White gift: the potlatch and the rhetoric of Canadian colonialism, 1868-1936 ...

• Main Author: Bracken, Christopher Joseph
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: University of British Columbia 2009
• Subjects: First Nations
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.14288/1.0088031; https://doi.library.ubc.ca/10.14288/1.0088031

This dissertation examines the irony of Canada's discourse on "Indian affairs" by reinterpreting the postal literature generated around the banning of the potlatch in British Columbia from 1868 to 1936. To explain the logic behind the antipotlatch law, the first section, "Folding," examines a set of texts which draw an absolute limit between Europe and the coastal First Nations. The gift is the privileged sign of this limit: it divides the societies which potlatch from a Euro-Canadian society which claims to be a system of exchange. Ironically, the moment such a limit is put into writing, it folds together everything it sets apart. The second section, "Giving," situates the antipotlatch literature within the context of this ironic fold. By banning the potlatch, Canada aimed to Europeanize the coastal First Nations: to collapse them into the white collectivity even though that collectivity defined itself by excluding them from its borders. To kill the potlatch was to erase the gift, the mark distinguishing ...