Hunger, Horses, and Government Men: Criminal Law on the Aboriginal Plains, 1870-1905 (Law and Society)

Scholars often accept without question that the Indian Act (1876) criminalized First Nations. Drawing on court files, police and penitentiary records, and newspaper accounts from the Saskatchewan region of the North-West Territories between 1870 and 1905, Shelley Gavigan argues that the notion of criminalization captures neither the complexities of Aboriginal participation in the criminal courts nor the significance of the Indian Act as a form of law. This illuminating book paints a vivid portrait of Aboriginal defendants, witnesses, and informants whose encounters with the criminal law and the Indian Act included both the mediation and the enforcement of relations of inequality.