There are moments when unsettling encounters disturb the contentedly familiar understandings that shape our worlds. Those occasions may leave us feeling utterly confused, fumbling to repair disrupted meanings, even prompting suspicions that something very wrong has happened which needs to be categorized and remedied. It is then that we may become, as with Socrates’ accusers in Plato’s words that began this chapter, those that “censure lives.” Such censuring may even end up “crushing others” in ways that leave no room to think about “improving” ourselves. Should censures involve agents of state justice, we might find ourselves formally accusing others of committing a criminal offence. For example, on a Monday evening in November 1883, near Calgary in Canada, a man named Thomas Douglas (a “labourer”) went about the mundane task of hitching a team of horses, having been asked to do so by an “Indian Department” farm instructor Alexander Doyle.Footnote ¹ That routine chore completed, he watched with mounting curiosity and then unease as the team rounded a hill heading toward Calgary, instead of Fish Creek where the instructor was stationed. He later reflected: “This aroused my suspicions and I went up the hill and saw him driving towards the … stacks. I saw him throwing sacks of oats over the fence.” These unexpected happenings interrupted anticipations that ordinarily helped Douglas make sense of the world. Confused, this “labourer” searched for explanations, settling on vernaculars of mistrust and blame. The latter led Douglas in the direction of censure, and the laying of an information before a Northwest Mounted Police officer, accusing Doyle of criminal wrongdoing. A subsequent arrest hailed the accused to face a preliminary examination overseen by a justice of the peace. At this venue, Douglas orally swore an accusation under oath, now framed as a criminal charge of embezzlement, in the accused’s presence. Several witnesses offered verbal evidence, which the accused very briefly questioned (“cross-examined”). The justice wrote down what he took to be legally relevant and entreated a statement under caution from the accused. Doyle’s short response averred simply that he went to retrieve some empty sacks. In the end, however, the justice decided that there was sufficient evidence of criminal activity to bind the accused over to trial at a competent court.

Fading transcripts of the legal performances at hand reveal much about officially sanctioned accusatory thresholds that once opened doors to colonial courtrooms. Remaining records indicate that pre-trial practices of accusation were basic to translating local social meanings into argots of criminal law. It is worth emphasizing what is mostly overlooked: despite their deceptively humdrum local appearance, performances of accusation across the prairies and elsewhere did not simply form adjuvant thresholds to colonial criminal law. Rather, they constituted the latter’s very foundations. This is an important concept, for without accusations that could initiate legal pathways for punishable offences, colonial criminal justice is unlikely to have emerged as it did. From disruptive phenomenological encounters that momentarily confused accusers, colonial accusations of crime materialized around raised suspicions and inclinations to point fingers. Once it became possible for those pointed fingers to find their way to state justice institutions, certain pre-trial procedures appeared. These ranged from information laying, arrest, preliminary examinations, to grand juries, and so on. As varied as accusatory procedures were across times and places, their point was uniformly to select who to admit to further juridical chambers. Through rituals of accusation, in other words, the intricacies of everyday events were translated into locally inflected categories of law, and selected individuals nominated to face criminal trials.

This book brings into focus a largely unnoticed, but pervasive, social and political lineage that cast certain practices of accusation as uniquely legitimate thresholds to colonial criminal law and order. Via a sociology of accusation, it thus spotlights the grounds from which colonial criminal law emerged. The significance of that point should be emphasized: without gatekeeping accusatory powers, colonial criminalization could not apprehend and capture the accused individuals required for its marque of criminal justice to assign culpability, guilt, or punishment. Although now embedded in seasoned pre-trial bureaucracies and state institutions, initiating moments of accusation still form thresholds that translate everyday social lore into sovereignly ratified idioms of criminal law (Reference PavlichPavlich 2018a). In colonial settings, however, distinctive accusatory thresholds were pivotal to the creation of criminal justice seeking to border social orders in support of settler agrarian capitalism. Perhaps it is worth recalling that the etymology of the term “threshold” connotes a beginning, an inception, a verge, a commencement, and is related to “making noise” but also to separating “grains from husks by stamping” (Reference AytoAyto 2011: 529). As we shall see, accusatory thresholds in Alberta involved politically charged theatres that staged performances as lawful entryways to criminalization. These thresholds involved decisions on whom exactly to “stamp” out as a criminal “husk” as judged by colonial legal agents. Those called upon to perform the violent stamping did so by categorizing accused subjects and acts as potentially criminal.

Criminal Accusation and Alberta circa 1874–1884

Despite their foundational significance for criminalization, social performances of criminal accusation have attracted little scholarly attention. Perhaps it serves dominant legal fields well to obscure their conditions of possibility, thus concealing contingent beginnings in shadowy powers of categorization conducive to their purposes. On this note, discourses that exclusively target state-defined crimes and criminals, or doctrinal legal scholars who emphasize narrow, technical discussions of procedure, all too often reinforce sovereign declarations of criminal justice. For these discourses, the very premise of a sociology of accusation is likely seen as irrelevant. Real research lies in describing the being of crime and criminals, not to worry about their contingent becoming. But the following approach directs its gaze precisely to the latter: to the socio-political rationales and performances of accusation that first categorize certain acts and actors as criminalizable. Criminalization from this vantage depends foundationally on ways of accusing, which serve as the underlying conditions of its possibility.

The plan is to draw on paradigmatic examples to chart a genealogy of the powers and social performances that staged criminal accusations in and around what is now known as the Province of Alberta, circa 1874–84 (see Figure 1.1).Footnote ² Within what First Nations refer to as Turtle Island, these lands were altered by a sovereignty grab through attempts to enforce “law” and manage far-reaching dispossessions for colonial settlement.Footnote ³ The decision to focus on the decade following 1874 relates to the Dominion of Canada’s explicit call for a mounted paramilitary police force that, under its purview, was to administer law and social order across the North-West Territories, west of Manitoba to the Rocky Mountains.Footnote ⁴ Throughout this decade, the political and social justifications for establishing a Northwest Mounted Police were laid bare, as were its rationales for deploying colonial criminalization to regulate disorder (Reference 236WallaceWallace 1997). Such deployments were predicated on forming thresholds of accusation by which so-called disorderly actions could be managed through criminal law.

Figure 1.1 Overview map: provincial boundaries of Canada.

This map and that of Figure 1.2 were drawn up by Sandy Hoye (Métis Archival Project, University of Alberta) with reference to Reference Kelly and KellyKelly and Kelly (1973: inside cover) and Reference WilkinsWilkins (2012: opening page), acknowledging the helpful advice of Frank Tough.

Reprinted with permission.

