Aboriginal Dispossession and Proletarianization in Canadian Industrial Capitalism: Creating the Right Profile for the Labour Market

The central theme of this paper revolves around the dispossession of Aboriginal peoples (First Nations, Métis, and Inuit) from their traditional socio-economic means of production and their subsumption into the industrial-capitalist mode of production. The investigation is a hypothesis about the historical proletarianization process regarding Aboriginal peoples in Canada stemming from dispossession. The analysis utilizes a critical political economic approach primarily in regard the revolutionary power of private property relations as the competitive antithesis to traditional-subsistence economy relations. Positing the facts of Aboriginal proletarianization within a political economic framework is an addition to the critique of capital. The research of the paper is anchored within: the numbered treaty framework and its application, the disciplinary methods of residential schooling systems, assimilation into proletarian ethics, and contemporary statistics about Aboriginal cohorts within the Canadian labour market. The historical research provides evidence about Aboriginal socio-economic dispossession and the contemporary data provides evidence regarding present-day conclusions of the initial industrial-proletarianization processes. Keywords: numbered treaties, residential schools, Aboriginal labour, Aboriginal history, political economy, industrial capitalism, proletarian, Karl Marx.

Name thesis:degree_name

Master of Arts (MA)

Level thesis:degree_level

Master's

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Political Science

Grantor dc:publisher

Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research, University of Regina

Year dc:date.issued

2013

Author dc:creator

• Bird, John Albert

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• McIntosh, Tom

Committee members dc:contributor.committeemember

• Zhu, Yuchao
• Farney, Jim

Language dc:language.iso

en

DOI

https://doi.org/10.82465/4447

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:uregina.scholaris.ca:10294/5290