Interview with Brian Gettler, JHI 6-Month Faculty Research Fellowship Recipient

Brian Gettler is an Associate Professor in the Department of Historical Studies. He was recently awarded a 6-month Faculty Research Fellowship at the JHI for his project, "Fiduciary Empire: The Origins of the Indian Fund in Canada, 1796–1897."

1. What questions guide your research on the early development of the Indian Fund in Canada?

The project is based in a series of questions of various orders. Most fundamentally, I want to understand the origins of the so-called Indian Fund, the collection of monies still held today by the Crown in trust for First Nations. While several scholars have touched on aspects of the development of this fiduciary relationship, none have done so systematically and, perhaps more surprisingly, none have even established a date at which it began. The identity and aims of those who made early proposals along these lines are also at the heart of the study. Was this a purely colonialist enterprise, one through which the state took control of Indigenous resources and used them for its own end? Or did First Nations also contribute to imagining a system whereby their lands might support them in novel ways? In fact, we already know that Indigenous peoples had been thinking along these lines for decades by the time the Indian Fund emerged, though their management of community funds and plans to generate further monies through land leases or sales aimed at securing their communities’ well-being for future generations, not at generating resources for the Department of Indian Affairs to control. This suggests key questions around how bureaucrats spent money and how this differed from what First Nations might have done had they been free to control community funds themselves. Finally, I want to understand how the funds themselves were managed. Like other monies held by the state, expenditure from the Indian Fund was supposed to occur only from interest on the fund. For this to work, the capital constituted through the sale and leasing of resources had to be invested in interest-bearing bonds. Preliminary evidence suggests that while civil servants invested some of these funds in the safest investments of the day—notably British public debt—they also invested heavily in colonial stock, some of which failed to generate dividends and even to repay the initial capital investment. Even when these investments proved lucrative, Indigenous monies served to finance the very same colonial infrastructure and institutions—roads, canals, railroads, courts, universities, and so on—that encouraged further dispossession.

2. How does this project relate to your previous research?

In many ways this is a continuation of my book, Colonialism’s Currency: Money, State, and First Nations in Canada, 1820-1950 (McGill-Queen’s UP, 2020). However, where this earlier work focused primarily on the ideological apparatus that allowed Indigenous dispossession at the hands of the Crown and the projection of First Nations onto the money as a means of claiming national political space, the new project looks to analyze the ways in which the settler colonial state used money it controlled but did not own to further its own goals, often in direct conflict with the best interests of Indigenous peoples as they themselves understood them.

3. How did the creation and administration of the Indian Fund reflect broader economic and political objects of the Canadian federal government in the nineteenth century?

The Indian Fund embodied both the conviction of settler officials that Indigenous peoples could not be trusted to manage their own financial resources and the notion that through targeted interventions settler society could “improve” or “civilize” First Nations. However, the origins of the fund lay as much in Indigenous attempts to control their own destiny—attempts that the state resisted in the courts and through its own policy and practice. The Indian Fund also reflected the Canadian government’s objectives in that it helped finance infrastructure and institutions while also upholding colonial credit in times of international financial crisis, as in the Panics of 1837 and 1857.

4. How will this fellowship from the JHI support your research project?

Most fundamentally, the JHI fellowship will give me time and space to delve in to the archive. Over the past few years, several undergraduate and graduate research assistants have assisted me in gathering a mass of archival evidence. However, our efforts have been focused almost entirely on the collection of material rather than on its analysis. The fellowship will give me the time to begin this critical work. It will also allow me to conduct exploratory research in archival collections other than those at the heart of my project. I plan to work on the question of connections between fiduciary policy in Canada and the United States, where a remarkably similar system springs at roughly the same time though in the absence of any obvious, direct communication.

5. What kinds of archives or other historical sources will support your investigation of the multi-layered uses of the Indian Fund? How do you access these resources?

At the heart of the project is the Indian Department fonds held at Library and Archives Canada (LAC). This collection is massive, including some 350 volumes of records of interest for the period, primarily composed of incoming and outgoing correspondence but also including numerous volumes of accounting data of different sorts. Nearly all of these records from the period are digitized and freely available online. Having identified key moments and topics in Indian Department documents, the research team will consult other LAC collections including the Colonial Office fonds, to trace high-level discussion of Indian Department funding, treaties, and land policy; the Executive Council of Upper, Lower and the Province of Canada, including, notably, orders in council; and the Department of Finance fonds and the Auditor General of Canada fonds, as both include account books and correspondence related to trust fund management. The Crown Lands Department fonds at the Archives of Ontario also includes statements on the revenue generated by the sale of First Nations lands. Numerous published primary sources will also be of use, including notably the reports of several nineteenth-century commissions of inquiry into Indigenous affairs.

6. What guidance do you have for other historians and researchers who want to access archives and historical documents related to Canada’s history of colonization and infrastructure development?

I would recommend consulting the website of Library and Archives Canada, which contains a staggering number of digitized collections, especially for the nineteenth century. I would also have a look at Héritage Canadiana which includes quite a bit more material from Library and Archives Canada and Canadiana including a massive repository of digitized print material. I would also speak with someone who has worked in these collections as their organization may not be apparent to novice researchers.

Images: 

1. Receiver General's Office, General Ledger, 1848–1858, Library and Archives Canada, RG19, vol. 2013, p. 121.
2. Indian Department, Trust Fund Ledger, 1860–1864, Library and Archives Canada, RG10, vol. 1004, f. 16, reel C-9061.
3. Copy of a Report of a Committee of the Executive Council recommending "a loan to the University [of McGill College] of $40,000 from the uninvested monies belonging to the Indian Fund," 14 June 1860, LAC, RG10, vol. 711, p. 210, reel C-13410.