Emphasizing social and political dimensions of criminal accusation, the discussion explores models of power (sovereign, disciplinary, biopolitical) through which the Dominion set about ruling through criminal law to ensconce dispossessing social orders. Comparable socio-political rationales and practices shaped nineteenth-century criminalizing legal fields across the British Empire – South Africa, New Zealand, Australia, India, Caribbean colonies, and so on (Reference FordFord 2011; Reference Nettelbeck, Smandych, Knafla and FosterNettelbeck et al. 2016). However, the Albertan example during a “decisive” decade for crafting colonial criminal law provides an exemplary glimpse into how accusatory thresholds were deployed by a newly formed Northwest Mounted Police. An enduring link between colonial sovereignty and accusatory thresholds of criminalization is reflected by a quest to order societies in favour of dispossessive settlements (Reference FordFord 2011). That is, these thresholds aimed at realizing the Dominion’s sovereign jurisdiction over “criminal” matters for an envisaged settler-colonial society; thereby forging gateways to state criminalizing arenas where limits for a colonially imagined, if divesting, social order could be regulated. The map in Figure 1.1 provides a sense of the sheer geographic scale of the lands the Dominion set about policing.

There are, of course, many historical analyses of the Alberta and Dominion context during the decade under review here, but one might at least point to certain key events.Footnote ⁵ Following 1867, an unsteady federation of four initial eastern Dominion of Canada provinces had elected a conservative prime minister (John A. Macdonald) with visions of a “national policy.” That policy was to extend “Canada westward through settlement and development,” building a railway to aid a proposed expansion (Reference Beahen and HorrallBeahen and Horrall 1998: 14; see also Reference MacleodMacleod 1976: 51). Such a dispossessing socio-political agenda was silhouetted against British Imperial and Dominion claims to legal sovereignty over territories to which Indigenous Peoples had developed eons old, storied, relations.Footnote ⁶ The quest to enforce colonial law was aimed at appeasing Indigenous peoples and regulating “intending settlers” (Reference SmithSmith 2009: 59).Footnote ⁷ In 1870, under the guise of “purchasing” Rupert’s Land for the sum of $1.5 million from the Hudson’s Bay Company, the Dominion proclaimed sovereign ownership over all the North-West Territories (see Reference RussellRussell 2019: 168 ff; Reference ToughTough 1997: 8–13). Thereafter, it declared an intent to promote settler agriculture and commerce across this claimed “possession” by enforcing a sovereign law that would stifle rival bids, such as from Indigenous law or the United States. At the same time, its settlement ambitions required that anticipated Indigenous resistance and challenge be managed (Reference SimpsonSimpson 2011).

In this political climate, the Dominion’s approach to policing took form around Métis and Indigenous contestations, such as in July 1869 at the Red River Colony (Reference TeilletTeillet 2019: 37 ff, 174).Footnote ⁸ Unheeded appeals to the Dominion expressed clear anxieties that locally distinctive cultures and land arrangements were at risk.Footnote ⁹ Such apprehensions were exacerbated by political positions adopted by Dominion surveyors who reviewed the colony’s seigneurial system of land organization (that granted each plot access to water). As Reference TeilletTeillet (2019: 177) puts it: “The surveyors, led by Colonel John Stoughton Dennis, arrived in Red River in August 1869 and, like the road relief crew before them, immediately took up with the Canadian Party. This made the Métis suspicious of their survey objectives.” With the leading figure of Louis Riel,Footnote ¹⁰ a concerted opposition resisted the Dominion’s annexation attempts, declaring the provisional sovereignty of a Red River Government, locally authorized to negotiate terms under which the Colony might enter the Confederation (Reference StegnerStegner 2000; Reference TeilletTeillet 2019: 207 ff). That government assumed control of Fort Garry (Winnipeg) and within months had established a distinctive code of law (Reference TeilletTeillet 2019: 186). Some dissenters were imprisoned, but one – a fractious Orangeman and Métis antagonist (Thomas Scott) – was sentenced by a tribunal to death, stirring a significant military response from the Dominion (Reference ReidReid 2012). This took form as an Expeditionary Force of 1,000 troops under the command of Colonel Garnet Worsley, with a young William Butler (who we encounter in the next chapter) as an intelligence officer (Reference DoyleDoyle 2017: 25 ff; Reference TeilletTeillet 2019: 215 ff). Following several noted military encounters with Indigenous forces, the overwhelming British force prevailed, yielding Manitoba as a province of the Confederation in July 1870, and an arrest warrant was issued for Louis Riel who fled to Montana. Interestingly, he was in 1873 elected to the Dominion parliament, took an oath of office in disguise, but never sat as a member in Ottawa (Reference TeilletTeillet 2019: 264).

In the wake of the Red River events and on the strength of dubious intelligence reports (see Chapter 2), the Dominion government under MacDonald looked to experiences from the Royal Irish Constabulary to establish a Northwest Mounted Police. The latter was to enforce Dominion law over the North-West Territories to curb resistance to planned “European” settlement across them. If criminalization was elemental to creating colonial law and order here, accusation lay at the inaugurating heart of what emerged as criminal matters. Several accounts detail the Dominion’s founding of that Northwest Mounted Police of some 330 men and its gruelling march in the latter part of 1874 along varied westward routes across the prairies (see Figure 1.2).Footnote ¹¹ Much less, if anything, has been written about a key dimension to that force’s mission soon after arriving. It was to create theatres of criminal accusation through which social disorder could be categorized – despite existing Indigenous legal fields – as crimes, and so funnelled into chambers of Dominion criminal justice. The oversight is consequential, because accusation created on-the-ground conditions for police officers to enforce criminal law and thereby to pursue social infrastructures for colonial settlement ambitions (Reference NettelbeckNettelbeck 2014; Reference SimpsonSimpson 2011). Accusation was foundational to a colonial rule by law, the upshot of which Geonpul scholar Moreton-Robinson in another context boils down to this: “The lives of Indigenous people were controlled by white people sanctioned by the same system of law that enabled dispossession” (Reference Moreton-RobinsonMoreton-Robinson 2015: 5).

Figure 1.2 Routes taken by different divisions of the North-West Mounted Police, 1874.

See acknowledgment for Figure 1.1.

Ongoing Indigenous contestations, or innovative uses, of Dominion law happened in the face of settler dispossession, imported diseases (e.g., smallpox), ransacked buffalo herds (see Figure 7.1), and the consequent onset of pervasive starvation across Alberta.Footnote ¹² Such devastating effects on Indigenous forms of life surrounded a politics of treaty making.Footnote ¹³ With encouragement by missionaries and Northwest Mounted Police officers, the Dominion tried to kindle conditions favourable to signing treaties that affected First Nations’ age-old, storied associations to lands. It also sought promises to keep peace in exchange for reserves of land, annuities, agricultural assistance, hunting and fishing rights, and so on (see Reference MorrisMorris 1890; Reference PricePrice 1999; Reference 235TalbotTalbot 2009). Treaty Six was signed in 1876 with Cree leaders across central Alberta and Saskatchewan, even as notable leaders like Chief Big Bear (Mistahimaskwa)Footnote ¹⁴ held out on signing the terms of what he took as destructive to existing forms of life (Reference MillerMiller 2009; Reference 235TalbotTalbot 2009). Treaty Seven was signed in September 1877 and included some 10,000 Blackfoot Nation members of southern Alberta.Footnote ¹⁵

