The Laws and the Land: The Settler Colonial Invasion of Kahnawà:ke in Nineteenth-Century Canada

With its solid research and clear prose, Daniel Rück’s The Laws and the Land makes a valuable contribution to the interconnected histories of Canadian law, Indigenous-newcomer relations, and settler colonialism. The defining feature of this book is its unwavering focus on a single community. Explicitly following in the footsteps of Susan M. Hill’s research on the Haudenosaunee of the Grand River in her book The Clay We Are Made Of, Rück centers his scholarship on the Kanien’kehá:ka community of Kahnawà:ke, located on the south shore of the St. Lawrence River only a few kilometers from Montreal. This singular focus allows Rück to seriously engage with the legal, economic, and political traditions of Kahnawa’kehró:non. Some of the book’s most interesting sections emerge from Rück’s careful attention to Kahnawà:ke law as it appears in the archive of the Canadian Department of Indian Affairs, including his insightful discussion of the community’s legal code of 1801 (65–74) and his well-founded argument regarding the enduring power of matrilineal clan governance throughout the nineteenth century (40–41, 201–11). This emphasis on a single community makes Rück’s work a welcome addition in a field that has often been defined by broader synthetic overviews.Nonetheless, Rück recognizes the limitations of his sources, and therefore he does not present his work as a history of the community of Kahnawà:ke itself. Rather, this is a history of a settler colonial invasion set in the context of Kahnawà:ke, as the book’s subtitle makes clear. Rück examines this invasion from the ground up, and his work accordingly presents a remarkably detailed account of settler dispossession. Rück’s investigations into minute disputes over community membership, governance structures, timber rights, land ownership, and above all the conflicting legal systems of Kahnawà:ke and Canadian settler society combine to form a compelling “microhistory” of the broader project of settler colonialism. Some individual highlights include his discussion of Claude Delorimier’s contested community membership (62–65), the changing legal status of sugarbushes (64–74, 123–60), the controversial Wallbank survey (161–98), the construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway (172–74, 211–14), and the imposition of the Band Council System (201–11).At the next level up, however, Rück’s investigation of the settler colonial invasion becomes a little more amorphous. Rather than focusing on the views of settlers or their elected representatives, Rück centers the Department of Indian Affairs as the chief actor in this invasion. As an actor, however, the department remains underdeveloped. Rück’s use of the model of “effective inefficiency” (18–19, 126–27, 193) to explain the incompetence, incoherence, and inconsistency of the Department of Indian Affairs sometimes feels like a half-hearted justification to avoid exploring the complexities that Rück himself acknowledges. Instances such as the department’s rejection of the 1875 petition of all seven hereditary chiefs to dissolve the community and sell off its land (117–20) or the department’s inability to reshape structures of governance and property in Kahnawà:ke around the turn of the twentieth century (229–32) call for a more thorough investigation into the department’s members, motives, and relationships to wider settler society and government.Nonetheless, even if this book is not a history of Kahnawà:ke, it is still a history rooted in Kahnawà:ke, and Rück skillfully details the impact of the policies carried out by the Department of Indian Affairs within the community. The local character of Rück’s work is what makes it so compelling, and so any criticism not directly related to Kahnawa’kehró:non’s experience of the settler colonial invasion can only be a quibble. Overall, The Laws and the Land is undoubtedly an important contribution to historical scholarship, and Rück’s research will certainly provide critical support to historians and other academics working in a wide variety of fields.

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