Cultivating Manitoba’s Male Settler-State: The Agricultural Influence of Masculine Archetypes and Government Policy

Abstract

During the first quarter of the twentieth century, Canada experienced its highest rate of immigration recorded. This spike in immigration was orchestrated through discriminatory legislation and the circulation of visual immigration advertisements representing the Canadian government’s ‘ideal’ settler. Posters and pamphlets spread widely across targeted Anglo-Saxon populations, falsely advertising Manitoba and Canada’s Western provinces as an uninhabited haven for colonial men, full of natural resources, meant to be tamed and profited from. Such domineering characterizations of masculinity were invented and fostered through policy in an effort to dispossess, erase, and replace Indigenous Nations and Federations with a population of male, Anglo-Saxon agriculturalists. Through the investigation of ideologies of masculinity advertised in Manitoba’s post-confederation immigration campaign, colonially invented forms of masculinity were revealed as the joint aggressors of Indigenous women and ecological health, with the unifying motivation of financially fueled colonial land theft.