CRIM 4652 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Indian Act, Symbolic Power, Eurocentrism

• School: York University
• Department: Criminology
• Course: CRIM 4652
• Professor: Tuulia Law

Document Summary

We see that there are distinct government processes at work: not monolithic. We can make some general observations comparing aboriginal peoples to eurocentric culture: relative to euro-christian societies, women were afforded many more social and civic rights. They believed that aboriginal peoples were truly uncivilized: this is how they thought of this territory as empty land (their system of thought enabled them to think this way) Europeans thought that they were helping indigenous peoples (they were locally ignorant to the fact that indigenous peoples had their own distinct culture) Discourses of cultural and racial superiority (these discourses allowed them to justify colonization) Mechanisms/policies of colonization: overt violence and coercion: Acts of military violence, dissemination of diseases, the imposition of rule and governance. Once rule is imposed by this foreign regime/colonial aggressors, the effects of this change of governance continues to have effects that we still see in today"s society.