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[THEME MUSIC] ALAN LESTER: I'm Alan Lester. I'm the Professor of Historical Geography at the University of Sussex.

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I think there's always been frontiers in recorded human history. Geographical zones where two or more people is a very different cultural background, economic practises,

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social rituals, and beliefs come into contact. Quite often, collision. They're not necessarily, but they have often turned out to be also zones of conquest, where one of those peoples

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asserts its dominance over another. That dominance can take various forms. It can take exclusion, mass killing, genocide in some cases.

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Or it can be the incorporation of a servile labour force. But those zones in which those relationships are working are constantly shifting. So frontiers move through space and through time

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in very complex ways. And the frontiers that we're dealing with here are frontiers that were consequent upon a diaspora of English speaking settlers

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during the 18th and early 19th century onto indigenous peoples land. I think there have always been frontiers. And each of the ancient European and the non-European empires

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had its frontier zones, in which those considered members of the imperial polity citizens came up against "barbarians" as they were called. The terminology changes through human history.

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But there've always been these zones delimiting the edges of polities, of great imperial polities. And they've always been dynamic.

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And they've shifted back and forth. And they've always involved relationships of exclusion, or marginalisation, or dominance, as the frontier moves and incorporates other peoples.

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I think in this particular case where we're looking at the frontiers that were established by English speaking colonists -- anglophone peoples -- during the 18th and 19th centuries.

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We're talking about a phenomena that did much to shape the modern world. Do during the 19th century over 20 million English speaking settlers formed a diaspora, immigrating largely

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from the British Isles and developing colonial frontiers, appropriating territory from indigenous peoples across something like a third of the Earth's surface in North America, southern Africa, and Australasia.

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And in doing so they created what we think of as the modern West, or at least the anglophone part of the modern West. So they created the modern nation states

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of the USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa, for instance. And in creating that modern west, many historians would argue this process

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of colonisation frontier expansion was responsible for the West industrialising, advancing economically at a greater rate than other parts of the world.

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So some historians talk about the great divergence, for instance, between the West and China from the early modern period. And used this frontier expansion, this dynamic

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of anglophone diaspora, appropriation of indigenous land and resources, to explain the Great Leap Forward in Western technology. And of course that gap is being closed now.

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We can see in all sorts of ways, that China is asserting an economic and political dominance on a global stage. But if we're to explain that rise of the modern West,

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I think examining these frontiers of anglophone diasporic expansion and the ways that they incorporated or displaced indigenous peoples, has to be an integral part of that explanation

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I think certainly in this period in talking about anglophone colonisation, yes. I think in other periods in human history, frontiers have been relatively more stable.

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They haven't necessarily had that sort of conquering dynamic of expansion. When we're looking at this anglophone diaspora in the 18th and 19th century, in retrospect

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it has proved to be an unstoppable force. And has led, as I mentioned, to the creation of these modern nation states and to the disposition of indigenous peoples across large swaths

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of the earth's territory. So I think we are talking about frontiers of colonisation with most of the records in the frontier life collection. Well I think these frontiers were the crucible, in which

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the anglophone West was forged. That's been written through the histories of many Western nations. The frontier has appeared historiographically significant

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ever since Frederick Jackson Turner, in the United States, around the late 19th, early 20th century came up with the frontier thesis. And his argument was that particular characteristics

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of the US national identity, were forged on the Western frontier as it pushed across the continent. So they weren't taking attributes

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that have been imported from Europe to the eastern seaboard. The USA was carved distinctively on this frontier, with values of sort of rugged individualism, militarism, democracy.

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All of these were leaving behind a European heritage and creating a new nation on the frontier. The irony is that Turner emphasised the exceptionalism of the USA --

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that this was a distinctively US national phenomenon -- and yet his basic ideas were appropriated on virtually all other anglophone colonial frontiers, too.

