Transatlantic Upper Canada: Portraits in Literature Land and British-Indigenous Relations 9780228002659

Table of contents :
Cover
Copyright
Contents
Acknowledgments
Preface
Introduction Literature, Land, and Colonial Relations
1 Romantic Ecology, Indigenous Culture, and the Ideology of “Improvement”
2 Bishop John Strachan, Christian Evangelism, and the First Nations of Upper Canada
3 The Legal, Literary, and Environmental Passions of Sir John Beverley Robinson
4 Anna Brownell Jameson and Sir Francis Bond Head among the Anishinaabeg
5 The Transatlantic World of John Norton (Chief Teyoninhokarawen)
6 John Brant (Chief Ahyonwaeghs) and the Grand River Haudenosaunee
7 Peter Jones (Chief Kahkewaquonaby) and the Credit River Mississauga
8 The Atlantic Crossings of George Copway (Kahgegagahbowh)
Afterword Paths Not Taken
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

T r a n sat l a n t ic Upper Canada

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Mc Gi l l - ­Q u een ’ s Tran satlan ti c S tudies Series editors: Alan Dobson, Robert Hendershot, and Steve Marsh The McGill-­Queen’s Transatlantic Studies series, in partnership with the Transatlantic Studies Association, provides a focal point for scholarship examining and interrogating the rich cultural, political, social, and economic connections between nations, organizations, and networks that border the Atlantic Ocean. The series combines traditional disciplinary studies with innovative interdisciplinary work, stimulating debate about and engagement with a field of transatlantic studies broadly defined to capture a breadth and richness of scholarship. Books in the series focus on but are not limited to the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, normally falling within the subfields of history, economics, politics and international relations, literature, and cultural studies. 1 Not like Home American Visitors to Britain in the 1950s Michael John Law 2 Transatlantic Upper Canada Portraits in Literature, Land, and British-Indigenous Relations Kevin Hutchings

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Transatlantic Upper Canada Portraits in Literature, Land, and British-Indigenous Relations

K e v i n H u tc hin g s

McGill-­Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Chicago

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©  McGill-Queen’s University Press 2020 ISBN ISBN ISBN ISBN

978-0-2280-0128-7 (cloth) 978-0-2280-0129-4 (paper) 978-0-2280-0265-9 (eP DF ) 978-0-2280-0266-6 (eP UB)

Legal deposit third quarter 2020 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts. Nous remercions le Conseil des arts du Canada de son soutien.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Title: Transatlantic Upper Canada: portraits in literature, land, and BritishIndigenous relations / Kevin Hutchings. Names: Hutchings, Kevin (Kevin Douglas), 1960– author. Description: Series statement: McGill-Queen‚Äôs transatlantic studies; 2 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20200218891 | Canadiana (ebook) 20200219324 | IS BN 9780228001294 (paper) | ISB N 9780228001287 (cloth) | IS BN 9780228002659 (eP D F ) | ISB N 9780228002666 (eP UB) Subjects: LC S H: Canadian literature—Ontario—19th century—History and criticism. | L CS H: Canadian literature—Indian authors—History and criticism. | L CS H: Romanticism. | L CS H: Ecology in literature. | L C SH : Environmentalism in literature. | L CS H: Ontario—Environmental conditions. | LCS H: Ontario—Relations‚ÄîGreat Britain. | L C SH : Great Britain—Relations—Ontario. | L CS H: Great Britain—Colonies—America. Classification: L CC P S 8111 .H88 2020 | DDC 809/.89713—dc23

This book was typeset by Marquis Interscript in 10.5/13 Sabon.

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To the memory of Mary Joseph, Norval Morrisseau, and Dwight D. Pinay

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Contents

Acknowledgments ix Preface xiii

Introduction: Literature, Land, and Colonial Relations  3

  1 Romantic Ecology, Indigenous Culture, and the Ideology of “Improvement” 32   2 Bishop John Strachan, Christian Evangelism, and the First Nations of Upper Canada  54   3 The Legal, Literary, and Environmental Passions of Sir John Beverley Robinson  84   4 Anna Brownell Jameson and Sir Francis Bond Head among the Anishinaabeg 111   5 The Transatlantic World of John Norton (Chief Teyoninhokarawen) 137   6 John Brant (Chief Ahyonwaeghs) and the Grand River Haudenosaunee 160   7 Peter Jones (Chief Kahkewaquonaby) and the Credit River Mississauga 186   8 The Atlantic Crossings of George Copway (Kahgegagahbowh)  213

Afterword: Paths Not Taken  236

Notes 241 Bibliography 261 Index 283

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Acknowledgments

I thank the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (sshrc ) for supporting this research by funding a Standard Research Grant (2009­–12) and a Tier 2 Canada Research Chair in Literature, Culture and Environmental Studies (2010–13). I also thank the Office of Research at the University of Northern British Columbia for providing me with time, funding, and moral support throughout the course of my research. Without such generous assistance, this book would not have been written. I am grateful to Alan Ojiig Corbiere for generously sharing his knowledge of Anishinaabe history, culture, and language, and for bringing the narratives of Louis Solomon and Jean Baptiste Sylvestre (see chapter 5) to my attention. I also owe a debt of gratitude to Tim Fulford of De Montfort University for teaching me much about the relationship between Romanticism and Native American culture during our work as co-editors of Native Americans and Anglo-American Culture 1750–1850: The Indian Atlantic (2009). I thank the unbc student research assistants who helped me during the various stages of this ten-year project: Dustin Batty, Blake Bouchard, Crystal Campbell, Derrick Denholm, Amanda Dinnes, Janet Grafton, Jordan Kinder, David Landry, Josh Massey, Charity Matthews, Shay Shortt, Matthew Slykhuis, Meghan Sterling, and Carly Stewart. Thanks are also due to the many colleagues, friends, and associates who informed and inspired me along the way, including Esther Bertram, Alan Bewell, Ted Binnema, Grahame Davies, Michael Demson, Ray Eagle, Sophie Edwards, Michelle Faubert, Gail Fondahl, Kurt Fosso, Judyta Frodyma, Marilyn Gaull, Terry Gifford, Nick

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x Acknowledgments

Groom, Samantha Harvey, Douglas Kneale, Mark Lussier, Susan Manning, James McKusick, John Miller, Susan Oliver, Joel Pace, Diana Parkin, Geoffrey Payne, Kate Rigby, Nicholas Roe, Caroline Rosenthal, Kathy Shaw, Donald Smith, Jonathan Swainger, Iain Thornber, Louise Westling, and Virve Wiland. I am deeply grateful to the two anonymous peer reviewers whose detailed recommendations for revision helped me to strengthen and contextualize this book’s arguments and insights; and I am thankful for Eleanor Gasparik’s eagle-eyed copy-editing of the manuscript. I am grateful as well to my long-time editor, Philip Cercone, with whom I have been fortunate to work since the early days of my academic career. This is the third monograph I have published with mqup; my continuing loyalty to the press is a testament to the high quality of mqup’s work and the individualized support and encouragement that Philip and the mqup staff have always given me. Research for this book was undertaken at the following archives and libraries: Archives of Ontario at York University, Canada; British Library, London, UK; Walter C. Koerner Library and Irving K. Barber Learning Centre, University of British Columbia, Vancouver; Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, Trinity College Library (John W. Graham Library), and Robarts Library at the University of Toronto; Toronto Reference Library (Toronto Public Library); Geoffrey R. Weller Library, University of Northern British Columbia; University of Glasgow Library Archives and Special Collections; Goethe- und Schiller-Archiv, Weimar, Germany; John Murray Archive and National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh, UK; Ojibwe Cultural Foundation, M’Chigeeng First Nation, Ontario; and Woodland Cultural Centre Research Library, Six Nations, Brantford, Ontario. My thanks to the librarians, archivists, and staff at each of these institutions for their helpful assistance. I also thank my students at unbc – especially those who have taken my courses in Romantic, environmental, and postcolonial literatures, as well as the graduate students who have taken my seminar on Transatlantic Upper Canada – for helping me to hone my ideas during classroom discussions and debates. I presented early versions and portions of the arguments that form the basis of this book at conferences of the Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English (accute); the US and UK-Ireland affiliate organizations of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (asle); International Conference on Romanticism (icr); North American Society for the Study of Romanticism (nassr); Native

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Acknowledgments xi

Studies Research Network, UK; Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association (pamla); the Reading Animals Conference, University of Sheffield English Animal Studies (2014); and the Transatlantic Studies Association (tsa). I am thankful to colleagues in these organizations for providing venues for the presentation of my research, and for offering encouragement and advice that helped me to revise and polish my work. An earlier, shorter version of chapter 1 was previously published under the title “Romantic Ecology, Aboriginal Culture, and the Ideology of Improvement in British Atlantic Literature,” in A Global History of Literature and the Environment, edited by John Parham and Louise Westling, Cambridge University Press, 2017, 171–86. Thanks are due to John Parham and Louise Westling for helping me to hone my insights. A portion of chapter 1 previously appeared as “The Forest and the City: Transatlantic Discourses of Savagery and Civility” in The Wordsworth Circle 41.3 (2010): 164­–7. I thank The Wordsworth Circle’s editor, Marilyn Gaull, for permission to reprint material from this essay in revised form herein. Finally, some material from chapter 4 was previously published as “The Grave-Robber and the Paternalist: Anna Jameson and Sir Francis Bond Head among the Anishinaabe Indians,” in Romanticism: The Journal of Romantic Culture and Criticism 18.2 (2012): 165­–81. Special thanks are due to my co-author (and former graduate research assistant), Blake E. Bouchard, for allowing me to revise and expand my contribution to this collaborative work for inclusion in the present monograph; and I am grateful to Romanticism’s editor, Nicholas Roe, for permission to reprint material from this essay. As always, I owe my greatest debt to my partner, Lisa Dickson, who has been a constant source of love, care, and intellectual companionship since our graduate student days at McMaster University, and who has supported and encouraged this project from its earliest inception.

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Preface The world which we live in is dark, and it’s even getting darker. There’s no brightness. It needs to be brighter. Norval Morrisseau, Norval Morrisseau: Travels to the House of Invention

Unsettling the settler within necessarily involves critical self-reflection and action in our lives – a difficult learning that is part of the struggle we must undertake. Paulette Regan, quoted in “Between ‘Colonizer-Perpetrator’ and ‘Colonizer-Ally’: Towards a Pedagogy of Redress” by Renate Eigenbrod

P e rs o n a l R e f lecti ons As the culmination of more than a decade of research and writing, this book has changed my understanding of who I am and what it means to be a member of Canada’s settler society. Therefore, I hope readers won’t mind if I open by reflecting a little on the motivations that inspired this project, and on why its completion represents an important epoch in my life. I was born of English and Welsh ancestry in Montreal, Quebec, on the traditional and unceded territory of the Kanien’keha:ka (Mohawk) people. When I was two years old, my family moved to Burlington, Ontario, which lies partly on Haudenosaunee territory (including a parcel of land that the British authorities granted to Chief Joseph Brant in the late eighteenth century), and partly on Anishinaabe territory.1 As a young student, I attended Mohawk Gardens Public School, where I learned about Joseph Brant, whose name adorned Burlington’s main

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street, our regional hospital, a local museum, and the upper-middleclass neighbourhood of Tyandaga (a variant spelling of Brant’s Mohawk name, Thayendanegea). School field trips to the Joseph Brant Museum were regular events, but in those days, this small institution, which occupies a handsome facsimile of Brant’s original Wellington Square home, was dedicated to Brant mostly in name only, being primarily concerned with telling the story of the region’s European pioneering history. To be sure, we studied the Mohawks a little in history classes, but mostly because of their alliance with the British during the War of 1812 (the major Canadian battles of which were fought on the nearby Niagara Peninsula); the ill-fated General Brock was the chief hero of the narrative we learned to celebrate. I never once learned about Chief John Norton, nor of Joseph Brant’s son John Brant, even though, like his sister Elizabeth, John had a street named after him in Burlington’s downtown core. And as far as I remember, local Ojibwe history didn’t form any part of our school curriculum, perhaps because the British treatment of the Anishinaabeg didn’t harmonize well with the heroic version of colonial history we consumed. For years, when my family travelled to and from Toronto, I didn’t even realize that the city of Mississauga, through which we passed along the busy Queen Elizabeth Way, was named after the Ojibwe people – Chief Peter Jones’s people – who had once lived, fished, farmed, and traded near the mouth of the Credit River. In an ironic old joke I have often heard repeated, a Canadian suburb is defined as “a place where they cut down all the trees and named the streets after them,” but sometimes I think we might define southern Ontario as a place where British Canadians removed all the First Nations and (with notable exceptions such as Mississauga and Toronto) named the towns and cities after themselves. When I was about five years old, my grandfather bought two lots of crown land in “cottage country” on Georgian Bay, on each of which, under modern-day “improvement” regulations, he was required to build a cabin. From that time until I turned sixteen, I spent my summers there hiking in the woods; canoeing, boating, and swimming in the clear waters of the bay; catching bullfrogs, garter snakes, and smallmouth bass; picking wild blueberries, huckleberries, and raspberries; singing songs around a blazing bonfire nearly every evening. It was in this privileged context that I acquired a lifelong love of nature, a passion that would eventually inspire my interest in the British

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Romantic poets. I had no idea that “the cottage,” as we called it, was built on traditional Anishinaabe territory – that my grandfather’s land was Indigenous land. It was on the way to this summer retreat that I witnessed poverty for the first time. As we drove the dirt road that ran from Highway 69 to the marina where my grandfather kept his boat, I saw darkskinned children playing in the yards around small tarpaper houses in a dusty world that bore no resemblance to the middle-class luxury of Burlington’s green-lawned residential neighbourhoods a few hundred kilometres to the south. No one ever told me that those kids were “Indians”; I just thought of them as “poor people,” and I suppose I quickly forgot about them as we loaded up the boat for the journey to my granddad’s woodland haven, my favourite place in the world. Like most middle-class white kids, I grew up watching Western movies on television, thrilling as John Wayne slaughtered the terrifying Apaches, gazing wistfully as Roy Rogers rode off into the sunset, wishing I was the Lone Ranger so that I too could have a loyal Indian friend like Tonto. I was sad that most of the Indians had died out (or so I had been taught to believe), and when I played “cowboys and Indians” with my friends, I preferred to be a cowboy, since the cowboys always won. Like all the local white kids, my idea of who the “Indians” were was woefully stereotypical. It wasn’t until I moved to British Columbia in 1980, a couple of years after dropping out of Burlington’s Lord Elgin High School, that I finally met some “real” Indians. My first close Indigenous acquaintance was a Cree carver and silversmith named Dwight Pinay, who signed his work “Treaty Indian #491, Peepeekisis Reserve.” I was living in a rusty old Bell Telephone truck at the time, earning a scant living as a musician. When I wasn’t busking on the streets or performing in smoky bars, Dwight would invite me over to his place to chat and play guitar while he chain-smoked and worked on his latest creation. I remember driving into Victoria with him in the mid-1980s, after the city had been awarded the 1994 Commonwealth Games. As we passed a big sign on the highway celebrating Victoria’s successful bid for the games, Dwight nearly spat with disgust. “Commonwealth Games,” he grumbled. “They should call them the Stolenwealth Games!” Such remarks – and Dwight was full of them – taught me for the first time to think critically about my country’s colonial past and its continuing legacy. A couple of years later, Dwight suddenly decided to leave the West Coast and move back to Peepeekisis in Saskatchewan. Since he didn’t

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own a vehicle, he asked me to drive him, along with a heavy trunk of tools and stone carvings, to the Via Rail station in Vancouver. He was tired of living so far from home, he told me, and he wanted to reconnect with his family and his culture, to sleep in a tepee, search for arrowheads, and gaze into the big prairie sky once again. Feeling rootless myself, and rebelling against the society my parents’ generation had built, I envied Dwight – though I was sad to see him go. Several years later, I too headed east, moving home to southern Ontario to pursue a university education at Guelph and Hamilton. The last time I spoke with Dwight, before he passed away at much too young an age, he asked me, “Are you still studying Wordsworth and all those guys,” and I told him I was. “You know,” he chided me, “they stole all their ideas from the Indians.” It wasn’t until years later, while reading Tim Fulford’s book Romantic Indians, that I realized Dwight hadn’t been joking. During my time in Victoria, in the early 1980s, I also made the acquaintance of the famous Ojibwe shaman and painter Norval Morrisseau, otherwise known as Copper Thunderbird. Still living in my truck at the time, I met Norval at a little place on Government Street called Gallery Untitled, a hangout for itinerant and wannabe local artists and literati. Famous visitors like Norval were few and far between, so the gallery’s owner was delighted to invite him in off the street, hoping perhaps to profit from his presence. During my visits to the gallery, I was always encouraged to make music, and Norval took a shine to me, inviting me to play my guitar for him while he drew small pen-and-ink sketches of animals and their spirits in his characteristic style. I can’t claim to have known Norval well – I hung out with him only a handful of times – but he honoured me by telling me stories, and I was eager to listen. On one occasion, he told me of the vision quest he undertook in his youth. Although I don’t recall the precise details, a part of his story has stayed with me ever since, and to the best of my recollection it went like this: An elder – Norval’s grandfather, I think – took him into the forest to fast, in the hope that he would meet his spirit animal. After spending many days alone and increasingly hungry, Norval finally had his encounter: a big bear walked into his camp, and before Norval knew what was happening, it had gathered him into a fierce “bear hug.” For a moment, Norval told me, he had feared for his life. Wide-eyed and astounded, I asked him how he managed to escape the big animal’s embrace. “I reached down,” he replied in a deadpan voice, “and tickled his balls!” For many

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years afterwards, I assumed that Norval had been completely serious. It wasn’t until I read Alan Ojiig Corbiere’s article on Nish humour2 that I began to question my assumption. Now I think it’s likely – though I still don’t know for sure – that Norval was simply having some fun with a naive white boy. During my last meeting with him, Norval gave me a bear claw, a gift I have since treasured and wear on a chain around my neck, close to my heart. When I asked him what the claw symbolized, he said, “It means what you make it mean.” That remark puzzled me for a long time, until I finally came, many years later, to understand the claw as a symbol of my ability to make meaning, as I am trying to do in writing these words. One of the last things Norval said to me was, “I don’t know whether or not you’re a good man, but I like you anyway.” Unlike Bruce Cockburn, the visionary Canadian songwriter who saw “starstrewn space” behind Norval’s eyes (2006), my experience of the shaman was comparatively mundane. Although he told wonderful stories and painted the most striking works of art, Norval seemed to me like a fairly regular guy. Nevertheless, I was struck by his soft-spoken kindness and shy humility. I didn’t realize it at the time, but meeting Norval Morrisseau was one of the great experiences of my life. A few years later, I began to tour the rough bars of British Columbia’s interior as a bass player and singer in a cover band playing country music and classic rock ’n’ roll. Among the places we performed were the province’s so-called “Indian bars,” as condescending white people called them: places like the Adelphi Hotel in Merritt, the Lakeview in Williams Lake, the Lakeland in Burns Lake, the Croft in Prince George. It was while working these gigs that I witnessed firsthand the destructive effects of alcohol and drug addiction. But I also met many good-hearted people, some of whom confided in me, sharing their stories and aspirations. It was at the Croft Hotel that I met a white-haired elder named Mary Joseph, who always sat beside the stage smiling and singing along. Mary knew everyone in the place, and many people called her auntie, mother, or grandmother. In taking a shine to me, she helped me to make a lot of friends in that rough bar, people who went by nicknames such as Banjo, Taxi, Two Feathers, and Kicker – good-hearted folk who made me feel welcome and whose favourite songs I was glad to learn by heart and play over and over again during the nearly 300 nights I performed there between 1986 and 1994. At the Croft I spent many of my breaks sitting with Mary, and sometimes she would reach across the table and hold my hand.

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One evening, she told me that she had met Pope John Paul II during his celebrated visit to British Columbia, and that this meeting was among the most important events in her long life. Once, when she had been drinking more than usual, she called me her best friend, a touching remark that made me feel rather sad, since I had only ever spent time with her in that bar. Perhaps without meaning to, Mary helped me to understand that in my work as a barroom musician I was really just a beer salesman, someone whose talents encouraged people like her to spend their time and money on alcohol. Increasingly, I became troubled by my complicity with destructive forces, and yet it was the money that people like Mary spent in places like the Croft that helped to finance the early years of my university education, the education that ultimately enabled me to write this book. I often think of Mary, who passed away a long time ago, and in my mind’s eye, I can still see her kind smile.

A c a d e m ic R e f l ecti ons Early in my academic career, I shied away from writing about Indigenous people because I worried about the ethics of doing so. The last thing I wanted to do was to appropriate voices and stories that didn’t belong to me; so I took shelter in the world of British Romanticism, spending a decade or so writing about William Blake and teaching the works of Jane Austen, Lord Byron, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Mary Shelley, William Wordsworth, and other contemporary British writers. After a while, however, I began to worry that this focus was itself problematic, that my fear of cultural appropriation was causing me to efface the very voices I feared to appropriate. Given my lifelong residence on traditional Indigenous territory, not to mention my work at a university with a significant Aboriginal student population, I owed it to myself and my students to include Indigenous literatures in my courses. And if I was to be at all effective in teaching these writings, I needed to research and write about them as well. Indeed, given the British Romantics’ engagement with the idea of the “Indian” as an exemplary instance of the Rousseauvian “natural man,” I couldn’t even understand or teach Romanticism itself without coming to terms with Romantic depictions of Indigenous peoples and cultures. Things got particularly interesting when, nearly twenty years ago, my colleague Ted Binnema told me about Sir Francis Bond Head, a British Romantic man of letters who, in his role as lieutenant-governor

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of Upper Canada in the 1830s, invoked Romantic ideas of nature and culture not only in his writings about the First Nations but also – and most significantly – in his treaty-making activities with them. Around the same time, I began to read George Copway’s autobiographical and historical writings, becoming fascinated by his traditional Ojibwe stories as well as by his numerous references to the writings of such Romantic luminaries as Byron, Burns, Scott, Southey, and Schlegel. In the historical scholarship surrounding both Head and Copway, I found many passing references to their Romanticism but rarely any detailed critical discussions of it – and I realized that my own background in Romantic studies might enable me to contribute some useful insights. As I studied these two writers, I was inevitably drawn to the work of their British and Indigenous contemporaries, among whom I found numerous direct and indirect relationships extending from Upper Canada to Great Britain and continental Europe. In my effort to investigate these connections, I found myself writing this book.

T ru t h a n d R e c onci li ati on In late May 2015, virtually all Canadian news outlets were discussing the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (trc ), which had nearly completed its lengthy investigation into the history and legacy of Canada’s notorious Indian residential school system. At the time, I happened to be in Ottawa to participate in the nation’s annual Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences, and I attended a plenary talk by the t rc chair, Justice Murray Sinclair, who spoke movingly about the commission’s work and its forthcoming report. Near the end of the talk, at the urging of the Gitxsan activist Cindy Blackstock, who moderated the event, audience members vowed en masse to participate in the reconciliation process. Immediately after the session ended, many of us attended an informal roundtable discussion titled “Reconciliation and the Academy: Building a Social Movement,” whose speakers, including the Anishinaabe writer and journalist Waubgeshig Rice, also urged us to work together for positive change. As a teacher, researcher, and citizen, I quietly vowed to accept this daunting challenge. A day or two later, the t rc released its summary report to much media attention, and the national debates got underway. The former media baron, Conrad Black, a member of the British House of Lords,

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would call the report’s assertion that Canada’s political and religious institutions had perpetrated “cultural genocide” in their treatment of First Nations a “disgrace” (Black). A couple of years later, Conservative senator Lynn Beyak would claim repeatedly that the benevolent intentions behind the residential school system somehow excused the abuses that occurred there (Tasker). Many non-Indigenous Canadians were outraged and called for her resignation. But those of us who disagree with Black, Beyak, and their numerous supporters shouldn’t feel smug. After all, our whole great society, as Bruce Cockburn has reminded us, is built on “stolen land” (1997), and the prosperity that so many Canadians enjoy has far too often come at the expense and exclusion of First Nations and Aboriginal people. Two days after Justice Sinclair and Cindy Blackstock spoke so powerfully at the trc plenary event, I decided to forego a conference dance scheduled for that evening (since I’m not much of a dancer) and take a stroll along Ottawa’s Sparks Street mall, where I had busked for small change nearly forty years earlier. As I reminisced about those long-lost days, I also pondered the lives of the writers examined in this book, writers who have come to feel like old acquaintances: Bishop John Strachan and Sir John Beverley Robinson, who laid the foundations for Canada’s religious, legal, and economic development, with appalling consequences for the First Nations; Anna Brownell Jameson and Sir Francis Bond Head, whose mutual criticisms and dealings with Indigenous people reveal much about the history of cultural relations in 1830s Upper Canada; the Mohawk chiefs John Norton and John Brant, Atlantic-world travellers who, despite their role in saving Upper Canada from American conquest during the War of 1812, could not ultimately obtain a title deed for Haudenosaunee territory along the Grand River; Chief Peter Jones and his erstwhile protégé George Copway, whose very different approaches to Christianity and anti-colonial activism so clearly demonstrate that Anishinaabe history is a story of many stories. And as I wandered along Sparks Street, communing with these voices from my nation’s colonial past, I suddenly became aware of a rhythmic sound, like distant thunder, coming from the direction of Parliament Hill. Roused from my reverie, I followed the beat until I arrived at last on the great lawn below the Peace Tower, where crowds of people were joining hands to dance in an expanding circle as Algonquin activists drummed and sang on the terraced stairs above, under the watchful eye of several uniformed rcmp officers. Not being

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a dancer, I watched from a respectful distance, feeling the throb of the drum in the centre of my chest, until the ever-growing circle began to encompass me, and a smiling elder, who reminded me of Mary Joseph, beckoned me to join. Shaking off my hesitancy, I took the hand she offered me – and then – how unexpectedly, and with what joy! – I too was part of the human circle turning there, dancing for healing and hope, atonement and reconciliation. I will always remember that moment and its glorious promise of how things might be. And yet, to realize such a future, there is so much I need to learn from the past, and even more work to do in the present. I pray for the humility, strength, and wisdom to do my share.

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T r a n sat l a n t ic Upper Canada

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In t ro du cti on

Literature, Land, and Colonial Relations Our people have been driven from their homes, and have been cajoled out of the few sacred spots where the bones of their ancestors and children lie; and where they themselves expected to lie, when released from the trials and troubles of life. Were it possible to reverse the order of things, by placing the whites in the same condition, how long would it be endured? George Copway (Kahgegagahbowh), Recollections of a Forest Life: or, The Life and Travels of Kah-ge-ga-gah-bowh, or George Copway, Chief of the Ojibway Nation

In 1839, the London-based Aborigines Protection Society published its Report on the Indians of Upper Canada, a pamphlet criticizing the mistreatment of First Nations people in the British colony. As the successor to the British Anti-Slavery Society and in the wake of the 1833 Emancipation Act, the newly formed group of Christian philanthropists wished to draw sympathetic attention to “those other victims of colonising enterprise who, though not actually slaves, were exposed to treatment as bad as the state of slavery involved” (Bourne 3). To many modern-day Canadians, the claim that First Nations people were treated like slaves may seem jarring. We like to think of ourselves as citizens of a benevolent nation that during its colonial history was not only the terminus of the fabled Underground Railroad that brought enslaved African-Americans to freedom but also a place in which, contrary to the United States, Indigenous people were generally treated with humanity and respect. To appreciate the Report on the Indians of Upper Canada, one must cast aside such assumptions and consider Canada’s colonial history anew. Although the Aborigines Protection Society’s very name smacks of paternalism – the idea that Native people needed some external entity to “protect” them – its claim that colonial dealings with Indigenous

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people involved “a question of international rights” (British and Foreign 4) was a tacit acknowledgment of First Nations’ sovereignty and agency as independent nations. Moreover, the society’s indictment of Upper Canada’s past and ongoing efforts to appropriate Indigenous territories suggested an understanding that First Nations’ agency must involve a measure of control over lands and resources. The society thus praised the efforts of several Aboriginal diplomats who had come to England in recent years to seek “secure and evident [land] title” deeds on behalf of their people: The undue acquisition of the Indians’ land, and encroachments upon it, are not new; and the personal appeals of their delegates to the crown have been frequent. More than thirty years ago such a delegate, John Norton, had the countenance of the late Mr [William] Wilberforce … In 1822, the younger Brant … came to London on such a mission for the six nations [Haudenosaunee]. Subsequently the Rev. Peter Jones has come over more than once for the Mississaguas [sic] of the River Credit, on the like errand …   Other examples might be cited; and it is believed that none have produced proper results … But these visits have exhibited Indians to the impartial English public most favourably; and they in that respect … deserve particular attention. (British and Foreign 27, 5) By bringing public attention to the mistreatment of Indigenous nations in Upper Canada, the Aborigines Protection Society wished to play a role in righting an egregious wrong. Focusing on the colony’s “undue acquisition of the Indians’ land,” they identified an issue that remains contentious in Canada to this day. Although we settler Canadians proudly sing in our national anthem that Canada is “our home and native land,” many Indigenous people like to remind us that our nation is in fact a “home on Native land.” To its credit, the Aborigines Protection Society was aware of this reality well before Canada became a semi-autonomous federal state in 1867. Although the society had its own colonial agenda – the Christianization and attendant “civilization” of the First Nations – its assertion that the voices of chiefs John Norton (Teyoninhokarawen), John Brant (Ahyonwaeghs), Peter Jones (Kahkewaquonaby), and others “deserve particular attention” remains true to this day.

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Introduction 5

Because First Nations diplomats responded directly to the circumstances of colonialism, it is necessary to consider their political advocacy in light of colonial events and policies. Thus, this book presents Norton, Brant, and Jones – as well as contemporary Anishinaabe authors Jane Johnston Schoolcraft (Bamewawagezhikaquay) and George Copway (Kahgegagahbowh) – in dialogue with key colonial figures in Upper Canada, including John Strachan (a powerful cleric, educationist, and politician); John Beverley Robinson (the colony’s most influential jurist); Sir Francis Bond Head (a close ally of Strachan and Robinson who governed Upper Canada briefly in the mid-1830s); and Anna Brownell Jameson (an outspoken British feminist whose husband was the colony’s attorney general and later vice-chancellor during Head’s administration).1 Despite their manifold differences, the Aboriginal and European people examined herein shared a number of things in common. First, with the exception of John Brant (who, as noted in chapter 7, subjected key writings by Strachan and the Scottish poet Thomas Campbell to rigorous critique), they were all literary authors who wrote, among other things, about British-Indigenous relations. Second, during the course of their lives and careers, they all crossed the Atlantic, in the process gaining important cosmopolitan and cross-cultural insights and expertise. And finally, since many of them knew each other either directly or by reputation, their writings are often mutually responsive and illuminating. In aiming to untangle the Gordian knot of connections that existed between and among these key colonial-era figures, while bearing in mind the asymmetries of power informing contemporary cross-cultural relationships, I hope this book provides some new insights concerning a significant period in Canada’s political and literary history, and sheds light on an imperial policy legacy whose implications for the land and its people are still felt in Canada today.

In d ig e n o u s L it e r ary Hi s tory in U p p e r Canada Although non-fiction was “the clearly dominant form for written Native expression” in nineteenth-century North America, Osage scholar Robert Warrior notes that the genre has received relatively scant attention compared to more recent works of Indigenous fiction. If greater attention were given to nineteenth-century non-fiction, he argues, Indigenous literary studies would be a “much more robust”

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field, one that would trace its proper origins and influences not merely to twentieth-century literary “father[s]” such as N. Scott Momaday but also to earlier “literary grandparents and great-grandparents,” including George Copway (Warrior 188–9). Although Transatlantic Upper Canada considers a handful of Native-authored poems, its primary emphasis on the non-fiction writings of Norton, Jones, John Brant, and Copway will, I hope, make a small contribution to such an enhanced literary history, one that fully acknowledges the “vitality and importance of nonfiction writing to Native letters” (Warrior 196). Due to its focus on “the clash of Native and non-Native cultures or … the championing of Native values over non-Native values,” much of the Indigenous literature examined in this book is, in Thomas King’s term, “polemical” (41). But its attempts to challenge Eurocentric ideologies and practices, and to set the historical record straight, do not make this literature postcolonial. As King has argued, “while postcolonialism purports to be a method by which we can begin to look at those literatures which are formed out of the struggle of the oppressed against the oppressor, the colonized and the colonizer, the term itself assumes that the starting point for that discussion is the advent of Europeans in North America … No less distressing, it also assumes that the struggle between guardian and ward is the catalyst for contemporary Native literature, providing those of us who write with method and topic. And, worst of all, the idea of post-colonial writing effectively cuts us off from our traditions” (King 39–40). Although the Indigenous authors examined here wrote polemically against the colonial cultures that helped to shape their writings, they did not take colonialism as their starting point. Despite adopting many European religious and cultural practices, writers such as Schoolcraft, Norton, Jones, and Copway wrote histories and commentaries extending back to pre-colonial times, attempting to ground their work in traditional world views. Therefore, in subjecting their writings to intensive close reading, I have tried to heed the warning of Ojibwe scholar and poet Kimberly Blaeser, who argues that the “insistence on reading Native literature by way of Western literary theory clearly violates its integrity and performs a new act of colonization and conquest” (69). Sto:lo author Lee Maracle explains this problem by highlighting the relationship between elite methods of critical practice and other forms of Western authority: “For Native people, the ridiculousness of European academic notions of theoretical presentation lies in the inherent hierarchy retained by academics, politicians, law makers, and law keepers. Power resides with the theorists so long as

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Introduction 7

they use language that no one understands” (Maracle 64). Although I cannot claim to have overcome my own decades of training in critical theory, I have attempted to interpret Indigenous writings with clarity and cautious humility, seeking to find and learn from the “critical voice that comes from within” each text rather than subjecting those texts to a particular interpretive theory (Blaeser 74). In an effort to read the literary texts on their own terms as much as possible, I have striven to contextualize my interpretations vis-à-vis the historical circumstances surrounding their production and contemporary reception. Because I teach and conduct research in literary studies, my primary goal has been to interpret the texts as literary works; nevertheless, my interpretations are supported by knowledge derived from extensive historical scholarship and research. In contextualizing my discussions of the Mohawk chiefs John Norton and John Brant, I am indebted to such works on Haudenosaunee history as Charles M. Johnston’s The Valley of the Six Nations (1964), Isabel T. Kelsay’s Joseph Brant, 1743–1807: Man of Two Worlds (1984), Carl Benn’s The Iroquois in the War of 1812 (1998), Timothy D. Willig’s Restoring the Chain of Friendship (2008), and Rick Monture’s We Share Our Matters: Two Centuries of Writing and Resistance at Six Nations of the Grand River (2014), as well as other histories that are acknowledged in the pages ahead. My research on Norton and Brant was also enhanced by several visits to the Six Nations’ Woodland Cultural Centre Research Library, near Brantford, Ontario, where librarian Virve Wiland introduced me to the letters that inform my chapter 6 discussion of Brant’s Grand River environmental justice activism. For my knowledge of Anishinaabe history, I am indebted to the work of historians such Alan Ojiig Corbiere, who generously arranged my visits to Manitoulin Island’s Ojibwe Cultural Foundation in 2011 and 2013, and whose essays on the Manitowaning Treaty (see Corbiere 2011a, 2011b, and 2013) have helped me to understand Manitoulin Island as a story of many stories. Moreover, like all scholars of Anishinaabe history in Upper Canada, I am also indebted to the scholarship of Donald B. Smith, whose Mississauga Portraits (2013) and earlier writings have introduced Peter Jones, George Copway, and other nineteenth-century Ojibwe authors to a broad readership, and who generously shared ideas with me in private e-mail correspondence during the early stages of this project. Given the historical method informing my close readings of the literary texts examined herein, I also acknowledge my reliance on many key historical studies of Upper Canada that helped me contextualize

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my archival research findings. For my understanding of the province’s political, legal, and economic history, I have benefitted most notably from such texts as G.M. Craig’s classic Upper Canada: The Formative Years, 1784–1841 (1963), Patrick Brode’s Sir John Beverley Robinson (1984), Jane Errington’s The Lion, the Eagle, and Upper Canada (1987), J.M.S. Careless’s Frontier and Metropolis (1989), Douglas McCalla’s Planting the Province (1993), and Alan Taylor’s The Civil War of 1812 (2010). As will become apparent in the chapters ahead, I have also learned much from key biographical studies focused on each of the individual British and Indigenous authors whose portraits are presented in this book.

R o m a n t ic P e rspecti ves Upper Canada was formally established in 1791, at the beginning of the Romantic Period in Britain. It is thus not surprising that Romantic themes and tropes played a role in contemporary discourse, sometimes directly and sometimes in tension with Enlightenment and Victorian ideas and practices. For example, as I demonstrate in chapters 1 and 5, British authors such as Sir Francis Bond Head and Anna Jameson often criticized the effects of Upper Canada’s colonization from a Romantic perspective, decrying the colonization of Native people and the Europeanization of their land – privileged signs of Enlightenment progress – as unnatural (and thus immoral) acts. Finding the discourse of progress suspect and its effects alarming, these authors brought Romantic perspectives to British North America well before the celebrated Confederation poets invented a Canadian version of literary Romanticism several decades later. In chapter 1 and elsewhere in this book, my discussions of the British writers’ representations of the land and its ecology are indebted in a general way to Green Romanticist scholarship, including such texts as Jonathan Bate’s Romantic Ecology (1991), Alan Bewell’s Romanticism and Colonial Disease (1999), James C. McKusick’s Green Writing: Romanticism and Ecology (2000), Kate Rigby’s Topographies of the Sacred: The Poetics of Place in European Romanticism (2004), and Katey Castellano’s The Ecology of British Romantic Conservatism (2013). Despite their diverse approaches to ecocritical study, these scholars, and many others who have followed in their footsteps, have convincingly shown that the British and European Romantics were interested in natural environments not merely as resources for the promotion

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Introduction 9

of human aesthetic experience but also as sites of a valuable nonhuman alterity and related local knowledges, and thus as spaces worthy of moral consideration. Although the term “ecology” was not coined until the 1860s, the Romantics embraced the concept of nature’s economy, a proto-ecological model according to which all things were understood as interconnected and interdependent (Worster passim). Perhaps the most succinct articulation of this holistic understanding of nature appears in William Blake’s The Book of Thel, where a personified Cloud assures the poem’s eponymous protagonist that “every thing that lives, / Lives not alone, nor for itself” (5).2 Such an ontology has profound ethical implications, for its holism challenges the dualistic and hierarchical idea of human mastery over nature (Hutchings 2002, 87–8). In North America, this ideology helped to justify the destruction of Upper Canada’s ancient forests and waterways, to the bewilderment (as noted in chapter 1) of Romantic passers-through such as Head, Jameson, and Charles Waterton. Building on arguments informing my earlier books, Imagining Nature: Blake’s Environmental Poetics (2002) and Romantic Ecologies and Colonial Cultures in the British Atlantic World (2009), this book’s inquiry into Romantic forms of environmentalism proceeds hand in hand with an investigation of related social justice issues. In Upper Canada, as in other parts of the expanding British imperial world, the transformation of the land and the colonization of its people were inextricable and mutually supporting processes. However, as I demonstrate in chapter 1’s discussions of Jane Johnston Schoolcraft and George Copway, Romanticism was not merely a discourse of and for European colonials. Both Schoolcraft and Copway were avid readers of such British Romantics as Thomas Campbell, Walter Scott, Thomas Moore, and Lord Byron, and they invoked Romantic themes and tropes to challenge adverse stereotypes supporting the colonization of their people and territories. In her 1823 poem “The Contrast,” for example, Schoolcraft juxtaposes “present moments with the past” to emphasize the distance separating her “Calm, tranquil” woodland childhood from the “strife and fear” of a colonial present marked by “trade’s o’erdone plethoric moil, / And lawsuits, meetings, courts and toil” – the trappings of a European civilization that destroyed local environments and associated woodland cultures (Schoolcraft 117–18, lines 2, 5, 39, 44–5). Over two decades later, Copway articulated a similarly hybrid Ojibwe-Romantic critique of European civilization as a means to criticize European

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culture and values. Calling himself “one of Nature’s children” and a product of “Nature’s wide domain,” he asserted his own – and by extension his people’s – moral superiority over that of the most aggrandized members of European civilization: “It is thought great to be born in palaces, surrounded with wealth,” he exclaimed, “but to be born in Nature’s wide domain is greater still!” (Copway 1850b, 10–11). Although British Romantics such as William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge tended to dichotomize urban and rural modes of life (rather than urban and woodland or “wilderness” ones), I suspect they would have enjoyed Copway’s exuberant privileging of nature over culture, seeing in it an interesting likeness to their own Romantic philosophies. And yet, for traditionalists among Copway’s people, the nature / culture dualism that informed much Romantic discourse did not properly apply. In the Mashkiki-minis or Turtle Island3 creation stories, the land and the people come into being simultaneously. For this reason, Copway would likely have been puzzled by Wordsworth’s characterization of England’s “Celtic tribes” as “aboriginal colonists” (2004, 63; emphasis added) whose arrival in the Lake District marked an epoch in the history of the land, putting an end to what Benjamin West had earlier called “the empire of beasts” (qtd in Wordsworth 2004, 63). For Copway, by contrast, the North American landscape was always already humanized. Challenging the claim that his people’s territory was a terra nullius, an empty and insignificant land waiting to be appropriated by productive Europeans (Bewell 2017, 115), he emphasized a topography that was imbued with Indigenous narrative: “There is not a lake or mountain that has not connected with it some story of delight or wonder,” he observed, “and nearly every beast and bird is the subject of the story-teller” (Copway 1851b, 97). Such an assertion is highly significant; as Dakota scholar Vine Deloria Jr has noted, “Indian tribes combine history and geography so that they have a ‘sacred geography,’ that is to say, every location within their original homeland has a multitude of stories that recount the migrations, revelations, and particularly historical incidents that cumulatively produced the tribe in its current condition” (qtd in Brooks 2008, xxiii). The ideas and practices associated with Indigenous “sacred geography” not only refute a dualistic conception of human-environment relations but also put paid to the Eurocentric notion that North American landscapes were inferior to European ones because, unlike the latter, they were bereft of meaning. That attitude is succinctly

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Introduction 11

articulated in the following lament by the American author Washington Irving: “While every insignificant hill and turbid stream in classic Europe has been hallowed by the visitations of the Muse, and contemplated with fond enthusiasm, our lofty mountains and stupendous cataracts awaken no poetical associations, and our majestic rivers roll their waters unheeded, because unsung” (Irving 261). Had Irving been attentive to Native American cultural traditions, he would have understood the ridiculousness of this all-too-colonial complaint.

T r a n sat l a n t ic Perspecti ves Because this book’s dramatis personae of British and Indigenous writers lived and wrote during an historical period characterized by crosscultural exchange, they occupied what historian Alan Taylor has in a related context called “a porous borderline of shifting identities” (376). The fullness of their lives and writings is thus best illuminated not through the lens of particular national or cultural histories but via the adoption of “transnationally oriented paradigms of study” (Heise 251), the purpose of which, to quote Australian critic Deborah Bird Rose, “is not to replace one monologue with another, but rather to reveal a rich diversity of events and people” (28). Since the encounters I examine herein occurred on both sides of the Atlantic, this book views its primary sources and their authors in relation to transatlantic interactions and influences. Although these influences were cultural, they had an important environmental underpinning. As Bernard Bailyn has noted, transatlantic exchanges were promoted by the physiography of the Atlantic basin itself: “The clockwise circulation of winds and ocean currents, sweeping westward in the south and eastward in the north and linked by deep riverine routes – the Elbe and Rhine, the Amazon and Orinoco, the Niger and the Congo, the Mississippi and St Lawrence – to immense cultural hinterlands, drew the Atlantic into a cohesive communication system” (Bailyn 10). To be sure, Upper Canada belonged to a regional Great Lakes world embedded in a globe-spanning British imperial world, so an Atlanticist framework must not deny local and global realities. As Cecilia Morgan argues in Travellers through Empire: Indigenous Voyages from Early Canada (2017), to make the Atlantic world “the sole means of conceptualizing [Indigenous travellers’] experiences overlooks the importance of the multiple-linked sites and places that played important roles in their lives and identities” (9).

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Examining Indigenous peoples’ travel in a global context, Kate Fullagar’s The Savage Visit: New World People and Popular Imperial Culture in Britain, 1710–1795 (2012) makes productive use of a global framework, showing how far-flung Native societies participated in Britain’s cosmopolitan imperial culture and how they helped to shape contemporary debates about the morality of British imperialism itself. Coll Thrush’s Indigenous London: Native Travelers at the Heart of Empire (2016) makes similarly insightful use of a macrocosmic framework. Despite its intensive focus on Britain’s colonial metropole, Thrush’s book positions London within a complex web of global networks, arguing that Indigenous people “experienced London’s empire first-hand, both in their home territories and in the empire’s heart” (3). These ambitious books convincingly demonstrate the fruitfulness of a global line of inquiry. My goal in the present book is more humble. In focusing primarily on the British Atlantic world – indeed, on the more northerly reaches of that world – I do not mean to deny the importance of local, hemispheric, and global contexts, but rather to provide a workable scope for a study of nineteenth-century literary travellers who acquired experiences, negotiated relationships, and asserted political agency in Upper Canada and in Great Britain, as well as on the various thoroughfares that connected the small colony to the larger imperial centre. Transatlantic textual scholarship shares with broader transoceanic research frameworks an emphasis on processes rather than products: texts are approached as complex manifestations of international or cosmopolitan dialogue rather than as discrete products of distinct literary nationalisms and nation-based historical movements. The field of transatlantic literary studies is not interested, for example, in British literature, Canadian literature, or American literature as separate fields of study, but in the ways these literatures are mutually constituted through processes of intertextual negotiation and interchange. In literary studies, to quote influential Atlanticist Paul Giles, transatlantic scholarship is “a twenty-first century version of comparative literature … situate[d] … on a dangerous and uncomfortable boundary where residual assumptions about autochthonous identity are traversed by something different.” Such a critical paradigm thus focuses not on developing nationalisms but on “various points of friction where … discourses intersect” (Giles 2001, 14).4 My desire to move away from a conventional nationalist framework is inspired by this transatlantic conceptual paradigm and is a key motivation behind the present study.

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And yet, as Jeffrey L. McNairn has noted, even Upper Canada’s many recent Atlanticist histories have had difficulty resisting the “gravitational pull of the [Canadian] nation,” a problem that among other things leaves “limited room for integrating the history of Aboriginal peoples into [their] accounts” (McNairn). By resisting this “gravitational pull,” I hope this book can move beyond such a limitation, providing an account of colonial relations in which both European and Indigenous writers may be recognized as “active agents negotiating complex sets of relations” in international contexts characterized by asymmetrical power relations and “accompanying reciprocal change” (Haig-Brown and Nock 2). Such complex negotiations are visible in the writings of Norton, Brant, Jones, and Copway, whose very identities, formed in the crucible of cross-cultural exchange, embodied a complex and shifting mixture of Indigenous and Western influences, thereby exemplifying what Heather Macfarlane and Armand Garnet Ruffo have called the “transnational nature of many Indigenous lives” (xvi). To quote Wisconsin-based Ojibwe activist Gail G. Valaskakis, such identities are “continually tested and reconstructed,” as they are “built and rebuilt in the discursive negotiation of complex alliances and relations within the heterogeneity of community; in discourse which is based not in unity or belonging, but in transformation and difference” (91). In the colonial context, Aboriginal people whose identities embodied a mixture of traditional and Western influences often functioned as “cultural brokers” (Szasz passim) and international diplomats whose expertise in both Indigenous and Western ways of knowing enabled them to interpret each culture to the other. To be sure, these figures ran the risk of becoming (or at least resembling) what Mohawk scholar Taiaiake Alfred calls “co-opted comprador politicians who work with the colonial regime to ensure, or to participate directly in, their own people’s oppression” by advocating the adoption of Western values and practices (61). And yet, as I hope to show here, their writings challenged many of the racist and Eurocentric stereotypes that attempted to justify their people’s colonization and removal from the land, sometimes by defending traditional beliefs and practices, and sometimes by directly critiquing the terms of the so-called civilizing mission and the questionable morality of colonial policies and practices. But it was not only Indigenous people who were subject to the hybridizing effects of colonial contact and exchange. Contrary to early models of literary and cultural influence, which emphasized what

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Michael H. Fisher has called the “mainstream of colonialism” by focusing on the ways in which European ideas and practices affected colonized people and places, modern-day transatlantic research also considers colonial “counterflows that have hitherto been masked by the more visible course of colonialism” (19). Such scholarship thus acknowledges that cultural influences moved not only from colonizer to colonized but also in the opposite direction. Citing Mary Louise Pratt’s ground-breaking scholarship in Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (1992), Alan Richardson and Sonia Hofkosh neatly summarize this more complex concept of influence, arguing that “in cultural as well as geographical terms, the periphery defines the imperial metropolis no less than the metropolis seeks to delimit and control its peripheries, the ideology of the ‘civilizing mission’ serving to blind the colonizer to the process of ‘transculturation from the colonies to the metropolis’” (Richardson and Hofkosh 6–7). In the transatlantic milieu, to quote Cherokee scholar Jace Weaver, the “Atlantic became a multi-lane, two-way bridge across which traveled ideas and things that changed both Europeans and American indigenes.” And “it was not only colonists but also those who remained in the newly minted ‘Old World’ who began to define themselves by comparison with and in opposition to the Indigenous Other” (Weaver 2014a, 511, 512). Although it poses a radical challenge to absolutist notions of hegemony, this dynamic model of cultural influence was hardly new in the nineteenth century; as the Scottish Enlightenment philosopher John Millar suggested in a generally applicable discussion of the Roman empire, the “former habits of intercourse” among conquered peoples “were not obliterated and forgotten” as a result of colonization “but, on the contrary, were in some degree communicated to the conquerors” (55). In his impressive contributions to Atlantic studies, Weaver calls the dynamic milieu in which such two-way exchanges occurred “the Red Atlantic,” a milieu so encompassing, so integral to contemporary discourse, that neither Native Americans nor Britons had to travel to participate in it (2014a, 510–11). In the field of Romantic studies, Tim Fulford has highlighted a textually mediated version of transatlantic influence by demonstrating, in Romantic Indians: Native Americans, British Literature, and Transatlantic Culture 1756–1830 (2006), that Native Americans “were vital figures in the formation of early Romanticism,” arguing that poets such as Wordsworth and Coleridge “would not have been able to express their visions of rural

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Introduction 15

community without having absorbed Native American culture as pictured by travelers” (Fulford 155). If representations of Native American societies influenced British Romantic depictions of rustic communities at home, so too did depictions of North American landscapes affect Romantic descriptions of British nature. Occasionally, for example, Wordsworth invokes explicit transatlantic comparisons to describe the wonders of natural phenomena located near his home in England’s Lake District. Citing Jonathan Carver’s Travels through the Interior Parts of North America (1778), he compares the local “living lakes, vivi lacus,” to the lower Great Lakes. “The water is … of crystalline purity,” he writes, “so that … a delusion might be felt, by a person resting quietly in a boat on the bosom of Winandermere or Derwent-water, similar to that which Carver so beautifully describes when he was floating alone in the middle of lake Erie or Ontario, and could almost have imagined that his boat was suspended in an element as pure as air, or rather that the air and water were one” (Wordsworth 2004, 53–4). By comparing nearby bodies of water to the lower Great Lakes, Wordsworth gives the Lake District an exotic colouring that functions to defamiliarize the local scene, elevating it beyond the rural mundane. To a similar end, in “Open Prospect” (Sonnet XIII of The River Duddon sonnet series), he expresses the sublimity of northwest England’s “bleak winds” by invoking a less tranquil transatlantic analogue, exclaiming “Dread swell of sound! Loud as the gusts that lash / The matted forests of Ontario’s shore” (Wordsworth 1820, 15, lines 5, 7–8).5 Here, once again, Wordsworth emphasizes the wonder of a local natural phenomenon by associating it with the image of a pristine, though in this case sublimely fearful, North American wilderness, thus enhancing his description in a way that familiar local comparisons would likely have failed to do. By the time Wordsworth wrote The River Duddon sonnets, however, the landscapes around “Ontario’s shore” were already undergoing a profound and accelerating transformation, their “matted forests” giving way to the fields and farms of colonial settlement. Considering what he “suppose[d] to have been the condition of our forefathers long before the European planted his footsteps on our shores,” Chief Peter Jones could only imagine a time when “the red man roamed undisturbed through the mighty forest; killing the buffalo, the deer, and the bear; or … partaking the pleasure of the fish that swam in their waters.” By the late 1830s, Upper Canada’s environments were by comparison hardly recognizable. “But oh, how

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has the scene changed since the white man discovered our country! Where are the aborigines who once thronged the shores of the lakes and rivers on which the white man has now reared his dwelling and amassed his wealth? What doleful tales do those bleaching bones tell which the husbandman has ploughed up, that he may sow his seed and reap an abundant harvest!” (Jones 1861, 25–6; emphasis added). Although Jones’s metaphor of the white man’s “plant[ing] his footsteps” on Native land is a pastoral one, his reference to the plough’s destructive activity challenges conventional notions of pastoral peace as prophesied, for example, in The Book of Isaiah, where under God’s righteous influence the people “beat their swords into plowshares,” thereby putting an end to earthly war (Isaiah 2.4). In Jones’s colonial version of the pastoral, Isaiah’s opposition between swords and plowshares seems inapplicable. Although the “bleaching bones” of his Ojibwe ancestors cannot directly tell their “doleful tales,” the white husbandman’s violation of their final earthly resting place presents the plough itself as a weapon of conquest. In short, according to Jones’s view of pre-colonial history, the European world of pastoral abundance – seemingly the natural outcome of the white man’s having “planted his footsteps” on Indigenous territory – replaced a traditional world of woodland plenitude characterized by the ubiquitous presence of wild animals. Having “ploughed up” the “mighty forest,” the white “husbandman” transformed Native hunting and gathering grounds and sacred burial sites into “amassed” and moveable “wealth,” leaving in his wake an impoverished, insulted, and dwindling Native population. Ultimately, however, as I show in chapter 8, Jones did not lament his people’s transformation from hunters and gatherers to agriculturists. As a pragmatist aware of the increasing scarcity of wild game and as a Christian convert, he believed that the Ojibwe people’s physical and spiritual survival necessitated their emulating the white man’s modes of sustenance and religion, and he worked tirelessly to effect this profound conversion. Indeed, far from lamenting the loss of the forest and its wild creatures, Jones declared that he “longed for the time when the game and fur shall be … [completely] destroyed” so that his people would be forced to rely on the more secure arts of agriculture rather than on the increasingly uncertain outcomes of hunting and trapping, an assertion which, he reflected, “coming from the pen of an Indian, may appear strange” (Jones 1861, 172). In acknowledging the “strange[ness]” of his stance on hunting and farming, Jones challenged Eurocentric stereotypes that pitted the

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“savagery” of hunting societies against the “civility” of agricultural and commercial cultures – a distinction I previously examined in Romantic Ecologies and Colonial Cultures (Hutchings 2009a, 33–49). By unsettling common notions of Indigenous “savagery,” the Mississauga chief’s rejection of hunting is a good example of what Giles calls “transatlantic contrariness and topsy-turvydom” (2001, 194). Jones was aware that many members of his primarily white reading audience would not expect an “Indian” to adopt such a position. But a similar topsy-turvy tumbling of expectations also informed the position of those British Romantic writers who, unlike the majority of their white counterparts in Upper Canada and Britain, lamented the passing of the ancient forests and woodland ways of life, writers for whom the Native American adoption of agriculture implied not progress (as it did for most contemporary European commentators) but the unfortunate loss of something valuable. Consider, for example, the following excerpt from a letter that the Duke of Northumberland wrote to the celebrated Mohawk chief Joseph Brant / Thayendanegea (John Brant’s father) in the wake of John Norton’s unsuccessful diplomatic visit to England in 1804–05. As a close friend of Brant and an honorary member of the Mohawk nation, Northumberland – whom Isabel T. Kelsay has aptly called an “earnest disciple of Rousseau” (1984, 641) – abhorred Christian evangelical efforts to “civilize” the Mohawks by making farmers of them: “There are a number of wellmeaning persons here,” he told his old friend, “who are very desirous of forming a society to better (as they call it,) the condition of our nation, by converting us from hunters and warriors into husbandmen. Let me strongly recommend it to you, and the rest of our chiefs, not to listen to such a proposition … Nine hundred or a thousand warriors, enured [sic] to hardship by hunting, are a most respectable and independent body; but what would the same number of men become who were merely husbandmen?” (qtd in Kelsay 1984, 641). In contrast to Peter Jones’s pragmatic claim that his people’s survival depended on their becoming “tillers of the ground” (Jones 1861, 172), Northumberland’s defence of Aboriginal hunting seems naively idealistic, not only because there were at the time far fewer than “nine hundred or a thousand” warriors inhabiting the Grand River Six Nations territory, but because, in the context of colonial Upper Canada, “no amount of hunting, even was there game, could guarantee independence to the Indians” (Kelsay 1984, 641). But in another sense, Northumberland’s rejection of husbandry did have a pragmatic basis: it stemmed from a sober understanding that the white man’s ultimate

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objective in persuading the Mohawks to become farmers was the acquisition of their land. Although he acknowledged a wish to see “Christian religion, sobriety, and good morals, prevail among our nation,” he admonished Brant to resist the pastoralization of Mohawk culture: “let us never submit to become the tillers of land, hewers of wood, and drawers of water, by the false and interested advice of those who, from being our pretended friends, would soon become our imperious masters” (qtd in Kelsay 1984, 641).

