READING 3
Mark Francis, “The ‘Civilizing’ of Indigenous People in Nineteenth-Century
Canada,” Journal of World History 9, no. 1 (1998): 51–87
Abstract: This article explores the nineteenth-century concept of “civilization”
that was used to direct policies toward indigenous peoples in Canada. In
Canada attitudes toward native people were shaped by the construction of a
theory of “civilization” as material culture, which was seen as independent
from, and superior to, other aspects of culture. This article analyzes Victorian
concepts of “civilization” as represented in the writings of John Stuart Mill, E.
B. Tylor, John Lubbock, Daniel Wilson, and missionaries. It then traces the
ideas of Canadian officials and politicians concerned with Indian
administration to show how these ideas reflected similar notions. Official
language is seen to have formed part of a general Victorian discourse of
“civilization” that excluded Indians from both self-governance and
participation in the European community.
It has been claimed that the Victorian epoch is the colonial age par excellence
and also that it is the period in which Europeans shifted from a range of
relatively benevolent attitudes toward indigenous peoples to a more deeply
negative racism.1 This claim is associated with a second argument that there
was a single modern global theory of “biological” racism, which began with
Buffon and his views on animal types in the eighteenth century and was
adumbrated in the nineteenth by imperialist pundits, such as H. M. Stanley
on the Africans and Raffles on the Javanese and Malays.2 In this article I agree
that the Victorian era marked a departure from earlier periods in its novel
coinage of harsh racial attitudes toward indigenous people, but I dispute the
suggestion that these always took a “biological” character. Further, I reject the
claim that Victorian ethnicity should be called “modern,” if by that one
means that there was a great divide between, on the one hand, a period in
which ethnicity was based on philosophical and moral doctrines and, on the
other, “modern times”—the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—in which
racism was based on natural science.
Such a division is flawed in two respects. First, not all varieties of nineteenthcentury racism depended on biological typecasting, and second, while
Victorian racism might have been more pervasive, or more widespread and
intrusive, than earlier varieties, it was quite distinct from twentieth-century
attitudes to indigenous peoples. In order to demonstrate that there is no
overarching modern theory of European colonial racism that can explain the
perceptions and treatment of indigenous peoples, I shall examine the notion of
“civilization” as it pertains to nineteenth-century Canada. There “civilization”
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1
largely depended on an advocacy of the virtue of a sophisticated material
culture, which the indigenous people lacked. The intention behind this
explanation is not to substitute another universal claim or constant (i.e., that
nineteenth-century racist attitudes were always caused by a strong emphasis
on the superior material culture of the European ethnic group) for one stating
that all Victorian attitudes were derived from a belief in animal typology and
natural science. Rather my intention is to plead for a more nuanced and
accurate account of how ethnicity has been constructed. In order to show part
of the route to a more adequate account, I will analyze the writings on
civilization by both English anthropologists and by Canadian officials and
missionaries.
“Civilization” is now virtually synonymous with “culture.” Both terms refer
to an interconnected web of the arts, sciences, politics, religion, social
relations, and material goods of a people. This has become such a
commonplace that when we reflect on how scholars during the early
twentieth century used the terms, it takes an effort of the imagination to see
that a definition that attempts holistically to embrace a wide variety of
activities, relationships, and knowledge was a novel concept at that time. The
importance such scholars attributed to this holism, and the resistance they
expected it to encounter, can be seen in the writings of the Toronto
anthropologist, T. F. McIlwraith:
To the anthropologist the term culture means the sum total of the manners,
customs, practices and beliefs of a community. It is equivalent to the term
civilization, as commonly applied to the life of more complex societies. A single
culture includes such elements as language, literature or oral traditions, religious
beliefs and practices, social organizations, political institutions, ethical and
traditional modes of behaviour and attitudes towards law, as well as the elements
of strictly material culture, arts and crafts, industries, means of transport, and
economic pursuits. Any one of these traits can be studied specifically, but it must
be borne in mind that the individual member of society grows up in an
environment in which all the elements are interwoven and naturally interactive.
Added together, they comprise the life of his group, to which he unconsciously
adjusts himself from infancy.3
McIlwraith insisted that the varied parts of a culture or civilization are
interwoven. He reinscribed this point by claiming that the disparate elements
of civilization/culture are so interconnected that any sudden or significant
change in a culture disrupts its other aspects.4 This sentiment had a sharp
implication for those officials who concerned themselves with the welfare of
the native population: no one aspect of indigenous civilization could be
modified or improved without change cascading through all its parts.
McIlwraith’s flat and scientific assessment, which appeared in the
introduction to the conference deliberations of Canadian and American
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Indian officials, published in 1939, was meant to mark the end of an era in
which governments “civilized” native peoples by adjusting their religious
habits, their livelihoods, and their education. In that era, “civilization” had
not meant that the native peoples would be assimilated, but rather that—at
least for the time being—they would remain a separate, though improved,
“race of men.” At some later moment, they would be readied for eventual
absorption into European society. Seen from this older perspective,
McIlwraith’s comments represented a new-found sensitivity to the problem
of handling Indians.5 The new vantage point was one from which
anthropologists would advise officials about possible social effects of policies,
effects that would ramify throughout a culture. That is, it would no longer be
possible to make a simple adjustment to one feature of a civilization without
considering the whole.6
The new use of “civilization” was not necessarily accompanied by the hopes
for reform expressed at the Toronto conference. Canadian readers were
already accustomed to a much more pessimistic vision of indigenous
civilization. The great folklorist, Marius Barbeau, had reached outside the
professional anthropological readership to warn that indigenous culture was
in wreckage with no remnants of internal authority. The Indian should be
adapting himself to modern conditions, but, instead, he remained sullen and
discontented, nursing antiquated griefs while “voluntarily stooping as it were
over the edge of an open grave.” Why would he not fight his way defiantly
through life— dull and humiliating though it might be—as so many white
men have done in the forlorn wastes of the New World?7 Barbeau suspected
that the Indian’s reluctance to adjust to civilization was because “we” had
shaken the ancient beliefs, notions, and myths to their roots. The Indian,
whether seer or sorcerer, wise man or fool, could see no salvation. “We”
could do nothing for the Indian now since as a “superior” (Barbeau’s irony)
race, “we” had, through missionaries, assured the Indian of the veracity of
our creeds.8 This Christian cultural penetration was only superficial, but it
still had been sufficient to leave the Indian lost on “a starless sea” with a
clouded mind and a decreasing population.9 Barbeau’s bitterness, which
included a sweeping condemnation of the artificial neo-Indian culture created
by European contact, was based on his sense of the interconnectedness of the
parts of a civilization. His dark vision left no room for anodyne policies that
would improve single aspects of Indian education or mode of living. He was
lamenting what had already passed. In the words of John Kayrahoo, an old
“half-breed” Wyandot: “But one kind of customs is now bound to exist for all
in this country. The same thing happens to all Indians. We were all advised to
take up work. The old customs of the past are merely what we talk about.
That is all. Moreover, we have now forgotten most of these things; . . . I am a
man of the past.”10
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In “Our Indians” Barbeau put forward the paradox of despondency. There is
an antithesis: First, life was made easier because of the rifle, the steel axe, and
the iron pot. Second, physical benefits were accompanied not by civilization,
but by unease, alienation, and resistance to European culture. “In a word they
were uncivilized; they were savage men of the wilds with unaccountable
ways of their own.”11 The paradox was unbalanced; the metal weapons and
implements lasted better than the dreams. Barbeau, the folklorist and the
recorder of memories, here argues that the defining attribute of the doomed
Indian civilization was its transformation through the adoption of European
material culture.
Whether Indians could be saved or whether they should be lamented, the
essence of “civilization” was the same. It was an interwoven delicate set of
beliefs and relationships that might very well be beyond instrumental
adjustment by government. The imposition of Christianity, the gift of tools,
instruction in a trade school, or the prohibition of a dance or a potlatch could
never be a simple matter again. So much is now obvious: like McIlwraith and
Barbeau, we have all resorted to a concept that makes it wrong to treat
“others”—that is, indigenous peoples—as if they belonged to a group that
lacked some essential quality, knowledge, or skill, and who would, therefore,
be improved by a Promethean gift. Instead, we live with an insistence that the
total assemblage of a people’s cultural knowledge has to be respectfully
treated as a whole upon which we intrude at the risk of damaging a group’s
identity.12 The moral obviousness of this prohibition leads to a
historiographical mystery. In the past scholars and officials did not share this
sensitivity, and, therefore, their motives have become opaque to us. I shall
show that this opaqueness exists because of a shift in the meaning of
“civilization.” If there is a mystery about the opinions of scholars and officials
during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it is not a product of
the Indian problem. “Civilization” was a European problem; it was the
Europeans’ struggle with their own civilized identity that obscured, because
it left Europeans of the Victorian period even less well prepared than before
to appreciate, or to weigh, the cultural values of anyone else.
Victorians’ uncertainty about their own cultural identity was not the only
freight carried by the concept of “civilization.” The older meaning of the term
as the antonym of “barbarism” flickered on through the nineteenth century
and had a continuing impact in structuring European views of aboriginal
peoples.13 However, the partial preservation of this meaning should not
conceal a major shift in the discourse of “civilization.” The nineteenth century
saw a discarding of an important series of connotations as well as the erection
of a new meaning. Both of these processes were to have serious implications.
On what was discarded: the eighteenth-century associations between
“civilization” and refinement of manners and between “civilization” and
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order were largely jettisoned. This had a bearing on how Europeans treated
native peoples. Refinement of manners was often regarded as an individual
rather than a group characteristic, but, like order, it had an objective quality.
An Indian could possess refined manners, or an Indian society, such as the
Iroquois, could be credited with a sense of order. Therefore, according to the
pre-Victorian understanding, either could be singled out as examples of
“civilization.” This identification was easier before the Victorian era because
“civilized” qualities were seemingly independent of each other. For example,
refinement or wisdom could be attained without commercial prosperity. The
Victorian invention of a new and primary meaning for “civilization” was
even more significant. The new meaning was increasingly seen as an
efflorescence of material wealth and as a quality lacking in an indigenous
people. “Civilization” was mostly emptied of the moral and philosophical
qualities it had possessed for earlier Europeans who had been thrown into
contact with Indians.
During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries American colonists did not
use progressive language when referring to their attempts to “civilize the
Indian.” Instead of speaking, in the way Victorians did, of the need to
“improve” Indians or to raise them up to a “higher level,” the colonists
usually expressed their aims as the need to “reduce” Indians to “civility.”14
This linguistic difference hints at a great conceptual divide between early
colonial views and Victorian ones about the meaning of “civilization.” It
suggests that there was a paradigmatic shift at the end of the eighteenth
century. I shall show that Victorian attitudes toward indigenous peoples were
fundamentally different in emphasis because they were based on a belief that
“civilization” was dependent upon material culture and, in addition, that it
was secular and universal. In contrast to this, pre-Victorian notions of
“civilization” were religious, particularistic (in the sense of referring to the
qualities of particular nations, such as the English or the French), and based
on a belief that the arts of civil life and humanity were best summed up as
philosophical and educational goals.
