Book review: Seen but Not Seen

By Maurice Switzer

In his prologue to the most recent of half a dozen titles he has authored on Indigenous topics, Donald B. Smith admits to being among the majority of Canadians who have suffered from a “long-established blindness to Indigenous peoples.”

It’s that sense of cultural humility which makes his impressive Indigenous canon credible, as well as extremely interesting to read. If more educators and politicians had historically approached this subject area with the same deference and respect, there may not have ever been a need for a century of periodic national commissions of inquiry into the sad state of relations between Canadians and First peoples.

In “Seen but Not Seen”, Smith exposes the roots of this cultural divide with a collection of well-documented profiles of 16 influential Canadians who displayed a wide range of facility in dealing with Indigenous subject matter. (The University of Calgary professor emeritus is a fastidious researcher: his “half-century of clipping and filing” resulted in this 281-page work being followed by 120 pages of supporting notes and a 23-page bibliography!)

Of special significance to Smith’s credentials is his track record of actually relying on the experience and knowledge of First Nations teachers like the late Elders Fred Wheatley and Basil Johnston.

His portraits include the usual suspects, like Canada’s first prime minister, whose statues and school names across the country are currently being brought into disrepute because of Sir. John A. Macdonald’s undeniable tendencies to social Darwinism – the theory that some races are innately superior to others. Smith cites some of “Old Tomorrow’s” most outrageous comments in the House of Commons in which he opined that the only successful intermarriages are among “Aryan races”, repeatedly described Indians as “savages”, and claimed he had met the ill-fated Indian fighter General George Armstrong Custer and “admired the gallant soldier”.

Sir John A. walked his talk by entrenching the odious Indian Act into Canadian government policy, resulting in a racist legacy that included jailing First Nations people for pow wow dancing and practising their culture, a pass system to restrict the movement of reserve residents, and the creation of the Indian Residential School System in which at least 6,000 children are known to have perished.

The chapter also references the 1885 mass public hanging of eight Cree “rebels”, which, Macdonald wrote to his Indian Affairs superintendent: “ought to convince the Red Man that the White Man governs,” and a campaign to deliberately starve Plains Indians.

But typical of Donald Smith’s approach to interpreting history – especially so long after the fact – is his persistence in trying to present balanced portrayals of his subjects. He tells us that, as a young attorney-general in Upper Canada, Macdonald argued that the Crown owed the Mississaugas of the Credit payment for lands acquired in Treaty 22, and, as prime minister, he advocated for the education of Indian girls as well as boys.

One of his goals as a historian, Smith says, is to avoid “presentism” — the judgment of the past through the lens of the present.”

So he concludes his Macdonald essay with the assessment: “Depressing though it is from today’s vantage point, the reality remains …..that assimilation – or ‘civilization’ as it was called at the time – was the universally-accepted approach.”

Duncan Campbell Scott, an Anglican minister’s son and the chief architect of Canada’s policy to – in words often wrongly attributed to him: “kill the Indian in the child” — is not portrayed by the author as having any redeeming features, so fixated was he on his mission to eradicate “Indian-ness”.

The civil servant with the most authority to enforce the Indian Act for almost two decades, Scott’s attempts to effect complete assimilation of First Nations included forced enfranchisement – loss of Indian status — and making it illegal for bands to hire lawyers to press land claims or treaty issues. He was well-aware of the staggering health and mortality statistics prevalent among residential school populations, writing in 1914: “Fifty per cent of the children who passed through these schools did not live to benefit from the education they had received therein” — but the knowledge did not move him to remedy the crisis.

Much of Scott’s chapter is devoted to his vindictive harassment of Onondeyoh, Mohawk activist Fred Loft, who founded the League of Indians of Canada in 1918 and whose relentless advocacy became a major thorn in the civil servant’s side.

An educated and articulate commissioned officer in World War I, Loft was quoted in a 1920 Toronto Star Weekly article: “If anything is responsible for the backwardness of the Indians today, it is the dominating, dictating, vetoing method of the Indian Department.”