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To explain, for instance, how distinctive Australian identity emerged, based on ideas of mate ship that were forged in the Bush as the frontier expanded. Or in South Africa, an Africana nationalist version

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of their past also drew very much on Turner's thesis. So in drawing attention to the way in which Turner's ideas were appropriate in other contexts, we begin to see how this frontier expansion was

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an integrated phenomenon during the 19th century, rather than exceptionalism in each particular case. I think there's probably two main reasons why we haven't yet developed a fully integrated history

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of anglophone colonial expansion. And they're to do with the way in which the US is seen as exceptional, and is somehow completely different from British imperial expansion

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in the British settler colonies. I think two strands which have fed into that notion of US exceptionalism -- US distinctiveness -- of Turner's thesis of the frontier

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which argues for a unique American characteristic forged on the Western frontier. But also the mythologisation of the US West, which comes from the Hollywood film industry,

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from popular culture's take on cowboys versus Indians, all of which hives off the US, Western frontier from other anglophone frontiers and makes it seem exceptional. Makes it seem absolutely unique.

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What historians are beginning to do now, is draw attention to the ways that this phenomenon of anglophone frontier expansion was a global phenomenon. The ways in which these processes

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of frontier expansion in North America, north of the US border in Canada, are included in that. In Australia, in New Zealand, and in South Africa, we're all interconnected.

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And they're interconnected in various ways. So I've mentioned already Turner's ideas about a unique American identity were actually appropriated in other parts of the world.

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As well, in Australia and in South Africa. Each to emphasise their own exceptional identities. So you have this circulation of ideas. And that circulation of ideas includes forms of governance,

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as well. So indigenous peoples manner of governance, the supposedly civilised institutions that they were subjected to.

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There was an exchange of ideas about how to run those kinds of institutions. Ideas of racial difference circulated between the USA and the British empire.

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Ideas of how to regulate Asian immigration for instance. So that's why settler societies could use Asian labour, and yet exclude Asians who were not needed from labour. Those ideas circulated across these various frontiers.

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And that's not to mention the more material connections that there were between the US frontier expansion and British settler expansion, in places like southern African, Australasia.

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There were connections of money, of credit of London and New York acting as a kind of twin hubs of finance so that settlers could gain access to credit and capital, with which to colonise.

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So in all sorts of ways historians are beginning to uncover the interconnections between the US frontier and British settler frontiers in Australia, New Zealand, and southern Africa.

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And trying to combat that tendency to think of the US as an exceptional case. Well I think in the Goodnight papers you get a glimpse of how that mythology gets

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generated in the first place. So Goodnight has a trial named after him, a cattle launching trial. He writes stories about Billy the Kid,

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and you get this mythologisation of the American outlaw, which makes it seem very different from the Australian bushranger for instance, when in many respects, these are very similar phenomena of ungoverned frontier spaces

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and the leeway that allows for individuals. Goodnight also was very good at mythologising himself and keeping a historical legacy, which emphasised his pioneering contribution

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to the creation of Texas. And you see that in in the Eberstadt collection particularly. There's a lot of material about the ways

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in which settler societies mythologised themselves in the way that they commemorate pioneers and adversaries of certain events of the conquest of indigenous peoples, and so on.

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And that mythologisation, again, isn't a distinctive US phenomenon. It happens in South Africa and Australia and New Zealand, as well.

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But I think picking up on legacies, like Goodnight's documents, Hollywood particularly has mythologised an American experience, to the exclusion of other frontier experiences.

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And made it seem as if it's something unique. Yeah I think for many indigenous peoples. And again they're beginning to see themselves as interconnected.

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You have now transnational indigenous peoples movements. And they share the experience of colonisation as something that's ongoing. So if we look back at Turner's thesis of the frontier,

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for instance. He writes about the frontier closing. So once initial conflict over frontier land had passed -- once indigenous peoples resistance, violent resistance,

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and other forms of resistance have been overcome and these were now settler colonial spaces -- for him, it's over. The frontier's clothed.

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This is now a white settler colony, or the USA in his case. But indigenous peoples didn't cease to exist. And they didn't renounce the culture that their ancestors had practised.

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They didn't renounce their claims the sovereignty. It's simply that they've been subsumed within settler colonial space. And that ongoing struggle for sovereignty, for recognition,

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is still very much with us. And we see it in phenomena like the so-called intervention in Australia today. And in the ways that indigenous peoples

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try to resist a kind of superficial appropriation of aspects of their culture. You mentioned before naming helicopters after indigenous peoples.

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And naming football teams in USA after indigenous peoples. That kind of culture appropriation that you see in films and so on. And what many indigenous peoples are arguing

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is that they're subject to colonisation on an every day basis. And until there is a serious and significant attempt to recompense and a restitution and a sovereignty --

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indigenous self-government -- for them, the frontier is still very much open. They're still negotiating those battles that began with the invasion of anglophone settlers.

