Newspapers publish stories reflecting a place and time, and this was certainly the case in 1870s Manitoba. The province was still an Indigenous space at the beginning of that decade, despite the continued oppression of the Métis community following the Red River Resistance led by Louis Riel. However, as the decade progressed, settlers took over the province’s land and power structures.

In Imprinting Empire: Land and Settler Colonialism in Manitoba Newspapers, Shelisa Klassen describes how newspapers helped this happen, and how they were weaponized against the Indigenous population of Manitoba as tools of settler colonialism. She examines nine newspapers of the era published in the province, including Le Métis, a French one.

“Manitoba was fortunate to have a diverse and active print media culture, with multiple newspapers operating during that decade,” says Klassen, who is an assistant professor of Canadian history at the University of Regina. 

“They wrote extensively about Indigenous people and about immigration, including Mennonite immigration, which was my entry point into this period.”

What they wrote about Indigenous people and immigration had a distinct bias and purpose. Newspapers in the 1870s were, according to Klassen, “run by businessmen and politicians who want[ed] to shape public opinion towards whatever political or economic agenda they [were] trying to achieve. In most cases, that [was] settler colonialism.”

Newspapers intentionally promoted settler colonial propaganda that ultimately led to the dispossession of Indigenous peoples from their land by the end of the decade. 

“Newspapers are tools for storytelling and mythmaking, and both are essential to settler colonialism,” Klassen explains. 

Klassen discovered that the settler colonial goals of newspapers in her research period were pretty blatant. “I thought they’d hide their motives a little better, but no, you can read it right on the newspaper page,” she says. 

“People are calling for violence, or excusing bad behaviour, whether from mobs, politicians, government officials, or soldiers, or wishing for the total erasure of Indigenous people from the province. It made my job as a historian rather easy.”

She adds, “It’s very honest, even if that means that you can’t trust all the facts they are publishing. In the pages of a newspaper (or I suppose the home page of a digital media site) you find clear evidence of a society’s fears and anxieties, as well as what will outrage readers, and what that society is working towards.”

Imprinting Empire was originally written as Klassen’s doctoral thesis. She reworked the book into one of interest to a general readership, which includes anyone who wants to learn more about settler colonialism or Prairie history. 

“I think that in Canada we’re taught a historical myth about a ‘peaceful’ settlement period, and my book is directly challenging and exposing that myth,” Klassen says.

“I also want to invite readers from backgrounds like my own [Mennonite] to learn that our stories are part of the settler colonial project. Our histories of immigration are not separate from colonial narratives or violent systems of removal.”

Klassen also hopes that “learning about the fragility and insecurity of settler colonial systems inspires us all to imagine a better future. 

“Colonial narratives about land and race and power prop up a settler colonial system that was not inevitable and therefore can be undone.”