- Title:
- Fair enough? How notions of race, gender, and soldiers rights affected dependents allowance policies towards Canadian aboriginal families during World War II.
- Creator:
- Arrowsmith, Emily
- Date Created:
- 2006
- Degree Awarded:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Subjects:
- World War, 1939-1945 Participation, Indian Military dependents First Nations Government Relations Soldiers World War, 1939-1945 Veterans Survivors' benefits History
- Geographical Focus:
- Canada
- Supporting Materials:
- n/a
- Description:
- During World War 11, 2400 Aboriginal soldiers’ families received the dependents” allowance from the Canadian federal government. Utilizing “race” and “gender” as the main categories of analysis, this thesis aims to investigate how specific idcas about Aboriginal soldiers™ familics were employed. enforced and undermined in debates about dependents” allowance policies. These debates mainly took place among burcaucrats at the Dependents’ Allowance Board and the Indian Affairs Branch, representatives from non-government organizations, social workers, soldiers and their families. The central tensions in each of the policy debates revolved between the recognition of soldiers’ universal rights and the belief that Aboriginal people had certain “innate” racial characteristics that made them unable to receive economic benefits under the same terms as non-Aboriginal recipients. Within these debates assumptions about “race” and “gender” intertwined in complex ways around issues of morality. sexuality, “class,” and cultural beliefs. Bureaucrats™ positions were affected by such variables as their attitudes towards soldiers, their position in the bureaucratic hierarchy, their cultural beliefs, whether or not they perceived the policy as a threat to their authority and the pressures they faced from other stakeholders. First Nations soldiers and their familics attempted to influence policy debates by questioning bureaucrats® actions and by presenting alternate understandings of their rights. Debates about dependents” allowance policies reveal that paternalistic assumptions about Aboriginal people’s inabilitics to manage their own affairs were coming under criticism as Indian Affairs Branch administrative practices were increasingly scrutinized and ideologies about “race™ began to fracture.
Source
- Preferred Citation:
- Arrowsmith, Emily. 2006. "Fair enough? How notions of race, gender, and soldiers rights affected dependents allowance policies towards Canadian aboriginal families during World War II.", Department of History, Carleton University
- Link to this page:
- https://cuhistory.github.io/grads/items/hist_139.html
Rights
- Rights:
- Copyright the author, all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated.