Fair enough? How notions of race, gender, and soldiers' rights affected dependents' allowance policies towards Canadian Aboriginal families during World War II

During World War II, 2,400 Aboriginal soldiers' families received the dependents' allowance from the Canadian federal government. Utilizing "race" and "gender" as the main categories of analysis, this thesis aims to investigate how specific ideas about Aboriginal soldiers' families were employed, enforced and undermined in debates about dependents' allowance policies. These debates mainly took place among bureaucrats at the Dependents' Allowance Board and the Indian Affairs Branch, representatives from non-government organizations, social workers, soldiers and their families. The central tensions in each of the policy debates revolved between the recognition of soldiers' universal rights and the belief that Aboriginal people had certain "innate" racial characteristics that made them unable to receive economic benefits under the same terms as non-Aboriginal recipients. Within these debates assumptions about "race" and "gender" intertwined in complex ways around issues of morality, sexuality, "class," and cultural beliefs. Bureaucrats' positions were affected by such variables as their attitudes towards soldiers, their position in the bureaucratic hierarchy, their cultural beliefs, whether or not they perceived the policy as a threat to their authority and the pressures they faced from other stakeholders. First Nations soldiers and their families attempted to influence policy debates by questioning bureaucrats' actions and by presenting alternate understandings of their rights. Debates about dependents' allowance policies reveal that paternalistic assumptions about Aboriginal people's inabilities to manage their own affairs were coming under criticism as Indian Affairs Branch administrative practices were increasingly scrutinized and ideologies about "race" began to fracture.