About the author | About the book | Author's notes
"Land and the Liberal Project invites readers to rethink Canada’s sovereignty as second-largest country in the world not as a peaceful, inevitable process, but as a project grounded in ideals that actively legitimized the dispossession of Indigenous lands."
About the author
Éléna Choquette is a professor of political theory in the Department of Social Sciences at the Université du Québec en Outaouais in Canada. Her research focuses on history, political science, and Indigenous studies, with the aim of better understanding power dynamics, particularly in Quebec, Canada, and societies shaped by colonization. Her recent book (Land and the Liberal Project: Canada’s Violent Expansion, UBC Press, 2024) examines the processes through which the Canadian state appropriated Indigenous territories. Her work has also appeared in E Settler Colonial StudiesE , the E Journal of Political IdeologiesE , and the E Canadian Journal of Political ScienceE .
About the book
In 1867, Canada was a small country flanking the St. Lawrence River and Great Lakes, but within a few years its claims to sovereignty spanned the continent. With Confederation had come the vaunting ambition to create an empire from sea to sea. How did Canada lay claim to so much land so quickly?
Land and the Liberal Project examines the political, legal, and rhetorical tactics deployed by Canadian officialdom in the cause of nation making, from the first articulation of expansionism in the 1857 Gradual Civilization Act to the consolidation of authority over the prairies following the North-West Resistance of 1885. Drawing on numerous archival sources, Éléna Choquette contends that although the dominion purported to favour a gentle absorption of Indigenous lands through constitutionalism, administration, and law, it resorted to police repression and military force in the face of Indigenous resistance. She investigates the liberal concept that underpinned land appropriation and legitimized violence: Indigenous territory and people were to be “improved,” the former by agrarian capitalism, the latter by so-called protection and enforced schooling.
By rethinking this tainted approach to building a transcontinental state, Choquette’s clear-eyed exposé of the Canadian expansionist project offers new ways to understand colonization.
This challenge to nationalistic narratives will find a keen audience among scholars and students of political science and political theory, Canadian history, and Indigenous studies.
Land and the Liberal Project invites readers to rethink Canada’s sovereignty as second-largest country in the world not as a peaceful, inevitable process, but as a project grounded in ideals that actively legitimized the dispossession of Indigenous lands. It matters now because it challenges dominant narratives and clarifies how enduring principles continue to shape state–Indigenous relations and debates over justice and land sharing.