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Let's take the Metis people in the Riel rebellion, for instance. You've got a lot of documents on the Riel rebellion. And to a great extent this was to do

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with the ways in which people were categorised and treated differentially, as the frontier expanded. So for many indigenous peoples they changed in status from being valuable military allies,

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or trading allies in the early days of frontier, to being seen as recipients of state welfare. As dependent on the benevolence of a settler colonial state. And as being subjects of a civilising mission.

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And the Riel rebellion had multiple causes. But certainly one of the causes was the fact that people of mixed heritage meeting in this context in Canada, were seen as neither one

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thing nor the other. If they were seen as the so-called pureblood indigenous peoples, they were peoples with whom treaties could be made. Semi-sovereign powers.

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And that'd had been the status of a number of First Nations peoples in Canada up until the 19th century. If they were seen as fully white, then they would have been citizens or subjects

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of their settler colonial governments. But mixed race peoples were often seen as a problem for colonial administrations, for settler states administrations.

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And neither one thing nor the other. And not just in North America, but in Australia too, for instance, they were ejected from the reserves. So reserves were for so-called pureblood indigenous peoples.

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Peoples of mixed race were often ejected from the reserves. But by the same token, they weren't given the same full rights and the same equal treatment as white subjects.

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So they were left in a kind of limbo. And much of that is behind the Metis peoples' support for the Riel rebellion. The fact that there were neither indigenous peoples

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entitled to treaty making. Or nor were they settler subjects entitled to equal treatment for whites. You see a very similar thing in Australia.

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For instance, the Coranderrk reserve in the 1880s, when a new piece of legislation ejected so-called half-caste children actually separating them from their families, because their parents were

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often seen as indigenous and entitled to stay on the reserve. Children weren't. So just cast adrift.

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We see here, the beginnings of a process of real cultural violence and psychological violence for generation after generation of indigenous people. Later in Canada, the records of the Frontier Life collection

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has for instance, the records of the Sarcee Reserve school in Calgary. A missioned-run residential school. These residential schools, are now notorious in Canada.

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And we've got some really poignant and distressing material here, on the way in which the Sarcee Reserve school was run. I'm particularly looking at the outbreaks of tuberculosis

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in the school, during the first World War. It was an extremely high death rate among children. And we have medical reports of the real suffering that some of these children went through.

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Perhaps the most damning indictment though, is that children were not allowed to leave the school once they were infected and to go back to their families.

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We have letters from parents asking for the return of their children before they died. And they weren't allowed out, because the department for Indian Affairs supported the school in keeping them

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on the school site, on the grounds that the school had better sanitation than their homes. And that there was a nurse on site to tend for them. Because of course, that was effectively a death sentence

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because tuberculosis was spread through droplets, through coughs and sneezes. And so confining all of these children in an institution guaranteed a very high rate of infection,

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whereas allowing them home would probably have saved many of their lives. So here we have a now very dramatic instance of these institutions doing tremendous harm and damage

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to indigenous peoples. But even beyond that, they were subjected to a kind of cultural violence where the validity of their cultures, practises, and beliefs

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was denied. And these were institutions of forced so-called civilisation adaptation to anglophone societal norms. So the boys were taught to farm.

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They were never taught to do particular forms of handiwork. The girls were taught housewifery as one of the reports puts it. So European gender norms are imposed upon them.

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And even after they graduated from the school, the records here show how they were placed away from previous generations of their own people, so that they wouldn't be contaminated

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by their influence. And that they could try to assimilate but without much support, in terms of capital, into settler society.

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So again, it relays to a point that I made earlier, about the ongoing nature of colonialism that many First Nations peoples -- in this instance in Canada -- is still .

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Occurring So there's records here of quite a few famous, and some lesser known exploratory parties. So going well in advance at the frontier of settlement,

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settlers following one in the wake of these explorers. And these explorations served multiple functions. They sourced out opportunities for trade with indigenous peoples.

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They established literally the lay of the land. And quite often, they were explicit exploratory parties preparing the way for colonial government expansion, and for the assumption of sovereignty.

