Mapping the Alberta-Montana Borderlands: Race, Ethnicity and Gender in the Late Nineteenth Century

SHEILA MCMANUS


WHEN WHITE, English-speaking women began to settle in southern Alberta and northern Montana in the late nineteenth century, they were members of an already-privileged racial minority and could place themselves within a traditional colonial narrative. The region may have lacked the visual aesthetic of more stereotypical colonial landscapes, but that did not stop some writers from responding to the area's beauty with classic colonial language: describing beautiful landscapes awaiting discovery and "empty" of its aboriginal inhabitants. Margaret Harkness Woodman, for example, wrote in an 1892 letter that "I believe I can justly claim to be the first white woman" to see the Great Falls of the Missouri River, which she visited in 1862. Mary Ella Inderwick, who ranched in south-eastern Alberta, mentioned in an 1884 letter that she'd "found" a small pond while riding alone, "a pond I must have been the discoverer of as no one knew of it and all wanted to see it." As Ruth Frankenberg has written, whiteness provides a "standpoint," a position of privilege "from which white people look at ourselves, at others, and at society." And one of the privileges of whiteness, then as now, is the perceived right to move into and draw one's own maps on top of other people's territory; for the women who migrated to the land east of the Rockies, the territory they were discovering was that of the Blackfoot Confederacy.