Whiteness and Ambiguous Canadianization: The Boy Scouts Association and the Canadian Cadet Organization

Abstract

Between the 1920s and late 1960s, the Boy Scouts Association of Canada and the Canadian Cadet Movement proved to be ambiguous institutions for the Canadianization of certain ethnic minorities. While nationally, as agents of Anglo-conformity and settler colonialism, these movements remained rooted in a British Canadian identity, at the local level they gradually became more accommodating of particular white ethnic identities. However, this did not extend to non-white cadets and scouts, especially Aboriginal boys, who were targets for assimilation into the larger Anglo-Canadian mainstream. As such, this is in part a study of Anglo-Canadian whiteness and the ways in which shifting definitions of whiteness and national identity can be viewed through the local accommodations made by two Anglo-Canadian youth movements Aboriginal youth were subject to assimilationist programs within cadet and scout units, but, at the local level, both national movements provided greater cultural accommodation to white ethnic and religious minorities, primarily through the intervention of ethnic and religious institutions that sponsored their own Cadet or Scout units. This began during the interwar years with two of the largest white linguistic and religious minority groups, French Canadian Catholics and Jewish-Canadians, spreading to white ethnic Eastern Europeans during the postwar period.