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So Bonneville for instance, who explored the Rocky Mountains in 1830S. We've got his records. And he writes back quite sort of blase,

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saying that it would be quite possible for a subaltern with just a few troops to extend US government sovereignty, vast ways tens of thousands of square miles of the Rocky Mountains.

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We've got Clark's records from the Lewis and Clark exploration. Probably the most famous of them. George Grey's exploration in 1938 in Western Australia.

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Dewdney's slightly later exploration, leading to a trial to British Columbia, which bypassed American sovereignty. One of the things that reading these records

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in more detail reveals, is just how dependent these exploratory parties were on indigenous assistance, collaboration. Grey was quite upfront about the fact

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that his party would have died, it would have perished in Western Australia, without aboriginal assistance. And yet despite this kind of negotiation,

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this recognition of the protocol needed to pass from one indigenous nation's territory to another, this adaptation by exploratory parties to their indigenous hosts, many of the same men

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who led these expeditions went on to develop careers basically dispossessing those indigenous peoples. So Clark enters the colonial government for instance.

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George Grey becomes probably the most famous colonial governor of the British empire, has an extraordinary career, youngest ever governor of South Australia. Aged 28.

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Becomes governor of New Zealand and the Cape Colony and New Zealand again. And forges a career, developing that model of forced assimilation, amalgamation as he called it.

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Forced civilisation that I mentioned earlier in respect to residential schools in Canada. He was probably the most articulate spokesperson of the need, not to recognise indigenous difference,

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but rather to assimilate. And if indigenous peoples wouldn't be assimilated, to use force in order to ensure their outcome. So he oversaw wars in Cape Colony

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and in New Zealand for instance, in order to achieve that outcome. Dewdhey went on to become a colonial administrator lieutenant governor of British Columbia later in his career.

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So there's a very close relationship between initial exploration and the establishment of an individual career pathway that leads through to the subsequent stages of that exploration,

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natural dispossession of indigenous peoples, and the advance of the frontier in the wake of these exploratory parties. Well I think there's the Hudson's Bay Company's Archive,

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which is enormously extensive and rich. But it's more of the kind of minutiae, the little glimpses of how trade actually operated on the ground, I think fascinate me.

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So for instance, you've got Campbell's papers and Campbell established training base at Fort William now in Ontario. And through his records, you can see how closely attuned he had to be to First Nations demands.

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So trade was very much conducted in the early days with relatively equal power relationships or even power relationships in favour of indigenous peoples. So in return for handing over beaver skins

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and even allowing people into their territory to hunt, they demanded certain goods in response. And from Campbell's records we can see how he managed to make his enterprise out of Fort William

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more successful than a rival outfit in USA at Fort Union, some 1,200 kilometres to the west. But they were dealing with many of the same trading partners. And Campbell, through developing his appreciation of what

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his indigenous traders partners wanted, was able to develop a slightly more sophisticated relationship. And then reinvest the capital that he

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earned from that back east. Those terms of trade obviously begin to change as the frontier advances, as indigenous peoples lose their solvency,

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and lose control over the land and the resources that come with it. Buffalo, and beaver and so on. And as they lose their status as potential allies

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and as trading partners, and become these kind of clients of a colonial state. And one of the things I think that also comes through from the documents and it helps explain that shift

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in the balance of power, is the sheer need for credit that many traders and early settlers had. And the way that they were linked into credit systems coming out from banks and from investors in New York

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and in London which indigenous peoples obviously were excluded from, simply didn't have access to. So it's almost as if incoming anglophone traders had an endless supply of tap that they could turn on and off

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of material resources with which to do the work of colonisation. And this is also one of the reasons why when indigenous peoples were dispossessed and when they were subjected to these kind of civilising

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institutions and leased from them to supposedly become independent farmers, they were never able to compete on the same terms as anglophone settlers around them.

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They were excluded from that access to credit. Now it didn't always work in favour of individual anglophone settlers, so you've got lots of records seen in frontier life of individuals for whom the risk failed.

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The borrowing of capital didn't work out. So there's records of people having to sell up their land to pay off their debts. And we know that something like a third of anglophone settlers

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were failed colonists. They gave up on colonisation and went back home to the Eastern seaboard or to Britain, because it hadn't worked out.

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But at least they had access to these credit networks in which they could take a risk and bring more resources than they themselves had at any one time to bear, on the frontier zone.