In 1876 too, the infamous Indian Act was ratified without Indigenous approval or consultation. Reference NicholsJoshua Nichols’ (2020: 107) discursive genealogy of this Act points to eradicating ideas of “civilizing, extinction, and culturalism.” The purported aim was to eliminate “savagery” and “barbarism” through civilizing processes. However, as Nichols points out, the inherent contradictions of this racist undertaking proved impossible, and “when this project lost steam,” white possessive governance turned to “indirect rule” via an administrative autocracy that appealed to notions of culture and self-governance subservient to colonial ambitions (Reference NicholsNichols 2020: 107–9). Indeed, under this Act, “Indian agents” aided by the Northwest Mounted Police (Reference Kelm and SmithKelm and Smith 2018; Reference TitleyTitley 2009), assumed “dictatorial control” over Indigenous Peoples on reserves (Reference Palmer and PalmerPalmer and Palmer 1990: 43; Reference Swiffen, Paget, Sarat, Pavlich and MaileySwiffen and Paget 2022). A version of indirect rule was, as we shall see in Chapter 5, adopted by the Northwest Mounted Police’s approach to “disorder.”Footnote ¹⁶

The decade under review came to an end with echoes of its start in continued challenges to colonial settlement and rule (Reference DempseyDempsey 1979; Reference 236WallaceWallace 1997). Indigenous and Métis leaders repeatedly petitioned an impassive Dominion government, including appeals to meet treaty obligations, to refrain from imposing its law, and for fair surveys as well as security of title to lands. Again, Dominion land surveyors carried out a mission to divide land into square parcels rather than rectangles with water access (Miller 1996; Reference TeilletTeillet 2019). Métis dissatisfaction prompted Gabriel Dumond and four representatives to visit Louis Riel, then exiled in Montana, imploring him to again lead a resistance (Reference DoyleDoyle 2017; Reference ReidReid 2012; Reference SalhanySalhany 2019). He accepted, and over the next months petitioned Ottawa for “appropriate surveys and title to farmland, representation in the Dominion parliament and a new railway linking the Saskatchewan River valley to ports on Hudson Bay” (Reference WilkinsWilkins 2012: 162). Without satisfactory response, Riel (with Dumond as his military leader) announced an intent “to take up arms for the glory of God, the honour of religion and for the salvation of our souls” (cited in Reference WilkinsWilkins 2012: 162). Cree leaders Chiefs Big Bear and Poundmaker (Pitikwahanapiwiyin) supported this resistance (Reference MillerMiller 2012; Reference SalhanySalhany 2019). On the ground, the combined forces commandeered supplies – food, clothing, and ammunition – mainly from government stores. Telegraphy wires were cut, and at Frog Lake, a contingent of Chief Big Bear’s armed forces under the leadership of Wandering Spirit entered a church service, killing an Indian agent (Thomas Quinn) and nine other men, and taking several women hostage (see Figure 7.3; first on left).Footnote ¹⁷

The Dominion responded by mobilizing 8,000 troops under a Major-General Middleton, and speedily sent them westward with the help of a yet incomplete railway (Reference StegnerStegner 2000; Reference WilkinsWilkins 2012: 169). This force advanced on a Métis stronghold around Batoche from three directions, and its initial contact with Dumond’s outnumbered force (around five to one) was disastrous – with a loss of more than fifty men against two dead and four injured Métis fighters (Reference TeilletTeillet 2019: 341; Reference WilkinsWilkins 2012: 170). Middleton’s attempts to storm the Batoche area by river also went awry due to Dumond’s shrewd and well executed strategies, but the battle eventually settled into a stalemate for four days. As Middleton ate his lunch on day four, a Colonel Williams under his command defied orders and attacked Dumond’s ranks. By now, the latter had depleted their ammunition supplies, even firing nails and pebbles, but eventually they retreated into buildings set against the river (Reference WilkinsWilkins 2012: 170). By nightfall, the forces conceded, although Gabriel Dumond refused to do so and managed to evade patrols (Reference DoyleDoyle 2017: pt 4). Militia under Chiefs Poundmaker and Big Bear also conceded at Fort Pitt, but not before Chief Big Bear had walked some 100 miles prior to giving himself up to police at Fort Carleton.Footnote ¹⁸

Louis Riel wandered the local woods for some three days, and finally surrendered to a Northwest Mounted Police patrol. When presented to Middleton, Riel was asked how he could imagine winning against the odds; he replied that the aim was not so much to win but rather to convince the Dominion “to deal fairly with the people of the territories and their long-neglected rights” (Reference WilkinsWilkins 2012: 173). He was transported to face a treason trial on 28 July 1885, refusing against his four lawyers’ advice to offer an insanity plea (Reference SalhanySalhany 2019). With Socratic overtones he remained unflinching throughout: “In the end, I acted reasonably and in self-defence, while the Government, my aggressor, cannot but have acted madly and wrong; and if high treason there is, it must be on the Government’s side, not on my part. I say humbly through the grace of God, I believe I am the prophet of the new world” (cited in Reference WilkinsWilkins 2012: 180).

The jury returned a guilty verdict but requested court clemency, which was ignored; Louis Riel was executed on 16 November 1885 (Reference SalhanySalhany 2019). Chief Poundmaker and Chief Big Bear were each sentenced to three years imprisonment.

Of course, the historical contestation through which colonial law emerged is complex, with many ways to retell diverse and differently inflected stories. However, suffice here to keep in mind the background violence that forged accusatory theatres as threshold openings to criminalization that aimed to secure possessive settler colonialism in Alberta. Several allied analyses have shown the degrees to which Imperial and colonial sovereignty across eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British contexts relied on a violent rule of criminalization and law to secure forms of social order.Footnote ¹⁹ Such valuable analyses also highlight the importance of criminalization to fluid Imperial and colonial settlements across the British Empire, and to the legal orderings of their collective forms. However, I have not found studies that attend specifically to the socio-political footings of accusation from which colonial criminalization could emerge. In response, the following analysis highlights certain rationales of rule by which the Dominion of Canada endorsed legal performances of accusation to enforce colonial criminal law and social order in what is today called the Province of Alberta.

A Sociology of Accusation

The sociology of accusation to follow charts a complex social and political lineage deriving from 1870s Alberta based on a rudimentary credence: justly deciding on who and what to accuse as having transgressed societal limits is too crucial a political, social, and ethical task to hand off to depoliticized, technically, or doctrinally imagined bureaucracies of criminal accusation. This task involves a complex sense of legality that is not well served when handed over carte blanche to bureaucracies that work best in shadows, abjuring broad public reflection, seldom probing the unequal processes of their delimiting work (Reference DyzenhausDyzenhaus 2022). Such bureaucracies typically operate in opaque fields with considerable leeway when deciding on which precise wrongdoings to ban, or how to categorize accusation’s potential targets. This is not to deny that state criminalizing institutions in extreme cases may be called upon to regulate and even incapacitate (Reference Duff, Farmer, Marshall, Renzo and TadrosDuff et al. 2010; Reference 223KellyKelly 2018); but resorting to institutions that survive on the repressively violent abandonments of offenders should never comprise routine patterns of justice. This is especially so for institutions tenaciously plagued by systemic inequalities – racism, sexism, or poverty-perpetuation – that affect both authorized banishers and those who are banned.

