Sarah Carter

Sarah Carter, Imperial Plots: Women, Land, and the Spadework of British Colonialism on the Canadian Prairies. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2016.
This book explains the formation of the Canadian West as a British-Canadian colony and reveals how homesteading denied property rights to women.  Throughout, it offers incisive reconsiderations of what it means to be ‘Canadian,’ demonstrating that gender, race, and property have been central to the making of this country.  Carter effectively moves from the macro level of national and imperial visions to the micro level of particular women.  While none should be surprised that imperialism was central to the colonization of western Indigenous lands, Carter exposes just how far Canadian policymakers went to exclude married women from enjoying a right to property. By offering comparisons with the American west, we learn that the strength of this opposition was peculiarly Canadian.  Indeed, before and after contact, Indigenous women were the farmers of the Great Plains.  Yet after prairie reserves were established, Indigenous women were limited to kitchen gardens while white men assumed their place on the land.  Imperial Plots covers the late 19th and early 20th centuries and crosses provincial and national boundaries.  Sarah Carter makes a strong contribution to our understanding of Canada’s emergence as a country, illuminating ongoing struggles around gender equality, Indigenous rights, and humans’ relationships with their natural environments.

Shortlisted Books
Ian McKay and Jamie Swift, The Vimy Trap, or, How We Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Great War.  Toronto: Between the Lines, 2016.
Sean Mills, A Place in the Sun: Haiti, Haitians, and the Remaking of Québec.  Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2016.
Adele Perry, Colonial Relations: The Douglas-Connolly Family and the Nineteenth-Century Imperial World.  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015.
Ronald Rudin, Kouchibouguac: Removal, Resistance, and Remembrance at a Canadian National Park.  Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016.