When pre-Victorian views on “civilization” were applied to indigenous
peoples, they resulted in a simple dichotomy between the absence and
presence of “civil” qualities. First, the Europeans believed that the Indians
were deficient in the qualities of which “civility” consisted. Second,
Europeans sought to instil various positive qualities into the Indians to
remedy this. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Indians were
perceived as lacking three essential qualities: order, manners, and industry.15
These “civilized” qualities seem oddly assorted until we see how they should
work in unison to control what the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century
observer saw as the “Indian problem.” According to the observer of that era,
the “generic” Indian was subordinated to his passions; he was either childish
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or animal-like.16 His notion of justice was without common rules, and he had
not mastered the arts of “civil” life and humanity.17 That is, the Indian did not
live in an ordered way, nor did he possess the kind of manners that a proper
education would have bestowed upon him. Further, his mode of living lacked
“industry” which, for the European of that period, was a description of the
moral qualities a person would gain from laborious work or toil.18 “Industry”
was the antithesis of idleness; it was not merely a matter of the production of
material wealth.
The second aspect of the early colonial desire to transform Indians was the
imposition of those positive “civil” qualities possessed by Europeans. For
French missionaries (except for the Jesuits after 1640) and for New
Englanders, “civility” meant their respectively unique national heritages
and/or Christianity.19 “Civility” and Christianity were seen as closely
connected even where the desire to impart Christianity was paramount. Even
missionaries deemed it necessary that “civility” must precede knowledge of
the ways of Christ.20 To “reduce” the Indians to “civility,” it was necessary
first to teach them the arts of civil life in classically oriented schools. In other
words, they must be given the same intellectual apparatus that Europeans
thought had been essential for replicating civic life since the time of ancient
Greece and Rome. Since civic culture could only exist as part of urban life,
Indians would have to give up their rootless existence in forests and settle in
permanent communities under regular laws. For the early colonial English,
“civility” referred to an extension of English patriotism; it was their particular
national heritage, not the secular and universal quality it denoted to
Victorians. In colonial America “civility” was a palladium that contained the
qualities of a true national life, which, by association with the ideal of the
polis or the republic of the ancient world, was believed to contain the
essential ingredients of civil life. For the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century
European, Indians would not simply become civilized; they became civilized
as English or French. Although this early colonial idea had important
ramifications for the indigenous mode of living, it was not, as it became later
for Victorians, primarily a belief that material culture was the essential core of
“civilization.”
John Stuart Mill, writing at a moment (1836) when he could still glimpse the
older meaning of “civilization,” remarked that it had a double meaning. In
one sense, “civilization” referred to human improvement in general. Thus, a
country was civilized if its people were more eminent in the best
characteristics of individuals and society, “further advanced in the road to
perfection; happier, nobler, wiser.”21 In another sense—and this was the sense
that became increasingly familiar during the later nineteenth century—
”civilization” stood only for improvement, which distinguished nations from
groups of savages or barbarians. The second usage, which was attractive to
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Mill as a social critic worried about the debilitating effect of mass politics in
“civilized” societies, was lacking in the benign moral features of the first
usage. That is, the second usage shed the idea that universal qualities, such as
happiness, nobility, and wisdom, were universals that one could possess, or
lose, at any time or in any social condition.
Another feature of Mill’s second version of “civilization,” and one that was
less than benign, was its narrow conception of human improvement, which
distinguished a civilized nation from a barbaric one solely in terms of its
preeminence in material goods. This distinction between “civilized” and
“barbaric” was formerly accompanied by a notion that the “civilized”
included a broad range of manners, moral refinement, and political wisdom
that the “barbaric” lacked. In the earlier period wealth was thought to be
conducive to the production of nonmaterial qualities, whereas Mill was
uncomfortably aware that his modern age had separated the two. For Mill,
the separation of “civilization” into two doctrines meant that he could
occasionally flay his contemporaries for allowing their increasing material
wealth or opulence to displace amiable and impressive virtues. In England,
the possession of riches had produced gentlemen whose “moral effeminacy”
made them unfit for any kind of struggle.22 The leaders of society had
acquired the characteristics of torpidity and cowardice.23
Mill’s moral-cum-historical analysis of the failure of nineteenth-century
gentlemen to live up to the classical model of the hero, while at the same time
adopting the supposed vices of the opposite sex, did not prevent him from
indulgently employing the narrow sense of “civilization” when it suited his
argument. That is, when it came to the question of “savages,” Mill treated
them as a mere residual category that possessed no characteristics that were
not impressed upon them
by their environment. “Savages” existed only in tribes that wandered over
vast tracts of land, in contrast to “civilized” peoples whose land was densely
populated and who dwelt in towns and villages. Mill’s “savages” are denoted
only by the qualities they lacked. Their life had no commerce, no
manufacture, and no agriculture. Further, it had no law, no government
(except during war), no administration of justice, and “no systematic
employment of the collective strength of society to protect individuals against
injury from one another.”24 In contrast, “civilized” people had those positive
qualities that came from membership in large societies. Chiefly these were
property, intelligence, and the power of cooperation.25 Mill was emphatic that
the “savage” possessed individual qualities—bodily strength, courage, and
enterprise— and was “often not without intelligence,” but these did not lead
to any benefit. This insistence means that Mill’s moralism was subordinate to
his acceptance of the proposition that society defined itself in terms of
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measurable qualities, and this prevented him from adequately addressing the
other sense of “civilization” he had put forth—the general improvement of
humanity through increased happiness, nobility, and wisdom. In short,
individual perfection was no longer the goal of “civilization.”
The emphasis on “civilization” as the increase of wealth and technology at the
expense of its other meanings became more dominant in the later nineteenth
century. At times, especially in the hands of anthropologists and
archaeologists, the alternative meanings disappeared or became vestigial—
almost subliminal—connotations whose only effect was to soften the harsher
messages of material culture. E. B. Tylor and John Lubbock are examples of the
kind of author who adumbrated the gospel of “civilization” as material culture.
Tylor’s description of the development of culture from savagery, through
barbarism, to civilization was specially dependent on what he called material
and intellectual culture. “Acquaintance with the physical laws of the world,
and the accompanying powers of adapting nature to man’s own ends, are, on
the whole, lowest among savages, mean among barbarians, and highest
among modern educated nations.”26 When Tylor stressed that intellectual
qualities accompanied material development, he neither deprecated the
rational abilities of the “savage” mind nor praised those of the “civilized”
one. It was obvious to him from a survey of indigenous religions that these
had such high qualities of consistency and logic that there could be nothing
wrong with the minds of those who contemplated them.27 This suggests that
in considering intellectual culture as linked to material culture Tylor was not
referring, as Francis Galton did in this period, to the mental properties or
intelligence possessed by an ethnic group. Tylor’s concept of “intelligence”
was not an objective biological or psychological property of individuals—
whether “savage” or “civilized”—but the property of a progressive group,
such as a modern nation. Of course, Tylor did not believe that everyone in
such a group would be intelligent. For him development was not a
homogeneous process. Further, like many other Victorian social scientists he
was often disposed to see virtue as a casualty of progress because it had
become separated from intelligence “in the great movements of
civilization.”28 However, moral regret such as this did not hinder Tylor from
recommending, as an ethical judgment, the notion that any known “savage”
tribe would be improved by the judicious application of “civilization.” Such
improvement would consist of an increase in wisdom as well as material
capability. Of course, Tylor’s ethics, like those of his contemporaries, were not
concerned with the growth of an individual’s moral sentiment, but with the
greater social entity whose overall ethical standing could be measured as if it
possessed an objective weight. Beyond this, there was no need to question the
psychological origins of moral sentiments that might register the virtuous
intent of “savages” or “civilizers.” That would involve examining
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individuals’ psyches—an unnecessary task if one could discover that a group
possessed uniform ethics.
Tylor’s contemporary, John Lubbock,29 did attempt to address the question of
whether the individual “savage” was indeed virtuous. He was coarser
intellectually than Tylor, and he found it easier to dismiss evidence of savage
rationality.30 Instead of admiring savage ideas that displayed complex and
structural reasoning, he simply rejected them as absurd.31 Lubbock also failed
to make a distinction between virtue and modern intelligence of the kind that
had mollified Tylor’s judgment.32 “Man,” Lubbock thought, had made more
progress in his moral than in his material or intellectual advancement because
savages almost entirely lacked moral feelings.33 He realized that, in saying
this, he was contesting the opinions of eighteenth-century moralists, such as
Lord Kames and David Hume, who believed that each human being
contained within himself or herself the ability to construct moral sensibilities.
However, this seemed to him to be contrary to the findings of contemporary
psychology. Like the psychologists on whom he relied (Alexander Bain and
Herbert Spencer), Lubbock preferred to attach his theory of moral growth to
the growth of the human psyche as a process that took place in a species.
Whether this adaptation of the human species was caused entirely or partly
by utilitarian pressures from without or by internal drives34 mattered little in
the context of his argument since, for Lubbock, moral capacities existed fully
only in “civilized” nations, not in the “savages” who were the subject of his
study. His framework contained no place for a concept of “civilization”
within which uncivilized individuals were able to acquire sophisticated
manners or mores, nor was there a sense that they could acquire the ability to
make moral decisions.
This shift in the meaning of “civilization” was to have an enormous impact
on how indigenous peoples were viewed. The focus on groups rather than on
individuals as the key components of culture resulted in a repudiation of
“uniformism.”35 That is, when Tylor and other well-established
anthropologists toyed with the idea of stages of development, they imagined
that intermediate groups, such as barbarians, bridged the gap between
“savage” and “civil.” In this theory human groups thought to be distant in
evolutionary terms were linked by the existence of intermediate groups. This
echoed uniformism in the natural world, in which it was postulated that there
were no sudden gaps in evolutionary processes. No such sophistication was
present when it came to the subject of the North American Indian. There a
crude anthropological theory dismissed individually possessed cultural
values and concealed any links between “savages” and “civilizers.” It was as
if there were two distinct types of humans: “savages,” and their virtues, were
individualized, whereas “civilized” people who lived in nations that
possessed collective powers had a significant cultural inheritance from the
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past. Despite its avoidance of saltatory moves, anthropologically driven
theory had created a gap between native peoples and whites that seemed
incapable of being filled by the “partly civilized Indian” or the “half-breed.”36
The differences between cultures had become absolute.