The critical scrutiny of criminal justice today is undercut by the dominance of technical discourses that take for granted the unique legitimacy of state criminalizing fields; sometimes the latter are even viewed as necessary, immutable, or beyond serious contest. Herein lies a problem: nowadays in Alberta, as elsewhere, the dominance of state criminal justice has vastly overshadowed – even at times purged – more elementary socio-political, cultural, and ethical vocabularies, such as those framing certain Indigenous laws (Reference BorrowsBorrows 2016, Reference Borrows2019; Reference SwiffenSwiffen 2010). These vocabularies elicit normative ideas on how to border societies justly; they do not simply accede to the necessity of individualizing ideas about criminals and their punishment (Reference Fassin and KutzFassin 2018; Reference MerryMerry 1999; Reference Napoleon, Provost and SheppardNapoleon 2012). Without normative lexica of this sort, state law’s idioms of individually culpable criminals are routinely used to define a society’s borders. But that move comes at a Mephistophelean cost of depoliticizing or naturalizing prevailing state conceptions of law, while making violence appear as an inevitable fate for offenders (Reference Benjamin, Eiland and JenningsBenjamin 2004: 248). In the process, criminalization may be asserted as the only legitimate way to define fundamental social limits by inversely declaring criminal transgression.

Searching for grammars through which to deliberate democratically on social limits without defaulting to state visions of criminality is, however, no simple undertaking. I am struck that over forty years ago, Reference GalanterGalanter (1981) called upon legal theorists to recognize plural calculations of justice, beyond state law, and to focus on how norms regulate societies. For their part, Reference Felstiner, Abel and SaratFelstiner, Abel, and Sarat (1980: 631) urged the sociology of law to study disputes as “social constructs” that were transfigured well “before they enter legal institutions.” With overtones of both calls, the following analysis focuses on accusatory performances that transformed complex relational conflicts into colonial notions of individualized crimes. It does not, however, accept that disputes necessarily follow pathways of “naming, blaming, and claiming,” (631); instead, it explores how a politics of pre-trial accusatory performance in the Albertan context categorized some social conflicts as criminal.

Through accusation, in other words, one might say that disputed relations “are transformed as they are negotiated” and fixed through legally “narrow” and specialized juridical discourses (Reference Mather and YngvessonMather and Yngvesson 1980: 788). The intended yield is a genealogy of shadowy and contingent accusatory grounds that transpose locally disturbed relations into legal idioms of criminality, highlighting a legacy grounding of massive criminal justice leviathans that engulf us nowadays. However, as early protagonists of restorative justice were to experience, the difficulties faced by quests to transform the repressive foundations of state criminalization should not be underestimated. Having brazenly promised nothing short of a “paradigm shift” away from retributive criminal justice, restorative advocates quickly found themselves gripped by the modern state’s stealthy, tentacular clasps and co-optations (Reference PavlichPavlich 2005; Reference RuggieroRuggiero 2011; Reference ZehrZehr 2015).

Jurisprudence offers little by way of fundamental critiques of criminal justice, tending to conceptualize accusation through state law’s lenses as necessarily involving matters of criminal procedure. Many incline to the view that accusation is simply a procedural matter, essentially encased within doctrinal and rights-based procedures as defined by state criminal law (e.g., Reference CicchiniCicchini 2020; Peterson 1974–75; Reference WebbWebb 2015). Accusation should then be approached as a straightforward technical issue of conforming to positive laws – such as safeguarding the interests and procedural rights of participants (accusers, the accused, and so on) at thresholds to state criminalization (Reference Brockman and RoseBrockman and Rose 2011). For legal theorists of this persuasion, legitimate accusations cannot but be positioned within state legal fields; the validity of pre-trial practices accordingly rests on whether procedures adhere to doctrines and principles of sovereign law (Reference CicchiniCicchini 2020; Reference SteinfeldSteinfield 2013–14), or whether they obey state-authorized canons of proper process (Reference Brockman and RoseBrockman and Rose 2011). As important as discussions of fair processes and rights of the accused may be, the emphasis on technical procedure alone downplays – or more usually ignores as legally extraneous – social and political relations that animate thresholds of criminal accusation in the first place. A legal theory that encloses accusation solely within sovereign legal doctrine mostly eschews foundational critiques of the wider justice of pre-trial practices, deferring instead to technicalities of whether bureaucratic administrations adhere to legally decided procedure – in police charge offices, prosecutorial offices, grand juries, preliminary judicial inquiries, and so on. Whatever the gains, such approaches are limited by an implicit belief in sovereignly proclaimed restraints on state power, all too often glossing over the systemic and unequal abandonments that criminalizing processes or punishments consistently yield.

By contrast, several analysts aim to justify criminalizing limit subjugation by deferring to philosophy. A burgeoning literature on criminalization (and over-criminalization) offers analytic philosophical arguments to decide when the repressions of state criminal law are justifiable (e.g., Reference Duff, Farmer, Marshall, Renzo and TadrosDuff et al. 2010; Reference Edwards and ZaltaEdwards 2021). Although broad, this approach aims to limit criminalization and to isolate only the defensible uses of state criminal justice. Such perspectives do recognize, as Reference Edwards and ZaltaEdwards (2021: n.p.) aptly observes, “the life of the criminal law begins with criminalization.” The attempt to delimit appropriate uses of state criminalization through analytic philosophy (rather than state legal discourses) is to be lauded; and yet, a retreat into philosophy comes with lapses, including not seeing how socio-political (accusatory) forces commence and indeed enable state criminalization. What justifications might be provided for criminal accusation at thresholds to criminal law, especially when alternative patterns of governance may be conceivable? The emphasis on philosophically determining when states may legitimately criminalize and punish certainly has merit, but it also overlooks key issues. For example, it eclipses the wider social and normative bases of institutions that attribute criminal responsibility (Reference LaceyLacey 2017), a collective historical ethics behind matured notions of criminal guilt (Reference NorrieNorrie 2016), and the institutional history of civil laws that shape social and political horizons (Reference FarmerFarmer 2016). Moreover, rarefied analytic philosophies directed to doctrines of criminal law underplay the foundational role of a socio-politics that shapes accusatory performances to criminalization (Reference PavlichPavlich 2017).

In short, neither a jurisprudential retreat to criminal procedure, nor a wholesale resort to analytical or modal philosophical argument, pays sufficient attention to the founding social and political configurations of accusation. These are the very foundations of criminalization, the sources that open criminal causes, that determine how certain subjects become candidates for criminalization in specific contexts (Reference PavlichPavlich 2018a). It is worth returning here to Reference Agamben, Clemens and HeronAgamben’s (2008: 15) conclusion following an adroit interpretation of Kafka’s The Trial:

The sociology of accusation, then, far from being a technical aside to the study of state criminalization, focuses attention on the latter’s very categorizing source (Reference PavlichPavlich 2018a).