L a n d O w n e rs h ip a n d “I mprovement” Despite his valid concerns about the relationship between land ownership and political agency, the Duke of Northumberland was mistaken in his assumption that the Mohawks (or any other Indigenous group) might best retain their territories by refusing to cultivate them. Imperialists often justified the expropriation of Indigenous land precisely because it was not farmed – or at least not perceived as being husbanded. In Two Treatises of Government (1690), the Enlightenment philosopher John Locke denied the right of hunter-gatherers to own land, arguing that “As much Land as a Man Tills, Plants, Improves, Cultivates, and can use the Product of, so much is his Property” (qtd in Bellin 110). Nearly a century later, in his influential History of America (1777), the Scottish Enlightenment historian William Robertson similarly claimed that “while hunting is the chief source of subsistence, a vast extent of territory is requisite for supporting a small number of people … As long as hunting continues to be the chief employment of man to which he trusts for subsistence, he can hardly be said to have occupied the earth” (Robertson 2.90–1). In nineteenthcentury North America, numerous commentators criticized Indigenous societies on the basis of this logic, often ignoring the fact that many First Nations people were indeed farmers, or, in the case of hunting societies such as the northern woodland Ojibwe, failing to notice that traditional land practices in fact constituted forms of husbandry. In other words, far from having “no more effect on vegetation than the beasts on which they preyed,” traditional hunting and gathering “involved the definite management of land and vegetation” (Rackham 71). At Rice Lake in Upper Canada, for example, George Copway’s people managed the land by “selectively burning the vegetation on the southern shore” (Smith 2013, 167). This practice accounted for Rice Lake’s Ojibwe name, Pimaadashkodeyaang, meaning “Lake of Plains.”

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Derived from “Pimaadash,” meaning “going across,” the lake’s name referred, as Alderville First Nation historian Leanne Betasamosake Simpson notes, to the movement of the flames that traversed the land as part of a deliberate practice intended to “maintain the prairie” (42). In a relevant discussion of Indigenous land-use practices in New England, William Cronon observes that such “regular fires promoted what ecologists call the ‘edge effect.’ By encouraging the growth of boundary areas between forests and grasslands, Indians created ideal habitats for a host of wildlife species” and for the proliferation of gatherable foods such as berries, enabling them to harvest foodstuffs “which they had consciously been instrumental in creating.”6 However, lacking “the conceptual tools to realize that Indians were practicing a … kind of husbandry of their own” (Cronon 51, 50, 52), Europeans could not appreciate this culture of the forest, believing that Indigenous peoples’ relationship to the land was largely a passive one – that in failing to “subdue” the Earth, they had failed to exercise humanity’s God-given “dominion” over it (Gen. 1.28). In an era that understood environmental “improvement” in agricultural terms, this misperception had important adverse consequences for Indigenous people and the land upon which they lived. According to Richard Drayton, “the improvement of agriculture depended, for contemporaries, on private property. Indeed the verb ‘to improve,’ which we use in the sense of ‘to ameliorate’ or ‘to perfect,’ originally meant to put to a profit, and in particular to enclose ‘waste’ or common land” (51). Since, as noted above, Eurocentric concepts of property and husbandry went hand in hand, forest-dwelling peoples were disqualified from claiming any right of ownership to their territories. As Drayton notes, this ideology of improvement played a key role in both domestic and colonial forms of governance, for it sanctioned “enclosure at home and colonization abroad” (105). Building on Drayton’s insights, chapter 1 begins with a comparative discussion of agricultural improvement in both Britain and Upper Canada. For now, suffice it to say that although agricultural improvement helped to relieve Malthusian fears that human populations would grow faster than the available food supply, it often caused great hardship for forest dwellers both at home and abroad – despite the benevolent intentions expressed by improvement’s advocates, who believed that their work was crucial to the future happiness of humankind. For the Canadian pioneer Susanna Moodie, agricultural improvement brought joy not only to the European homesteaders who strove

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to clear the land but also to the land itself. In the poem “Canada,” which opens her memoir Roughing It in the Bush (1852), the nascent nation’s “guardian angel” announces an impending “victory” over “the desert solitude / Of trackless waters” and “forests rude,” calling both humans and the land to share in the joy of this happy transformation: “Joy,” she cried, “to th’ untilled earth, Let her joy in a mighty nation’s birth, – Night from the land has passed away, The desert basks in noon of day. Joy to the sullen wilderness, I come, her gloomy shades to bless, To bid the bear and wild-cat yield Their savage haunts to town and field. Joy, to stout hearts and willing hands, That win a right to these broad lands, And reap the fruit of honest toil, Lords of the rich, abundant soil. (Moodie 18, lines 45–60) Contrary to Sir Francis Bond Head, who romanticized Upper Canada’s Indigenous people as “lords of creation” (1846, 136), Moody reserves such divine status for European settlers, calling them “Lords of the … soil” in tribute to the “honest toil” they perform in bringing the “noon … day” of Enlightenment to the forest’s benighted, “gloomy shades.” This transformation banishes not only the predatory “bear and wildcat” but also, implicitly, the First Peoples who preyed upon these and other animals, as suggested by Moodie’s choice of the phrase “savage haunts,” which conjures up an image not only of the primeval forest but also, implicitly, of the “savage” hunter, whose physical presence on the land gives way to a spectral “haunt[ing]” of his former hunting grounds. For Moodie, there is no reason to lament or apologize for this appropriation of the land, since, as noted above, land was transformed into “property” via the application of recognized forms of physical labour. As agents of improvement, hard-working settlers, with their “stout hearts and willing hands,” ostensibly “win a right to these broad lands” (emphasis added). Upper Canada’s colonial authorities formalized this wholesale ­territorial appropriation by regulating and monitoring the transfer of the Crown’s “waste lands” to emigrants who wished to establish

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homesteads in the province. Such settlers were required to sign a formal petition stating that they had “the means to improve” the lands they would receive, and that they would work diligently to effect this improvement (qtd in Strachan 1820c, 207). In a book written to promote British emigration to the colony, John Strachan noted that grantees were required to complete certain “settling duties” in order to retain their lands (1820c, 55). Such duties included “the clearing of five acres …,7 the building of a house, and opening of the road across the front of the lot, which is a quarter of a mile, all to be performed within a limited time” (Gourlay 1.241–2). The completion of these tasks was crucial not only to the successful settlement of individual homesteaders and their families but also to the colony’s overall economic development and prosperity. As Sir Francis Bond Head observed, while one homesteader “is working with his axe in the wilderness, his location and his log-hut are improved in value by every neighbouring clearance, by the establishment of every adjoining mill; in fact, by every road, canal, village, town, city, or market of any description, constructed in any part of the country” (Head 1846, 88). Unimproved “wilderness” areas, such as Indigenous hunting grounds, Crown and Clergy reserves,8 and large tracts held by speculators,9 disrupted this complex ecology of improvement, causing resentment among hard-working settlers.

“I mprov e m e n t ” a n d t h e “Ci vi li zi ng Mi s si on” For a few contemporary commentators, the land’s agricultural transformation would be a boon not only for white settlers but for Indigenous people as well. A major proponent of this view was Thomas Douglas, Lord Selkirk, the founder of Manitoba’s Red River settlement. In his Proposal for Forming a Society for Promoting the Civilization and Improvement of the North-American Indians within the British Boundary (1806), Selkirk quoted the following passage from a Quaker tract to bolster his argument that the land’s deforestation and agricultural development would benefit its Indigenous inhabitants: “‘It must be a prospect truly gladdening to the enlightened Christian mind, to survey the hastening of that day, when this part of the human family, weaned from savage habits and allured by the superior advantages of civil life, shall exchange the tomahawk and scalping-knife for the plough and the hoe; and instead of ranging the forests in seeming affinity to the wild beasts of the desert, shall

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peacefully and rationally enjoy the productions of the fruitful field’” (qtd in Douglas 1806, 20). Significantly, Native advocates of agricultural improvement such as John Norton, John Brant, Peter Jones, and George Copway shared Selkirk’s belief that their people would benefit both physically and morally by embracing the arts of agriculture. Among whites, however, such a view was uncommon. For example, in an 1821 instalment of the Edinburgh Review, the anonymous reviewer of John Howison’s Sketches of Upper Canada (1821) argued that because the “tendency to improvement” – which “distinguish[es] man from the lower animals” – was “totally wanting” in the Indians, they were “destined,” “like the bears and wolves, … to fly at the approach of civilized man, and to fall before his renovating hand, and disappear from the face of the earth, along with those ancient forests which alone afford them sustenance and shelter” (qtd in Bannister 2–3; see also Heriot v). Given the prevalence of this viewpoint, Copway scholar Timothy Sweet is correct to suggest that “the material precondition of every pastoral landscape” in North America was, for many contemporary whites, the death “or at least the removal of Indians” (1993, 9). In an economic history aptly titled Planting the Province (1993), Douglas McCalla observed that until around 1850, Upper Canada’s settler population “doubled every ten years” due to high rates of birth and immigration, and that the “acreage of land under culture grew at virtually the same rate” (3–4). Since “the majority of Canadian pioneers sought to re-create their old world as fast as possible” in the New World (Careless 14), great pressures were exerted on Aboriginal lands, the widespread appropriations of which caused insecurity and poverty among the First Nations. In an address to Governor General Lord Metcalfe dated 7 June, 1845, the Sarnia and Walpole chiefs petitioned for a title deed to their remaining territories, lamenting that “white men cover these lands. The fall of each tree startles the timid deer, and drives them farther and farther from the Red hunter. The beaver is gone, the martin no longer seen. The Indian is poor indeed, and can it be that he is to be made poorer still?” (qtd in Strachan 1847, 48–9). In tying the increasing poverty of Indigenous people to the white man’s appropriation and transformation of the land, the Sarnia and Walpole chiefs’ petition exemplified what Rob Nixon has called “the environmentalism of the poor,” a form of activism “frequently triggered when an official landscape is forcibly imposed on a vernacular one.” For Nixon, “imposed official landscapes typically discount

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spiritualized vernacular landscapes, severing webs of accumulated cultural meaning and treating the landscape as if it were uninhabited by the living, the unborn, and the animate deceased” (17). In Upper Canada, such a process was exemplified, among other things, by the common colonial penchant for renaming places, a practice Chief Joseph Brant criticized when he noted ironically that Upper Canada’s first lieutenant-governor, John Graves Simcoe, had “done a great deal for this province,” having “changed the name of every place in it” (qtd in Craig 1963, 280). For colonials and their champions, this renaming was nothing to be ashamed of; indeed, as part of the effort to recreate the Old World in the New, it was worthy of celebration. Consider, for example, the following lines from “Song of Emigration,” a poem the British Romantic poet Felicia Hemans (1793–1835) composed to extol the influx of Britain’s rural poor to Canada: We will give the names of our fearless race To each bright river whose course we trace; We will leave our memory with mounts and floods, And the path of our daring in the boundless woods! And our works unto many a lake’s green shore, Where the Indian’s graves lay, alone, before. (Hemans 275, lines 41–6) Here, in the poem’s final stanza, Hemans’s Scottish speaker imagines Upper Canada as a place where the Indians, “having already died out,” have “left their forests to immigrants from the glens” (Fulford 203). Although the “Indian’s graves” remain as a haunting reminder of pre-colonial history, Hemans otherwise imagines the province as an empty and insignificant land whose mountains, rivers, lakes, and woods await new inscriptions, meanings, and physical transformations. Nevertheless, numerous Aboriginal place names survived as potent memorials having important implications for Native activism. In Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada, Anna Jameson noted that in the province’s southwest region, the few remaining Wendats (also known as Wyandots or Hurons) attempted in an 1829 petition to Lieutenant-Governor Sir John Colborne to “substantiate their claim” to their remaining ancestral territories “by pointing out the places which bear their name, as the ancient inhabitants of the soil” (2008, 373).10 But such arguments were generally ignored. By and large, as an act of erasure, the replacement of Indigenous place

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names and narratives with European ones throughout much of Upper Canada functioned to naturalize the land’s conquest. In Hemans’s poem, this process of renaming is an important aspect of Upper Canada’s colonial improvement and an affirmative testament to the admirable “daring” of settlers who, in “leav[ing their] memories” on the land, created an heroic legacy. In its physical and cultural applications, the discourse of improvement was and is a metanarrative juggernaut difficult for colonized people to resist. As an aspect of “progress ideology,” to quote Deborah Bird Rose, it “puts a positive value on change, and posits that history, or society, is moving towards the resolution of conflict and contradiction” (19, 16). For colonized people, the political and cultural consequences of such a perspective can be dire; as Rose notes, improvement ideology’s “seemingly common-sensical orientation towards the future … enables regimes of violence to continue their work while claiming the moral ground of making a better future,” since “present distress can be claimed to be leading towards, and thus to be justified by, a more perfect future” (15, 17). Such notions were very much in play in early nineteenth-century North America. Consider the following passage from a textbook titled The American Reader (1813), in which American schoolchildren were taught how to respond to the sufferings and expected extinction of “the Indian”: “His agonies at first seem to demand a tear from the eyes of humanity: but when we reflect; that the extinction of his race, and the progress of the arts which give rise to his distressing apprehensions, are for the increase of mankind, and for the promotion of the world’s glory and happiness, that five hundred rational animals may enjoy life in plenty and comfort, where only one savage drags out a hungry existence, we shall be pleased with the prospective futurity” (qtd in Elson 81; see Hutchings 2017a, 69). Although this passage appears in an American textbook, the majority of Upper Canada’s settlers and administrators (with the possible exception of Romantics such as Anna Jameson and Francis Bond Head) would certainly have shared its sanguine perspective on the teaching of colonial history. Although the Indian “demand[s] a tear from the eyes of humanity,” his “agonies” are accorded only so much sympathy, for they are considered auguries of “the world’s glory and happiness.” According to the utilitarian calculus informing this proposition, the happiness of many progressive and “rational animals” not only trumps the well-being of the atavistic “savage” but also justifies the latter’s ultimate “extinction” as a felix culpa or “fortunate fall.”

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In its claim that the same North American terrain that feeds “only one” Indian can support “five hundred” European-Americans, the above-quoted passage echoes the claims of contemporary philosophers, missionaries, and colonial administrators who championed European expansion. For Reverend Benjamin Slight (who spent four years ministering to the Credit River Mississauga people, and who presided at George Copway’s wedding to Elizabeth Howell), Upper Canada’s forested terrain was potentially “capable of cultivation to such a degree that it may afford subsistence to a hundred times the number of people it could in its natural state” (Slight 105). For others, this ratio of one hundred to one was too low: indeed, where the American Reader invoked a ratio of five hundred to one, American president John Quincy Adams went even further: “But what is the right of a huntsman to the forest of a thousand miles, over which he has accidentally ranged in quest of prey? Shall the liberal bounties of Providence to the race of man be monopolized by one of ten thousand for whom they are created?” (qtd in Head 1857, 350). By invoking Providence, Adams emphasized the question’s moral dimension, as did Slight, who concluded that the “vast continent,” in its “nearly altogether uncultivated state,” failed to answer “the design of the great Creator in its production” (105). For the French philosopher and historian C.F. Volney, such an ostensible waste of resources put “beyond the reach of controversy the question, whether savages have a right to refuse land to agricultural nations, who have not enough of their own” (391). The moral questions raised and addressed here have important environmental implications: according to contemporary stadial theory, different topographies promoted what Karen O’Brien refers to as “different geographical distributions of virtue” (161). Predictably, influential contemporary thinkers considered “undisciplined landscape[s]” (170) such as forests anathema to human moral development, associating them with “savage” lifestyles. In Sketches of the History of Man (1778), Henry Home, Lord Kames, offered a succinct account of this thesis in his critique of hunting, which he and other Scottish Enlightenment philosophers considered the most primitive mode of human subsistence. “In the hunter-state,” he claimed, “the daily practice of slaughtering innocent animals for food, hardens men in cruelty,” making them “more savage than bears or wolves.” Upon leaving the forest to practise herding and farming, however, human societies gradually lost their violent nature, becoming progressively

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more civilized: “The calm and sedentary life of the shepherd, tends to soften the harsh manners of hunters; and agriculture, requiring the union of many hands in one operation, improves benevolence” (Home 1778, 1.341–2). Because of its “salutary” effects, agriculture was, as Kames argued in The Gentleman Farmer (1776), “of all occupations … the most productive of contentment, and [the] sweetest sort of happiness” (Home 1776, xv–xvi). Given agriculture’s association with these moralizing influences, a cultivated landscape signified the presence of human virtue in “the moral topography of the land” itself (Janković 5). In contrast, forests, associated with human “savagery,” comprised what Anne McClintock aptly terms “anachronistic space” because they were considered “prehistoric, atavistic and irrational, [and] inherently out of place in the historical time of modernity” (40). To enter the forest was thus to go back in time, as John Strachan implied when he wrote that “in removing from his native country, [the emigrant from Britain to Canada] is leaving the improvements of a thousand years, to encounter all the rudeness of nature” (1820c, 66). It is little wonder that, in a published letter to Lord Selkirk, the future Bishop of Toronto spoke of “the horrors of the wilderness” (Strachan 1816, 7). Tellingly, the teleological model of time informing the concept of anachronistic space was entirely foreign to Indigenous tradition. As Michael D. McNally observes in Ojibwe Singers (2000), “Ojibwe elders typically do not choose to speak in such a language of historical development and change. Instead, they often begin by identifying traditional activities associated with the recurring cycle of seasons: maple sugaring in the spring; gardening, fishing, and berrying in the summer; wild ricing and hunting ducks in the late summer / early fall; and hunting big game in the winter. Seasonality is more than a convenient outline for introducing the culture. It is the framework of time and space into which the warp and woof of a distinctly Anishinaabe way of life has been woven” (24). To members of a colonizing culture obsessed with European notions of human and environmental improvement, such a cyclical concept of time suggested a kind of stasis: movement, to be sure, but without forward motion. For Ojibwe people, however, it signified a dynamic and ethical mode of being. Rather than simply indicating “an adaptive food gathering strategy,” McNally notes, “this seasonal way of life has a beauty and integrity borne of its harmony with the natural movements of all that has motion. The Ojibwe term bimaadiziwin … encompasses … notions of well-being,

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balance, profound interdependence, and right relations.” Quoting Irving A. Hallowell, an anthropologist who did his field work among Manitoba’s Berens River Anishinaabeg during the 1930s, McNally explains that “a significant part of believing in bimaadiziwin entailed ‘the obligation to preserve the equilibrium of nature’” by taking from the land only what was “‘actually needed to provide food, clothing and warmth.’” Thus, an Ojibwe person “‘was far from considering himself the lord of creation. He was only one of the “children” of nature, a suppliant for [bimaadiziwin]’” (McNally 24). In his autobiography, George Copway’s discussion of traditional Ojibwe hunting practices affirms this traditional mode of being. Recalling his childhood days prior to his Christian conversion, Copway recounts not only his father’s admonition to share the bounty of the hunt with the band’s poor and elderly members but also his injunction that a hunter should “‘never laugh at any suffering object’” and “‘never kill any game needlessly’” (1850b, 20). Moreover, the humility inherent in such a stance suggests that Copway’s claim to be “one of Nature’s children” (1850b, 10) likely involves not only an appeal to Romanticism (as I suggested above) but also an expression of the traditional values informing bimaadiziwin. In transatlantic Upper Canada’s intercultural milieu, such a hybridizing of discourses might help to explain why Aboriginal writers such as Copway and Schoolcraft found Romanticism attractive, and why British Romantics such as Jameson and Head were so fascinated by Indigenous culture and beliefs.

T h e C h a p ters For the most part, the chapters in this volume comprise portraits of key figures in Upper Canada’s transatlantic literary history, focusing on their cross-cultural relationships, environmental philosophies, and political activities as represented in their various writings. To contextualize these portraits, chapter 1 begins with a brief comparative discussion of forests and woodland cultures in England and Upper Canada, highlighting parallels between the treatment of England’s forest-dwelling commoners and the First Peoples of Upper Canada. It then considers representations of trees and forests in the writings of selected literary champions of improvement (including the Scottish poet Thomas Campbell and the Canadian pioneer memoirist Susanna Moodie) and those of Romantic travel writers (such as the natural historian Charles Waterton and the popular memoirist

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Anna Jameson) who lamented the destruction wrought in the name of this paradigm. The chapter also considers Aboriginal perspectives, particularly those of the Irish-Ojibwe poet Jane Johnston Schoolcraft (Bamewawagezhikaquay) and the Ojibwe autobiographer and historian George Copway (Kahgegagahbowh), whose works combined both Ojibwe and Romantic understandings of the relationship between land and culture.11 By comparing and contrasting Enlightenment, Romantic, and Aboriginal perspectives on deforestation in Upper Canada, chapter 1 highlights a complex legacy of environmental and cultural oppression and dissent in the British colony. The two chapters that follow deal with two of Upper Canada’s most influential colonial administrators, John Strachan and his protégé John Beverley Robinson, both of whom were elite members of the colony’s governing oligarchy, the so-called Family Compact. Although Strachan and Robinson achieved renown in their respective clerical and juridical roles (Strachan becoming the colony’s first Anglican bishop, and Robinson becoming its chief justice), the two men also exercised great political influence as members of Upper Canada’s legislative and executive councils. Chapter 2 considers how Strachan’s Scottish Enlightenment philosophy and Anglican theology shaped his views of the natural environment and his interactions with Indigenous people, while also examining his perspectives on the War of 1812 and the 1836 Manitowaning Treaty. These discussions contextualize, and culminate in, an analysis of Strachan’s literary activities, including his response to Thomas Campbell’s controversial Indian romance Gertrude of Wyoming (1809) and his critique of American Indian policy in a narrative poem entitled “The Missionary.” Chapter 3 begins with a discussion of Robinson’s wartime experiences at Detroit and Queenston Heights (the places, respectively, where he met the Shawnee war chief Tecumseh and fought alongside the Mohawk war chief John Norton), and an analysis of his post-war experiences in Britain, where he worked to complete his legal training in 1815–16. Influenced by Strachan’s literary enthusiasms, Robinson took the opportunity in Britain to cultivate the acquaintance of Thomas Campbell and Walter Scott, with whom he shared his thoughts on nature and Aboriginal culture. After examining these circumstances, the chapter culminates in the first detailed analysis of Robinson’s little-known loco-­ descriptive poem “Lines on an April visit to the Windermere Lake,” which expresses the young Canadian’s fascination for the picturesque environs of England’s Lake District. Ultimately, chapters 2 and 3

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aim to demonstrate Strachan’s and Robinson’s abiding interest in Indigenous cultural issues, an interest that historians have often missed as a result of their focus on these figures’ roles in mainstream colonial governance and in opposing democratic reform in Upper Canada. Further developing the colonial contexts examined in chapters 1 to 3, chapter 4 investigates the fraught relationship between two Romantic memoirists, Anna Jameson and Sir Francis Bond Head, who met in Upper Canada during the latter’s tenure as the colony’s lieutenant-governor. Although they shared a common Romantic fascination for nature and Aboriginal culture, the liberal-minded Jameson disapproved of Head’s paternalistic approach to Anglo-Indigenous relations and treaty making, which she criticized in her Canadian memoir Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada (1838). For his own part, Head was deeply offended not only by Jameson’s “abominable”12 depictions of Upper Canada’s colonial society but also by her collecting of Indigenous skulls during her travels across Lake Huron, which he denounced in letters to his publisher, John Murray, and in an 1838 Quarterly Review article entitled “The Red Man.” By examining these discussions, as well as late nineteenth-century transcriptions of oral narratives by Jane Schoolcraft’s nephew Lewis Solomon and his colleague Jean Baptiste Sylvestre (two of the Métis voyageurs who travelled with Jameson on Lake Huron and witnessed her skull collecting), chapter 4 relates events and circumstances that have heretofore escaped the notice of modern-day readers. Ultimately, these discussions show how research into Aboriginal history can enrich our understanding of well-known figures such as Head and Jameson herself. Having investigated the influential perspectives of the above-­ mentioned British settlers and sojourners, I devote the remaining chapters to an analysis of contemporary Aboriginal activists and their international diplomacy. Chapters 5 and 6 focus on the renowned Mohawk chiefs John Norton (Teyoninhokarawen) and John Brant (Ahyonwaeghs). Each fought for the Crown in the War of 1812 and advocated on behalf of the Grand River Haudenosaunee both in Upper Canada and in Britain, where they unsuccessfully sought to obtain a title deed to the lands that General Frederick Haldimand granted to Britain’s Haudenosaunee allies following the American Revolutionary War. Chapter 5 considers Norton’s Cherokee-Scottish background and subsequent adoption into the Mohawk nation by Chief Joseph Brant (Thayendanegea), as well as his critique, in The Journal of

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Major John Norton (written circa 1810–16), of colonialism’s adverse consequences for Indigenous people and territories. The chapter also considers Norton’s roles as warrior, diplomat, and transatlantic celebrity, including his interactions in Britain with such figures as William Wilberforce and Walter Scott. Most important, this chapter provides a detailed discussion of previously unknown details in Norton’s relationship with John Beverley Robinson, who mentioned Norton in an unvarnished account of the Battle of Queenston Heights and in correspondence with Thomas Campbell (who shared his thoughts about Norton in a letter to his fellow Scottish Romantic poet, Walter Scott). Chapter 6 continues this discussion of the Mohawks’ transatlantic history by examining the literary, political, and environmental activism of Chief John Brant, who, like his ally Norton, straddled both Native and European worlds. Brant did not produce any significant literary works, but he effectively critiqued libelous representations made about his father, Chief Joseph Brant, in writings by John Strachan and Thomas Campbell, confronting the latter through the mediation of a London lawyer during his diplomatic visit to Britain in 1822. Although he came close to being co-opted into colonial society in his role as Superintendent of the Six Nations and in his work on behalf of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in New England, Brant, like Norton before him, used his expertise in Haudenosaunee and European cultures to advocate on both sides of the Atlantic for this people’s interests. Moreover, in his efforts to stop the Welland Canal Company from building a dam on the Grand River (a development that would impoverish and displace Haudenosaunee farmers while benefitting Family Compact shareholders such as John Beverley Robinson), Brant may be seen as an early activist for environmental justice. While examining these and other aspects of Brant’s life and career, this chapter also provides some insight into the life of Brant’s lesser-known sister, Elizabeth Brant, who accompanied the young chief on his trip to England and assisted him in his evangelical efforts. The final two chapters examine the lives and writings of two Ojibwe authors, the Welsh-Mississauga chief Peter Jones (Kahkewaquonaby) and the Mississauga autobiographer George Copway (Kahgegagahbowh). Both produced spiritual autobiographies recounting their Christian conversions, worked as woodland missionaries, and wrote traditional histories of their people. As chapter 7 shows, the elder Jones refused the common belief in his people’s impending extinction, working tirelessly to ensure both their physical and spiritual survival.

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Defying the authority of an archdeacon (John Strachan) and three lieutenant-governors (including Sir Francis Bond Head, who tried to remove Jones’s Credit River band from their fertile lands near Toronto), Jones made three trips to Britain, where he advocated his people’s cause among sympathetic evangelicals (including the English moralist and Romantic-era poet Hannah More) and in audiences with King William IV and Queen Victoria. In addition to considering these circumstances, chapter 7 examines the role that nature played in Jones’s Christian conversion and evangelism, and the implications of his efforts to transform his people from hunters into farmers. Building on these contexts, the book’s final chapter considers the transatlantic crossings of George Copway, analyzing his strategic appropriations of tropes garnered from his readings of Lord Byron, Alexander Pope, Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel, Walter Scott, and other European poets. Among other things, the chapter suggests Byron’s metaphysical drama Manfred as a possible source for Copway’s Romantic self-depiction as a “noble Christian convert” (Smith 2013, 186), while also reading Copway’s anti-colonial poem “Once more I see my father’s land” as a strategic appropriation of the “Greater Romantic Lyric” (Abrams 77). In its closing section, the chapter examines Copway’s relatively neglected 1851 travelogue Running Sketches of Men and Places, in England, France, Germany, Belgium, and Scotland (1851), showing how his responses to European people, landscapes, and circumstances informed his efforts to combat stereotypes that adversely affected his people. Although chapters 2 through 8 offer portraits of individual writers (or, in the case of chapter 4, a comparative perspective on two writers), they also demonstrate some of the ways in which these writers responded to or even interacted with each other, occasionally in the context of relationships involving famous authors or other individuals overseas. As the chapters unfold, I hope readers will get a sense of the ways in which, for better or worse, Upper Canada functioned as a small transatlantic literary community in which ideas and practices involving culture and land were represented, practised, and contested in the context of asymmetrical power relations and extraordinarily rapid change.13

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1 Romantic Ecology, Indigenous Culture, and the Ideology of “Improvement” Improvement makes strait roads, but the crooked roads without Improvement, are roads of Genius. William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

When these forests, with all their solemn depth of shade and multitudinous life, have fallen beneath the axe – when the wolf, and bear, and deer are driven from their native coverts, and all this infinitude of animal and vegetable being has made way for restless, erring, suffering humanity, – will it then be better? Anna Brownell Jameson, Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada

One of the nineteenth century’s most significant Enlightenment legacies was the concept of “improvement.” Derived partly from Renaissance Humanist notions of human perfectibility, this progressivist paradigm gained traction during the eighteenth century as a result of new scientific discoveries and technological innovations. According to many “improvers,” humans could better their lives both materially and morally by transforming natural terrain both at home and abroad, rendering “wastelands” productive and capable of meeting the enhanced needs of expanding and shifting human populations. Because forests were for the most part considered unproductive spaces, the nineteenth-century Atlantic world witnessed an assault on trees unprecedented in scope. The spirit of progress informing this assault found broad acceptance both in Britain and in North America; its advocates included philosophers, agricultural theorists, colonial officials, and popular writers. In North

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America, this general consensus was disrupted by a small number of dissenting voices, including British Romantic travellers Charles Waterton and Anna Brownell Jameson, and Aboriginal authors such as Chief Peter Jones (Kahkewaquonaby), Jane Johnston Schoolcraft (Bamewawagezhikaquay), and George Copway (Kahgegagahbowh). In this chapter, I consider how these writers contested related stereotypes of human and environmental savagery, showing how this contestation challenged the ideology and practice of improvement. By investigating some of the ways in which Romantic and Aboriginal voices paralleled each other, and sometimes converged, in opposition to the transformation of ecosystems in the lower Great Lakes basin, this chapter reveals the outlines of an activist literary politics that, though ultimately unsuccessful, suggested possibilities for an alternative, anti-colonial environmental ethic in Upper Canada.

E n g l is h C ontexts In his Remarks on Forest Scenery (1791), the famous British aesthetician of the picturesque, William Gilpin, depicted the forest as humankind’s first home: “That man was originally a forest-animal appears from every page of his early history. Trace the first accounts of any people, and you will find them the inhabitants of woods; if woods were to be found in the countries in which they lived” (1.271). And yet, if human societies were originally rooted in the woodlands, in the course of their development they had not only forsaken those roots but also actively destroyed them. As populations increased, “man” began “to find [the forest] in his way. In one part, it occupied grounds fit for his plough; in another, for the pasturage of his domestic cattle; and in some parts, it afforded shelter for his enemies. He soon shewed the beasts, they were only tenants at will. He began amain to lay about him with his axe. The forest groaned … The fable was realized: man begged of the forest a handle to his hatchet; and when he had obtained the boon, he used it in felling the whole” (Gilpin 1.285–6). For Gilpin, who considered trees “the grandest, and most beautiful of all the productions of the earth” (1.1), England’s rampant deforestation was lamentable for its aesthetic impoverishment of the nation. For others, however, the problem went beyond aesthetics. As early as the midseventeenth century, for example, John Evelyn argued that the future of English civilization would depend upon an abundance of wooded spaces: from the forests were built the ships necessary to England’s

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naval security and commercial prosperity. In Sylva, or a Discourse of Forest-Trees (1664), Evelyn thus issued an urgent call for the enactment of civic legislation “for the preservation of our Woods” (108). And yet, such preservation could also be dangerous. As Gilpin observed, “enemies” of the civil state often sought shelter among the trees. The association of such people with wooded environments is implicit in their common identification as “savages.” Derived from the Latin silvaticus, or woodland, “savage” literally means “forest person” (Rigby 215; Forbes 106), while the term “civilization,” derived from civitas, means “city” (Volney 388). Dwelling in the forest – a word springing from the Latin foris, signifying “outside” (Rigby 215) – the “savage” is thus the quintessential “other” to the law-abiding civilian. Indeed, according to the influential French historian and philosopher C.F. Volney, many of the earliest cities were nothing more than garrisons enclosed by walls designed “to protect [civilians] from plunderers without” (388) – to protect them, that is, from savages. Because in the stereotyping discourses that circulated in colonial North America “Indians” frequently occupied the role of such external “plunderers,” anti-Indigenous and anti-forest phobias proceeded hand in hand. In This Well-Wooded Land (1985), Thomas R. Cox and his co-authors explain this correlation of phobias from the perspective of the European settler: “That the forest was home for the Indian, providing him with an environment in which he was supposedly invincible, added … incentive for [the forest’s] removal. Could one ever feel truly safe with the woods nearby?” (Cox et al. 37). The answer to this rhetorical question, of course, depended on one’s position vis-à-vis the state. From the perspective of forest-dwelling people, especially those who refused to acknowledge the authority of invading conquerors, the woods often functioned as a place of refuge. In England, as William Wordsworth remarked of Britain’s post-Roman era in his Guide to the Lakes (1810), Cumbria’s wood-choked dales and mountainsides “furnished a protection to some unsubdued Britons, long after the more accessible and more fertile districts had been seized by the Saxon or Danish invader” (2004, 64–5); and in colonial North America, it was not uncommon for “unsubdued” Indigenous people to resist state oppression by seeking shelter in the so-called trackless forests. During the Romantic period, peasants inhabiting British forests were often regarded as unruly impediments to the civilization of an urbanizing agrarian nation (Harrison 104–9). For if, as William

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Marshall argued in 1801, unimproved common lands appeared “in the present state of civilization and science, as filthy blotches on the face of the country” (12), the inhabitants of such lands were also deeply offensive to the civilized gaze. Consider, for example, a remark J. Howlett offered in his book Enclosures (1787): “Seldom have I passed over an extensive waste, but I have been shocked with the sight of a proportionable number of half-naked, half-starved women and children, with pale meagre faces, peeping out of their miserable huts, or lazing and lounging about after a few paltry screaming geese, or scabby worthless sheep” (Howlett 80). Such a perspective accorded with Charles Vancouver’s claim that England’s forests functioned as “nest[s] and conservator[ies] of sloth, idleness and misery” (496). Worse than the offensive sight and habits of England’s uncouth forest people was the danger they ostensibly posed to civilized notions of law and order. As Carl Griffin has noted, English forests had long been “the scenes of … myths that centred upon social justice and social conflict,” and “at certain points in time forests were at the forefront of national concerns about social order.” In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, criminal practices such as poaching and stealing wood – often carried out in response to enclosure, oppressive forest laws such as the Black Act, and food shortages – “shaped southern forests as they were known by outsiders” (Griffin 50, 51). It is no wonder that people who lived in and around England’s forests were often viewed with suspicion. As early as the mid-seventeenth century, to quote John Evelyn, such people were considered to be “not generally so civil, and reasonable, as might be wished; and therefore to design a solid Improvement in such places, his Majesty must assert his power, with a firme and high Resolution to Reduce these men to their due Obedience, and to a necessity of submitting to their own, and the publick utility” (Evelyn 112–13). Associating the promotion of domestic civility with related processes of social and geographic improvement, Evelyn preached a secular gospel of internal colonialism that anticipated the modernizing discourses of Romantic-era theorists like William Marshall, who also argued that “some degree of compulsion appears to be necessary” when dealing with the inhabitants of England’s unenclosed common lands (15). Such compulsion included the forcible removal of peasants from their forest homes in the name of social and environmental improvement. In an age of moral activism, the idea of compelling poor people to vacate their homelands might have aroused public sympathy, so

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Marshall could by no means idealize the woodland poor in the way that writers like Gilpin had sometimes done before him. If, from the standpoint of the national wealth, unenclosed and uncultivated lands were economically worthless, the inhabitants of such lands were thought to be morally worthless, as Marshall suggested when he complained that there are, “to this day, in different parts of England, extensive tracts of land, some of them of a valuable quality, which lie nearly in a state of wild nature! which were never inhabited! … unless by freebooters and homebred savages. Yet these uncultivated savage districts lie within the limits, in the very bosom, of our own circumscribed territory” (Marshall 7). Despite their long-standing presence in the woods, Britain’s “homebred savages” didn’t quite count as bona fide “inhabitants” (as Marshall’s weakly qualified claim that undeveloped English lands “were never inhabited” implies; emphasis added). Considered subhuman, “atavistic throwbacks to a primitive moment in human prehistory” (McClintock 43), the denizens of wooded and waste lands could presumably be compelled to leave their forest homes without raising troubling ethical questions.

“ Im p rov e m e n t ” a n d Upper Canada According to thinkers who participated in or were influenced by the cultural theories of the Scottish Enlightenment, North America’s forests were also unhealthy and dehumanizing environments. Unlike agricultural regions in which the soil and atmosphere were continually purified by the penetrating sunlight and circulating air, woodlands were thought to produce a pestilential atmosphere (Bewell 1999, 41) that accounted for, among other things, what Alexander Wilson called the questionable “turn of mind of the Aborigines of that vast country” (273, 274–5). As Henry Home, Lord Kames, observed, “the rude manners of savages are partly owing to the roughness and barrenness of uncultivated land” (1778, 1.62). Formed by the woodland environment and its associated subsistence practices, Native Americans were thought to resemble the animals they hunted “both in occupation and in genius” (Robertson 2.90).1 In short, like Britain’s “homegrown savages,” they were regarded as less than fully human. Therefore, when the question of environmental improvement was raised among Europeans, the sustainability of traditional Indigenous cultures was rarely a concern. Embracing a metaphysics of North American foresthating whose history may be traced back to the original Pilgrim settlers

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(Worster 86), Wilson offered an unequivocal prescription for the New World landscape and its people: “The more quickly [America] is deprived of its woody covering, the more rapid will its improvements be in every thing that hath distinguished the European nations in equal latitudes” (276). In Upper Canada, as elsewhere in North America, such improvements entailed not only the clearing of the woods but also the removal of the Indigenous people who inhabited them. During the early nineteenth century, perhaps the most enthusiastic literary proponent of improvement was the Scottish poet Thomas Campbell, whose works were widely read and admired in the British colony, including (as noted in chapters 2 and 3) by members of the governing oligarchy. In his early twenties, Campbell “appeared like a meteor” blazing across the literary sky (Smiles 2.322), finding sudden international fame when he published The Pleasures of Hope (1799), a poem the prominent Romantic-period literary critic William Hazlitt praised as one of literature’s “gifts to a world” (144). In an exuberant apostrophe influenced by Scottish Enlightenment ideals of progress, Campbell’s speaker exclaims: Come, bright Improvement! On the car of Time, And rule the spacious world from clime to clime; Thy handmaid arts shall every wild explore, Trace every wave, and culture every shore. (Campbell 1907, Part 1, lines 321–4) The scope of Campbell’s vision is impressive. As an agent of British imperial power, “bright Improvement” promises to transform “every” corner of the globe, exploring “every wild” place until it comes to “rule” the entire “spacious world.” Although improvement’s reach is global, Campbell chose to epitomize its transformative effects by focusing on the densely forested shores of Lake Erie’s “Indian world” (A. Taylor 28): On Erie’s banks, where tigers steal along, And the dread Indian chants a dismal song, Where human fiends on midnight errands walk, And bathe in brains the murderous tomahawk – There shall the flocks on thymy pasture stray, And shepherds dance at Summer’s opening day. (Campbell 1907, Part 1, lines 325–30)

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As I have observed elsewhere (Hutchings 2009a, 182–4), these lines demonstrate Campbell’s conviction that cultural and environmental change would proceed hand in hand in North America. By transforming the continent’s primeval forests into “thymy pastures,” “bright Improvement” would replace dangerous animal predators with docile pastoral “flocks” and their predatory human counterparts with dancing shepherd swains, thereby transforming savage landscapes into civilized pastoral ones. Since American settlers coveted the continent’s terrain “not as it was but only as they might remake it” (Turner 257), and British emigrants to Canada “wished to replicate” the English landscape “as nearly as possible” in their new homeland (Den Otter 3),2 it is no wonder Campbell’s poem was popular among North American settlers. By justifying the appropriation of Indigenous lands and the extirpation of Indigenous people in the name of enlightened progress, The Pleasures of Hope was an exemplary colonial text. Although North America’s accelerating deforestation was generally celebrated by colonial homesteaders and administrators, a small minority of dissenting voices, including transatlantic tourists in search of the picturesque, saw cause for grave concern. Consider, for example, the case of the British natural historian Charles Waterton who recorded the following observations during his 1824 travels along the Erie Canal while en route to visit the American and Canadian sides of Niagara Falls: “Nature is losing fast her ancient garb, and putting on a new dress in these extensive regions. Most of the stately timber has been carried away; thousands of trees are lying prostrate on the ground; while meadows, corn-fields, villages, and pastures are ever and anon bursting upon the traveller’s view as he journeys on through the remaining tracts of wood. I wish I could say a word or two for the fine timber which is yet standing. Spare it, gentle inhabitants, for your country’s sake; these noble sons of the forest beautify your landscapes beyond all description; when they are gone, a century will not replace their loss; they cannot, they must not fall” (Waterton 263).3 Among North American settlers, such admonitions did not go unheard; but even where some sympathy existed, the preservation of trees for aesthetic purposes was often considered impractical. As the prominent Canadian clergyman and amateur poet John Strachan (a friend of Thomas Campbell and the subject of this book’s chapter 2) noted, “those farmers who go upon their lands full-handed, may attend to the preservation of the beautiful and the picturesque; but even they will, at first, be put to serious inconvenience by such patches. They are

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a harbour for vermin of various kinds; and especially for birds, which destroy the fruits of the orchards, and devour the grain as soon as sown” (Strachan 1820c, 76). It is important to note, of course, that for both Waterton and Strachan, “preservation” is an aesthetic rather than an ecological concern: trees are deemed valuable not in their own right but for the pleasure people could derive from viewing them. Another Romantic travel writer, Anna Brownell Jameson (whom I discuss in detail in chapter 4), addressed the problem of deforestation in Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada (1838) when, like Strachan, she considered the question of “why, in clearing the woods, [Canadian settlers] did not leave groups of the finest trees, or even single trees, here and there, to embellish the country” (2008, 61). But for Jameson, the answer to this question had nothing to do with the pragmatic exigencies of agriculture. Rather than having been cut down to discourage the presence of crop-killing vermin and birds, Jameson explains, individual trees and copses that had been deliberately spared died nonetheless: “When deprived of the shelter and society to which they have been accustomed,” these trees “uniformly perish – which, for mine own poor part, I thought very natural” (61). By depicting trees as social beings whose survival “natural[ly]” depends upon their “accustomed” need for “shelter and society,” Jameson indulges a fanciful Romantic penchant for anthropomorphic “saming.” At the same time, however, by highlighting the needs and subjectivity of trees rather than of homesteaders, she articulates a biocentric perspective that is all but absent among members of Upper Canada’s settler society. More scientifically, her words articulate what we would nowadays consider an ecological insight: individual trees are not discrete entities; their being as such is literally rooted in a larger ecosystem, the forest understood as a “society” of interdependent trees. As a privileged British tourist, Jameson felt the difference between her own views and those of Canadian settlers acutely. “A Canadian settler hates a tree,” she declares, “regards it as his natural enemy, as something to be destroyed, eradicated, annihilated by all and any means. The idea of useful or ornamental is seldom associated here even with the most magnificent timber trees, such as among the Druids had been consecrated, and among the Greeks would have sheltered oracles and votive temples. The beautiful faith which assigned to every tree of the forest its guardian nymph, to every leafy grove its tutelary divinity, would find no votaries here. Alas! for the Dryads and Hamadryads of Canada!” (Jameson 2008, 61). For Jameson, the

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destruction of trees in Upper Canada stems from the inability of Canadian settlers to find any aesthetic or practical value (the “ornamental” or the “useful”) in them. Moreover, in her invocation of the “beautiful faith” informing Druidic and Greek mythologies, she implies that this destruction is connected to a colonial Christian theology that locates “divinity” outside nature’s realm. Her claim that the “Canadian settler hates a tree” and considers it “his natural enemy” finds an equivalent in writings by other nineteenth-century authors who, unlike Jameson, were intimidated by what the Canadian novelist John Richardson called “the dark, tall, and frowning forests” (13), forests the nineteenth-century German ethnographer Johann Georg Kohl described as “march[ing] like hostile battalions” across the landscape (175). For contemporary settlers, whose very survival necessitated the carving of homesteads out of densely treed terrain, it was difficult to think of forests otherwise. During his travels in the English countryside, for example, Upper Canada’s attorney general, John Beverley Robinson – a literary enthusiast who, like Strachan, befriended Thomas Campbell – found rural England’s “picturesque disposition of woods, groves & shrubbery … very remarkable to an eye used to consider woods as an encumbrance to be got rid of.”4 For Canadian pioneer Susanna Moodie, “that horrid word bush [a vernacular term for the woods] became synonymous with all that was hateful and revolting in my mind” (81). It is thus no wonder that her husband, J.W.D. Moodie, could sing so exuberantly of the woodsman’s back-breaking labour: Come chop away, lads! the wild woods resound,     Let your quick falling strokes in due harmony ring; See, the lofty tree shivers – it falls to the ground!     Now with voices united together we’ll sing – To the woods! – to the woods! (qtd in Moodie 216) According to these lines, the very purpose of going “to the woods” was to cut them down. Given the ubiquity of such sentiments among British North American settlers, it seems apt that Romantic author and Upper Canadian lieutenant-governor Sir Francis Bond Head characterized “emigration to this country” as an unfortunate “War with the Wilderness” in which the homesteader must “engage himself

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in a duel with each and every individual tree of the interminable forest that surrounds him” (1846, 34). In the Romantic imagination, the consequences of such “warfare” were dire not only for the land but also for the First Nations people who relied on the forests for sustenance. As William Wordsworth imagined the scenario, “the encroaching axe” was a weapon of “dire rapacity” wielding a double-edged blade: in the process of consuming America’s forests, it would also drive Indigenous people farther and farther into the continent’s interior, until “the remnant of [their] line” was “swe[pt] away” (2007, Book 3, lines 925, 927, 936). Wordsworth was hardly alone in his belief that, as the forests vanished, Native peoples would become extinct; as Brian W. Dippie has shown, the myth of the “vanishing American” was ubiquitous in contemporary colonial culture (passim), so common, indeed, that many First Nations people came to share the white man’s belief in their peoples’ impending demise. But some Aboriginal activists rejected this notion altogether. For example, in his posthumously published History of the Ojebway Indians (1861), Peter Jones (Kakewaquonaby), a Mississauga chief of Welsh-Ojibwe descent, wrote, “I cannot suppose for a moment that the Supreme Disposer has decreed that the doom of the red man is to fall and gradually disappear, like the mighty wilderness, before the axe of the European settler.” As a Christian convert who urged his people to renounce the chase and become farmers, Jones (as noted in my Introduction) admitted that he “longed for the time when the game and fur shall be … destroyed” (1861, 29, 172), but he steadfastly refused the quietism and defeatism informing the myth of the vanishing Native American. For more traditional Ojibwe people, the destruction of the forest and its fur-bearing animals was a catastrophe. According to the German ethnographer Kohl, who travelled to Lake Superior in 1855, Aboriginal people were “filled … with terror” when they first observed the remains of a forested area that had been clear-cut by white settlers (246). Such a response is easy to appreciate when one considers the status of trees and other organisms in Ojibwe tradition. As Peter Jones remarked, non-Christian Ojibwe “suppose that all animals, fowls, fish, trees, stones, &c., are endowed with immortal spirits” (1861, 104); or, as the Ojibwe author George Copway remarked, in the traditional world “the skies were filled with … deities … and the whole forest awakened with their whispers” (1851b, 147). In such a world, the

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wholesale destruction of trees was considered sacrilegious, as Jesuit priest Father Dominic Du Ranquet discovered in 1844, when he cut down “an ancient grove of oaks” near his chapel on Walpole Island in Lake St Claire. Having “defiled” a “sacred space,” he roused the anger of the island’s 1,100 Ojibwe, who demanded his removal from their territory (McGowan 204–5). As Kate Rigby has shown in detail (passim), the idea of sacred space also informed European Romantic thought. In the poem “Nutting,” for example, Wordsworth recounts a scene from his rural youth, where, wreaking havoc on a grove of hazelnut trees, he destroyed a “virgin scene.” Articulating an overt moral, the remorseful poet tells his addressee to “move along these shades / In gentleness of heart; with gentle hand / Touch, – for there is a Spirit in the woods” (1990, 153–4, lines 19, 52–4). Although William Blake took issue with Wordsworth’s implicit pantheism, he nevertheless attributed a kind of visionary subjectivity to “Trees on Mountains,” which in Milton “thunder thro’ the darksome sky / Uttering prophecies & speaking instructive words to the sons / Of Men” (123, plate 26, lines 7, 9–10). Blake’s related observation that “the tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the Eyes of others only a Green thing that stands in the way” (702) provides a succinct critique of a world view enabling the destruction of forests on both sides of the Atlantic. In her Canadian memoir, Anna Jameson – who came to Upper Canada with a prized copy of Wordsworth’s poetry among her possessions – expressed a sense of sympathy for forests that was thoroughly Romantic. “No one who has a single atom of imagination,” she declared, “can travel through these forest roads of Canada without being strongly impressed and excited” by the “seemingly interminable line of trees before you; the boundless wilderness around; the mysterious depths amid the multitudinous foliage, where foot of man hath never penetrated” (Jameson 2008, 252–3). Although her claim that Canada’s interior forests had never been touched by “foot of man” partakes of a colonial ideology that imagined North America as “a vacuum Domicilium waiting to be inhabited by a more productive people” (Cronon 56), Jameson’s imaginative sense of wonder in the midst of the forest demonstrates her sense that a tree is much more than a “Green thing standing in the way.” Indeed, Jameson’s profound sympathy for trees invites comparisons with the philosophy of the traditional Anishinaabe people through whose territory she passed. According to Chief Peter Jones, whom

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Jameson mentions in her discussion of the Credit River Mississauga (2008, 173), Indians in “their heathen state … very seldom cut down green or living trees, from the idea that it puts them to pain; and some of the pow-wows [medicine men] have pretended to hear the wailing of the forest trees when suffering under the operation of the hatchet or axe” (Jones 1861, 104). Showing a similar concern, Jameson confessed that “the pity I have for the trees in Canada, shows how far I am yet from being a true Canadian. How do we know that trees do not feel their downfall? We know nothing about it. The line which divides animal from vegetable sensibility is as undefined as the line which divides animal from human intelligence … Without exactly believing the assertion of the old philosopher, that a tree feels the first stroke of the axe, I know I never witness nor hear the first stroke without a shudder; and as yet I cannot look on with indifference, far less share the Canadian’s exultation, when these huge oaks, these umbrageous elms and stately pines, are lying prostrate” (Jameson 2008, 246). Jameson’s radical thoughts on “vegetable sensibility” are not wholly idiosyncratic, agreeing as they do with Lord Kames’s speculations concerning plant “sagacity” and the idea that “vegetable life seems to be not far remote from animal life” (Home 1776, 304). But such speculations were philosophically risky, inviting the sort of ridicule Thomas Taylor articulated in A Vindication of the Rights of Brutes (1792), a book he waggishly hoped would “be followed by treatises on the rights of vegetables and minerals” (19), or courting the kind of lampoon that informed a contemporary parody of Erasmus Darwin’s The Botanic Garden (1790), whose anonymous author invited readers to “See plants, susceptible of joy and woe, / Feel all we feel, and know whate’er we know!” (qtd in White 230). Just as European settlers often disdained Indigenous understandings of nature, so too did many British rationalists hold in contempt Romantic notions of other-than-human being.

