"Average mail ... lots of routine" : Arthur Wellsley Vowell and the administration of Indian Affairs in British Columbia 1889-1910
Date
2016-01-06
Authors
Bradley, Patrick
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Abstract
Federal Indian Superintendent Arthur W. Vowell was a long serving administrator, who managed the Canadian government’s relationship with Aboriginal people in British Columbia between 1889 and 1910. This research challenges the thesis that policy and practice were necessarily symmetrical by arguing bureaucracy operated as a distinct form of power in British Columbia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I argue that the power exercised by department bureaucrats was not manifested in centralized top-down organization and micro-management by Ottawa, but instead evolved through the subjective, dispersed activities and daily decision making of individual bureaucrats. Drawing on department correspondence, and other evidence derived from a study of the life of Indian superintendent Arthur Vowell, this study seeks to understand how Indian affairs bureaucracy functioned. This understanding is developed through the particular lens of Arthur Vowell’s administrative activities and their role in the larger context of the colonial project in British Columbia.
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Keywords
Colonialism, Bureaucracy, Aboriginal people