Mawani, Legal Geographies of Aboriginal Segregations

The article is structured around the relation between space and race, and specifically spatial segregation, in the 19th
Century as a central aspect in the consolidation of modernity and of colonial domination. If separation of white and native populations was a pattern in different colonial contexts, the author points to the difference between the practices of exclusion in dependent nations in which the extraction of natural resources was the main point of operation of power relations, from thesocio -spatial relations established in settler colonies, in which the emphasis is on the expansion of white residency. In this last cases therelation between practices of isolation, tha formation of racialized identities and the law appear to be directly connected in constituting white dominance. This is what she explores in the formation of the city of Victoria (BC) as a site of white supremacy that implied the creation of the Songhee reservation as a means of spatializing difference in a
distant place. The production of race is central in this analysis as it produces colonial power and has as effects theconstitution of white and indigenous subjectivities. This was made possible through the use of law, and not through military occupation, in a disputed process between indigenous, white settlers and indigenous people. It s the frame of legality that makes it difficult to critique violence implicated in this process. If initially the population of Victoria was an intermingled group of a majority of indigenous people and a few white fur traders, the creation of theSonghee reserve is an initial strategy for outcasting indigenous out of the city, (in the opposite shore and across a bridge) but still in some proximity. The discourse legitimating segregation points to hygienic and moral reasons for racial separation. Indigenous were thus confined to a reduced space
they had to share with a diversity of other indigenous groups, and their life gets subjected to disciplinarian measurements such as having to avoid the city as much astehy can and being baned to be there at all at night (because of alluded alcoholism and prostitution problems), in sum excluding difference form colonizers spaces. This techniques were then producing racially homogeneous population that turned to be a spatial categorization that were part of the bureaucratic rationalization of the city, by a process of creation of the "empty" spaces the colonizers imagined to be occupying [cfr argentina y los desiertos].
Latter the white settlers considered the reserve to be too close to the city and a source of problems so there was an intensified pressure to remove it. An anxiety that not only made visible the racial distinction but also produced it. It took 60 years to the colonial administrators to do this as their concern with the rightfulness of this eviction prevented them to make it effective. The space of the reserve becomes then a signifier of racial disorder, a place of corrupt and savage indians in constant danger of violent explosion against the civilized whites. In regards to this images the space of the reserve becomes a material reality of
segregation of all indigenous "Space are not fixed, dead or undialectical, as Edward Soja Explains, but on the contrary have an important relationship with the people seen as interior and exterior to that space" (182) In sum the constition of Victoria and its citizenship was made through projecting all that hites were not, to the Songhee peole and to the space of he reserve . Again this negation was unfolded in the matreiality of the daly forms of colonial intervensions, tehnologies of degregation, and in the end the enforced removal. In this dinamic "officials used the law to envison and constitute theri own whiteness and civility" (???), however this was not uncontestedbut took several years of debate. The songhees both resited eviction and ignored the presures to make them leave the area. Official were determined to get Songhee agreement in order to justify their embrace of liberal ideals. But agreement does not imply there was consent , rather the ideals of justice and equality raced by the discourse of law were produced on the base of racialized notions and thus was a form of producing unequal relations between colonizers and colonized. Eviction was justified by this -supposedly- consensus, and was thought as a necessary step in the civilizatory process. "Eurocanadians colonists envisioned their own subjectivities and their civic imagineries against the bodies and spaces of the indigenous inhabitants. The contradiction between the forced exclusion of natives and the liberal values of fairness and rationality was reconciliated by the legitimation of the law, and by framing it as the indigenous best interest, while letting white authorities and residents constitute their subjectivities as free, rational, fair." (page??) This of course neglected the violence of land dispossession, destruction of possibilities of mantaining a cultural habit, and teh ongoing social, political and economic marginality effected.


The photograph is form a "Residential school group photograph, Regina, Saskatchewan" taken form http://www.heyokamagazine.com/HEYOKA.6.LouieLawless.htm is not the same as what the text's case, but gives (me) a picture of other related institution.