Gender, Race, and Respectability in 1870s Manitoba Newspapers

Manitoba in the 1870s was undoubtedly an Indigenous space, and white settlers in the new province struggled with their understanding of life in Manitoba often differed from Euro-Canadian norms. These settler anxieties were expressed in the English-language newspapers through concerns about the lack of white women and children, and therefore a lack of “civilization” or “respectability.” In the name of attracting “respectable white women” to the prairie, violence against Indigenous women and men was justified or encouraged in these newspapers, often by appealing to Christian sentiments. 

In this Lunch & Learn, postdoctoral fellow Shelisa Klassen will draw from research into these newspapers, as well as from a settler colonial analysis of gender, race and religion. The presence, or absence, of white women was a tool used in local newspapers to enforce religious and societal conformity to Euro-Canadian norms and expectations. And yet, the newspapers also reveal the complexities and contradictions when individuals spoke out against this rhetoric. 

Shelisa Klassen is a historian of immigration and settler colonialism in Canada. Her work primarily addresses the way that ideas about nation, identity, and ethnicity were discussed in nineteenth century newspapers in Manitoba. In addition to organizing a conference about religion and settler colonialism in the Canadian prairie, she is working on her manuscript based on her doctoral dissertation, which examines the role of newspapers in establishing and maintaining settler colonialism, through the example of 1870s Manitoba. Newspapers attempted to build community between the settlers at the outposts of empire and those in metropolitan centers, and in predominantly Indigenous societies like Winnipeg in the 1870s, newspapers focused on addressing settler anxieties about their own sovereignty and connection to empire, while downplaying the violence and dispossession involved in establishing settler sovereignty.