Showing the Flag
The Mounted Police and Canadian Sovereignty in the North, 1894-1925
Under their various names the Mounted Police have played a vital,colourful, but often controversial role in Canadian history, andnowhere has this been truer than on the northern frontier. The policewere the agents through which the central government assertedsovereignty over the Yukon and the Northwest Territories, just as ithad done earlier on the Prairies.
This book describes to what extent the RCMP shaped the northernfrontier -- a frontier which steadily shifted, separating territoryunder actual government control from that in which it was nominal. Thechapters treat each new spurt in this expansion and the period ofcontact and transition which followed.
As agents of the government the police imposed on the Canadian Northa system largely alien to it which was designed not to express theaspirations of the north but to regulate and control it. Through theenforcement of laws and in other public services the RCMP demonstratedthat the land and its people including the Indians and Inuit, belongedto Canada. This political nature of the force was of the highestimportance. In assessing their performance of often harsh and dangerousduties, Morrison refers to them as "group heroes" in the"Canadian tradition of collective heroism."
In view of the current concern over Canada's sovereignty in thePolar Seas, this book is a timely explanation of how the territory wasoriginally brought into the orbit of Canadian control in what wasthought to be the final chapter in Canada's "manifestdestiny."
Morrison has well articulated this perspective of the central role of the Mounted Police in the Canadian North. His book will force others to recast their studies and to amplify what is set forth in this brief presentation, and it will serve well as background to Canada's post-World War II increasing realization of the geopolitical strategic importance of the area.
Showing the Flag is an excellent study of the role of the Mounties in the Canadian North from 1894 to 1925.
Showing the Flag is an important contribution to Canadian historiography, not only as an addition to mounted police history, but as background to the many aspects of northern studies related to the Indians and Inuit, government policy, early fur trade and whaling development, and specific regional histories. As such, it should be warmly received by all scholars of Canadian history, and particularly those with special interests in the northern territories.
Illustrations
Maps
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1. The Mounted Police
2. The Yukon: The Early Period
3. The Police and the Gold Rush
4. The Police as Civil Servants
5. The Police and Yukon Politics
6. North of the Arctic Circle
7. To Hudson Bay and the Eastern Arctic
8. Expanding Activities in the Mackenzie Delta
9. Hudson Bay
10. Patrols and Patrolling
11. The Police and the Native Peoples of the Northern Frontier
12. Ultima Thule
13. The End of the Frontier
Appendix
Notes
Bibliography
Index
