The Importance of Being Monogamous: Marriage and Nation Building in Western Canada to 1915.

• Author: Campbell, Angela
• Position: Book review

The Importance of Being Monogamous: Marriage and Nation Building in Western Canada to 1915.

by Sarah Carter

Edmonton, University of Alberta Press, 2008. Pp. 383.

Sarah Carter's most recent book, The Importance of Being Monogamous: Marriage and Nation Building in Western Canada to 1915, (1) is, if memory serves, the first historical academic text that I have read since graduating with a B.A. in History in 1995. The opportunity to read and review this book was a welcome treat not only because of a personal, rarely-indulged interest in colonial history, but more because of this book's relevance to my current research on polygamous marriages in Canada. The Importance of Being Monogamous is of crucial importance to all legal academics, practitioners and students interested in exploring critically law's understanding of and approach to "unorthodox" marriages.

The thrust of Carter's argument is that what most Canadians perceive as "typical" or "traditional" marriage is by no means the result of a natural social evolution. Rather, it is a consequence of calculated state objectives rooted in cultural supremacist, classist and sexist ideals. Carter's primary focus is on Canadian land settlement policies in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She demonstrates how these policies constructed an ideal of marriage that was used as a vehicle for the domestication of Western Canada by white Christian families. This nuptial model was one characterized, unsurprisingly, as monogamous, heterosexual, intra-racial, male-dominated and self-sufficient. Land policies were designed to marginalize and exclude communities who did not adhere to this spousal ideal. In Canada, those most affected were the fundamentalist Mormons, newly emigrated in the 1880s from the United States, and Aboriginal peoples. These two groups form the focus of Carter's analysis.

Both Mormons and Aboriginal peoples were the targets of legislative and policy-based attempts to eradicate polygamy on the plains. Canada's current prohibition against polygamy in section 293 of the Criminal Code (2) was initially prompted by the fear that Mormons continued to marry polygamously after emigrating from the United States, where this practice had been recently banned. But the real scrutiny over marital habits, according to Carter, was reserved for Aboriginal families. Politicians and missionaries struggled with what they perceived as the fluid, indulgent and cavalier nature of customary marriage, and in particular, with the Aboriginal acceptance of--in white persons' terms--"polygamy" and "divorce." Thus, while polygamy's criminalization was spurred by a concern over the western Mormon presence, the first and only successful prosecution for this offence occurred in 1899, against a member of the Kainai nation. (3)

Carter's analysis of settlement policies also illustrates how land, sexuality, gender and power were inextricable in the timeframe that she considers. What mattered was the peaceful and prosperous settlement of the West, and any distractions from this were to be muted or eliminated. A major preoccupation became how to ensure that white men on the frontier would "settle down" while not being "lured" by Aboriginal women. Numerous initiatives were thus devised and integrated into land settlement schemes to curb bachelorism and promote marriage between white couples. Most notably, the Dominion Lands Act (4) and the homestead system were established to encourage marriage while eliminating women's chances at economic mobility. Land was thus distributed only to men, and only to those who married according to the formal rules of the state. Carter's characterization of land policy as "a powerful tool for imposing the nuclear family model" (5) is thus persuasive.

But these policies were not the perfect tool for bringing the Christian imagination of marriage to bear throughout the West. The most important contribution of this book, to my mind, is its revelation of the resistance and resilience of Aboriginal peoples and Mormons in the face of state...