Economic rationalism reifies an “ideology of improvement,” where the only value inherent in land is commodification---to be rational is to own, and to own is to be rational.

For Trutch, Indians had no rights to the land because they made no use of the lands, which were not “of any actual value or utility” to Indians.95 Such lands could only serve the public interest if they were thrown open for preemption. He had taken the same approach two years earlier in regard to the reduction of reserves in the Kamloops region and claims made by the Shuswap First Nation. Trutch concurred with the view of Philip Henry Nind, gold commissioner for the Cariboo region of the interior, that the Shuswap Indians’ claims to land were baseless as “they made no real use” of the land. As these claims were “very materially” preventing “settlement and cultivation,” Trutch urged Colonial Secretary Lytton to authorize an enquiry into the true extent of Indian land interests throughout the province.96

Improvement, of both land and people, was the reigning idea governing Trutch’s attitude toward First Nations and their entitlement to everdiminishing tracts of reserve land. Responding to concerns voiced by the bishop of British Columbia and the Aborigines Protection Society in 1871, he noted in his letter to the secretary of state for the provinces that despite the benefits accorded to Indians by white settlement, he had yet to meet “a single Indian of pure blood [who had] attained to even the most glimmering perception of the Christian creed.” Despite their concerted efforts to “advance the material and moral condition” and to “change their habit of mind,” the “idiosyncras[ies] of the Indians . . . appear to incapacitate them from appreciating any abstract idea, nor do their languages contain words by which such a conception could be expressed.”97

The language of savagery was deployed by Trutch to express what First Nations lacked in a racial and anthropological sense: the capacity for abstract thought, which consequentially made it impossible for them to relate practices of cultivation to a general settler economy of agricultural production. For Trutch, the lack of homesteads in the English model provided evidence for his conclusion that aboriginal people lacked the “habit of mind” required for civilization. In either case, in Trutch’s view, aboriginal people lacked the very capacities defined by Locke as the conditions for proper human subjectivity (explored in depth in chapter 4). We can recall Fanon’s acute description of a related tautology: “In the colonies the economic infrastructure is also a superstructure. The cause is effect: you are rich because you are white, you are white because you are rich.”98 Here, and as we will see in chapter 4 in relation to the racial assessment of Palestinians by early Zionist settlers, the alleged lack of mental capacity for abstract thought explains the absence of legible forms of ownership, and the apparent absence of ownership justifies the conclusion that these racial subjects lack the capacity for abstract thought.