S c h o o l c r a f t a nd Copway: R e c o l l e c t in g a Forest Li fe Jameson’s radical sympathy for Upper Canada’s unspoiled forestlands perhaps helps to explain why an Anishinaabe family residing near Sault Ste Marie adopted her, calling her “Was-sa-je-wun-e-qua, or ‘Woman of the bright stream’” (Osborne 136), and why other Ojibwe people befriended her as well. Among the most notable of these friends

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was “the first known American Indian literary writer” (Parker 1), Jane Johnston Schoolcraft (1800–1842), the Irish-Ojibwe poet also known as Bamewawagezhikaquay (Woman of the Sound the Stars Make Rushing Through the Sky). As a writer, Schoolcraft composed roughly fifty poems in English and Ojibwemowin5 while also transcribing or translating traditional stories and songs. Although she was born and raised in what is now northern Michigan, Schoolcraft and her family maintained numerous cross-border ties,6 often identifying more closely with British than with American colonial authorities (Parker 12). During her childhood at Sault Ste Marie, Michigan, Schoolcraft learned traditional Native knowledge and lore from her Ojibwe mother, while at the same time acquiring intimate knowledge of European culture from her Irish-born father, whose impressive woodland library included volumes of British poetry by Walter Scott, Thomas Moore, Lord Byron, Robert Southey, and Thomas Campbell, as well as literary works by such American authors as Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper (Parker 4, 14). Articulating a mixture of Ojibwe, British, and American world views, Schoolcraft’s writings reflect the hybrid knowledges, values, and sensibilities of the Upper Great Lakes Métis cultural milieu. Among Schoolcraft’s most interesting environmental poems is one in which she recollected her first encounter with the trees of her homeland upon returning from a visit to Ireland in 1809. Having first written the poem in Ojibwe, Schoolcraft translated it into English under the title “To the Pine Tree”: The pine! the pine! I eager cried, The pine, my father! see it stand, As first that cherished tree I spied, Returning to my native land. The pine! the pine! oh lovely scene! The pine that is forever green. Ah beauteous tree! ah happy sight! That greets me on my native strand And hails me, with a friend’s delight, To my own dear bright mother land Oh ’tis to me a heart-sweet scene, The pine – the pine! that’s ever green. (Schoolcraft 89, lines 1–12)

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Like J.W.D. Moodie’s “To the Woods,” Schoolcraft’s poem makes liberal use of exclamation points to emphasize a spirit of woodland exuberance; but far from encouraging the forest’s destruction in an anthropocentric economy of pioneer labour, “To the Pine Tree” expresses a sense of delight in the “cherished tree” itself. Such delight is markedly at odds with the attitudes often expressed by white settlers, who labelled many pine forests “barrens” on account of their perceived lack of fruitfulness and utility. As Robert Dale Parker observes, the land in Schoolcraft’s poem “seems animated, as well it might be to an Ojibwe steeped in Ojibwe patterns of thought and grammar: the tree greets her” (51–2). Indeed, by depicting the tree as “hail[ing]” her “with a friend’s delight,” the poet suggests that her own delight in the encounter is reciprocated by the tree itself. Moreover, the syntactic ambiguity in her reference to “The pine, my father!” suggests a familial tie, thus further emphasizing the close relationship between the speaker and her beloved tree. In another poem composed in response to a journey, Schoolcraft reflected on her role as a mother and on her relationship to her own “mother land.” Her destination in this instance was Philadelphia and Princeton, where in 1839, acquiescing to the wishes of her white husband, the American ethnographer and Indian agent Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, she reluctantly delivered her children to boarding schools that would educate them to become Europeanized citizens (just as Canada’s residential schools would begin systematically doing to thousands of Indigenous children several decades later).7 The experience was clearly a traumatic one. In a letter to Anna Jameson, the Schoolcrafts’ friend Catherine Maria Sedgwick wrote that Jane “was mourning like Rachel for her children” (qtd in Konkle 97). Although Schoolcraft originally wrote her poem in Ojibwemowin, her husband Henry produced an English version under the title “On leaving my children John and Jane, in the Atlantic States, and preparing to return to the interior.” According to this “free translation,” in which Henry took great liberties with the Ojibwe text, the poem’s grieving speaker, despite the pain of being separated from her beloved children, finds solace in the midst of her sorrow, selflessly acknowledging that “duty commands me, and duty must sway” (qtd in Schoolcraft 142, lines 30, 32). But such consolation finds no place in the poem’s original text. To appreciate Schoolcraft’s true feelings about her and her children’s predicament, English-language speakers may now consider the poem in a new English translation prepared by Dennis Jones, Heidi Stark, and James Vukelich:

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As I am thinking When I find you My land Far in the west My land My little daughter My little son I leave them behind Far away land [emphatically] But soon It is close however To my home I shall return That is the way that I am, my being My land My land To my home I shall return I begin to make my way home Ahh but I am sad[.] (Schoolcraft 142–3) The profound sense of disconnection expressed here is twofold: separated both from her children and from her woodland home, Schoolcraft gives vent to her feelings of loss and sorrow by communicating them directly to the “land,” the poem’s addressee. Although the land remains silent, it is depicted as a sentient subject, a “you” capable of hearing and understanding the poet’s lament. As the poem progresses, however, poet and land converge into a single entity, “my being / My land.” Home is, in other words, not the end point of the speaker’s journey; rather, it is “the way that I am.” Given this integral relationship between human being and land, one can appreciate the perilous nature of Schoolcraft’s children’s immersion in a distant, culturally alien environment, where, like their grieving mother, they face the prospect of a traumatic fracturing of identity (Hutchings 2016, 303). Moreover, in Schoolcraft’s poem, the mutual integrity of human being and land challenges the subject / object dualism implicit in the Western ideas of “landscape” and “environment,” a dualism informing European notions of

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human mastery that underscored the colonial imperative to improve the land.8 For Schoolcraft, such ideas were highly suspect. Although as a woman of mixed ancestry she embodied Ojibwe, American, and British forms of identity, she could not ultimately embrace the changes that improvement wrought upon her native land. Consider, for example, the following lines from her poem “The Contrast,” in which she juxtaposes memories of her “earliest, happiest days” among the “woodland bowers” of St Mary’s (Schoolcraft 117–18, lines 6, 8) against the unpleasant colonial realities of the present day: But ah! how changed is every scene, Our little hamlet, and the green, The long rich green, where warriors played And often, breezy elm-wood shade. How changed, since full of strife and fear, The world hath sent its votaries here. The tree cut down – the cot removed, The cot the simple Indian loved, The busy strife of young and old To gain one sordid bit of gold By trade’s o’er done plethoric moil And lawsuits, meetings, courts and toil. (Schoolcraft 117–18, lines 35–46) According to Parker, Schoolcraft’s poetic critique of her homeland’s colonial transformation is potentially compromised by “colonialist condescensions” implicit in her depiction of the Indian as “simple” (Parker 53), a term often used by whites to denote the absence of a capacity for complex reasoning. In British Romantic poetry, however, the term may be found in pastoral depictions that idealized rural peasants, as in Wordsworth’s complimentary reference in The Excursion to the “simple” shepherd (Wordsworth 2007, 155, Book 4, line 883), whose simplicity connotes not a lack of reason but an admirable absence of social artifice and presumption – as it arguably does in Schoolcraft’s poem as well. Schoolcraft’s use of such terms as “hamlet” and “green” – conventional descriptors for British village settings – further highlights the pastoral influence she inherited from her reading of the British poets whose writings found their way into her father’s library. And just as these poets often invoked the innocent delights of

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the rural idyll to highlight the urban metropole’s moral corruption, so Schoolcraft engages similar pastoral contrasts to criticize a colonial world in which people busily strive “To gain one sordid bit of gold,” a line recalling Wordsworth’s poetic condemnation, in “The world is too much with us,” of his society’s vulgar obsession with “Getting and spending” (Wordsworth 1990, 270, line 2). Unlike Thomas Campbell, who invokes pastoral fields, flocks, and swains in The Pleasures of Hope to celebrate the destruction of North America’s woodlands, Schoolcraft deploys the pastoral mode to condemn improvement practices for their simultaneous assault on nature and local culture (as suggested by her juxtaposed references to “The tree cut down – the cot [cottage] removed”). For a Christian Ojibwe poet who believed, as she asserts in the poem “Pensive Hours,” that “even a leaf cannot wither and die, / Unknown to [God’s] care, or unseen by his eye” (Schoolcraft 109, lines 21–2), the tree’s destruction, like that of the Indian’s cottage or wigwam, is much to be deplored. One is reminded here of analogous sentiments expressed on the other side of the Atlantic by the nineteenth-century English working-class poet John Clare, who blamed closely related English improvement and enclosure practices for what Alan Bewell aptly describes as “the catastrophic loss of … local natures and the ways of life which they sustained” (2017, 273). Elsewhere in her poetry, Schoolcraft engages the Christian moral dualism of light and darkness to query the ideology of improvement and its role in the practice of deforestation. As historian Donald Smith describes it, the contemporary lower Great Lakes watershed featured ancient forests whose “tall trees grew interlocked thirty to forty metres above the ground leaving the land beneath in dark shadows” (2013, 129). British settlers made much of these shadows, likening the “thick, impervious, rayless forest” to an “impenetrable … prison house” (J. Richardson 6, 305) or a “dark prison” in which the “soul droops her wings” (Moodie 163, 85), and associating wooded landscapes with benighted forms of human and animal savagery. But Schoolcraft refused such notions, as indicated in the following passage from her “Lines written under affliction”: How could a beautiful landscape please,     If it showed us no feature but light? ’Tis the dark shades alone that give pleasure and ease,     ’Tis the union of sombre and bright. (Schoolcraft 126, lines 5–8)

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If these lines are not a direct response to Thomas Campbell’s poetry,9 they might be seen as a general commentary on his ideal of “bright Improvement,” which, as noted above, banishes the supposed gloom of Indigenous forests in favour of sunny pasture lands. From Schoolcraft’s hybrid Christian-Ojibwe perspective, the forest’s “dark shades” are not spaces bereft of God’s light or of Enlightenment knowledge, but places of woodland otium that actively bestow upon humans the gift of “pleasure and ease.” It is thus no wonder that in her dramatic poem “Absence,” the character Nindahwaymau declares, “Gladly I seek the woody shade, / To steal away from care” (Schoolcraft 120, lines 9–10). The forest’s sheltered spaces also appealed to one of Schoolcraft’s Ojibwe contemporaries, George Copway (1818–1869), also known as Kahgegagahbowh, or “Standing Firm” (whose Atlantic crossings form the subject matter of chapter 8). Born in eastern Upper Canada’s Trent River Valley, Copway became “a literary lion in the United States” (D. Smith 2013, 165), and in his writings he would engage the work of such British Romantics as Scott, Burns, Byron, and Southey. Prior to his Christian conversion and English education, however, Copway spent his boyhood learning to hunt and to worship the deities that presided over the Ojibwe world. In his Traditional History and Characteristic Sketches of the Ojibway Nation (1851), he describes that world as follows: “The earth teemed with all sorts of spirits, good and bad; those of the forest clothed themselves with moss. During a shower of rain, thousands of them are sheltered in a flower. The Ojibway, as he reclines beneath the shade of his forest trees, imagines these gods to be about him. He detects their tiny voices in the insect’s hum. With half closed eyes he beholds them sporting by thousands on a sunray” (Copway 1851b, 148–9). Far from being the locus of real or metaphorical darkness, Copway’s forest is a place of visionary plenitude: combining “shade” and “sunray,” it embodies Schoolcraft’s “union of sombre and bright” while similarly being a place where the “reclin[ing]” Ojibwe experiences a sense of “pleasure and ease” amidst the voluble deities who filled “the whole forest … with their whispers” (147). To discourage his white Christian readers from confusing such beliefs with pagan idolatry, Copway defends the forest as an edifying space in which the Indian learns to revere God: “Living as he does, amid the happiest creations of the Great Creator, he cannot but adore and worship Him. His devotion is pure. He ‘Sees God in storms and hears him in the wind.’ Nature points him up to

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Nature’s God. I love my country; and will any of my readers condemn a child of the forest for loving his country and his nation?” (Copway 1851b, 24–5; emphasis added). In this passage, Copway strategically quotes a line from Alexander Pope’s An Essay on Man (1733–34), wherein the condescending poet shows pity for “the poor Indian” and his “untutored” pagan mind (Pope 2.355, epistle 1, line 99). By quoting a renowned English poet, Copway burnishes his literary credentials while also exhibiting his own “tutored mind,” thereby contradicting Pope’s stereotypical depiction of Indigenous people as ignorant and unlearned. Crucially, moreover, he claims his Christian readers’ goodwill by arguing, contrary to Pope’s assertion, that the Indian is ultimately a monotheist whom nature has taught to “adore and worship” the one true God in a spirit of “pure” “devotion.” He then connects this devotion to the Indian’s love of “his country and his nation,” thus affirming a form of patriotism not tied to the colonizing power. Copway further challenges negative colonial stereotypes by refusing the idea that the forest was necessarily a locus of vice and incivility. According to proponents of improvement, forest-dwelling societies were morally vicious and ignoble largely because they derived their sustenance from the hunting of wild animals. As C.F. Volney argued, “the American hunter, who has daily occasion to kill and to eat the slain, by whom every animal is regarded as prey which he must be quick to seize, has imbibed, of course, an errant, wasteful, and cruel disposition. He is akin to the wolf and the tiger” (395). The cure for such a disposition lay in the progressive impulses thought to reside within natural history itself. Positing cultural improvement as a developmental process in which primitive societies gradually moved from the primitive “hunter-state” toward increasingly refined “states” of herding and agriculture, the Scottish philosopher Lord Kames claimed that the “the harsh manners of hunters” would disappear, to be replaced by a new community-oriented spirit of “benevolence” (Home 1778, 1.341–3). In North America, such thinking helped settlers and government officials to justify the morality of colonialism; by transforming forests into productive fields and farms, and by urging Indigenous people to renounce the hunt and take up the plough, they could claim to be participating in a beneficent, “civilizing” process. Although he strove to find favour with his transatlantic audience of white Christian readers, Copway was unwilling to accept such

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logic. In the British edition of his autobiography, Recollections of a Forest Life (1850), his chapter on hunting includes a discussion of the moral lessons he learned from his father, who taught him not only that “a great hunter” must share his bounty with the elderly and the poor but also that he must show compassion for his animal prey: “‘You must never laugh at any suffering object, for you know not how soon you may be in the same condition: never kill any game needlessly.’ Such was his language when we were alone in the woods.” Presenting his father’s woodland teachings as “lessons directed from heaven” (Copyway 1850b, 19–20), Copway suggests that his people practised Christian virtues of charity and stewardship well before the arrival of the missionaries and settlers – virtues very much at odds with the claim that woodlands produced “savage” peoples characterized by “an errant, wasteful, and cruel disposition” (Volney 395). However, despite his defence of traditional hunting practices and his claim to have “delighted in running after the deer” (1850b, 25), Copway ultimately rejected the hunt, advocating the need for his people to forsake forest life and become devout Christian farmers. Indeed, after exuberantly recounting the rituals of song and dance characterizing “the great feast of the first deer that a young hunter caught” (25), he performs a volte-face, reassuring his Christian readers with a sombre testimonial: “In the days of our ignorance we used to dance around the fire. I shudder when I think of those days of our darkness … I thank God that those days will never return” (26). As I have argued elsewhere (Hutchings 2009b, 231–4), this sudden association of traditional woodland practices with “ignorance” and “darkness” is far from convincing, in part because it exists in tension with a combination of complementary Romantic and Ojibwe strains informing Copway’s thought. Consider, for example, Copway’s engagement with Lord Byron’s poetry. In Recollections of a Forest Life, the chapter on hunting and woodland ethics begins with an epigraph quoted from Byron’s “To the Countess of Blessington”:     My life is not dated by years – There are moments which act as a plough;     And there is not a furrow appears, But is deep in my soul as my brow. (qtd in Copway 1850b, 16)

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In Byron’s agricultural metaphor, the “moments” “dat[ing]” the speaker’s life may “act as a plough,” but the “furrow” thus created produces not fertile ground suitable for new growth (as one might expect given Copway’s pious Christian claim to have rejected the hunt) but a wound or scar that is both spiritual and intellectual (as the respective references to “soul” and “brow” imply). Such a reading gains support from the lines in Byron’s poem immediately preceding the quatrain Copway chose for his epigraph: I am ashes where once I was fire,     And the bard in my bosom is dead, What I loved I now merely admire –     And my heart is as grey as my head. (Byron 1993, 7.75–6, lines 10–12) In Byron’s poem, these lines prepare the ground, as it were, for the deployment of the plough metaphor; the speaker’s loss of artistic passion turns living flame into cold ash, killing the bard of inspiration that had formerly resided in his heart. As in much of Byron’s poetry, the cause of these unfortunate events is not specified; all we are told is that the speaker’s mind and soul have become deeply “furrowed” in their encounter with the “plough” of time. Like Byron’s speaker, Copway gestures in his narrative toward a life he had once loved passionately; “I loved the woods and the chase. I had the nature for it, and gloried in nothing else” (1850b, 3; emphasis added). In light of such exuberant outbursts, his pious renunciation of the hunt in favour of a Christian agrarian life comes across as forced and unconvincing (Hutchings 2009b, 233–4). In a chapter wherein Copway defends the exceptional morality of traditional forest life while also directly advocating the need to reject that life, his choice of Byronic epigraph suggests a significant internal conflict. As an Ojibwe author who spoke “in the double voice of the ‘noble savage’ and the ‘pious convert’” (Ruoff 1997b, 9), he arguably rejected the hunt and its associated traditions not from a deep conviction of their moral evil but to appease his white Christian reading audience, without whose sympathy his voice would not be heard. Interestingly, Copway wrote his Traditional History with the expressed hope that it would “awaken in the American heart a deeper feeling for the race of red-men and induce the pale-face to use greater effort to effect improvement in their social and political relations”

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(1851b, vii; emphasis added). Rather than emphasizing his people’s need to embrace improvement practices associated with European ideas of progress, including the clear-cutting of forests to make way for farms and fields, Copway put the onus on members of America’s settler society to improve a colonial system that marginalized and oppressed Native Americans.

“ Im p rov e ment”: S oc ia l a n d E n v iro n m e ntal Consequences Ultimately, on both sides of the Atlantic, “bright Improvement” came at a great cost to vulnerable people and the forest environments in which they lived. In Britain, as Oliver Rackham has shown, “forests were hit hard by Enclosure Acts, which … expropriated the rights of commoners and the Crown,” bringing forests under the control of private landowners “who, with rare exceptions, instantly destroyed them” (139). The result was a loss of habitat for wild creatures, including many “rare plants” (14), as well as homes and sustenance for Britain’s forestdwelling commoners. In northeastern North America, massive deforestation in the name of improvement led to the extirpation of such animals as the cougar, elk, prairie chicken, wolf, wild turkey, and wood buffalo (F. Turner 259), while at the same time pushing Indigenous people westward or onto small reserves or (as Americans call them) reservations. While the majority of white settlers celebrated deforestation as a necessary prelude to the land’s pastoral transformation and socio-economic development, British Romantic travel writers such as Charles Waterton and Anna Jameson criticized improvement’s adverse effects, lamenting the widespread loss of aesthetically pleasing trees and forests. While generally agreeing with this Romantic critique, Aboriginal writers such as Jane Johnston Schoolcraft and George Copway went further, emphasizing improvement’s negative physical and ethical consequences both for the land itself and for the Aboriginal people who lived there. Unfortunately, these Romantic and Aboriginal voices remained very much in the minority during the early decades of the nineteenth century. As a result, massive deforestation led to the destruction of traditional societies that relied on native species for physical and spiritual sustenance. Nevertheless, by pointing toward roads not taken, these dissenting voices provide a counter-history that might help modern-day readers to appreciate the positive values associated with forests and traditional modes of forest life.

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2 Bishop John Strachan, Christian Evangelism, and the First Nations of Upper Canada The rise of a bishop over the clergy of his diocese may be compared to that of a rude chief over the members of his tribe; as in both cases a superiority of station, derived from personal qualities, put it in the power of a single person to acquire superior wealth, and thence to become the permanent head or leader of a society: but the original pre-eminence of the chief arose from his military talents, that of the bishop, from the veneration paid to the sanctity of his character and profession. This makes the only difference in the nature of their advancement. John Millar, An Historical View of the English Government, from the Settlement of the Saxons in Britain to the Accession of the House of Stewart

In t ro du c t i on John Strachan, the first Anglican Bishop of Toronto, was born the son of a granite quarry foreman in Aberdeen, Scotland, on 12 April 1778. According to his mother’s account, he was destined to accomplish extraordinary things. As Strachan himself later described her notion, “the day of my birth was accompanied with too many singularities not to portend something great. [I] was born … in the twelfth day of the month at the twelfth hour of the day. The sun and the moon were both full. It was high water at that instant, moreover it was Sunday and the Sacrament was dispensing in the city.” Despite such auspicious beginnings, Strachan himself insisted that there was “nothing remarkable” about his childhood (1969, 1–2). After attending a local grammar school, he found his way into King’s College, Aberdeen, on a small

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bursary. But at the age of fifteen, upon his father’s sudden death, the young scholar was forced to fund his studies by working as a private teacher (5). Thus commenced a career in education that would take him to Upper Canada, where, years later, he would become the founder of two universities and a proponent of residential school education for Indigenous children. Although Strachan left Scotland to seek a better life in Canada, where he abandoned the Presbyterian kirk in favour of the Anglican communion (A. Taylor 201, 235), his Scottish roots ran deep. His literary editor, Wanda Campbell, remarks that Strachan not only carried his intellectual and cultural “heritage with him in his heart” but throughout his life he also “spoke with a Scottish brogue so thick that strangers had difficulty understanding him” (xvii–xviii). Strachan was a child during the Scottish Enlightenment’s zenith years, a time when “intellectual celebrities” such as Adam Smith, William Robertson, Henry Home, and Adam Ferguson – key contributors to Strachan’s intellectual and cultural heritage – were laying “the mental foundations for the modern world” (Buchan 1, 2). In his poem “The Dialogue,” Strachan paid tribute to these and other Scottish thinkers, calling the author of The Wealth of Nations “Sagacious Smith,” listing Robertson among those historians whose works have brought “honor to our island,” and predicting that “Dr Ferguson’s Essay on Civil Society will always be read with profit and delight” (1996, 23, 37n16, 38n22). Given his admiration for these thinkers, it is hardly surprising that Strachan developed and brought to Canada a particularly rationalistic world view, one coloured by the progressivist philosophy informing contemporary Scottish thought, including the ideology and practice of improvement examined in the previous chapter. By his own account, Strachan was no romantic; an early experience of passionate love had shown him the dangers of heightened feeling and fancy, not only disrupting his studies but also literally driving him to distraction, as he noted in a memoir written at the age of twenty-two. “When I sat down to read I understood nothing, my reason was swallowed up in my imagination and when I awakened from my dream I often found myself in the middle of the road looking towards the place where my charmer dwelt. If I took my dictionary in my hand, I forgot the word I was looking for. I could not command my attention a single moment. My head was turned. One idea engrossed all my faculties, my blood boiled in my veins” (Strachan 1969, 9). When he finally escaped from this “unlucky delirium into

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which my passion precipitated me,” Strachan applied himself to his studies with renewed diligence, learning “to discriminate between hypothesis and facts and to separate the ebullitions of fancy from the deductions of reason” (11–12). Strachan’s emphasis upon reason would inform his approach to religion and religious instruction in important ways. In his view, reason without faith was highly suspect: indeed, as he put it many years later, “knowledge if not founded on religion is a positive evil” (qtd in J.D. Wilson 204). But faith without reason was equally problematic. “We all know how changeable our feelings are, and how apt to lead us astray,” he claimed, for in his eyes any approach to divine worship in which “religion becomes a matter of feeling, rather than of rational belief” (Strachan 1819, 287) was highly suspect. Strachan’s opposition to Methodism – which as I note in chapter 7 fueled his conflict with the Ojibwe chief and Methodist missionary Peter Jones (Kahkewaquonaby) – had much to do with its emphasis on emotional forms of worship, which in his view distorted the understanding of Indigenous converts. Conversely, Strachan blamed a lack of sober rational thought for distorting European and Euro-American understandings of Indigenous culture by disseminating simplistic stereotypes. Thus, in a review article published in the Christian Recorder, he favoured the American Episcopal minister Samuel Farmar Jarvis’s criticisms of both the French rationalist philosopher C.F. Volney, who championed a view of Native Americans as ignoble savages, and the French Romantic philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who championed the opposing idea of savage nobility: “‘Volney, in opposition to the sentiments of Rousseau, has endeavoured to sink the character of the savage in the same proportion as that eccentric author sought to raise it’” (qtd in Strachan 1820b, 174). Strachan admired Jarvis’s critique of Volney and Rousseau because in his view it eschewed reductive stereotypes in favour of a more rational, dialectical approach to understanding and engaging with Indigenous societies. But although he championed rational thought, Strachan was not an enemy of emotion or imagination per se. After criticizing the “ebullitions of fancy” that disrupted his own youthful studies, he made an important qualification, praising forms of imaginative poetry that “raise sympathy and unstring the heart, rous[ing] the soul to virtue” and enabling us to “contemplate with satisfaction the struggles of the Good” (Strachan 1969, 13). In later years, in the wake of his emigration to Upper Canada, Strachan’s sense of poetry’s potential to rouse

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the soul surely informed his own literary pursuits. Although “the Muses” were “not yet familiarized to the Woods of Canada” (1996, 106), Strachan refused to be discouraged. As he confidently declared in his “Verses written August 1802,”     At Kingston, bards may glow with Milton’s fire Or seek a calmer bliss from Dryden’s lyre; A Bacon, too, may grace some future age, Or Newton reading Nature’s inmost page. (Strachan 1996, 54, lines 139–42) These lines nicely encapsulate the balance Strachan sought to achieve between the “bliss” of poetic emotion and imagination on the one hand, and the mental rigour of scientific rationalism on the other. Crucially, in his references to “Milton’s fire” – Strachan’s metaphor for the inspiration that informed such theological epics as Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained – and Bacon’s and Newton’s “grace,” Strachan subtly ties both poetry and science to spiritual concerns, prophesying a future in Upper Canada in which the arts and sciences will flourish together to help create a righteous, morally upright society. Such a vision of Upper Canada is of course highly Eurocentric. But in the central contributing role it accords to imaginative literature, it reveals a side of Strachan that, with the exception of Wanda Campbell’s scholarship, has rarely been appreciated. As Campbell notes in her Introduction to Poetry by John Strachan (1996), historians have generally dismissed Strachan’s verse as unworthy of serious consideration (xi–xiii). But in focusing solely on his prose writings, they have missed an opportunity to consider the contributing role that imaginative art played in Strachan’s overall world view. In this chapter, I follow Campbell’s helpful lead by including discussions of Strachan’s verse among my considerations of his more pragmatic prose writings. In doing so, I hope, like Campbell, to provide a useful glimpse into Strachan’s imaginative life, and to show how this aspect of his character informed his pastoral, pedagogical, and political pursuits. Although, as Campbell notes, Strachan wrote the bulk of his poetry during the early years of his residence in Upper Canada, leaving most of it unpublished, “he never entirely abandoned his passion for the verse that allowed him to voice his fondest dreams and deepest attachments” (W. Campbell xvi). Moreover, Strachan’s love of poetry was evident in the friendship he actively cultivated with the celebrated

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Scottish poet Thomas Campbell, whose Native American romance Gertrude of Wyoming (1809) may well have inspired Strachan to write “The Missionary,” the scathing poetical critique of American colonialism that I examine in the closing section of this chapter. Because historians have tended to focus on Strachan’s role in Upper Canada’s governing Family Compact and in the colony’s mainstream colonial governance, religion, and education policies, my main goal in this chapter is to provide the first detailed analysis of Strachan’s literary and political discourse on Indigenous people in Upper Canada. Before commencing this investigation, however, it will be helpful to consider the various roles he came to play as one of the most powerful and influential members of the colony’s settler society.

C a n a d ia n B ac kgrounds After arriving in Kingston, Upper Canada, in late December 1799, Strachan became tutor to the children of such prominent Loyalists as Richard Cartwright, an influential merchant and politician, and John Stuart, a Church of England clergyman famous for preaching the gospel among the Mohawks of eastern New York state – missionary work that would inspire Strachan’s future plans concerning the conversion and “civilization” of Indigenous people in Upper Canada. Realizing, however, that his opportunities as an educator were limited, he resolved to supplement his teaching career by pursuing an ecclesiastical vocation. Following the example of the Reverend Stuart, himself a former Presbyterian, Strachan converted to Anglicanism, and shortly thereafter, in May 1803, he was ordained deacon of the mission at Cornwall, in the Saint Lawrence Valley, where he soon rose to the position of priest. Thus Strachan commenced a career in the Church of England that would lead to his future aggrandizement as Archdeacon of York and, ultimately, Lord Bishop of Toronto. In Cornwall, moreover, he established a grammar school at which he educated several future members of Upper Canada’s political elite – the so-called Family Compact – including the fatherless John Beverley Robinson, a future chief justice (and the subject of my next chapter), whom Strachan considered an adopted son, and who would become Strachan’s closest friend and ally in later years (Craig 1976). During this early period, Strachan also forged alliances with Montreal’s leading merchants, including the powerful fur trader James McGill, founder of McGill University, a connection further strengthened by Strachan’s marriage

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in 1807 to Ann Wood McGill, the widow of James McGill’s brother Andrew (W. Campbell xvii). With the outbreak of the War of 1812, Strachan moved his family to Upper Canada’s capital at York (later renamed Toronto), where Major-General Sir Isaac Brock made him chaplain of the garrison and of the legislative council. During the war years, as G.M. Craig notes, Strachan “was indefatigable in ministering to the sick, the wounded, and the homeless,” and he “achieved lasting fame in the annals of Upper Canada” through his near-heroic dealings with the enemy on both occasions when the garrison’s regular forces, having withdrawn in the face of certain defeat, left the provincial capital defenseless (Craig 1976). Deeply affected by what he called the “growing horrors of this impious war” (1946, 1), Strachan condemned the tyranny of the United States government in the harshest terms, developing influential anti-American sentiments that would come to inform virtually all his political thought. Given that his wife Ann was “probably raped” and horribly traumatized by invading US soldiers at Cornwall in the autumn following the first American occupation of York, his antiAmericanism was likely deeply personal as well. It is no wonder that he became “the leading ideologue of the Upper Canadian war effort” (Heaman 128, 127). According to Jane Errington, Strachan was not always so vehemently anti-American. Upon first arriving in Canada, he viewed the United States with at least a small measure of sympathy (45), but as the years passed, he developed an antipathy toward the republic and began to think of its citizens as “brutes” (qtd in Errington 45), a comment justifying William Kilbourn’s characterization of Strachan as “the patron saint of Yankee-baiters” (13). One can appreciate the hardening of Strachan’s attitude by comparing some of his pre- and post-war comments on the American people and their mode of government. Before the war, for example, he repeated the claim, popular among scholars of the Scottish Enlightenment, that national identities were shaped in part by climatic influences. Since colder climates were considered physically and intellectually bracing while warmer climates were thought to promote laziness and dissolution, the human “animal,” Adam Ferguson claimed, “always attained to the principal honours of his species within the temperate zone” (182). Echoing this argument in an article published in the Kingston Gazette a year before the outbreak of hostilities, Strachan similarly claimed that “all the branches of knowledge are carried to the highest perfection” in

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“northern nations,” where people’s souls are “raised to exertion by their native storms.” For this reason, he argued, “the natives of colder and more severe climates far surpass the inhabitants of the milder sky.” Moreover, whereas the temperate north tended to promote societies characterized by liberty and justice, the intemperate south promoted “despotic” societies wherein “slavery was rife” (qtd in Errington 45). As Errington observes, Strachan’s argument implicitly pitted the northern nations of Britain and Canada against the more southerly United States (45), but in attributing these nations’ differences to climatic influences, he placed much of the blame for America’s perceived shortcomings on the country’s geography rather than on its cultural institutions. However, after experiencing first-hand the outrages caused by American military aggression in Upper Canada, Strachan came “to believe firmly in the evil consequences of a republican form of government” (45). Thus, during and after the War of 1812, Strachan would formulate ideas and policies in religion, education, and politics designed to protect Upper Canada’s British subjects and Indigenous allies “from the contagious & profligate example of our present enemies” (Strachan 1946, 59). Following the war, Strachan was rewarded for his service with an honorary appointment to the colony’s executive council, becoming a permanent, salaried member in 1817. In this position, which he held for nearly twenty years, he accepted “special responsibilities for the Church and education” (D. Flint 47, 61), responsibilities that would affect not only Upper Canada’s settler society but also the First Nations. Moreover, in 1820, Strachan would further enhance his already impressive political influence by joining the colony’s legislative council, a position he occupied until 1841 (Craig 1976) and which, in concert with his role on the executive council, encouraged some people to consider him “the province’s first un-official prime minister” (J.D. Wilson 204). Strachan also continued an impressive ascent in his ecclesiastical duties, becoming Archdeacon of York in 1827 and Toronto’s first Anglican bishop in 1839. According to one account, he wielded such influence in his combined clerical and political roles that “for a time [he] actually directed the destinies of Upper Canada” (Roberton 11). One can easily appreciate why Strachan has been called the colony’s “most consummate politician” (Spragge i) and “one of the most remarkable characters in the early history of Ontario” (D. Flint 7). Although scholars have written at length about Strachan’s roles in mainstream colonial society, comparatively little has been said about

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his efforts to shape First Nations history and governance in Upper Canada. In this chapter, I address this omission by examining in detail his numerous writings about Indigenous culture, considering in particular his stance on the civilization, religious conversion, and education of the First Peoples resident in the colony. To accomplish this goal, I analyze not only Strachan’s relevant prose writings but also his imaginative poetry, which Wanda Campbell has made available in a fine critical edition published by the Canadian Poetry Press.

S t r ac h a n a n d “ T h e I mprovement o f t h e In di ans” 1 In a review of Samuel Farmar Jarvis’s A Discourse on the Religion of the Indian Tribes of North America (1820), Strachan posed the following question: “But … what are the Indians to us” given that “they are rapidly disappearing from the face of the earth, and in a little time they will be no more seen?” Invoking the commonplace idea that Native people would soon be extinct, while at the same time rejecting the notion that nothing could be done for them, Strachan answered his question thus: “To us they are much, both as men and Christians. As men, they have the claims of brethren; as Christians, they are united in the same Lord. Have we not reduced them to a mere handful – deprived them of their lands, and taught them our vices; and shall we not endeavor, before it be too late, to rescue the small remnant that is left, by communicating to them the imperishable blessings of the Gospel?” (Strachan 1820b, 229). For Strachan, the evangelical effort to bring Native people into the Christian fold was both a benevolent response to the Indians’ humanity and status as “brethren” and a way for the white man to atone for the very real and lamentable sins of colonialism. As he stated in his report on the “Religious State of the Indians in Upper Canada” (1838), “humanity as well as religion requires something to be done for the Indians” (1.114). In Strachan’s view, however, the missionary work that would ameliorate the Indians’ physical and spiritual condition posed numerous challenges. “In a Christian Country,” he argued, you have no difficulties to conquer in making a man a Christian, compared to those which meet you in converting a Heathen; the former is like a cleared field, you have only to sow the seed, and pray to God to give it increase; but the latter is the same field in

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a state of nature, covered with trees and brambles, which must be all cut down, grubbed up, and cleared, before you can attempt to sow any of the seed – and even then, the crop will be often small and imperfect, the prejudices leave rankling weeds – there is much ignorance and remains of superstition which require many years to eradicate and remove – and after all, the same amiableness, simplicity, and sweetness of Christian temper and disposition, may not be effected. (Strachan 1819–20, 404) As I have noted elsewhere (Hutchings 2016, 304–6), Strachan develops in this passage a common colonial metaphor – the Christian-agrarian trope of “planting the gospel”2 – to characterize evangelical work in Upper Canada. In his view, “the state of nature” by no means signified a morally beneficial condition (as it did for Romantics such as JeanJacques Rousseau).3 On the contrary, as a locus of “ignorance” and “superstition,” it represented a stumbling stone to moral progress. In the context of a colonial society whose every “settler hate[d] a tree” (Jameson 2008, 61), Strachan’s claim that it was necessary for the Aboriginal forest to be “cut down, grubbed up, and cleared” highlighted a striking connection between the destruction of Indigenous ecosystems and the colonization of Native peoples. Just as Strachan the settler championed the colony’s physical deforestation, arguing that there was no room in Upper Canada even for “the preservation” of “beautiful and … picturesque” trees and woods due to their harbouring of crop-eating “vermin” (1820c, 76), so Strachan the evangelical cleric understood Indigenous culture as something to be eradicated to make way for the establishment of Christian cultural knowledge and civilization. In Strachan’s view, the immense challenge involved in removing the “trees and brambles” of Indigenous cultural systems, and the uncertain success that accompanied such labour, made the Anglican Church’s employment of Aboriginal missionaries – a common practice among Upper Canada’s Methodists – highly problematic. After becoming Bishop of Toronto, when he was asked why he had “not yet ordained any of the Indians to act as Missionaries,” he responded as follows: It will be found hazardous to admit them without long training, and a more than ordinary assurance that they will continue temperate. There is no deficiency of natural talent and ability; for the Indian is often found precocious, acute, and discerning; but there

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appears to be an indolence in his constitution, which looks wistfully for excitement; and to guard against the causes of improper excitement, virtuous habits must be well formed, and till such habits become as it were part of the man, they cannot be safely entrusted with the instruction of their countrymen, or allowed to have unrestrained intercourse with the careless and dissolute portion of the whole population, – and, unfortunately, few others are to be met with living among the Indians. (Strachan 1847, 26) Although Strachan goes on to argue that “a Missionary can never acquire much influence [with the Indians], until he can freely speak their language” (1847, 47), he believed that Indigenous converts, including missionaries, were predisposed to moral backsliding, and that any evangelical benefits derived from their linguistic fluency would thus be put at risk. For Strachan, in short, the Indian’s persistent “constitution[al]” “indolence” and desire for “excitement” are akin to the trees and brambles that covered the physical and metaphorical landscape. Without the continual grubbing up and rooting out of such traits, they would spring forth anew like pestilential weeds, destroying the fruits even of the most heroic missionary’s labour. Having given the issue of Aboriginal education a great deal of thought during the decades since he had worked as LieutenantGovernor Sir Peregrine Maitland’s “chief adviser” (Smith 1987, 102), Strachan proposed the following remedy to the above-described predicament: “The Indian, in order to give him the best opportunity of becoming what we desire, and in particular a good Missionary, ought to be removed in early infancy from his parents, and carefully nurtured in a seminary or family where he would seldom or ever see bad examples, or see them only to abhor them. The result, in most cases, would no doubt reward the labour and expense of the experiment, and we trust that some such experiments will now be made” (Strachan 1847, 27). As I have previously shown (Hutchings 2016, 305–6), this passage adumbrates the very logic that would inform the establishment of Canada’s notorious Indian residential school system in the postConfederation era. In the context of Strachan’s metaphorical scenario of “planting the gospel,” the removal of Indigenous infants from their families and communities promised to clear the tree- and bramblestrewn ground of Indigenous culture, thereby guaranteeing a fruitful harvesting of heathen souls. “To secure the minds of children, to open their understandings, and fortify them with good principles,” he

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claimed during the period in which he advised Maitland, “is to cut up vice and idolatry by the roots” (Strachan 1819–20, 408; emphasis added). Given such rhetoric, it is likely that Strachan influenced Maitland’s “civilizing plan” for the First Nations, the focus of which, as John S. Milloy has shown, “was very much on the children” (15). Elsewhere in his writing, however, Strachan contradicts his racialist argument concerning the Indian’s special tendency toward backsliding, acknowledging that the same failure often afflicts Upper Canada’s white Christians. Indeed, in his reference to the “bad examples” to which Indian children are exposed in the backcountry, he includes immoral whites – the “dissolute portion of the whole population” (Strachan 1847, 26–7) – whose corrupting influence prevents Indigenous men from becoming good missionaries. As he frankly admits, many of the province’s white people were in desperate need of moral guidance. For Strachan and other white Christian evangelists,4 the vicious example of such men – whom Anna Jameson, anticipating the modern-day epithet “white trash,” called colonial society’s “ruffian refuse” (2008, 363) – posed major difficulties. For one thing, it made Indigenous people question the moral authority of the white man’s culture. As the Anglo-Pequot writer William Apess observed in his 1831 memoir A Son of the Forest, Native Americans often responded to the white missionary’s proselytizing by saying, “your doctrine is very good, but the whole course of your [race’s] conduct is decidedly at variance with your profession – we think the whites need fully as much religious instruction as we do” (Apess 71). Making a similar argument, George Copway claimed that immoral whites “caused the ruin and the downfall of the Indians of North America,” encouraging the Indigenous people with whom they had come into contact to reason of them thus: “If these are the specimens of civilized life,” let us avoid “becom[ing] civilized after the same manner” (1851a, 305–6). To his credit, Strachan did not hesitate to acknowledge the truth of such arguments. Indeed, he worried that the circumstances of rural life in Upper Canada worked against the moral development of all white settlers. People who “live scattered on their farms, cut off from that daily intercourse which polishes and softens the manners, [and] confined to family circles,” he argued, develop “selfish and contracted [ideas], and they are little disposed to trouble themselves about any other living thing than what contributes immediately to their comfort. In such circumstances, the social affections sleep or expire, [and] their deportment becomes rough and forbidding.” As a result,

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“the first clergyman” to enter such remote settlements “finds himself not only engaged to preach the Gospel, but to preach civilization” (Strachan 1827, 25–6). Although Strachan appears to make a distinction here between “the Gospel” and “civilization,” his claim that the missionary must “preach civilization” suggests the extent to which the settlers’ civil shortcomings – their roughened “manners,” forbidding “deportment,” and selfish concern for personal “comfort” – were also the signs of a moral failure. Among colonial administrators, Strachan was far from alone in worrying about the potentially adverse consequences of life in the bush and clearings. According to Sir Francis Bond Head, the “convulsion in … habits” that attended emigration from Europe to the New World could cause even the most refined gentleman to fall from the ladder of social development, making him “plunge … from a high state of civilization to that mode of life which belongs to its earliest stage” (Head 1828, 29–30). Writing less abstractly, Strachan’s friend and former student John Beverley Robinson said much the same thing, arguing that “when a young man of liberal education is placed in a remote wilderness, with nothing around him to invite to the pursuits of literature and science, and no rational amusements within his reach, there is a great danger that even the well-disposed will yield to the temptations, or rather I should say to the discouragements, of their position. To the unthrifty and heedless it is certain ruin.” Due to a lack of moral supervision, young men in the wilderness were particularly at risk. “Withdrawn from the observation of parents and friends, they are delivered from a most powerful check upon the impulse of vicious propensities”; as a consequence, such men were easily prone to suffer “a ruinous loss of reputation” (Robinson 1840, 34). For Strachan, even men of the cloth were susceptible to moral ruination once they entered the backcountry. To be sure, their calling was potentially ennobling. As he argued in The Christian Recorder, “a more correct and devout knowledge of the Scriptures, a greater zeal, a more fervent spirit of prayer, attend Missionary exertions; so that as the Heathens are turned from darkness to light, those by whom they are converted become more and more perfect” (Strachan 1819– 20, 284). Nevertheless, the task of ministering “to rude and uncultivated nations” (286) was fraught with such moral peril that Strachan admonished missionaries “not to attempt the conversion of Indians singly” but always to work in the company of fellow evangelists and civilized Christians. “The Missionaries must not be deprived of social

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intercourse, by which, instead of elevating the Indians,” he claimed, they would themselves be “in danger of sinking into the savage state. They ought to settle among the Indians in numbers, four or five, with their families, and in their conduct they must never forget their motto, ‘be ye as wise as serpents, and harmless as doves’” (1820b, 225). Although he acknowledged the existence of white missionaries who, in the course of their labours among the First Nations, fell from the straight and narrow path of civilized Christian conduct, Strachan waxed defensive when such actions threatened to tarnish the Church’s reputation among the general populace. “Are we to become indignant, “he asked, “because a few out of a great number of Missionaries have misapprehended their qualifications, and are not found able to maintain that respectability, which is essential to their success, or that discretion, which is requisite to govern a savage mind, even though their lives depend upon it?” (Strachan 1819–20, 286). According to Strachan, one should always bear in mind the heroic nature of wilderness evangelism and be slow to judge fallen missionaries. “Why express so much admiration at fortitude and boldness of daring in temporal matters, even when unsuccessful, and deny the smile of approbation to the poor Missionary, whose life is so frequently in danger and sometimes the sacrifice of his zeal? A correct knowledge of facts would soon remove this unnatural prejudice[;] we could then apply the case to ourselves, and be able to estimate more correctly the labours, the dangers, and difficulties, which attend the preaching of the Gospel among savage nations” (286). Despite the many difficulties he associated with missionary activity, Strachan retained a strong sense of optimism concerning Indigenous people’s ability to understand and embrace Christian doctrine. In his review of Jarvis’s A Discourse on the Religion of the Indian Tribes of North America, he quoted the author’s description of Native American religion to illustrate the extent to which Aboriginal and Christian beliefs were compatible. Because Jarvis’s ideas came to inform Strachan’s official report on the “Religious State of the Indians in Upper Canada” (1838), they are worth quoting here at length: Like all other nations unblessed with the light of Christianity, the Indians are idolators; but their idolatry is of the mildest character, and has departed less than among any other people from the form of the primeval truth. – Their belief in a future state is clear and distinct, debased only by those corporeal associations which

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proceed from the constitutional operations of our nature, and from which, even Christians, therefore, are not totally exempt. – They retain among them the great principle of expiation for sin, without which, all religion would be unavailing – and they acknowledge, in all the common occurrences of life, and even in their very superstitions, the overruling power of Divine Providence, to which they are accustomed to look up with an implicit confidence, which might often put to shame the disciples of a purer faith.   Provided, then, that their suspicions respecting every gift bestowed by the hands of white men, can be overcome, the ­comparative purity of their religion renders it so much the ­easier to propagate among them the Gospel of Salvation. (qtd in Strachan 1820b, 222) Strachan found this passage attractive because, like Jarvis, he believed that Native American religious beliefs originated with a “divine revelation” regarding “a future state of rewards and punishments” (1820b, 219), the same revelation that inspired the Christian faith. As Jarvis claimed in the passage just quoted, Indian “idolatry” was “of the mildest character” because, although like all pagan religions it had “departed” from “the form of the primeval truth,”5 it had retained key elements of this original revelation; hence Jarvis’s reference to “the comparative purity” of Native American religion. For Strachan, such an argument boded well for the potential success of missionary work among Indigenous nations, since it implied that Aboriginal and Christian beliefs, howsoever different they might now be, were not radically at odds. It thus supported an optimistic view that Native people – whose beliefs were already characterized by a “comparative purity” – might be guided out of the sorry “state of nature” toward an orthodoxy that would replace “debased … corporeal associations” with a fully purified, properly dualistic understanding of earthly existence, one that vanquished paganism by subordinating body to spirit and nature to culture, locating truth in an abstract realm beyond the apprehension of the five senses. Strachan found Jarvis’s discourse on Indian religion so convincing that he effectively plagiarized parts of it nearly two decades later for use in his report on the “Religious State of the Indians in Upper Canada” (1838), which he wrote at the request of LieutenantGovernor Sir George Arthur to help guide Upper Canada’s Indigenous

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governance policy. “In truth the obstacles in the way of converting the Indians,” he claimed, “are not so great as with other Pagan nations, for their Paganism is of the mildest character – They believe in a future State of existence tho debased with corporeal associations – They retain among them the knowledge of the great principle of expiation & confide in a superintending Providence” (Strachan 1838, 115; emphasis added). Although Strachan’s report does not acknowledge any debt to Jarvis, the italicized passages indicate nearly word-forword borrowings from Jarvis’s text, and his claim that the Indians had “retain[ed]” key elements of Christian belief demonstrates his continued adherence to the idea that traditional Indigenous religion had its origins in divine revelation. Clearly, Strachan had either internalized Jarvis’s words and used them without recalling their source, or he had directly consulted Jarvis’s book without attribution when he wrote his report. Strachan also used Jarvis’s insights to support his own partisan denominational politics, claiming that Indians were more receptive to Christian truths when the missionaries working among them embraced Anglicanism, “the religion of their great Father over the water” (115). Given Strachan’s unsuccessful efforts to make Peter Jones and the Credit River Mississauga forsake their adopted Methodism in favour of the Anglican communion (a circumstance discussed in chapter 7), his claim here seems more an expression of his own political and denominational desire than a statement of fact. The similarities that Jarvis and Strachan identify between Indigenous and Christian forms of belief were not enough, however, to ensure the missionary’s success in the backcountry. In Strachan’s view, the “erratic” nature of a nomadic forest life inevitably distracted Indigenous people from the pursuit of Christian truth (Strachan 1838, 112). “It appears indeed impossible to make any great or permanent religious impressions upon them,” he claimed, “without first effecting a radical change in their mode of life and moral habits. So long as they live in small parties or detached families, and exist principally by hunting, they must remain savage” (1819–20, 223). Since in Strachan’s mind a degree of “civilization” was a prerequisite to Christian conversion, he argued that “the first labours of the Missionary should … be directed to that of collecting the Indians into villages; he must show them how to cultivate their lands, and instruct them in the more simple occupations of domestic economy; they must feel the substantial advantages of settling around him, and finding that he has made their condition in time more comfortable, they will give him

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their confidence, and more readily attend to what he tells them about eternity” (224–5). Fortunately for the implementation of Strachan’s settlement plan (which, as Charles M. Johnston notes, was reminiscent of Chief John Norton’s proposal for the Grand River Six Nations [1964, xcii]), the effort to encourage Indigenous people to congregate in villages was being helped along by environmental changes that were making a traditional woodland existence increasingly difficult to sustain: “now that they have begun to be convinced by the scarcity of game, that they can no longer live by hunting, they will be the more easily persuaded to adopt the habits of civilized life” (Strachan 1846, 16). Knowing, however, that the “wicked example” of many backcountry whites, especially those merchants who dealt in “the liquid poison,” could easily disrupt the “civilizing” process, Strachan advised that “among the American Indians, the Missionaries ought not only to instruct, but have authority to exclude from their villages every white man: for without this power, their labours will produce little or no effect.” But in exercising such authority, the missionaries needed to practice the utmost diplomacy. Thus, Strachan advised that the exclusion of whites must not “be exerted in a manner offensive to the chiefs of the tribes; it must be done with their consent” and “through them, as the proper organs” (1819–20, 226). Among other things, Strachan’s desire to form Native villages in Upper Canada’s interior regions made him an enthusiastic proponent of the Manitowaning settlement on Manitoulin Island, the product of Treaty 45, which Lieutenant-Governor Sir Francis Bond Head negotiated with a council of Anishinaabe chiefs in August 1836. As noted in chapter 7, Head favoured this location because of its remoteness from the settled regions of the province. Like Strachan, he believed that Indigenous people needed to be protected from the contaminating influences of morally vicious white men. When Strachan first visited Manitowaning in July 1842, he travelled from the mainland via canoe, just as Head had done six years earlier. During this journey, which took several days, Strachan’s hopes for the success of the settlement were supported by an unexpectedly touching wilderness experience, which he subsequently described in uncharacteristically romantic language. “On the first night of our encampment, I discovered that one of our canoes was manned by converted Indians from our mission at the Manatoulin [sic]. Before going to rest they assembled together, sung a hymn in their own language, and read some prayers which had been translated for their use from the Liturgy. There was something

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indescribably touching in this service of praise to God upon these inhospitable rocks; the stillness, wildness, and darkness, combined with the sweet and plaintive voices, all contributed to add to the solemn and deep interest of the scene. I felt much affected with this simple worship, and assisted in conducting it every evening until we reached the Manatoulin [sic] Island.” After witnessing similar scenes on Manitoulin Island itself, where “the sons and daughters of the forest” joined together in “plaintive and beautiful singing,” the “deeply affected” Bishop of Toronto wrote that he “was nearly overcome” with emotion and that he “felt with becoming gratitude to God, that the miserable condition of the long-neglected Indians of this country would now be ameliorated through the medium of our Holy Catholic Church” (Strachan 1846, 11). As my discussion in chapter 7 demonstrates, the Manitoulin Island settlement scheme came under harsh criticism in the wake of its establishment. Mississauga chiefs Joseph Sawyer (Nawahjegezhegwabe) and Peter Jones resisted it vigorously, helping to make the scheme a particular object of contention with the Aborigines Protection Society in England, whose Report on the Indians of Upper Canada called it “reprehensible” (British and Foreign 17). But despite minor setbacks (Strachan 1847, 47), Strachan remained confident in the practical and moral efficacy of the settlement plan: The object of the Government in forming a settlement in the Manitouawning [sic] Island is worthy of all praise, – being to collect the Indians, who receive presents and other assistance annually, in one place, and gradually to enable them to support themselves from the produce of the land. At present they are scattered over an immense surface of barren territory, – there being seldom more than three families together, and frequently only one in a single place, and all living in the most wretched manner. The wild animals, too, have become so scarce from the barrenness of the soil, the severity of the climate, or their destruction by the Indians at all seasons, that even the most active of this people fail in procuring for themselves a sufficient supply of food. Many die annually from cold and hunger; and to preserve life and render them more comfortable, it was thought the wisest and most convenient plan to build villages for them on different parts of the island and train them to agriculture. (Strachan 1847, 47)

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For Strachan, the Manitoulin Island settlement scheme, which he attributed to Upper Canada’s former lieutenant-governor, Sir Peregrine Maitland, was first and foremost a product of the British government’s benevolent concern to ensure the Indians’ survival and well-being in a colonial world that could no longer support traditional ways of life. But as “the most convenient plan,” it was also designed to be administratively efficient and cost-effective. Strachan the politician knew (to quote the Scottish historian John Millar) that “the public magistrate finds it much more difficult to extend and support his authority over a multitude of individuals, dispersed through a wide country, than over a small number, confined to a narrow district” (Millar 58). Believing that the Manitoulin settlement “ought to embrace all the Indians who are in the habit of frequenting the … Island” (Strachan 1847, 48) and that all “the small tribes as are scattered round the shores of Lake Huron” should be “transfer[red]” there as well (Strachan 1838, 113), he refused to grant Ojibwe Chief Shingwaukonse’s request to establish a separate Anglican mission on the mainland at nearby Garden River. Although Strachan was impressed by the chief’s request, he told John Beverley Robinson that Shingwaukonse’s people “‘were too few & will be much better off [at Manitowaning]’” (qtd in Chute 98). But if in favouring Manitoulin Island Strachan sometimes seemed insensitive to the wishes of Indigenous people themselves, he was ultimately motivated by a firm conviction that their “civilization” must precede their Christian conversion. By gathering as many Native people as possible at Manitoulin Island’s Manitowaning settlement, where they would be taught to farm the land, Strachan hoped to begin the civilizing processes that he believed would facilitate missionary activity among the First Nations of Upper Canada. Although on his second pastoral visit to Manitowaning three years later he expressed disappointment that the congregation was smaller and the settlement “was but little improved,” Strachan blamed the Indians’ “erratic” nature for these setbacks, remaining convinced that the settlement plan was in their best interest (1847, 47).

S t r ac h a n E n c o u n ters the Mus e Because Strachan used poetry as well as prose to express his thoughts about the colonization of Indigenous North Americans, my discussion would be incomplete without a consideration of his verse, especially “The Missionary,” a long poem encapsulating Strachan’s critique of

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American Indigenous governance policy. Although much remains uncertain about this poem (including whether or not Strachan actually meant to title it “The Missionary”),6 Strachan’s editor, Wanda Campbell, makes a convincing case for its having been written “in the years leading up to or during the War of 1812,” a time when Strachan’s anti-Americanism was increasingly virulent. Noting that the poem is set around the time of the American Revolution (W. Campbell 184) and that Strachan was a critical reader of Thomas Campbell’s Gertrude of Wyoming (1809), a long poem criticizing British Loyalist and allied Native forces for perpetrating Pennsylvania’s infamous Wyoming Valley massacre during the Revolutionary War, Campbell suggests that “The Missionary” was likely motivated by its author’s “desire to set the record straight” about America’s founding conflict (184, xxiii). Although Strachan, like John Robinson, admired Thomas Campbell and cultivated his friendship during visits to London, he believed the poet’s sympathy for the Americans was misplaced; hence, in his own poetry, he presented a very different version of historical events. One of Strachan’s brief untitled poems, likely composed in September 1812 (Strachan 1946, 1), can shed light on “The Missionary,” for in it Strachan, like Campbell in Gertrude of Wyoming, paints a portrait of British-American hostilities in which helpless innocence is assailed by the “growing horrors” of the Revolutionary War. In this “impious” conflict, a “vanquish’d Loyalist” father is taken captive by republican forces, leaving his children “begging bread,” while his distraught wife, “Weeping o’er her sucking child,” runs “through the wild” in a “frantic” effort to escape “the coming foes triumphal car.” Given the poem’s “wild” setting, one might expect the “stroke” that threatens to kill these innocent victims to come from a tomahawk wielded by a stereotyped Indian warrior who, like the monstrous Indian antagonist in Campbell’s poem, knows no Christian mercy. But rather than depicting an allied British-Indian massacre of peaceable American settlers, Strachan turns the tables on Gertrude of Wyoming, portraying an American massacre of British Loyalists whose only crime is love for one another and devotion to the Crown. Although, like Campbell’s poem, “The Missionary” highlights the persecution of innocent people, its sympathies lie with Native Americans rather than with the Euro-American settlers who displaced them. As Strachan’s most forceful anti-American and pro-Indian diatribe, the poem deserves careful scrutiny; but before commencing a close reading, I want to illuminate its central concerns by situating

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it in the context of Strachan’s larger discourse on United States-Indian relations. As Alan Taylor has argued, the British military alliance with Native Americans was among the most controversial issues during the War of 1812 due to the Indians’ stereotyped reputation for cruelty in warfare (203–33). Not only did American Patriots loudly proclaim the inhumanity of this alliance but so too did prominent British politicians in a critique going back to the Revolutionary War. This critique’s most famous proponent was Edmund Burke, who, in a speech delivered to Parliament in early 1778, argued passionately against Britain’s alliance with Indian warriors whose supposed “‘native cruelty’” “‘consisted in human scalps, in human flesh, and the gratifications arising from torturing, mangling, roasting alive by slow fires, and frequently even devouring their captives’” (qtd in Fulford 54, 184). Although recent scholarship has exposed such stereotypes as aspects of British and American racist wartime propaganda,7 Strachan did not challenge the idea of Indigenous cruelty per se. Rather, he questioned its cause, seeing it not as an inherent racial trait but as a justifiable response to the horrors of American anti-Indian aggression during the Revolutionary War. Prior to the revolution’s outbreak, he asserted, his ecclesiastical mentor, Reverend John Stuart, had taught “the Indians of the Mohawk Valley” the values of “Christian charity, forbearance, justice and benevolence,” but with the commencement of hostilities the peaceable Indians were “transformed by [American] arms into the most vindictive rage and savage ferocity” (Strachan 1819a, 6–7). In a letter written on 1 November 1812 to the British abolitionist William Wilberforce, Strachan sought to justify a renewed British alliance with Indigenous warriors, claiming that since the Revolution, the American government had sought revenge against the Indians for their British alliance by “systematically … exterminating” them, “if not always by open force, at least by an insidious policy” of taking their lands “and driv[ing] them back into the interior.” Such treatment, Strachan claimed, proved that Thomas Jefferson’s muchtouted civilizing policy was pure “Cant” cynically designed “to gain applause from foreign nations,” and that “the American government neither attend to the feelings or rights of the poor Indians.” This insensitivity to the Indians’ feelings and rights was problematic, Strachan claimed, not only because it was grossly inhumane but also because it violated Indigenous nations’ sovereignty. Since the Indians “are independent,” he argued, “they have a right to the privileges of

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independent nations” (1946, 22–3) – a right the Americans denied them but which, he implied, the British respected. In contrast to the United States, Strachan would later claim, the “treatment bestowed upon the Indians by the British has been at all times humane, and the greatest deference has been paid to their manners and customs” (1820c, 147).8 Although such contemporary chiefs as John Brant, Peter Jones, and Joseph Sawyer would surely have challenged this self-congratulatory claim, Strachan appears to have believed it wholeheartedly. Undoubtedly, such remarks contributed to the developing myth of British and Canadian humanity to Indigenous people, which many non-Aboriginal Canadians still proudly embrace today. In other letters written in November 1812, Strachan claimed that the United States’ recent invasion of Upper Canada was motivated primarily by the Americans’ desire to defeat the Indians once and for all. In his correspondence with James McGill, for example, he claimed that the conquest of Upper Canada was of “incalculable” importance to the Americans, since “the possession of it would give them the complete command of the Indians who must either submit or starve within two years and thus leave all the Western frontier clear & unmolested. The Americans are systematically employed in exterminating the Savages, but they can never succeed while we keep possession of this country. This my Dear Sir is the true cause of the war, & so long as there is any prospect of conquering us the war will continue” (Strachan 1946, 25).9 Strachan’s views of the Americans’ motivations were of course highly reductive, despite the fact that some prominent American voices clambered loudly for the Indians’ outright “extermination”; as Alan Taylor has shown, the American decision to declare war on Britain was in fact a highly complex one having much to do with unresolved conflicts stemming from the American Revolution, especially contentious distinctions between “the king’s subject and the republic’s citizen” (206, 4). Strachan’s rather simplistic claim that the Americans were in fact fighting a war of Indian extermination that would be foiled by a successful British defence of Upper Canada likely appealed to his sense of Christian charity and paternalistic regard for Indigenous people. Clearly, the British were selfless protagonists in this imagined scenario and the Indians needy recipients of their charitable assistance. As already noted, Strachan did not deny long-standing stereotypes concerning the violent ferocity of Indigenous modes of warfare. “That they fight in a savage manner is true,” he conceded in his letter to

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Wilberforce; but he nevertheless asserted the need – indeed, the moral obligation – for British North Americans to “use every means which God has given us to repel” the American invaders. Besides, if the British were to deny the Indians’ “right to defend their lives and property” by refusing to let them join the fray, he claimed darkly, “they will turn against us & massacre our wives & children, while we are on the lines opposing an invading force” (Strachan 1946, 21). Such a threat of bloody Aboriginal violence against British women and children may well have unsettled the famous humanitarian Wilberforce (who, as I note in chapter 5, was disturbed by Chief John Norton’s war dance when he met the latter in England), and perhaps in mentioning it, Strachan ran the risk of undermining the morality of his argument in favour of Britain’s military alliance with the Indians. But even in asserting the likelihood that unallied Native warriors might “massacre” Upper Canada’s most defenceless settlers, Strachan made it plain that culpability for such a horrific scenario would ultimately rest not with the Indians themselves but with the Americans, since it was the American aggressors who had invaded “our peaceable shores.” Thus, he told Wilberforce, “when you hear of the cruelty of the Savages, think of the still greater cruelty of the Cabinet at Washington” (21–2). In “The Missionary,” Strachan depicts the supposed cruelty of Indian warfare as the very product of the United States’ unjust and inhumane treatment of Native Americans. Its central character, Logan, is modelled on the legendary John Logan (1725–1780), the famous Iroquois leader who renounced his friendship with white Americans and went on the warpath after American soldiers massacred his family in events leading to the outbreak of Lord Dunmore’s War in 1774. In deciding to call his protagonist Logan, Strachan likely had in mind Gertrude of Wyoming: in a note to this poem, Thomas Campbell acknowledged a debt to the famous speech John Logan is said to have made in defence of his attacks on white Americans, a speech Thomas Jefferson published in his 1787 Notes on the State of Virginia (W. Campbell 195).10 By placing the wronged Logan at the centre of his poem and making him its leading Indigenous character, Strachan wished to shine a light on the US government’s mistreatment of Native Americans, exploring in detail the injustice that Campbell’s easily overlooked endnote had merely hinted at, and exposing in the process the questionable grounds upon which Campbell defended the American republic. In the opening lines of “The Missionary,” a party of Tarrantine warriors camped on the American shores of Lake Ontario is awakened at

