Research - Dr. Jean Manore
Dr. Jean Manore
Department of History
- Aboriginal Treaty Rights and historical memory: Treaty #9 and the process of colonization. The First Nations, of what is now called northern and northwestern Ontario, signed a treaty with the federal and provincial governments in 1905 and 1906. While the First Nations have an oral history of the negotiations which indicate that the treaty was simply one of ‘peace and friendship,’ the federal government believes that something much more was represented in the treaty’s terms. However, its corporate memory does not include an historical understanding of what those terms would have meant at the time of signing. This research will explore the context under which the terms were drafted by the federal and Ontario governments and thus elucidate the governments’ understanding of the treaty negotiation process at the turn of the 20th century. Ideas such as the “King’s protection,” “bounty and benevolence,” and “obeying the law” will be discussed, as well as the hunting and fishing clauses, education and reserves.
- Aboriginal Treaty Rights and cultural colonization: The Technologies of Treaty #9. The purpose of this research is to build on the conclusions drawn from the first project and trace, through various technologies such as the pen, the canoe, and the survey map, how the idea of the treaty being a document for colonization came to be disseminated to the broader provincial and Canadian public.
- Aboriginal Treaty Rights and state formation: Treaties #3 and #9 and the role of surveyors and engineers in the expansion of the liberal state. This research will examine Ian McKay’s seminal article on his “Liberal Order Framework” and how it affected Canadian understandings of Aboriginal title to land. It focuses on surveyors, who acting on behalf of the state, went into Aboriginal homelands and transformed them, through their maps and reports, into resource hinterlands ripe for development.
