White Flour, White Power

Did rationing make ‘paupers’ of Indigenous people? The question cannot be answered factually, I will argue, because ‘pauper’ is a moral rather than an empirical category. Many observers of the rationing relationship, in its various forms, have been worried that it made ‘paupers’ of the recipients, that is, that rationing degraded people, morally and culturally, and perverted their progress towards citizenship. The rationing relationship, in short, has provided a way of seeing Indigenous people; it has afforded opportunities for the imaginative construction of their agency. In this chapter I will trace the rise, within the discourse of officials and others, of a perception that rationed Indigenous people were at risk of moral corruption and cultural decay. I will attempt to link that construction of a flawed or fragile Indigenous agency to the discussions about how to make rationing serve the aims of, first, protection policy and, later, assimilation policy. Then I will illustrate the rise, since the mid-1960s, of a revised conception of Indigenous agency. The revisionist view conceives rationing as an Indigenous transaction with the colonists, in which the recipients' agency is intelligent, knowing and consistent with Indigenous traditions.

This chapter moves right through the period of this book's narrative, from Spencer to ‘self-determination’. I hope that the reader will grant that this departure from the usual structure of narrative history is justified by my argument that rationing was important as a site of representations, not only as a practice of material sustenance.