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So for many indigenous peoples facing this onslaughter of anglophone settlers, there were two waves of invasion, if you like. The first was of farmers and pasturists

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following in the wake of initial exploratory and trading expeditions. And in many places there was a second wave of colonisation consequent from mineral discoveries.

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So in Klondike in British Columbia, in California, in southern Africa, the Highveldt in New Zealand, in Victoria, Australia. In each of these places there were gold rushes or diamond

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rushes In the case of Kimberley in southern Africa, which bought many, many more and anglophone settlers into those territories which brought in an infrastructure of industrial development, railway

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development, and urban growth. And in each of these urban areas, came to be seen as the preserve of white settlers. There was displacement of indigenous peoples

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from urban areas. So recent work has shown how cities were as much frontiers as were the kind of normal conception of a wilderness as a frontier.

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That development of segregated urban space was a common phenomenon. We've got records here from the Californian Gold Rushes talking about the initial onset of colonisation

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following on discovery from the Klondike from the Victorian goldfields to report of a commissioner into the Victorian goldfields, which occurred at a particularly devastating moment

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for the Koolin peoples of what's now Victoria in Australia. So it had already been subject to decimation through smallpox, even before that first wave of pastoralist invasion. And a set of massacres in the spread of further disease.

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And the discovery of gold in Victoria, bought this new second wave of colonisation. By the end of it, by about the 1860s, 1870s the population will be reduced

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by something like 90% of the Koolin Aboriginal people. And that was particularly the extreme scale, in terms of depopulation. But a very similar phenomenon was experienced

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by indigenous peoples in each of these sites of gold rush and exploration. What it also led to, though, was a new demand for labour. Indigenous peoples-- because of the decimation--

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demographic decimation-- obviously, many places were not able to supply the large quantities of cheap, unskilled labour required for gold mining, and in South Africa, for diamond mining.

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South Africa experimented with the importation of Chinese labour, but ultimately settled on a system of migrant labour from the African reserves. And the demographic ratios there between

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indigenous African people and white settlers enabled that tapping into the much more numerous African population. But in other settler colonies, the solution was found through

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the selective importation of Asian labour. Chinese labour, in particular. It put these new settler societies-- only just won in the face of indigenous resistance--

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into a new dilemma with which to grapple. How to access enough labour to exploit the mineral resources under their territory, become industrialised, without being-- as they saw it-- swamped by the Asiatic menace,

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or the Asian peril, as they called it. These racist ideologies emerged as these as white men's countries to be preserved at all costs for white settlers. So you have various regulations, schemes,

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through which Asian labour can be tapped, can be imported, can be used, without free Asian immigration. And the so-called polluting, or corrupting, of these white societies.

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And again, this is a project that connects the US frontiers with British settler frontiers. Because ideas about how to do this circulated between them. One example, for instance, is using English language tests

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to keep out the majority of Asians unless they were acquired for labour. So it avoids explicitly racist legislation. And the British government, in particular,

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was keen to avoid explicitly racist legislation. Not least because it was governing India in partnership with a number of princely states and through collaboration with a number of Indian territories,

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and wanted to avoid explicitly racist legislation in case it undermined that legitimacy of rule in India. And Indian migrants were subjected to indentured labour contracts.

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English language tests, which actually first emerged in Mississippi in the US, began to be used by British settler colonies, too, and Canada, in order to regulate the degree of Asian migration and ensure that those who came were only

00:27:57.320 - 00:28:08.080

to supply labour needs and would not stay and change the racial mixture of the population. So these ideas about how to maintain white men's countries circulated across the USA and the British empire

00:28:08.080 - 00:28:24.020

in the late 19th and early 20th century. Much of that was fueled by this initial minimal discovery and the need to industrialise in a racial way. The establishment of settler governments

00:28:24.020 - 00:28:38.430

was by no means a smooth process, just simply following on from the occupation of the landscape by settlers. It was always contested, always being renegotiated. There was obvious contestation from indigenous resistance.

00:28:38.430 - 00:28:45.800

And even after the extension of sovereignty, there were still occasions in which that which resistance would emerge and contest that sovereignty.

00:28:45.800 - 00:28:54.980

The Riel rebellion we mentioned was one instance of that. But indigenous peoples didn't just try to resist violently the imposition of settler sovereignty.

