Penitentiary provides a telling example. Following the Red River Rebellion inspired by Métis leader Louis Riel, the Province of Manitoba was imposed and Stony Mountain Institution was constructed in Winnipeg. The first warden at Stony was a member of the military unit stationed nearby who had been dispatched to put down the rebellion. When a second uprising broke out in 1885, known as the North-West Rebellion, the partially-built Canadian Pacific Railway carried military troops and North-West Mounted Police to outmaneuver the Métis, Cree, and Assiniboine rebels. After a short show-trial Louis Riel was convicted of high treason and hanged, on orders of Canada’s first Prime Minister, John A. Macdonald. The other rebel Chiefs were incarcerated at Stony Mountain, where their health deteriorated rapidly. Shortly after being released, theydied.

The history of the prison system is also tied up in the residential school system. The residential school system were boarding schools that the government forced indigenous children to attend. The similarities between prisons, asylums, poorhouses, workhouses, Houses of Refuge, reformatories, reform schools and residential schools is no accident. The residential schools set up in the 1860s and 70s were modeled on the ‘industrial schools’ and ‘reformatories’ organized by Upper and Lower Canada, which were themselves hybrids of prison and school for younger offenders. Even the ‘curriculum’ – forced labor, with a vocational bent, remedial schooling, quasi-military discipline – was similar. The chief difference is racial – ‘saving’ a child in a residential school meant trying to abolish all aspects of their previous identity and material existence, and