- March 2, 2017
2017 Stapleford Lecture
Dr. Sarah Carter, University of Alberta
The Gender of Homesteading: Women and the Contest for Land on the Canadian Prairies
Date
Thursday, March 2, 2017
7:00 p.m.
Location
ED 193—Education Building
Main Campus, University of Regina
Canada’s land laws denied most women the right to homestead. Legal and cultural obstacles and discrimination ensured that women acquired only a tiny fraction of the land that was thrown open for settlement following treaties with First Nations. Settler women were complicit in the dispossession of Indigenous people but they faced gendered patterns of disadvantage; they were both privileged and restricted. They were tenacious and inventive in their strategies to obtain land, but met with little success. Yet despite the barriers, there were female homesteaders, farmers, and ranchers on the prairie. Dr. Carter’s talk aims to bring some of these forgotten women to light.
Dr. Carter FRSC is Professor and Henry Marshall Tory Chair in the Department of History and Classics, and the Faculty of Native Studies at the University of Alberta. She specializes in the history of settler colonialism in Western Canada and in comparative colonial and borderlands perspectives. Her books include The Importance of Being Monogamous (2008), Aboriginal People and Colonizers of Western Canada (1999), and Lost Harvests: Prairie Indian Reserve Farmers and Government Policy (1990).