“Civilization,” as a signifier whose primary meaning was the presence of a
high level of material culture rather than of manners and refinement, was not
only invoked by Mill, Tylor, and Lubbock to explain the problems of general
social development, it was also the key term used by scholars and
missionaries when they were providing a specific explanation of why the
indigenous peoples of Canada had made so little progress in the 300 years
since the Spanish, French, and English breached the pre-Columbian
fastness.37 To begin with scholars, it seems obvious that no matter how well
disposed they were toward native peoples, such sympathy never disrupted
the idea that Indians were outside of “civilization.” When Horatio Hale
reported to the British Association on the Kootenay Indians of British
Columbia in 1892, he commented on their good moral character and
behavior. They were “moral, honest, kind and hospitable,” and only when
they were imposed upon by bad Indians from other tribes and by bad whites
did worse traits appear.38 However, the possession by the Indians of
internalized moral virtues did not signify to Hale that these people were
“civilized.” On the contrary, he believed that tribal habits were destructive of
the “civilization” that was being imparted to the Indians in schools.39 Franz
Boas, regarded as one of the forerunners of modern anthropology and as a
man with unswerving loyalties to the Indians of the northwest coast, insisted
the potlatch ceremony should not be interfered with; it was a lingering
survival that we should be slow to take away from the native who was
struggling against the forces of “civilization.”40
What Hale and Boas did implicitly, Daniel Wilson, with his extraordinary
combination of literary scholarship and archaeology, did overtly. That is, he
painstakingly defined “civilization” in such a way that it contained qualities
that native peoples could not claim. When Wilson posed the question “What
is civilization?” in 1865 he used it to strip away from Indians anything but
their material culture. He offered a contrast between the “Euroamerican” and
the Indian in which the former adapted the accumulated inherited scientific
knowledge, arts, laws, and social economy to his novel circumstances, while
the latter, after centuries of contact, was still restricted to hunting and
dwelling in wigwams made of buffalo skin and birch bark.41 This was a
nonsymmetrical description because, as Wilson noted, the difference between
the white and the “Redman” was caused by an attribute of the former. This
attribute was not that individual white men possessed qualities that, when
aggregated, made them superior, but that the whites as a group possessed the
essence of “civilization.” “Civilization is for man’s development. It is selfUsed by permission for Bridging World History,
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originated; it matures all the faculties natural to him and is progressive and
seemingly ineradicable.”42
Wilson’s definition of “civilization” was unsymmetrical in another sense as
well. That is, not only were the whites unique in possessing the progressive
qualities of self-development, they also had nonmaterial internalized parts to
their lives, while the Indians were described solely in terms of their crude and
laborious occupations and dwellings. Indians were characterized as the
simple products of their material culture; they could be nothing else. When he
later dealt harshly with American scholars, such as Horatio Hale and Lewis
Henry Morgan, for romanticizing the Indian past by attributing to the
Iroquois concepts they could not possibly have had,43 Wilson was considering
intellectual culture entirely as a projection of material culture. If the Six
Nations were said to possess a Prince of Peace or a Hiawatha, this could only
be an echo transmitted from their developed European neighbors. Wilson
could accept that the Iroquois were capable of forming a prudential
confederacy in order to reduce internal feuding, but not that they could
design a universal federation for the Indian race. A civilization of the kind
that could produce a farsighted philanthropic reformer who sought a
universal peace was far above the social condition of a tribe.44
Wilson’s objective here was specifically directed against any attempt to attach
“civilization” to the qualities an individual might possess. The individual
Iroquois was produced by the process of warfare, and while in Wilson’s
opinion he was not more inherently barbarian than Europe’s Grand Monarch,
Louis XIV, had been, he could not escape this socialization.45 The purpose of
comparing an Indian to a king whose court was known for elegance and
sophistication was to etch his point that refinement or manners weigh little in
the scales of “civilization.” They were simply the qualities of an individual
and, like other personal attributes (for example, courage, loyalty, and
prudence), were not compatible with an advanced society. This was a
stunning refusal to accept Voltaire’s notion of “civilization,” which placed the
court of Louis XIV as the pinnacle of human achievement.
Wilson’s “realism” here was forged in opposition to the romanticism of
Hale and Morgan on the subject of Six Nations government and religion.
Instead of adopting such “fantasies,” he commended the views of the
historian Francis Parkman, whom he quoted as remarking that an Iroquois
was “a thorough, yet a finished and developed savage. He is perhaps an
example of the highest elevation man can reach without emerging from his
primitive condition of the hunter.”46 Parkman’s fine sense of modernity had
left the individual qualities of the Iroquois in the past. They could only be a
projection of their mode of living.
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To identify the virtues of a people as belonging to the past had serious
modern ramifications. If the Iroquois were only a paramount barbarous
nation, then their previously admired form of government could not be a
true polity. “Civilization” could not be construed as meaning that the
Iroquois should be included among civil societies because of their statecraft
and their skill at diplomacy. Those activities were merely the kind of
politics that could exist without the presence of a true civic culture. This
culture, in turn, could not exist without wealth and technological
sophistication. When Wilson and Parkman focused on the flawed material
culture of the Iroquois—such as their lack of a potter’s wheel and the
absence of forging 47—it meant that Indian political wisdom could not be
interpreted as a sign of citizenship or civic values. To say, as both did, that
the Iroquois could never have developed a civilization of their own implied
that, left to themselves, even the wisest of the Indians could not be selfgoverning. The new doctrine of “civilization” significantly denuded the
political qualifications of Indians. If the older definition of “civilization” as
the presence of virtue or manners had remained in place, then at least some
individual Indians could have been regarded as politically competent. The
newer doctrine of “civilization” was a logic for political assimilation and
governance. It carried a message that only when Indians had shed their
cultural characteristics—when, in fact, they ceased to be Indians— could
they possess civic values. Until then, they had to be governed.
Missionaries, like ethnographers and prehistorians, played an important role
in creating an impression that the salient characteristic of Indians was their
material culture. Even when they were critics of government efforts to
“civilize the Indian” through the use of material goods, missionaries
themselves adopted the same criteria of “civilization” as governments had. If
Indians ate their plow animals and kept their axes shiny by refraining from
clearing the forest, then it was necessary for Christianity to precede the gift of
“civilization.”48 Christianity carried the values of thrift, prudence, and
industry, and without these cultural values, civilization would not take root.
The gift of “civilization” was to be a tangible one. Egerton Ryerson Young
quoted another prominent missionary, Alexander Sutherland, when he
poetically envisioned “civilization” as driving back the game together with
the Indian hunters who preyed on it, and replacing both with the dwellings
of the industrious white man, whose iron roads and factories were
wondrously displayed against a backdrop of golden fields of ripening grain,
crystal lakes, and emerald rivers of ice.49 The glittering language left little
space for those personal virtues with which traditional Christianity was often
associated. As has been observed by Catherine Hall, some nineteenth-century
propagators of Christian ideals not only absorbed race theory, but became
fixated on the external signs of “civilization.”50 That is, they focused on
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12
externalities, such as clothing or its absence, rather than restricting their gaze
to traditional areas of spiritual inquiry, such as the soul within.
One particularly naive Canadian missionary account poignantly illustrates
this. Reverend Frost, who styled himself as “For Thirty Years A Missionary to
the Indians,” asked the question, “Is the Indian of today any better than the
Indian of long ago—before the white man came? or to put it this way, Is the
Christian Indian any better than the pagan Indian?”51 Frost’s first attempt to
answer his question resorted to ambiguous statements about how an
individual pagan who paid his debts and was otherwise honest compared to
a Christian Indian who was not honest.52 Frost’s answer was that it all
depended on the quality of the Christian Indian of whom one was speaking.
He then took refuge from such ambiguity in the concrete certainties of the
improved way of life of the Christians. “The Christian Indians on Lake
Nepigon [sic] are deeply struck by the differences in themselves now from
what they were and what the pagan Indians are now who roam the woods.
The latter only have one kettle and all eat out of that. They have no dishes or
plates—just eat off the ground.”53 “The Christian Indians say that the pagans
do not take the trouble to build a wigwam, but sleep on the ground.”54 In
contrast to the bare earth, Frost had seen homes in Christian villages that
were just as good as, if not better than, some of the homes of their white
neighbors. He also gave a telling example of the bishop of Algoma who, in
company with a lady from England, visited a cabin where they had surprised
an old man. He initially refused them entry to his home, saying it was too
littered up and not fit for gentlefolk. Investigation proved that it was untidy
because the woman of the house was engaged in making baskets (a
commercial task that whites had encouraged Indians to undertake) and had
littered her home with fiber. Frost and the others applauded the fact that the
house was very clean, as were the fragments of basketwood.55
The strong materialist bent of Frost’s account is also to be found in the
writings of the much more complex and sophisticated missionary, John
Maclean, whose books on the Indians offered a view of civilization very
similar to those of Tylor and Wilson.56 The chief difference between the cleric
and the anthropologist here was not a matter of content, but rather a matter
of the former’s more earnest desire to apply his knowledge to government
policy. Maclean was aware that political and ecclesiastical leaders meant
different things when they desired “civilization” of the Indian race, and that
they differed about the means by which to accomplish this. This
disagreement was rooted in the fact that people were captured by theories
that were “untried, puerile and antagonistic to the customs and training of
the Indians.”57 Maclean’s own theories focused on the need to see that Indians
were not simply a series of primitive groups that lacked some specific moral
or technical elements, but instead were peoples who already possessed
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interlinking sets of beliefs, customs, and relationships—none of which could
be transformed in isolation. According to Maclean, the would-be civilizer of
the Indian faced innumerable hindrances, because to civilize implied the “full
metamorphosis” and development of the nature of the individual as well as
the complete overthrow of the religious, political, and social customs
(including domestic relations) of the people.58
According to Maclean the Indians’ reluctance to adopt European civilization
was because they already possessed one of their own.59 Maclean had some
sympathy with this Indian perception, even though
it made his task more difficult. “It is perfectly legitimate for the savage of the
west to be proud of his native culture, adapted as it is to his needs, and
apparently better suited to him than the civilization of the white race under
whose influence he sees his fathers and brethren rapidly dwindling away.”60
For Maclean, the native was not only justified in his recalcitrance, but fitted
into a modern scientific trend. That is, Indians believed firmly in the theory of
evolution, which meant that they would object to the European system of
education as rendering them unfit for their environment. The only knowledge
they wished to absorb was that which would improve their hunting and
fighting, and “fit their children to become better Indians.”61 Maclean, like
many scientifically informed Christians of his period, grasped the Darwinian
message that human beings were formed by their struggle with the
environment. He thought this particularly applied to the Indian. “In the
struggle for existence, he has laboured under the sternest conditions.
Incessant war, continual hardship, and uncertain means of subsistence, have
kept the tribes at the lowest numbers compared with the vast regions over
which they had roamed.”62 “Survival of the fittest” provided Maclean with an
explanation of Indian cultural and demographic weakness, not a
legitimization of racial conflict for the whites. That there was a clash of
cultures was abundantly clear to Maclean. “We wish to make them white
men, and [Indians] desire them[selves] to become better Indians. They believe
the native culture is best suited for themselves.”63 Maclean saw Indian
civilization as an integrated whole, but not as something he wished to cherish
and protect. Rather, it had to be destroyed in order to rescue Indians from
their struggle with the harsh Canadian environment. For this reason, their
beliefs as to what was best suited to themselves were to be ignored.