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night by “hollow sounds” rising from the “placid” waters. Because of Logan’s “prudence keen” and “steady courage,” the Tarrantines choose him, their adopted “son,” to investigate. Embarking on this “dang’rous mission” by canoe, He swiftly glides along Ontario’s shore, Directed by the lab’ring clashing oar; But when his barb’rous foes, the whites, appear, His quiv’ring lips a boiling rage declare. Their cruel wrath had burst upon his head; He mourns a slaughter’d wife and children dead, For distant far their brave protector stood When savage meanness shed their guiltless blood. (Strachan 1996, 109, lines 13–20) Logan’s history echoes that of the Oneida warrior Outalissi – himself modelled on the historical John Logan – in Campbell’s Gertrude, who also mourns the loss of his family as the result of a cruel massacre. But whereas the noble Outalissi’s family is destroyed by a “howling, desolating band” of ignoble warriors led by a fiendish Mohawk chief, the “Monster Brandt” (Campbell 1907, III.xvi; lines 5, 4), Logan’s family is murdered by ignoble and merciless white men. Turning the tables on contemporary stereotypes, Strachan’s poem depicts these white Americans as ruthless barbarians (“barb’rous foes”) who murder Logan’s “guiltless” family in a spirit of “cruel wrath” and “savage meanness.” Given such circumstances, readers are likely to sympathize with Logan’s “boiling rage” at the sight of the arriving “whites”; but when he subsequently falls into a state of “blinded wrath” and resolves to seek “sweet revenge” (Strachan 1996, 109–10, lines 22, 23), his response becomes stereotypical, a manifestation of the primal, predatory violence Europeans often attributed to Indigenous warriors. However, having earlier presented Logan as a “keen” practitioner of “prudence” – one of the cardinal virtues of Platonism and Christianity – Strachan complicates simplistic stereotypes. In Logan’s character he thus provides an interesting antidote to Campbell’s practice of opposing a stereotypical good Indian (the sympathetic Outalissi) to a stereotypical bad one (the antipathetic Brandt). Whereas, to quote Tim Fulford, Campbell “divides Indians into good and bad because he will not explore white ‘savagery’ and because he cannot reconcile what he perceives to be contradictory Indian characteristics” (192), Strachan

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devotes the early lines of his poem to a consideration of “white ‘savagery’” pitted against a Native protagonist embodying a broad spectrum of characteristics: neither merely a noble nor an ignoble savage, Logan is psychologically complex. As the following lines indicate, no such complexity informs the character of Strachan’s white villain, the rum trader “Crafty Rankins” (1996, 110, line 33), a representative of Mammon who leads his men To search these gloomy woods in quest of gold. His Heart, long practis’d in the basest guile, Is slyly cover’d with a siren smile. To grasp at wealth, he’d slaughter or betray The Indian race like common beasts of prey. (Strachan 1996, 110, lines 34–8) These lines nicely encapsulate the duplicity of Strachan’s villain, whose “siren smile” masks his base intentions. Although in his “quest for gold” Rankins represents European commerce – the highest “state” of society according to Scottish Enlightenment theories of human social development – the simile that concludes these lines depicts him as a predatory hunter, thus placing him on the lowest stage of the same developmental hierarchy. In depicting Rankins thus, Strachan muddies the philosophical waters, showing that commerce, rather than representing the pinnacle of human social achievement, can be a morally degenerative force. The fact that Rankins dehumanizes the Indians by treating them “like common beasts of prey” rather than as fellow human beings (or “brethren,” in Strachan’s moral parlance) adds further force to the poem’s critique. Rankins is, in short, a representative par excellence of the “vicious” white men of the backwoods whom, as noted earlier, Strachan criticized for their insidious influence on Indigenous people. Claiming to present a wampum belt to the Tarrantine chiefs as a gift from “Our King,” Rankins tells the Indians that he and his men, following royal “command,” have risked life and limb to accomplish their journey across the ocean and into the American interior, braving numerous dangers to bring the Indians “gifts as shall rejoice your feeling hearts” (Strachan 1996, 110, lines 45, 47, 52). Pretending also to be remorseful for the wrongs perpetrated by Euro-Americans upon Atlantic-coastal Indians such as Logan, he delivers the following conciliatory speech:

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    We know, alas, where lofty trees are found That pois’nous weeds and brambles mar the ground; The verdant plains that feed the nimble deer The crested snake in dreadful horror rear; So fathers oft among their sons behold The dastard coward, the gen’rous and the bold. The last supports the honors of his race; The former lives these honors to disgrace. We seek not, therefore, madly to conceal The faults which former actions must reveal. The crimes the whites have done we here confess And gladly come their errors to redress. (Strachan 1996, 110–11, lines 53–64) Although Rankins deploys the language of religion by “confess[ing]” to past “crimes,” his pious gesture is an empty one: he merely pretends to be a man of pure soul and motive, one of the “gen’rous” sons who abhors the past sins of his “dastard” brothers. The environmental analogy with which he begins his speech – in which he depicts nature as a locus of both good and evil – is particularly interesting given that in a subsequent speech to the assembled warriors, Logan echoes Rankins’s environmental references to argue against the white man’s proposal to establish friendly relations: Look round, my Brothers, to your lofty woods, Your blooming plains transpir’d with crystal floods. Through these, with freedom blest, our Fathers ranged As pleasure bade them, or as seasons chang’d, But freedom fled when strangers press’d our shore, And life’s most grateful joys are known no more. (Strachan 1996, 112, lines 103–8) In Rankins’s speech, the positively valued “lofty woods” provide habitat for “pois’nous weeds and brambles,” while the “verdant plains that feed the nimble deer” also nourish “the dreadful horror” of the “crested snake.” Although Logan’s subsequent references to “lofty woods” and “blooming plains” suggest a direct response to the terms of Rankins’s speech, they do not support such a dualistic view of nature. Whereas for Rankins nature is a site of both good and evil – or, more insidiously, a place where positively valued forests and plains

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nurture underlying evils – for Logan it is quite simply the locus of “pleasure” and “freedom” (the latter being an ultimate good for him since it is “blest”). Rejecting Rankins’s references to nature’s “pois’nous weeds” and snakes, Logan speaks instead of the white man’s “pois’ning manners” (113, line 137), thereby locating poison not in nature but in Euro-American culture. Strachan’s poem is, in short, a biblical allegory in which “artful Rankins” (111, line 79) himself plays the role of the satanic “crested snake” in his own analogy, and the forbidden fruit with which he repeatedly tempts the “guiltless” Indians (109, line 20) in their Edenic American garden is rum, “the pois’nous draught of death” (116, line 270). To ensure that readers fully grasp the biblical allegory, Strachan goes on to yoke the themes of temptation and fall to a perverted version of the Christian dictum Amor vincit omnia (“Love conquers all”), lamenting that “Temptations come again, the warriors fall. / Bewitched they seem and liquor conquers all” (116, lines 283–4). Prior to these events, however, Rankins must first convince the Indians to welcome him and his men into their midst and help them build his desired trading post. Although Logan speaks vehemently against this proposal, the “wise Ethini” – who, like Logan, also embodies “Keen prudence” (Strachan 1996, 113, lines 155, 157) – makes a rational argument in favour of establishing peaceful relations with the whites, ultimately winning the debate when Rankins sweetens the deal by restoring to “the Turtle,” one of the Tarrantine chiefs, his beloved son “just rescu’d from the burning stake.” Having thought his son “long number’d with the silent dead” in the wake of past intertribal hostilities, the grateful chief is “o’ercome with sweet surprise,” receiving the young warrior “with streaming eyes” (111, lines 71, 75, 76). Predictably, however, Rankins’s motives in rescuing the young man and restoring him to his father are wholly self-serving: “To seize advantage, artful Rankins knows / When lost in joy the grateful heart o’erflows” (111, lines 79–80). Having successfully gained the Indians’ gratitude and overwhelmed Logan’s contrary arguments in the process, Rankins requests a small favour in return: We ask no more than room to build a fort Where all the tribe at pleasure may resort To taste the noble gifts we gladly bring As friendly tokens from our gracious King. (Strachan 1996, 111, lines 81–4)

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On the face of things, Rankins’s request seems humble; after all, he requests only enough space in Tarrantine territory to build a fort or “station,” from which he says he will dispense such items as “linens fine, / Beads, knives, and kettles, shining brass, and twine” (113, line 170; 115, lines 233–4). According to Strachan, however, such seemingly minor requests for land were highly suspect in territory coveted by the United States. In his letter to Wilberforce, he claimed that “the American government have established what they call trading posts in the Indian territory under the pretense of supplying [the Indians] with necessaries instead of money for their lands at which posts the most scandalous frauds have taken place” (Strachan 1946, 23). Requests for small plots of land upon which to establish these posts represented the thin edge of a very broad wedge. As Wanda Campbell notes, Strachan in fact had reasonable grounds on which to suspect American government policy regarding Indian lands (188). In a letter written in February 1803 to the governor of Indiana Territory, President Jefferson said candidly that to promote the Indians’ “disposition to exchange lands, which they have to spare and we want, for necessaries, which we have to spare and they want, we shall push our trading houses, and be glad to see the good and influential individuals among them run in debt, because we observe that when these debts get beyond what the individuals can pay, they become willing to lop them off by a cession of lands” (qtd in W. Campbell 189). Although Strachan does not show this precise mechanism at work in “The Missionary,” the American trader Rankins does indeed adopt a policy of manipulating the Indians by encouraging them to obtain goods on credit before demanding repayment of the resultant debts, effectually making the Indians his “slaves” (1996, 119, line 380). Unfortunately for the Tarrantines, Rankins does not speak metaphorically when he tells them they will “taste” his “noble gifts” (line 83): as already noted, he plans to ply them with rum in exchange for valuable furs. A skilled manipulator, he is extraordinarily successful in doing so, virtually enslaving the addicted Indians. “Impell’d by him, the warriors quickly fly” off to seek the coveted pelts, and as a result of the hardships associated with such labour “numerous martyrs die” (Strachan 1996, 115, lines 241–2). This critique of the fur trade’s human consequences is a bit rich given Strachan’s profitable association with Montreal’s leading fur merchants, but it accords with the Aborigines Protection Society’s characterization of the trade as an “exterminating agent,” “the own Sister of the African Slave Trade”

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(British and Foreign 29). Perhaps most interesting is Strachan’s characterization of the fur trade’s Tarrantine victims as “martyrs,” since a martyr is usually someone who willingly dies for a sacred cause. But given that in “The Missionary” he depicts Rankins’s Indian victims as people who at the time of first contact placed their trust fully in God’s “Almighty Power” (1996, 114, line 189), such a characterization seems at least somewhat apt. Unfortunately, the Indians who manage to return to the fort “with peltries loaded” have one goal in mind: to exchange their bounty for “the fav’rite liquor” for which they “keenly … burn” (115, lines 249–50). The corrupting influence of alcohol is suggested by a subtle linguistic reversal: whereas members of the band had earlier acted with “Keen prudence” (109, line 8; 113, line 157), they now “keenly” strive to feed their destructive addiction. Strachan describes the ravages of alcohol at length in the poem. The goblet passes round; the tumults rise. The growing din re-echoes to the skies. Thus, raging breasts with savage passions tore; Those most they hate whom most they lov’d before. (Strachan 1996, 116, lines 257–60) Whereas at the poem’s outset, “savage meanness” is located in the hearts of murderous white men (Strachan 1996, 109, line 20), the same “savage passions” now reside in the breasts of the Indians who, completely transformed under alcohol’s influence, begin to slaughter one another. Even the Turtle, so recently reunited with his lost son, “madly stabs” his “darling” offspring and “laughing wildly knows not what is done” (116, lines 263–4). None of Strachan’s Indians is immune to alcohol’s ravages; even “the wisest Sachems … with eager haste / Drink deep and revel equal to the rest” (116, lines 273–4), falling prey to the deadly poison’s destructive power. Further increasing the Indians’ misery, a “fierce contagion” arrives: “Dire disease, / The baneful small-pox, rages through the tribes” (118, line 334; 117, lines 304–5), sowing further despair and death among the people. Moreover, arriving on the scene in a gruesomely gothic climax, “beasts of prey” devour unburied human corpses and drag still-living victims “from their huts” (117, lines 324–5), while Ethini kills his “dearest friends” and loved ones in what Strachan represents as a damning act of mercy. Thus the Indians vanish from the scene “and leave no trace behind” (118, line 350).

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As for Rankins, he “sadly mourns that cruel death had come” – not out of sympathy for the Indians, but because they have died “Before his debts were paid and cargo home.” Even so, his conscience, “now extremely sear’d / By frequent crimes … calls him forth, his impious cause to plead, / To prove his innocence about the dead” (Strachan 1996, 118, lines 357–60). Thus, in a false process of self-examination, he attempts to “veil his wicked deeds” (119, line 381) by posing a series of self-serving questions and stereotypical justifications: Have I, says he, these savage ruffians slain Or murder’d any of the swarthy train? Can I repel the ravage of disease, Or tell the king of terrors when to cease? And if my coming brought an earlier tomb, Wise Providence had first resolv’d their doom; And how can polish’d colonies increase, Unless mischance cut off the barb’rous race? If policy sometimes prolongs their fate, The whites may justly crush them for their hate. My feelings shudder at the sport they make When roasting throbbing prisoners on a stake. In drunken routs they revel all the night, And in the deepest gambling take delight. Their savage hearts all sacred truth decline, Nor have they knowledge human or divine. What blessings can they lose by timely graves, And what’s their use, unless we make them slaves? (Strachan 1996, 118–19, lines 363–80) Like many Euro-Americans, Rankins attempts to salve his conscience by claiming that the Indians’ “savage hearts” had declined “all sacred truth,” portraying their demise as a product of providential wisdom and justice (while implying, furthermore, that his own actions have been subject to the same heavenly oversight). As previously noted, however, Strachan rejected such a perspective, claiming that the Indians practiced a “mild” form of paganism derived from an original divine revelation, and arguing that it was the duty of a Christian society to reconnect them to those divine roots by sending Christian missionaries to minister among them – and by giving these missionaries the authority to prevent corrupt white men like Rankins from

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associating with them. Thus, early in his poem, he presents the Indians as a pious people whose hearts, though prone to error, nevertheless proclaim “the mighty God of life,” while depicting duplicitous whites such as Rankins as the ones who “fall deserted” by the same omnipotent deity (114, line 187; 112, line 120). As if to show that Rankins himself lacks faith in the theological rationale he uses to justify the genocide of the Tarrantines, Strachan also puts numerous secular arguments into his mouth, including the claim that the growth of “polish’d colonies” requires the extinction of “the barb’rous race.” Declaring that his own “feelings shudder” when he thinks of the tortures Indian warriors inflict upon their enemies, Rankins attributes to himself a degree of moral sensitivity that the poem as a whole never supports. Strachan further emphasizes this hypocrisy when he has Rankins express disgust at the Indians’ “drunken routs.” “Were you to blame when these bright spirits fell, / The victim of the pois’nous drafts you sell?” (1996, 119, lines 385–6), the narrator asks rhetorically, his answer implied in the question itself, which subtly opposes the Indians’ formerly “bright spirits” or souls to the “pois’nous” alcoholic spirits Rankins had peddled among them. As the Tarrantines’ “vile instructor in the paths of vice / Who plung’d them deep in mis’ry’s dire abyss,” Rankins, his soul “extremely sear’d,” merits “no pardon” from “injur’d heaven” (119, lines 390–1; 118, line 359). Tragically, although he is most deservedly hell-bound, he dispatches the hapless Indians to the same destination, thereby playing the role of hell’s emissary in Strachan’s theological vision. If Strachan had indeed meant to call his poem “The Missionary,” he could not have chosen a more ironic title.

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3 The Legal, Literary, and Environmental Passions of Sir John Beverley Robinson If a man were permitted to make all the Ballads, he need not care who should make the Laws of a Nation. Andrew Fletcher, An Account of a Conversation Concerning a Right Regulation of Governments for the Common Good of Mankind

In t ro du c t i on In Canada’s pre-Confederation history, there are few homegrown political figures more influential than John Beverley Robinson (1791– 1863). Descended from an elite family of United Empire Loyalists who emigrated from Virginia to Canada in the wake of the American Revolutionary War, Robinson first laid eyes on Toronto – then called York – in 1798, when its residents numbered a mere 200 souls. One of his earliest childhood memories was of walking beside the coffin of his father, formerly Upper Canada’s surveyor of woods and reserves, down an old Indian trail along the banks of the Don River (Brode 7). Subsequently adopted by Reverend John Stuart, for whom Chief Joseph Brant translated the Book of Matthew into the Mohawk language, and educated by John Strachan, who would become Archbishop of York and first Bishop of Toronto, the orphaned boy imbibed Tory principles and convictions from his early youth. It is thus hardly surprising that he would grow up to be a champion of the British monarchy and the Church of England, eventually becoming a key figure in the Loyalist oligarchy – the so-called Family Compact – that governed Upper Canada. After serving with distinction at the capture of Detroit and in the Battle of Queenston Heights during the War of 1812, Robinson rose quickly through the ranks of public life:

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appointed acting attorney general in 1812, he became solicitor general in 1815, and then attorney general in 1818 (Howes 368). Building on this latter role, which made him “the principal officer of the Crown in the province,” in the 1820s he became the colony’s “de facto government leader” – the “pre-eminent figure in Upper Canadian public life” (Brode 40, 270). Such were his gifts and talents that, in 1829, at only thirty-eight years of age, he was promoted yet again, becoming the youngest person in the British Empire to serve as Chief Justice of the Court of King’s Bench (later Queen’s Bench) (W. Smith 73). The chief justice’s position gave Robinson extraordinary powers in Upper Canada. Not only did it enable him to oversee “all major cases to come before the Court,” and thus to establish legal precedents that would influence Canadian jurisprudence “long after his court had become a memory,” but it also gave him other political powers. At the time of his appointment, the chief justice also served as speaker of the legislative council and president of the executive council. Thus – much to the dismay of the colony’s political reformers – Robinson for a time embodied “all three levels of government – judicial, legislative, and executive” (Brode 235, 244, 165). Moreover, during several extended visits to Great Britain, he cultivated close connections with numerous men of political influence, including the Duke of Wellington and various colonial ministers, who consulted him on aspects of imperial policy. These connections helped Robinson to become “the first Upper Canadian to play a significant role in imperial affairs.” Although he never realized his dream of turning Upper Canada into a “New Albion” governed by a benevolent aristocratic Anglophone elite, his deft application of English common law enabled him to accomplish his goal of “preserv[ing] the British heritage in the new world” (Brode 225, 232, 235). Despite having published a handful of political tracts on topics relevant to Upper Canada and its place in the British Empire, Robinson is not generally considered a man of letters. And yet, his love of literature was strong. Under John Strachan’s tutelage at the Cornwall Grammar School, Robinson came to know and admire the classics and the humanities, and to be exposed to the works of such writers as Virgil, Horace, Shakespeare, Pope, and Goldsmith. An amateur poet, Strachan encouraged his students not only to read poetry but also to write their own verses, a task into which the young Robinson put his heart by composing a birthday ode in honour of his teacher, whose future ecclesiastical and political career would became

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intimately intertwined with his own. So close was the relationship between mentor and mentee that Strachan came to consider Robinson his “adopted son” (Strachan 1946, 37). The literary enthusiasms Robinson acquired under Strachan’s instruction were by no means superficial or fleeting. Later in life, while training for the legal profession as an articled clerk, the future chief justice not only studied the necessary treatises on law but also “read extensively in the great literature of the day, and at times regretted the fact that he was also obliged to study the law” (Brode 8, 9). In this regard, Robinson resembled Strachan himself, who, despite his many accomplishments, sometimes privately wished he had pursued a career devoted to poetry rather than to the Church of England. Like Strachan, Robinson’s favourite contemporary poets included Thomas Campbell and Walter Scott, two of the most celebrated poets of the day in Britain as well as in the United States and Upper Canada. So taken was Robinson by Campbell’s and Scott’s work that, during his first visit to Britain in 1815–17, he went out of his way to cultivate the acquaintance of the famous poets and members of their literary circles. Over the years, legal and political historians such as Patrick Brode and David Howes have helpfully illuminated Robinson’s contributions to early Canadian public life, examining his legal decisions in detail, and accounting for his role as “the archetype of the Loyalist, one of the few veritable embodiments of that profoundly Canadian myth” (Howes 368). Due to the bureaucratic nature of Robinson’s legal and political work, these discussions, though invaluable, paint a rather dry portrait of a man who lived an eventful and often passionate life. In this chapter I want to add some depth to our understanding of Robinson by examining his imaginative life as it found expression in his cultural activities and literary enthusiasms. I focus in particular on the tensions that existed between his Romantic and pragmatic views of nature, examining how these tensions informed his views of Upper Canada’s Indigenous people, views about which very little has yet been written. My primary emphasis is upon Robinson’s formative years, in particular his first extended visit to Britain, during which time he studied law at Lincoln’s Inn Hall, immersed himself in London’s cultural life, cultivated the acquaintance of famous poets, and wrote some poetry of his own. In the course of my discussion, I show how Robinson, like Strachan, often sympathized with the plight of the First Nations, especially during the War of 1812 when he acknowledged the heroic efforts of Chief John Norton and his Mohawk warriors at

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the Battle of Queenston Heights. I also demonstrate how, in the wake of the war and in the face of declining Indigenous influence in colonial affairs, Robinson’s attitude became more cynical and self-interested, especially regarding Norton’s authenticity and authority as a Haudenosaunee leader and diplomat. By examining little-known aspects of Robinson’s early career in transatlantic context, I aim to shed light on the role he played in Upper Canada’s intertwined cultural and environmental histories.

J o h n R o b in s o n a n d the War of 1812 To appreciate the significance of Robinson’s first visit to England, and the sharp contrast it made with his life in Upper Canada, a discussion of his career during and immediately following the War of 1812 is in order. At the outbreak of hostilities, Robinson was a twenty-one-yearold newly commissioned lieutenant in the Third York Militia Regiment. Present during Major-General Sir Isaac Brock’s famous victory at Detroit on 15 August 1812, he was among the officers who entered Fort Detroit to negotiate the enemy’s terms of capitulation (Brode 14). For the young lieutenant, one of the action’s highlights occurred the morning following the American surrender, when, as he later put it, “I had the pleasure of breakfasting with Sir Isaac Brock and with [the Shawnee leader] Tecumseh at an inn at Detroit” (qtd in C.W. Robinson 31). Two months later, he fought in what for Canadians would become the war’s most iconic campaign, the Battle of Queenston Heights. Here, after the gallant but overconfident Brock was shot and killed, General Roger Hale Sheaffe and Britain’s Mohawk allies (fighting under the command of Chief John Norton) reinforced and rallied the British troops, ultimately driving the American invaders from British soil. Written at nearby Brown’s Point the next day, Robinson’s account of the campaign is emotionally taut, relating an uneasy mixture of pride, excitement, and trauma. Immensely relieved that the battle had “terminated so gloriously for this Province,” he was nevertheless shocked by “the price at which [the victory] was purchased.” As he noted in his memorandum, “few things occurred which I had not an opportunity of observing, and what I did see from its novelty, its horror, and its anxiety made so awful an impression on my mind that I have the picture of it just and perfect in my imagination.” For example, in graphic detail, Robinson recalled that “one of our poor fellows had his leg shot off by a ball which carried away the whole calf of another

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lad’s leg.” And speaking of the enemy, he expressed some sympathetic concern for the plight of “miserable wretches suffering under wounds of all descriptions and crawling to our houses for protection and comfort.” Although Robinson’s belief in the righteousness of the British cause never wavered, he did not hide his troubled emotions in the battle’s wake: “The spectacle struck us who were unused to such heart-rending scenes,” he noted, “with horror.”1 In his memorandum on the Battle of Queenston Heights, Robinson provided an unvarnished reflection not only on his personal experience in the theatre of combat but also on the role played by Chief John Norton (Teyoninhokarawen) and his warriors, whose bravery and martial skills saved the fledgling colony from a crushing defeat at the hands of “a far superior army of Americans” (Willig 195). Since, in its depiction of Norton and the Mohawks, Robinson’s description of the battle’s climactic moments differs in significant ways from other contemporary and even modern-day accounts, it is worth discussing here at length. Early in the battle, Robinson noted, the American aggressors took possession of the British battery on Queenston Heights rather handily, but in a successful counterattack, the British troops and their allies dislodged the “villainous aggressors,” who fled the scene in complete disarray: About 3 O’clock Genl. Sheaffe advanced towards the battery on the Mountain thro’ the Woods with the Main body and the field pieces on the right, and Mohawk Indians under Capt. Norton and a Niagara comp[an]y of Blacks proceeded along the brow of the Mountain on the left, and our comp[an]y of Militia with the light comp[an]y of the 49th broke thro’ in the centre. In this manner we rushed thro’ the woods to our encamp[men]t ground on the Mountain which the Enemy had occupied. The Indians were the first in advance. As soon as they perceived the Enemy they uttered their terrific war whoop, and commenced a most destructive fire and dashing rapidly upon them. Our troops instantly sprang forward from all quarters joining in the shout. The Americans stood a few moments [and] gave two or three general vollies [sic], and then fled by hundreds down the Mountain. At that moment Capt Bullock of the light and two Militia appeared advancing on the road from Chippewa. The consternation of the Enemy was complete. They were

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encompassed on all sides and fled with the utmost precipitation. Never were men more miserably situated & they had no place to retreat to, and were driven by a furious, & avenging army from whom they had little mercy to expect to the brink of the Mountain which overhangs the [Niagara] river. They fell in ­numbers, the river presented a shocking spectacle filled with poor wretches who plunged into its stream by the impulse of fear without the hopes or probability of being saved. Many leaped down the side of the Mountain to avoid the horrors which pressed upon them & were dashed in pieces by the fall. A white flag was observed in the river, and with the utmost difficulty the slaughter was suspended.2 Of particular interest in this account is the key role played by Norton and his warriors; as “the first” to “advance” and commence firing upon the Americans, they demonstrated great courage and heroism in a battle that had already claimed General Brock’s life. Although in his description of the Mohawk warriors’ “terrific war whoop” Robinson emphasized what many contemporary commentators considered a distinctively Native form of military violence, his account does not support such a distinction, since the British troops immediately copied the Indians’ tactic, springing “forward from all quarters” and “joining in the shout,” suggesting that the regular soldiers and militia were possessed by a spirit similar to that displayed by the Mohawk warriors. Robinson’s depiction of the British counterattack and its consequences differs significantly from that of his commanding officer, General Roger Hale Sheaffe, who blamed his army’s Mohawk allies for the battle’s most horrific violence. Whereas Robinson states that the retreating Americans “were driven by a furious, & avenging army from whom they had little mercy to expect,” thus attributing the slaughter of retreating Americans not just to Norton’s Mohawks but also to the whole British side, Sheaffe lays the blame squarely on the Indians: “A terrible slaughter ensued. The Indians were furious,” he wrote (emphasis added), using the same adjective Robinson employed to describe the mood of the entire allied forces as they mercilessly routed the Americans. “Their war whoops so intimidated the Americans, who expected no quarter,” Sheaffe continued (without admitting, like Robinson, that British soldiers had actually joined in the whoop), “that in despair some leapt the precipice and were seen

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for some time after suspended halfway down in the branches of the trees, where the Savages had shot them from the brow [of the heights]” (qtd in A. Taylor 189). Even today, historians treat Sheaffe’s account of Queenston Heights as authoritative. For example, in a recent study of the battle’s climax, Alan Taylor quotes from the British general’s narrative to support his assertion that it was the unruly Mohawk warriors who “turned the American retreat into a bloody rout” (189). How may we account for the difference between Robinson’s and Sheaffe’s depictions of the battle and its aftermath? To be sure, the veteran British general and the fresh-faced lieutenant recorded the day’s events from different physical vantage points as well as from different ideological ones, and also for different reasons. Robinson wrote his memorandum as a private record of personal experience and, judging from its moments of candid self-reflection, as a way of dealing with the overwhelming emotions incited by his first experience of violent warfare. Arguably, however, Sheaffe wrote with a greater concern for reputation and posterity. Like all modern military conflicts, the War of 1812 was fought not only on the battlefield but also in the forum of public opinion. As Alan Taylor has shown in detail, American hawks made deft use of anti-Indian propaganda to indict British morality, presenting the British deployment of Native warriors as particularly reprehensible (203–33). Even in Britain itself, many people deplored the alliance with Indigenous warriors; to quote Fulford, for decades following the Seven Years’ War “Indians were, in Britons’ minds, cruel and fiendish – in Edmund Burke’s words ‘hell-hounds,’ in General Jeffrey Amherst’s ‘brutes’” (54). Already facing American and domestic criticism for their military alliance with Indigenous warriors, British officers had good reason to distance themselves and their men from acts of warfare deemed savage or barbaric, and Sheaffe likely constructed his account of the battle so as to depict British soldiers in the best possible light. In contrast, the young Robinson, not yet fully immersed in colonial politics, did not concern himself with questions of military decorum or the subtleties of wartime propaganda. Writing not to persuade others but to come to terms with his own thoughts and emotions in the wake of the traumatizing battle, he emphasized his ability “to relate accurately almost every circumstance of general moment, or of peculiar interest, for I was an eyewitness of the whole.”3 Had he read it, Norton himself would likely have appreciated Robinson’s unvarnished account of Mohawk actions at Queenston Heights. Often frustrated by stereotypical reports of

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Indigenous cruelty in warfare, especially those that were circulated by the Americans, Norton complained that “it would be useless as well as endless to repeat the number of cruelties that had been asserted, & as bluntly contradicted, – without proofs to substantiate either on one Side or the other, – and as the Americans are fond of complaining of cruelty, without just cause, – I should be more inclined to believe the contradiction than the assertion” (Norton 315). Although Robinson was deeply disturbed by the violence he witnessed and participated in at Queenston Heights, his wartime experiences were by no means all horrific. Indeed, as Brode has noted, some wartime moments must have been rather pleasant: it was during this period that Anne Powell, the daughter of Chief Justice William Dummer Powell, set her sights on the handsome young officer, and Robinson was encouraged to spend some time with her. Though it has been overstated,4 Anne’s attraction to Robinson is understandable; even his adversaries found much to praise in his appearance and character. According to Marshall Spring Bidwell, “his features were classically and singularly beautiful, his countenance … luminous with intelligence and animation” (qtd in Brode 105). Aside from his striking appearance, many were impressed by Robinson’s manner of speaking, including Anna Jameson, who would later write that he had “the most pleasing, insinuating voice I ever heard” (2008, 92). At one point during the war, the dashing young officer, who was “fond of playing the gallant” (McKenna 208), paid a visit to Anne Powell and other daughters of the colonial elite, who were at work embroidering a flag for Robinson’s regiment. Taking a break from his military duties, Robinson must have cut a romantic figure when he recited the popular epic poem The Battles of Talavera for the young ladies gathered in the sewing room. Is it any wonder that Anne fell in love with him, and that her decision to cross the Atlantic in 1816 may have been motivated, in part, by a desire to secure his affections? (McKenna 211). In the vicissitudes of war, John Robinson was fortunate. As Alan Taylor notes, those who served General Brock loyally “enjoyed great acclaim and patronage thereafter in postwar Upper Canada,” and Robinson was no exception (446). As a reward for his bravery at Queenston Heights, he was not only promoted to the rank of captain, a position he held until the cessation of hostilities, but he also rose to a position of substantial authority in the colonial administration. Among those killed at Queenston Heights was Robinson’s commanding officer and former employer, Lieutenant-Colonel Macdonell, the

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province’s attorney general. Although Robinson had not yet been called to the bar, Sheaffe appointed him acting attorney general in the wake of Macdonell’s death (Brode 17), a role that called upon him to prosecute wartime traitors in the Ancaster treason trials. Choosing to hold the trials in a civil rather than a military court, Robinson opposed the justices’ decision to impose the death penalty on all fifteen of the men found guilty. Although he had lost many friends and compatriots in battle, and had witnessed the panic and destruction caused by the American sacking of York – experiences that reinforced his lifelong antipathy toward the United States – he resisted the urge to use the law as a vehicle of mere vengeance, wanting to make an example of only one or two of the most grievous offenders. In the end, however, eight of the accused men were hanged (Brode 24–5). By the time Robinson was given leave to travel to England in September 1815, he had been involved in some of the bloodiest and most controversial events in early Canadian history.

J o h n R o b in s o n M e e t s the “I mmortal” T h o m as C a m pbell Robinson travelled to England to complete his formal education since he knew that, to have a successful legal career, he would need to “be recognized as a barrister by one of the great Inns of Court in London.” Armed with letters of recommendation from several men of influence, he was admitted as a student to Lincoln’s Inn Hall in November 1815 (Brode 26, 28). Although he applied himself to his studies with appropriate diligence, he lived a life of comparative leisure during this period, taking pleasure in long daily walks through London’s parks,5 enjoying theatrical performances at Drury Lane and Covent Garden, and making the acquaintance of several prominent authors, including the American expatriate writer Washington Irving6 and the celebrated Scottish poet Thomas Campbell. It was at a performance by the great tragic actress Sarah Siddons that Robinson was introduced to Campbell, and the two men engaged in “a great deal of conversation during the play.” Although at this first meeting Robinson found the poet rather “uneasy and fidgety in his manner” – characteristics he did not “expect” to discover “in the author of Erin go Bragh” – he was impressed by Campbell’s “fine eye” and enjoyed his “entertaining” conversation.7 Afterwards, the two men struck up a friendship, meeting on several occasions (including at the poet’s Sydenham residence)

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and exchanging letters. Knowing that the author of the Indian romance Gertrude of Wyoming was fascinated by the North American landscape and by Indigenous life and warfare, Robinson presented the poet with two distinctive gifts: a stone taken from the escarpment at Niagara Falls and an Indian calumet or peace pipe. Writing to Campbell on 23 July 1816, Robinson discussed the calumet in particular detail. The letter is worth quoting at length because, while shedding light on Robinson’s views of Campbell, it also speaks to his ideas on British and American Indian policy. “When I last had the pleasure of seeing you at Sydenham,” Robinson recalled, you very politely consented to honour me by accepting from me an Indian pipe, or calumet of peace, which I had in my possession, and which is precisely the thing meant to be described in a note to the beautiful poem of “Gertrude.” I now take the liberty of sending it. It is made of the red stone found on the shores of Lake Huron, and is one of several presented to Colonel M’Douall, the British commandant at Michilimakinac, by the chief warriors of the Sioux, and other western and south-western tribes, on their introduction to him, when they came to assist in defending that fort and island against the threatened attack of the Americans, in the summer of 1814.   You may recollect, that after the loss of our squadron on Lake Erie, … the enemy … embarked an army for the reduction of Michilimakinac. Colonel M’Douall then commanded it, and he had but a small part of a Fencible Regiment, and a few men of a veteran battalion – barely sufficient to man the works of the fort – but he had bands of native warriors encamped in the island. The enemy, after hovering round with their fleet some days, at last made a descent. The Indians alone met them before they had proceeded to the fort, and, though far inferior in number, completely routed them, and killed their commanding officer. They were forced to re-embark, and we kept Michilimakinac, till, by the terms of the treaty of Ghent, we were compelled to surrender it, contrary to our faith repeatedly and solemnly pledged to the poor Indians we had induced to embark in our cause; and by thus giving up the favourite point of rendezvous for their friendly traders, we have abandoned them to the mercy of a people, who acknowledge no ties of honesty or humanity in their treatment of these poor wretches. My brother happened to be

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at Michilimakinac that summer, and his friend Colonel M’Douall, among other Indian curiosities, gave him this pipe – one of the finest specimens of the real calumet. I brought it with me to England, to gratify the curiosity of acquaintances, or to serve as a token of remembrance for a friend. What unexpected things happen to us in our progress through life! such as we not only could never have anticipated, but which are so far out of the line of probabilities, that we scarcely believe, though we know them to be true! Little did I imagine that I should have the pleasure of presenting this calumet to the first poet who has honoured America by making it the scene of a poem! … I feel how insignificant must be tribute of praise of a mere native Canadian, to poems which have met with universal admiration in this land of refined and highly cultivated taste; but I must not be prevented, by false delicacy, from doing justice to my own country, in assuring you that the author of “Gertrude” and of “The Pleasures of Hope” holds there the first place in the rank of living poets! (qtd in Beattie 2.323–4) Thrilled to have met one of his literary heroes, Robinson wrote without shame of his enthusiastic admiration for the celebrity poet, adding that upon his return to Canada he would be proud among his own countrymen to “exclaim … ‘I knew Campbell!’” Flattered in turn by the young “native Canadian’s” praise, Campbell “attached a particular value” to Robinson’s letter, “not only for the sentiments it expressed towards himself, but for the personal regard he entertained for the writer” (Beattie 2.323). In a letter not previously known to Campbell scholars, the Scottish poet thanked Robinson for his “expressions of good opinion,” humbly declaring that he could “easily deduct all that is above my merits & still be rationally proud of your approbation as it is that of a man whose manners are too dignified to commend without sincerity & whose talents would strike a stranger of the most ordinary observation.”8 Looking beyond the polite expressions of mutual regard the two men exchanged in their letters, one can detect the presence of two very different minds, and perhaps even a subtle clash of ideas. On his part, Robinson was anxious to teach the famous poet a thing or two about political affairs in North America. As a reader of Gertrude of Wyoming, he knew that Campbell admired the United States, and, like other contemporary Tory readers such as Walter Scott, he was

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troubled by Gertrude’s depiction of American settlers as peaceable victims of British and Native “atrocities” during the Revolutionary War (Scott 1809, 243). In his detailed discussion of the Indian calumet’s origins, therefore, Robinson took pains to authenticate the pipe by providing a detailed record of its provenance, while at the same time informing Campbell about the political and military circumstances that led to his possession of the prized artifact. He thus criticized the United States for its invasion of British territory in the War of 1812 while also indicting the republic for its lack of “honesty or humanity in [its] treatment” of Indigenous people. To his credit, however, Robinson did not pretend that the British were blameless. Eschewing partisan rhetoric, he noted that in ratifying the Treaty of Ghent, the British negotiators had violated numerous pledges of faith their government had made with its Native allies, who were rewarded for their heroic defence of Michilimakinac and of other British territories by being “abandoned” to American “mercy.” Given that modernday historians generally view the War of 1812 as the pivotal moment in which the fortunes of Indigenous nations began to fall in North America,9 Robinson’s contemporary critique of American and British Indian policy comes across as nuanced and far-sighted. In his letter of thanks to Robinson, Campbell avoided discussing political issues, preferring instead to regard the gifts of Niagara stone and Indian calumet with what Robinson had called “a poet’s eye” (qtd in Beattie 2.325). “They are really treasures of curiosity,” Campbell enthused, adding that the gifts were “incalculably more valuable from the associated ideas that accompany them. Neither the trade of London nor the steam engines of Birmingham could afford any thing so pleasing to the romance of the imagination … I thank you very much for the circumstantial details which authenticate those relics of noble and barbarous simplicity. I have suspended your gift over the mantle-piece of my chimney where it will always bring to my mind the most powerful and pleasing recollections.”10 Although Campbell acknowledged in passing the “circumstantial details” informing Robinson’s account of the pipe, he avoided discussing these historical and political contexts, regarding the pipe not as a symbol of Indian political alliance and goodwill ultimately betrayed in North America (as Robinson had implicitly presented it in his letter) but as a primitive relic “of noble and barbarous simplicity,” an aesthetic object “pleasing to the romance of the imagination.” As I note in chapter 6, it was not until John Brant (Chief Ahyonwaeghs) of the Mohawks visited him

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five years later that Campbell would seriously reconsider the ways in which Gertrude of Wyoming supported stereotypical views of Indian society at the expense of historical truth.

A C a n a d ia n Tory in t h e B r it is h C ountrys i de According to Robinson’s son and nineteenth-century biographer, C.W. Robinson, John Robinson loved “everything connected with country life” (406). This appetite for rural spaces and people helps to account for Robinson’s admiration of Thomas Campbell’s writing; such favourite works as The Pleasures of Hope (1799) and Gertrude of Wyoming (1809) feature much beautiful pastoral description. Robinson’s penchant for the British countryside is reflected in many of the letters and diary entries he wrote during his first visit to Britain. Delighted by his first experience of the English springtime, he wrote effusively of a drive he took in the countryside near London, saying: “Imagination can not picture a more delightful drive. The leaves and blossoms were just beginning to spread & every thing [was] breathing of spring. Alas Canada has nothing to show like this & it is a mortifying certainty that in our time it cannot have. Time, Centuries, will be required to produce it.”11 Comparing Upper Canada’s “primitive” natural environment to England’s “improved” rural and urban spaces was a common preoccupation for Robinson, who, during the course of his judicial and political career, would become an influential champion of the colony’s rural and urban transformations. Writing to a Canadian friend about Britain’s many natural and architectural wonders, he fell into rhapsodies: “Well might you speak in raptures, Dear Sir, of England. To a native of Canada it seems a perfect paradise. He can’t but fancy that a great people have been for centuries employed entirely in adorning and embellishing this beautiful Country.” As a resident of Canada experiencing the imperial centre for the first time, Robinson considered himself supremely qualified to appreciate England’s improved landscapes; as he noted in his diary: “Those who have never seen these things cannot conceive them, and they who have been familiar with them from their childhood feel not the same veneration for them, [for] the charm of novelty is wanting.” Being “just on the happy point between these two” positions, Robinson felt England’s rural charms intensely.12

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The one exception to this mood was the effect of the English moorlands, which seemed to horrify him. Writing to his newly affianced English sweetheart, Emma Walker, he described the Eastern Moors near Sheffield as “the most horrible, barren, useless, hopeless, heartless looking Country that … can lie out of doors.” “There is something chilling,” he continued, “in the thought that this wide waste wears probably the same face now [that] it has worn for centuries, perhaps since the flood.”13 As a Canadian who dreamed of the day when his country would complete its transformation “from a state of universal wilderness” to an agrarian paradise (J.B. Robinson 1825, 6), he was horrified at the prospect of a wild landscape seemingly immune to the processes of “bright Improvement” that Thomas Campbell had famously celebrated in The Pleasures of Hope (1907, 12, Part 1, line 321), and he thanked “bounteous Providence” that he had to leave his “own Country to have any idea of them.” But to his credit, he acknowledged the narrowly anthropocentric character of his perspective, understanding that not all landscapes were created for his own species’ habitation and use. For as he travelled across the Eastern Moors, he was struck by the sight of “a fine specimen of the moor fowl” or red grouse, calling it “a beautiful inhabitant of so foul a waste” and seeing in its existence evidence that “Providence … has provided creatures for all elements and all situations.” As he told his fiancée with a romantic wink at his own status as a rustic Canadian residing temporarily in London’s cultured metropolis, the moor fowl “felt more at home … among these cheerless rocks than I do in Bond Street, or at the opera.”14 As he travelled across England’s rural landscapes en route to Scotland, Robinson visited places whose inhabitants seemed, like the moor fowl, to have the blessing of Providence. For example, on his journey through Yorkshire, which he considered “one of the very finest and most beautiful parts of England,” he travelled for a time with “a party of honest Yorkshire men” whose conversation was “partly moral, partly political & partly philosophical & in all subjects equally profound.” In Robinson’s view, these men were decidedly superior to their common urban counterparts. “There was a blessed simplicity & careless good humour about them,” he mused, “that form a strong contrast with the sneaking low minded cockney.”15 Given the romantic contrast Robinson makes here between rural Yorkshire and Cockney London, it is surely necessary to qualify William Smith’s over-generalizing claim that Robinson “held … the wisdom of the common people in

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contempt” (58). Nevertheless, not all rural people could live up to Robinson’s romantic pastoral ideal. In parts of Scotland, for example, he found the homes and buildings too “filthy” for his liking. “This dirt,” he told Emma in a letter from Edinburgh, “is a sad annoyance … wherever you meet with it. It soils all that is elegant & dispels all the illusions of pastoral simplicity. It quite vexed me in the Highlands. I liked the pastoral look & the pastoral manners of the inhabitants of the Glens, but the pastoral smile of their houses was intolerable.” Ultimately, for Robinson, the paternal Highlander’s lack of cleanliness, not to mention his propensity to take “a gulp of … whiskey before breakfast,” spoiled what might otherwise have been considered “mightily romantic.”16 Robinson owed the highlights of his Scottish sojourn to Thomas Campbell. The poet had provided the young Canadian law student with letters of introduction to his “Northern brethren” (Beattie 3.326), the renowned publisher Francis Jeffrey and the celebrated poet Walter Scott. Although he appreciated Jeffrey’s “elegant, refined, unhesitating and almost oratorical” conversation, Robinson was particularly taken by Scott’s “simple, hearty, easy manner” and the charmingly vernacular “Scotticisms” that gave colour to his speech. Previously, Robinson had criticized the “peculiar structure” of Scott’s celebrated poem The Lady of the Lake in a letter to Campbell, claiming that, like Byron’s The Corsair, it required a “peculiar taste” to be appreciated (qtd in Beattie 2.324). But his meeting with Scott clearly won him over. As he told Emma in a letter penned at Kelso, he could hardly believe he had spent time with “the author of ‘Lady of the Lake’ who with the lightest pencil that man ever handled, traced each delicate feature of the fairy scene, and painted for the mind’s eye with a precision of delineation [and] a colouring as satisfactory as ever painter displayed to the mere ocular perception.” Delighted by Scott’s warm hospitality, Robinson accepted an invitation to dine and stay the night at Abbotsford, Scott’s estate at Melrose in Roxburgshire, and the evening was “spent in the most sociable and familiar manner possible.” Indeed, Scott put Robinson so much at ease that the poet appears to have lost some of his glamour. As Robinson later told Emma, the evening’s conversation was so familiar and natural, “and the Bard’s veal, & beef steaks were so exactly like other people’s that I most provokingly lost all sense of the romantic peculiarity of my situation.” After supper, the two men “sat down to our bottle of Madeira foot to foot with a corner of the table between us” and “had long discussions about poetry and posts.” For

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his own part, Robinson appears to have indulged his critical faculty with gusto, saying “I really sported my admiration of some works & disapprobation of others, as if I had quite an equal right to decide, & as if I had not been speaking to a man whose poems had gone thro’ a dozen editions.” Despite his excitement at being in the company of one of the English world’s most celebrated living authors, Robinson maintained his dignity throughout the conversation, telling Emma that he “never once directly, or indirectly hinted at [Scott’s] celebrity, or that I knew any thing more of him than that he was a friend of Mr Campbell’s.”17 After finishing their wine, the two men took “a long walk” around Scott’s estate, with the poet “point[ing] out many projected improvements.”18 As Susan Oliver has shown, Scott had an “abiding interest in forestry” and “was highly skilled in planting trees as a means of ‘improving’ the landscape. By 1827, he had planted extensively throughout the grounds of Abbotsford, meticulously recording the process in his planter’s journal” (2009, 587, 594). As a champion of Upper Canada’s ongoing transformation from primeval forest to developed agricultural colony, Robinson found the tour of Scott’s estate particularly interesting, if rather puzzling. “The soil is a wretched red gravelly composition incapable of wearing a very smiling appearance & only improvable in the manner he is attempting it by planting it with firs, oaks & larches,” he noted, adding that Scott had “already made very great plantations & is constantly going on with them, but it is melancholy to see him look with delight on the little rubbish of pine bushes which by five years cherishing he has persuaded to hide a little the nakedness of the hills.” To improve the land by planting forests seemed strange to Upper Canada’s future chief justice, for whom improvement went hand in hand with deforestation. But whereas a Canadian homesteader could cut down a tree relatively quickly, to watch one grow, as Scott did, took a lot of patience, and more time than a mere individual human could afford; for, as Robinson mused, while “trees are gradually shooting up we are withering.”19 For his own part, Scott preferred optimistically to focus on the growth of trees rather than the “withering” of their human planters. In closing his review of Henry Stueart’s The Planter’s Guide (1828), as Oliver notes, Scott paraphrases the words of a character from his novel The Heart of Midlothian” (1818), exhorting his readers “to take to heart the exhortation of the dying Scotch laird to his son: – ‘Be aye sticking in a tree, Jock – it will be growing whilst you are sleeping’” (qtd in

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2009, 596). Given that “Jock” is a common Scottish nickname for John, and that Scott published The Heart of Midlothian in the year directly following John Robinson’s visit to Abbotsford, one might be excused for wondering whether Scott was here “penning a cheeky response to Robinson” himself.20 Although he enjoyed his tour of Scott’s estate, Robinson showed little enthusiasm for the poet’s patient approach to trees and tree planting. “Man has little time for such speculations,” he concluded, “& he that is an enthusiast in trees and forests should go without loss of time to Canada where he will see them in all their glory, without having to wait for the tedious operation of their growth.”21 Interestingly, Robinson counselled speed here not only because of the shortness of human lives relative to those of trees but also because Upper Canada’s old-growth forests were falling fast and he knew they would be gone before too long. If, as seems likely, Robinson encouraged Scott to visit Upper Canada, the prospect of seeing the colony’s remaining oldgrowth forests would surely have tantalized the poet, who once told the American author Washington Irving that “there is nothing I should like more than to be in the midst of one of your grand, wild, original forests with the idea of hundreds of miles of untrodden forest around me” (qtd in Oliver 2013, 117). Although Scott never found an opportunity to see North America’s forests, he remained “a knowledgeable and serious plantsman” on his own estate (Oliver 2009, 596). By the late nineteenth century, literary pilgrims to Abbotsford would consider his plantations “a noble work” that fully “justif[ied] the poet’s enthusiasm.” Indeed, Scott’s intensive labours as a plantsman created a “precept and example” that “helped to make planting fashionable among his neighbours” (Palgrave 13–14, 10). Although Scott invited Robinson to extend his visit at Abbotsford, the latter declined the offer. He was conscious of his intrusion upon the poet’s privacy and did not wish to interrupt his work. The next morning after breakfast, Scott accompanied his Canadian guest to the edge of his estate, where the two men parted with “a hearty shake of the hand” and Scott asked the young Canadian to “remember him most kindly” to Campbell. As he watched Scott wander back toward the house with his greyhounds in tow, Robinson contemplated his good luck in having made the poet’s acquaintance: “what would some female friends of mine on the other side of the Atlantic have given,” he mused, “for such a lookout!”22

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A “ P o e t ic Fi t”: R o b in s o n a n d t h e Lake Di stri ct Robinson was inspired by the Lake District, which he visited in the spring of 1817, more than by any other part of Britain. “I was much pleased with the people of the Country, I mean the farmers & shepherds, pure and natural,” Robinson wrote. “I love a genuine, unsophisticated Englishman, who feeling happy and secure in his own independence, knows nothing nor cares nothing for those ridiculous fopperies & follies of other nations which the more polished part of his Countrymen too often degrade themselves by imitating. I think he is the most respectable animal in nature. How much happier could I spend all my days in one of the vales of Westmoreland than in Paris, – would you beg to differ with me,” he asked his fiancée (herself a Londoner), “if I said London[?]”23 Although Robinson never mentions the Lake Poets in his letters from the Lakes, his musings on the area and its people are clearly influenced by the Romanticism they had begun to popularize nearly two decades earlier. Indeed, in his reflections, Robinson sounds a bit like William Wordsworth, the Lake District’s foremost Romantic poet, whose praise for the local countryside and the simple commoners who lived there was matched by his criticism of the city, which, with few exceptions, he saw as a space of social artifice and moral corruption. While at the Lakes, Robinson made excursions on foot or horseback to “all the points of most interest on Lakes Windermere, Coniston Water, Grasmere, Derwentwater, and Ulswater” (C.W. Robinson 121), enjoying the “picturesque” scenery and enthusing about “the whole range of nature from the ‘awfully sublime’ to the ‘strikingly pretty.’” A glance at the books he mentions in his letters highlights the extent to which his was a distinctively literary pilgrimage. He mentions his happy purchase of “‘[Benjamin] West’s descriptive guide to the Lakes,’” calling it “the very book I wanted”; he recalls the “raptures” with which the poet Thomas Gray wrote about the local area; and – showing that he could appreciate a good joke at his own expense – he invokes William Combe’s “Dr Syntax in search of the Picturesque,” a book written to lampoon picturesque tourists like himself.24 Moved by the Lake District’s sights and the reflections they inspired, Robinson felt the muse stirring within, and, like so many visitors both before and after, he considered composing a poem. Explaining his

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inspiration in a light-hearted letter to Emma, he wrote that “a delightful evening & a serene sky” had put me quite in a poetic mood, and I really had considered the idea of surprising you with a poetic lover – [something?] bordering on the ludicrous. A thousand odd ideas crossed my fancy – as Shakespeare says “I had a mint of phrases in my brain” – but malheur à l’hommes as the French say, or “foul befal the man” as my friend Walter Scott says who, intending to deal at all in the sentimental, travels without one of the “much approved velvet paper memorandum books with metallic pencils.” While you are on your airy seat in the true element for the sublime breathing an air purified by an elevation of 8 or 9 feet above the gross earth we inhabit what myriads of bright ideas sweep across the mind, but if you have not this same memorandum book and metallic pencil to “catch them living [as] they rise” – you descend from your seat of inspiration [and abandon] yourself to the vulgar considerations of beds & supper [& so] “all your thoughts perish.”25 This paragraph must surely have made Emma laugh aloud, for it is clever and humorously self-deprecating. Quoting from the pious musings of Samuel Annesley (“all your thoughts perish”) and the vaunted poetry of Shakespeare and Scott, Robinson invokes the sphere of high moral and literary culture, suggesting the potential seriousness of his poetic endeavour. But in making fun of his “sublime” position on an “airy seat” elevated only “8 or 9 feet above the gross earth,” he, like the fictitious Dr Sytnax, makes his own aesthetic motivations appear ridiculous; and by quoting the vulgar marketing phrase of a company called Hall’s (the manufacturer of those “much approved memorandum books” and unbreakable “metallic pencils”), he concedes that the loftiest flights of imagination are dependent for their literary fulfilment upon the most mundane material considerations. If in poking fun at himself Robinson was trying to resist the muse, he was ultimately unsuccessful; in a subsequent letter, he told Emma that the “poetical fit” that had been coming on “ever since I had beheld the Vale of Otley Lake [and the] charms of Yorkshire” had now become “outrageous,” and that he was finally “obliged to yield to its influence.”26 The result was a poem Robinson sent to Emma in a beautifully handwritten script that has fortunately survived. In his Life of Sir John

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Beverley Robinson (1904), C.W. Robinson presented an edited version of 42 lines from his father’s 84-line composition. To the best of my knowledge, the poem has not otherwise been published. Because I consider it a significant specimen of early transatlantic Canadiana featuring some rather good verse, I take the liberty, before discussing it, of presenting it unedited and in full: Lines on an April visit to the Windermere Lake, on a fine evening, immediately after a storm – The clouds are fled, the storm is o’er, The winds are hush’d that swept thy shore, ’Tis Ev’ning, and thy Mountains gleam Beneath the Sun’s departing beam, The Mists the Clouds had scatter’d wide Are gilded as they mount their side – More lovely now each Charm appears, ’Tis Beauty smiling through her tears, Sweet Lake, whose bosom clear, serene, Reflects each feature of the scene, One who ne’er thought to wander here, A Stranger greets thee, Windermere – Born in a land where Winter reigns Stern as o’er bleak Siberia’s plains, Where Summer’s bright, and genial sky Might rival that of Italy, I oft have stray’d where deep’ning wood Frowns o’er Saint Lawrence, noble flood, Or where Niagara’s torrents roar, Sublimest work in Nature’s store; On Abr’ham’s plains, where Britain’s pride, Lamented Wolf, in vict’ry died; But could I hope to wander here, On thy sweet margin, Windermere? Oh Sun, in all thy various course, Ev’n in those regions where thy force Is fiercest felt, where shine most bright Thy glories, splendid Orb of Light!

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Where suppliant nations bow the knee And own no other God but thee; Or in those milder climes where reigns Thy temper’d influence o’er the plains, Where hills, and dales, and meads are dear, Like Albion’s in eternal green, Say, dost thou ever rise to cheer A brighter scene than Windermere? – Ontario’s billows love the sand That skirts my happy native Land, O’er Erie’s bosom oft my eye Hath wander’d till it met the sky, Realms which many millions boast Might lie extended on their coast, Like Ocean’s waves their waters rise, Where gales autumnal sweep the skies Britannia’s Squadrons late they bore In all the cumbrous pomp of war Of Grandeur they the palm may bear Of Beauty thou, Sweet Windermere –     Yet ’tis not now the eye may view Thy Landscape’s most enchanting hue, But though the fields that deck thy side Glow not in all their summer pride, Nor yet each softer vernal grace Appears reflected in thy face, Though yet around thy circling lands No blossoms wave, no leaf expands, But on thy Mountain’s snow clad brow Stern Winter hangs, – though ’tis not now The loveliest season of the year, Still Thou art lovely, Windermere! – There are, whom dead to Nature’s charms, No beauteous scene with rapture warms, Who view the tow’ring Mountain’s side, The forest’s shade, the valley’s pride, The glassy Lake, the murm’ring rill

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Without one dear ecstatic thrill –     But they to whom indulgent Heaven Souls of a kindlier glow hath given To whom these scenes more bliss impart Than all the tinsil works of Art,     How must they joy to linger here Among thy beauties, Windermere! –     Ah – ’tis not thus that I may prove How dearly I these beauties love, Soon must I leave blest Albion’s shore For distant lands, and never more May cross the wide Atlantic main, To tread these fairy scenes again –     Farewell each Cot, each Cove, each hill, (In mem’ry shall I view ye still:) – Each isle thy ambient water laves, Each tree that o’er thy bosom waves, And every charm that centers here, Farewell; – Farewell sweet Windermere –    [finis]27 In the letter accompanying his poem, Robinson characterized his verses as “sketches” made “on the spot, tho’ colour’d and touch’d at leisure,” acknowledging the presence of “some pastoral difficulties which I had not genius to overleap at once, nor patient industry to smooth away.” Among other things, he worried about potential problems with the poem’s scansion, explaining the correct way to pronounce Niagara (not “Nīagără” but “Niāg’ra”). Playfully, he enjoined Emma to secrecy, saying “it is not necessary that the world should know” he was “subject to these fits of folly,” and fearing that his poem could invite criticism that “would extinguish my young genius & might go near to break my heart.” More seriously, perhaps, he worried that his “rhapsody” might “ruin me in the estimation of all sober people.” “[I] place my reputation in your hands,” he told her, though he ultimately gave her permission to show the poem “to such around you, as you know to be as indulgent critics as yourself.”28 In its literary form, the poem combines loco-descriptive elements with moments of lyric introspection, juxtaposing images of the external world against the thoughts and emotions those images inspired.