That kind of sociology requires suitable vocabularies – partially recognizing but also working beyond technical, doctrinal, or analytical philosophical idioms. It demands vernaculars through which to approach the politics of accusation and the resultant categorization of social limits at the start of legal processes. This book’s Preface mentioned the etymology of the term “accusation” as descending from the Ancient Greek kategoria, connoting how social “categories” of meaning were politically shaped through structured accusations (see Antaki 2017; Reference Negrier-DormontNegrier-Dormont 1994). Centuries later, as also noted, Latin influences used the term crimen to signify the start of a legal cause, and as importantly, an accusatory “calling to account” by historically sanctioned authorities (Reference AytoAyto 2011). Calling someone to account for crime or delict by laying an information or charge before a public official signalled politically authorized beginnings for legal action that involved social limits of one sort or another.Footnote ²⁰

Working off such etymological cues, a suitable sociology might focus on how accusations play out through historical performances. Here authorized juridical agents call subjects to account for normatively framed social transgressions (see Reference 221GirardGirard 1979). Broadly, accusatory “hearings” happen on various stages through diverse performative regimes that categorize different societal norms and name transgressions, thus cataloguing local or contextually sanctioned ideas of social limitation. Which precise rituals are to count as a “proper” accusation is of course a matter of contingent history (Quintilian 2010: 100). This is to say that rituals of accusations are malleable, assuming various historical modes of categorization; including, orchestrated public confrontations, shaming rituals, social media allegations, juridical inquisitions, or examinations, and so on. Moreover, outlining what is locally accepted as a legitimate accuser, accused subject, or considered as an authentic accusation, are all matters of socio-political histories. So too are the normative categorizations that reference social limits through various locally enacted accusations (e.g., infidelity, impiety, dishonesty, laziness, greed, self-centredness, suspected criminality, and so on) – they might also extend to problematized collective structures, such as policing systems that perpetuate unequally marginalizing, racist, sexist, poverty-inducing structures (see Reference LebronLebron 2017; Reference LentinLentin 2020; Reference MaynardMaynard 2020: 73, Reference Maynard2017).

However, even though accusation per se has and could assume diverse historical forms, today’s gigantic criminalizing systems across the globe have granted an almost hegemonic privilege to one form; namely, criminal accusation (see Reference PavlichPavlich 2018a). Accusations that categorize offences as crimes against sovereign states have become rudimentary to societal forms that define themselves in large measure through and against categories of crime and social disorder.Footnote ²¹ Of course, not all accusations acquire local normative traction to open gates to criminal law, and part of what we investigate here is how legal performances favour certain kinds of criminal accusations. But as state criminal accusations monopolize openings to criminalization, so they increasingly usurp jurisdiction over violently enforceable interpretation (Reference CoverCover 1986: 1603; Reference HerrupHerrup 1987: 93 ff). Here relational bridges come to span problematized everyday meaning frames (e.g., disorder) and legal languages that open out to criminalizing prohibition. The political effect is to categorize selected relations as socially disordering crimes committed by individual criminals. Today, this sort of accusation typically unfolds within bureaucracies sanctioned by occidental systems of law, wherein accusers (be they members of the public, police officers, or prosecutors) provide information adjudicated at cusps of criminalizing fields (by say justices of the peace, grand juries, judges, and so on). It involves pre-trial legal hearings with authority to commence criminal matters by translating, as noted, social lore as (criminal) law, customary rite as lawful right, public fame as legally countenanced suspicion, and so on (Reference PavlichPavlich 2018a: 123 ff). Such translations may deploy contingent ideas of crime,Footnote ²² but they also tenaciously capture subjects in unequal ways, exposing people disproportionately to the possibility of the state’s legally enforced violence.Footnote ²³

Colonial Accusations and Paradigmatic Examples

As a sociologist of accusation, I have distilled this book’s theory from close readings of archived documents. The archives consulted are vast but include the textual remains of fifty preliminary examinations or summary trials for indictable offences with different degrees of completeness, some of which are highlighted here. Surviving textual records may be interpreted as offering at least a sense of how colonial officials drafted criminal accusation as it unfolded in Alberta in that crucial decade following the arrival of the Northwest Mounted Police (Reference 236WallaceWallace 1997). My narrative, however, claims neither to have discovered nor comprehensively represented a past ethos, even less to say that its interpretations are based on a random sample of officially selected records – avoiding the pretense that the entire population of written records is known.

Rather, my story unfolds by tapping selectively and fortuitously into legal archives from a different time with a direct purpose in mind: to apprehend socio-political rationales of accusation forming thresholds to colonial criminalization – renewed versions of which shape criminal law today. This approach certainly dovetails with “history of the present” approaches that look to perturb current social forms by charting untypical lineages, enabling the possible transformation of unjust social relations (Reference CarneyCarney 2015; Reference GarlandGarland 2014). It also defers to genealogical diagnoses (Reference KoopmanKoopman 2013; Reference Rose, Hall and Du GayRose 1996; Reference ShoemakerShoemaker 2008) and Indigenous legal approaches (Reference BorrowsBorrows 2019; Reference NapoleonNapoleon 2019). This helps one to navigate complex lines of descent behind contingent political and plural legal arrangements that variously circle around criminalizing concepts of social order, sociality, and society. To repeat: my aim then is not to discover or represent a fixed ontology of colonial law in Alberta, but to tell one of many possible stories seeking to re-politicize today’s prevailing use of criminalization to order and border societies.

However, charting the socio-political backgrounds of criminal accusation from archival remains requires vigilance, given the official purposes that archives were designed to serve.Footnote ²⁴ Accordingly, my analysis does not privilege, or rest findings on, deep dives into colonial law’s canons or ratios. Nor does it traipse along conceptual paths taken by empirical sociologists of law who claim – sometimes privileging enumeration above all else – a comprehensive representation of aged colonial laws. It also declines conventional historical supplication to discover a “past” that ignores the nub of what Tomlins raises by these rhetorical questions:

Closer to critical theories that cultivate a sense of the erstwhile as imperceptibly yet durably flooding social forms today (Reference StolerStoler 2016), this book repudiates legal histories that claim to “discover” an abstracted ontology of law. At the same time, it recognizes clear “family resemblances” with critical legal histories that rename and redefine what we so often assume law to be.Footnote ²⁵

The following sociology of accusation also acknowledges a debt to Reference WittgensteinWittgenstein (1980: 51–121) in its attempts to wrest official meanings from quieted legal archives.Footnote ²⁶ His ordinary language approach insists that the use of words in a language, as indicated by grammatical rules within “language-games,” determines their meaning. I have probed dusty archival documents in attempts to trace certain implicit rules for how words were used in archived language-games of colonial law. These point to how local users made use of – and so made meaningful – words like “prosecutor,” “arrest,” “prisoner,” the “accused,” “crime,” “law,” “order,” and so on in particular legal language-games. Wittgenstein tells us further that these language-games evince forms of life: “The term “language-game” is meant to bring into prominence that the speaking of language is part of an activity, or of a form of life” (Reference WittgensteinWittgenstein 1980: 23; emphasis in original).

