Imperial Plots: Women, Land, and the Spadework of British Colonialism on the Canadian Prairies by Sarah Carter (review)

Sarah Carter has established an excellent reputation as a historian of life on the Canadian Prairies. She has built her career around researching and interpreting the experiences of Indigenous peoples as well as those of immigrant women who settled in the region. Imperial Plots: Women, Land, and the Spadework of British Colonialism on the Canadian Prairies is Carter's latest contribution to these intertwined histories. As with her previous work, this book is a meticulously researched, carefully contemplated exploration of power dynamics in the colonial context.

The starting point for this book is Prairie land. Carter contemplates the history of the land's relationship with Indigenous communities prior to the arrival of Europeans, and she finds that for the most part it was Indigenous women who worked the land for farmed produce. Carter reviews sources on the farming practices of the women of the Upper Missouri area and beyond, and she shows that farming was undertaken on a large scale, with extensive trading fully integrated into their seasonal activities. She illustrates how farming was not merely productive work for the women who engaged in its activities but, rather, a deeply cultural experience involving spiritual significance. She also shows how after European observers arrived on the scene they endeavoured to rhetorically transform these women's agricultural work and knowledge into "gardening" – a form of engaging with the land that could be understood as peripheral to the serious work of community survival.

As Carter demonstrates, the rhetorical categorization of Indigenous women's farming on the Prairies as relatively insignificant fit with a pattern in European representations of farming as men's work. It was a pattern that served to exclude women more generally from owning Prairie land after European settlement began in earnest, in spite of immigrant women's concerted efforts to become landowners in their own rights. After establishing the historical precedent of women's farming activities on the Prairies in her introductory discussion about Indigenous cultivation practices (there was evidently nothing "natural" about women's exclusion from farming), Carter turns to a close examination of these immigrant women's efforts and the responses they received from government. Of particular interest to Carter are the ways in which British women tried to carve out for themselves the same land ownership privileges as their menfolk.

Throughout the period under study in this book (the mid-i800s to the Great Depression), women were legally permitted to purchase land, though they were looked at as gender deviants if they did so while they were single; however, the right to homestead was increasingly denied to female settlers unless they could prove that they fit a fairly narrow definition of "head of a household." As Carter shows, the arguments that British women used to justify land entitlement, and the strategies devised to acquire and manage farms regardless of the legal impediments, changed over time in response to the specific roadblocks that were established in their way. At base, though, they all relied upon the presumption that colonial authorities would interpret examples of individual British women's successes as evidence of their capacity and that they could be encouraged to buy into the logic of having British women assist in this form of colonization. Canadian officials in the Prairie context proved to be remarkably resistant to evidence and arguments alike.

As Carter shows, there were ultimately very few women of British background who were able to engage in the dispossession of Indigenous lands in the Canadian Prairies in their own names. But it was not for the want of trying. Carter's study is a rich and insightful exploration of the individuals, the organizations, and the socio-cultural dynamics involved in these women's struggles to legally and literally do the spadework of British colonialism on the Canadian Prairies.