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To be sure, the poem’s aesthetic discourse is highly conventional; in the sixth stanza’s critique of those unfeeling people who are “dead to Nature’s charms,” Robinson articulates the (rather self-­ congratulatory) Romantic notion that the ability to be moved, like the poet, by the wonders of nature is an indication of high moral worth – a sign, as the poem puts it, that one has received the blessing of an “indulgent Heaven.” The poem’s reflection on “suppliant nations” whose people worship the sun is also rather typical of the era in its (self-­congratulatory and Eurocentric) suggestion that hot southerly climates, unlike their temperate northern counterparts, are conducive to the worship of false idols rather than the one true God. (Indeed, in differentiating such nature worship from his own aesthetic musings, Robinson makes abundantly plain that his effusive praise for nature is not to be confused with paganism.) The poem’s originality lies not in its aesthetic and moral discourses but in the way its reflections on local land- and waterscapes inspire reflections on distant Canadian topographies, making it an interesting example of a distinctively transatlantic poetry. In these juxtapositions, we are offered a glimpse into the heart and mind of an ambitious young Upper Canadian, still fresh from the colony, as he negotiates the terms of his identity, ambitions, and dreams. To my knowledge, the only scholar thus far to have commented on Robinson’s poem is David Howes, who in a study of Robinson’s juridical practice offers a brief but perceptive discussion of some of the excerpted passages published by C.W. Robinson in 1904. Noting that in the first two stanzas the speaker refers to himself as a “Stranger” wandering on Windermere’s “margin,” Howes suggests that the poem highlights Robinson’s self-perception as an outsider who “occupied a marginal or liminal status with respect to British society.” Robinson’s sense of his own provincial otherness gives him pause to reflect upon the land of his birth as the conventionally descriptive opening stanza gives way to the second stanza’s meditation upon the topographies of British North America, whose “Frown[ing]” woods and “roar[ing]” torrents contrast sharply with Windermere’s “smiling” and “serene” features (Howes 373). But the contrasts informing the poem’s depictions of Canada itself are also striking. The poet’s home country may be a “Stern” land “where Winter reigns” and a space of sobering military conflict “where Britain’s pride, / … in vict’ry died,” as stated in the second stanza, but it is also a land of “bright” and “genial” summer skies

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whose beauty “Might rival that of Italy.” And though Canada’s primeval forest “Frowns” in a manner suggesting the land’s hostility to European settlement and habitation, the poem goes on in the fourth stanza to augur a future in which “many millions” will make it their home. Figuring European emigration as a rising tide of “Ocean’s waves,” Robinson anticipates the rhetoric of writers such as George Copway, who at mid-century feared that “Wave after wave” of arriving European emigrants would drown him and his fellow Native Americans in a “sea of population” (1850a, 3). At a time when Upper Canada’s population numbered in the mere tens of thousands, Robinson’s prophecy that millions would one day reside along the Great Lakes’ northern shores – a prophecy that has of course come true – was a sign of unbridled colonial ambition. After returning to his aesthetic theme in stanza 6, where he asserts a romantic desire to “linger” among Windermere’s “scenes of bliss,” the speaker performs something of a volte-face. Although in the closing stanza he claims to love the region’s “beauties” “dearly,” he knows he must “leave blest Albion’s shore” and return to his home in “distant” Canada, where duty calls him to play a role in nurturing and directing the colony’s growth and development. Crucially, however, despite this disruption, Robinson does not depict his sense of duty as something at odds with his aesthetic reveries. Rather, it is precisely by attending to his work in Canada that he “may prove / How dearly I these beauties love.” As a loyal descendent of British emigrants to the Americas, he will demonstrate the depth of his love for “blest Albion’s shore” by leaving it behind to play a part in the dream of creating a new country in Albion’s image – a New Albion. As he bids farewell to “sweet Windermere,” taking particular care to salute “each Cot, each Cove, each hill,” “each isle,” “each tree,” and “every charm that centers here,” he is consoled by the knowledge that upon his return to Canada he will carry his present experiences of the Lakes with him “In mem’ry,” and that these remembered “spots of time” (to borrow Wordsworth’s famous phrase29) will inspire him as he performs his duties as a loyal servant of the Crown.

E p il o gue When Robinson returned to Upper Canada with his new wife Emma Walker in the autumn of 1817, the career that would leave “an indelible imprint not only on judicial practice but also on Canadian

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concepts of law and government” (Brode 273) had only just begun. During the course of this career, Robinson witnessed changes that would have been unimaginable to him prior to the War of 1812. When he was a child, much of Upper Canada was, as he would later put it, a “perfect wilderness” “uninhabited except by Indians.” While settlers worked to establish homesteads, villages, and towns, Robinson and his fellow members of the Family Compact strove to direct that development so that Upper Canada would remain “one of the most valuable possessions of the crown” (Robinson 1840, 39, 104), the “seat of a resident agricultural population” whose loyal subjects would devote themselves to “the purpose of perpetuating British dominion in North America” (22). To effect such a profound change, Indigenous people would be removed from their hunting grounds; forests would be cleared; wetlands drained; and roads, canals, and railways constructed to support local economic activity and so that Britain could draw from Upper Canada “the timber, the hemp, the grain,” and other imported commodities required to “furnish employment for her manufacturers, her ship-builders, and her seamen” (19). As a champion of large-scale settlement and economic development, Robinson, like his fellow colonials, could not help being complicit in the province’s mistreatment of its First Nations, as I demonstrate, for example, in chapter 6, where in a discussion of Chief John Brant’s anti-dam-building activism, I consider the impact of the Welland Canal (of which Robinson was both a champion and a shareholder) on the Haudenosaunee people of the Grand River. For his service to the Crown, Robinson was amply rewarded. He was made Upper Canada’s attorney general in 1818 and its chief justice in 1829, and he was subsequently knighted as a Companion of the Bath in 1850 and made a Baronet of the United Kingdom in 1854. The following year, he attended a royal levee at St James’s Palace where, “resplendent in his court dress and wearing his Detroit medal and his Order of the Bath, [he] was presented to Queen Victoria” (Brode 262). On the same trip to England, he was also honoured by Oxford University where, in company with Alfred Tennyson, the Poet Laureate, he received an honourary degree as Doctor of Civil Laws (263). Such was Robinson’s importance to the development of preConfederation Canada that upon his death in 1863, he was given a state funeral despite the fact that his brand of Tory Loyalism had been routed politically. Did Robinson forsake his literary enthusiasms and interests during the course of his life’s work after his first visit to the United Kingdom?

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Not according to his son, who notes that throughout his life, Robinson remained fond of literature, especially the poems of Campbell and Scott, and that on his circuits as chief justice, “he generally took with him either Virgil or Horace” (C.W. Robinson 405). If, as a champion of Upper Canada’s agricultural and economic development, Robinson found it difficult to sustain the literary-aesthetic appreciation for nature that he had demonstrated in his rhapsodic “Lines” on Windermere, he did not ultimately lose that interest. As A.A. Den Otter has recently noted, the chief justice, “recogniz[ing] that not all of British North America was arable” (xviii), acknowledged that some of its landscapes could be reserved for more romantic forms of human preoccupation. Thus, in an 1854 address to the Canadian Institute, Robinson told his audience that some of Canada’s forestlands were “‘likely to continue in [their] primitive state, … exhibiting to the lover of nature, and to the enquirer into her works, her romantic woods, rocks and rivers, her shrubs, mosses, insects, and all her wonders, animate and inanimate in their aboriginal state, undisturbed and unaffected by the operations of man’” (qtd in Den Otter xviii). Although Robinson could thus appreciate nature in its “aboriginal state,” the administrations that he served would still seek to appropriate it for economic gain via the extraction of timber and minerals, the exploitation of fisheries, or the building of transportation infrastructure. Indeed, in 1850, the chief justice’s brother William Benjamin Robinson (1798–1873) – a fellow member of the Family Compact who, during his own long career, worked variously as Member of the Legislative Assembly, Inspector General of Upper Canada, and Commissioner of the Canada Company – would impose two “Robinson Treaties” (known as the Robinson-Huron and RobinsonSuperior treaties) along the largely uncultivable northern shores of lakes Huron and Superior. These treaties would force the region’s Ojibwe people “to accept reserves” (Peyer 230) and live as wards of a paternalist state, depriving them “of clear title to both land and resources” (Chute 146). In the philosophy of the Family Compact, the state’s paternalist authority would extend beyond the Crown’s Indigenous allies to all members of the settler society, being a general principle of governance. As Loyalist supporters of the English monarchy, John Robinson and his Tory associates wished nothing less than to transform Upper Canada “into a Kingdom of ‘British North America,’ or of ‘New Albion’” complete with a landed aristocracy whose honourable members would give “dignity and support to the government, and excite

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[members of the common populace] to honourable and patriotic emulation” (Robinson and Sewell 27, 32). It hardly needs saying, then, that the Family Compact and its most prominent son, John Beverley Robinson, came down on the wrong side of Canadian history as the movement for “responsible government” gained traction, replacing Loyalism with increasingly democratic forms of government (which, in Robinson’s view, too much resembled the revolutionary republicanism that he and his fellow veterans had risked their lives to resist during the War of 1812). But there is little evidence to support the idea that the anti–Family Compact Canadian political reformers ever intended to treat the colony’s Indigenous people more humanely than their Tory opponents had done during their years of political ascendency. In a diatribe against Loyalist rule in Upper Canada, one of the most vocal leaders of the reform movement, the rebel William Lyon Mackenzie, expressed nearly as much contempt for Loyalist Mohawks as he did for their white Tory counterparts, claiming in 1840 that Chief Joseph Brant’s “descendants” continued to “bask in the sunshine of royal bounty” (62–3) while common Canadian settlers struggled under the tyranny of British rule. And as Peter S. Schmalz has noted, the Ojibwe surrenders of millions of acres of land on the Saugeen Peninsula and along the shores of Georgian Bay in 1836 were motivated in part by the desire of the lieutenant-governor, Sir Francis Bond Head (a political ally of Robinson’s whom I discuss in detail in chapter 4), “to solve his pressing financial problem with the Reform party,” whose “grievances could be removed substantially by providing a considerable number of acres for settlers or speculators” (Schmalz 131–2). For the province’s Indigenous people, reform under the slogan “responsible government” simply replaced one set of land-grabbing colonial overlords with another.

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4 Anna Brownell Jameson and Sir Francis Bond Head among the Anishinaabeg What doleful tales do those bleaching bones tell…! Where is the pensive mourner who was once seen approaching the graves and bones of his departed fathers to weep there? He is gone the way of all flesh, and his bones lie by the side of his ancestors. Peter Jones / Kahkewaquonaby, History of the Ojebway Indians; with Especial Reference to their Conversion to Christianity

Bad roads, bad inns – or rather no roads, no inns; – wild Indians, and white men more savage far than they; – dangers and difficulties of every kind are threatened and prognosticated, enough to make one’s hair stand on end. Anna Brownell Jameson, Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada

In t ro du cti on When the British author Anna Brownell Jameson arrived in Toronto in 1836, she immediately found herself in the thick of local society. Her husband, Robert Jameson, was Upper Canada’s attorney general and was in line for promotion to the colony’s pre-eminent legal appointment, the vice-chancellorship of Court of Chancery. Although the Jamesons had been estranged for several years, they appear to have struck a mutually advantageous deal: she would come to Upper Canada to help her husband demonstrate his social stability, thereby supporting his hoped-for promotion, and in exchange he would provide her with a monetary settlement granting her a degree of financial independence (Thomas 2008, 589–9­0). As an added benefit to this

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arrangement, Jameson would profit from her Canadian experience creatively and financially by gathering material for a memoir of her time in the province, a hybrid work of philosophy, literary criticism, and travel that nowadays is deservedly considered a landmark in Canadian literary history. In her highly visible role as the attorney general’s and vice-chancellor’s wife, Jameson became acquainted with the British colony’s elite members, including John Strachan and John Beverley Robinson, the latter of whom assisted her journey into Upper Canada’s remote interior by providing her with a map, “a whole sheet of instructions, and several letters of introduction to settlers along [her] line of route” (Jameson 2008, 204).1 During her stay in Toronto, she also made the acquaintance of Sir Francis Bond Head, the colony’s recently appointed lieutenant-governor. Readers of Jameson’s travelogue Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada (published in 1838) will be familiar with her passing references to Sir Francis, including her incisive critique of his paternalistic approach to Indigenous governance policy.2 This chapter considers Jameson’s critique of Head’s paternalism in light of a letter my then-research assistant, Blake Bouchard, and I discovered several years ago while reading Head’s papers in the John Murray Archive at the National Library of Scotland. The letter, which Head wrote to his close friend and publisher, John Murray II, contains a rather scandalous allegation. He indicts Jameson’s moral character by accusing her of stealing a skull from an Indigenous gravesite – an allegation heretofore unknown to modern-day Jameson scholars but ultimately supported, as this chapter demonstrates, by the autobiographical narratives of Lewis Solomon and Jean Baptiste Sylvestre, two Métis voyageurs with whom Jameson travelled on Lake Huron in the summer of 1837.3 This chapter considers Jameson’s skull collecting in light of her generally sympathetic portraits of Indigenous people in Upper Canada as well as her interactions with Head, Solomon, and Sylvestre, and in relation to her interest in the contemporary science of phrenology. The fact that Jameson never directly mentions her skull collecting in Winter Studies and Summer Rambles suggests that she wished to hide it from public knowledge. It is important to note, however, that the taking of skulls from Indigenous interment sites was a common activity among contemporary white travellers and settlers, who, far from struggling with the ethics of such a pastime, often considered themselves to be benevolently disposed toward Indigenous people. Indeed, as part of what Michelle A.

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Hamilton calls “the common nineteenth-century salvage anthropology paradigm” (198), skull collecting was among those activities that good-intentioned whites engaged in to preserve a record of a race they believed would soon become extinct.4 Moreover, as I suggest below, it is possible that Jameson intended to give a skull or several skulls to the famous phrenologist George Combe, who believed that his studies would supply “the key to all philosophical and social problems” (Stephen 428).5 Ultimately, given how common and uncontroversial – and in some minds, praiseworthy – the collecting of Indigenous skulls was in Upper Canada, I suggest that Head’s strident moral condemnation of Jameson’s participation in the activity is more surprising than the fact that Jameson was a skull collector. For his own part, Head has not been treated kindly in the historiography on Upper Canada. Notwithstanding the praise he received from the likes of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Charles Darwin, and Domingo Sarmiento – and notwithstanding his often open-minded representations of the Aboriginal people he encountered in both South America and Upper Canada6 – historians have rarely forgiven him for his inept handling of Upper Canada’s popular reform movement and the fact that the Rebellion of 1837 broke out on his watch. Indeed, some commentators have been rather cruel in their assessment not only of his politics but also of his moral capacity and character, referring to “a notable deficiency inside his skull” (Roberton 131) and calling him a “posturing, vainglorious individual devoid of … common sense” (Read 57) as well as “opinionated, arrogant, and quite impossibly petty” (Wise xxiii). Although in my view the use of such epithets risks oversimplifying Head’s complex character, it is important to approach his accusations against Jameson with utmost care and attention.

B ac k g ro u n d s a n d M utual Cri ti ci sms Because Jameson and Head are both nowadays considered relatively minor authors of the late-Romantic and early-Victorian periods, a brief discussion of their literary careers can provide some useful context for this chapter’s discussions. Although each author was highly critical of the other, they shared a number of things in common, including a notable degree of international celebrity as travel writers. Before coming to Upper Canada, Jameson had penned such popular travelogues as The Diary of an Ennuyee (1826) – “a sentimental Childe Harold’s journey for impressionable and adventure-hungry young ladies”

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(C. Thomas 1985–2019) – and Characteristics of Women (1832), a study of Shakespeare’s heroines that spread her fame beyond Great Britain to America and continental Europe. On a visit to Germany after the latter book was published, Jameson was feted by “an admiring group” of Romantics, including Johann Ludwig Tieck and August Wilhelm von Schlegel, and “she began a lifelong friendship with Ottilie von Goethe, the poet’s daughter-in-law” (C. Thomas 1985–2019) with whom she would correspond during her sojourn in Upper Canada. During the same period, Head was busy earning fame for his Rough Notes Taken during Some Rapid Journeys across the Pampas and among the Andes (1826) and Bubbles from the Brunnens of Nassau (1834), with Coleridge praising the latter for “the Anglo-gentlemanly, sensible, and kindly mind breaking forth everywhere” in its pages (qtd in Fairford 17). Having been born in the early years of the British Romantic period, both Jameson and Head shared a penchant for nature and the picturesque, and each admired particular British Romantic authors, with Jameson favouring William Wordsworth and Head preferring Lord Byron, Walter Scott, and Thomas Campbell. Moreover, as noted below, Jameson and Head shared a view of Indigenous American culture that was at least partly influenced by the Rousseauvian philosophy of Romantic cultural primitivism. Despite these similarities, the two writers came into conflict during their Canadian sojourns largely because of their incompatible approaches to the politics of gender and Indigenous governance. This conflict is reflected in Head’s response to Jameson’s Canadian travelogue, which he discussed in several letters to John Murray not long after he returned to England in the wake of the Upper Canada Rebellion. In early November 1838, Head asked Murray if he would “be so good as to send immediately here to Lady Head (and place to my account) Mrs Jameson’s new book entitled ‘Winter Studies and Summer Rambles.’”7 Although he claimed to want the book for his wife, Julia Valenza Somerville, Head was clearly anxious to read it himself, for less than two months later he sent Murray an outraged response. “With respect to Mrs Jameson’s book,” he wrote, it is indeed as you say abominable – It will have a bad political effect – it will tend in no little degree to check emigration, and it will wound and mortify the feelings of the people of Upper Canada, who instead of being as Mrs J. describes on a level with our 4th or 5th rate society, are I assure you a religious and

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a moral and a very sensible little community. In no part of the world that I have ever visited have I ever met less folly and a greater proportion of good sense and good feeling.   Mrs Jameson’s story however is soon told – Excepting once at a Christening, I believe she never entered a Church all the time she was at Toronto, but being a literary lady she fancied that instead of returning the visits that were made to her, she might establish at her house night intellectual conversaziones – this new fashion did not take, and altho every civility was offered to her, yet the ladies of Toronto did not desire to become Jamesonites – the consequence was she took up with the society of a few young radical writers, and has revisited the civilities she received by abusing the community – not even sparing the Attorney General [John Beverley Robinson]8 with whom her husband Mr Jameson (whom I have made Vice chancellor) dines every Sunday, and is on terms of the greatest friendship.   In her travels, she disgusted the Indians, by disturbing one of their graves, and carrying off as a literary curiosity one of the sculls [sic] of their ancestors. Several Indian councils were I have been informed held on the subject and you can hardly conceive how their simple feelings were hurt. I think what I have told you will sufficiently ans[wer] your question of what I think of her book.9 Calling Winter Studies and Summer Rambles “abominable” (a word consistent with Murray’s own view of the book,10 and with his own subsequent claim that the book was full of “indecencies”11), Head attacks Jameson’s character in an ad hominem effort to undermine her book’s moral authority. She is, he claims, socially inconsiderate, impious, and radical, not to mention cruelly insensitive toward the colony’s Indigenous people: all serious indictments. While the main purpose of this chapter is to investigate Jameson’s skull collecting and evaluate Head’s response to it, it will first be helpful to contextualize Head’s letter to Murray in light of the former’s underlying antagonisms toward “a post-Wollstonecraftian feminist” (Henderson 47) who refused to conform to contemporary standards of feminine decorum and duty. When he complained that Jameson places Upper Canada “on a level with our 4th or 5th rate society,” Head clearly had in mind the following passage from Jameson’s travelogue:

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Toronto is like a fourth or fifth rate provincial town, with the pretensions of a capital city. We have here a petty colonial oligarchy, a self-constituted aristocracy, based upon nothing real, nor even upon anything imaginary; and we have all the mutual jealousy and fear, and petty gossip, and mutual meddling and mean rivalship, which are common in a small society of which the members are well known to each other, a society composed, like all societies, of many heterogeneous particles; but as these circulate within very confined limits, there is no getting out of the way of what one most dislikes: we must necessarily hear, see, and passively endure much that annoys and disgusts anyone accustomed to the independence of a large and liberal society, or the ease of continental life. (Jameson 2008, 62) As the appointed leader of a political culture Jameson describes as a “petty colonial oligarchy,” Head – who retained an interest in Canada long after his return to England – was understandably offended by Jameson’s portrayal. But his offence stems not only from “mortif[ied] … feelings”; as he tells Murray, Jameson’s description of Upper Canada as a place that “annoys and disgusts” the cultured visitor was bound to “have a bad political effect” by “check[ing] emigration” to a colony whose prosperity relied to a great extent on its ability to attract new settlers. To be sure, Jameson’s portrait of Toronto society is marked by an air of condescension, her references to “petty gossip” and “mean rivalship” implying that she considered herself morally superior to the town’s best citizens. Defending his former subjects as members of “a religious and a moral and a very sensible little community,” Head goes on the counterattack, indicting Jameson’s character by accusing her of failing to attend church services and by hinting that she harboured republican sympathies. Undoubtedly, much of Head’s splenetic response to Jameson stems from his highly conventional view of gender roles: he could not approve of a thinking, independent woman who believed that all people, regardless of their sex, were “equally rational beings with improvable faculties” and “equally responsible for the use and abuse of the faculties entrusted to them.”12 If Jameson’s perceived impoliteness toward prominent members of her husband’s social circle highlighted for the lieutenant-governor her moral failings as a wife, her ultimate decision to live separately from her husband and pursue an independent literary career must have stirred his animosity even

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more.13 Jameson’s hosting of “night intellectual conversaziones” in her Toronto home was problematic for Head not only because it brought her into contact with “a few young radical writers” (a serious indictment of her loyalty to the Crown) but also because it demonstrated her desire to participate in rational (that is, conventionally masculine) culture. In a candid letter written to one Mr Dundas in care of John Murray, Head describes how a man should treat his wife, making his position on women’s rationality clear by paraphrasing several lines from an old poem by Matthew Prior: “Be to her faults a little blind / And to her virtues very kind / And clap the padlock on her mind.”14 As a liberalminded author influenced by the writings of Mary Wollstonecraft and other contemporary feminists (Ernstrom passim) and whose Canadian memoir provided “a kind of script for the middle-class woman who would change herself” (Henderson 2003, 48), Jameson displayed in Winter Studies and Summer Rambles a measure of intellectual engagement and freedom of thought that was clearly offensive, if not threatening, to a conservative male writer such as Sir Francis. Indeed, it is likely that the lieutenant-governor’s sexual politics made it impossible for him to sympathize with the views expressed in Winter Studies and Summer Rambles even before he began to read the book.

In d ig e n o u s S oci ety a n d C o l o n ia l G overnance Head’s animosity toward Jameson is unfortunate. Despite their political differences, the two writers shared much in common, including a Romantic penchant to invoke Indigenous society as a means to critique European civilization. One of the things that makes Head such an interesting study for literary scholars is the way his Romantic views of nature and culture inform his First Nations governance policies in colonial Upper Canada. Opposing the idea, generally associated with the Comte de Buffon and his followers, that American environments and people were degenerate in comparison with their European counterparts (D.H. Thomas 30–2), he presents the following argument in the opening paragraphs of his own Canadian memoir, The Emigrant (1846): However deeply prejudiced an Englishman may be in favour of his own country, yet I think it impossible for him to cross the

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Atlantic without admitting that in both the northern and southern hemispheres of the new world Nature has not only outlined her works on a larger scale, but has painted the whole picture with brighter and more costly colours than she used in delineating and in beautifying the old world.   The heavens of America appear infinitely higher – the sky is bluer – the clouds are whiter – the air is fresher – the cold is intenser – the moon looks larger – the stars are brighter – the thunder is louder – the lightning is vivider – the wind is stronger – the rain is heavier – the mountains are higher – the rivers larger – the forests bigger – the plains broader. (Head 1846, 1–2) In Head’s view, far from being detrimental to the physical and moral constitution of its Indigenous inhabitants, North America’s “splendid wilderness,” with its heightened beauty and sublimity, had helped to create a flourishing people who were in many ways superior to their European and Euro-American counterparts: “They hear more distinctly – see farther – smell clearer – can bear more fatigue – can subsist on less food – and have altogether fewer wants than their white brethren” (Head 1846, 84, 148). For him, these physical virtues are matched with moral ones, including “the noblest resignation, the purest courage, [and] the most powerful self-possession.” Although he complicates this Romantic portrait of the noble savage by claiming that Indians were occasionally motivated by “the basest vengeance, the most barbarous cruelty, and the most unrelenting malice,” Head generally portrays the “condition of man in a state of nature” (1857, 323, 311)15 as prelapsarian, with the white man playing the role of the serpent in the garden. “Upon this strange scene of unadulterated, uncontaminated nature,” he asserts, “a solitary white man’s face intruded; and within the short, fleeting space of half a century, what an extraordinary change has he effected!” (Head 1846, 85). If, as Head argues, the Indians’ admirable physical and moral makeup had been shaped by their immersion in the “splendid wilderness” that sustained them, the white man’s “War with the Wilderness” (34) was quickly changing this equation. This assault set in motion a process of physical and moral “annihilation” further expedited “by the bayonet, by the diseases we bring among them, by the introduction of spirituous liquors, by our vices,” and even “by our proffered friendship” (Head 1857, 308). While Jameson also believed that Native Americans were a “fated” people doomed ultimately to vanish as a result of colonial pressures

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(2008, 377 unnumbered note), she could not conceive of them as virtuous productions of an “unadulterated, uncontaminated” New World environment; indeed, she viewed Upper Canada’s wild places themselves as “defiled at once, and sanctified by [human] contact” (568).16 Hence, while acknowledging the “picturesque accompaniments and lofty virtues” of “savage life,” she also refers to the Indians’ “own depravity and indolence” (497, 328; emphasis added). Nevertheless, she echoes Head’s rhetoric of colonial contamination when she indicts “the contagious example” of white traders and colonists, whose adverse moral influences were leading Aboriginal people into “a frightful state of degeneration” characterized by increasing rates of alcoholism and poverty (328).17 Therefore, her favourite Indigenous people were the ones who lived farthest from colonial influences. Like Head, who claims that “real” Indians – the bona fide “Red lords of creation” (1846, 136) – could be found only far beyond white settlements, in “the lonely interior of the immense wilderness” (1857, 313), Jameson finds her own version of the “wild and lordly savage” only when she arrives in the relatively unspoiled environs of remote Mackinaw – nowadays called Mackinac – Island (2008, 402).18 In addition to agreeing that contact with whites tended to have a corrupting influence on Indigenous people, Jameson and Head shared the conviction that the colonial civilizing mission was ultimately ineffectual, believing that Native Americans were resistant to change. On the one hand, to be sure, Jameson claims to respect the missionaries who strove to convert and civilize Native people (2008, 328); and she goes so far as to state, as a moral “law,” that the “hunter must make way before the agriculturist, and the Indian must learn to take the bit between his teeth, and set his hand to the ploughshare, or perish.” Despite these assertions, however, she frankly states “that the idea of the Indians becoming what we call a civilised people seems quite hopeless” (326). “It is possible I may, on a nearer acquaintance, change my opinion,” she admits, “but they do strike me as an untamable race. I can no more conceive a city filled with industrious Mohawks and Chippewas [Ojibwes], than I can imagine a flock of panthers browsing in a penfold” (345). Jameson’s opinion here seems very much in line with that of Sir Francis, who invokes a similar figural contrast between wild and domesticated animals in arguing the same point: “one might as well endeavour to persuade the eagle to descend from the lofty region in which he has existed to live with the fowls in our court-yards, as to prevail upon the red men of North America to become what we

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call civilized; in short, it is against their nature, and they cannot do it” (Head 1846, 124).19 Not only do Jameson and Head invoke similar naturalistic analogues to illustrate their claims, but their nearly identical references to “what we call civilized” indicate a shared Romantic skepticism regarding contemporary claims for the superior moral status of European civilization. As she contemplates the corruption of European society and its less than happy implications for the civilizing mission in North America, Jameson makes a comment that brings the Romantic aspect of her argument into sharp focus. After weighing the pros and cons of Lieutenant-Governor Head’s “benevolent” but ultimately unjust decision to remove a group of Moravian Delawares “as far as possible from the influence of the whites” (Jameson 2008, 328), she poses the following rhetorical question: “With regard to all attempts to civilise them, what should the red man see in the civilisation of the white man which should move him to envy or emulation, or raise in his mind a wish to exchange his ‘own unshackled life and his innate capacities of soul,’ for our artificial social habits, our morals, which are contradicted by our opinions, and our religion, which is violated both in our laws and our lives?” (330–1).20 What makes this passage particularly interesting from a literary standpoint is Jameson’s direct quotation from the third book of The Excursion (1814), in which Wordsworth’s Solitary urges the wild Indian to “flee the ‘encroaching axe’ of civilization and eschew, for as long as possible, all contact with white colonial society” (Hutchings 2009a, 157). Representing the pre-contact Indian’s “contemplations” of the natural world as “worthier, nobler far” than the “destructive energies” characterizing European “social art,” Wordsworth’s Solitary strives – at least at this point in The Excursion – to imagine a cultural identity uncorrupted by the kinds of moral contamination that Head and Jameson associated with settler culture in Upper Canada. And just as the Solitary urges his Indian addressee to move to a “vast / Expanse of unappropriated earth” (Wordsworth 2007, Book 3, lines 937–8, 934, 947–8),21 so too did Sir Francis wish to convince Upper Canada’s Anishinaabe people to do the same. Therefore, in recommending policy to the British colonial secretary, Lord Glenelg, he argued that “the greatest kindness we can perform towards these intelligent, simple-minded people, is to remove and fortify them as much as possible from all communication with the whites” (Head 1839b, 4). Accordingly, he attempted to persuade local First Nations to move from the highly coveted lands north of lakes

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Erie and Ontario to the wild and remote environs of Lake Huron’s Manitoulin Island (see figure 4.1),22 where they would be free, so he supposed, to maintain their traditional lifestyles without succumbing to the adverse influences of colonial civilization. Interestingly, Jameson does not take issue with Head’s Indian removal policy per se. “I believe that Sir Francis Head entertained an enthusiastic admiration for the Indian character,” she concedes in a lengthy footnote, “and was sincerely interested in the welfare of this fated people. It was his deliberate conviction that there was no salvation for them but in their removal as far as possible from the influence and dominion of the white settlers; and in this I agree with his Excellency” (Jameson 2008, 376 unnumbered note). Despite this agreement, however, Jameson was offended by Head’s lack of consultation with the very people he wished to protect from colonial influence. Qualifying her earlier statements, therefore, she continues her footnote thus: “Seeing that the Indians are not virtually British subjects, no measure should be adopted, even for their supposed benefit, without their acquiescence. They are quite capable of judging for themselves in every case in which their interests are concerned. The fault of our executive is, that we acknowledge the Indians our allies yet treat them, as well as call them, our children. They acknowledge in our government a father; they never acknowledged any master but the ‘Great Master of Life,’ and the rooted idea, or rather instinct of personal and political independence in which every Indian is born or reared, no earthly power can obliterate from his soul” (Jameson 2008, 376–7). In short, it is the lieutenant-governor’s paternalism that Jameson finds offensive – as did such Ojibwe chiefs as Peter Jones (Kahkewaquonaby) and Joseph Sawyer (Nawahjegezhegwabe), both of whom stridently resisted Head’s removal plan.23 Jameson’s critique of paternalist governance is remarkably similar to that of the nineteenth-century Ojibwe author George Copway (Kahgegagahbowh), the subject of chapter 8 in this book. Although he calls himself “one of Nature’s children” (Copway 1850b, 10) – thereby implicitly affirming a Romantic view of the Indian as “Primeval Nature’s Child” (Wordsworth 2007, Book 3, line 928) – Copway is highly critical of such rhetoric when it informs colonial policy: “In former years,” he writes, “the American governors were more kindly disposed to us than they have been of late, yet the name of ‘Children’ is applied to us. The government and its agents style us, ‘My Children.’ The Indians are of age – and believe they can think and act for themselves. The term, ‘My

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Figure 4.1  Map of Upper Canada by Henry S. Tanner, c. 1833. Courtesy of the Toronto Public Library (t r l ) 912.713 T12.



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Children,’ comes with an ill grace from those who seem bent on driving them from their fathers’ house” (Copway 1851b, 192–3).24 Jameson’s fundamental agreement with Copway’s critique of colonial paternalism demonstrates an affirmation of Indigenous peoples’ right to political agency, and a concern for the justice of their treatment, that was rare in contemporary British writing. From a modern-day critical perspective, however, such sympathy for Indigenous people may seem hard to square with Head’s allegation that she violated one of their gravesites during her “summer rambles” through the wilderness. For the remainder of this discussion, therefore, I take a closer look at Head’s response to Jameson’s skull collecting and at Jameson’s own account of her travels among the Indigenous peoples of Upper Canada and northern Michigan.

A G r av e A l l egati on Head discusses Jameson’s desecration of an Indigenous gravesite not only in the letter to Murray but also – albeit without naming her – in a lengthy Quarterly Review essay entitled “The Red Man,” which he published not long after returning from Upper Canada to England. Since this published critique is much more detailed than the one Head sent to Murray in his private correspondence, it is worth quoting at length: About a year or two ago, an English female tourist, whose name – though it does not deserve our protection – we are not disposed to mention, happening to pass some … [Indian] graves, uncovered one, and in the presence of two or three Indians, very coolly carried off the sleeping tenant’s skull, as if it had been a specimen of quartz or granite. The Red witnesses during the act looked at each other in solemn silence, but on imparting the extraordinary scene they had witnessed to their chief, councils were held, – the greatest possible excitement was created, – and to this day, these simple people (or “savages,” as we term them) speak with horror and repugnance of what they consider an uncalled-for and an unaccountable violation of the respect which they think is religiously due to the dead. For our parts, we have often felt that we would not be haunted by the possession of that skull, for all the blue-stockings that ever were knit, or for all the acclamations that phrenologists can bestow. (Head 1857, 331–2)

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In this passage, Head calls attention to his own gentlemanly gallantry (itself a kind of paternalism) by choosing not to reveal Jameson’s identity despite his assertion that she “does not deserve our protection.” By “protecting” Jameson from public censure, he implicitly contrasts his own concern for the feelings of another human being (however unworthy she might be in his eyes) with Jameson’s alleged ability to disturb an Indigenous grave “very coolly,” that is, without showing any concern for the feelings of her “Red witnesses.” Moreover, when he claims that she treated the skull like “a specimen of quartz or granite,” he implies that Jameson viewed Native people not as human subjects but as mere objects, a view he challenges by highlighting the “horror and repugnance” she incited in the hearts and minds of her Indigenous companions. By calling her act “an unaccountable violation of the respect” that Indigenous people “think is religiously due to the dead” (emphasis added), Head also suggests that Jameson, and not the Indians, was the true pagan on the scene.25 The passage’s concluding references to “blue-stockings” and “phrenologists” are also telling. Clearly, for Head, if Jameson had followed conventionally feminine pursuits rather than usurping the masculine prerogatives of literature and science, she would never have “violate[d]” the “sanctity” of an Aboriginal grave. According to Head, Jameson’s taking of an Aboriginal skull demonstrated much more than a lapse in moral character. If he thought her published critique of Toronto society would have “a bad political effect” in Upper Canada (a charge, one should note, that attributes a great deal of public influence to her writing), her violation of an Indigenous grave had the potential to harm intercultural relations and incite violence between whites and First Nations people in the colony’s frontier regions: People who commit acts of this nature, little think of the serious consequences they may entail upon travellers who have the misfortune to follow them. The headless skeleton we have mentioned may yet be revenged, and certainly, if in the neighbourhood of his violated grave the body of a White man should be found, “Cold, and drenched with blood, His bosom gored with many a wound, Unknown the manner of his death, Gone his brand, both sword and sheath,”

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it might reasonably be noted down, that he had, most probably, been made to pay the penalty of the deed of a thoughtless Englishwoman. (Head 1857, 332) Embellishing his critique with a passage loosely quoted from Sir Walter Scott’s The Lay of the Last Minstrel, Head offers his readers a highly graphic and affecting image of violence. By locating the ultimate cause of this bloody scenario not in the deliberate actions of warlike men but in the “thoughtless” act of a misguided Englishwoman, he adds a measure of shock value to his portrait, perhaps hoping to persuade “‘the better half’ of [his] readers” – whom he directly addresses in his essay on two separate occasions – that the unnamed female perpetrator does not deserve to be recognized as a member of “the fairer sex” (Head 1857, 317, 320). Moreover, by pointing to the likelihood that future white travelers might pay with their lives for her insensitive “deed,” Head paints this “thoughtless Englishwoman” as someone potentially complicit in an act of murder, if not potentially guilty of murder herself. Although Head appears to have embellished his case against Jameson, the essential truth of his allegation finds confirmation in the narratives of two of her fellow travellers on Lake Huron, the mixed-blood voyageurs Lewis Solomon and Jean Baptiste Sylvestre, who mention Jameson in the personal histories they related to A.C. Osborne near the close of the nineteenth century. Among other things, these narratives demonstrate how our understanding of Upper Canada’s literary history is enhanced when Aboriginal voices are taken into account. Born on Drummond Island in 1881, Lewis Solomon was the son of William Solomon, “old Solomon, the interpreter,” as Jameson calls him in her travelogue (2008, 565). A British government interpreter and a veteran of the War of 1812, William married one of Jane Johnston Schoolcraft’s sisters at Mackinaw; thus, Lewis was nephew to Schoolcraft (whose poetry forms a topic of discussion above in chapter 1). Only sixteen years old when he travelled with Jameson and her party from the Manitowaning settlement on Manitoulin Island to Coldwater on the mainland, Lewis Solomon went on to have a storied career, working among other things as a guide and translator for the likes of Bishop John Strachan, Lord Morpeth, Lord Lennox, the Earl of Northumberland, and Colonel W.H. Robinson (the son and first biographer of Chief Justice Sir John Beverley Robinson). On the trip with Jameson, his fellow

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travellers included George Head, Francis Bond Head’s young son (Osborne 132–4).26 Lewis Solomon had a special status among the Métis voyageurs whom Osborne interviewed for his research on Métis migrations in upper Lake Huron and Georgian Bay. His “command of English [was] somewhat above the average of that of his fellow voyageurs,” so Osborne chose to publish his “narrative, with few exceptions, in his own words” (Osborne 127). Although many decades had passed since his journey with Jameson, Solomon’s memory of her remained sharp. “She was a rich lady from England, well-educated, and travelling for pleasure,” he recalled, adding that she “was an agreeable woman, considerate of others and extremely kind-hearted. I was a pretty fair singer in those days, and she often asked me to sing those beautiful songs of the French voyageurs, which she seemed to think so nice.” Confirming Jameson’s own account of her time at the Sault, Solomon went on to note that she had indeed run “the ‘Sault Rapids’ in a birchbark canoe, with two Chippewa Indian guides,” and that to honour this exploit, the local people had “named her Was-sa-je-wun-e-qua, ‘Woman of the bright stream’” (qtd in Osborne 136). Contrary to our popular image of the author of Winter Studies and Summer Rambles as an intrepid woman travelling with “neither companion nor man-servant, nor femme de chambre, nor even a ‘little foot-page’ to give notice of my fate, should I be swamped in a bog, or eaten up by a bear, or scalped” (Jameson 2008, 191), Solomon noted that, during the canoe voyage, he “was attendant on Mrs Jameson, and was obliged to sleep in her tent, as a sort of protector, in a compartment separated by a hanging screen.” Given the likelihood that contemporary readers would have perceived such a sleeping arrangement as improper despite the presence of the screen, it is no wonder that Jameson omitted this circumstance from her travel memoir. However, Solomon made it clear that nothing untoward had occurred during the time he spent with her, stating that at bedtime “I was obliged to wait until she retired, and then crawl in quietly without waking her” (qtd in Osborne 136). At this point in his narrative, Solomon added rather matter-of-factly that Jameson had “gathered several human skulls at Head Island, above Nascoutiong, to take home with her,” stating that she “kept them till I persuaded her to throw them out, as I did not fancy their company.” Although Solomon’s narrative thus confirms Head’s claim that Jameson collected Indigenous skulls, its matter-of-fact tone suggests that the colony’s former

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governor had greatly exaggerated the negative response of her Aboriginal fellow travellers. Far from denouncing her act as a source of “horror and repugnance,” as Head claimed in his Quarterly Review article, Solomon seems to have remembered Jameson with fondness, stating indeed that when they shook hands upon parting, he found “four five dollar gold pieces in my hand” (qtd in Osborne 136). Solomon’s narrative is confirmed by that of his fellow voyageur Jean Baptiste Sylvestre, the son of a French-Canadian fur trader turned soldier and a mixed-blood “woman of Scotch descent” named Angelique McKay (Osborne 142). “I was with the party who brought … Lady Jameson down from Manitoulin Island to Penetanguishene in birch-bark canoes,” he told Osborne, adding that “we stopped at Skull Island, where there was a large pit in the solid rock filled with skeletons. Mrs Jameson asked someone to get a skull for her, and Thomas Leduc went down and got one. They put it in the canoe near my feet, and I told them to take it away. Mrs Jameson kept it in the canoe with her. We took her to Coldwater, where an ox-team and a wagon was procured, and she was driven to Orillia (the Narrows), where she boarded a vessel for Holland Landing, thence to Toronto” (qtd in Osborne 143). Although Sylvestre’s account differs from Solomon’s in that he recalls her taking one skull, and not several as recounted by the latter, both accounts confirm Head’s claim that the Aboriginal people who accompanied Jameson were at least somewhat “disgusted” by her act. However, in neither case is there any evidence to suggest that Jameson’s skull collecting caused “the greatest possible excitement” leading to the convening of Native “councils” or would endanger the lives of future travellers into the Upper Canadian interior, as Head claimed in the accounts quoted above. Head’s assertion that Jameson engaged in skull collecting to gain the “acclamations” of “phrenologists” is also worth investigating, because such activity was very much in keeping with a colonial European tradition of appropriating the remains of Indigenous people for scientific study. During the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, phrenology and craniology were thought to provide methods for human classification, the former claiming to read individuals’ characters from their skulls and the latter using skull measurements to assess racial types. As craniology gained scientific authority due to the work of Joseph Banks and other natural historians, phrenology came to be increasingly regarded as a species of pseudo-scientific quackery. Given Head’s apparent disdain for women’s intellectual

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activities, it is perhaps not surprising that he would, in his allegations, associate Jameson with phrenology rather than craniology. Although different in method, motive, and status, phrenology and craniology shared common ground insofar as they both contributed to the development of “an international trade in the body parts of recently discovered ‘natives’” (Fulford, Lee, and Kitson 127). In a discussion of Tahiti, Tim Fulford, Debbie Lee, and Peter J. Kitson note that this trade inevitably caused the “destruction of the sacred sites in which skulls were laid to rest” (138). Indigenous interment grounds in the New World shared a similar fate as “a new wave of scientific research on human skulls … set loose the wholesale looting of Indian graves across America” (D.H. Thomas 38). Indeed, according to historian Robert Bieder, the “collecting of Indian crania appears to have been a cottage industry on the [North American] frontier” (67). Since the Indigenous skull was “the holy grail of the nineteenth-century creed of Romantic race theory” (Fulford, Lee, and Kitson 148), Jameson – who clearly wished to contribute to contemporary knowledge of Indigenous people – might well have coveted one as a “literary curiosity” (as Head surmised in his letter to Murray) or as a contribution to knowledge in the field of natural history. As it happens, Head’s claim that Jameson was interested in phrenology (rather than craniology) was likely correct: one of Jameson’s friends was Cecilia Combe, wife of George Combe, the author of A System of Phrenology (1819) and Elements of Phrenology (1824).27 In a letter to her mother and sister, Jameson refers to Combe as “the famous Phrenologist and philosopher” (1915, 228). Perhaps in taking a skull or several skulls, Jameson was motivated by a desire to assist Combe in his work. Whether or not this was the case, evidence in Winter Studies and Summer Rambles suggests that Jameson was herself something of an amateur phrenologist. Consider, for example, her description of Sir Francis Bond Head himself: “He is a little man, with a neat, active figure, a small but intelligent head, grave and rather acute features; his bright blue eye is shrewd and quick, with an expression of mingled humour and benevolence, and his whole deportment in the highest degree unaffected and pleasing” (2008, 93). Although this may seem on the whole a flattering portrait, Jameson’s reference to the governor’s “small but intelligent head” appears to encode a subtle phrenological critique. In Elements of Phrenology, Combe repeatedly equates brain and skull size with mental capacity: “most physiologists admit that the mental manifestations are vigorous in

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proportion to [the brain’s] size, all other things being equal,” he wrote, adding that “size appears to be essential to [mental] power; for a very energetic mind and a very small brain are never found concomitant” (Combe 29, 32–3). Admittedly, in its reference to the governor’s “small but intelligent head,” Jameson’s portrait implies that a small skull need not necessarily signify a limited mental capacity; but this qualification does not let the lieutenant-governor off the hook: elsewhere in Elements of Phrenology, Combe warns his readers “always [to] bear in mind that the phrenologist does not compare general size and general [intellectual] power: a man may have a small head, taken in the aggregate, and a powerful intellect; but it will be found that in him, the anterior lobe or seat of intellect is large, and that the deficiency lies in the organs of the propensities or sentiments, or of both. In such cases, there will be intellectual vigor without force of character” (Combe 139). To say that someone lacks “force of character” is, of course, to imply that they are morally flawed and thus arguably worse off than those who merely lack intelligence. When in Winter Studies and Summer Rambles Jameson indicts Head’s “fault[y]” tendency to treat the Indigenous peoples of Upper Canada as “children” by imposing policy upon them “without their acquiescence” (2008, 376–7 unnumbered footnote), she implies the presence of a tyrannical mindset in which a properly moral “force of character” (to use Combe’s phrase) is absent.

J a m e s o n o n t h e In t erment Grounds Although Jameson never admits to collecting skulls in Winter Studies and Summer Rambles, she demonstrates an interest in Indigenous people’s gravesites several times during the course of her narrative.28 The first instance occurs in her discussion of Mackinaw Island, which she praised for the “exceeding beauty” of its “enchanting scenery” (Jameson 2008, 407–8). On Mackinaw, Jameson was an honoured guest of the Irish-Ojibwe poet Jane Johnston Schoolcraft (Bamewawagezhikaquay, or Woman of the Sound the Stars Make Rushing Through the Sky) and her husband, the renowned American ethnologist Henry Rowe Schoolcraft. Something of Jameson’s enthusiasm for the “exceeding beauty of this little paradise of an island” and its “enchanting scenery” (407–8) is captured in a sketch she made (see figure 4.2), which, as Wendy Roy has noted, depicts the Anishinaabe people and their dwellings as picturesque objects on a picturesque

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landscape (Roy 2003, 104–7). This interest in picturesque aesthetics also informs Jameson’s discussion of Mackinaw Island’s famous “cave of skulls”: “We drove to-day to visit a spot of romantic interest in the life of Henry; the cave in which he was secreted after the massacre at Michilimackinac by his adopted brother Wa,wa,tam, lest he should be made into a ‘mess of English broth,’ like some of his hapless companions. He describes the manner in which he was brought here at eventide; how he crept into its farthest recesses and fell asleep; – and waking in the morning, found himself lying upon a heap of human skulls!” (Jameson 2008, 422).29 Unfortunately, by the time of Jameson’s visit, this “spot of romantic interest” had been transformed as a result of colonial contact, for although it was “still called the ‘cave of skulls,’ … all the bones have been removed and interred in a desolate, picturesque little cemetery hard by” (423). If there is a hint of nostalgia in Jameson’s tone as she reflects upon this recent change, it quickly gives way to aesthetic enthusiasm as she reflects on the “surpassing beauty” of the cave’s island location: “In short,” she exclaims, “this is a bijou of an island! – a little bit of fairy ground, just such a thing as some of our amateur travellers would like to pocket and run away with (if they could) – and set down in the midst of one of their fishponds – cave of skulls, wigwams, Indians, and all” (423). This is the closest Jameson comes to actually mentioning skull collecting in Winter Studies and Summer Rambles. While she attributes the desire “to pocket” the island, “cave of skulls … and all” to “some of our amateur travelers” rather than to a professional traveller like herself, the passage certainly demonstrates her interest in the colonial practice of appropriating Indigenous people’s remains. Like Sir Francis Bond Head, who emphasizes the reverence Indigenous people had for their burial grounds, Jameson subsequently speaks of the “profound veneration with which all the Indian tribes regard the places of their dead” (2008, 488–9). Discussing how the expansion of an American military fort at Sault Sainte Marie disturbed an “ancient burial-place of the Chippewas” (488), she offers a sympathetic critique: “In all their treaties for the cession of their lands, [the Indians] stipulate with the white man for the inviolability of their sepulchres. They did the same with regard to this place, but I am sorry to say that [it] has not been attended to, for in enlarging one side of the fort, [the Americans] have considerably encroached on the cemetery. The outrage excited both the sorrow and indignation of some of my friends here, but there is no redress. Perhaps it was this

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Figure 4.2  “Island of Mackinaw – Lake Huron,” pencil sketch by Anna Jameson, 1837. Courtesy of the Toronto Public Library (t r l) 966-6L-22.

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circumstance that gave rise to the allusion of the Indian chief here, when in speaking of the French he said, ‘They never molested the places of our dead!’”(489). From a modern-day Western perspective, the sympathy Jameson expresses for her Ojibwe friends’ “sorrow and indignation” over the American military’s violation of this local burial ground seems very much at odds with her skull-collecting activities. However, as David Hurst Thomas notes, most of the nineteenthcentury anthropologists who collected Indigenous crania “cared deeply about Indian people” (xxx), and it is likely that Jameson felt the same way. After all, it was not unusual during this period for British people to feel compassion for “the poor Indian” while nevertheless acting against Native American interests in various ways.30 Jameson mentions two more visits to Native interment sites near the end of Winter Studies and Summer Rambles, both of which occurred while she travelled by canoe from Manitoulin Island – where the lieutenant-governor had negotiated Treaty 45 with sixteen Anishinaabe chiefs during the previous summer31 – to the southern shores of Georgian Bay.32 In a sketch she drew during this leg of her journey (see figure 4.3), Jameson depicts herself – the sole woman in her party – wearing a bonnet and holding a parasol above her head in order, as Wendy Roy has suggested, “to preserve that distinctive marker of race, white skin,” from “the coarsening rays of the sun” (Roy 2003, 104). Among the fellow travellers sharing her canoe, Jameson identifies “our Indian steersman, Martin,” “old [William] Solomon, the interpreter,” seven Métis voyageurs, Samuel Peters Jarvis (the superintendent of Indian affairs), and “the governor’s son, a lively boy of fourteen or fifteen [Sir Francis Bond Head’s son George]” (Jameson 2008, 565).33 If, as seems likely, young George Head witnessed Jameson’s skull collecting, we could reasonably assume that he told his father about it upon his return to Toronto. Perhaps he was even responsible for some of the embellishments, mentioned previously, that found their way into his father’s accounts. Whatever the case may be, Jameson notes that during this leg of her canoe voyage she and her companions passed “two Indian sepulchres, on a point of rock overshadowed by birch and pine, with the sparkling waters murmuring round them.” Telling her readers, “I landed to examine them,”34 she highlights not only her personal interest in these sepulchres but also the personal agency enabling her to take a closer look at them. The passage culminates in the following observation: “The Indians cannot here bury their dead, for there is not a sufficiency of

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Figure 4.3  “The Canoe on Lake Huron,” pencil sketch by Anna Jameson, 1837. Courtesy of the Toronto Public Library (tr l ) 966-6L-35.

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earth to cover them from sight, but they lay the body, wrapped up carefully in bark, on the flat rock, and then cover it over with rocks and stones. This was the tomb of a woman and her child, and fragments of the ornaments and other things buried with them were still perceptible” (Jameson 2008, 570–1). Jameson’s next visit to a gravesite occurs shortly after this episode, when she and her party members land “on the ‘Island of Skulls’” where an “ancient sepulchre of the Hurons” is located (2008, 572). As we know from the narratives of Lewis Solomon and Jean Baptiste Sylvestre, this is the place where Jameson obtained one or more skulls. In his History of the Ojebway Indians, Chief Peter Jones notes that the island had witnessed an action in a “bloody war” between the Ojibwe and Nahdoway (or Iroquois) people at the turn of the eighteenth century. According to Jones’s account, a large band of Ojibwe warriors, seeking vengeance against the Nahdoways for the perpetration of “brutal acts” against their people, travelled to “an island on the south shore of Lake Huron. There they fell on a large body of Nahdoways, who had been dancing and feasting for several nights, and were so exhausted as to have sunk into a profound sleep the night on which they were killed. The island is called Pequahkoondebaymenis, that is, skull island, from the number of skulls left on it. In one of my tours to the north I visited this island, and lodged on it for a night. Its present appearance indicates a place frequented by Indians, the smoothness of its surface being well adapted for a great Indian dance” (Jones 1861, 111, 112–13). Jones’s history of Pequahkoondebaymenis might help to explain why Jameson’s Aboriginal travelling companions appear (contrary to Head’s account) to have been relatively nonchalant about her skull collecting: since the island was not an Ojibwe interment site but the final resting place of the Ojibwes’ ancestral enemies, Solomon and Sylvestre may not have taken Jameson’s act as a personal affront. In contrast to the pastoral description of the previous interment ground surrounded by “sparkling” and responsively “murmuring” waters, the “Island of Skulls” has a distinctly gothic feel in Jameson’s narrative: “The spot was most wild and desolate, rising from the water edge in successive ledges of rock to a considerable height, with a few blasted gray pines here and there, round which several pair of hawks were wheeling and uttering their shrill cry.” Before leaving “this ominous Island,” Jameson and her fellow travellers observed “some skulls and bones … scattered about, with the rough stones

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which had once been heaped over them” (2008, 572). Perhaps because the Nahdoways had been driven out of this region many years previously, the gravesite had long been left untended. Hence, its scattered skulls and bones, mingling with the stones that had formerly covered them, might have seemed to Jameson less like human remains worthy of reverence than forgotten natural objects slowly returning to the dust from which they arose. Perhaps in taking a skull from its resting place on Pequahkoondebaymenis, she felt that she was respectfully reclaiming for the realm of culture a human artifact that had long been disregarded in nature.

C o n c l u s i on As previously noted, Sir Francis Bond Head attributes two different motives to Jameson’s skull collecting. When he claims in his letter to Murray that she took a skull as a “literary curiosity,” he implies that her motive was a frivolous one based on a desire, as a “literary lady,” to impress her fellow “blue-stockings” and other literary friends. The suggestion here is that she wished to use the skull as a prop for the recounting, in literary conversaziones, of her Canadian experiences. But when Head hints in his Quarterly Review article that she took the skull to obtain “the acclamations” of phrenologists, he gestures toward a more scientific or analytical motive. Such a motive would be consistent with the observations of Jameson’s biographer, Clara Thomas, who notes that the author always strove to obtain “accurate information” on the topics she discussed in her writing, and that her “detailed and careful research” lent her work a measure of “authority and precision” that helped set it apart from other contemporary travelogues (1967, 135, 137). While it is clear that Jameson carried out significant research prior to and during her Canadian travels, most scholars agree that she deliberately accessed both “white sources and Indian sources” in an attempt to gain authority and authenticity for her narrative (Buss 1992, 57). Perhaps, for Jameson, a skull might have served literary storytelling purposes as a symbol of authentic Indigenous culture while also serving “science” as an “Indian source” from which she believed further information could be gleaned via phrenological analysis. Whichever the case, a consideration of Jameson’s skull collecting might well complicate the claims of modern-day scholars who have praised the ethics informing this remarkable traveller’s real and textual interactions with Indigenous people in Upper Canada.35

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Ultimately, in their mutual criticisms, both Anna Jameson and Sir Francis Bond Head demonstrated a concern for the morality of contemporary colonialism: Jameson considered Head’s paternalism oppressive, and Head saw Jameson’s skull collecting as insensitive and disrespectful. Nowadays, the adverse effects of paternalist governance policies on First Nations people are well known. Even if Jameson was correct in her generous assumption that Head “was sincerely interested in the welfare” of Indigenous people (2008, 376 unnumbered footnote), good intentions cannot be allowed to excuse the damage perpetrated in the name of paternalism, the legacies of which still haunt Canadian society today.36 At the same time, although most people would nowadays consider the collecting of human skulls to be a barbaric practice, nineteenth-century phrenologists and collectors like Jameson often sincerely believed that their pastime was a benevolent one. However, the fact that Jameson never admits in her Canadian travelogue to gathering skulls suggests that she had at least some moral qualms about participating in the activity – perhaps further exacerbated because skull collecting was not considered a lady-like activity. Given that the taking of Indigenous skulls was so common among Western travellers and settlers in North America, perhaps we should consider Head’s outspoken condemnation of the practice as more unusual and surprising than Jameson’s having been among the many collectors. Ultimately, the curiously modern sense of outrage that Head expresses in response to Jameson’s act suggests an interesting historical irony. While I fully agree with Jameson’s assertion that Head’s paternalist policies were at the root of unjust Aboriginal governance practices in Upper Canada, this same paternalism seems to have motivated the lieutenant-governor’s desire to “protect” Indigenous people from skull collectors like Jameson herself.