00:28:54.980 - 00:29:05.620

There was also space for negotiation, which they tried to deploy. For instance, some of the records here are about the North island Maori in the 1820s and 1830s,

00:29:05.620 - 00:29:16.850

trying to negotiate a deal with the British before the onset of colonisation, whereby they would keep out French colonists-- used to play the British against the French.

00:29:16.850 - 00:29:27.490

But also get the British to recognise that this was Maori territory, Maori sovereignty. So they signed a Declaration of Independence and the British resident agent signs it with them

00:29:27.490 - 00:29:37.460

and negotiates that with them. And later on, of course, it's superseded by the Treaty of Waitangi, which became enormously controversial in New Zealand history and through which the British

00:29:37.460 - 00:29:46.180

extended sovereignty. But that's one instance of the ways in which indigenous peoples tried to use treaties to negotiate with incoming settlers.

00:29:46.180 - 00:29:53.590

Try to understand what anglophone people-- what Europeans-- meant by sovereignty. Try to get their heads around that.

00:29:53.590 - 00:30:00.860

Because they have very different conceptions. Try to talk to Europeans-- anglophone people-- on their own terms to negotiate the retention of sovereignty.

00:30:00.860 - 00:30:09.720

Now, of course, in many-- in most cases, we know that didn't work. But there wasn't just a contestation over sovereignty between indigenous peoples

00:30:09.720 - 00:30:20.000

and incoming anglophone settlers. We also have a number of European and European-derived states contesting sovereignty in these areas. The Eberstadt collection contains an awful lot

00:30:20.000 - 00:30:29.430

of material on Texas, which has enormously complicated patterns of sovereignty and contestations over sovereignty. So you've got a contestation between the Native American

00:30:29.430 - 00:30:37.540

people and incoming, both Spanish-speaking and English-speaking settlers. You've got contestation between the Spanish government and a Mexican government.

00:30:37.540 - 00:30:44.160

Contestation between Mexican government and a Texan independence movement. And in between the Texan independence movement and the USA.

00:30:44.160 - 00:30:54.190

All of this is going on in a relatively concentrated period. And we've got records from a short-lived period-- about a decade or so-- of Texan independence, which are very interesting, as well.

00:30:54.190 - 00:31:06.320

Looking at how a relatively small group of breakaway settlers, as they were, from the US, tries to establish itself and negotiate its own sovereignty in this highly contested region.

00:31:06.320 - 00:31:18.510

Much further to the north, across the Canadian border, there are some records of George Arthur, who-- to me-- has always been a fascinating figure with a career hopping across the empire.

00:31:18.510 - 00:31:30.240

And he arrives in Upper Canada just after the rebellion, which takes much of his inspiration from a rebellion in Lower Canada. And he has to deal with a dilemma--

00:31:30.240 - 00:31:43.870

how to treat US citizens who have crossed the border-- so-called patriots, or the people from hunters' lodges-- to try and foment and encourage rebellion against the British crown in Upper Canada.

00:31:43.870 - 00:31:56.050

And Arthur decides to execute those who were captured in these raids across the border as a demonstration to the US that the British will treat even US citizens in that way if they

00:31:56.050 - 00:32:07.810

contest British sovereignty. So the Canadian government is not only putting down things like the Riel rebellion, it's also dealing with contested sovereignty across the border

00:32:07.810 - 00:32:16.140

and negotiating with the USA. So the extension of settler government is never this smooth, ongoing process. It's contested by multiple parties.

00:32:16.140 - 00:32:25.930

And through the records we have here-- because they cover such an extensive terrain-- we get to see how this sovereignty was negotiated, how borders come to be established and settled

00:32:25.930 - 00:32:43.670

across large parts of the Earth's surface. I've talked about the contestation of sovereignty and the way in which borders come to be negotiated through force and negotiation, as well.

00:32:43.670 - 00:32:54.490

The actual project of exercising governmentality in these new settler spaces also allows a much more mundane and prosaic processes. So act of cartography--

00:32:54.490 - 00:33:06.000

mapping what territory one actually governs-- acts of surveying-- allocating that territory to particular settlers, deciding on ownership of that territory. There's a massive bureaucracy that's

00:33:06.000 - 00:33:16.800

involved in the creation of these spaces as settler-colonial territory. And many of the records in the collection indicate the ways in which these everyday processes

00:33:16.800 - 00:33:24.870

were worked out. And they're just as important as the much more spectacular instances of conflict. So we get to see on a micro scale

00:33:24.870 - 00:33:36.460

how the boundaries between farms were designated and how settler ownership of the land actually comes to be inscribed in law. And how indigenous peoples are excluded from that process.