Maclean suspected that the white treatment of Indians was, at heart, part of a
racial conflict that could end in the natives adopting the mode of life of their
conquerors.64 Therefore, Maclean could not adopt the strategy of a twentiethcentury liberal sympathizer with indigenous people of taking refuge in the
multicultural belief that all civilizations are equally deserving of respect and
preservation. The racial conflict he observed always ended in a defeat of the
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Indians. Like many Canadians, Maclean took a grim satisfaction in
mentioning that matters were even worse south of the border. In the United
States, the Indians’ struggles to retain their independence had always ended
in the massacre and oppression of the Indians.65 It would have seemed
morally vacuous to Maclean if he had used his understanding of Indian
civilization as the basis for recommending pluralistic policies that would
attempt to conserve it. In any case, his own developmental theories would
have been against this. That is, although he respected the Indian, he had been
captured by a historiography that owed much to writers, such as Charles
Kinglsey and Hippolyte Taine, who viewed modern nations as absorbing the
moral qualities of their predecessors. Behind Maclean’s claim that “barbarism
has rights which civilized man must respect”66 is the idea that Indians are like
the Picts, Scots, Celts, and Gauls during the early centuries of the Christian
era.67 If these peoples, and their traditions, had not been absorbed, the later
European cultures would have been impoverished.
Comparative analysis served two functions for Maclean. One was simply to
excuse the more objectionable Indian customs by referring to analogous ones
among other peoples, many of whom were proto-Europeans. For example,
the willingness of Indian tribes, such as the Bloods and Piegans, to accept
compensation for injury and loss of life could also be found among the
Arabians, Germans, and Hungarians.68 Similarly, ancient Germans behaved
like Indians in their gambling, drinking, and feasting, and their harsh
treatment of women caught in adultery.69 (Maclean claimed both peoples cut
off the woman’s nose, beat her, and drove her away from the group.)
However, in addition to offering an apology for Indians, Maclean’s
comparisons carried a more potent message. In drawing a parallel between
Indians and early Britons or Germans, he was suggesting that both exhibited
the barbarian spirit of freedom. Without this infusion of spirit in the
European past, white civilization would now lack an essential ingredient. The
white man’s burden was, therefore, a familial one. The barbarian deserved
respect because “we” too were once barbarians. For Maclean “barbarism”
was not, as it had been for many other European writers, the antonym of
“civilization”—it was a component of it.
The rights of barbarians meant that whites had corresponding duties. First
and foremost, these were negative ones, which Maclean wrapped in
evangelical language. “Believing and teaching the Gospel of brotherhood, we
are not at liberty to [kill the Indian], nor even to pauperize him.”70
Christianity also imposed positive obligations to “civilize and Christianize”
the native. Some of this mission was the traditional one in which souls were
to be saved, but Maclean had translated this traditional proselytizing. He took
the evangelical concept that referred to the transformation of the Christian
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individual into “the new whole man,” and applied it to Indians as a race.71 As
a Christian, one had the positive duty of changing the social condition of
Indians. In this way, Christianity and racial doctrine were harmonized.
Maclean had found a formula that retained the Christian belief in the
individual Indian’s salvation while interpolating into this the notion that the
Indian belonged to a separate order of mankind. As he put it, civilizing did
not mean the compulsory acceptance by the Indian of the white man’s
customs, but it did imply “the transformation of the whole man.” There was
an obvious sense in which “the whole man” could no longer be an Indian.
Maclean believed that the transformation of the Indians was to be
accomplished by changing their social condition. This, in turn, required an
alteration in their mode of production. This might sound like Karl Marx, but
Maclean took his text from a fellow missionary. He quoted Reverend
Wilbur—from the mission to the Yakima Indians—saying, “The plough and
the Bible go together in civilizing Indians.” While Maclean found this
injunction to be quaint and homespun, he also believed that it contained an
important truth: that the Indian should voluntarily adopt the customs of the
white man as well as their material culture. The government’s maxims should
be: “hand, head and heart training must go together in elevating the Indian
race.” The emphasis for Maclean was on the primacy of material culture. To
labor in the same way, or to create the same produce as the whites, would
“civilize” the Indian. Maclean suspected that the spiritual side of Christianity
would be ineffective in reaching Indians unless their mode of life was
fundamentally altered. Nothing else would suffice, not even attempts to
create a sense of awe to overwhelm Indians with a sense of their inferiority.
The government policy of demonstrating the superiority of white culture was
futile by itself. When the federal government had sent some western chiefs to
Ontario and Quebec to witness the work and wealth of the white man in
order to give them a real knowledge of their position, this had been
ineffective. While the chiefs had responded in the desired way when back
east, they lost their sense of awe upon their return to their own environment.
A display of material wealth and technology was not enough to disrupt
Indian civilization.72
On the need to change the Indian mode of living, the missionary was united
with the secularly minded anthropologist. Although they started from
different premises about the nature of humankind, both ended with the
desire to elevate natives by changing their technology and their view of labor.
Anthropologists tended to see the Indian as a product of an impoverished
lifestyle who lacked various qualities that were present in developed human
beings. As a result of this, they were able to deprecate what Indian virtues
they could recognize as similar to their own. Virtues such as wisdom,
bravery, or fortitude did not signify that an individual Indian was, or could
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be, “civilized.” Missionaries still tentatively retained a Christian view that the
essence of human beings was something above and apart from their society,
but in order to bring Indians to salvation, Indian culture had to be uprooted,
since it would interfere with the creating of the whole man. By themselves,
Indians could never activate their “latent powers.”73
Up to this point, I have discussed the evolution of a Victorian concept of
“civilization” as it applied to indigenous people in general and to Canadian
Indians in particular. This concept was suggestive of certain policies in that it
emphasized that Indians were to be treated as a homogeneous “red” ethnic
group in opposition to whites, rather than as tribes/nations or as individuals.
This image of an ethnic group was not based on biology, but on material
culture. “Civilization” had become a marker that denoted the presence or
absence of a high level of material culture. The use of this simple benchmark
indicated that the Indians were a group that either lacked “civilization” or
possessed a grossly inadequate one. Older definitions of “civilization” as the
possession of qualities, such as refinement, manners, or virtue, had meant
that individual Indians or particular tribes could be regarded as “civilized,”
but these meanings were largely supplanted in the Victorian period. My main
contention in this article is that the new concept of “civilization” structured
much of the language and, by implication, the policies of late nineteenth- and
early twentieth-century officials. For the officials the conceptual apparatus of
“civilization” was a reservoir filled with the thoughts of scholars and
missionaries who claimed to possess significant knowledge about indigenous
peoples. Borrowings by officials from the reservoir were usually simplistic. If
one had been able to ask them why they used the word “civilization” in a
certain way, they would have replied that they had no need of theories, or
that they felt no need to define or explain a notion whose meaning seemed so
obvious. Nonetheless, Indian officials in Canada were imbued with theories,
and these were closely connected with the policies that they often
promulgated as well as administered.
The first significant report on Canadian Indians predated confederation. The
Pennefeather Report was compiled for the Province of Canada in 1858.
Judging previous Canadian policy to have been a failure, the authors of the
report regretted that residential schools for Indians had not brought about
any noticeable improvement in their graduates. “They do not seem to carry
back with them to their homes any desire to spread among their people the
instruction they have received.”74 This failure was observable in the
subsequent behavior of the children: the girls did no housework, nor did the
boys assist on the farms.75 The fact that educational failure was adduced from
the subsequent lack of household and agrarian labor suggests that Indian
education was primarily viewed as a device to change Indian habits, and not
as a way to impart scholarship or spiritual values. When the report
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specifically mentioned “civilization,” it was to refer to progress in working
habits and technology: “their advance in civilization and intelligence is not
yet sufficient to make them as a people capable of wholly taking care of
themselves.”76 Those who appreciated the blessings of civilization were also
said to be the opposite of those who preferred “the wild freedom of savage
life.”77 The report thus summoned up two of the connotations of
“civilization” that both appear in scholarly literature and run through later
government reports. “Civilization” meant working toward, and possessing,
the material goods that were its signs. However, this was in contradiction to
the “savage” or “barbarian” lifestyle, which was accompanied by freedom.
The government’s task was to educate Indians so that they could trade in
their freedom for the ability to create material wealth.
The first post-Confederation report on Indians used the term “civilization” in
the same way as the Pennefeather Report had done. Commenting on the
additional responsibility that came with the overview on Indian affairs for
Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, the deputy secretary of Indian affairs, W.
Spragge, observed that no progress had been made in the maritime provinces
in prevailing upon the natives to form themselves into communities of the
kind that had long existed in Ontario and Quebec. There, “occupying farms
or village lots they enjoy, in settled and permanent habitations, many of the
comforts and advantages of civilization, combined with systematic and
continuous education, and the Pastoral care of religious instructors.”78 From
the perspective of Ottawa, the policy of the two new provinces had been one
not of “civilization,” but of charitable aid. The small parliamentary grants
($1,300 for Nova Scotia and $1,200 for New Brunswick) only afforded some
relief from indigence, medical allowances for the sick, and some clothing,
blankets, and seed grain.79 Pecuniary thrift such as this, Spragge noted, did
not allow for the elevation of these people. However, the deputy secretary
would not be content with raising the Micmac to the level of the more
advanced Indian communities in Ontario and Quebec, with their better
sanitation and relative freedom from smallpox. Even these communities were
anxiously scanned for signs of progress. As usual, the Six Nations were
singled out for commendation. They had an agricultural society and some
temperance organizations. Also important, “the cause of good order is no
doubt gaining ground.” The highest compliment of all was, in Spragge’s
opinion, that their 3,000-person community experienced no more misconduct
than a similar settlement of white persons would.80 While this was intended
to be a liberal sentiment, it also signals that Spragge thought that Indians
became “civilized” to the degree that their society resembled a white one.