Through both “surface” and “depth” grammars, criminalizing language-games in colonial legal fields used words in specific ways – to border, order, and ban forms of social life (Reference PavlichPavlich 2018a; Reference 231PitkinPitkin 1973; Reference Turner, Hokowhitu, Moreton-Robinson, Tuhiwai-Smith, Andersen and LarkinTurner 2021). These language-games determined how to use the term “criminal accusation” in mid-nineteenth-century Alberta: they signalled socio-political processes that commenced with “information” that might occasion an arrest of everyday forms of life, leading to decisions on whether the accused’s unsettling odyssey into Dominion criminal justice would end or continue. Such language-games of accusation rested ultimately on conventions behind colonial forms of life (Reference WittgensteinWittgenstein 1980: 226e), indicating socio-political rationales that made sense of what could legally count as properly accusing someone of committing a crime.Footnote ²⁷

Sitting amid a pile of archived transcripts, one recalls the attempt to make sense of complex legal tales. Justices of the peace had long ago transcribed what they intended future readers to encounter as legal truths. Almost 150 years on, my eyes cautiously probe the written words left by an agitated justice of the peace’s pen, exploring how a delegated Dominion agent proclaimed criminal law. My specific quest was to bring underlying socio-political logics and meanings of accusation into focus – “fusing” one might say Reference GadamerGadamer’s (2013: 455 ff) “meaning horizons.” That fusing gaze is admittedly directed by critical sociological lenses that tint disquieted readings, recognizing that reflexive sociological language-games demand unsettling readings of what appears familiar (Reference 214BourdieuBourdieu 1992). It is also shaped by transiently lived and repeatedly interrupted forms of life; an unsettling that seeks to discern and trouble the violent edges of imperial or colonial pens etching a white male privilege into preserved manuscripts – probing a “white man’s law” in development (Reference FosterFoster 1992; Reference HarringHarring 1998; Reference NettelbeckNettelbeck 2013). From the outset, however, I note that my genre of analysis, while influenced by and written as an ally of critical Indigenous studies (Reference 222Hokowhitu, Moreton-Robinson, Tuhiwai-Smith, Andersen and LarkinHokowhitu et al. 2020) or Indigenous laws (Reference BorrowsBorrows 2016; Reference NapoleonNapoleon 2019; Reference Starblanket, Stark, Asch, Borrows and TullyStarblanket and Kiiwetinepinesiik Stark 2019), is written by a non-Indigenous social analyst seeking reflexively to name and challenge a tenaciously pervasive “coloniality” (Reference Maldonado-TorresMaldonado-Torres 2007).

But the following reading also takes seriously the combined effects of intent, aleatory, and power by which documents, and interpretations, survive in officially sanctioned archives. Colonial powers enclosed official decisions and process around what to archive for unknown futures, the stories that legal authorities – haphazardly yet with local presumptions of purpose – intended to leave behind. Despite the aleatory of what remains, one may read between recorded lines to discern a violent law-creating lineage that still affects today’s widespread institutions of criminal justice, all grounded on local criminal accusations. Yet, it is important to keep in mind that archived legal texts and records worked “through a double logic of violence: the violence of law and the violence of the archive” (Reference Mawani, Dubber and TomlinsMawani 2018: 297). A focus on “paradigmatic” examples affords glimpses of that violence, through which selected language-games made accusatory performances intelligible to users (Reference AgambenAgamben 2009b). Furthermore, a reliance on reading and reasoning through example is close to allegory and quite different from sampled representation or discovery mentioned before. The socio-political rationales of colonial criminal accusation in Alberta may then be interpreted from paradigmatic examples that imply rules for the use (and so the meaning) of terms. Examples of criminal accusation might then shed light on wider meaning frames, recognizing

If Agamben worked through examples of camps (concentration, refugee) to render oft-eclipsed elements of modern politics intelligible, the following isolates paradigmatic examples that highlight facets of colonial accusation and the socio-political foundations of criminalizing bans. The aim of such a paradigmatic understanding is to extract and name a ruling politics that regulated social limits through accusations of crime. In many ways, as implied, this approach refuses a tenacious colonial emphasis on discovery – whether of lands or knowledge – seeking instead to use exemplars to highlight a socio-politics of accusatory performance at the start of criminalizing laws in Alberta. Bentham’s example of panoptic surveillance in penitentiaries aided Reference FoucaultFoucault’s (1977) nuanced charting of disciplinary powers, emphasizing exemplary patterns and techniques of modern European rule. More reservedly, in what follows, an analogous exemplary concept – threshold “theatres of criminal accusation” – references legally prescribed roles, powers, and performances that produced linked accusatory gateways to, and at the foundations of, Dominion criminalization.Footnote ²⁸

What precise genre of critique is implied by a sociology that approaches accusation through examples of performance following scripts of colonial language-games and forms of life? To be sure, it does not revolve around judgement, but around attempts to “separate out” or interrupt sedimented and depoliticized ideas that present themselves as necessary (Reference ButlerButler 2020; Reference WilliamsWilliams 2017). The unpacking and repacking of concepts or examples, a deconstruction of sorts, also refuses the intellectual blackmail of dominant versions of modern critique that extort critics to judge social contexts against progressive criteria, or risk not being critical at all (Reference Derrida, Anidjar and CarlsonDerrida 2002; Reference PavlichPavlich 1998, Reference Pavlich2000). Disrupting familiar words commonly used in criminalizing arenas is a countermanding venture; blunt instruments of doctrinal judgment may miss the nuance of how normative collective limits are tackled by legal discourses.Footnote ²⁹ Yet a critical sociology of this sort makes no pretence at being an all-embracing, complete, or exclusively valid story. On the contrary, there are many stories to tell about the complex matters at hand, including many that are not mine to tell. Ultimately, however, stories signal how we plurally and variously comprehend ourselves and respond to our worlds – alone, together, with others, or in relation to the lands on which social limits are criminalized.Footnote ³⁰ What follows then is but one story among many, aiming to unsettle sedimented colonial legal stories with ancestries of white patriarchal privilege (Reference AhmedAhmed 2007; Reference Starblanket, Stark, Asch, Borrows and TullyStarblanket and Kiiwetinepinesiik Stark 2019). It is an ally to Indigenous discourses that challenge the coloniality within dominant performances of justice.

Theatres and Performances of Accusation

Legal performances at “theatres” of accusation in Alberta – as may be glimpsed from paradigmatic examples – introduced varied recitals, from information laying to arrest to preliminary examination.Footnote ³¹ Yet criminal accusation was routinized in Alberta only once Northwest Mounted Police officers established theatres by which social disorder could be categorized through Dominion law.Footnote ³² In the sociology of accusation to follow, I use the term “theatres” lithely to reference diverse performances at the pre-trial stages or chambers of law noted earlier (Reference KingKing 2003). No doubt, this approach to accusation as inaugural recital of criminalization owes a debt to a substantial literature that has studied law – beyond its textual, rule-driven, technical, or doctrinal claims – as a performance (Reference Sarat, Douglas and UmphreySarat et al. 2018). One might recall Reference Balkin and LevinsonBalkin and Levinson (1999: 729) who famously argued: “Law, like music or drama, is best understood as performance – the acting out of texts rather than the texts themselves.” Or stated more assertively: “Law is the ultimate performative institution: producing the frameworks of subjecthood and subjectivity through discursive acts” (Reference Stone PetersStone Peters 2008: 181).Footnote ³³ Law may then be approached as, “a performance art: an art of public rhetorical suasion, in which compelling stories dramatized before the relevant audience (judges, juries) ultimately shape legal outcomes, often making doctrine simply irrelevant” (Reference Stone PetersStone Peters 2014: 34).