00:33:36.460 - 00:33:46.140

So reserve land is communally registered, in many cases. It's not individually owned. And that has all sorts of implications for this process of ongoing colonisation

00:33:46.140 - 00:33:55.070

I've talked about before for indigenous peoples. The fact that they don't even own territory on the same basis as incoming settlers. And that still has implications today.

00:34:01.610 - 00:34:11.320

The process of settlement-- I've mentioned that taking ownership of the land-- the issuing of deeds was critical to that. That, in itself, often relied on anglophone settlers' access

00:34:11.320 - 00:34:18.740

to these networks of credit-- to loans, which, as I've mentioned, didn't always work out. Some settlers had to sell up land

00:34:18.740 - 00:34:28.590

because they were indebted, and give up on the enterprise. That settlement process was also very much dependent on the development of a new infrastructure, a new technology.

00:34:28.590 - 00:34:38.900

Often, it operated in exclusionary ways. Access to the railways, for instance, wasn't necessarily universal. Settlers had privileged access to the railways

00:34:38.900 - 00:34:49.020

to ship commodities and so on, and make a an ongoing enterprise of their farms. Many indigenous peoples were often excluded from those kinds of networks.

00:34:49.020 - 00:35:01.240

Settlement was also very much a gendered process. We have this common assumption that the violent, rough work of pioneering colonisation was always done by men. Once the frontier was tamed, then they

00:35:01.240 - 00:35:08.620

were joined by their family units and the frontier was domesticated. In many cases, that's true. We've got plenty of records in the Frontier Life

00:35:08.620 - 00:35:16.360

collection of that violent, male-orientated world of the frontier. But it's not always true. We've also got lots of family records--

00:35:16.360 - 00:35:25.950

Bartsch family records, for instance-- where we see that this was a family enterprise right from the very beginning. And the man's expression of masculinity

00:35:25.950 - 00:35:35.440

was as much about the duty of care for his family in these frontier zones as it was about going out and taming the wilderness and fighting indigenous peoples, and so on.

00:35:35.440 - 00:35:44.200

Some of the most revealing correspondence actually deals with the minutiae of everyday life on these on these frontiers. For instance, Canadian official MacLeod talks

00:35:44.200 - 00:35:56.710

about the difficulty trying to get Sitting Bull and his other chiefs together and to ensure their trust for a meeting to negotiate treaties in the occupation of space.

00:35:56.710 - 00:36:09.230

And in the very same letter, he expresses concern to his wife about her cold and, will it get more serious? So you've got this intermixture of the familial, the domestic, and the political that we often glimpse

00:36:09.230 - 00:36:20.600

in a male-orientated history in these records. And settlement appears much more as this intimate, gendered, domesticated process. Of course, what's often missing from

00:36:20.600 - 00:36:31.370

this is that same level of insight into indigenous experiences. But there are some records here which indicate the indigenous understanding

00:36:31.370 - 00:36:39.370

and experience of settlement-- I'll have to have a look, actually, to give you the names. There was a-- is it Bill Plume records?

00:36:39.370 - 00:36:46.320

Yes, Bill Plume. Yeah. Maybe if we start from, there are experienes-- Yeah.

00:36:46.320 - 00:36:50.380

Yeah. It's Bill [? Plume ?] records from-- is that-- That's from the Glenn Barr.

00:36:50.380 - 00:36:59.610

Glenn Barr. Right, yeah. So there are indications of the experiences of indigenous peoples and their intimate and everyday

00:36:59.610 - 00:37:07.820

experiences of colonisation. For instance, in the Glenn Barr archive, we've got the Bill [? Plume ?] records, which see colonisation from indigenous peoples' perspective

00:37:07.820 - 00:37:18.910

and contains some of those intimations of everyday experience of the mundane and the quotidian. But they're few and far between. It's excellent to have an example of that from here.

00:37:18.910 - 00:37:25.250

But of course, overwhelmingly, like all colonial archives, we get to see the frontier from the anglophone side.