Jacqueline Briggs

Jacqueline Briggs. “Exemplary Punishment: T.R.L. MacInnes, the Department of Indian Affairs, and Indigenous Executions, 1936-52,” Canadian Historical Review 100, no. 3, (September 2019): 398-438.

Using T.R.E. MacInnes, an official in the Department of Indian Affairs as a focus, this well-written and methodologically sophisticated analysis draws on decolonisation theory, criminology, and extensive research in departmental files to critically examine existing scholarship on capital punishment as it affected the Indigenous peoples.  Briggs convincingly demonstrates that in the first half of the twentieth century, the elite endeavoured to impose social control on the Indigenous peoples and how the bureaucracy reflected such ideas and influenced policy.