![]() This article attempts to locate the process of dispossessing Aboriginal land outside the normative framework imposed by the law. ![]() This particularity of the Indian land policy in Quebec has given rise to divergent interpretations that rest on the same implicit premise that a structuring legal framework existed, which, when reconstituted, gives meaning to history, either by legitimizing the unilateral dispossession process or by stigmatizing it. ![]() The British, followed by the Canadian government, adopted a policy of unilateral land appropriation in that area, dispossessing the Aboriginals without reliance on a treaty system. This policy, made official in the Royal Proclamation of 1763, was implemented in an extensive portion of the Canadian territory, but not in the Saint Lawrence Valley, heart of the former French empire in America, and what is now the province of Quebec. "At the conquest of New France, the British had already built a long tradition of purchasing Aboriginal land. Moreover, the actions of Lord Durham’s administration and the demands of these eight Patriotes raise important questions about colonial independence and Patriote efforts to ensure that Canadiens, as white non-British British subjects, received those political rights that white, bourgeois, and British men in England and its empire were increasingly demanding: specifically, the right to govern themselves. The Patriotes’ struggle to abolish irresponsible government, which led to their banishment to Bermuda in July 1838, reminds us that Lower Canada was part and parcel of social, cultural, and political changes that were taking the British empire by storm in the 1830s. ![]() This article traces the process by which eight Lower Canadian Patriotes became Bermudian convicts to uncover what their transition from freedom to unfreedom can teach us about the intersection of gender, race, independence, politics, and empire during Lord Durham’s tenure as Governor General and High Commissioner of British North America. ![]()
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