NB: Workshop attendees should read and be prepared to discuss Dr. Soomal's paper. To obtain a copy, please reach out to Professor Steven Maynard.
Abstract
This paper demonstrates the chemical origins of the Department of Indian Affairs' policy of assimilation. Building on the efforts of Science and Technology Studies scholars as well as historians and philosophers of chemistry such as M. Murphy, Michael Gordin, Stefan Helmreich and Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent, I take up their methodological call to examine how chemical technologies modelled broader logics of social, political and economic governance—such as the glass bottle (representing enclosure), the periodic table (signifying systematicity and elemental thinking) and the analytic balance (suggesting equilibrium). Extending their insights, I examine chemical absorbents and solutions as material-semiotic technologies of Canadian settler colonialism that not only powered extractive industry, but furnished the racial imagination of North American ethnologists—including the leading Canadian ethnologist Daniel Wilson—and found its way into the practices of racial engineering directed towards Indigenous peoples by the Department of Indian Affairs in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. This framework of racial absorption reached its greatest expression in the work of Duncan Campbell Scott. By revealing the chemical origins of Scott’s absorption thesis, I hope to offer historical texture to the work of scholars such as Audra Simpson, Kim TallBear, and Patrick Wolfe, who have theorized the genocidal effects of blood quantum politics in terms of settler colonialism, but have not yet investigated how exactly “absorption” emerged as an eliminatory frame of settler colonialism.
To tell this story, I closely examine Daniel Wilson’s ethnological theories of absorption, paying attention to its chemical aspects. I begin by tracking Wilson’s epistemic borrowings from his brother, the leading Scottish chemist George Wilson, and American geologists-turned-ethnologists such as Henry Rowe Schoolcraft and Henry Lewis Morgan, who likewise sought to exploit the conceptual and material affordances of chemical absorption to engineer race as if it were matter in the crucible. From there, I study Wilson’s enduring impact in the Canadian sphere, demonstrating his influence on geologist George Mercer Dawson and physician Alexander Peter Reid and suggesting the routes of transfer by which this frame of racial absorption found its way into the political philosophy and practices of Sir John A. Macdonald. I thus examine the tactical operations of amalgamation, absorption, and dissolution well beyond the confines of the chemist’s crucible, tracing their scalar application within the social logics of American and Canadian ethnology and subsequent uptake by the Department of Indian Affairs into the racial orders of Canadian settler colonialism. The paper concludes by engaging with Leanne Simpson’s writing about the “Dish with One Spoon” treaty, which asks us to take the world as a dish rather than a crucible.
Bio
Sajdeep Soomal is the Buchanan Post-Doctoral Fellow in Canadian History in the Department of History at Queen’s University. His research broadly examines how scientific ideas and practices have influenced colonial political economies. His first book project, Chemical Liberalism, examines how chemistry came to be entangled with liberal political philosophies across Britain and its empire, with a focus on 19th century settler colonial Canada. He holds a PhD in History from the University of Toronto.
