Fictions of Race: American Indian Policies in Nineteenth-Century British North American Fiction

Abstract

This article explores the hemispheric and transatlantic uses of race and empire as tropes of settler-colonial otherness in the novelThe Canadian Brothers(1840) by Canadian author John Richardson. In this pre-Confederation historical novel, Richardson contrasts the imperial British discourse of racial tolerance, and the British military alliances with the Natives in the War of 1812, with the brutality of American Indian policies south of the border, in an effort to craft a narrative of Canadian difference from, and incompatibility with, American culture. At the same time, the author's critical attitude towards all European military and commercial interventions in the New World illuminates the rootedness of both American and Canadian settler colonialisms in British imperialism, and exposes the arbitrariness and constructedness of the political boundaries dividing the continent.