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5 The Transatlantic World of John Norton (Chief Teyoninhokarawen) Let not those who still claim the British name, nor the citizens of the United States, deceive themselves in the belief that because the poor Indians, whose lands they possess, and whose rivers they navigate, have no powerful voice to blazon their wrongs, and hold them up to the abhorrence of mankind, they will always rest unavenged; or that the civilization which is pompously carried on; but which is in fact a slow consuming system of extinction, will avert the retributive justice which God will assuredly render. James Buchanan, Sketches of the History, Manners, and Customs of the North American Indians

In t ro du cti on In a book published in 1820 under his brother James’s name, John Strachan, the future Archdeacon of York and later the first Anglican Bishop of Toronto, lamented the condition of Upper Canada’s Aboriginal people and their leadership, voicing in particular his concern for the apparent degradation of the province’s Mohawks. “Among the Indians in Canada there are at present,” he claimed, “no conspicuous characters; none of the chiefs or warriors possess any commanding influence, or are remarkable for their eloquence. The Mohawks, who are the most cultivated among the native nations, seem to have rather deteriorated, than improved, since their removal to Canada. No man of note has arisen among them since the death of Captain Brant” (Strachan 1820b, 146–7). Although the Mohawks had indeed struggled in the years since they had followed their Loyalist chief to their new home along the banks of Upper Canada’s Grand River, Strachan’s claim was highly questionable. Joseph Brant’s successors included

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two commanding and eloquent chiefs: Brant’s adopted nephew, John Norton (Teyoninhokarawen), and his youngest son, John Brant (Ahyonwaeghs). Saving my discussion of the younger Brant for the next chapter, I devote the present discussion to Norton, focusing in particular on his roles as warrior, writer, diplomat, and transatlantic celebrity. In an apt summary, Cecilia Morgan describes Norton as “an individual shaped by different worlds and the nature of the borders that he traversed. His movements were made possible and, at times, orchestrated by his particular transatlantic contexts and networks,” including “both imperial warfare and humanitarianism” (55). This chapter subjects key passages in Norton’s journal to detailed textual analysis and investigates his relationships with such contemporaries as Walter Scott, William Wilberforce, and especially Upper Canada’s future chief justice, John Beverley Robinson (whose archive discloses some new information about the Mohawk chief). In so doing, it shows how Norton strove to correct misperceptions about his people and their history, combatting adverse colonial stereotypes in an effort to gain sympathy and self-determination for his people. According to the account Norton provided in The Journal of Major John Norton, a work written between 1810 and 1816 (Benn 1998, 7) but not published during his lifetime, he was the son of a Cherokee man taken captive in his early youth by a British officer at Kuwoki, South Carolina, after British soldiers burned his home village in 1760 during Britain’s hostilities with the Cherokees in 1759–61 (Norton 36). As Tim Fulford describes this circumstance, the young boy “was in effect adopted into the British tribe, for the officer who plucked him from the burning village took him home to Scotland” (214). Following his Scottish captor’s profession, Norton’s father, once grown, also pursued a career in the British military, marrying the Scotswoman who would become Norton’s mother around 1770. After receiving an education at Dunfermline and Edinburgh,1 the young John Norton followed his Cherokee father into the military, returning to North America in 1785 where, upon leaving the army, he became a schoolmaster on the Six Nations’ Tyendinega reserve located at the Bay of Quinte on Lake Ontario’s northern shore. Finding teaching uninspiring, Norton resigned from this post in 1791 to work and live among the Native Americans in the Ohio country fur trade. It was likely during this time that he first met Joseph Brant, a meeting that would dramatically change the course of his life and career. Impressed by the young Scots-Cherokee’s intelligence and fluency in numerous European

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and Native American languages, Brant helped Norton to secure a position in the British Indian Department, where he worked primarily as an interpreter among the Grand River Six Nations (Haudenosaunee) people, a position he held until Brant, having adopted him as his “nephew” and “personal deputy,” made him a Mohawk war chief in 1799 (Willig 161–3). Norton’s claims regarding his paternal Aboriginal ancestry seemed highly questionable to many of his white contemporaries – especially those who opposed his efforts to help the Haudenosaunee secure a title deed to their territories on the Grand River. As Carl Benn has observed, doubts about Norton’s lineage have unfortunately lingered until the present day, contributing to his critical neglect among historians and Indigenous studies scholars. Happily, Benn’s most recent study of Norton puts these doubts to rest, providing evidence that “overwhelmingly supports the probability that [Norton’s] father was a Cherokee” (2012, 262). And yet, the Mohawks who adopted him into their nation did not fret about his ethnic background.2 As John Strachan would later observe during a visit to the Grand River Tuscaroran village, Six Nations people were generally not “affected by anything like a spirit of caste”; as such, they recognized outsiders who intermarried with their people “as a portion of the tribe” (1846, 53). A similarly relaxed attitude toward ethnic difference informed cases of adoption. According to Carl Benn, Haudenosaunee society had long embraced “a strong multiracial tradition” that welcomed adopted outsiders as “full members in Iroquois tribes. By the Mohawk standards of the period, John Norton was a Mohawk” (1998, 8) – or, in the Mohawk lexicon, he was a “Kanien’ke:haka” (Hamilton 191). This is by no means to downplay the importance of Norton’s British upbringing. On the contrary, it is likely that his adoptive name, Teyoninhokarawen (meaning “It keeps the door open” [Benn 2011, xii]), gestured at least partly toward the mediating role Joseph Brant hoped Norton would play in the contemporary colonial world. Adumbrating his future role as a cultural broker who devoted his expertise in Western culture to the service of his adoptive people, Norton’s Mohawk name suggested the two-way processes of hybrid exchange that constituted his transatlantic identity. The hybridity that made Norton an exemplary cultural broker informed his military and diplomatic exploits as well as his journal’s account of Indigenous traditions and practices. His central motivation for writing the manuscript was to challenge contemporary stereotypes

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– including, in particular, those associated with Native Americans’ perceived inability to transform themselves into industrious Europeanstyle agriculturists: “I have attempted to account for the deficiency of the Aboriginal Americans in the qualifications of such a persevering industry [i.e., husbandry and farming] as is attendant on a providing foresight; as rather proceeding from the diversity of their occupations than from any inferiority, in the natural powers of mind or body, to other nations” (Norton 132). With these words, Norton refuses the insulting Eurocentric idea that Aboriginal people, living like animals in and for the moment, lacked the prudential foresight and industriousness that motivates the European farmer, who clears the forest, tills the soil, and sows seeds not for immediate benefit but to gain sustenance in the future. And yet, while attempting to discredit the notion that Native Americans are by nature morally and mentally “inferior” to whites, Norton is careful to dismiss the opposite view, embraced by many Romantics (including the Ojibwe author George Copway, whom I discuss in chapter 8), that Indigenous people are endowed with a natural nobility of body and spirit that makes them superior to their cultured European counterparts: “I have also endeavoured to shew that … to their way of life, and the nature of their ordinary employments, is to be attributed their excelling in attainments which display no small degree of sagacity, rather than to the possession of any peculiar natural faculties, uncommon to those which it has pleased the Benevolent Author of our Being to bestow, generally, in various proportions, on the whole human race” (Norton 132). What Norton is arguing for in his wholesale dismissal of both antagonistic and benevolent stereotypes is the humanity of Aboriginal people. In short, he rejects stereotypes which, to quote Delaware author Daniel David Moses, prevent Indigenous people from being taken “seriously … as … human being[s]” (237). Neither vicious nor virtuous by nature, but endowed like all other people with God-given faculties common to “the whole human race” and shaped like all people by the “ordinary employments” of their lives, Native Americans, in Norton’s portrait, are full members of the human family – and therefore deserve to be treated as such. In addition to addressing anti-Indian stereotypes, Norton’s journal refutes simplistic ideas about European influence on Indigenous North Americans. “Among the Mohawks,” he explains, “we find some families, and individuals highly respectable both for their morality and industry, and others as notoriously bad. The former have been

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benefited by the precepts of religion, the latter have been injured by bad example. Those have acquired good from their communication with Europeans – these have been corrupted” (Norton 11). Unlike Upper Canada’s future lieutenant-governor, Sir Francis Bond Head, who in the mid-1830s justified his efforts to move Indigenous people to remote reserves by arguing that all contact with European settlers was harmful to them, Norton affirms a more complex model of European influence. He acknowledges both positive and negative consequences depending on particular contexts and circumstances (though, to be sure, in asserting that his fellow Mohawks had benefitted from the white man’s religious “precepts” while suffering from his “bad example,” Norton subtly critiques whites for hypocritically failing to live up to their own vaunted moral codes). Later in the journal, he explains that where his people have fallen into vice, they have done so as a direct result of the adverse economic conditions under which they suffered, attributing their immoral conduct to the “abject dependence” they are forced to endure as wards of the colonial government. Such people are, he states, “contaminated by all the vices attendant on a Dependent Situation” (Norton 278). To remedy this situation, Norton worked to transform the political and economic system that created and perpetuated it. In particular, by striving to help his people achieve independent ownership of their land and the attendant ability to secure their livelihoods, he hoped they would become immune to such moral “contamination.”

C o l o n ia l is m and Land Although Norton has been called an “Anglophile” (Benn 1998, 33), he was highly critical of the ways in which Great Britain, France, and the United States had historically treated even those Native Americans whom they acknowledged as friends. “The French in Canada possessed themselves of the country of their Allies, the Algonquins,” he wrote in his journal, “and the English took a friendly care to act equally kind by their Allies the Iroquois or Five Nations, whose influence they also made use of to possess themselves of the lands along the Delaware and Susquehannock and other parts, the property of other Tribes. The New Englander was equally rapacious in acquiring the lands of the Mohickanok, and other friendly Tribes, as they were to get those belonging to the Tribes who shewed hostility” (Norton 130). Although Norton generally eschews the use of literary devices, favouring instead

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an objective or expository mode of writing, he clearly could not resist deploying bitter irony in his references to the expropriation of Native lands as a “friendly” and “kind” act, before depicting this theft in its true colours as “rapacious.” By noting that these lands were stolen from Indian “Allies,” he emphasizes the white colonizers’ dishonour and betrayal; and by calling these stolen lands the “property” of Indigenous nations, he clearly rejects the European philosophical claim (discussed in the Introduction to this volume) that Aboriginal people did not own their traditional territories. Furthermore, by attributing the theft of these territories to French, English, and American people, he shows his refusal to accept any of North America’s three colonizing powers’ nationalist claims to treat Native people more honourably and humanely than their counterparts. Whereas Norton attributes the theft of lands to “the governing part” of North America’s European “communities,” he sees “the slow but not less certain means of commerce” as “no less destructive” to Indigenous traditions. “When the Europeans first arrived,” he explains, “the whole country abounded in wild animals; to the south of latitude forty five, corn was generally raised; therefore, in these parts, the natives only partially depended on the flesh of these animals for food, and their skins served them for clothing; those killed for this purpose, did not perhaps equal the natural increase in the temperate climates. And in the more northern parts, the fish, which the waters produced, formed a great part of their subsistence” (Norton 130). In contrast to influential Scottish Enlightenment philosophers such as Lord Kames, who generalized that all Native North American societies lived in “the hunter-state” (Home 1778, 1.341), Norton here emphasizes agriculture’s crucial role in providing sustenance for Native peoples whose territories were located in suitable climates and topographies. (Indeed, elsewhere in the journal, Norton overturns the Eurocentric ethnographers’ false hunter / agriculturist binary distinction when, in recounting a Six Nations origin story, he informs his readers that “the Great Turtle which supports the earth” had taught the first Iroquoian to cultivate corn because it would “yield you a certain support, independent of the Chace, at the same time that it will render more palatable the viands, which you may thereby obtain” [Norton 89] – thus showing that for his people hunting and farming were mutually implicated activities.) Finally, whereas Europeans often depicted Indigenous hunting practices as wanton and wasteful, Norton claims that the hunt was conducted in a sustainable manner prior to the advent of the

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European fur trade, with the “natural increase” of animal populations exceeding their decrease as a result of hunting and trapping during pre-contact times. As the Native hunter became addicted to alcohol and to the attractiveness and “convenien[ce]” of European manufactures, however, “he no longer bounded his desires by killing enough to supply with meat and clothing, his family, his aged relatives or unfortunate friends; but hunted to obtain skins for the merchant, the number of which was only decided by his ability in killing them … Thus the [continent’s] northern part was soon despoiled of the principal part of what it naturally afforded for the support of man” (Norton 130–1). In short, for Norton, the effects of Indigenous participation in commerce – the highest state of human existence in European stadial theories of social development – were pernicious, functioning as “slow but no less certain” forms of environmental and socio-cultural violence and destruction. And since Indigenous people continued to hunt wild animals for the fur trade despite the trade’s decreasing profitability, they were often unable or disinclined to take up farming as an alternative mode of subsistence. As Norton explains, “there was little room to expect that those who had been brought up hunters could spare much time to attend to the industrious occupations of their agricultural neighbours; and without such imitation in clearing the forests, sowing grass-seed to form meadows, and cutting hay, they could not replenish their country with domestic animals, in lieu of the wild ones natural to the country, which they and their ancestors had nearly extirpated” (Norton 130–1). If, as Lord Kames and other European philosophers claimed, a people “improved” both in manners and morals as a result of their transformation from hunters to herders and farmers (Home 1778, 1.341–3), the Indians’ participation in the fur trade had become a significant barrier to their civilizational development. In Norton’s day, however, perhaps the biggest obstacle preventing northern Indigenous peoples’ transformation to a primarily agricultural mode of subsistence was political. Those who cleared and farmed the land found it difficult to undertake such arduous work with confidence given the insecurity of their territorial holdings, which were increasingly invaded by incoming white settlers and squatters. As Norton observed, Native Americans “have always wanted a security to engage in laborious improvements, which the meanest of their neighbours enjoy, from an uncertainty of enjoying the undisturbed possession of the spot, which they have brought under cultivation by

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the sweat of their brow” (131). The question Norton raises here is an important one: why would an Indigenous family work hard to clear and cultivate their land when white strangers seemed destined to usurp it, thereby reaping the rewards of that difficult labour? By the time Norton settled among the Grand River Six Nations people, Joseph Brant and his fellow chiefs had long been anxious about their insecure hold on the land, which they did not own outright, since, like all First Nations reserves, it was held in trust by the Crown. In 1784, the Six Nations had received the Grand River reserve from Sir Frederick Haldimand, the British military commander, in reward for “the Services” of Joseph Brant and “the fidelity of the Five Nations” during the American Revolutionary War (Norton 280). Having lost, in Brant’s own estimate, 2 million acres of traditional territory in the United States (Kelsay 1987), Brant and his adherents, numbering approximately 1,800 souls (McCalla 27), received a tract of land running (to quote the Haldimand Proclamation) “Six Miles deep from each side of the [Grand] River beginning at Lake Erie, & extending to the Head of said River” (qtd in Kelsay 1987). The vast reserve of approximately 950,000 acres (Daniel Coleman 185) contained much prime cultivable territory, some of which Brant and others wished to sell or lease to alleviate the people’s poverty, but since the Haudenosaunee were not freeholders, they could not exercise the right to dispose of their lands as they wished. Moreover, as more and more white settlers invaded the reserve lands, government officials began to question the very validity of the Haldimand treaty, including the extent of the Grand River tract. As Joseph Brant complained in an 1802 letter to the Earl of Moira: “Latterly, it has made us uneasy to find our title seemingly disputable – and also not to be able to have our Grant confirmed by the legal deed, as is the other grants to Loyalists; but I yet have that confidence in the equity and honor of the British Government, that I flatter myself should His Majesty be acquainted with our situation, he would not fail to have justice rendered to us” (qtd in Kelsay 1984, 628). Something had to be done, and Norton was the man to do it. Recognizing his potential to act as a bridge between Mohawk and British cultures, Brant and his fellow chiefs deputized Norton in a secret ceremony in early 1804, sending him to England to seek redress from the Crown. Norton was instructed to obtain confirmation of the Haldimand Grant, including a title deed in fee simple, thereby enabling Six Nations people to clear and cultivate the land with the same confidence as white freeholders, while also giving them the legal right to

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control sales and leases. The mission was to be conducted in secret because the chiefs knew that the obstructionist colonial government frowned upon direct contact between First Nations and the Crown, preferring all such interactions to be mediated by the Indian Department, a branch of the colonial administration which, as Colin Calloway notes, “saw itself as the sole link between the Indians and the British government.” Therefore, in going over the heads of local officials, Brant and Norton would ultimately encounter “considerable opposition” in Upper Canada, arousing in particular the ire of Colonel William Claus, the Indian Department’s superintendent general from 1800 to 1826, who would do everything in his power to foil Norton’s transatlantic mission (Calloway 59, 53).3 Brant, for his part, provided Norton with letters of reference to the close friends and allies he had made during an earlier sojourn in England, including the Duke of Northumberland – who would become Norton’s staunch friend and supporter – as well as Sir Evan Nepean and the Earl of Moira. Each did what they could to encourage and facilitate Norton’s lobbying efforts (Klinck 1970, xlii).

T r a n sat l a n t ic C e l e b ri ty and Di plomat During his time in England, as Carl F. Klinck has shown, Norton “became something of a celebrity,” having his portrait painted, regaling audiences with stories about Aboriginal traditions and life in Upper Canada, and performing Mohawk war dances for polite audiences. Among the venues in which he performed was Cambridge University (likely Trinity College) (1970, xlviii–xlix), where Norton made a deep impression on Charles Allanson Winn, Lord Headley.4 Recalling his experience of the performance, Headley wrote that when Norton’s war “dance” commenced, the Mohawk chief’s “whole appearance was instantly changed; instead of being mild & humane, his countenance assumed a most savage & terrific look; he sprang forward to seize his enemy with amazing ferocity; the action was both manly & graceful” (qtd in Fulford 212). According to Tim Fulford, Norton’s “dance was part of a conscious strategy aimed at winning Britons to his cause”: in shape-shifting, like an Indigenous trickster figure, from the “white people’s guises” of “officer, gentleman, [and] agricultural improver” to the roles of Indigenous warrior and chief, and then back again, he deliberately strove to unsettle stereotypical British views of Native American identity (Fulford 213).

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If Fulford’s analysis is correct, Norton’s strategy seems to have not always proven effective. For among the witnesses to his performances was William Wilberforce and other members of the Clapham Sect, a group of evangelical clergymen, parliamentarians, and philanthropists well-known for their anti-slavery activism, who took a keen interest in Norton and the Grand River Haudenosaunee settlement. For the most part, these men were quite taken with the Mohawk chief, with whom they met on several occasions in late July 1804; in his journal entry for 30 July, Wilberforce noted that “we are all extremely struck with Mr Norton (Teyoninhokarawen),” expressing admiration for “his blended modesty and self-possession” and “his good sense and apparent simple propriety of demeanour.” And yet, some aspects of Norton’s behaviour seemed to contradict this assessment. Earlier that day, after meeting with “friends about sending the gospel to the Indians,” Wilberforce and his associates witnessed the performance of “Mr Norton’s Mohawk [war] dance,” a spectacle that incited “much discussion” among them. At least some of this conversation appears to have been focused on the perceived impropriety of the performance. At the end of his journal entry, Wilberforce noted, with apparent approval, that Norton “again danced his war dance” but “more moderately.” In all likelihood, Norton modified the dance in his second performance at the suggestion of his genteel Christian audience, who were taken aback by the dance’s dramatic violence, perhaps fearing that the spectacle would alienate Britons from Norton’s cause, rather than win their sympathy, by reinforcing negative stereotypes of Native “savagery.” Whichever the case, Wilberforce was clearly impressed by the Mohawk chief and inspired by his mission on behalf of the Grand River Six Nations: “May it be a providential incident thrown in my way,” he told his diary, “to send the gospel to those ill-used people.” It is likely, indeed, that Norton’s vast knowledge of Indigenous affairs played a role in shaping Wilberforce’s subsequent philanthropic resolution to “addict myself to … [the] North American Indians” (qtd in R.I. and S. Wilberforce 3.188, 3.503). Other Britons who took note of Norton’s Mohawk war dance during his 1804–05 visit to Britain included the famous Scottish poet Thomas Campbell, author of a best-selling long poem entitled The Pleasures of Hope (1799). As noted in my next chapter, Campbell would defame Norton’s adoptive uncle, Chief Joseph Brant, by depicting him as a cannibalistic “Monster” in his 1809 historical romance Gertrude of Wyoming (a poem about a British and Indian

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massacre of American troops and settlers during the Revolutionary War). However, far from being impressed by Norton, Campbell viewed him and his performances with skepticism and no small measure of disdain. As he told his friend and fellow poet Walter Scott in a letter composed on 25 April 1805, “there is a Mohawk Indian in town, who whoops the war-whoop to ladies in drawing-rooms, and is the reigning rage of the town this season. He is an arch dog, and palms a number of old Scotch tunes (he was educated in the woods by a Scotchwoman), for Indian opera airs, on his discerning audience. [Samuel] Rogers the poet, somebody told me, being one of the spectators of this wonder, at hearing of proposals for the whoop, was seen to shrink with a look of inexpressible horror, and hide himself behind a sofa” (qtd in Beattie 2.51). Rogers’s horrified response to Norton’s proposed “war whoop” is perhaps understandable when one considers the historical realities of contemporary Indigenous warfare. In battle, as Alan Taylor has shown, Native American warriors deployed “the terror of their sound and appearance” in a “theatre of intimidation” designed to strike mortal fear into the hearts of enemy combatants. During the War of 1812, Britain’s Aboriginal allies – including Norton and the Haudenosaunee warriors under his command – would help to defeat the American enemy in key campaigns at Detroit and Queenston Heights via their “piercing screams” (which their British allies also deployed) and intimidating displays of their “painted appearance” (Taylor 165, 206, 189). Campbell’s correspondent, Walter Scott, might well have appreciated such tactics: in depicting the “furies of … war” in his contemporary poem The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805), he refers to the “deadly yell” of the Border clan’s battle cry (Scott 1883, I.vii.9–12; emphasis added). In Campbell’s description of Norton’s performance, however, such serious considerations were entirely absent. In ridiculing Rogers’s cowering “behind a sofa” at the very proposal for the “war whoop,” Campbell indicts the elder poet’s masculinity, associating him with the “ladies in drawing-rooms” who, he claims, comprised Norton’s main audience. As his ironic reference to the audience’s “discerning” mindset would indicate, Campbell was perhaps more interested in criticizing polite British society than he was in ridiculing the Mohawk chief himself. Moreover, in contrast to Scottish writers such as Lord Kames, who associated Native Americans with “savage … bears or wolves” (Home 1778, 1.341–2), Campbell’s description of Norton as an “arch dog” might suggest that he saw the man as thoroughly

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domesticated, a knowing imposter who took pleasure in hoodwinking a gullible and degenerate British public.5 And yet, by differentiating Norton’s “Scotch tunes” from actual “Indian opera airs,” Campbell’s letter to Scott suggests the impossibility of sorting out the “authentic” from the “inauthentic” in the transatlantic contact zone (for one does not usually associate the refined arts of opera with so-called “savage” forms of culture). Norton’s ultimate failure to fulfill the terms of his first diplomatic mission to Britain has been well documented. Although with assistance from the Duke of Northumberland, Lord Dorchester, and other influential sympathizers he came close to obtaining the sought-for title deed to the Grand River tract (Kelsay 1984, 635), his efforts were ultimately undermined by colonial intrigues back home in Upper Canada. The province’s government was worried about the prospect of Norton’s success in London, because the upper portion of the Haldimand tract had in fact belonged to the Mississaugas when Haldimand granted it to the Haudenosaunee. Hence, if forced to recognize Haudenosaunee title to the entire tract, the colonial authorities would have to purchase the land from the Mississaugas and give it to Brant’s people rather than using it for their preferred purposes of white settlement (Willig 635–6). Therefore, at the request of Lieutenant-Governor Peter Hunter, William Claus used backhanded divide-and-conquer tactics to question Brant’s – and, by extension, Norton’s – authority among the Six Nations, ultimately persuading two Haudenosaunee councils to disavow Norton’s claim to represent them (Klinck 1970, xliii). This stratagem had its desired effect. When news of the Six Nations’ supposed repudiation of Norton arrived in London, officials there became “more concerned with Norton’s identity and his credentials than they were with the status of the Grand River lands” (Willig 176). Suddenly suspected of being an imposter – a man “who calls himself an Indian” as Lord Castlereagh, Britain’s secretary of war, would later put it (qtd in Willig 181; emphasis added) – an appalled Norton was forced to abandon his mission and return to Canada. In July 1806, having returned home, Norton attended a public council along with forty Grand River chiefs, where full confidence was expressed in Chief Joseph Brant and himself. As a result, Norton – to Claus’s consternation – was reinstated as a chief (Kelsay 1984, 643; Willig 180). Just over a year later, in November 1807, Brant passed away. On his deathbed, the famous chief is said to have

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addressed his dying words to Norton, asking his adopted nephew to “have pity on the poor Indians: if you can get any influence with the great, endeavour to do them all the good you can” (qtd in Klinck 1966, 175). Upon Brant’s passing, after working for ten years as the elder chief’s deputy, Norton began his career as “Brant’s successor in Grand River leadership” (Klinck 1966, 173), a position he would hold for fifteen years until Brant’s son John became Tekarihogen (or hereditary chief). During this period, prior to the commencement of war with the Americans in 1812, Norton worked to promote temporal and spiritual “improvement” among the Six Nations. After visiting his Cherokee ancestors in the United States, he returned to the Grand River to advocate the establishment there of a “seminary and educational farm,” hoping that these institutions would encourage his adoptive people to emulate the “vast improvements” he had witnessed among the Cherokees down south. Although his “acculturationist reforms” provoked some traditionalist opposition at the Grand River (Willig 164–6), Norton worked zealously to promote them, having been confirmed and reinvigorated in his Christian faith by Wilberforce and other members of the Clapham Sect, with whom he continued to correspond. Although Norton was somewhat disappointed by his people’s lack of progress in the Christian faith, which “did not flourish as might be wished” (qtd in Calloway 126), he told an unidentified correspondent that the Mohawks were “improving rapidly,” with several of the reserve’s industrious farmers having harvested “three or four hundred bushels of Wheat in the Year” (10 August 1808; qtd in Johnston 277).

T h e W a r o f 1812 Such labours, interrupted in 1809–10 by Norton’s journey to meet his relatives in Cherokee country, were severely disrupted by the outbreak of hostilities between Britain and America in the War of 1812. In anticipation of the conflict, Norton had already received a wartime commission as commander of the Six Nations, a position that brought him a significant degree of autonomy, since Upper Canada’s new governor and military commander, General Isaac Brock, chose to bypass the Indian Department and deal with Norton face to face (Willig 187–9). Although he had experienced his share of disrespect at the hands of the colonial government in Upper Canada, Norton strongly rejected any Haudenosaunee military alliance with the

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Americans, who, he claimed, used Native warriors “as a Hunter used a Dog, pushing them always forward in the greatest Danger, – without allowing them any Share of glory” – and seeking the people’s “utter Destruction” while pretending to value them as allies (qtd in Benn 1998, 166–7). However, in the conflict’s early days, Norton had difficulty recruiting Six Nations warriors to the British cause, as he noted in his journal. Addressing Norton as “Friend,” two of the Grand River’s “most respectable Chiefs” stated flatly that they viewed him and his recruitment efforts “with apprehension & suspicion: – We think you so zealously disposed to serve the King,” they explained, “that you are inclined to draw after you all these people without considering the difficulties in which you may thereby involve them. … We find ourselves in the hands of two powerful Nations, who can crush us when they please. They are the same in every respect, although they are now preparing to contend” (Norton 290). Such words posed an early challenge to the myth – propounded by the likes of John Strachan and Sir Francis Bond Head, and still widely embraced by many Canadians – that Britain’s historical treatment of Indigenous people was much more humane and respectful than America’s. Significantly, the Grand River Six Nations’ reluctance to join the British war effort had much to do with the provincial government’s refusal to grant the people fee-simple ownership of the Haldimand tract: “Without a clear title to their land,” Willig observes, “the warriors at Grand River had little incentive to fight” (190). Had his overseas efforts to secure title to the Grand River lands succeeded in 1804–05, Norton would likely have had an easier time recruiting Haudenosaunee warriors to the British cause in the war’s early days. Although Norton persuaded fewer than forty Six Nations warriors to join in the siege of Detroit, his subsequent recruitment efforts were more successful, and in later campaigns on the Niagara frontier his warriors fought with passion and purpose, turning the tide of battle on more than one occasion (Willig 194–5). In a letter written on 30 September 1812 to a member of Lower Canada’s executive council, John Strachan acknowledged the Mohawks’ key role in the alliance, claiming that if Brock had not “employ[ed] the Indians, … he & all his men must have perished” (1946, 17). Strachan’s sentiment proved correct in the following month, when Norton and his fellow warriors saved the day at the Battle of Queenston Heights, where Strachan’s friend and former student John Beverley Robinson witnessed the carnage in his role as a newly commissioned, twenty-one-year-old

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lieutenant of the York militia. In chapter 3, I discussed the memorandum that Robinson penned about the battle, as well as his perceptions of the heroic role played by Norton and his Mohawk warriors. In his own reminiscences on the battle and the larger war, Norton seemed frustrated by propagandistic claims that the Mohawks fought with particular cruelty when the British and Americans had done so themselves: “It would be useless as well as endless,” he complained, “to repeat the number of cruelties that had been asserted, & as bluntly contradicted … on one Side or the other…” (Norton 315). But white perceptions of Indian warfare were not always as negative as those about which Norton complained. In the winter of 1814, while briefly stationed in Quebec City, the Mohawk chief met and befriended Thomas Scott, paymaster of the 70th Regiment, who happened to be the brother of the poet Walter Scott. In a letter composed near the beginning of March, Thomas told his brother the following: Yesterday morning Captain Norton, the chief of the Five Nations, left. I had the pleasure to be his intimate acquaintance, and he is a man who makes you almost wish to be an Indian chief. What do you think of a man speaking the language of about twelve Indian nations, English, French, German, and Spanish, as well, being in possession of all modern literature – having read with delight your Lady of the Lake, and translated the same, together with the Scriptures, into Mohawk – having written a history of the five nations, and a journal of his own travels, now in London ready for publication, and being at the same time an Indian chief, living as they do and following all their fashions. For, brother, you ask doth he paint himself, scalp, etc. etc.? I answer yea, he doth; and with the most polished manner of civilised life, he would not disdain to partake of the blood of his enemy at the banquet of sacrifice. Yet I admire and love the man, and would cheerfully give fifty guineas that you could see him for one half-hour. (Scott 1894, 1.345) Although, in ascribing cannibalism to Norton, Thomas Scott engages in some highly questionable racist stereotyping, his letter is remarkable for the tensions informing its portrait: On one hand, Norton is a supremely “civilised” man who is fluent in many tongues, “possess[es]” (not merely dabbles in) “all modern literature,” and has not only translated literary and biblical texts but is also an author in his own

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right. On the other hand, in contrast to his “polished manner,” Norton is a bona fide “Indian chief” who, in apparent confirmation of stubborn contemporary stereotypes, “paints,” “scalps,” and drinks the blood of his conquered enemies. Given Norton’s complaints about white perceptions of Indian warfare, one wonders what Norton himself would have thought of Thomas Scott’s portrait, whose praises are ultimately qualified by his statement that Norton “almost” makes him “wish to be an Indian chief” (emphasis added). In Romantic Indians, Fulford assumes that Norton did in fact translate Scott’s The Lady of the Lake, stating that “it is not surprising that Norton did so; after all, Scott’s imaginary Highlanders showed the presence of Romantic Indians in their literary ancestry and Norton was himself an Edinburgh-educated part-Scot,” and suggesting that Norton aimed to remind Native people “that many Britons revered the warrior and clan ethics for which Mohawks had long stood” (Fulford 10). As Karl F. Klinck states, the finding of Norton’s “Mohawk translation of Scott’s poem would be a triumph for Indian literature. Speculation alone becomes exciting as one fancies Highland material in comparable Iroquois dress: wilderness scenes, stag-hunts, chieftains gathering the clans, exotic garments, and so much more” (1970, xxi). Although one hesitates to rain on the parade of such pleasurable speculations, it is of course possible that Norton never did complete a translation of Walter Scott’s famous poem. Given Thomas Scott’s exaggerated claims that Norton translated “the Scriptures” (when in fact he translated only the Gospels of Saint Matthew and Saint John [Benn 1998, 186]) and that Norton’s book was currently “ready for publication” in London (when it was not completed until 1816 and never found a publisher in Norton’s lifetime), it is not unlikely that some exaggeration had crept into his portrait of the Indian chief he so admired. What seems to ring true in Thomas Scott’s epistolary portrait of Norton is his depiction of the latter’s concern about the potential reception of his journal in Britain, an awareness demonstrating Norton’s keen understanding of Romantic-period literary politics. As Thomas told his brother Walter, Norton “is afraid that the Edinburgh Review will be hard on his book. I promised to write to you to have it reviewed in the Quarterly. It surely is a strange circumstance that an Indian Chief should produce a literary child” (Scott 1894, 1.345–6) – though one might suggest it was even more unexpected that an Indian chief would appreciate the political differences between the

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Whiggish Edinburgh Review and the Tory Quarterly Review. Clearly, Norton was a man who challenged cultural expectations of all sorts. In response to his brother’s letter, after musing about the “Transatlantic” reception of his recently published novel Waverley, Walter Scott showed his appreciation for the overturning of contemporary stereotypes of savagery and civility in the topsy-turvy Atlantic world, saying of Norton, “I beg my compliments to the hero who is afraid of Jeffrey’s scalping knife” (qtd in Lockhart 4.401–2) – Jeffrey being, of course, the Edinburgh Review’s renowned publisher. At some point during Norton’s 1816 sojourn in Scotland, it appears that Norton and Walter Scott met, and that Scott, like his brother, came to admire the Mohawk chief. In a letter dated 13 April 1820, Norton’s friend Adam Wilson of Edinburgh informed him that his “Old & Staunch Friend Mr Scott has just been Dubbed Sir Walter Scott by the King” and that the newly created “Knight is constant in his Enquiries after you” (qtd in Klinck 1970, lxxxix).

B ac k in B ri tai n In the summer of 1815, about six months after the Treaty of Ghent was formally ratified, ending the War of 1812, Norton returned to Britain with his wife Catherine (Karighwaycagh) and his son John (Tehonakaraa), where he worked on his journal, visited some influential friends and sympathizers, and spent time with his Scottish relatives in Dunfermline. It was also during this trip that Norton, in recognition of his contributions to Canada’s military defence in the War of 1812, was “honoured with a non-serving major’s commission in the army” (Benn 1998, 185), an honour that was bound to upset his detractors in Canada. As it happens, Norton’s travels took him to London at the very time John Beverley Robinson was pursuing his legal studies there at Lincoln’s Inn Hall. In his diary entry for 31 January 1816, Robinson mentions that when he called on his former military commander, Sir Roger Sheaffe, he “found Norton,” a fellow veteran of Detroit and Queenston Heights, “just going for breakfast with him,” noting that they had “a long talk about Canada matters.” In the same entry, he mentions Norton’s journal project, writing that the latter “talks about publishing a book on the subject of the Indians – their different tribes &c.” During this meeting, Robinson offered Norton some surprisingly sympathetic advice regarding his journal’s subject matter: “I recommended to him to take

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occasion to say something about the Indian claims & their reasonable expectations from our repeated promises, and how miserably & shamefully we had deserted them [in the Grand?].”6 Coming from the pen of Upper Canada’s future “de facto government leader” (Brode 40) and chief justice, such a frank (though private) admission of the colony’s failure to fulfill its moral obligations to its Haudenosaunee allies was significant. Although Robinson appears to have shown sympathetic interest in Norton’s writing, he nevertheless had serious misgivings about the author. Despite acknowledging that the Mohawk chief “ought to be able to give a tolerable account” of Indigenous history, he called Norton “such a veritable coxcomb that I can’t guess what sort of a book he would write.”7 Since “coxcomb” refers to a vain and conceited man, perhaps Robinson suspected Norton would aggrandize himself in his narrative, focusing on his own heroic exploits among the Indians, or presenting himself as a Byronic figure – in which case Robinson would have been wrong, since Norton studiously avoided taking such an approach to his subject matter.8 In another diary entry written just over two weeks later, wherein he mentions another chance meeting with Norton at Sheaffe’s residence, Robinson continued his private critique of Norton’s character: “Breakfasted with … R. Sheaffe at his lodgings. Norton was with us. That grand humbug has done well in coming here, he is now hon[oured] with the rank of Lt Col. & the govt here think most highly of his merit.”9 By calling Norton a “humbug” – one who practises the arts of deception – Robinson revealed the ultimate basis of his distaste for the Mohawk chief. Unable to accept Norton’s full membership in the Grand River Six Nations community, and – like many of his Canadian contemporaries – suspicious of Norton’s claims to Cherokee ancestry, Robinson considered Norton a fraud – a charlatan social climber and troublemaker pretending to be an Indian for personal gain. It is likely that Robinson would have agreed with the assessment of Upper Canada’s current lieutenant-governor, Francis Gore, who in December 1815 complained that Norton’s military promotion conferred “a species of influence incompatible with that subordination of the Tribes to the views of His Majesty’s Government, which it is so important to preserve” (qtd in Benn 1998, 184) – though, in contrast to Robinson’s dismissals, at least Gore’s statement affirmed Norton’s status as a member of “the Tribes.” In Britain, however, Robinson’s suspicions regarding Norton’s authenticity were not always shared, as was evident in the fact that Norton’s

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military promotion “was a Royal Commission, not a Provincial one” (Klinck 1966, 176). Not only was Robinson all too aware that Britain’s high-ranking officials thought “most highly of [Norton’s] merit,” but Sheaffe, Robinson’s friend and former military commander, and several members of the aristocracy had clearly fallen under the Mohawk war chief’s charismatic spell. On 17 February, a seemingly frustrated Robinson told his diary that he had paid another visit to Sheaffe’s residence only to find Norton present there yet again, and that, as a token of his admiration for the Mohawk warrior, Sheaffe had “presented Norton with a ring.” Not only did Sheaffe make it abundantly clear that he “admire[d] Norton,” but on the same evening, another of Norton’s London admirers, Lord Percy, demonstrated his own affection for Norton by taking him “to the opera.”10 Norton’s remarkable success in London society clearly unsettled Upper Canada’s future government leader and chief justice, who seemed jealous of the attention given to his fellow Upper Canadian and former comrade-in-arms. Norton left London soon after this period to rejoin his family in Scotland, where he remained for “the greater part of this visit” to Britain, but he returned to London briefly in the summertime, not only to do some “last-minute” work on his journal prior to returning to Canada (Klinck 1970, lxxxii) but also, it seems, to deal with some legal matters, as John Robinson’s correspondence for this period demonstrates. Although Robinson had misgivings about Norton’s activities in London, he was nevertheless willing to turn his acquaintance with the Mohawk chief to personal advantage, as revealed in a letter he wrote to the poet Thomas Campbell on 23 July 1816. As noted in chapter 3, Robinson was an enthusiastic admirer of Campbell, who, in his opinion, held “the first place in the rank of living poets”; and his letter, which was accompanied by Canadian gifts (including an authentic Indian calumet of the sort Campbell had depicted in one of his poems), was very much an example of what we nowadays call fan mail. Wishing to impress the celebrity poet, Robinson told Campbell, among other things, that he was “anxious to fulfil my promise of making you acquainted with Norton” (qtd in Beattie 2.325). Although, as noted above, Campbell himself had taken liberties with Norton’s character, calling him an “arch dog” in correspondence with Walter Scott over a decade earlier, it appears that he now wanted to meet the Mohawk chief, and that Robinson strongly wished to promote the encounter. Having immortalized Chief Joseph Brant as a cannibalistic “Monster” in his best-selling 1809 poem Gertrude

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of Wyoming (Campbell 1907, III.xvi, line 4), Campbell apparently wanted to meet the man who claimed to be Brant’s adopted nephew. Although he seemed unable to share his private views of Norton with Sheaffe, Robinson appears to have found a sympathetic ear in Campbell, for he crowned his letter to the Scottish poet with a comic anecdote at Norton’s expense. While seeking the Mohawk chief to arrange the promised dinner meeting, Robinson “could not find him, till I saw him in the Court of Common Pleas, attending as a witness – an unlucky blow to his savage fame – reducing him almost to the degrading level of mere civilised life” (qtd in Beattie 2.325).11 Just as Campbell had thought Norton out of place, and therefore inauthentic, when he danced the war whoop in London’s polite drawing rooms, Robinson appears to have considered Norton similarly misplaced and inauthentic in the civil environs of the English courtroom: hence his claim that Norton’s presence there struck “an unlucky blow to his savage fame.” And yet, in his joke at Norton’s expense, Robinson touched on an issue of concern for many Indigenous people in Upper Canada: under the province’s system of government, Indians, as wards of the Crown having no individual legal rights, could not own land, vote in elections, participate on juries, or provide testimony in court – problems that Norton wished to see redressed.12 As Britain’s Aborigines Protection Society lamented over two decades later in their Report on the Indians of Upper Canada (1839) – a report depicting Norton’s transatlantic diplomacy in a positive light (British and Foreign 5) – Native people could hardly be expected to “accommodate themselves to the usages of a civilized community, when they are studiously excluded from sharing in its laws” (British and Foreign 39). By appearing in an English courtroom, Norton was certainly doing something that other Haudenosaunee people were denied the right to do. Given the style of conduct in England’s courtrooms, however, Norton might very well have agreed with Robinson’s claim that he was “unlucky” to provide testimony in such a place. As Robinson noted in his diary entry for 5 December 1815, witnesses were often the butt of intimidation and mockery: “The style,” he wrote, “is to browbeat and insult, and uniformly to question the witnesses’ veracity, without respect to his feelings” (qtd in Brode 29). Whatever transpired in the courtroom, Robinson took the opportunity to converse with Norton after his appearance there; as he told Campbell, “I asked him to dine with me on Monday, and hope to be honoured with your and Mr Adams’s company to meet him” (qtd in Beattie 2.325). According

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to Campbell’s nineteenth-century biographer William Beattie, the hoped-for dinner did take place, one of its “happy result[s]” being the arrangement of Campbell’s subsequent meeting with Norton’s fellow Mohawk chief, John Brant (Beattie, 2.325 unnumbered footnote). But this claim seems doubtful: Beattie appears to have confused Norton with John Brant, who would not meet Campbell for several more years; and since Robinson did not mention the dinner with Norton and Campbell in subsequent letters or diary entries, it is possible that the hoped-for meeting never took place.

C o da When Norton and Catherine returned to Canada in the late summer of 1816, they left young John with family members in Dunfermline, where he attended school until 1820. Once home, Norton set to work on a large tract of land he had acquired, which overlooked the Grand River near Caledonia. According to the Reverend Robert Addison, for whom Norton acted as an interpreter among the Six Nations around 1817, Norton was at this time “much occupied in improving his lands, and, as he lives among the Indians on the Grand River, he hopes his example and influence will be of essential service to those poor wanderers, and induce them to cultivate their lands.” In improving his own tract, as John Brant noted in 1823, Norton made productive use of a “Plough, churn, and Flax Machine” presented to him by his old friend the Duke of Northumberland (qtd in Klinck 1970, lxxxv, lxxxix). Although he had been unable to obtain the title deed that would have given the Grand River Haudenosaunee farmers the security they needed to work their lands without fear of them being taken away, he still hoped to see his fellow Mohawks become productive farmers. By the time the British travel writer Anna Jameson visited the Haldimand tract in 1837, much of the land had undergone a remarkable transformation. Describing the situation of Brantford, the local town named in honour of Joseph Brant, she displayed her enthusiasm for aesthetically pleasing landscapes: “The situation of this place is most beautiful – on a hill above the left bank of the Grand River. And as I stood and traced this noble stream, winding through richlywooded flats, with green meadows and cultivated fields, I was involuntarily reminded of the Thames near Richmond; the scenery has the same character of tranquil and luxuriant beauty” (Jameson 2008, 247). Given such a description, is it any wonder that white settlers,

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homesick for the lands they had left behind in Europe, coveted such an attractively fertile place? Ultimately, as she viewed the land, transformed as it was by human settlement and labour, Jameson could see no future there for the Grand River Six Nations people to whom General Haldimand had granted it in 1784: “The interests and property of these Indians are at present managed by the government. The revenue arising from the sale of their lands is in the hands of commissioners, and much is done for their conversion and civilisation. It will, however, be the affair of two, or three, or more generations; and by that time not many, I am afraid, will be left” (Jameson 2008, 249). As already noted, Norton tied the misfortunes of the Grand River people to their lack of control over the land. Here, perhaps inadvertently, Jameson does the same, if only by directly juxtaposing the colonial government’s management of Indian “interests and property” – of which she (unlike Norton) appears to approve – against her grim vision of the Six Nations people’s impending extinction. Within a decade of Jameson’s visit, as squatters and other settlers took more Grand River territory every year, the government would decide to consolidate remaining Indian lands by assigning “one hundred acres to each male head of household among the Six Nations there,” effectively breaking Haldimand’s promise to Joseph Brant under the guise of “protect[ing]” the remaining Indian lands from white encroachment (Willig 195). John Norton was not around to witness these developments. He left Upper Canada in 1823 in the wake of a duel he fought with a man named Joe Crawford over the fidelity of his wife Catherine, to whom he assigned a portion of his military pension before his departure. In his sixties at the time, and leaving the Grand River Six Nations under the able leadership of Chief John Brant (whose career forms the subject of the next chapter), Norton travelled southward with a Cherokee cousin, apparently reaching Mexican territory and heading toward the Pacific Ocean by 1826. At that point, he disappeared from the known historical record (Benn 1998, 187) – a rather romantic ending to a life spent striving very publicly, against great odds, to secure his people’s future at the Grand River. In his performances and in his writing, Norton had made a valiant attempt to combat the stereotypical thinking that insulted the Haudenosaunee and all too often functioned to justify their ill treatment under colonial rule. Although he was unable to find a publisher for his journal, its rediscovery in recent decades has been a boon to historical and literary scholarship. Calling

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the manuscript “the first major book by a resident of Upper Canada,” Klinck has suggested that it might well “be called ‘The Book of the Mohawks,’ since they are here interpreted by the most talented among them in the broad context of eastern North American Indian life and history for men of good will” (1966, 169, 177). Norton’s context was indeed a “broad” one: its “transatlantic networks” (Morgan 23) extended from the southern territories of his Cherokee ancestors to the hills and cities of Scotland; from the forests and clearings of the Grand River Six Nations settlements to the bloody battlefields of 1812–14; from the halls of power in Upper Canada to places of influence in Great Britain where Norton vied, like John Beverley Robinson and other Upper Canadians, for the attention of aristocrats, philanthropists, poets, and others who might take an interest in colonial justice and the well-being of his people. Norton’s life and writings thus have much to teach us not only about early North American history but also about the dynamic transatlantic contexts in which this history unfolded.

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6 John Brant (Chief Ahyonwaeghs) and the Grand River Haudenosaunee Oh Southwell, Southwell, how I rejoice to have left thee, and how I curse the heavy hours I dragged along, for so many months, amongst the Mohawks who inhabit your kraals! George Gordon, Lord Byron, Letters and Journals of Lord Byron: With Notices of His Life. Vol. 1

Besides, they are so barbarous and rude! So totally divested of civility! Their country is so overrun with wood! And in the arts they shew such small nobility! Sidney Owenson, Lady Morgan, The Mohawks: A Satirical Poem

B ac k g ro unds Unlike the other Indigenous people whose lives and careers are highlighted in this book, the Mohawk chief John Brant did not produce any substantial works of literature, history, or autobiography. Nevertheless, in his responses to key writings by the influential Canadian cleric John Strachan and the famous Scottish poet Thomas Campbell, he made important contributions to the history of British literature, contributions that shed light not only on the lives and writings of Strachan and Campbell but also on the transatlantic history of the Grand River Haudenosaunee people. Moreover, in his letters and political activism, John Brant provided an early critique of colonial economic development and its adverse socio-ecological effects. Directly associated with several key figures examined in this volume – including Strachan, John Beverley Robinson, John Norton, and Peter Jones –

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Brant, like Norton before him, was a cultural broker who used his expert knowledge of Upper Canada’s settler society to advocate both in Canada and in Great Britain for his people’s political enfranchisement. In the process, he challenged racist stereotypes that contributed to their ongoing marginalization. In discussing Brant’s literary and political activities, this chapter aims to shed new light on his life and work, showing how he sought to expose and correct libelous misrepresentations of the British-Haudenosaunee military alliance, and how his efforts to stop the Welland Canal Company from building a dam on the Grand River provide an early (if ultimately unsuccessful) example of Indigenous environmental justice activism. The youngest son of the famous United Empire Loyalist Chief Joseph Brant (Thayendanegea)1 and his wife Catharine, John Brant (Ahyonwaeghs) was born into the Turtle Clan on 27 September 1794 at the Mohawk Village, near present-day Brantford, Ontario (Kelsay 1987; Chadwick 5).2 Although he lived in the long shadow cast by his famous father,3 he came to be well respected in his own right, earning fame first for his conduct as a young warrior in key battles during the War of 1812 and later for his work as a transatlantic Mohawk diplomat, superintendent of the Six Nations, and agent for the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in New England (in some activities assisted by his younger sister Elizabeth Brant). Although Catharine Brant did not fully approve of her son’s immersion in the white man’s culture and society, she used her traditional prerogative to name him Tekarihogen (or hereditary chief) of the Grand River Six Nations (Haudenosaunee) in 1830, two years before his untimely death in the cholera epidemic of 1832. During his lifetime, John Brant arguably achieved his most widespread recognition not as a consequence of the above-mentioned duties, but as a result of two forays into the world of letters and literary criticism. These brought him to the attention of an increasingly broad reading public, first in Upper Canada (through his critical response to John Strachan’s biographical sketch of his father) and later throughout much of the English-speaking world (via his related and widely publicized critique of Thomas Campbell’s celebrated 1809 poem Gertrude of Wyoming). To appreciate the significance of these literary activities – considered highly unusual for a Mohawk person in the early nineteenth century – some context is necessary. According to the nineteenth-century historian William L. Stone, John Brant developed a lifelong love of “the best English authors” during his early

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education in Ancaster and Niagara; in addition to the benefits he received from extensive travel and “associations with good society,” this literary education “improved his mind” to such an extent that “his manners were early developed as those of an accomplished gentleman” (Stone 2.501).4 Stone’s portrait of Brant as a highly cultured gentleman had been affirmed in previous nineteenth-century accounts written by Francis Hall, Robert Gourlay, and John Mactaggart, each of whom visited John and Elizabeth Brant at their home at Wellington Square (located in what is now Burlington) near the head of Lake Ontario. Having met the Brants during his 1816 Canadian travels, Hall, a lieutenant in the 14th Light Dragoons, portrayed him as “a fine young man, of gentlemanly manners, and appearance, [who] speaks and writes English agreeably and correctly, and dresses in the English fashion, retaining only the moccasins of his Indian habit” (130). According to political reformer Gourlay’s 1822 account, John and Elizabeth Brant were “in manners, conversation, and conduct, equal to the best bred people of our own nation” (ccv). Taking such praise even further, the British government civil engineer Mactaggart claimed of John Brant several years later that, “in truth, I have not met a more polite gentleman or a better scholar in all Canada” (2.45). Given such accounts and the administrative and evangelical roles Brant came to play in Upper Canada, one may appreciate Isabel Kelsay’s comment that the “white world very nearly claimed” him (1984, 529).

T h o m as C a m p b e l l a n d Jos eph Brant If members of the Grand River Six Nations were worried that the younger Brant might forget his roots, his efforts to defend his father’s reputation in Upper Canada and throughout the English-speaking world certainly demonstrated otherwise, showing a strong concern to correct distorted aspects of the popular historical record. Brant’s concern for his father’s legacy – and, by extension, for the reputation of the Haudenosaunee people whom the great warrior chief led to Upper Canada in the wake of the American Revolutionary War – was nowhere more apparent than in his personal dealings with Thomas Campbell. The Scottish poet depicted the elder Brant as a demonic, murderous savage in Gertrude of Wyoming, an elegant long poem set during the American Revolutionary War and published to international acclaim in 1809. As noted in previous chapters, Campbell had many admirers in Upper Canada, including John Strachan and John

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Beverley Robinson, both of whom took pains to cultivate his acquaintance during their travels to Britain. To help the reader appreciate John Brant’s interactions with this famous Scotsman – and to clarify some of the key ideological differences that set him apart from Strachan and Robinson – I want to briefly examine two of Campbell’s most famous poems. Praised by the British Romantic literary critic William Hazlitt as works “that have gone to the heart of a nation, and are gifts to a world” (144), they helped to shape the contemporary reading public’s (mis)perception of Indigenous people in North America. The first of these poems, entitled The Pleasures of Hope, made Campbell an overnight sensation upon its publication in 1799, being widely read not only in Britain but in Continental Europe, the United States, and Upper Canada. In Part I of the poem, Campbell offers an enthusiastic paean to the transformative power of “bright Improvement,” a distinctively European process of socio-economic development that would, he claimed, come to “rule the spacious world from clime to clime,” bringing “culture” to “every wild” place and “every shore” around the globe (1907, 12, Part 1, lines 321–4). To illustrate this process and its utopian outcomes, Campbell included in the poem a highly stereotypical vignette in which he imagined the transformation of so-called savage landscapes and cultural practices along the shores of Lake Erie, the vast freshwater inland ocean into which the Grand River discharges its waters (a passage that, although examined in chapter 1, requires fresh scrutiny here): On Erie’s banks, where tigers steal along, And the dread Indian chants a dismal song, Where human fiends on midnight errands walk, And bathe in brains the murderous tomahawk – There shall the flocks on thymy pasture stray, And shepherds dance at Summer’s opening day. (Campbell 1907, Part 1, lines 325–30) According to his friend and contemporary biographer Cyrus Redding, Campbell was not thinking of Lake Erie’s American shores when he wrote this passage. Rather, he had “the desired advance of Canadian civilization” in mind (1860, 1.43), in which case he was likely thinking of the Mohawk people about whom he had read in numerous popular histories and travels. By representing the Mohawks as “murderous,” tomahawk-wielding “fiends” – human equivalents of the predatory

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“tigers” he incorrectly locates in the lower Great Lakes watershed – Campbell implicitly asserted the moral righteousness of a civilizing mission that aimed to transform the region from a primeval, predatory forest – the haunt of all that is “wild” and unruly – to a peaceful, identifiably British “thymy pasture.” This scenario of environmental improvement would certainly have won the approval of prominent Canadians such as John Strachan and John Beverley Robinson, the latter of whom would celebrate the idea that “thousands of acres” of land were “redeemed in each year” from Upper Canada’s “wilderness,” referring to this transformative process as one of the colony’s foremost “improving circumstances” (1840, 40; emphasis added). Indeed, as Robinson’s choice of language suggests, he saw the Europeanization of the colony’s terrain as a veritable act of redemption, a sacral conversion from benighted “savagery” to enlightened “civility.” One wonders what John Brant would have thought of such musings if, as is likely given Campbell’s fame in Upper Canada, he had read The Pleasures of Hope as part of his literary education. The second work, published ten years after The Pleasures of Hope, is Campbell’s tragic long poem Gertrude of Wyoming, which emphasizes the theme of a violent and destructive Mohawk warrior culture at much greater length than the earlier poem.5 It depicts a controversial episode in the American Revolutionary War wherein British Loyalist forces and allied Iroquois warriors killed several hundred American colonists at Forty Fort in Pennsylvania’s Wyoming Valley (Jarvis 168). Set on the banks of the famous Susquehanna River – the very setting in which the British Romantic poets Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey dreamed of establishing their Pantisocracy commune among local Native Americans – Campbell’s poem begins in the bucolic mode, depicting the Wyoming Valley as an exemplary scene of agrarian peace and prosperity. But this pleasant colonial idyll is ultimately disrupted by the incursion of a “howling, desolating band” of Indigenous warriors led by “the Monster Brandt.” Brandt – whose character Campbell modelled after politically biased and grossly inaccurate historical representations of Chief Joseph Brant – is also called “The Mammoth,” a term associating him not with the improved and improving colonial present but with a violent and monstrous prehistoric past. Adding a degree of exotic sensationalism to his portrait for good measure, Campbell associates Brandt and his marauding Indians with cannibalistic ritual: “Red is the cup they drink,” he warns his readers, “but not with wine” (1907, Part 3, xvi, lines 4–5, 8).

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Brandt’s sudden incursion into the Wyoming Valley at the head of a literally bloodthirsty band of Indian warriors destroys the colonial idyll, turning the plot of Campbell’s poem toward catastrophe as the lovely heroine, Gertrude, and her gentle father are cruelly murdered and the Wyoming Valley is transformed from a “terrestrial paradise into a frightful waste” (44). Given such a libelous representation, it is no wonder John Brant felt the need to defend his father’s reputation.

