Seen but Not Seen: Influential Canadians and the First Nations from the 1840s to Today

Abstract

2021 was annus horribilis in Canada. Preliminary investigations suggested that numerous unmarked, untended child graves may lie around defunct Indian Residential Schools. Statues of revered founders of public education and of the nation were toppled. Ongoing devastation was attested in footage of an Indigenous patient taunted by Quebec hospital staff as she lay dying. Historians and educators are left wondering how to better convey the evils while continuing to love and honor the good. Such a goal motivated Donald Smith, long-time University of Calgary historian of Indigenous Canada, award-winning scholar of Mississauga leaders, and textbook author with countless Indigenous friends; a public intellectual who cautions against “genocide” terminology (Literary Review of Canada) and the condemnation of educator Ryerson on flimsy evidence (Ontario History). Smith’s Seen but Not Seen: Influential Canadians and the First Nations from the 1840s to Today offers readers unparalleled expertise on Canadian indigeneity across two centuries.The author makes it clear there was little meeting of the minds between the dominant society and the sparse, scattered Indigenous peoples (as little as 1 percent in many regions of nineteenth-century Canada, compared to 4.9 percent overall today). Smith explores influential Canadians (politicians, scholars, ethnographers, missionaries), many living in southern regions where the Indigenous population scarcely registered. They assumed (with varying degrees of good and ill will) that assimilation was the natural and desirable course. In the 1840s even some Anishinaabe leaders agreed, offering treaty money to help establish industrial schools, hoping that educated graduates would eventually run them. But Indigenous voices in this book mostly resisted, notably by repeated refusal of franchise and other citizenship rights when it meant giving up Indian status.Smith sees marked differences in the book’s array of assimilationists. The study is justifiably hard-hitting against an early twentieth-century superintendent of the Department of Indian Affairs, Duncan Campbell Scott. This long serving autocrat took every opportunity to augment powers of sometimes-corrupt Indian agents, to criminalize traditional ceremonies and councils, and to facilitate land takeovers, suppressing any pushback from the group he was supposed to serve. By contrast, the author introduces us to a number of Indigenous friends and even some of the tolerant actions of Prime Minister John A. Macdonald. Most, I think, would argue that such things scarcely offset his deliberate policy of starving the Plains Cree onto reserves. Historians weigh shortcomings against major accomplishments. The real defense of the wily Macdonald is that, despite deplorable Indian policy, he was singularly skilled in bringing together disparate provinces in the face of American annexationism; it’s unlikely Canada would exist without him.The author succeeds very well in his goal of avoiding “presentism.” The discursive style can be distracting, since in addition to sixteen individuals named in chapter headings, more than a dozen other characters drop in unannounced. Fortunately, some are as fascinating as Mohawk poet Pauline Johnson, fake Indian Grey Owl, and various dedicated white supporters of Indian activism. The reader who stays focused will appreciate a book that exceeds the sum of its parts. It forms a sort of diorama from early days at Grand River and New Credit in Upper Canada through buffalo-hunting, missionary, and homesteading days on the Prairies. We see the construction of a toxic Department of Indian Affairs in Ottawa. We meet Emily Carr and Paul Wallace, who made friends in remote villages and introduced West Coast totems and Peacemaker stories to an ignorant public.Breakthroughs came with the Indian Association of Alberta, British Columbia’s Native Brotherhood, Harold Cardinal’s 1969 The Unjust Society, and other voices of resistance. Smith leaves the proliferation of post-1970 activism to a later historian who may bring longer-term perspective. The book does close with a helpful fifteen-page compendium of the many accomplishments, including fierce resistance to the assimilationist 1969 White Paper, the standoff at Oka, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, judicial breakthroughs, and land-claim and residential-school settlements. This nuanced, contextualized discussion of earlier history is a welcome start.