The White Man's Gonna Getcha: The Colonial Challenge to the Crees in Quebec (review)

The White Man's Gonna Getcha, the title of Toby Morantz's ethnohistorical account of life among the Eastern James Bay Cree during the first half of the twentieth century, refers to an expression Cree parents use to keep their children in line. Central to the distinction Crees draw between themselves and whites is the mythical figure of the pwaat, an antisocial pseudohuman creature living on the fringes of society. The pwaat, however, is a complex and contradictory character, simultaneously possessing positive and negative qualities: those of both partner and exploiter. Morantz sees this contradictory image as emblematic of a deeply ambivalent relationship between Crees and Euro-Canadians—especially during the twentieth century, when the governments of Canada and Quebec began to assert and then consolidate their control over the region.

In previous work (e.g., Francis and Morantz 1983), Morantz argued that the pre-twentieth-century fur trade in James Bay cannot be understood as a form of colonial domination. Rather, the Cree retained their autonomy throughout the fur trade era and were able to dictate in significant ways the terms of that trade as well as of Cree-white relations generally. In the present book, she examines the next phase of Cree–white relations in James Bay: the twentieth-century rise of colonial-style relations of domination. But, she argues, even during this period of colonialist expansion, Cree relations with powerful Euro-Canadian outsiders—much like their relations with the mythical pwaat—were complex and ambivalent.

Following Comaroff and Comaroff 1991, Morantz refuses to see colonialism as a simple story of subjugation by an expanding and monolithic state. Rather, Canadian colonialism developed differently in different regions and always unevenly. She uses the term "bureaucratic colonialism" (a modified version of what the Comaroffs dub "state colonialism") to describe the particular form of colonialism that took hold in James Bay, a form characterized by the all-pervasive, yet neglectful, intervention by state bureaucrats in "every institution that profoundly touched Cree society" (177). Rather than viewing colonial relations as the product of a coherent plan consciously imposed on the Cree by state bureaucrats, however, she sees the relations as arising almost epiphenomenally out of Cree interactions with the often-contradictory practices, policies, and agendas of particular Hudson's Bay Company (HBC) traders, missionaries, and government officials in a very particular set of environmental and historical circumstances (themselves often the products of earlier interactions).

Drawing on the documentary record and oral histories recorded by anthropologists and others, Morantz traces the effects on the region of epidemics and famine, improved transportation and communication technologies, missionization, and the restructuring of the fur trade. All of these events gave the federal and provincial governments increased access to the region and justification for imposing on the Cree an array of programs and services, including schools, social assistance and transfer payments, health care, and law enforcement. Often woefully underfunded, these "pale versions of southern institutions" (176) nevertheless dramatically increased government presence in the region and undermined Cree autonomy. But, Morantz argues, these programs were not simply imposed on a helpless Cree population. Rather, Crees often embraced these changes and frequently played an important role in their creation. Among the most extended (and compelling) examples in the book concerns the establishment of beaver sanctuaries and registered traplines throughout the region during the 1930s and 1940s (158–75). Although Morantz acknowledges that these institutions served to subject the Cree to the authority of state bureaucrats, she notes that the Cree—faced with starvation resulting from severely depleted animal populations—nevertheless enthusiastically embraced them. And further, although the sanctuaries were the product of power struggles among HBC, federal, and provincial authorities, they were at the same time modeled on the...