For a sociology of accusation, one might acknowledge some proximity to Reference GoffmanGoffman’s (1959) work, but especially to his “dramaturgy.” One might also note an overlap with his approach to “stigma” and the importance of “information control”:

As vivid as research on law, performance, and theatre certainly is, it too has paid scant attention specifically to theatres of accusation that shape thresholds to criminal law. Redressing the oversight, this book seeks to understand how accusatory performances undergird criminal law. Taking a cue from Reference GoodrichGoodrich (2011), it attends then not to sanctioned performances of legal trials but seeks to infiltrate the proscenium by which such law appears. The point here is

One might say that performances at colonial theatres of criminal accusation simultaneously reference offstage and frontstage thresholds; from shielding accusers’ phenomenological meaning ruptures, or discretionary decisions on which specific lives to arrest, to preliminary judgments on whether to bind an accused over to a trial. All such performances shielded what could be contextually declared as law and social order.

Acting out the beginnings of colonial law at theatres of accusation evokes theoretical notions of both performance and theatricality. But how are we to understand these terms? As Reference Stone PetersStone Peters (2014) notes the very idea of a performance is ambiguous because it denotes specific stages and staging but also intimates universal application (recall Shakespeare’s As You Like It, “all the world’s a stage …”). Performance in its ambiguity renders local forms of criminal accusation both discernible and tangible, but it also sediments accusatory forms of life more generally. However, criminalizing accusations typically distinguish their performances from the everyday, starting with information laying and arrests that interrupt lives and hail accused parties to account for specified actions. As legal forms, accusatory performances arise from and animate legal texts (e.g., magistrate handbooks), implying the “performativity” through which accusatory rituals routinize criminalizing thresholds. Here we also find unique sorts of “speech acts” (e.g., Reference AustinAustin 1975; Reference SearleSearle 1970) where certain uses of words themselves occasion legal acts (such as when justices of the peace declare that “the accused is hereby bound over to trial”). Directly relevant to “theatres of accusation” too, one might reference Reference ButlerJudith Butler’s (2006) work on performativity, noting that identities appear and are reproduced socially through repeated performances that are shaped by (and perpetuate) power relations. The reproductions are never fixed, as local identities surface through repeated role enactments in contexts shaped by intersecting power relations (Reference Cho, Crenshaw and McCallCho, Crenshaw, and McCall 2013). As such, socio-political forces shape a gendered, racialized, age-infiltrated, economically aligned (and so on) performativity that yields local instances of, say, accusers, witnesses, and accused identities.

Thinking further about the performativity of colonial accusation, let us recall Reference Derrida, Anidjar and CarlsonDerrida’s (2002) powerful essay on law as a performative force through which the “mystical foundations of authority” are violently enacted. Referencing Reference Benjamin, Eiland and JenningsBenjamin’s (2004: 236 ff) “Critique of Violence,” he educes violence as intrinsic to law-creating and sustaining forces – repeatedly enacted through decisions mired in paradox, promising a justice that can never fully arrive (Reference Derrida, Anidjar and CarlsonDerrida 2002: 258 ff). Law emerges then through a never-ending, groundless performativity that violently declares and institutes legal fields in the name of justice. Control over the means of legal violence gives a sense of why criminal accusation was so key to securing a settler-colonial order. But justice cannot finally be named, even as given examples of law try to do so. If law aims to settle conflicts through determining judgements, justice is impossibly and permanently unsettled. Justice is impossible precisely because it forever eludes determined capture by any system or judgment of law, incessantly harbouring the promise of ever more just social arrangements. Elaborating perhaps upon Wittgenstein’s “conventions” that groundlessly found grammars of meanings for given forms of life, Reference Derrida, Anidjar and CarlsonDerrida (2002: 242–43) describes how law’s violent performances, inceptions, commencements, and judgments occur in the name of a forever elusive promises of justice. Colonial regimes of accusatory categorizations may be then said performatively to commence, again and again, openings to possible criminalization.Footnote ³⁴ Its theatres oblige participants to encounter the words and violent force of a law whose mythical foundations never allow for complete or final justification.

The term “theatre” in what follows (referring to its etymology) is used to connote coordinated spaces designed to be “looked at” or “watched” by an audience (Reference AytoAyto 2011: 526). The spectacular powers of theatre require audiences to encounter their own ethics and deceits, enticing viewers to re-negotiate everyday identities.Footnote ³⁵ Yet there is an aporetic dimension to such theatres insofar as law over millennia lays diverse claims to legitimate, expert rules, and lucid procedures – each laying claims to justice without falling prey to deprecating theatricality (Reference BeattyBeatty 2022). At the same time, as Reference Stone PetersStone Peters (2014: 34) notes, law always seeks a “back-up for the not-always-convincing ordering rod” by employing “every theatrical art in its means: sensational narrative, emotion-stirring speeches, dramatic staging, images meant to terrify and arouse.”Footnote ³⁶ In other words, “both legal performance itself and law’s ambivalent relationship to its own theatricality matter to the way in which law produces itself, to its specific outcomes, to its broader effects, and to its meaning or institutional self-conception” (Reference Stone PetersStone Peters 2008: 182).

The staging of accusation through diverse theatres across the prairies in nineteenth-century Alberta sought to render Dominion criminal law as a unified material force whose workings could be observed, archived, and its choreographed projections apprehended. Those accusatory theatres negotiated categories and moral limits to envisaged colonial orders (see Reference LeiboffLeiboff 2021: 88 ff). They performatively shepherded – in unequal ways – so-called defiant individuals from everyday social to legal fields, opening pathways to potential criminalization. To set the stage for what follows, as it were, one might note that the Northwest Mounted Police performatively declared a presence across the prairies in contexts with contesting powers and legal fields. It did so by requiring local informants to deliver information about indictable crimes to justices of the peace at arrayed theatres of accusation.

Colonial Rule and Criminalizing Powers

Throughout this decade, the performativity of colonial criminal accusation enabled a wider colonial politics of possession, as criminal laws helped to shape social arrangements for planned migratory settlement (Reference Cavanagh and VeraciniCavanagh and Veracini 2017; Reference HarrisHarris 2020; Reference SimpsonSimpson 2016b; Reference StoreyStorey 2018). Managing Indigenous dispossession through criminalization has left enduringly destructive imprints on current horizons:

Such breakdowns are all too evident in the noted disproportionate capture of BIPOC cohorts (Reference Cunneen and TauriCunneen and Tauri 2016; Reference FriedlandFriedland 2009; Reference MaynardMaynard 2017), as well as failures to police say missing and murdered Indigenous women.Footnote ³⁷ This is precisely why observers insist that something be done about routinely relying on morally defunct practices of punitive criminalization (Reference 223KellyKelly 2018: 178 ff), repressively “bad” and unequal legal fields (Reference ReillyReilly 2019), systemic racist and sexist failures of policing (Reference Buller, Audette, Robinson and EyolfsonBuller et al. 2019; Reference LebronLebron 2017), and so on.Footnote ³⁸ Some also suggest the value of eventually abolishing key elements of criminal justice systems borne to colonization (Reference Carrier and PichéCarrier and Piché 2015; Reference Davis, Dent and MeinersDavis 2003; Reference RuggieroRuggiero 2011), while others promise that restorative paradigms could valuably replace adversarial courts of criminal law (Reference ZehrZehr 2015).Footnote ³⁹

Although difficult to envisage when confronted by hegemonies of state criminalization, the varied examples suggest how we might go about rethinking violence and revitalizing law as a reasoned deliberation related to lands, environments, without simply routinizing vengeful and repressive criminalizing institutions (e.g., Reference Napoleon and FriedlandNapoleon and Friedland 2016a; Reference ZehrZehr 2015). The present analysis provides for an allied possibility: re-imagine accusation beyond the rote and technical practices of criminalization to reconsider how, what, and who might aptly be accused of generating destructive social relations. Several guiding concepts are helpful when considering accusation in colonial Alberta, but three in particular might also be regarded as imperatives for orientating a critical approach to the topic.

