Amelia Paget’s The People of the Plains: Imperialist and Ethnocritical Nostalgia

Abstract

Twentieth-century representations of nostalgia as the mourning of a lost, idealized, organic communal identity often obscure the simultaneous but contradictory possibilities that nostalgia provides to narrative. Amelia Paget’s anthropological account of Cree, Ojibway, Assiniboine and Sioux First Nations in Western Canada, The People of the Plains, makes use of an “imperialist nostalgia” that praises the West’s bright future as part of the new nation, while at the same time it deploys this same colonial mourning to introduce another version of nostalgia that undermines any celebration of the liberal nation-state. In this 1909 text, then, Paget manipulates nostalgia’s capacity both to conceal and to articulate criticisms of the past, and the present, about which she writes.