The Grave-Robber and the Paternalist: Anna Jameson and Sir Francis Bond Head among the Anishinaabe Indians

Abstract

I: Introduction When British writer Anna Jameson (1794–1860; figure 1) arrived in Toronto in 1836, she found herself in the thick of local society, for her husband, Robert Jameson, was Upper Canada’s attorney general. It is not surprising, then, that Mrs. Jameson quickly became acquainted with the British colony’s elite members, including fellow author Sir Francis Bond Head (1793–1875; figure 2), the recently appointed lieutenant governor. Readers of Jameson’s travelogue Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada (1838) will already be familiar with her passing references to Sir Francis, including her incisive critique of his paternalistic approach to indigenous governance policy. This essay revisits Jameson’s critique in light of a letter we recently discovered in the John Murray Archive at the National Library of Scotland. The letter, which Head wrote to his friend and publisher, John Murray, contains a rather scandalous allegation, for in it he accuses Jameson of stealing a skull from an indigenous gravesite – a circumstance that, if true, would complicate her avowed sympathy for North America’s First Peoples. In this essay we evaluate Head’s case against Jameson, weighing its plausibility and considering its implications. In the process, we hope to shed new light on the relationship between British Romanticism, colonialism, and contemporary ideas of indigenous culture and governance. Because Jameson and Head are minor authors, a few introductory words are in order before we proceed to our main argument. Although, as we demonstrate below, each was highly critical of the other, they shared a number of things in common, including a respectable level of popularity as travel writers. Before coming to Upper Canada, Jameson had penned such popular travelogues as The Diary of an Ennuyee (1826) and Visits and Sketches at Home and Abroad (1834), while Head had earned a degree of celebrity for his Rough Notes Taken During Some Rapid Journeys Across the Pampas and Among the Andes (1826) and Bubbles from the Brunnens of Nassau (1834). Having been born in the early years of the British Romantic period, both authors shared a penchant for nature and the picturesque, and each admired particular Romantic authors (for example, Jameson was an enthusiastic reader of Wordsworth, and Head enjoyed the poetry of Byron and Scott).