J o h n B r a n t C o n f ro nts Archdeacon J o h n   S t r achan Brant was not the first resident of Upper Canada to criticize Gertrude of Wyoming for its historical inaccuracies. Several years before Brant’s meeting with Campbell, in a biographical sketch of Joseph Brant published anonymously in his journal The Christian Recorder and later reprinted in A Visit to the Province of Upper Canada in 1819, the Reverend John Strachan – who otherwise praised Gertrude for its display of “exquisite poetical talents” – complained about the poem’s political biases.6 Refuting Campbell’s claim that the Wyoming Valley was an earthly paradise and that its peace-loving inhabitants were the innocent victims of murderous British and British-allied aggression, Strachan denounced the Wyoming settlers for their disloyalty to the Crown, arguing that they “had engaged most actively in the support of rebellion,” having previously “purged themselves, as they termed it, of all the loyalists, in the most violent and cruel manner.” As a result, he claimed, Wyoming’s rebellious residents – cruel “oppressors” who had “hunted” their Loyalist counterparts “like wild beasts” – “could not reasonably expect to be exempted from the horrors of civil war” (Strachan 1819b, 147, 112). The Americans, in short, had got what they deserved.7 Like the Scottish Romantic poet Walter Scott, who reviewed Campbell’s poem shortly after its publication,8 Strachan’s main concern was that Campbell had cast “the British character” in a dishonourable light; he thus admonished the author to correct the poem’s inaccuracies in a subsequent edition, including its erroneous depiction of Joseph Brant whom, Strachan noted in passing, was incorrectly “said to be of the [Wyoming military] expedition, and one of the principal authors of the cruelties committed” (1820c, 162). But Strachan’s brief defence of the Mohawk war chief was at best lukewarm, and at worst downright harmful. Although Joseph Brant did not participate in the conflict in Wyoming, he was, Strachan darkly

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intoned, “present with the Indians on many trying occasions” during the Revolutionary War, “and no doubt adopted their mode of warfare,” including the scalping of victims (1819b, 147).9 And although earlier in the same essay Strachan commends Brant for having been “at one time a sincere and zealous Christian” who worked to accomplish “the conversion of his countrymen,” he goes on to claim that the Mohawk chief had afterwards not only been corrupted “in his religious principles” but had also lost “his reverence for the King” (148) – grave charges indeed against a man who took pride in his Christianity and in his certified status as a United Empire Loyalist.10 In completing his portrait of the Mohawk chief’s ostensible fall from grace, Strachan claimed that, upon settling at the Grand River, the formerly temperate Brant had begun “to indulge in spirituous liquors,” growing “callous” in his dealings with others and ultimately drinking himself to death (150). Among those who were deeply offended by Strachan’s defamatory portrait of Brant was Robert Gourlay. Having met John and Elizabeth Brant in their home at Wellington Square, he claimed that “the feelings of the family of Capt. Brant, the celebrated Indian Chief” had been “wantonly and cruelly injured,” noting that he himself had “never heard Capt. Brant spoken of in Upper Canada but in terms of respect” (Gourlay cciv unnumbered footnote). Years later, in a speech delivered to mark the re-interment of Joseph Brant’s remains at the Mohawk Church, Chief Peter Jones contradicted Strachan’s claim that Brant had become religiously impious, calling his old associate “a thoroughgoing Churchman” who had “entertained high respect for the missionaries and the word of God” (1861, 212). It is important to note, however, that Strachan’s charge that Joseph Brant had become intemperate in his later years found support in the journal of the elderly chief’s adopted “nephew,” Chief John Norton, who wrote of his mentor that “in his youth and in the prime of Life, he had served the King with fidelity and Zeal, – and was then an Example of Temperance & sobriety; – (which could not be said of him in his latter Days)” (284). According to Isabel Kelsay, Brant’s drinking had become “public knowledge” during the last years of his life (1984, 640). But Joseph Brant himself was understandably loath to accept such criticism of his moral character, especially from the likes of John Strachan. Tradition has it that two or three years before Brant’s death, Strachan had criticized the old chief’s drinking in one of his public sermons. Upon hearing of these remarks, an enraged Brant went in

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search of him, swearing that he would make “the –– Scotch turncoat apologise wherever he found him, even if it were in church” (qtd in Kelsay 1984, 640). Finding Strachan in the street, Brant is said to have knocked the young cleric off his feet, threatening to remove his scalp if he did not offer an apology. Apparently, Strachan, fearing for his safety, “retracted everything, for if Joseph was elderly, he was big; and if Strachan was young, he was also a little man and no match for the enraged old chief” (Kelsay 1984, 640). Whether true or not, this story must have delighted Strachan’s many political opponents, who would have relished the idea of the imperious cleric – arguably the most powerful Tory politician in Upper Canada by the 1820s – being knocked down and made to grovel in the street. Perhaps in publishing his account of Brant well after the chief’s death, Strachan was in part seeking retribution for the indignity he had suffered during this alleged altercation (whether real or the product of mere gossip). His ostensible effort to exonerate Brant from the libelous representations of Gertrude of Wyoming was entirely undermined by the criticisms he levelled against the famous chief in the same essay. As Sarah Green has aptly noted, these criticisms “were almost as detrimental to Brant’s reputation as Campbell’s iconization [of him as an ‘ignoble savage’] had been” (5). Proud of his father’s many accomplishments and indignant at Strachan’s misrepresentations, John Brant “entered upon the vindication of his father’s character,” to quote William L. Stone, “with great spirit.” In “the course of a correspondence with the Reverend Archdeacon,” Stone wrote, the young Brant defended his father with impressive skill, “exhibiting the tact and talent with which a Mohawk Chief could manage a controversy in the field of letters”; in the end, Stone claimed (citing a letter from Elizabeth Brant’s husband, William Johnson Kerr) that Strachan had acted honourably and the matter was “satisfactorily adjusted.” Unfortunately, modern historians are unable to weigh Stone’s positive assessment of the situation since the relevant correspondence was not preserved, and Stone, satisfied with the outcome, decided that it was unnecessary to present his readers with some actual “extracts from [John Brant’s] correspondence” (2.523). What we know for certain, however, is that in the “Correspondence” section of a subsequent issue of The Christian Recorder, Strachan acknowledged receiving “a communication” from one of Joseph Brant’s “near relative[s]” informing him that his “Life of Captain Brant” had “given offence” to the chief’s family and friends (1820a, 40). In response, Strachan offered an apology – but as Green

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notes, he did so without actually retracting in print any of the biography’s libelous representations (140).

C o n f ro n t in g T h o mas Campbell If his efforts to extract a proper apology from Strachan proved less than fully successful, John Brant had somewhat better luck dealing with Thomas Campbell’s calumnies against his father, which, given the international reach of the Scottish poet’s literary fame, were potentially much more damaging to Joseph Brant’s reputation. As Walter Scott observed, Gertrude of Wyoming had been eagerly anticipated prior to its publication: “when it was whispered that he who sung the doubtful conflict of Hohenlinden and the carnage of Culloden, had chosen for his theme the devastation of Wyoming, expectation was raised to its height” (1809, 242). Once published, the poem found a large reading audience not only in Britain but also in North America. Despite the misgivings mentioned in chapter 3, Upper Canada’s future chief justice John Beverley Robinson called Gertrude of Wyoming a “beautiful poem” (qtd in Beattie 2.323–4); and even Strachan, otherwise so critical, considered it an example of “imperishable verse” written by “the best Poet of the age” (1819b, 146). In the United States, Campbell’s greatest American champion, Washington Irving, was even more effusive in his praise, calling himself “surprised and gratified to meet with a [British] poet sufficiently unprejudiced to conceive an idea of moral excellence and natural beauty on this side of the Atlantic,” and claiming that in Gertrude “the sweet strains of Mr Campbell’s Muse break upon us as gladly as would the pastoral pipe of the shepherd amid the savage solitude of our trackless wildernesses” (Irving 259, 262). When John Brant travelled to England in 1821–22 to attempt, like his father and John Norton before him, to secure a title deed to the Grand River reserve lands, he finally had an opportunity to confront Thomas Campbell. Having recently defended his father’s reputation against Strachan’s libels, he was well prepared to present his case to the Scottish poet. Since he was seeking justice, it seems appropriate that Brant (who was accompanied by his sister Elizabeth and her husband) sought legal assistance, enlisting the services of a London lawyer named Saxe Bannister, who had recently returned from Upper Canada where he had developed a strong sympathy for the First Nations. In a pamphlet likely written during Brant’s residence in

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England, Bannister expressed his disdain for the common racist assumption that Indigenous people were constitutionally incapable of adopting the arts of so-called civilization: “It is a cruel sophism, after debasing a people by bad governing and by hard treatment,” he wrote, “to argue from their degradation that they are essentially not fit to share the benefits of civil institutions” (Bannister 3). To his mind, Joseph Brant – far from being the irreclaimable savage that Campbell depicted in his poem – was among a group of famous Indigenous exemplars who proved the lie of such stereotyping: “the sublime language in which the Logans, the Philips, the Brants, and the Tecumthes expressed their noble aspirations to a better fate, will never fail to be listened to with respect” (Bannister 5). Given such sentiments, it is not surprising that Bannister agreed to act as an intermediary between John Brant and Thomas Campbell. To some extent, Brant’s and Bannister’s interventions were crowned with success. Upon considering the evidence presented to him, Campbell published a retraction in his literary journal the New Monthly Magazine, which took the form of an open letter addressed to Chief Ahyonwaeghs: “sir , – Ten days ago I was not aware that such a person existed as the son of the Indian leader Brant, who is mentioned in my poem “Gertrude of Wyoming.” Last week, however, Mr S. Bannister of Lincoln’s Inn, called to inform me of your being in London, and of your having documents in your possession which he believed would change my opinion of your father’s memory, and induce me to do it justice. Mr Bannister distinctly assured me that no declaration of my sentiments on the subject was desired but such as should spontaneously flow from my own judgment of the papers that were to be submitted to me.   I could not be deaf to such an appeal. It was my duty to inspect the justification of a man whose memory I had reprobated, and I felt a satisfaction at the prospect of his character being redressed, which was not likely to have been felt by one who had wilfully wronged it. As far as any intention to wound the feelings of the living was concerned, I really knew not, when I wrote my poem, that the son and daughter of an Indian chief were ever likely to peruse it, or be affected by its contents. (Campbell 1822, 97)

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In this retraction, Campbell’s sense of surprise at learning of the existence – in London, no less – of two of “the Monster Brandt’s” children is palpable. Clearly, his transatlantic reading public was much more diverse than he had expected! If he was surprised to learn of John and Elizabeth Brant’s very existence (as if it were miraculous that a “Mammoth” like Brandt could have sired human offspring), he must have been even more surprised to learn that his poem had adversely “affected” them and “wound[ed] their feelings.” How could these sensitive beings possibly be the scions of such a cruel and unfeeling savage as Campbell had represented their father to be in the pages of his poem? If the poet felt a sense of dissonance here, he must also have been struck by the fact that Chief Ahyonwaeghs, rather than wanting to scalp him for his insulting representations (as might well have been expected of someone related to The Pleasures of Hope’s tomahawkwielding “human fiends”), wished to persuade him rationally and without coercion, via the presentation of documentary evidence, that his own “judgment” of Joseph Brant had been grossly incorrect. In apologizing for his misrepresentations, Campbell proclaimed his own innocence, explaining to John Brant that he was himself the unwitting dupe of “popular histor[ies]” produced by the likes of John Adolphus, whose account of Wyoming as the site of Joseph Brant’s “‘unsparing slaughter’” of American settlers – a treacherous “massacr[e]” made all the more horrific by Brant’s “‘extraordinary ferocity’” and use of all conceivable “‘devices of torment’” – had led him astray (Campbell 1822, 97–8). Imagining himself as a defendant in the Canadian court of public opinion (an appropriate response, perhaps, given John Brant’s retaining of legal counsel), Campbell spread the blame for his written libel, representing himself as a victim of undue influence. “When your Canadian friends,” he thus asked Brant, “call me to trial for having defamed the warrior Brant, I beg that Mr John Adolphus may be also included in the summons. And after his own defence and acquittal, I think he is bound, having been one of my historical misleaders, to stand up as my gratuitous counsel, and say, ‘Gentlemen, you must acquit my client, for he has only fallen into an error, which even my judgment could not escape’” (98). As if he were worried that such pleading would be insufficient, Campbell went on lightheartedly to depict himself as a Romantic innocent, telling John Brant that “I imbibed my conception of your father from accounts of him that were published when I was scarcely out of my cradle,” and later confessing that he had taken “the liberty of a

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versifier to run away from fact into fancy, like a school-boy who never dreams that he is a truant when he rambles on a holiday from school” (98–9). Clearly the road to Brant’s reputational literary hell was paved with Campbell’s innocent intentions – and no small measure of poetic licence. Although Campbell denied full responsibility for his misrepresentations of Joseph Brant, his retraction of those errors was less ambivalent. As he told John Brant, “I rose from perusing the papers you submitted to me certainly with an altered impression of [Joseph Brant’s] character. I find that the unfavourable accounts of him were erroneous, even on points not immediately connected with his reputation … In Canada the memorials of his moral character represent it as naturally ingenuous and generous.” Resuming his use of legalese, Campbell admitted that “the evidence afforded induces me to believe that [Joseph Brant] often strove to mitigate the cruelty of Indian warfare. Lastly, you affirm that he was not within many miles of the spot when the battle which decided the fate of Wyoming took place, and from your offer of reference to living witnesses I cannot but admit the assertion. Had I learnt all this of your father when I was writing my poem, he should not have figured in it as the hero of mischief … I can only say that my own opinion about him has changed” (Campbell 1822, 98). To say the least, John Brant must have been gratified to read such a public retraction.11 Interestingly, it appears that the documents John Brant presented to Campbell in defence of his father’s character included John Strachan’s “Life of Capt. Brant,” which, despite its distortions, challenged at least some of the negative stereotypes associated with Joseph Brant’s reputation. If Strachan’s essay helped to disprove Campbell’s defamatory portrait of the “Monster Brandt,” it failed to convince the poet that other aspects of his poem were equally erroneous. In objecting to a claim made in “the Canadian newspapers” that he had “falsely represented Wyoming to have been a terrestrial paradise,”12 and that the whole Wyoming “catastrophe” was “nothing more than a fair battle” (Campbell 1822, 99), Campbell remained skeptical: “If this be the fact,” he told John Brant, “let accredited signatures come forward to attest it and vindicate the innocence and honourableness of the whole transaction, as your father’s character has been vindicated. An error about him by no means proves the whole account of the business to be a fiction. Who would not wish its atrocity to be disproved? But who can think it disproved by a single defender, who

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writes anonymously, and without definable weight and authority?” (99). Here the “single defender” to which Campbell refers is surely Strachan, who published his “Life of Capt. Brant” and its accompanying critique of Gertrude of Wyoming anonymously under the byline “N.N.” – “N” being the final letter of both his first and last names. One wonders whether Campbell’s rejoinder marked the end of the debate, or whether Strachan, when he befriended him in later years, accepted the poet’s challenge and admitted his authorship of the offending article. In subsequent editions of Gertrude of Wyoming, Campbell included a note summarizing his dealings with John Brant and the retraction he printed in the New Monthly Magazine. Calling the Mohawk chief “an interesting and intelligent youth,” Campbell noted that he “had formed an acquaintance with [John Brant] on which I still look back with pleasure” (1907, 91). Since Campbell doesn’t actually mention a direct meeting with Brant in his published letter, it is difficult to know for certain whether they met face to face. Campbell’s longtime friend Cyrus Redding implies that an actual meeting between the poet and the Mohawk chief did occur, and that he was a witness to the event, when in his biography of Campbell he noted, as if writing from experience, that John Brant “was a fine young man, of gentlemanly manners and appearance, who spoke and wrote English well” and “dressed in the English fashion,” and that his sister Elizabeth “spoke English elegantly, and comported herself both in address and manner with almost Oriental softness” (Redding 1860, 1.287–8).13 However, given that Redding’s descriptions of John and Elizabeth are plagiarized nearly word for word from Francis Hall’s 1818 Travels,14 it seems likely that the “acquaintance” that Campbell claims to have remembered “with pleasure” was purely epistolary.15 Due to a lack of documentary evidence, we cannot know for certain whether John Brant was satisfied with the outcome of his interactions with Campbell. What we do know is that many nineteenth-century commentators were decidedly disappointed by the limited extent of the poet’s retractions. When he republished Gertrude of Wyoming, he did not make any substantive changes to the poetic text; rather than expunging his reference to “the monster Brandt,” Campbell simply added an endnote acknowledging his interaction with John Brant, confessing his errors, and stating that “the name of Brandt … remains in my poem a pure and declared character of fiction” (Campbell 1907, 92). Joseph Brant’s earliest biographer, William L. Stone, who was made

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“an honorary chief of the Seneca tribe” (Mitchell 162), complained that Campbell’s retaining of Brant’s name in the poem, modified by the insertion of a mere endnote, was “something like knocking a man down, and then desiring that he would regard the blow as purely a phantasy of the imagination” (Stone 2.527, unnumbered note). In her travelogue Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada, Anna Jameson, who visited Six Nations territory at Brantford in 1837, also complained of Campbell’s continuing use in Gertrude of such epithets as “the accursed Brandt” and “the monster Brandt,” asking her readers “is not this most unfair, to be hitched into elegant and popular rhyme as an assassin by wholesale, and justice done in a little fag-end of prose?” (Jameson 2008, 248). Despite his close friendship with Campbell, even Cyrus Redding expressed concern, complaining that in Gertrude’s “subsequent editions” the poet had not done “that copious justice to young [John] Brandt’s feelings which I think was their due,” and confessing “that the singular circumstance of an Indian chief coming so far, and feeling anxious to vindicate his father’s memory on a charge of which he was innocent, did not appear to move Campbell as so touching an incident might have done” (Redding 1858, 2.287). Given the adverse publicity that Campbell’s poem had brought to Joseph Brant’s name, such concerns were not overdone. In his propagandistic Caroline Almanack (1840), William Lyon Mackenzie, the famous reformer who led the Upper Canada Rebellion of 1837, included Joseph Brant among the “Tory scoundrels” who at Wyoming “murdered in cold blood … upwards of 2500 men, women, and children!” (62–3). In the wake of the rebellion, even Mackenzie’s British nemesis, Lieutenant-Governor Sir Francis Bond Head, would refer in after years to the “well-known and well-sung massacre at Wyoming” (1840, 419), implying that he had no problem with Campbell’s representation of historical events. Indeed, as recently as 1995, in a fictional retelling of the story of Mary Sitts, an American settler taken captive by the Mohawks during the American Revolutionary War, Diane P. Baltaz calls Joseph Brant the “Monster Brant” no fewer than nine times in her first twenty pages, thus demonstrating the continuing adverse influence of Campbell’s poem on the famous chief’s reputation.16 Fortunately for Joseph Brant and his descendants and sympathizers, Thomas Campbell’s literary stock has fallen drastically since the nineteenth century. Although many of his contemporaries, including John Strachan and John Beverley Robinson, considered his work to be as immortal as Shakespeare’s, such an assessment now seems quaint.

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Although in recent years Jonathan Wordsworth has attempted to recuperate Gertrude of Wyoming by arguing that the poem is not centrally concerned with politics or warfare but rather “with relationship, strong simple emotions, [and] bonds of love and loyalty” (2),17 Campbell’s poem is nowadays mostly remembered – when it is remembered at all – for the poet’s run-in with John Brant. Perhaps J. Cuthbert Hadden was correct in his 1899 assessment of the poem’s vanishing reputation. Noting that the great Romantic-era literary critic William Hazlitt “spoke enthusiastically of passages of so rare and ripe a beauty that they exceed all praise,” Hadden observed that “we have changed our poetical view since Hazlitt’s day; and the most that can now be said for ‘Gertrude,’ is that it is a third-rate poem containing a few first-rate lines. It is practically dead, and can never be called back to life” (97). Perhaps Campbell would have been surprised by such an obituary, although as a literary critic, he was himself rather severe when considering the status of British authors whose works had failed to stand the test of time. As he stated in his Essay on English Poetry (1819), “Happily, indeed, the task of pressing indifferent authors on the public attention is a fruitless one. They may be dug up from oblivion, but life cannot be put into their reputations. ‘Can these bones live?’ Nature will have her course, and dull books will be forgotten in spite of bibliographers” (Campbell 1819, 167). If he were alive today, John Brant would perhaps take comfort in Campbell’s musings; for if the Scottish poet and his famous poem are nowadays largely forgotten in Canada, the name of Joseph Brant lives on – even if “there remains today considerable debate among the Grand River community itself as to how Brant’s legacy should be assessed with regard to his political dealings with the Crown” (Monture 29–30). In short, if the truth of Joseph Brant’s life had once been reduced to a mere footnote in Gertrude of Wyoming, Campbell’s poem has since become a footnote in the life of Joseph Brant. For those of us who sympathize with Brant, this is poetic justice indeed.18

J o h n B r a n t a n d t h e “I mprovement” o f t h e G r a n d R iv e r S i x Nati ons Ultimately, Cyrus Redding’s assumption that John Brant had come all the way from the Grand River to London with the express purpose of confronting Thomas Campbell was inaccurate, attributing too much importance to the Scottish poet’s role in the young chief’s busy life. In

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fact, Brant’s visit was the consequence of other more pressing concerns. Like Chief John Norton, who had made the journey before him, Brant crossed the Atlantic on a diplomatic mission to obtain a secure title deed to the Haldimand tract, the vast Grand River reserve that Sir  Frederick Haldimand had granted to Joseph Brant and the Six Nations in gratitude for their loyalty to the Crown during the Revolutionary War, and in compensation for the resultant loss of their traditional territories in the United States. Unfortunately, very little had changed since Norton’s unsuccessful trip to London in 1804–05: the Grand River lands were still under threat by the incursion of white settlers, and the Haudenosaunee, not being freeholders, remained unable to control the land sales and leases that would otherwise have helped to ameliorate conditions of poverty. After the War of 1812, the Six Nations had encountered a new threat to their tenure when the provincial authorities purchased from the Mississauga a large tract of land near the Grand River headwaters, which they intended for white settlement. Since this land was part of the original Haldimand grant, it is not surprising that the Six Nations chiefs protested – nor, unfortunately, is it surprising that their concerns were abruptly dismissed by Upper Canada’s self-interested colonial government. After Sir Peregrine Maitland, the lieutenant-governor, flatly refused to consider the chiefs’ entreaties, John Brant was sent to England to advance the Six Nations’ claim to the entire Haldimand tract. Unfortunately, to quote Isabel Kelsay, Brant’s mission ended “with the usual results.” Like Norton previously, Brant “was feted and petted, but he did not get what he went after” (Kelsay 1984, 653–4). While in England, however, Brant found considerable sympathy among members of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in New England (more commonly known as the New England Company), a benevolent group interested in promoting the conversion and “civilization” of Indigenous peoples. After his return to Upper Canada, Brant used funds provided by the New England Company to assist in his people’s spiritual and temporal “improvement,” among other things establishing an Anglican school at the Grand River to “promot[e] education and the diffusion of knowledge among the Mohawks” (qtd in Stone 2.530).19 As he told the Company’s treasurer, James Gibson, in a letter dated 27 October 1828, “to effect a complete change in manners and customs, that have been long established, will indeed be an arduous task. Let not the difficulties terrify us from the attempt. The more arduous, the more animating – inasmuch as if the attempt

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succeed, the reward will be great. Not that those who commence this work of humanity are to flatter themselves with the hope of seeing the complete effect of their labors; time will be required; and when the foundation is laid in the spirit of sincerity, no doubt can remain that, with the help of God, the edifice will be raised” (qtd in Stone 2.530–1). Elizabeth Brant played a key role in helping her brother in his attempt to raise this “edifice” of British culture and religion among their people, exerting herself “most faithfully for the improvement and well-being of her race,” and “devising various means for the elevation of the Indian character” (Stone 2.535). According to James Buchanan, the British consul for the state of New York, the Brant siblings, with their European manners and style of dress, were themselves exemplars of such improvement, providing living proof “that wisdom, science, and exaltation of character, are not the exclusive property of any colour, tribe, or nation” (32). In a dispatch dated 28 Februrary 1828, the Reverend Luger, a missionary at the Mohawk Village, praised John Brant’s work, informing the New England Company committee that he could not “speak too highly of Mr Brant’s uniform attention” to his mission (Company for the Propagation 8). As F. Douglas Reville, the late nineteenth-century historian of Brant County, noted, the New England Company was so impressed by John Brant’s work that it presented him with “a finely-wrought cup of sterling silver” (139). Although Luger and Brant found willing converts and students among the Six Nations, they also encountered significant resistance in some quarters. At a conference with the Delawares and Cayugas – whom the New England Company considered the Grand River’s “most obstinate and heathenish” peoples (Company for the Propagation 9) – the two men failed to convince the chiefs to renounce their traditional beliefs and practices. As the chiefs politely put their case, God had given Indigenous people “‘different customs and worship, which ought not to be changed. We have ours, and the white people theirs’” (qtd in Company for the Propagation 9). Even Brant’s mother did not support her son’s adoption and promotion of European ways. As Elizabeth Brant told James Buchanan, Catharine Brant, who lived at the Grand River, “preferred being in Wig-wams, and disapproved, in a certain degree, of her and her brother John’s conforming so much to the habits and costume of the English” (32). Indeed, members of the Grand River Haudenosaunee were so concerned by the Brants’ adoption of English practices that they felt the need to remind John of his Mohawk roots and attendant duties. Hence, around 1820, according to

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Grand River tradition, they presented him with a version of the Two Row Wampum or Guswhenta their ancestors had originally given to Dutch settlers, and later to British and American administrators, to codify “the relationship between original peoples and newcomers based on friendship, peace, and respect” (McCready 173).20 Given that the Two Row Wampum signified “a treaty of equals, not one of superiors and dependents” (Daniel Coleman 189), the chiefs were likely warning Brant against complicity with a system that saw the Six Nations as subordinate and in need of improvement.

J o h n B r a n t a n d t h e Welland Canal Like his father and John Norton before him, John Brant was a noted advocate for forms of improvement associated with European religion, education, agriculture, and commerce. But when colonial development activities threatened to compromise the Grand River land base and the security of his people’s tenure and livelihood there, he voiced strong resistance to them. Among these activities, the construction of the Welland Canal was anathema to Grand River Six Nations interests, providing a prime example of how the Eurocentric practice of environmental improvement negatively affected Indigenous people in Upper Canada. The idea of constructing a navigable passage around Niagara Falls had already long been mooted when the project began in earnest in the 1820s, having first been suggested in the early eighteenth century by a French commandant stationed at Michilimackinac. Given practical constraints during this period, however, it remained something of a wild-eyed dream. Instead, as Roberta M. Styran and Robert R. Taylor note, “the French (and later the British) followed the example of the Aboriginal peoples, and established portages around the Falls” (xvii–xviii). But with the passage of time, the construction of a water route around the cataract became more and more pressing and increasingly feasible. Although the Welland Canal was a controversial enterprise even in the eyes of numerous members of the settler society, its construction promised many benefits, not only for Upper Canada’s military security (Aitken 1954, 32–3) but for the colony’s economic development as well. As John Beverley Robinson told William Hamilton Merritt, the canal’s earliest chief proponent and developer, “‘the grand object was to overcome a great natural impediment to the prosperity of the better half of our country’” (qtd in Aitken 1975,

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163).21 Crucially, moreover, the Welland Canal would allow Upper Canada to compete economically against the Americans, who had recently opened the Erie Canal for the transportation of cargo from the American Midwest to the eastern seaboard, thus threatening to divert trade from Britain’s North American colonies. In particular, as members of Upper Canada’s House of Assembly argued, a new Canadian canal, by allowing ships to navigate around the imposing Niagara escarpment, would “give an easy and safe transport to the [agricultural and natural resource] productions of the country” above the Falls,” in the process enabling “the Lands on Lakes Huron and Erie … [to be] very much increased in value.”22 In addition to its promised military and economic benefits, the Welland Canal had a significant aesthetic dimension due to its association with Niagara Falls, which brought it much publicity and helped to inspire its construction. As I have noted elsewhere (Hutchings 2011, 154), Niagara epitomized the power of the sublime in the contemporary imagination on both sides of the Atlantic.23 Since the cataract’s roar could be heard up to 60 kilometres away, “shaking the air and the earth itself” (D. Smith 1987, 11), it is not surprising that Sir Francis Bond Head compared the Falls “to an ocean thrown over a precipice” (1846, 215). To conquer such an obstacle would surely justify the claim made by Brant’s acquaintance John Mactaggart – who pointed to canals as “the root of improvement” in Upper Canada – that the Welland Canal, once completed, would be “one of the most wonderful of the hydraulic contrivances of man” (2.105, 2.147).24 Indeed, after it was opened, the Canal continued to inspire local people and travellers, including Anna Jameson, who called it “a magnificent work, of which the province is justly proud” (2008, 232), and the emigrant farmer Joseph Abbot, who upon visiting the Niagara region in 1841 was told that the great engineering project was “the eighth wonder of the world” and “far better worth [wasting] time on than the Falls of Niagara, which were well enough to look at, but were of no use” (71). Such notions exemplified what Rob Nixon calls “the romance of the technological sublime,” an “imagining [of] the unimaginable” (268) that provided a catalyst for massive development projects whose adverse effects on marginalized local populations were all too often overlooked. Such effects could be dire. As the Mississauga autobiographer George Copway noted over two decades after the Welland Canal’s opening, “the rivers that once wound their silent and undisturbed course beneath the shades of the forest, are made to leave their natural

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ways, and, bending to the arbitrary will of man, follow the paths he marks out for them. Man labors, and gazes in astonishment at the mighty work his hands perform – he gazes at the complicated machinery he has set in motion.” As for the implications of this astonishing activity for Indigenous people, Copway could only lament that “the Indian is out of sight – he sends no horror to the pale-face by his shrill war-whoop, nor pity by the wail of his death song” (1850a, 3–4). Carving its way across terrain on which Britain’s Six Nations allies had played a vital role in defending Upper Canada from American invaders during the War of 1812, the Welland Canal was built with local Indigenous people very much “out of sight” – at least as far as any real concern for its massive impacts on their lands and livelihoods were concerned. For the Grand River Haudenosaunee, the crisis came as a result of unforeseen circumstances: landslides that occurred along the Chippawa Creek (Welland River) during construction in late 1828 forced the canal’s proponents to look elsewhere for water to fill the man-made waterway. Deciding that the Grand River – which the Mohawks called O:se Kenhionhata:tie or Willow River (MacGregor 8) – offered the most “expedient” solution, 25 the Welland Canal Company’s board of directors decided to build a dam there to divert the river’s water along an overland “feeder” to the canal, thereby threatening to flood the upstream pastures and farmlands that John Brant’s people had worked so hard to clear and cultivate in the decades since they and their ancestors had emigrated to the Haldimand tract. On 1 January 1829, the company announced its plans for the Grand River dam, inviting bids on the project. In response, John Brant, who foresaw the building of several dam “stations” along the river, attempted to use his influence as superintendent of the Six Nations to stop the initiative in its tracks. Writing on 16 January to three members of Upper Canada’s Parliament, he declared the project “fraught with evils of great magnitude to the interests of the Six Nations Indians,” saying that it should arouse “the strongest opposition on the part of those who are charged with the care and protection of the Indians.”26 When this appeal to the white politicians’ honour and paternalist charity failed to achieve satisfactory results, he addressed a longer and more urgent letter “to the Honorable the Commons of the Province of Upper Canada in Provincial Parliament.” In it he provided a detailed rationale for his people’s opposition to the project, the contemplation of which had, he said, “created alarm among the Indians,” who had

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asked him to intervene on their behalf in order “fully to remonstrate against the contemplated improvement.” In fulfilling this duty, Brant first emphasized the project’s “inevitable” adverse social consequences, including the likely “introduction of ardent spirits” at each dam “station,” and the influx of “a population not intending by precept or example to improve the moral condition of the Indians; but on the contrary impeding in the greatest degree our efforts for the civilization and happiness of those tribes which your petitioner hopes to see ultimately crowned with success.” In short, Brant was convinced that any “improvement[s]” the project might “provide for the general good of the Province” would work at cross purposes with the “civilization[al]” and moral improvements associated with his work on behalf of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in New England and his own Christian conscience. In addition to disrupting all benevolent efforts to “improve” his people’s moral condition, the proposed dam, Brant argued, would endanger their very survival by “interrupt[ing] … their fisheries” and inundating their crops: “it is generally believed,” he wrote, that “the proposed dam will overflow the lands a distance of sixteen miles up the River, destroying the fine intervale lands, which have been under Indian cultivation since the first settlement of the Province.” Appealing to “the Justice and wisdom of your Honorable Body,” Brant signed off by praying that “the most ample protection may be extended to the Indians under his Superintendence.”27 Unfortunately, these moral appeals fell on deaf ears, thereby demonstrating the dangers inherent in Brant’s effort to challenge the colonial governmental and economic system from within. In any contest between the interests of the Province and those of Indigenous people, the former were bound to win. Although the idea of building a dam on the Grand River to divert water to the Welland Canal had “occurred to the Commissioners of internal navigation as far back as 1823,” the project remained shady from a policy standpoint, having been, as the Welland Canal Commissioner admitted, “unauthorized by any Legislative act of [the] province” (Randal 183). Given this lack of legislative oversight, one wonders whether the legislators to whom Brant wrote his anti-dam-building letters deliberately chose to keep the issue at bay by ignoring it until the dam was built and resistance to it would become irrelevant. In whatever way it happened, Brant was clearly angered by the short shrift given his people. Writing on 11 December 1829 to Zachariah Mudge, secretary to Lieutenant-Governor Sir John Colborne, he adopted a tone that was uncharacteristically blunt and

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deeply sarcastic: “Sir,” he began, “I have the honour to report for the information of His Excellency, the Lieut. Governor that the dam thrown across the Grand River by the Welland Canal Company has overflowed the Indian Corn fields, their Crops laid waste, and their winter[’]s provision destroyed – I respectfully entreat His Excellency will be pleased to assist the Sufferers in obtaining payment for their loss, to enable them to procure subsistance [sic] during the season.”28 In a report presented to the House of Assembly in 1831, Commissioner Robert Randal acknowledged that, as a result of the new dam, “the lands of individuals situated along the banks of the [Grand] river for a distance of about ten miles” had been “overflowed without the consent of the owners and without recompense” (183). In the previous year, a select committee reporting to the House of Assembly had dealt with questions relating to compensation costs associated with this flooding, claiming that the “sum estimated as likely to be awarded to the Indians and other persons for damage done at the Grand River and elsewhere, is about £2000.”29 While suggesting that the House did indeed care about the Welland Canal’s adverse effects on the Grand River Six Nations people and lands, such concern was belied by the fact that the provincial government had diverted money held paternalistically in trust for the Haudenosaunee to help pay for the Welland Canal itself, without ever returning those funds (Daniel Coleman 194). As if such dishonourable dealings were insufficient, the British Parliament went on in 1831 to establish the Grand River Navigation Company “with a capital investment of $50,000, of which $38,256 was invested by the government from Indian Treasury money without the knowledge or consent of the Six Nations” (Reaman 80–1). It is easy to bristle at such underhanded dealings given that the government claimed to control Indian Treasury funds as part of a program of paternalistic oversight designed to protect the Haudenosaunee and other Indigenous people. Ultimately, John Brant was naive to suppose that his letter-writing campaign on behalf of the Six Nations people might encourage members of Upper Canada’s parliament to rethink the Welland Canal Company’s plans for the Grand River. After all, key members of the ruling elite or Family Compact had themselves become investors in the company (Cross 162), and it was in their interest – not merely the province’s – to proceed as planned. Among these investors was John Beverley Robinson, Upper Canada’s attorney general, who, overcoming initial worries about the project’s “wild visionary” nature,

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became one of the company’s directors and, indeed, “the most influential government figure” involved in the project. So great was Robinson’s support for building the Welland Canal that the waterway’s original southern terminus was named Port Robinson in his honour (Brode 109, 147, 180). Interestingly, during his legal career, Robinson was occasionally called upon to settle disputes involving the damming and diversion of water in Upper Canada. In determining watercourse rights, he generally acknowledged that riparian owners had “a natural right, of having the water flow in its usual and proper course” (qtd in Brode 245). In a decision he delivered from the Court of Queen’s Bench in the case of McLaren v. Cook (1847), he wrote that “nothing short of a grant, or use for such length of time as will support the presumption of a grant, will entitle the proprietor of land on a stream to divert or pen back the water in such a manner as to occasion damage to those being above or below in the same stream” (qtd in George and Sworden 26). Clearly, in the case of the Grand River dam and “feeder” canal, such legal considerations did not apply. Having repeatedly failed to obtain title to their lands in fee simple, the Haudenosaunee remained wards of the government. Under this paternalist system, as noted in the previous chapter, the people had no individual legal rights; hence, they could not own land, vote in elections, or appear as witnesses or provide testimony in court. Therefore, they had no legal recourse in opposing dam-building activities on their territories – a circumstance that might help to explain the curious lack of legislation concerning the Grand River dam’s construction. Why risk proposing such legislation, MP s might well have asked, when the Six Nations people lacked legal rights anyway? Conveniently, by the time the question of legislation was raised in the House of Assembly, the Grand River dam was a fait accompli, and the issue had become moot. In a letter written to Upper Canada’s receiver general, John Henry Dunn, on 13 November 1829, the now–Chief Justice30 John Beverley Robinson discussed plans for the organization of a ceremony to celebrate the Welland Canal’s impending formal opening, a celebration that he hoped would be “English & neat,” and in which he wished to see the Six Nations represented: “You had better go and talk the matter over with Sir John [Colborne],” he advised Dunn, recommending that the receiver general should also “write to [John] Brant & say it would be very acceptible [sic] if some of the Chiefs could be present” to “give variety to the scene and … beget a friendly feeling on their

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part” (qtd in Styran and Taylor 13–14). This desire to “beget a friendly feeling” suggests Robinson’s awareness that amends needed to be made for the damage the canal’s construction had done to the Six Nations. However, given the severity of this damage and the lack of any real consideration for Haudenosaunee well-being during the canal’s actual planning and construction, Robinson’s inclusive gesture seems at best superficial and at worst quite cynical. Upon the occasion of the canal’s formal opening, a Buffalo newspaper, the Republican Extra, praised the project as an “important work” having no comparable counterpart in Europe: “Truly, the bold features of the enterprizes [sic] of the New World, throw those of the Old, far in the shade” (qtd in Styran and Taylor 15–16). Unfortunately, the canal’s construction had also thrown the Grand River Six Nations “into the shade,” at least as far as their own interests were concerned. After its opening on 29 November 1829, the Welland Canal remained a subject of debate in the House of Assembly, where, among other things, a select committee belatedly considered the harm done to the Six Nations when the Grand River overflowed its banks above the newly constructed dam.31 According to Credit River Mississauga Chief Peter Jones (whose life and writings are considered in the next chapter), these discussions were heated. In his diary entry for 2 March 1830, he wrote: “In the evening I went and heard the discussion in parliament on the subject of the Welland Canal. There was a sharp contest on the subject; so much so that some of the honourable members appeared to be neshkatezeh.32 If the Indians in their councils were to speak so hard to each other, I think the tomahawk would soon be raised” (Jones 1860, 271). Although Jones does not mention having witnessed any discussion of the Welland Canal’s consequences for the Six Nations, the irony informing his reference to “the honourable members” is as palpable as his implicit critique of their uncivil behaviour. Surely, in the wake of his own failed epistolary efforts to gain the sympathy of parliament, John Brant would have agreed with such an assessment. Among its adverse effects on the Six Nations, the flooding of the Grand caused by the Welland Canal and by the Grand River Navigation Company (incorporated in 1832) led to drastic changes in the landscape, creating an artificial wetland that came to be known as the “Grand River Swamp.” Quoting an unnamed “chronicler of seventy years ago,” local historian F. Douglas Reville noted in his 1920 History of the County of Brant that “the country on the Grand River was formerly considered very unhealthy, and as it would appear, for some time,

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justly so – fevers prevailing in the hot season to a considerable extent. The cause of this, seems to have been the damming of the river, which, raising the water over a great extent of low land, some, indeed most, of which was covered with decaying wood, stumps of trees and other vegetable matter, caused from the action of the sun, an exhalation of malarious vapour, which proved exceedingly injurious to health, particularly of those unaccustomed to it” (qtd in Reville 97). When Sir Francis Bond Head replaced Sir John Colborne as Upper Canada’s lieutenant-governor just over six years after the Welland Canal commenced operations, he similarly acknowledged the adverse health effects set in motion in Upper Canada by “the system of flooding lands for canals.” Invoking the contemporary miasma theory of disease, he observed that such flooding created artificial lakes covered by a “green scum” that produced pestiferous vapours which, when inhaled, were “rank poison to human life.” However, Head’s main concern about such “‘drowned land’” was not for the Indigenous people who had been displaced by the flooding or who still lived nearby, but for that of the “wilderness” itself, the inundation of which he condemned as “a sentence of death to every tree whose roots remained covered with water.” In one of his romantic critiques of colonial practice,33 he expressed his affective response as “a solitary witness” to one such flooded region located along the Rideau Canal, which he saw as an exemplary instance of the environmental destruction generally wrought in Upper Canada by the construction of dams and canals: “As far as I could see, in all directions, I was surrounded by dead, leafless trees, whose pale, livid, unwholesome-looking bark gave them the appearance of so many corpses; and as the wind whistled and moaned through the net-work of their stiff, stark, sapless branches, I could not help feeling it was wafting with it, in the form of miasma, Nature’s punishment for the wholesale murder that had been committed” (Head 1846, 96–7). In this romantic scenario, Head does not stop to consider the relationship between the afflicted “wilderness” and the First Nations people who lived within its precincts, nor does he ponder the probability that providential “Nature” would direct its miasmic “punishment” not merely at the white society whose people had perpetrated this “wholesale murder” but at Indigenous people who were innocent of such a crime.

C o da The Grand River continued to supply water to the Welland Canal until the summer of 1881, when water was diverted instead directly from

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Lake Erie. Nowadays, to quote Styran and Taylor, the Grand River–fed “feeder” canal is “little more than a shallow, stagnant ditch” (lxxi) – a reminder not only of the original Welland Canal’s technological triumph but also of the suffering and hardship it brought to Chief John Brant’s people. Unfortunately, in the decades leading up to and following the decommissioning of this feeder, during which time white settlement entirely transformed the Haldimand tract, the Grand River became so polluted by agricultural and industrial waste – the effluent of “bright Improvement” – that a 1937 issue of Macleans magazine described the river’s lower reaches as “an open sewer” (qtd in MacGregor 8). It was not until the 1960s that the watershed’s ecological health began to recover as a result of concerted efforts undertaken by the Grand River Conservation Authority “and various ‘friends’ of the river,” efforts that led to the Grand’s designation in 1994 as a Canadian Heritage River (MacGregor 8–9). Of course, the Grand River’s human heritage is a complex one, as ongoing controversies between the Haudenosaunee and non-Indigenous residents in Caledonia demonstrate, and as I have tried to show in this chapter’s discussion of John Brant’s cultural, political, and environmental activism. Although he had a modest measure of success in challenging anti-Indigenous stereotypes such as those that circulated in the influential writings of John Strachan and Thomas Campbell, Brant’s lack of success in securing Six Nations title to the Haldimand tract and his failure to stop the Welland Canal Company’s incursions on the Grand River are stark reminders of the obstacles Indigenous people faced when they sought justice from within the colonial system. However, rather than giving up the fight he had commenced, Brant continued his efforts to reform Upper Canada’s system of governance by campaigning successfully for election to the colony’s parliament in 1830, believing, perhaps, that at the very centre of government his efforts on behalf of the Six Nations would be crowned with greater success. Unfortunately, after Brant took his seat as MP for Haldimand County in early 1831, “his election was challenged on the grounds that some of those who voted for him were leaseholders rather than the freeholders required by law,” and he was forced to give way to his white opponent (Kelsay 1987). Tragically, on 27 August 1832, Brant died in the cholera epidemic that swept the province. Sadly, as Isabel Kelsay points out, his death may have been caused not by the disease itself but by the treatments provided by his white doctors (1987) whose intentions were as benevolent as they were ineffectual.

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7 Peter Jones (Chief Kahkewaquonaby) and the Credit River Mississauga Time rolls his ceaseless course. The race of yore,     Who danced our infancy upon their knee, And told our marvelling boyhood legends store,     Of their strange ventures happ’d by land or sea, How are they blotted from the things that be!     How few, all weak and wither’d of their force, Wait on the verge of dark eternity,     Like stranded wrecks, the tide returning hoarse, To sweep them from our sight! Time rolls his ceaseless course. Walter Scott, The Lady of the Lake

K il l in g “ T h e V a n is hi ng Ameri can” At the turn of the nineteenth century, several British Romantic authors responded to contemporary fears that humans might one day vanish from the Earth. Invoking a mix of sacred and secular discourses ranging from the Book of Revelation to Thomas Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population (1798), literary works such as Thomas Campbell’s “The Last Man,” Lord Byron’s “Darkness,” and Mary Shelley’s The Last Man contemplated the possibility of human extinction by providential design or by natural process. In North America, however, this fear of a general human extinction was largely absent. The increasing availability of land for colonization and cultivation, and an accompanying sense of almost boundless opportunity, supported a colonial culture of profound optimism, at least where the future of white settlers was concerned. For Indigenous peoples, of course, the matter was far different. Since the advent of European contact, Native American populations had been drastically reduced

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not only as a result of warfare but also due to smallpox and other “pathogens that evolved among inhabitants of the Old World” (Dobyns 26). As well, during the nineteenth century, many Indigenous groups continued to decline in the face of physical displacement, alcoholism, poverty, and other forms of slow violence. Some nineteenth-century writers tied Indigenous peoples’ precipitous decline to the disruption of ecosystems and the resultant extirpation of wild animals caused by European settlement, anticipating Deborah Bird Rose’s insight that “settler societies are built on a dual war: a war against Nature and a war against the natives” (34). In The Excursion (1814), for example, William Wordsworth associated the American settler society’s “encroaching axe” with the “sweep[ing] … away” of Native bloodlines in a complex act of “dire rapacity” (2007, 127–8, Book 3, lines 925–36). More prosaically, in Transatlantic Sketches (1833), J.E. Alexander disapprovingly observed that agricultural “improvement … meant, among other things, … driving [the Indians] with the red deer and the buffalo to the recesses of the rocky mountains” (2.77). Others saw the Indians’ situation as much more precarious than that of America’s besieged wild animals. In a moment of romantic pathos, the American artist George Catlin lamented the lot of the Native people whose portraits he painted, saying “my heart bleeds for the fate that awaits the remainder of their unlucky race; which is long to be outlived by the rocks, by the beasts, and even birds and reptiles of the country they live in” (1.10). At least one European commentator likened the continent’s Indigenous nations to the Old World’s ancient architectural ruins, claiming that “the remains of the Indian tribes are become to America what the shattered column, the broken arch, and the falling cloister are to Europe” (Procter 76). Although the analogies changed, many nineteenth-century thinkers shared the common belief that the Indigenous nations were “rapidly passing away from the face of the earth” (Catlin 1.3). Some commentators attributed the Indians’ supposedly inevitable extinction to the inscrutable workings of Providence, as in the case of the Canadian pioneer Susanna Moodie, who was grieved by the thought “that a mysterious destiny involves and hangs over them, pressing them back into the wilderness, and surely sweeping them from the earth” (299). Calling Indigenous North Americans an “untamable” and “fated race,” Anna Jameson invoked a similar metaphysical agency, claiming as one of the “fixed” “laws” of the “moral world” the idea that the Indian “hunter must make way before the

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[European] agriculturist” (2008, 345, 326). But often, to quote Susan Scheckel, those who believed Native Americans were doomed to extinction “couch[ed] their accounts … in reassuring metaphors of natural process” (5), thereby associating the Indians’ decline with the laws of nature (though these laws were themselves generally considered subject to Providential oversight). Sometimes, for example, Indigenous people’s predicament was figured in the poeticized language of diurnal or seasonal change: they disappeared “like the mists which are exhaled by the scorching radiance of [the] summer sun” (S.F. Jarvis 64); they vanished “like the leaves of the forest that are swept aside by the autumn winds” (qtd in Dippie 13); or they “melted … like snow before the sun” (Head 1846, 146). Other occasions called for more violent naturalistic metaphors according to which, for example, America’s First Peoples disappeared “like a promontory of sand, exposed to the ceaseless encroachments of the ocean” (qtd in Dippie 13), or “like grass on the progress of the forest in flames” (Head 1839b, 2). Occasionally, even Indigenous people used such naturalistic metaphors to describe their own sense of loss, as in the case of Peter Jones’s early Mississauga protégé, George Copway, who lamented that his once “numerous and happy” people had “faded away like frost before the heat of the sun,” or, more grandly, that they had “one by one, fallen away, like the stars that die at a distance in the skies” (1850b, 32, 186). Although the stakes were different when Indigenous people used such similes, the logical implications were similar. By figuring the Indians’ disappearance in terms of the changing seasons or of other naturally occurring phenomena, nineteenth-century commentators implied that a “natural law was in operation, and no mortal could alter its course” (Dippie 14). Outraged by such logic, the Welsh-Ojibwe chief and Methodist missionary Peter Jones (Kahkewaquonaby, or Sacred Feathers) resolutely rejected the idea of the “vanishing American.”1 Focusing in his posthumously published History of the Ojebway Indians (1861) on the role Europeans played in the decline of Native populations, he wrote, “I cannot suppose for a moment that the Supreme Disposer has decreed that the doom of the red man is to fall and gradually disappear, like the mighty wilderness, before the axe of the European settler” (Jones 1861, 29). As noted in chapter 1, Jones’s statement, although refusing the logic of the “vanishing Indian,” implicitly acknowledges that “the mighty wilderness” will inevitably succumb to the white settler’s axe. And since the ongoing and accelerating

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destruction of North America’s wild places meant that Native people would soon be unable to obtain physical sustenance via traditional practices of hunting, fishing, and gathering, Jones would work to ensure his people’s survival in part by becoming a tireless advocate for their adoption of agriculture. To be sure, like many others before him, Jones succumbed to naturalistic cliché when, shortly after his reference to the settler’s axe, he stated that “the natives have been continually falling one after another, like tall trees before the blast” (1861, 30), but he made it clear that in his simile “the blast” signified not the workings of nature but the machinations of the white man, including in particular those unscrupulous traders (or “white savages,” as he called them [Jones 1860, 353]) who profited from the deadly whisky trade. “Of all the causes which have contributed to the rapid decrease of the Indian tribes,” Jones declared, “the abuse of ardent spirits, while following their native mode of life, is, in my opinion, the primary and most important” (1861, 30). Thus, in his diary, he denounced those whites who were “the means of [the Indians’] destruction by continuing to introduce the fire-waters … amongst them,” and he praised Native temperance for helping to put the whisky traders out of business (1860, 22, 91). Perhaps George Copway best summarized the relationship between the liquor trade and Indigenous mortality when he exclaimed, “the pale face says there is a fate hanging over the Indian bent on his destruction. Preposterous! – They give him liquors to destroy himself with, and then charge the great God Spirit as the author of their misery and mortality” (Copway 1851b, 96). Having witnessed the depredations of alcoholism among the Mississaugas, Mohawks, and other Indigenous nations, Jones became an ardent crusader for temperance in the name of his people’s survival. But for Jones, the effort to ensure his peoples’ physical survival was far from sufficient; as a devout Methodist convert and missionary, he worried most about their spiritual salvation. As he said of a band residing near Lake Michigan who had not yet “receive[d] religious instruction,” “I pitied them from the bottom of my heart,” adding, “O, ye Christians of Britain, Canada, and the United States, will ye suffer these immortal souls to perish for the lack of knowledge! … O Lord, raise up more labourers, for the harvest is truly great, and souls are perishing!” (Jones 1861, 46). With its emphasis upon temperance in the name of religious self-discipline, Methodism, Jones believed, was the perfect vehicle to ensure that his people would not “perish” either

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physically or spiritually. His life’s mission, in short, was dedicated to ensuring his people’s longevity both in this world and in the next. Although, as I show in the ensuing discussion, this mission in some ways appeared to make Jones an agent of his people’s assimilation to European cultural norms, it was informed by a scathing counterdiscursive critique of colonialism. For example, when indicting white liquor traders, he wrote: “Good Lord, I fear the white men will have to give an awful account at thy bar in the day of judgment for the evils they have inflicted upon the poor red man of the forest” (1860, 22). Rather than trying to turn Indians into Europeans, who were far too often poor role models, Jones worked to help his people adopt new ways of sustaining their cultural identity – in other words, new ways of being “Indian.”

B ac k g ro unds When Peter Jones was born in his mother’s wigwam on Burlington Heights in midwinter of 1802, no one would have guessed that he would grow up to be a leader to his people, frustrate the authority of an archdeacon and three lieutenant-governors, and be presented to two British monarchs. His father, Augustus Jones, was a land-hungry Welsh American Loyalist who had come to Canada in 1787 to work as a Crown surveyor, and who subsequently secured extensive tracts of land at the eastern end of Lake Ontario and on Grand River Six Nations territory (the latter of which were granted to him by his friend Chief Joseph Brant) (D. Smith 1987, 5). Like many white men who worked on the frontier prior to and during the period, Augustus had two wives, one at home (Sarah Tekarihogen, the Christian daughter of a Mohawk chief) and the other in the forest (Peter’s mother, Tuhbenahneequay, a Mississauga woman who rejected Christianity in favour of her people’s traditional beliefs and practices) (D. Smith 2013, 11). Hence, as the son of an interracial, “adulterous” marriage, Peter would be doubly stigmatized in the eyes of Upper Canada’s white Christian settler society. Even in his mature adulthood, when he had gained renown in both England and Upper Canada, his opponents would sometimes invoke his father’s polygamy and his own mixedrace background in their attempts to discredit his activist work and his right to speak on behalf of the Credit River Mississauga. In both his Life and Journals (1860) and his History of the Ojebway Indians (1861), Jones writes of his “wild Indian youth” (1860, 7)

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primarily as a way to highlight the profound difference between his traditional Ojibwe and post-Christian-conversion identities. As he mentions in his journal, his Ojibwe name, Kahkewaquonaby, “literally means ‘sacred waving feathers,’2 and refers to feathers plucked from the eagle, the sacred bird. By this name, I was dedicated to the thunder god; the eagle being considered by the Indians the representation of the god of thunder.”3 Later in life, Kahkewaquonaby would dedicate himself to the Christian deity worshipped by his father’s people, but during his early youth the influence of his mother, Tuhbenahneequay, was paramount. A member of the Eagle Totem or clan, Tuhbenahneequay taught her sons “the customs and habits of her nation” and “the superstitions of her fathers – how to gain the approbation of the Munedoos, (or gods,) and how to become successful hunters.” Highlighting the great distance separating his subsequent Christian identity from his traditional Ojibwe one, Jones presented what his English readers would have regarded as an exotic self-portrait, saying “I used to blacken my face with charcoal, and fast, in order to obtain the aid of personal gods or familiar spirits, and likewise attended their pagan feasts and dances” (1860, 2). Although in the larger context of his Christian conversion narrative, these references to “superstitions” and “pagan feasts and dances” are implicitly critical, Jones found much to enjoy during the more than fourteen years in which he “lived and wandered about with the Indians in the woods.” Hunting was a particular pleasure: “At a very early age I was taught to handle the bow and arrow with which I used to kill small game. As I grew older I became very fond of the gun, and was considered a great hunter” (Jones 1860, 3). As Donald Smith notes, the young Kahkewaquonaby, like “the fittest of the Mississauga males,” also enjoyed testing his physical prowess by walking, running, and swimming great distances (2013, 7–8). But despite these pleasures, life in the forest was far from idyllic: during this time he also witnessed what he called “the miseries of savage life, and the woeful effects of the fire-water” (Jones 1860, 2). Due to his father’s increasing influence, however, Peter Jones’s life began to change profoundly as he grew older. Wanting his son to receive a European-style education, Augustus Jones enrolled the young boy in an English school at Saltfleet in 1816, where, during a ninemonth period, he “was taught to read, write, and cypher.” Afterwards, Peter moved to the Grand River where he “settled” with his father “amongst the Mohawk Indians” and learned the arts of agriculture. An additional year of English schooling in 1822 (Jones 1860, 6, 8)

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helped the young man to perfect the English-language skills that would enable him to become an effective mediator between Upper Canada’s colonial society and his mother’s people, skills that would also prepare him for his later work as a Mississauga diplomat and bicultural mediator in the colonial society’s larger, transatlantic forum.

C h r is t ia n C o nversi on By far the most significant transformation – not only in his youth but also in his life as a whole – occurred when Peter Jones converted to Christianity at a Methodist camp meeting in the woods near Ancaster, Upper Canada, on 25 June 1823. As Tim Fulford has noted, the Methodism that Jones embraced was “a highly emotional version of Christianity” (256). It is not surprising, then, that Jones described his conversion experience using the language of feeling, testifying that “tears flowed down my cheeks at the remembrance of my sins,” and saying, “I cannot describe my feelings at this time. I was a wonder to myself.” Aside from changing his sense of self, Jones’s conversion transformed his perception of his forest surroundings: “Every thing now appeared in a new light, and all the works of God seemed to unite with me in uttering the praises of the Lord. The people, the trees of the woods, the gentle winds, the warbling notes of the birds, and the approaching sun, all declared the power and goodness of the Great Spirit” (Jones 1860, 10, 13). According to A.A. Den Otter, Jones’s vision here reflects “an enhanced awareness of nature” (230). This certainly appears to be the case, but a qualification is necessary: in the wake of his conversion Jones had little concern for the things of nature themselves; his interest lay, rather, in their perceived ability to join him in “uttering the praises of the Lord.” In other words, the “new light” in which he viewed the world derived from an enhanced metaphysical awareness, a conviction that the things of nature ultimately signified – “declared the power of – the creator God or the ‘Great Spirit.’” Jones makes clear this distinction between the greater light of God and the lesser light of nature in his History of the Ojebway Indians, where he criticizes Romantic primitivist philosophy and its notion of the noble savage: Many of the white people who have but a partial acquaintance with the Indian character, have imagined that, whilst the Indian follows the light of nature, he will be saved by that light, and that he is far happier in that barbarous state than he would be

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as a civilised Christian. They have therefore contended that, as an act of justice to the poor Indian, the missionary ought not to disturb his happiness by endeavouring to impart to him that by which he cannot be benefitted. Their constant cry is, “Let the Indian alone: he is well enough off: do not enhance his guilt and his misery.” Would these objectors wish to become savages for the sake of bettering their condition? Perhaps there is not much difference between them and the wild Indian. (Jones 1861, 91–2) Invoking the language of Enlightenment stadial theory, which distinguishes between the “savage” or “barbarous state” of pre-agricultural societies and the “civilised” state of agrarian Christianity, Jones demonstrates his commitment to a Christianized ideology of progress. By suggesting that “there is not much difference” between “the wild Indian” and the white Romantic, who merely “imagine[s]” that he knows “the Indian character” and who on that basis opposes Christian intervention in Native society, Jones exposes the latter’s knowledge as subjective fantasy informed by a pagan world view. That Jones’s white Christian friends agreed wholeheartedly with the progressivist moral thrust of this critique is implicit in the way they often characterized Jones’s religious conversion. For example, the famous Canadian educationist Egerton Ryerson (after whom Toronto’s Ryerson University is named) called his friend Jones “a Christian and a gentleman, and a fine illustration of the improvement and elevation of which the Indian mind and heart are susceptible under the influence of Christian truth and British civilization” (qtd in D. Smith 2013, 31). In the years following his conversion, Jones would often use the same vocabulary of “improvement and elevation” to describe the transformation of other Indigenous converts and to justify his missionary work in the forests and clearings of Upper Canada. Jones was attracted to the stadial philosophy of cultural development because, in theory at least, it mitigated against essentialist notions of racial difference. If all societies followed similar developmental trajectories through various “stages” or “states” (beginning with hunting and gathering, then moving to animal husbandry, agriculture, and finally commerce), then surely the claim that “the wild Indian” was inherently incapable of “civilization” was a mere product of ignorance and prejudice. Jones thus enjoyed contemplating Britain’s primitive past and the barbarisms of which early Britons were thought to have been capable. During his second trip to England, in the spring of 1838,

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for example, he wrote of a visit he made “to see the remains of a Druidical Temple, called Carnbrea, where human sacrifices used to be offered to their gods.” Among the ruins, he noticed that “several of the rocks” had been “hollowed out into basins, where the poor creatures were slain, and these basins to all appearances caught the blood of the victims.” Compared to “the poor Indians” (a ubiquitous phrase in the discourse of benevolent whites as well as in Jones’s own vocabulary), the ancient Druidic Britons were “poor creatures” indeed, their moral state even more benighted in Jones’s view than that of Upper Canada’s non-Christian Indians. Attributing to divine Providence Britain’s transformation from such grim origins to its present “civilized” state, Jones commented that “surely God has done much for England” (1860, 398). If in the course of history God could ultimately bless a nation whose past was steeped in idolatry and bloody human sacrifice, how much more might He do for the Indians, who, “before they were contaminated by unprincipled European adventurers, who introduced the fire-waters and many vices amongst them,” were at bottom “a moral people” (Jones 1861, 58)?