The Stories to Follow

One story of criminal accusation in Alberta takes us back to two seemingly distant, but influential, intelligence reports – authored by military officers William Butler and Patrick Robertson-Ross. They were instructed in 1870 and 1872, respectively, by the Dominion of Canada (North-West Territories Council) to reconnoitre the North-West Territories in preparation for colonial settlement. Both reporters identified Alberta’s supposed lawlessness as requiring colonial intervention. Chapter 2 describes the socio-politics implied by the reports, detailing their race-tinted assessments, and how they divided an assumed population into racially conceived forms of life. Replicating popular imperial supremacist opinions, the reports egregiously placed “white” settlers at the pinnacle of evolutionarily imagined notions of social progress. Both relied on rumour to recommend that law be used to enforce relational orders conducive to colonial settlement. This was to be achieved without provoking wars against Indigenous Peoples.

Chapter 3 studies how a 330-man Northwest Mounted Police force was assembled in response to rumoured law-and-order issues that framed the report’s recommendation. This force marched into Alberta in late 1874 (see Figure 1.2) with plans to deploy Dominion law sovereignly over legally plural contexts. With relatively few officers, and claiming jurisdiction over vast geographies, the force set about arranging spectacular symbolic performances of criminal accusation. Senior police officers met with Indigenous leaders to discuss possible targets for legal governance. Based on meetings with leaders in southern Alberta the Mounted Police negotiated an initial target – a socially injurious liquor trade. A discernible socio-political logic lay behind the symbolic projections of a stable, ascendent, and enduring Dominion rule by criminal law. Theatres of accusation provided performatively staged openings to that law.

More directly focused on the internal scripts for performances at these theatres, Chapter 4 describes how colonial criminal accusation worked through arrayed chambers; laying information, arrest, and summary trials or preliminary examination. It highlights the pre-trial work of oft-overlooked leading actors in law enforcement – senior police officers serving ex officio as justices of the peace. Descending from age-old British legal institutions, the colonial justice of the peace migrated to eastern Canada and then to pre-trial arenas in the North-West Territories. By way of paradigmatic examples, this chapter shows how police and justices arranged – relying on legal scripts – theatres where performances of criminal accusation could be staged. The examples suggest that without accusatory theatres, colonial criminalization could not have appeared let alone presented itself as superior to other legal fields. Accusatory foundations were thus performatively implicated at the heart of colonial law’s attempts to manage dispossessing settler orders via criminalization.

Frequently serving as accusers, or as facilitators for other accusers, Northwest Mounted Police officers were coached on how and when to delimit social disorder. Chapter 5 highlights examples of their training to perform as accusers (or to facilitate other accusers) around theatres that categorized criminal acts and actors. Here officers were instructed in both “direct” and “indirect” governance (as per Bentham), with lessons derived from paramilitary and police science disciplines. Recruits learned how to follow commands to deploy violence, and how to use discretion in efforts to prevent dissent. With inspiration from the Royal Irish Constabulary, police officers also learned how to become criminal accusers by habit. That training, with its colonial biases clear, is detectable from a paradigmatic example of police responses to the first death of a Northwest Mounted Police constable in 1882. Located within a settler assumptive universe supporting dispossessing visions of social order, one glimpses how police training in this case focused accusations on Indigenous persons.

Following an analysis of key colonial accusers, Chapter 6 focuses attention on the target of Alberta’s performances at theatres of accusation: criminally accused individuals. It reveals a politics through which accused subjects were formed at police-guided accusatory theatres – including information gathering, arrest, and examination. These theatres required targeted subjects to perform roles, under the threat of force, as law’s accused persons. Referring to three paradigmatic examples, the discussion centres on how colonial law recognized criminally culpable individuals. Underscoring individually based accusations, this law moulded accused personas through at least two key techniques. First, its justices transcribed what could be legally “heard” and translated complex relations into idioms of law – thereby attributing degrees of culpability for crimes to accused individuals and deflecting attention away from conflict-generating social structures. Second, the theatres managed avowals of legal truth, thus subtly promoting obedience to colonial law and thence settler social order.

If the previous chapters highlight the rise of intersecting powers behind settler-colonial criminal accusation, the penultimate Chapter 7 focuses directly on a third assemblage of these variously integrated powers – biopolitics. Colonial biopolitics generated and worked through categories that located individuals within divisive population groups (Reference Swiffen, Paget, Sarat, Pavlich and MaileySwiffen and Paget 2022). Revealing an imagined normative social hierarchy, colonial criminal accusation assigned individuals to economic, racialized, and gendered population groups that congealed with white, male, possessive relational orderings. A remarkable assembly of Cree leaders perceptively challenged dispossessing colonial law and order in a translated public letter submitted to a local newspaper. Without political processes to manage conflicts between opposing legal fields, lawless violence could quickly descend around accusatory thresholds – as revealed by a case involving the police inspector Dickens (one of the famous author’s sons). Through this example, we glimpse the struggles by which colonial theatres of criminal accusation tried to assert monopolistic jurisdiction – highlighting how violence and force were the currency of lawless, biopolitical battles to declare law. Both this case and another reflects how patriarchal biopower rendered women without name or persona in law, as absent referents, even when accusers. Intersectional powers of law and a patriarchal, racialized biopolitics underscored the possessive powers that colonial accusation supported (Reference CarterCarter 1997; Reference Cho, Crenshaw and McCallCho, Crenshaw, and McCall 2013; Reference TomlinsonTomlinson 2013). As is outlined, such powers have left enduring legacies of inequality within criminal justice systems today.

The discussion concludes by reviewing paradigmatic socio-political logics of hybrid sovereign, disciplinary, and biopower within colonial theatres of criminal accusation, as revealed by the preceding analyses of archived Albertan texts. It traces a “coloniality” within accusatory performances framed by racialized, patriarchal, and marginalizing criminal justice institutions (Reference Maldonado-TorresMaldonado-Torres 2007). In composite, the chapters point to several key social and political foundations through which accusations of crime provided conditions for colonial criminalization to emerge. It is significant that such accusations and the law that they sustained were from the outset placed in the service of dispossessing social, political, and economic ambitions. The book ends by reflecting on two legacy bequests of colonial accusation that might be used to think in ways that exceed the socio-political horizons that contour today’s vast, unequal, and repressive criminal justice systems.