well confirm Stoler's views, but it might complicate them as well. Stoler comments directly on métissage in the Indies, India, the Caribbean, and the U.S. southwest, but the important history of the Western Canadian métis is unnoticed. From the rebellions of the nineteenth century (1869 and 1885) to ongoing land claims and contemporary demands for the restitution of Louis Riel's reputation, the métis are of central importance to the difference that is at the heart of being Canadian: native, French, and English.

The erasure of this Canadian writing and what it addresses matters. Different "Indian" policies vis-à-vis reserves and the legal status of women, for instance, helped to produce variations in the histories of Native peoples in what became constituted as Canada and the United States. Stoler cites works on U.S. Indian boarding schools, but her discussion of "educating for empire" makes no mention of the Canadian residential school system. Recent books by John Milloy and J. R. Miller plot the changing colonial strategies used in the deliberate construction of a disciplined, morally governed Native population. The ties that First Nations children lived with in this history were often not so tender, and unraveling their knots is central to contemporary Canadian race relations and political engagement with the past. . . .