The Pennefeather and Spragge Reports represent the traditions of the British
colonial civil service.81 Much of their direction comes from the desire for
increased efficiency. Little can be done to get at the intentions behind the
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official use of “civilization.” It is only later that one finds theoretically explicit
statements explaining Indian policy. Nicholas Flood Davin’s 1879 report is a
good example of a theoretically loaded official document. Curiously for a
figure who had earlier made a profession of gloating that Americans treated
their Indians with less humanity than the British,82 he was sent to the United
States to report on the nation’s Indian schools, with the intention of copying
some ideas. Despite his British imperial bias, Davin was impressed with the
American practice of “aggressive civilization,” which had been inaugurated by
President Ulysses S. Grant in 1869.83 Under this policy, Indians had been
consolidated on a few reserves, where they had been provided with
“permanent individual homes.” In addition, there had been an attempt to
abolish tribal relations so that Indians could speedily became U.S. citizens. The
American government saw it as its duty to give the Indians any reasonable
assistance in their preparation for citizenship “by educating them in industry,
and in the arts of civilization.”84 The experience of the United States struck
Davin as identical to Canada’s as far as the adult Indian was concerned. “Little
can be done with him. He can be taught to do a little at farming, and at stock
raising, and to dress in a more civilized manner, but that is all.”85
Davin’s pessimism about the fruits of Indian policies was accompanied by an
ambiguity that shrouded the concept of “civilization” for him. At some level
he recognized that the attempt to “civilize” Indians by altering their mode of
living and their appearance was not affecting the rest of their customs and
behavior. He was not willing to recognize that Indians had a culture, but he
suspected that fully acculturated Indians possessed traits that would prevent
them from accepting European culture. “The Indian is a man with traditions
of his own, which make civilization a puzzle of despair.”86 Davin listened
carefully to any evidence that might convince him that Indians should give
up a culture they were not supposed to possess. Indian informants, such as
Colonel Pleasant Porter of the Creek Nation, assured him that the chief thing
when dealing with “the less civilized or wholly barbarous tribes was to
separate the children from the parents.”87 Chief White Cloud, a Chippewa in
Minnesota, sent word to his people in Canada “to travel along the white
man’s way, and educate their children.”88
Davin, whose background as a jingoistic Anglo-Irish journalist gave him a
firm grasp of scientific racism, was uncertain whether even the separation of
children from their parents would be effective in elevating the Indian. He had
a nonenvironmentalist grasp of this issue— that is, he thought that the
Indians’ physiology might interfere with their education. The Indian was a
noble type of human being in a very early stage of development. His savage
temperament was mostly lymphatic and “might or might not be modified by
advance of civilization in the course of generations.”89 In an official document
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of the day, this was a rare intrusion of biological racism. It would not have
been normal utterance for a bureaucrat to remark, as Davin did, that the
individual Indian was not a child but that “the race is in its childhood.”90
Most accounts of Indians assumed that the only feature of Indians that was
backward was their material culture.
Davin’s biological views were not Darwinian: they were similar to a popular
eugenics account of the need to breed a hybrid race by crossing Indians with
another race. He was not echoing Francis Galton, who had been railing
against miscegenation. Galton believed that the decline of empires was due to
mixed blood. The Athenians and their empire had disappeared because of
lack of racial purity, and so would the British.91 Contrary to this, Davin
wanted to unite “savages” with Saxons and Celts in order to produce a cross
with great staying power that would often be highly intellectual.92 Yet, he
believed, even this sort of breeding experiment could be unsuccessful, as
“some of the half-breeds of high intelligence are incapable of embracing the
idea of nation —of a national type of man—in which it should be their
ambition to be merged and lost. Yet he realises that he must disappear.”93 The
touch of romanticism here should not obscure Davin’s hard-nosed and
materialist core. He concluded his somber assessment of the fate of the
natives with the prophecy that the modern Indians could no longer produce a
figure, such as a Pontiac or Tecumseh, with large ideals. He believed that
modern civilization had no place for the notable individual. Progress was
now solely a pursuit for the race or nation. Davin’s moralizing outburst was
extraordinarily passionate for an official document that purported to
reinforce the belief that residential schools for Indians would have positive
outcomes. This may be the reason he followed it with a less gloomy
prognosis. His words were softened with the remark that “we” need not
reflect on past Indian heroes in order to respect the “latent powers” of the
Indian. A survey of “our” own barbarous past will do. As “we” were once, so
the Indian is now, and therefore, Davin surmised, there was a familial duty to
protect and educate the Indian.
The decade of the 1870s not only produced Davin’s biological pessimism, it
also witnessed the harshest nonbiological, environmentalist racial policy to be
enunciated in Canada. This came in the form of the publication in 1875 of
Joseph Trutch’s defense of British Columbia’s policies.94 As a new province of
Canada, and one that accepted little federal guidance in the area of native
affairs, British Columbia found itself the subject of external criticism. Trutch,
as premier of the province and as the person who had previously been the
architect of Indian policy there, felt defensive about adverse comment that
emanated from Ottawa as well as from the clergy and from the Aboriginal
Protection Society. It was the criticism from the capital that seems to have
been particularly irritating. The dominion commissioner had claimed that the
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crown colony government had made no effort to “civilize” Indians, but had
just let them alone. This accusation of laissez-faire was accurate enough, and
at the time it was a stinging rebuke because every properly constituted British
colonial government was supposed to be under an obligation to “civilize”
indigenous peoples. Since the British Columbia government had, in fact,
neglected to institute any “civilizing” policies, Trutch strained to find some
euphemistic way in which to defend the province. The result revealed the
underlying conceptual apparatus more clearly than did other Canadian
accounts. It relied solely on the simplest and most basic idea of “civilization”
in the Victorian period—material culture.
Trutch’s defense of the local system was that it needed not reform but more
funding to encourage Indians in “the pursuits of civilized life.”95 He defined
“civilization” as the presence of physical goods, things that had been given to
the Indians just as much as—sometimes more freely than—to the whites. The
Indians had partaken, in equal status with “our white people,” of all the
advantages of “civilization,” which for Trutch were first and foremost the use
of roads and trails throughout the country. These roads and trails had cost
nearly the whole of the public debt, and the Indians were free of the tolls that
had been imposed on most white people. This, in turn, made food cheaper for
them. The Indians also benefited from “civilization” because they now
possessed the implements of husbandry and agriculture, as well as superior
tools for hunting and fishing. Finally, the Indians had received “the blessings
which result from the preservation of law and order throughout the country,
instead of the scenes of bloodshed and robbery which prevailed formerly
among them.”96
This account of the expenses incurred by the British Columbia government
was not phrased in the usual Victorian language of welfare. Many of the
benefits it listed consisted of negative aid. For example, the local government
had suppressed the liquor trade and freed the Indians from customs duties as
well as from tolls. These last boons were “virtually money payments.”97 In
addition, British Columbia had continued the colonial practice of presenting
gifts on the queen’s birthday. As many as 4,000 Indians had attended such a
celebration in 1865, and a large number had come in subsequent years.98 The
lieutenant governor had met the Indians and had distributed monies and
other prizes to competitors in games and water sports. He also had
supervised the giving of presents of food and clothing. The practice of giving
gifts was only countenanced rather than encouraged because it ran counter to
the provincial government’s policy of introducing self-reliance. Also, more
bluntly, the practice reduced the need for Indians to labor when workers
were scarce.99
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Trutch was smug in his sentiment that the “degree of civilization” introduced
by the Europeans had conferred infinite benefits.100 His defense was
remarkable because his list of advantages Indians had received as a result of
“civilization” did not include any notion of letters or arts, but chiefly
concerned material goods. There was also no sense in which the native people
were included in the political community, nor even a suggestion that they
should be educated so that one day they would take their place in such a
community. The argument for “civilization” here is not an assimilationist one;
it remained primarily on the level of physical benefits. Of course, Trutch
accompanied his defense with pious hopes that a later generation of Indians
would grasp revealed religion and would mingle with the whites, but these
expressions were disingenuous because he also thought that such outcomes
were unlikely. The first was undermined by the dismissive comment that in
twenty years on the coast he had not found a single full-born Indian with a
glimmering of the Christian God.101 The second looks less pious in light of the
provincial refusal to recognize indigenous land claims or to provide treatybased reservations of the kind the dominion government had negotiated
elsewhere in western Canada.
At heart, Trutch’s rationale for provincial policy was neither segregationist
nor assimilationist. Segregation seemingly would have necessitated the
establishment of large, and therefore expensive, reserves, while assimilation
would have resulted in educational costs Trutch would have wished to avoid.
If one is to assign any rationale to his policy defense other than racially
motivated thrift, then it would lie in his vision that when Indians mingled
with and lived among the white population, they would be gradually weaned
away from “savage” life by the acquisition of habits of peace, honesty, and
industry. In comparison to dominion policy this seemed remarkably simple,
but it was a consequence of Trutch’s adherence to the language of
“civilization” as material culture. This was so persuasive to him that he was
prevented from clearly articulating one of the two widely accepted but
antithetical philosophies on how to deal with indigenes—protection or
assimilation. Trutch’s view was less complicated than either; he relied on the
Indians disappearing as they were overwhelmed by the technology and
industry that surrounded them.
Late nineteenth-century Canadian federal officials were more sanguine than
Trutch about the future of the Indians, but they had doubts about the wisdom
and effectiveness of their policies. In particular, the policy of assimilation or
amalgamation often elicited doubts. Even among the Indians who had been
in contact with Europeans the longest, such as the Six Nations, there was
resistance to European customs and practices. There were still important
groups that avoided Christian morality and European-style elective politics.
Self-appointed Indian spokesman and critic, Dr. P. E. Jones, was still pleading
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with the Iroquois to integrate themselves with the white community a
century after they had settled in Upper Canada. Jones asked them to abandon
tribal relations, give up superstition, forsake “savage” habits, and learn the
arts of “civilization.”102 Those who dealt with isolated and more truculent
Indians held the same views: the Indians cared little about the progress they
made in becoming like whites. S. R. Marlatt, an inspector of Indian affairs,
reporting on the Manitowapah Agency (reserves on Lake Manitoba, Lake St.
Martin, and Lake Winnipegosis), concluded that while the Indians there
appeared to be contented and satisfied with their lot, “the great mass of them
think only of today, and, so long as they have plenty to eat, they think little of
the future and were it not that they are obedient, and anxious to carry out our
instructions, their progress would be slow indeed.”103 Marlatt’s point was a
common one: the Indians did not desire to become like whites or to adopt
their aspirations. If “civilization” were to be grafted onto the native people, it
would have to be forced on them.
