HighWater Press, Winnipeg, 2011
416 pp., illus., $35 paperback
A double review with Civilizing the Wilderness: Culture and Nature in Pre-Confederation Canada and Rupert’s Land
by A.A. den Otter
University of Alberta Press, Edmonton, 2012
472 pp., $49.95 paperback
Two recent books, while very different, tell two sides of the same story: the passionate efforts of nineteenth-century missionaries to “civilize” the Aboriginal peoples of the Northwest and the perspectives, continuing to the present day, of those who were “civilized.”
A key figure in both Civilizing the Wilderness and Manitowapow is Peguis, chief of the Saulteaux at Red River, who welcomed Lord Selkirk’s Scots settlers, encouraged agriculture, and converted to Christianity, baptized into the Church of England as William King. Yet Manitowapow opens with an angry, astute letter from Peguis to a British parliamentary committee investigating the future of the Hudson’s Bay Company and Rupert’s Land.
Peguis complains that he has not been paid, as promised, for the lands his tribe has surrendered and expresses the wish for “a fair and mutually advantageous treaty.” In exchange for his people’s sober, honest, and industrious conduct, Peguis writes, we “hope the Great Mother [Queen Victoria] will not only protect us from oppression and injustice but grant us all the privileges of the whites.” Faint hope: Civilizing the Wilderness author A.A. den Otter points out that the committee hadn’t bothered to invite Peguis, or any other First Nations leaders, to appear before it.
Paternalism, as den Otter too kindly calls it — Peguis was talking about theft — was one of the ingredients of what den Otter refers to as a dynamic, optimistic notion: “It meant much more than conversion to Christianity; it also included introducing Native converts over time to the contemporary British world of science and technology, economy and industry, literature, arts and education.” This imperial smugness automatically placed the conquered Indigenes, as they were called, in an inferior position as illiterate, improvident savages who needed to be rescued from their terrifying, godless wilderness.
The ecstatic, fundamentalist Christianity preached by evangelical Anglican and Wesleyan Methodist missionaries did resonate with the spirituality of the Aboriginal world view. Manitowapow includes excerpts from the diary of Henry Budd, a Cree raised at Norway House who, in 1853, became the first Aboriginal North American ordained as an Anglican priest. “We have attended to the usual Services today, and endeavoured to worship God in his house of Prayer, but Oh! what a worship we have rendered him!” Budd writes on March 19, 1871. “Full of sin and imperfections! Lord wash our very prayers in the blood of thy dear Son.”
In Civilizing the Wilderness, den Otter gives a more complex portrait of Budd (born Sakachuwescam) as a gifted scholar, teacher, and charismatic preacher, in both English and Cree, who was consigned to remote missions on the Saskatchewan River, where he suffered from prolonged depressions.
Den Otter uses Budd’s poignant story and those of his Anishinaabe Methodist contemporaries Henry Bird Steinhauer (Sowengisik) and Peter Jones (Kahkewaquonaby) as parables to illustrate the dual cultural identities produced by the civilizing crusade and its pernicious hypocrisy. The missionaries’ insistence that the Native people become farmers, in defiance of harsh weather and poor soil, reflected their own utopian vision of recreating in the Northwest “a romanticized pastoral rural society” that had vanished in Great Britain.
Similarly, while Protestant children had to learn to read their Bibles, either in English or syllabics, for an outdoor people who travelled by canoe, boat, or cart, any book had a short lifespan, and the English-style residential school, with its harsh discipline, traumatized children and devastated communities. As the Aboriginal people learned at gunpoint during the Red River and Northwest rebellions, civilization for them did not include equality, citizenship, or the right to own land.
Manitowapow is a testament to civilization’s literary success, albeit relatively recent — the majority of the anthology’s writers, primarily Métis, Cree, and Anishinaabe, were born after 1930. With a few exceptions — notably, Tobasonakwut Kinew, a prominent Anishinaabe activist once named Peter Kelly — their names are Scots, French, or English.
The theme of cultural duality, even multiplicity, unites this collection of some two hundred stories, poems, essays, and mani-festos. Not only are the younger writers fluent in English, many are highly educated urban professionals — teachers, performers, politicians — who use the English and Aboriginal languages as tools, or weapons, to explore and proclaim their identities.
When the Other Is Me: Native Resistance Discourse, 1850–1990, the title of a recent book by Emma LaRocque, a Métis and a University of Manitoba professor, neatly expresses Aboriginal hostility to “civilizing.” Manitowapow includes two of LaRocque’s angry poems, yet the last lines of a third, “Geese Over the City,” capture the anthology’s ambivalent, nostalgic tone:
Twice more
The Geese
went over the city
making me sad
that I could not see
making me happy
that I could see
there was much Cree in me
despite
town height.
This review appeared in the February-March 2013 issue of Canada's History magazine.
— Heather Robertson (Read bio)
Heather Robertson's latest book is Walking into Wilderness: The Toronto Carrying Place and Nine Mile Portage, which covers the war between the French, English, and their First Nations allies in the Great Lakes watershed.