Scott regarded outspoken Indians like Loft as subversives and had him placed under surveillance.

As with Macdonald, Smith’s text serves to minimize Scott’s excesses as the “conventional wisdom of the day.”

Some of the most fascinating passages in the book are about the least-known figures who, in some cases, had huge impacts on Canadian views of Indigenous peoples.

Stewart Wallace’s A First Book of Canadian History, sold over half a million copies between 1928 and 1944, and was the only authorized history text in Ontario public schools. Its caricature of Indians as bloodthirsty savages was typical of the era’s scholarly publications.

Historian Edgar McInnes’s Canada: A Political and Social History, sold over 200,000 copies and from 1947 into the 1980s, was a history course text in Canadian universities. McInnes’s point of view was summarized thusly: “The aborigines made no major contribution to the culture that developed in the settled communities of Canada.”

At the other end of the spectrum was Alberta journalist Hugh Dempsey, whose writing contributed to creating more awareness among Canadians about how the Indian Act created obstacles for First Nations. His readers learned that when he married Pauline Gladstone of the Blood Tribe in 1954, his new wife automatically lost her Indian status, at about the same time as her brother’s new “white” bride legally became an Indian!

Pertinent to contemporary controversies about Indian identity, Smith also introduces us to Chief Walking Buffalo Long Lance, whose articles in major newspapers in four western Canadian provincial newspapers were credited with providing Canadians with much authentic information about First Nations before his untimely death in 1932. It was subsequently revealed that he may have been the Grey Owl of Canadian journalism, his claims of Indian ancestry being flimsy, at best. Yet his research and writing were better informed and more reliable than that produced by some of the most educated scholars of his day.

As Hugh Dempsey – who praised the importance of Long Lance’s work – would say about Native attitudes towards kinship: “Bloodlines are less important than a mutual acceptance of someone as ‘family’.”

Donald Smith has provided us with a good read, more entertaining and less tedious than most works of non-fiction. His profiles of these 16 Canadians illustrate how Canadian views about Indigenous peoples evolved in the country’s first century, and how essential it is that enlightened political leaders and educators contribute to that process.

One might take exception to his insistence that  — no matter how offensive was the racism that was evident in the words and deeds of some of our most esteemed citizens – their attitudes were merely typical “of their time”.

Ironically, one of this book’s secondary characters contradicts that viewpoint.

Duncan Campbell Scott ignored his chief medical officer’s reports about the high rates of serious illness and death at Indian residential schools and was responsible for costing Dr. Peter Bryce his job and government pension when his subordinate tried to publicize what is now widely recognized as government-sanctioned genocide.

There has always been Dr. Peter Bryces, people in all epochs of history who knew what was the right or wrong thing to do. History records that there were always people who knew that slavery was morally reprehensible and that the Holocaust was a crime against humanity, even as their societies were active participants in such evils.

Christians certainly believe there have always been people who recognize the difference between what society might decree to be acceptable and what is the morally correct course of action.

Even when the majority of a country’s citizens appear to hold repugnant views – think of the millions of  American voters who elected Donald Trump as their president – that never justifies an individual’s personal decision to just “go along with the crowd”.

A wise man once said: “Peer pressure and social norms are powerful influences on behaviour and they are classic excuses.”

The words Donald B. Smith has used to inform his readers about the important roles played in Canadian history by the Mississauga peoples along the north shore of Lake Ontario, and now in Seen but Not Seen, have been written by a non-Indigenous person who consistently demonstrates respect for Indigenous realities in Canada through his research and writing.

He describes Alberta writer Hugh Dempsey as “a bridge between two worlds, communicating invaluable information about the Indigenous world to non-Indigenous [people].”

That would be an apt description of this author.

 

Donald B. Smith, Seen but Not Seen (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2020).
ISBN: 9781442622128

Maurice Switzer is a citizen of the Missisaugas of Alderville First Nation. He lives in North Bay, where he operates Nimkii Communications, a public education practice with a focus on  the  treaty relationship that made possible the peaceful settlement of Canada.