Canadian official doubts about whether the Indians would change were
sharpened by demographic facts. That is, it was thought that the Indians were
not being assimilated and that they were growing in numbers. For example, in
1895 the deputy secretary of Indian affairs noted that although the Indians had
not been modified by “civilization,” they had increased by more than 2,000
souls in the previous year.104 While this reflection seemed to provide proof that
the Canadian authorities were benevolent, it also led to a heightened sense of
alarm in official reports coming from Ottawa. These did not echo the wistful
tone of American experts who coined scientific elegies for the disappearing
Indian, because their own Indians seemed to be growing in numbers.105
The reports of the Indian Affairs Department during the 1890s used a
different language when referring to the treatment of Indians, one that was
similar to the “aggressive civilization” language of the United States. Two
senior officials of the department, Hayter Reed and James A. Smart (they
served in succession as the chief Indian official in Ottawa, with the title
deputy superintendent general),106 enunciated a theory of “civilization” that
went beyond the usual almost exclusive reliance upon material culture and
added a concept of political culture.107 Like the late nineteenth-century
American theory of how to “civilize the Indian,” this addition relied upon an
egalitarian notion of citizenship. Reed and Smart reported that the Indians
were inclined to take advantage of the legislation that had given them special
status. Although this status might have accurately reflected their stage of
evolution at the time it was granted, this was no longer the case. Its new
function allowed the Indians “to shrink from assuming the responsibility of
citizenship.” To Reed, “it seems at least as reasonable to insist upon Indians,
who are to an extent a privileged class, taking advantage of means provided
for the material benefit of themselves and of the State, as to require white
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23
members of the commonwealth to subject their children to proper
educational influences.”108
This insistence that Indians and whites be treated the same is not as innocent
as Aristotle’s dictum that equals be treated equally. The latter, in the hands of
a modern liberal democrat, might be construed to allow some respect and
restraint toward cultures different from one’s own, while the former
permitted no such thing. This is not to say that Reed lacked sympathy with
his native subjects. His definition of equality even produced benign
statements, such as that which favorably compared the conduct of Indians
with their fellow subjects in the dominion.109 However, it had harsh outcomes
as well. For example, when Reed reflected upon the low attendance of Indian
pupils at day schools, he blamed this on the parents’ fondness for their
offspring, which prevented the exercise of the kind of firmness that was
necessary “even to compel children more or less prepared by heredity to
undergo the confinement and discipline of school.”110 Smart’s reformulation
of this point was even more striking, as it equated “civilization” with
chastisement. Smart not only reinscribed Reed’s observation that heredity
had done much to overcome the white child’s natural aversion to the
monotonous work and confinement of schools, while Indian children
possessed this aversion in its strongest form, he also added that Indian
children have a disadvantage because their parents give them sympathy and
prefer not to force their inclinations by disciplining them and subjecting them
to personal chastisement.111 These sentiments ultimately derived from Walter
Bagehot’s belief that modern society rested upon the advantages received
from compelling people to work as a form of repetitive drill. The opposite of
this, natural behavior, was seen as destructive of a high level of “civilization.”
Natural behavior was to be repressed. It seemed that some Indian bands (the
ones Reed referred to as “the less civilized bands”) were rightly suspicious of
the government’s intention to place their children in industrial boarding
schools. They were correct because Reed’s goals were not confined to forcing
Indian economic development from a “stone age” culture to a modern
industrial one. Their native languages were to be replaced with English, and
“the retarding influence of the reserve” was to be checked.112 Smart’s aim was
equally wide ranging. He believed that before education could take place,
Indian culture had to be modified. A great deal had to be done in the way of
eradicating superstition and prejudices, and “in overcoming fear not
unnaturally entertained by the parent that education will not only destroy
sympathy between them and their offspring in this life, but, through the
inculcation of religion separate them in a future state of existence.”113 The
official intention here was no longer to improve the material culture of the
Indians. To Smart, that indigenous people might adopt a new technology or
derive a benefit from it or save themselves from being overreached by the
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24
whites was of little importance.114 Improved material culture was no longer
an end in itself, but merely a means to assimilate the Indians, to make them
the same as white citizens.
The citizenship core of the 1890s notion of “civilization” did not last.
Canadian discourse had briefly paralleled the American, but it reverted to its
former pattern. When a senior Indian official from the United States reported
on Canada in 1915, he saw the two countries as differing sharply. The
American practice was to break up the tribal community and segregate
individual members on tracts of land surrounded by white persons. It was, he
remarked, “our frank and avowed policy to have them as quickly as possible
lose their identity as Indians. Canada’s policy is to develop civilized
communities of Indians.”115 The official, Frederick H. Abbott, was full of
praise for Canada’s treatment of Indians, and for the fact that it had been
largely initiated and implemented by long-serving officials who stood outside
partisan politics.116 However, he was critical of one aspect of the dominion’s
treatment of those eastern Indians who had had a long period of contact with
whites. He used a long quotation from an article by the chief of Indian affairs
in Ottawa, Duncan Campbell Scott, to make his point. Scott’s article had
appeared in a recently published series of books titled Canada and Her
Provinces. Abbott took advantage of Scott’s public defense of his official
stance to launch an attack on Canada’s failure to grant voting rights to any
band other than the long-assimilated Wyandottes of Anderson.117 This use of
Scott is interesting because it confronted him at the very point on which he
had been backtracking from the American-style “aggressive civilization”
language of the 1890s.
Scott had defended this change with the remark that it was not the present
desire of his government “to force Indians into full citizenship.”118 Instead, it
would examine whether some bands in Ontario and Quebec were “ripe” for
the kind of enfranchisement granted the Wyandottes in 1881. He believed
that a kind of slow evolution had come about through education and
intermarriage.119 The Indian Act would also be amended to allow those
eastern Indians who dwelt apart from reserves to embrace full citizenship.120
However, the reserves themselves would stay in existence even for the
relatively developed eastern Indians. Scott thought it foolish to end the
reserve system when it had brought so much benefit. In any case, “there is
nothing repugnant to the policy which is being carried out or to the exercise
of useful citizenship in the idea of a highly civilized Indian community living
upon land which its members cannot sell.”121
What had changed for Scott was the primary direction of “civilization.” He
had reverted to the Victorian language that encouraged Indians to become
“civilized” without becoming assimilated. Industrial schools had failed, and
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25
their failure meant that the purpose of Indian education had become clearer.
“It is now recognized that the provision of education for the Indian means an
attempt to develop the great national intelligence of the race and to fit the
Indian for civilized life in his own environment.”122 This was not the kind of
culturally sensitive and anthropologically informed policy that became
common in the mid-twentieth century. When Scott advocated that Indians
should be fit for their own environment, he was not recognizing that their
culture contained valuable cultural insights. Nor was he advocating the
protection of indigenous culture. Instead, Scott, who had been with the
Indian Affairs Department for thirty-five years, was merely harking back to
the pre-1890s desire to alter Indian material culture. With this in mind, he
imagined that Indians would live in separate communities but, like the
general population, would earn their living from the soil or as members of a
mercantile or industrial community. To quicken this process, there would be
a substitution of Christian ideals of conduct and morals for the aboriginal
conceptions of both. The school program, which had been complex because of
its recent assimilationist goals, would be simplified. There would also be an
attempt to remedy the problems that Indian children faced in learning
English, a foreign language, while lacking proper winter clothing and food
for lunch.123 For the rest, Indians would be assisted by a grant of cattle,
implements, tools, and building materials.124 Indigenous needs were material
ones. When Scott commented that “Indian agencies have always been among
the pioneer posts of civilization in the undeveloped territories,” he was
reaffirming his adherence to the belief that the possession of technology and
wealth was the chief criterion of “civilization.”
During the Victorian period, notions of civilization that referred to the
possession of virtue or refinement or to civic equality were usually either
abandoned or relegated to minor secondary meanings. On a practical level this
had important ramifications, as it meant that individual Indians, such as Joseph
Brant, Tecumseh, or Pontiac, who could have been portrayed as “civilized” in
an earlier period, could no longer be pictured this way. While a Brant might
have possessed the requisite amount of individual refinement, political
wisdom, or nobility in the late eighteenth century to pass for a “civilized”
person, his successors were denied this. They could only be perceived as
components of an ethnic or racial group. “Civilization” had become primarily a
developmental concept that referred to progress caused by the possession of
advanced technology and wealth. This new concept appeared to have a hard
scientific basis, since the extent to which Indians had achieved “civilization”
could be accurately gauged and did not depend upon attitudes, manners, or
refinement—attributes that were immeasurable or imponderable. In any case,
to have relied upon perceptions of individual social standing would have
seemed misleading to Victorians. They, whether English or colonial, were more
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26
familiar with the measurement of modern national identities, compared to
which individual variation seemed insubstantial. For similar reasons,
“civilization” rarely referred to the possession of political sophistication or to
excellent decision-making qualities—either of which could be easily linked to
European civic culture. The Indian was seldom viewed as someone who might
possess the qualifications of a citizen. Although at the end of the Victorian
period only the western provinces and New Brunswick specifically disallowed
the vote to Indians, enfranchisement was difficult in the other provinces as
well. Since the whole purpose behind government intention to improve Indians
was to elevate them as an ethnic or racial group, it seemed irrelevant to
consider individual Indians.
To say that “civilization” was primarily a developmental theory in this period
is not to imply that it was essentially a biological theory of either a Darwinian
or non-Darwinian type. If by “Darwinian” one means that Canadian
anthropologists, missionaries, and officials wished to subject indigenous
peoples to the forces of natural selection, this would usually be false. (The
major possible exception would be the laissez-faire attitude of Joseph Trutch
in British Columbia, whose defense of Indian policies was the expression of a
hope that Indians would disappear.) To the extent that official policies took
account of phrases such as “struggle for existence,” the effect was to insist
that Indians be compelled to undergo a lengthy process of artificially
imposed adaptation so that eventually they could compete on an equal
footing with whites. Non-Darwinian biological concepts of evolution were
also rarely applied to Indians, if by “non-Darwinian” one means a
Lamarckian analysis in which a species willed its own adaptation. This could
not be easily reconciled with the common late nineteenth-century and early
twentieth-century observation that Indians were apathetic and uninterested
in self-improvement.
Rather than copying a scientific biological model, the developmental theory
applied to indigenous Canadians drew upon historical analogies with the
European past. The Indians were imagined to be like the ancient Britons or
Germans in their combination of savagery and the love of freedom. Such
analogies tended to reinforce the belief that tutelage for Indians would be a
lengthy process lasting some generations and that, as in the European past, it
would mean an exchange of freedom for the possession of great technological
competence and wealth. This trade-off would involve the use of confinement
and discipline to force the Indians quickly through an evolution Europeans
had laboriously and slowly undergone without external help. Reserves and
industrial schools in which isolated groups of Indians would face restriction
and, in the case of children, chastisement fitted neatly with the conception
that mechanically repeated drill would speedily achieve “civilization” of the
kind that natural change had taken centuries to accomplish.
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Discipline also meshed with the overarching reliance upon a definition of
“civilization” as a high form of material culture. When officials such as
Hayter Reed insisted that “civilization” was an artificial rather than a natural
condition, they were justifying their desire to compel Indians to progress to
higher levels of prosperity and technology. Since “civilization” itself was an
artificial condition, there could be no objection to altering the customs or
social relations of Indians. These were merely projections of a way of life that
was controlled by the environment or nature. In order for Indians to move
toward “civilization,” it was necessary to force them away from nature so
they could adopt an artificial culture. Such a transformation was inevitably
connected with pain and dislocation, but Victorians would not have been
disconcerted by this reflection. Their concept of “civilization” was a smug
reaffirmation of commercial success, but it also carried a sense of loss, which
they believed was part of their own identity. They felt that they too had been
barbarians whose wild love of freedom had been curtailed by the
confinement and discipline that was the concomitant of “civilization.”
