How the RCMP has secured the imperialist power of the north

Canada was only six years old as a nation-state when it established the North-West Mounted Police (NWMP) in 1873. This original name for what would become the RCMP (Royal Canadian Mountain Police) outlined a colonial purpose, as the Northwest was not yet fully part of Canada at this time. The territory had been fraudulently purchased from the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) three years earlier and remained largely under the effective control of Indigenous nations such as the Métis, Cree, Anishinaabe, Dene, and Nakota.

Indigenous effective control ran contrary to all fraudulent claims to the territory by Canada, since the HBC had never purchased the land from Indigenous peoples in the first place in order to legitimately sell it to anyone — the Canadian/British military had to be sent to Red River (Winnipeg) in 1870 to remove the Métis-led provisional government that had been established there the year before.

Read it all at Source: A Condensed History of Canada’s Colonial Cops – The New Inquiry