Notes
*
Much of the research on which this article is based was conducted in
Canada when I was the recipient of a Canadian Studies Faculty Research
Award. Many people in Canada helped make my trip a pleasant as well
as an informative experience, but several deserve to be mentioned by
name. I am especially grateful to John Leslie, chief of the Claims and
Historical Research Centre of Indian and Northern Affairs, Canada, Pat
Kennedy and Trish Maracle of the National Archives of Canada, Joyce
Banks of the National Library of Canada, and Trish Nicks of the
Department of Ethnology of the Royal Ontario Museum. I am also
grateful to S. A. M. Adshead, Joanna Goven, and Lyndsay Head for
comments on an early version of the article.
1.
Nicholas Thomas, Colonialism’s Culture: Anthropology, Travel and
Government (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994), pp. 12, 79.
2.
Ibid., p. 81. Thomas protests that scholarly attempts to study racism in
historical periods inhibit attempts to grapple with the subject as a global
phenomenon. In opposition to periodization he erects a notion of modern
racism that appeared c. 1800. This strategy appears to be a rejection of
sophisticated forms of periodization in favor of two periods separated by
a single cataclysmic shift from the past to the present. Rather than being
postmodernist, it resembles Augustinian historiography.
3.
The North American Indian Today (University of Toronto–Yale University
Summer Conference, Toronto, 4–16 September 1939), edited by C. T.
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Loram (Obit.) and T. F. McIlwraith (Toronto: University of Toronto
Press, 1943), p. 21.
4.
Ibid.
5.
There seems to be agreement that the Great Depression of the 1930s was
the high-water mark of government regulation and interference in the
daily lives of Canadian Indians and that following this there was a new
social awareness. See Ralph W. Johnson, “Fragile Gains: Two Centuries
of Canadian and United States Policy toward Indians,” Washington Law
Review 66 (1991): 673; and John Leslie and Ron Macquire, The Historical
Development of the Indian Act, 2nd ed. (Department of Indian and
Northern Affairs, Canada, 1979), p. 132.
6.
McIlwraith’s views were similar to those of his contemporaries, such as
Edward Sapir, a student of Franz Boas. His theories were not drawn
from the famous definition of culture that appeared at the beginning of
Edward B. Tylor’s Primitive Culture. George W. Stocking Jr. has rightly
rejected the idea that Tylor was working with the modern
anthropological idea of culture during the 1860s and 1870s. See George
W. Stocking Jr., Race, Culture and Evolution: Essays in the History of
Anthropology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), p. 89; and
Stocking, Victorian Anthropology (New York: Free Press, 1987), p. 302.
7.
Marius Barbeau, Indian Days in the Canadian Rockies (Toronto: Macmillan,
1923), p. 166.
8.
Ibid., p. 167.
9.
Ibid., pp. 166, 196–201.
10.
Marius Barbeau, Huron and Wyandot Mythology (Ottawa: Government
Printing Bureau, 1915), p. 36.
11.
Marius Barbeau, “Our Indians—Their Disappearance,” Queen’s Quarterly
(autumn 1931): 705.
12.
Official attitudes toward Indians became less peremptory not simply
because of increased cultural sensibility but also as a result of shifts in
political theory. From the mid-twentieth century an idea was propagated
that government should be less dictatorial toward Indians because they
were the possessors of rights and should be consulted about the direction
of their affairs. This was the opinion in 1946 of the director of Indian
affairs, R. A. Hoey, who had been reading the Meriam Report (1928), an
American document that was influential in the U.S. reform of Indian
legislation in 1934. See Special Joint Committee of Senate and House of
Commons (appointed to examine and consider the Indian Act), sess. 1946,
“Minutes and Proceedings of Evidence,” no. 1, p. 25.
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13. On ancient and early modern uses of civilization, see Anthony Pagden,
The Fall of Natural Man (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).
Until the eighteenth century “civility” could mean the antonym of
“savagery” or “the possession of manners or virtues.” In the early
nineteenth century “civilization,” which had replaced “civility,” took on
a materialist meaning. See, for example, Sydney Smith (1824), who
praises the Americans for having “a higher proof of civilization than
painted tea-cups, waterproof leather, or broad cloth at two guineas a
yard” (The Works of Sydney Smith [London: Longmans, 1869], p. 465).
14.
See James H. Merrill, “The Custom of Our Country: Indians and
Colonists in Early America,” in Strangers within the Realm: Cultural
Margins of the First British Empire, ed. Bernard Bailyn and Philip D.
Morgan (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), p. 127;
James Axtell, The European and the Indian: Essays in the Ethnohistory of
Colonial North America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), pp.
45, 61; and James Axtell, The Invasion Within: The Contest of Cultures in
Colonial North America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), p.
135.
15. Axtell, The European and the Indian, p. 46.
16.
Ibid., p. 44. See also Anthony Pagden, European Encounters with the New
World, from Renaissance to Romanticism (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1993), p. 154, who notes the common belief in the eighteenth
century that passions were the overwhelming threat to all forms of
civility.
17. Axtell, The Invasion Within, p. 135. The schools Indians attended were
classically oriented. See James Axtell, After Columbus: Essays in the
Ethnohistory of Colonial North America (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1988), p. 59.
18. Axtell, The European and the Indian, p. 48.
19. Axtell, The Invasion Within, p. 133; Axtell, After Columbus, pp. 53, 241. The
eighteenth-century insistence that “civility” was only possible in
association with a national life was not exclusively a religious perception.
Anthony Pagden dwells upon passages in the work of Diderot and
Rousseau that emphasize the necessity of patriotism in creating civil life.
Pagden also tellingly cites Raynal to the effect that the savage alone knows
that “sa patrie est partout,” which suggests that “civility” was so far from
being a universal quality that it could only be attained by those who had
advanced away from a common nature by becoming part of a national
group. Pagden, European Encounters, pp. 152–53.
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20. Axtell, The Invasion Within, pp. 133 and 272. See also Anthony Pagden, The
Fall of Natural Man, pp. 16, 71–72, for an earlier account of the same belief.
21. John Stuart Mill, “Civilization,” in Essays on Politics and Society, vol. 18 of
Collected Works of John Stuart Mill (Toronto: University of Toronto Press,
1977), p. 119. Bernard Semmel has written a monograph on Mill that
overemphasizes his theory of civilization as the defense of individual
virtue against material progress. See Bernard Semmel, John Stuart Mill and
the Pursuit of Virtue (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), pp. 82–119.
22.
Ibid., p. 131.
23. Ibid., p. 132. Mill was influenced by Coleridge’s discussion of the duties
of the aristocracy. On Coleridge see John Morrow, Coleridge’s Political
Thought: Property, Morality and the Limits of Traditional Discourse (London:
Macmillan, 1990), pp. 111–21. Mill’s antifeminist bias in the passage
cited here contrasts sharply with the sensitivity on this subject that he
later displayed in The Subjection of Women.
24.
Ibid., p. 120.
25.
Ibid., pp. 121–23.
26. Edward B. Tylor, Primitive Culture, 2nd ed. (London: John Murray, 1873),
p. 27.
27.
Ibid., pp. 22–23. This idea was derived from his reading of Max Muller.
On Tylor’s relationship with Muller, with whom he often disagreed, see
Stocking, Victorian Anthropology, pp. 61–62, 305–307.
28. Ibid., p. 28. When Tylor and other Victorians linked “civilization” to
membership in a modern national group, they might be seen as
engaging in an argument similar to that of the eighteenth-century
figures referred to by Anthony Pagden and James Axtell, but there is an
important distinction here about what was meant by “nation” in the two
periods. In the eighteenth century, it was believed that one could assume
membership in a national group by freely adopting a different language
and moral and civic ideals. In the nineteenth century such matters were
less likely to be seen as voluntary and in the power of individuals.
29.
To treat Lubbock after Tylor is not to suggest that the former was
dependent upon the latter. Indeed, it has been suggested that Tylor
borrowed his theory of technological progress from Lubbock. Adam
Kuper, The Invention of Primitive Society (London: Routledge, 1988), p. 81.
Tylor is discussed first because although like Lubbock he occasionally
blurs his categories of material culture and biology, he was more
insistent in focusing on material culture as the primary cause and effect
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of social change. Stocking, Victorian Anthropology, p. 235; Stocking, Race,
Culture and Evolution, p. 96.
30. John Lubbock, The Origin of Civilization and the Primitive Condition of Man
(London: Longmans, 1870), p. 3.
31. Ibid.
32. That is, Tylor’s suggestion that modern intelligence had worked against
the production of virtue meant that he thought savages possessed
beneficial qualities lacking in more advanced peoples. This, in turn,
meant that he could not wholeheartedly espouse a theory of progress.
33.
Lubbock, The Origin of Civilization, p. 261.
34.
Ibid., p. 277.
35.
Uniformism is a term applied to the doctrine held by natural scientists,
such as Charles Lyell and Charles Darwin, who avoided catastrophic
changes when theorizing about evolution. Instead they preferred to
work with a model in which the natural world changed in a gradual and
uniform way.
36. In this respect, nineteenth-century Canada was similar to seventeenthand eighteenth-century American colonies. In both cases there was no
intermediate “barbarian” stage between “savage” and “civil” people.
“Indianized” colonists played no role in the formation of colonial
culture. See Axtell, The European and the Indian, p. 283.
37. In the late Victorian period, as in the twentieth century, “civilization”
and “culture” were sometimes interchangeable. See, for example, Daniel
Wilson and E. B. Tylor, Anthropology and Archaeology (New York:
Humboldt, 1885), p. 33.
38.
Horatio Hale, “Eighth Report,” in Reports on the North-Western Tribes of
the Dominion of Canada (Section H of the British Association meeting in
Bristol, 1889), p. 8. [I have used the copy of this document that can be
found in the library of the Department of Northern and Indian Affairs in
Ottawa. It appears to be scarce, as there is no copy listed with the British
Association material in the National Union Catalogue.] Hale had earlier
been an American ethnographer noted for his work on the Iroquois.
Later he settled in Canada. See Douglas Cole, “The Origins of Canadian
Anthropology, 1850–1910,” Journal of Canadian Studies 8, no. 1 (February
1973): pp. 38–39.
39. Hale, “Eighth Report,” p. 9.
40.
Franz Boas, “Twelfth and Final Report,” in Reports on the North-Western
Tribes, p. 55.
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41.
Daniel Wilson, Prehistoric Man, 2nd ed. (London: Macmillan, 1865), p. 5.
42.
Ibid., p. 6. Despite his use of the racial term Redman, Wilson rejected
contemporary accounts that discussed Indians and blacks as biologically
inferior. See Bruce G. Trigger, “Sir Daniel Wilson: Canada’s First
Anthropologist,” Anthropologica, n.s. 8, no. 1 (1966): 15.
43.
Daniel Wilson, “The Huron-Iroquois of Canada: A Typical Race of
American Aborigines,” Transactions of the Royal Society of Canada (Section
II) (1884): 83. According to Robert F. Berkhofer, the consensus among
modern scholars is to see L. H. Morgan’s treatment of the democracy
and utopian harmony of the Iroquois as an imaginative romanticization
of pre-Contact Indian life. Robert F. Berkhofer, “White Conceptions of
Indians,” in History of Indian-White Relations, vol. 4 of Handbook of North
American Indians (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1988), p.
533. However, noncritical accounts of Morgan can still be found. See,
e.g., Kuper, The Invention of Primitive Society, pp. 47, 70–72.
44.
Wilson, “The Huron-Iroquois,” p. 83. Also see pp. 65–67.
45.
Ibid., p. 83.
46.
Ibid., p. 67.
47. Wilson went to considerable efforts to disprove the theory that Indians
had once possessed the knowledge to harden the implements they made
from free deposits of copper. Trigger, “Wilson,” p. 12.
48. Egerton Ryerson Young, By Canoe and Dog Train, Among the Cree and
Salteaux Indians (London: Charles H. Kelly, 1892), pp. 178–79.
49. Egerton Ryerson Young, Stories from Indian Wigwams and Northern Camp
Fires (London: Charles H. Kelly, 1903), pp. 67–69. Young was a Methodist,
and it may seem surprising that, as a member of that church, he had so
abandoned otherworldliness in favor of materialism. However, William
Westfall has explained that nineteenth-century Methodists had joined
other denominations to form a common Ontario Protestantism that
stopped seeing the sacred as exclusively otherworldly. See William
Westfall, Two Worlds: The Protestant Culture of Nineteenth-Century Ontario
(McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1989), pp. 192–96.
50. Catherine Hall, “From Greenland’s Icy Mountains . . . to Africa’s Golden
Sand: Ethnicity, Race and Nation in Mid-Nineteenth-Century England,”
Gender and History 5, no. 2: 212–30.
51. F. Frost, Sketches of Indian Life (Toronto: William Briggs, 1904), p. 281.
52.
Ibid., pp. 282–86.
53.
Ibid., p. 287.
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54.
Ibid., pp. 214–15, 218–19.
55.
Ibid., pp. 288–89.
56.
That is, Maclean’s definition of “culture” is similar to the one Tylor
coined in Primitive Culture. In addition, like Tylor and Wilson, Maclean
was conscious that “civilization” was a contestable term that needed
definition.
57. John Maclean, The Indians, Their Manners and Customs (Toronto: William
Briggs, 1889), p. 262.
58. Ibid.
59.
Ibid., p. 276.
60. John Maclean, Canadian Savage Folk, The Native Tribes of Canada (Toronto:
William Briggs, 1896), p. 542.
61. Ibid.
62.
Ibid., p. 552.
63.
Ibid., p. 543.
64. Ibid.
65.
Ibid., p. 546.
66.
Ibid., p. 551–52.
67. Maclean, The Indians, p. 276.
68.
Ibid., p. 277.
69. Ibid.
70.
Maclean, Canadian Savage Folk, p. 552.
71.
Ibid., p. 263.
72. Maclean, The Indians, p. 271. Maclean’s analysis sounds similar to Marx’s
homo faber because he is not simply identifying civilization with material
culture but also offering a notion that human consciousness is mediated
through the process of production. This is not to suggest that Marx was
influential here, but rather to point out that the nineteenth century
tended to transfigure materialism.
73.
Maclean’s phrase “latent powers” can also be found in the works of Hale
and Wilson. This, like other similarities, suggests that the division
between missionary and anthropologist was not extreme.
74.
Report of the Special Commissioners to Investigate Indian Affairs in Canada
(Toronto: Queen’s Printer, 1858), p. 97.
75. Ibid.
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76.
Ibid., p. 103.
77.
Ibid., p. 104.
78.
Canada, Department of the Secretary of State, Indian Branch, Annual
Report, 1867–68 (Ottawa), p. 5.
79. Ibid.
80. Ibid.
81.
John Leonard Taylor, “Canada’s North-West Indian Policy in the 1870s,”
in Sweet Promises: A Reader on Indian-White Relations in Canada (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 1991), p. 208. On the subject of Indian policy
before confederation, see John S. Milloy, “The Early Indian Acts,” in
Sweet Promises, pp. 145–54; John F. Leslie, Commissions of Inquiry in Indian
Affairs in the Canadas, 1828–1858: Evolving a Corporate Memory for the
Indian Department, (Ottawa: Indian Affairs and Northern Development
Canada, February 1985); and Douglas Leighton, “A Victorian Civil
Servant at Work: Lawrence Vankoughnet and the Canadian Indian
Department, 1874–1893,” paper delivered to the meeting of the
Canadian Historical Association, London, Ontario, 30 May 1978.
82.
Nicholas Flood Davin, British versus American Civilization: A Lecture
Delivered in Shaftesbury Hall, Toronto, 19 April 1873 (Toronto: Adam,
Stevenson, 1873), p. 41.
83. Davin noted that the policy also predated Grant.
84.
Nicholas Flood Davin, Report on Industrial Schools for Indians and HalfBreeds (Ottawa: Minister of Interior, 1879), p. 1. E. Brian Titley claims
that Davin’s recommendations were eventually acted upon. See E. Brian
Titley, A Narrow Vision: Duncan Campbell Scott and the Administration of
Indian Affairs in Canada (Vancouver: University of British Columbia
Press, 1986), p. 77.
85. Ibid.
86.
Ibid., p. 10.
87. Ibid., p. 7.
88. Ibid., p. 8.
89. Ibid., p. 10. Time was important to Davin; even when he was not
speaking about Indians, he felt comfortable with statements such as that
“we all feel that the education of any human being should begin two or
three centuries before he was born.” See Nicholas Flood Davin, Culture
and Practical Power: An Address Delivered at the Opening of Landsdowne
College, Portage La Prairie (Regina: Northwest Territories, 1889), p. 2.
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35
90. Ibid.
91. Francis Galton, Hereditary Genius: An Inquiry into Its Laws and
Consequences (London: Macmillan, 1869), pp. 342–43.
92. Davin, Report on Industrial Schools, p. 10.
93.
Ibid., p. 11.
94. On Trutch’s background and policies, see Robin Fisher, Contact and
Conflict: Indian-European Relations in British Columbia, 1774–1890, 2nd ed.
(Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1992), pp. 160–74.
95.
Joseph Trutch to secretary of state, 26 September 1871, in British
Columbia: Papers Connected with the Indian Land Question, 1850–
1875(Victoria: Richard Wolfenden, 1875), p. 100. 96. Ibid. 97.
Joseph
Trutch, “Report of the Government of British Columbia on the Subject of
Indian Reserves,” in British Columbia: Papers Connected with the Indian
Land Question, p. 3. 98. Ibid.
99. Ibid.
100. Trutch to secretary of state, 26 September 1871, p. 101.
101. Ibid.
102. The Indian (A Biweekly Newspaper Edited by Dr. P. E. Jones on the Six
Nations and Mississaugas Reserve) 9 (12 May 1886): 101. Some Iroquois
still resisted European religious, marital, and political customs after the
Victorian period had ended. In 1923 Colonel Thompson reported that
800 non-Christian Indians lived on the Six Nations reserve and
conducted their relations “without wedlock.” Modernizing Christian
Indians objected to this, and to the nondemocratic tribal council that
gave control to the oldest woman in those families that had a right to
elect a chief. The reformers wanted to replace this “antiquated” system
with a “democratic” one that would exclude women from the franchise.
Col. Andrew T. Thompson, Report (of) Commission to Investigate and
Enquire into the Affairs of the Six Nations Indians, 1923 (Ottawa:, King’s
Printer, 1924), pp. 9–12.
103. Report of the Department of Indian Affairs for the Year Ended June 30,
1899(Ottawa), p. 98.
104. Report of the Department of Indian Affairs for the Year Ended 30th June,
1895(Ottawa), p. xxi.
105. See the brilliant description of “salvage ethnology” of the American
anthropological establishment in Curtis M. Hinsley Jr., Savages and
Scientists (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1981). In
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36
Canada the image of the vanishing Indian has been over-etched recently
by Daniel Francis, The Imaginary Indian (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp, 1992).
106. Reed, who was a long-serving official, was sacked by Clifford Sifton and
replaced by Smart, a politician and official from Manitoba. Since Sifton
did not introduce any dramatic changes in the department, there is no
reason to believe that the change in officials caused a change in the
policies referred to in this article. See D. J. Hall, “Clifford Sifton and
Canadian Indian Administration, 1896–1905,” in As Long as the Sun
Shines and Water Flows, ed. Ian A. L. Getty and Antoine S. Lussier
(Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1983), pp. 122–23,
136–37. Reed’s policies have been extensively analyzed by Sarah Carter,
Lost Harvests: Prairie Indian Reserve Farmers and Government Policy
(McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1990), pp. 141–58.
107. To say that there was a shift away from an exclusive reliance on the
discourse of material culture does not mean that it no longer played a
part in official rhetoric. On the contrary, officials were still strongly
attached to the idea that training Indian children in industrial schools
was an important means of transforming them. At one level, industrial
schools fitted neatly into the ongoing Victorian belief that the task of the
civilized was to bring prosperity and technology to the poor and
backward Indian. However, at another level, there was a shift to a new
rationale for civilization.
108. Report of the Department of Indian Affairs for the Year Ended 30th June,
1894(Ottawa), p. xxii.
109. Report . . . 1895, p. xxi.
110. Ibid., p. xxii.
111. Report of the Department of Indian Affairs for the Year Ended 30th June,
1897(Ottawa), p. xxvi.
112. Report . . . 1895, p. xxii.
113. Report . . . 1899, p. xxxi.
114. Ibid.
115. Frederick H. Abbott, The Administration of Indian Affairs in Canada: Report
of an Investigation Made in 1914under the Direction of the Board of Indian
Commissioners (Washington, D.C., 1915), p. 42.
116. Ibid., p. 25.
117. Ibid., p. 44. Abbott was correct in his suspicion that Canada did not
encourage its Indians to seek the franchise. From 1857, when the
enfranchisement process was enacted, to 1920 only slightly more than
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37
250 Indians were granted the vote. John L. Tobias, “Protection,
Civilization, Assimilation: An Outline History of Canada’s Indian
Policy,” in Historical Perspectives on Law and Society in Canada, ed. Tina
Loo and Lorna R. McLean (Toronto: Copp Clark, 1994), p. 299.
118. Duncan C. Scott, “Indian Affairs, 1867–1912,” in Canada and Its Provinces
(Toronto: T. and A. Constable, 1914), vol. VII, p. 605. There is a hostile
account of Scott’s article in Titley, A Narrow Vision, pp. 34–35.
119. Scott, “Indian Affairs, 1867–1912,” p. 605.
120. Ibid., p. 606.
121. Ibid., p. 623.
122. Ibid., p. 616.
123. Ibid., pp. 616–17.
124. Ibid., p. 616.
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38