P l a n t in g t h e Gospel As Donald Smith has shown, Jones was a highly effective evangelist among the Mississauga. Rather than rejecting his people’s traditional culture and beliefs outright, he often preached in the Ojibwe language, emphasizing “the points of resemblance” and “common human values” shared by Ojibwe and Christian systems of belief (2013, 53). But some of Jones’s teachings were less familiar to the woodland Ojibwe. As an integral part of his effort to ensure his people’s survival, Jones taught the Mississauga not only the rudiments of Christian doctrine but also those of farming, becoming in the process “chief farmer as well as religious teacher” (1860, 86). In part, this double duty was a pragmatic necessity, for “the deer that used to teem in thousands” along the shores of the southern Great Lakes during the winter months were quickly dwindling in number: “Alas! For these noble creatures,” Jones exclaimed in his diary, “like their old masters, the poor Indians … are now fast disappearing before the face of the white man” (242). Although on his woodland missionary circuit he occasionally resorted to hunting and fishing in order to feed himself and the people he visited, over time he found that he had, as he put it, “lost my art in gameing [sic] and hunting” (264). Clearly, in Jones’s view, if the Mississauga

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Peter Jones (Kahkewaquonaby) and the Credit River Mississauga 195

were to survive in this world and not “perish” in the next, they needed to adapt to changing circumstances by adopting new modes of physical and spiritual sustenance. Hence, for Jones, the ideal missionaries – those men “calculated to do lasting good among the Indians” – were “men who are not afraid to blacken their hands by logging the timber, and burning the wood in the field; men who are not ashamed to work in their shirt sleeves; men who do not say to the Indians, ‘Go and do this or that;’ but who say to them, ‘Come on brethren:’ such men only can convince the Indians that they are their friends and wish to do them good” (228). As one who taught his people “how to … clear the land and how to hold the plow” (22) by working alongside them in the field, Jones was, by his own definition, an ideal minister. By teaching his people to farm, Jones not only helped them to find sustenance during a period in which game was in rapid decline but also gave them the practical knowledge necessary to understand the central tropes informing his own evangelical enterprise. Christian doctrine is replete with metaphors of agriculture and “the husbandry of souls” (Stevens 98) that were alien to the Ojibwe, who, unlike the Haudenosaunee, did not traditionally practice farming. In his missionary work, Jones understood himself to be “planting the gospel amongst the aborigines of North America” (1861, 32) and ministering to “little lambs of the forest” who were “hungering for instruction” in “the howling wilderness” (1860, 139, 236). Similarly, in the biographical sketch she inserted into his History of the Ojebway Indians, Jones’s English wife Eliza used many such metaphors to characterize her husband and his evangelical endeavours. As she put it, his conversion made him “one of the first-fruits” of missionary enterprise “among the red men of the wilderness.” And in turn, once called upon to minister to his people, he “went forth bearing precious seed, and sowed that seed in tears; but in due season he reaped in joy”; thus was Peter Jones “instrumental in … bringing the poor lost wanderers into the fold of the good Shepherd” (E. Jones 5, 10). Such rhetoric is in many ways unremarkable, since metaphors of the harvest and sheepfold are standard Christian fare. But when used in reference to Indigenous hunting societies, the distance between metaphorical vehicle and tenor collapses. Traditional Mississauga were not metaphorical “wanderers” (a term suggesting aimlessness) in a figurative wilderness but motivated travellers following wild game and seasonal gathering in forested regions deemed real wildernesses. Thus, in much of Jones’s discourse, as in that of colonial Christian society, the “howling wilderness” is a

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demonic space not only in a figurative sense but in a literal sense as well. It is no wonder that (like John Strachan) he advocated village settlement for his people, and that (as noted in chapter 1) he ultimately reconciled himself to the disappearance of the wild game, which, when gone at last, would “leave no inducement for them to abandon their farms and homes” (Jones 1861, 172). I say “much of Jones’s discourse” supports standard Christian stereotypes of the wilderness, because there are important exceptions. In contrast to Eliza’s seemingly unequivocal equation of her husband’s former Ojibwe “forest life” with “the … thick darkness of superstition and idolatry” (E. Jones 12), Peter imagined “the Gospel taking the wings of the morning and flying to the … Pacific Ocean, and making the wilderness vocal with the high praises of God” (1860, 165). Although he accepted the necessity of “subduing the forest” as a prerequisite to Indian civilization, he nevertheless appreciated the aesthetic and inspirational role that the otherwise “dreary woods” could play in raising his own and his people’s thoughts to heaven: “I have often been led into delightful contemplation of the goodness and power of the Supreme, when traversing the mighty forests, contrasting the sombre foliage of the trees with the delicate yet brilliant hues of the wild flowers which deck, like so many gems, the green verdure beneath, and I have been led in admiration and gratitude to exclaim, ‘My Father made them all!’” (Jones 1861, 53, 56). However, in recounting the story of his religious conversion at the Methodist camp meeting in Ancaster, Jones depicts the forest as an ambiguous space. While pondering his sins prior to his actual conversion experience, he informs the reader that he “retired into the solitary wilderness to try to pray to the Great Spirit. I knelt down by the side of a fallen tree. The rattling of the leaves over my head with the wind made me uneasy. I retired further back into the woods, and then wrestled with God in prayer.” At this point, the “solitary wilderness” is an “uneasy” space of doubt and moral contention; unable to find any solace there, Jones, at God’s bidding, resolves to “go back to the camp and get the people of God to pray for me” (1860, 11). Shortly after his actual conversion in the camp, however, “the evil spirit” tempts him “to doubt the reality of the change wrought in my soul by the Holy Spirit,” and so he resolves “to seek the Lord with greater diligence.” As part of this spiritual seeking, he once again “retire[s] to a grove to pray” (14), this time finding in the woods not contention but renewed faith. Jones’s choice of the word “grove” here is particularly

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Peter Jones (Kahkewaquonaby) and the Credit River Mississauga 197

interesting given its negative connotations in the Old Testament, where it commonly characterizes the pagan places of worship that Jehovah commands the ancient Hebrews to “cut down” and “destroy” (Exodus 34:13; cf. also Deut. 7:5, 12:3, 16:21, etc.). But as Jones mentions later in reference to a meeting held outdoors at the Credit River, the “Lord dwelleth not in temples made with human hands.” Ultimately, he discovers that one may be “wonderfully blessed in private prayer in the woods,” and he is happy to hear his people’s “shouts of praise” rising from “the bushes” (Jones 1860, 62, 25, 66). Nonetheless, there were those in the halls of power who vehemently opposed the Methodists’ woodland evangelism and showed their displeasure to Jones on a number of occasions. In his diary entry for 8 August, 1826, for example, an appalled Jones wrote that Upper Canada’s lieutenant-governor, Sir Peregrine Maitland, “was very much opposed to our attending the Methodist Camp meetings,” warning “that if we persisted in going to any more of them, he would cast us off and have nothing more to do with us – that we could now take our choice, either to desist from attending Camp meetings, and retain the good will and aid of the Governor, or persist in going and lose his friendship and assistance.” Calling this unexpected development “a great trial to us,” Jones cited his “right,” as “a free agent, … to worship God according to the dictates of his own conscience,” adding “that the King’s laws granted all his subjects liberty to worship God as they felt it their duty.” But interestingly, rather than dwelling on these rights and liberties, Jones emphasized the environmental aspect of the lieutenant-governor’s attempted prohibition, saying, “if a man thought it right to retire to the woods to pray, who had a right to prevent him?” (1860, 75). Worried that Maitland might make good on his threat to “cast … off” the Credit River Mississauga at a time when they “were just commencing a settlement, and endeavouring to improve in civilization,” Jones and the chiefs at first “thought it advisable … not to oppose his will in this matter” (75). Eventually, though, they changed their mind, resolving in a Council meeting of 10 June 1829 “that in matters of religion, no earthly king, governor, or any other person, had a right to dictate to our hearts how or where we are to worship the Great Spirit” (222). Among those who put pressure on Jones to change the environmental and cultural venues of his missionary work was Sir Peregrine Maitland’s chief advisor, the Reverend John Strachan, who was made Archdeacon of York in 1827. As noted in chapter 2, Strachan was not

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only Upper Canada’s leading Anglican cleric but also a member of the colony’s executive and legislative councils, and thus one of the most powerful men in Upper Canada. An ardent sectarian who argued that Methodism’s founder, John Wesley, had done “more harm than good” (Strachan 1820d, 329), who looked down upon Methodist missionaries as “uneducated itinerant preachers” (qtd in D. Smith 1987, 71) and who wished to “preserv[e] the Indians” from Methodist teachings he considered “little less pernicious than Popery itself,”4 Strachan had previously “appeared very friendly” to Jones and the Credit River Mississauga. Indeed, it was Strachan himself who had first advised them to settle along the Credit River, to the west of York, and “erect a village” there, offering “advice as to the way [the Mississauga] had better proceed to obtain assistance from Government” in the undertaking (Jones 1860, 38–9). But in exchange for this proffered assistance, the archdeacon told Jones, the Mississauga would have to change their religious affiliation from Methodism to Anglicanism. As Strachan later put the case in his report on the “Religious State of the Indians in Upper Canada” (7 May 1838), “Sir Peregrine wisely thought that if the Indians were to be instructed at the expence [sic] of the Government in the truths of Christianity it ought to be through the national Church over which Government has a just control and no other” (1.141). Knowing the extent of Jones’s influence among the Mississauga, Strachan, in company with Attorney General John Beverley Robinson, offered to increase his salary and give him access to York’s planned college if Jones would work to bring the Mississauga into the national church’s fold (Jones 1860, 106–7). To Maitland’s earlier argument, Strachan and Robinson added that whereas Methodist financial support for the Credit River settlement and other missionary work depended on charitable “subscriptions” that were “liable to fluctuation,” the more stable support the government could provide if the Indians came “under the superintendence of the Established Church” would “make the missionary establishments more permanent” (Jones 1860, 106–7). But as confirmed Methodists, Jones and the converted Mississauga refused to bend under such pressures. Six months later, when Strachan reiterated the colonial government’s objections to Methodism in another meeting with Jones, he pretended to do so out of concern for biblical doctrine rather than for colonial and national politics. Contemplating the meeting afterwards in his diary, Jones wrote of Strachan that “he … asked me if I had given up going to Camp meeting[s]? I told him I had not. He then

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Peter Jones (Kahkewaquonaby) and the Credit River Mississauga 199

asked if I found any thing in Scripture to sanction such meetings? I said that I found nothing in the Bible against such meetings. He replied, that he thought I could. Upon this our talk ended” (Jones 1860, 227). A man of principle with an intimate knowledge of Scripture, Jones held fast not only to his chosen faith but also to his right as a missionary to preach the gospel wherever he wished, whether within the walls of a “bush chapel” (77) or under the forest canopy in the midst of the great “wilderness.”

T r a n sat l a n t ic Fundrai si ng Given the strings that Maitland, Strachan, and Robinson attached to the Mississauga’s financial assistance, the Credit River settlement’s ability to survive and thrive in the future was far from assured. Hence, the Credit River people turned their hopes toward England, giving Jones, whom they had made a chief, “written authority to go in their behalf and solicit aid for their improvement, and to transact business for them with their great father over the great waters” (Jones 1860, 294). Thus, in early March 1831, Jones left Upper Canada on a transatlantic fundraising mission (or, as he wryly called it, a “begging excursion” [308]), journeying to England via New York, where he boarded the packet ship Birmingham for the thirty-seven-day crossing to Liverpool. Once overseas, he began in earnest his efforts to solicit aid from “the benevolent people of England, in order to support the Missions and schools among [the Mississauga]” (299). With the support of prominent Methodists in Bristol, London, and elsewhere, Jones found large and receptive audiences for his sermons as well as for his lectures on “the superstitions of the American Indians” (321). Among the first people Jones met during his first visit to England was “the celebrated Mrs Hannah Moore [Hannah More],” the abolitionist author of “Slavery a Poem” (1788) – in which European slave owners are called “w h i t e savag e [ s ]” (More line 211) – and of various pious tracts on Christian morality, which Jones later told her “were much read” in America.5 Jones found the eighty-seven-year-old author to be an “interesting character” whose “whole soul [was] drawn out to God” and remarked, with seeming approval, that “she did not take the same interest in hearing about the customs and manners of the Indians as her companions did” (1860, 307), being more interested in matters of religion and in ascertaining whether Jones was Protestant or Catholic. But if More was not interested in questions of

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traditional Indigenous culture, she was apparently fascinated by Jones’s stories of missionary work in the Canadian woods: “After telling Mrs Moore of the wonderful change effected by the Gospel amongst the Indians of Canada, she seemed highly delighted, and said to her companions, ‘Come, let us go over to Canada and live among the Indians and instruct them.’” Although such a remark seems condescending, Jones was happy to give More the benefit of the doubt, saying that she “spoke this in a humorous way to signify how willing she should be to go and do good amongst the poor Indians” (306). If Jones enjoyed More’s company, she clearly reciprocated the sentiment. During the more than two-hour interview, “she frequently took hold of my arm in an affectionate manner, and would speak of the amazing goodness of God” – understandably so, since in her eyes the Christian Indian chief would himself have been living proof of God’s goodness. Ultimately, the interview with More was not only enjoyable but also profitable: More presented Jones with “a five pound note for our Missions in Canada” as well as a signed copy of her 1825 book The Spirit of Prayer (307). A major consideration during his British fundraising tour involved the question of Jones’s wardrobe, his “usual dress” being English (Jones 1860, 329). Although in late 1828 he had engaged “Oneida Joseph, the famous Oneida chief,” to make him “a suit of an Indian costume” (191), he felt the need to have a new suit of traditional Ojibwe clothing made for his visit to England, so asked “the Indian sisters” at the Credit Village “to make me a deer-skin dress” (293). But for Jones, having such clothing had nothing to do with personal preference or comfort. As a minister who had preached to his people, among other things, “the necessity of … moderation in dress” (87) and who believed that all people were best attired in garments “suitable” to their “character and station” (308), Jones was uncomfortable wearing his beautifully ornate Ojibwe clothing.6 Indeed, when left to his own devices in Britain, he would politely decline to “put on the robes or gown … to preach in” (329). But in instances where his hosts expected or encouraged him to don his Indian wardrobe, he would comply with their wishes. Like his pious hosts, he knew that the costume would help to kindle interest in the Mississauga’s cause, thereby filling the collection plates. This was certainly the case in London, where, as Jones noted, “my presence, or rather the report of an Indian going to appear at a public meeting, created no little excitement, and

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Peter Jones (Kahkewaquonaby) and the Credit River Mississauga 201

brought out many to the meetings,” a circumstance Jones attributed to the public’s being “desperately fond of new things” (300). Deliberately catering to this fondness for novelty, Jones’s traditional wardrobe had a powerful effect on the congregations he addressed. He wore the clothing, for example, when he “preached to a full chapel” belonging to the renowned biblical commentator Dr Adam Clarke, an enthusiast of Native American culture whose museum contained, among other artifacts, “Indian implements of war, heathen gods, &c., &c.” At Clarke’s chapel, Jones observed, the “people were very attentive and looked upon me with wonder, as I was dressed in the Indian costume, which I was previously requested to do by Dr Clarke” (Jones 1860, 336–7). Perhaps part of the “wonder” people felt in Jones’s presence had to do with the apparent contrast between his pagan appearance and the subject matter of his pious Christian sermon, which focused on Mark 16:15, wherein Jesus commands his disciples to “go … into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature.” As a targeted product of this evangelical enterprise, Jones, in his Ojibwe dress, was a visibly exotic “creature,” but as an agent of the same evangelism – and as one who spoke well-known Christian words with pious conviction – he was also familiar, as on many occasions when he preached and lectured in his English clothes. Straddling both European and Ojibwe worlds, Jones disrupted English expectations of what it meant to be “Indian.” As Fulford has aptly noted in a discussion of the Mississauga chief’s wardrobe, “Jones’ appearance … suggested that Indians could retain some of their traditional and exotic difference while embracing much of British, Christian, culture. As a result, he made Britons see past the two alternatives that were usually offered as Indians’ only possible futures (total assimilation to white ways or extinction as rural primitives)” (Fulford 260). The question of dress – and its relationship to contemporary notions of cultural authority and authenticity – was also central to Jones’s encounters with two British monarchs. On his first trip to England, he was presented, along with two Nova Scotia Mi’kmaq Indians, to King William IV and Queen Adelaide at Windsor Palace. After Jones gave William a copy of his Ojibwe translation of St John’s gospel, “the King and those around him talked for some time about our dress.” Whereas the monarch considered one of the Mi’kmaq costumes to be inauthentic, deeming it a “complete model of the American [rather than British North American] Indians,” he approved of Jones’s apparel,

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calling it “the real Chippeway costume” (Jones 1860, 342; emphasis added). Although the trustworthiness of William’s claim to distinguish authentic from inauthentic modes of Indigenous dress is questionable, Jones had done well to appear before the king in his traditional attire. But on his second visit to England (which I consider in detail below), when he was presented to the young Queen Victoria, the question of clothing initially generated a great deal of consternation. The colonial secretary, Lord Glenelg, was uncertain of the propriety of Jones’s appearing before the monarch in traditional dress. After deciding in consultation with Lord Melborne that Jones “had better appear in the English dress,” Glenelg changed his mind with only twenty minutes to spare before the interview, forcing a compliant (though rather harried) Jones “to undress and … put on the Indian costume as fast as I could” (406). Here, the oscillation in choice between English and Ojibwe wardrobes nicely encapsulates the transatlantic liminality or in-betweenness of Jones’s Atlantic-world identity, becoming a meet emblem of his role as a cultural broker,7 one who used his expert knowledge of both English and Native American cultures to promote the interests of his people. Crucially, in recounting his first royal visit, Jones makes it plain that, in contrast to Maitland and Strachan, the king had no objection to his being a Methodist, making a distinction only between the Mi’kmaq chief’s Catholicism and Jones’s own Protestantism (1860, 342) – “a point of contrast to which the king drew very marked attention” (K. Flint 210). Although the monarch himself apparently did not ask Jones about his Methodism, one of the lords in waiting did so in the king’s presence. After acknowledging his Methodist faith, Jones took the liberty of asserting “that the doctrines taught by the Methodists were the same as those of the Church of England” – an assertion to which the lord assented, saying “there was no difference” between the two doctrines (1860, 343). Thus, in the presence of the king, and apparently with his tacit agreement, Jones was affirmed in his view that the anti-Methodism of leading Upper Canadians such as Maitland and Strachan had neither doctrinal nor royal sanction. Clearly, the repeated threats these officials had levelled at the Mississauga if they did not join the Church of England – however real and troubling – were, at bottom, nothing more than the petty tyrannical manoeuvrings of self-interested colonial administrators. In recounting his interviews with royalty, Jones appears to display a remarkable deference to authority, mentioning in his diary that he

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Peter Jones (Kahkewaquonaby) and the Credit River Mississauga 203

came away from his first royal interview feeling “highly gratified with my visit to our great father the King, and our great mother the Queen” and concluding with the patriotic exclamation, “God bless the King and Queen!” (Jones 1860, 344). Thus, in his role as an envoy for his people, Jones affirmed the Mississauga’s loyalty to the Crown. And yet, a closer reading of the diary entry for his first royal visit shows that his praise for the king and queen was based not upon a feeling of awe for the imperial power they represented and embodied, but on his sense of their moral character, in which he perceived the telltale signs of Christian humility and goodness. As he noted approvingly, the “King and Queen were dressed very plain, and were very open, and seemed not at all to be proud.” That Jones believed the royal couple to be fallible – and thus not essentially different from other people – is evident in the terms of the blessing he bestows upon them: “May God direct them,” he prayed, “in the good and right path of righteousness!” (344). Like “the poor Indian sinner in the woods” – a name Jones bestows upon himself (320) – even kings and queens required divine guidance. Ultimately, in his moral discourse, Jones emphasized a levelling theology according to which all people were equal under God. Perhaps the most interesting of Jones’s responses to royalty may be seen in the diary entry concerning his tour of Westminster Abbey, which took place in late February 1832. Among other things, he saw “the place where the Kings of England are crowned, and the royal chairs that they sit on when they are thus crowned. I took the liberty,” he admitted, “to squat myself down upon them as we passed by, so that I can now say that I, a poor Indian from the woods of Canada, sat in the king’s and queen’s great crowning chairs” (Jones 1860, 338). As Fulford notes, the gratitude Jones expresses as “a poor Indian” who is nevertheless “allowed to sit where the monarch sat” must be weighed against the likelihood that Britons would consider his action “disrespectful and even rebellious.” Not only does Jones’s description reduce the monarch’s crowning throne to a mere “chair” (Fulford 261), but there is something strange about his choice of the rather vulgar word “squat” to characterize his action of sitting there. Given that Upper Canada’s Indigenous people often lost their land to poor British “squatters,” whose illegal encroachment was too often tacitly supported by the colonial government – and by a settler population that considered squatters “heroes” (D. Smith 2013, 121) – perhaps Jones was drawing a veiled parallel between his own appropriation

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of the royal seat and the white man’s appropriation of Indigenous territory. Both acts may be said to violate “sovereign” space (since under the treaty system, reserves were held for the Indians in trust by the Crown). Like the white settler who squats on Native land, Jones, in squatting on a royal throne, took a “liberty” indeed. In Coll Thrush’s apt phrase, it was “an act that was both ironic and deeply symbolic” (12). All in all, Jones’s first visit to Britain was a remarkable success. In a single year, he had “addressed congregations in public 100 times, and preached 62 sermons” in numerous cities, including “Liverpool, London, Bristol, Birmingham, Chester, Manchester, Halifax, Huddersfield, Leeds, Hull, York, Stockton, Bradford, Sheffield, High Wycombe, Brighton, Lewes, Rochester, Reading, Windsor, Oxford, Lynn, Bury St Edmond, Woolwich, Greenwich, Deptford, Lambeth, Norwood, Limehouse, Millhill, Pinner, Tottenham, &c., &c.” Having amassed an impressive total of £1,032.06 in cash donations, plus “various articles in school rewards, clothing, books, edge-tools, &c., &c., to the amount of about four or five hundred pounds, sterling, for the benefit of the [Indian] Missions,” plus a thousand printed copies of his Ojibwe translation of St John’s gospel – not to mention the allimportant “prayers of thousands of faithful Christians” – Jones concluded with understandable satisfaction that he had “succeeded in the object of my mission to this country”(1860, 346–7). Not only had he gained much in the way of material and spiritual support for his people but he also returned to Canada with an ardently evangelical Methodist bride, Eliza Field of Lambeth, who provided Jones with an enthusiastic and affectionate Christian helpmeet in his life and missionary work.

L a n d a n d A c ti vi sm As a missionary, Peter Jones not only preached the gospel and taught the arts of agriculture but also advocated for the Mississauga’s political and legal enfranchisement, which he saw as crucial to the process of their “civilization.” As he observed in his History, “Indians at the present time enjoy no political rights or advantages. They cannot vote at elections for members of Parliament, nor sit as jurors, however qualified they may be, simply because they have no title deeds for their lands. I feel confident that these things act as a powerful check to their advancement in the arts of civilized life … I know of no legal impediment to their possessing such rights; the difficulty lies in the tenure by

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Peter Jones (Kahkewaquonaby) and the Credit River Mississauga 205

which they hold their lands” (Jones 1861, 217). The Mississauga people’s lack of political rights made their tenure at the Credit River village extremely unstable, despite the fact that government officials such as Archdeacon Strachan had recommended their settlement there in the first place. As A.A. Den Otter notes, recent events south of the border gave Jones much cause to worry. In 1830, President Andrew Jackson had introduced his cruelly oppressive Indian Removal Act, thereby initiating the legislative process that would lead to the Cherokee people’s forced removal from their traditional territories (253–4). Jones saw through the contemporary rhetoric depicting American Indian removal in a benevolent light. Believing that it would cause the Cherokee and other Native American nations to “perish” via war and starvation, he depicted the American president’s legislation as part of a naked attempt to expropriate the Indians’ “fine rivers and their rich flats” so that invading whites could “eat, drink, and be merry” (qtd in Den Otter 254).8 Although many Upper Canadians, including Strachan, were highly critical of American Indian policy, Jones feared that Canada might follow suit and attempt to evict the Mississauga from their own small settlement at the Credit River. After the arrival in York in early 1836 of Upper Canada’s new lieutenant-governor, Sir Francis Bond Head, such fears seemed increasingly justified. Although Sir Francis criticized the US government’s treatment of Native Americans, arguing that in British North America “the rights of the Indians have been more carefully attended to” (1846, 121), he was pessimistic about the Indians’ future survival and highly critical of missionary efforts to bring them into the fold of Christian civilization. In a letter to Lord Glenelg, he voiced his frank opinion of the problem, couching it in the language of the objective outsider. Speaking of Upper Canada’s Indigenous people, whom he saw as “daily and yearly fading before the progress of civilization” (Head 1839b, 13), he wrote that every Person of sound Mind in this Country who is disinterested in their Conversion, and who is acquainted with the Indian Character, will agree, – 1. That an Attempt to make Farmers of the Red Men has been, generally speaking, a complete Failure; 2. That congregating them for the Purpose of Civilization has implanted many more Vices than it has eradicated; and, consequently,

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3. That the greatest Kindness we can perform towards these intelligent, simple-minded People, is to remove and fortify them as much as possible from all Communication with the Whites. (Head 1836, 125) Although a few contemporary voices agreed that Sir Francis’s proposed removal scheme was a “benevolent and justifiable” enterprise (Jameson 2008, 538), it was highly controversial.9 For their own part, Jones and his fellow Methodists were outraged by the plan. Sir Francis’s claim that the Indians were incapable of becoming “civilized” Christian farmers was contradicted by the fruits of their missionary labours and, in particular, by the success of the Credit River settlement. In response to the charge that the Mississauga were in general making less than satisfactory agricultural progress, Jones’s uncle, Chief Joseph Sawyer (Nawahjegezhegwabe, or The Sloping Sky), later attributed his people’s hesitancy to clear and cultivate new tracts of land to a sense of “discouragement” among young Mississauga farmers, who “did not feel a wish to improve lands from which they might be immediately removed, and in which in fact they had no permanent possession” (Slight 152). Moving forward with his Indian removal scheme despite intense Methodist opposition, Sir Francis visited Manitoulin Island in July 1836 where, among other things, he negotiated the Manitowaning Treaty with nine Odaawaa (Ottawa) and seven Ojibwe chiefs from the upper Great Lakes region. Noting that Manitoulin and its surrounding islands were currently “alike claimed by the English, the Ottawas, and the Chippewas,” Sir Francis promised the assembled chiefs that if they signed his treaty, “your Great Father [King William IV] will withdraw his claim to these islands” and “make them the property (under your Great Father’s control) of all Indians who he shall allow to reside on them.” By making the remote Manitoulin Islands10 an exclusive Indigenous reserve, the treaty – in Head’s eyes at least – promised to “protect” the Indians “for ever … from the encroachments of the whites.” For those “who wish[ed] to be civilized,” the treaty promised government funding for Christian settlement and education, while for those who wished “to be totally separated from the Whites,”11 it provided the possibility of a remote refuge. As Ojibwe historian Alan Corbiere has recently shown, many of the Manitowaning Treaty’s signatories, including Odaawaa chiefs JeanBaptiste Assiginack and Mookomaanish, were happy with the treaty.

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Peter Jones (Kahkewaquonaby) and the Credit River Mississauga 207

It promised to provide their people with “a homeland, a refuge, a place of education, and a place to derive a livelihood and maintain an identity” (Corbiere 2013, 81). But when Sir Francis attempted to pressure the Mississauga to move from the Credit River settlement and other areas in the southern part of the province and join their Anishinaabe cousins up north on the Manitoulin archipelago, he caused an uproar. Contrary to the lieutenant-governor’s claim that the Indians were incapable of becoming farmers, Peter Jones and Joseph Sawyer noted that the Mississauga were now dependent upon agriculture for their subsistence. They claimed that the Manitoulin Islands, unlike the fertile lands at the Credit River and in Upper Canada’s other more temperate southerly farming regions, were “in general barren” and thus mostly incapable “of cultivation” (Jones 1861, 43) (though, as I note below, this claim was somewhat controversial). Chief Sawyer went so far as to assert that if the Mississauga were forced to move “to Maneetoolin” they would “soon … be extinct as a people” (qtd in Slight 111). To some extent, Chief Sawyer’s assertion accords with the views of Sir Francis Bond Head himself. Like all white subscribers to the myth of the “vanishing Indian,” Sir Francis believed that the First Nations would – despite the provisions of the Manitowaning Treaty – in “a short time, and with a few exceptions … be extinct” (1839b, 13). The crucial difference here is whereas Sir Francis believed fatalistically that the Indians were inevitably doomed to extinction (and that his proposed removal scheme would merely palliate the process), Chief Sawyer was convinced that his people would become extinct only if Sir Francis and the colonial government were successful in their effort to remove them from their established territories and force them to retreat to Manitoulin. For Jones, Sawyer, and their fellow Mississauga, the stakes surrounding Sir Francis’s proposed removal policy could not have been higher. So urgently concerned were the Mississauga and their white Methodist supporters that in 1837 they decided to send Peter Jones back to England to petition Queen Victoria and seek assistance from the British and Foreign Aborigines Protection Society. Hence, in September, Jones left Upper Canada once again, arriving in Liverpool on 7 November and in London two days later. Once on English soil, he again found himself surrounded by Methodist well-wishers. He spent his time productively, attending religious meetings, working on his History of the Ojebway Indians, and voicing his concerns about the treatment of Indians in Upper Canada with anyone who promised

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to be of assistance. Early in the new year, he visited the Aborigines Protection Society (Jones 1860, 393), which, in 1839, would publish their Report on the Indians of Upper Canada, a scathing critique of Sir Francis Bond Head’s “reprehensible” Indian removal policy. Among other things, the society’s report contradicted Sir Francis’s claim that the Indians were incapable of farming by providing statistical data concerning the previous year’s impressive Mississauga harvest. Similarly, they dismissed his views on the inevitability of Indian extinction by providing a detailed statistical account of the Mississauga’s declining mortality rates during the ten years that had passed “since their conversion” to Methodist Christianity (British and Foreign 17, 32). On 28 August 1838, Jones was finally granted an audience with the colonial secretary, Lord Glenelg, in preparation for his interview with Queen Victoria. As he later noted in his diary, “His Lordship made several enquiries about the Indians in the west, and about the Manitoolin Indian Settlement. I told his Lordship that I had visited the Island; that, in my opinion, it was unfit for an Indian settlement, as the Island was rocky, and the soil was very poor; that the Indians objected to their settling on that Island” (Jones 1860, 405). Jones’s assessment of Manitoulin Island was echoed in the Aborigines Protection Society’s report, whose authors claimed that the Indians residing there would be “doomed to live on berries yielded by the few shrubs which can take root between the crevices of the rocks” (British and Foreign 26), an assessment that has been echoed in historical scholarship, including some of my own published work.12 But other evidence, including the existence of productive farms on Manitoulin Island today, indicates that Jones’s claims (which accurately describe substantial parts of the Manitoulin archipelago) were rather too sweeping. In recounting her own visit to the Anishinaabe settlement at Manitowaning in 1837, Anna Jameson wrote that the “soil on which I now tread is rich and good; and all the experiments in cultivation already tried here have proved successful” (2008, 538). Moreover, three years later, in a petition to Lord Sydenham, a group of local chiefs contradicted Jones’s assessment of their homeland, telling the new lieutenant-governor, “we are very thankful for your having given us Manatoulin Island where we wish to live, where our children, and those hereafter to be born can live comfortable. Our chiefs and young men are greatly pleased when they see all they plant growing so well and producing so much. We do not (as others say of us) look in vain for crops.” Significantly, in closing their petition, the chiefs added, “we

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do not know the Indian who has been talking ill of this Island but he should only have talked of the place where he lives himself – he has not told the truth” (qtd in Corbiere 2011, 5). Sadly, the general truth of the chiefs’ assessment, as opposed to Jones’s, was borne out in 1862, when the government revoked the Manitowaning Treaty in response to increasing pressure from the many white settlers who wished to farm the island’s fertile regions and exploit its timber, fisheries, and other resources (Pearen passim). Although Jones’s assessment of Manitoulin Island was in some respects problematic, his desire to remain at the Credit River settlement was understandable. His people had already begun successfully farming the land there, the region’s cultivable soils were indeed more abundant than Manitoulin’s, and its more southerly location provided a more temperate climate and thus a longer growing season. Beyond all else, Jones wished to prevent his people’s forced removal from the Credit River’s familiar lands and plentiful fisheries: a negative portrayal of the Manitoulin settlement would surely help his case. For his own part, Lord Glenelg appeared to sympathize with Jones’s position; as vice-president of the Church of England’s Missionary Society he was interested in the Mississauga’s well-being and had a stake in the success of their “improvement” as Christians. So supportive, indeed, was Glenelg, that Jones left the interview in a spirit of triumph, believing that he had successfully secured title to the Mississauga’s Credit River lands (Den Otter 260). Alas, Jones’s hopes for the future would be dashed in 1847, when his people were forced to leave the Credit River due to pressures caused by white settlement. But rather than migrating northward to Manitoulin, they would move west to the Grand River, where the Mohawks granted them a part of their own reserve on which to establish the Mississauga settlement still known today as “New Credit.” After the meeting with Glenelg, Jones was ready for his interview with Queen Victoria. To some extent, the meeting seemed pro forma, since Jones believed he had already secured land title deeds for his people. But having decided to raise the issue of the Credit River lands with the young monarch anyway, he presented Victoria with the Mississauga’s petition, telling her “that I was happy to say Lord Glenelg … had already granted the prayer of the petition, by requesting the Governor of Upper Canada, to give the Indians the title deeds they asked for” – deeds, as noted earlier, that Jones also believed would secure his people full judicial and civil rights in the colony. In his

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account of the royal interview, Jones noted that “His Lordship bowed to Her Majesty, and she bowed in token of approbation of His Lordship’s having granted the thing prayed for by her red children” (Jones 1860, 407). Explaining his decision to present the formal petition to Victoria despite its already having been granted, Jones wrote that he thought she would like to possess such a document as a curiosity, as the wampum attached to it had a meaning, and their totams [sic] marked opposite the names of the Indians who had signed it. The Queen then said, “I thank you, sir, I am much obliged to you.” I then proceeded to give her the meaning of the wampum; and told her that the white wampum signified the loyal and good feeling which prevails amongst the Indians towards Her Majesty and Her Government; but that the black wampum was designed to tell Her Majesty that their hearts were troubled on account of their having no title-deeds for their lands; and that they had sent their petition and wampum so that Her Majesty might be pleased to take out all the black wampum, so that the string might all be white. (Jones 1860, 407–8) By attaching strings of wampum to their petition, the Mississauga chiefs were following a venerable tradition, “likely introduced to the Anishinaabeg by the Huron-Wendat,” of using wampum “in diplomatic relations” (Corbiere 2014, 49). In interpreting the significance of the differently coloured beads for the queen in the presence of the colonial secretary, Jones was careful to ensure that the Mississauga’s message was received and fully understood. As Kate Flint notes, in presenting the petition and interpreting the attached wampum beads, Jones gave the queen “a lesson in the realities of the emotions involved in First Nations-English political issues,” but his tone in doing so indicated a “respectful and conciliatory” approach to governmental authority (211, 212). It is thus interesting to compare Jones’s interpretation of the black wampum’s significance to that of the Aborigines Protection Society. In contrast to the chief’s relatively mild assertion that the black beads signified the Mississauga’s “troubled” hearts, the society claimed much more forcefully that the same beads were “expressive of sorrow, and trouble, and war” (British and Foreign 39). Stripped of the polite veneer of diplomatic rhetoric, the society’s interpretation of the black

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wampum – probably learned from Jones himself – suggests that much more may have been at stake than Jones let on in his interview with the queen: that the “loyal … feeling” signified by the white beads could potentially give way to feelings of disloyalty if the terms of the Mississauga’s petition were not granted. Given that Jones had taught the Mississauga “that it was their duty as a people to love their king and country, and to pray for all in authority over them” (1860, 88), and given the strength of the British military and the comparative weakness of First Nations arms after the War of 1812, it is highly unlikely that the Mississauga contemplated military action against the British government in response to the uncertainty of their land tenure. If the society was correct, however, the Mississauga had other means available to them. According to their Report, the Indians were so upset by Sir Francis Bond Head’s proposed removal policy that, during the 1837 Upper Canada Rebellion, “it was a matter of doubt for some short time whether they would turn out in defence of Government on the breaking out of the insurrection. But their loyalty to their Great White Father across the Salt Lake prevailed over their indignation” (British and Foreign 21). Here, the society implies that the Mississauga’s loyalty to the Crown did not necessarily imply loyalty to Upper Canada’s “Government,” and that they only supported the latter from a sense of duty to the former. Like Indigenous nations elsewhere in the British imperial world, the Mississauga did not see the local colonial government as a legitimate representative of the Crown. In reality, the Crown and the colony were often at odds regarding questions of Aboriginal governance. As the society noted, although the Mississauga’s “petition was graciously received by her Majesty, and re-instructions were sent out [to Canada] respecting the Indians rights” to their land, the colonial parliament failed to act on those repeated instructions (British and Foreign 39) – a failure suggesting that if a breach of loyalty had occurred in Upper Canada, local authorities, and not the Mississauga, were the culpable party.

E p il o gue Predictably, some Upper Canadian officials attempted to undermine Jones’s authority in the eyes of the Crown in hopes of calling his political activism into question – just as they had done to the Mohawk Chief John Norton during his 1804–05 diplomatic visit to England on behalf of the Haudenosaunee. For example, prior to Jones’s second trip to

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England, in a letter to Lord Glenelg, Lieutenant-Governor Head had drawn pointed attention to Jones’s European phrenology and to his mixed European-Native American ancestry (mentioning, for good measure, Augustus Jones’s “adulter[ous]” relationship with Jones’s mother, Tuhbenahneequay), implying that Jones was not a “real” Indian and thus had no business representing the Credit River Mississauga. Indeed, in claiming that Jones was “labouring hard to obtain possession of the land which belongs to those who are under his spiritual jurisdiction” (qtd in Binnema and Hutchings 132), Sir Francis hinted that Jones was an unscrupulous interloper who wanted the Credit River lands for his own aggrandizement and not to ensure the present well-being and future survival of his people. Sir Francis’s claim could not have been further from the truth. To quote Michael D. McNally, Peter Jones “fought tirelessly in the halls of power on behalf of the land base and rights of his mother’s Credit River community” (52). That he was not motivated by a sense of worldly self-interest was evident in his refusal to follow the requests by Maitland, Strachan, and Robinson to join the Church of England despite the bribe of an increased salary. Although he worked hard to promote his people’s adoption of the Christian faith, he did so from a sense of deeply felt religious conviction. Furthermore, as an outspoken critic of colonial morality, Jones often deployed his Christianity counter-discursively, invoking biblical teachings to indict those European settlers and colonial authorities whose continuing mistreatment of Native people demonstrated “their failure to conform to the dictates of their [own] imported religion” (Weaver 2014b, 177). The fact that the Methodist emphasis upon temperance provided an effective way for Jones and his fellow Ojibwe converts to combat the deadly effects of the whisky trade among Native peoples was a happy byproduct of Christian conversion. As for Jones’s efforts to transform his people into agriculturists, he did so not from a Eurocentric sense that hunters were inherently inferior to farmers, but primarily because he knew that farming could provide a sustainable way for his people to survive during an era in which wild game was becoming increasingly scarce due to the profound environmental changes wrought by colonial settlement. Ultimately, Jones had no desire to turn the Mississauga people into Europeans, nor did he wish to become European himself. On the contrary, he wanted to secure a title deed for the Credit River lands so that he could disprove the fatalistic claims of those who believed that Indigenous Americans were a doomed race – in short, so that his people could continue to exist as a people.

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8 The Atlantic Crossings of George Copway (Kahgegagahbowh) Earth’s distant ends our glory shall behold, And the new world launch forth to seek the old. Then ships of uncouth form shall stem the tyde, And feather’d people crowd my wealthy side, And naked youths and painted chiefs admire Our speech, our colour, and our strange attire! Alexander Pope, “Windsor Forest,” The Works of Alexander Pope, Vol. 1

b r e at h es there the man, with soul so dead, Who never to himself hath said,     This is my own, my native land! Whose heart hath ne’er within him burn’d, As home his footsteps he hath turn’d,     From wandering on a foreign strand! Walter Scott, The Lady of the Lake

In t ro du cti on Among the most remarkable people to cross the Atlantic Ocean during the nineteenth century was George Copway (1818–1869), an Ojibwe author in search of justice for his people and international fame and fortune for himself. Born in Upper Canada in the autumn of 1818, the young Kahgegagahbowh (or Standing Firm), as he was known among the Ojibwe, spent his boyhood engaged in traditional pursuits, learning from his father the arts of hunting, trapping, and fishing. Moreover, by his own account, he was inducted into the Medewiwin Society or Grand Medicine Lodge, the “great fraternity among the Indians for

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religious purposes” (Kohl 41), after a successful vision quest. But Kahgegagahbowh’s traditional upbringing came to an end when, at the age of twelve, he converted to Christianity at a Methodist camp meeting. Thereafter, as George Copway, he attended a school run by the Reverend James Evans, where he learned to read and write in both English and Ojibwemowin.1 This education enabled the young convert to join the American Methodist Church as a qualified missionary, in which role he would spend three years working among the Ojibwe people of L’Anse, on the southern shore of Lake Superior, La Pointe on Madeline Island, and Ottawa Lake in northern Wisconsin. Subsequently entering a residential school near Jacksonville, Illinois, Copway received further training in Methodist doctrine while also acquiring the rudiments of a “classical education” (D. Smith 2013, 166–76). After completing this schooling, the young missionary returned to Upper Canada where he met his future wife, an Englishwoman named Elizabeth Howell, at the Credit River mission home of Peter Jones, who had acted as his “spiritual guide and father,” and whose wife, Eliza Field, was Elizabeth’s friend (Morgan 62). After their marriage, the couple moved to Minnesota, where Copway worked for two more years as an ordained minister before returning once again to Upper Canada in 1842. However, following a three-year sojourn among the Ojibwe of Upper Canada, the Copways encountered difficulties when George was charged with mismanaging funds belonging to both the Saugeen and Rice Lake bands. Expelled from the Canadian Conference of the Wesleyan Methodist Church, he was briefly jailed in Toronto but never charged with a crime. Embittered by this experience and feeling he had been sorely mistreated, Copway left British North America, moving with Elizabeth and their two sons to the United States. There he commenced his career as a public speaker and, ultimately, as an author who wrote “interpretations of various origin stories about the earth and the cosmos that … reflect[ed] traditional Anishinaabe worldviews” (Noodin 178). With the assistance of Elizabeth, who was herself an accomplished writer and an enthusiast of English poetry (Ruoff 1997a, 46; D. Smith 1998, 13–14), Copway became something of an “overnight” literary sensation, appearing before the public, to quote Donald Smith, “like a comet … all flash and brilliance across the sky” (1998, 23, 28). Between 1847 and 1851, he published three major works, including a best-selling autobiography, a history of the Ojibwe people, and a European travelogue, while also lecturing extensively. Taking liberties with his

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self-fashioning, Copway presented himself to the public as an Ojibwe chief and missionary, never mentioning the scandals that plagued him in Upper Canada nor his brief imprisonment there. A tireless selfpromoter, he relished his newfound “status as a literary lion in the United States” (D. Smith 2013, 165). However, as this chapter seeks to demonstrate, Copway also used his literary fame to bring critical attention to the history, condition, and political mistreatment of Indigenous people in the United States and Upper Canada, challenging oppressive stereotypes and seeking redress for historic wrongs.

T h e N o b l e I ndi an In a 1997 study of Indigenous missionaries in antebellum America, the German historian Bernd C. Peyer called Copway “a mid-­ nineteenth-century Indian gone romantic” (266). Since then, several studies have examined Copway’s engagement with the Romantic literary tradition in detail.2 In this chapter, I contribute to this discussion by considering some of the ways in which Copway’s writings engage European Romantic political and aesthetic discourses to criticize colonial modernity and defend Aboriginal traditions. As Donald Smith has recently noted, Copway engaged with the Romantic tradition in innovative ways (2013, 186), finding its critique of European civil society useful to his own Indigenous activism. In his Traditional History and Characteristic Sketches of the Ojibway Nation (first published in 1850), his diatribe against British and American law provided a case in point. Writing in veiled response to his brief imprisonment in Upper Canada, Copway claimed that “of late years, law has borne with it very many evils. We can judge somewhat of the character of a community by its buildings. Prisons, penitentiaries, and poor-houses are bad signs. Before law was introduced, the Indians had none of these. Whatever we had was shared alike. In times of gladness all partook of the joy; and when suffering came all alike suffered” (Copway 1851b, 141). Having been subjected to the white man’s law during his brief imprisonment in Upper Canada, Copway here turns the tables on the colonial society that wished to judge him. Implicitly, he defends himself by indicting the “character” of the “community” that imprisoned him, seeing in the very existence of its prisons a “sign” of the community’s own moral culpability. Copway’s critique has its roots in both Ojibwe and Romantic cultures. In his autobiography, he explains the Ojibwe side of his argument in a discussion of his

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people’s hunting practices. Among the “sayings of our medicine men” and the “advice given by our fathers,” he informs his readers, is the following imperative: “When you kill a deer, or bear, never appropriate it to yourself alone, if others are in want; never withhold from them what the Great Spirit has blessed you with” (Copway 1850b, 30–1). During his 1855 sojourn among the Ojibwe people living on the American shores of Lake Superior, the German ethnologist Johann Georg Kohl found such charity and hospitality so extremely generous that he labelled it “a species of communism.” Although Kohl worried that this generosity encouraged sloth by causing “the hard-working man” to toil “for the lazy” (80), Copway sees Ojibwe charity as the sign of equitable and highly moral social relations. In a society in which all “shared alike,” there was no reason to steal from or covet the good fortune of others. This is the traditional basis for Copway’s argument that “before law was introduced” among the Indians, they had no need for prisons. A similar argument also informed the Romantic cultural theory that descended from Rousseau to the British and American Romantics and thence to Copway, who was fascinated by the writings of Lord Byron, Walter Scott, and Robert Southey in Britain, and by the works of Washington Irving, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and James Fenimore Cooper in America. According to Rousseau’s speculative history, “man” in his original state was “naturally good,” but during the course of history, his condition gradually changed and he became “wicked.” Rousseau attributes this unfortunate transformation to the advent of agriculture, which, he argued, led to the creation of private property and the disappearance of equality since those who owned land exploited the labour of those who did not. In the resultant society of haves and have-nots, laws then had to be formulated to protect landowners’ private property and wealth. It was at this point that “nature” – both human and ecological – “became subject to law” (Rousseau 1952b, 363, 352, 333), and man’s “natural” goodness was lost. This aspect of Romantic philosophy clearly resonated with Copway, who argued that coercive laws “tended to brutalize rather than ennoble the Indian race” and who claimed that “the more a man is treated as a brother” – that is, the more men treat each other as equals – “the less demand [there is] for law” (1851b, 141). In British Romantic literature, one of the most succinct formulations of the relationship between law and the “noble savage” can be found in William Blake’s Vision of the Last Judgment, which asserts that “the

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Uncivilized Savage … having not the Law do[es] by Nature the things containd [sic] in the Law.” (559) In other words, in Blake’s view, the imposition of law – whether moral or juridical – on “Uncivilized” people actually created the conditions for the law’s transgression. Although Copway did not know Blake’s work, his assertion that the introduction of law among his people created the need for prisons accords nicely with Blake’s claim in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell that “prisons are built with stones of Law” (36, line 21). As I have shown elsewhere, Copway’s Romanticism is not casual but studied and overtly literary (Hutchings 2009b, 218–34). Occasionally it shows in his penchant for picturesque description: for example, when he depicts the “bold, broken, rugged rocks, piled up one upon another in ‘charming confusion,’ on the shores” of the Great Lakes (1851b, 14). Here and elsewhere in his oeuvre, Copway adds a literary touch to his descriptive prose by quoting directly from a work of European literature, in this case from an English translation of Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel’s romance Lucinde (1799). While it is possible that Copway merely meant to decorate his descriptive prose, or to impress his white reading audience by showing off the fruits of his literary education, it is worth inquiring whether his penchant for literary quotation functions in a more sophisticated and allusive manner. When referencing Lucinde, was Copway aware that Schlegel’s character Julius voices a “romantic” preference for the “charming confusion” of “the Indefinite” – which he defines as a locus of “mysterious” “power” – over the rational forms of “orderly arrangement” characterizing “the Definite”?3 In an era in which Europeans and EuroAmericans often viewed nature as a mere resource to be exploited for human benefit, might Copway have referenced Schlegel’s “charming confusion” in his description of Ojibwe territory as a way to yoke Ojibwe concepts of nature to this mysterious power? One might ask a similar question about some of Copway’s references to Byron’s poetry. In his European travelogue’s passing description of the Hudson River, for example, Copway borrows a line from Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, noting that its waters wind “along (as Byron said of such scenery,) ‘In the wild power of mountain majesty’” (1851a, 45). And later in the same book, after quoting Childe Harold’s description of the Rhine for three full pages, Copway writes, “O what power and beauty is there in those lines after one has looked on this majestic river!” (206). Each of these references highlights a Romantic notion of “power” manifested in nature.4 Copway’s attraction to this aspect

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of Romantic nature writing might be explained by Romanticism’s seeming affinity to the traditional Ojibwe world view that “saw a world filled with powers, powers that could help [the people] or annihilate them (Schenck xvii).” As Theresa Schenck has noted, Ojibwe religion was “especially concerned with power: recognizing it, honoring it, and even acquiring it” (xvii). Donald Smith has suggested that Copway inherited his Romanticism from Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the French Romantic philosopher who “had linked the natural world to the idea of innocence and purity in contrast to the developed world’s corruption and decay,” but that in his autobiography he added the “new ingredient” of Christianity “to Rousseau’s mix” to develop his own self-portrait as “a noble Christian convert” (D. Smith, 2013, 186). Although Copway certainly presented his readers with a distinctively Christian version of Romanticism, it is worth noting that he was not the first writer to innovate on Rousseau’s philosophy in this way: his much-admired Lord Byron (himself a reader of Rousseau) beat him to it.5 In his metaphysical drama Manfred (1817), Byron’s dramatis personae includes a Swiss Chamois Hunter who attempts to save the eponymous protagonist – a member of the aristocracy who is disconsolate despite having reached the pinnacle of human knowledge and achievement – from committing suicide by leaping from the summit of the Jungfrau, urging him to seek the “aid of holy men, and heavenly patience” (Byron 2012, 649, 2.1.34). Count Manfred at first disdainfully rejects the hunter’s assistance, calling him a “brut[e] of burthen” composed of “dust” inferior to his own (649, 2.1.36–7). Subsequently, however, in a moment of clarity, Manfred retracts these slurs, recognizing the hunter as a man of “humble virtues, hospitable home, / And spirit patient, pious, proud and free,” praising his “self-respect, grafted on innocent thoughts,” and commending his “toils, / By danger dignified, yet guiltless.” Unlike Manfred, who knows his own soul is “scorch’d,” the Chamois Hunter is “guiltless” and thus destined for “a quiet grave / With cross and garland over its green turf” and his “grandchildren’s love for epitaph” (650, 2.1.64–73). In this characterization, Byron adapts the language of Rousseauvian cultural primitivism, turning the stereotypical “noble savage” into a “noble Christian savage.” It is important to note that the Chamois Hunter’s virtues are manifested not despite his mode of living but because of it: they are the very products of a Christian life in the wilderness. Such a portrait

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would surely have resonated with Copway, who, as A. LaVonne Brown Ruoff has noted, often wrote “in the double voice of the ‘noble savage’ and the ‘pious convert’” (1997b, 9). Copway’s Rousseauvian critique of Western society is evident throughout his oeuvre, but the nature / culture opposition structuring its logic is best encapsulated in the early pages of his autobiography, where he writes: “I was born in Nature’s wide domain! The trees were all that sheltered my infant limbs – the blue heavens all that covered me. I am one of Nature’s children.” As I noted in this book’s Introduction, Copway politicizes this outburst by rejecting the presumed superiority of those Europeans who are “born in palaces, surrounded with wealth,” exclaiming that “to be born in Nature’s wide domain is greater still!” (1850b, 10–11). In this exuberant boast, Copway associates true “great[ness]” not with the finest trappings of European civilization and power, but with the open air and wooded spaces of Turtle Island / North America. And yet, he knew all too well that the people he calls “Nature’s children” were being systematically marginalized in North America by white settlers’ unquenchable appetite to acquire their land and the wealth it could be made to generate. Hence, later in his autobiography, when considering the condition of Indigenous people, Copway eschews the bright rhetoric informing his celebration of them as “Nature’s children.” Instead, he favours the darker tones of romantic elegy, as, for example, in the following poem penned during an 1839 visit to the city of Boston. While staying in this burgeoning metropolis, Copway climbed to the top of the State House to view the city and its bustling harbour. Here, while contemplating “the works of the white man,” his thoughts, he tells his readers, turned toward “the noble race of red men who once lived and roamed in all the land, and upon the waters as far as my eye could reach” (107), inspiring him to write the following lines: Once more I see my fathers’ land,     Upon the beach, where oceans roar; Where whitened bones bestrew the sand,     Of some brave warrior of yore. The groves, where once my fathers roamed –    The rivers, where the beaver dwelt – The lakes, where angry waters foamed –    Their charms, with my fathers, have fled.

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O! tell me, ye “Palefaces,” tell,     Where have my proud ancestors gone? Whose smoke curled up from every dale,     To what land have their free spirits flown? Whose wigwam stood where cities rise;     On whose war-paths the steam-horse flies; And ships, like mon-e-doos in disguise,     Approach the shore in endless files. (Copway 1850b, 108) Given Copway’s penchant for British Romanticism, it is worth noting that this elegiac poem takes the form of the “Greater Romantic Lyric,” wherein an initial description of the landscape or of the changes it has undergone “evokes a varied but integral process of memory, thought, anticipation, and feeling which remains closely intervolved with the outer scene. In the course of this meditation the lyric speaker achieves an insight, faces up to a tragic loss, comes to a moral decision, or resolves an emotional problem” (Abrams 77). As if following this generic form, Copway begins his poem by contemplating his “fathers’ land” and the changes it has undergone since the “Palefaces” arrived in America. Where forest “groves” formerly stood, great urban centres now rise; where wisps of woodsmoke once “curled up” from Native wigwams, great clouds of smoke and steam spew forth from the white man’s “steam horse” and other engines of industry and commerce. Although the transformation of ancient Indian “war-paths” into railway lines suggests that commercial development has brought peace to a land formerly accustomed to violent warfare, Copway subtly belies such triumphalism by asking his white readers uncomfortable questions concerning the fate of the land’s former Indigenous inhabitants. His first question – “Where have my proud ancestors gone?” – is to some extent rhetorical: Copway knows full well that many of his ancestors had succumbed to disease, alcoholism, displacement, and poverty – sad legacies of the American continent’s European conquest. But he poses his second question – “To what land have their free spirits flown?” – very much in earnest. As a Christian convert, Copway was deeply troubled by the evangelical doctrine that the souls of unconverted “heathens” would be lost forever. As he exclaims in his autobiography, “thousands have already perished, and thousands more will yet perish, unless converted to God. The thought of perishing! how insufferable! O how intolerable!” (1850b, 51). Rather than

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celebrating the white man’s religion, Copway’s poem questions its motives when he likens Boston’s merchant ships to “mon-e-doos in disguise,” a remark suggesting that, in America, the spiritual values once signified by the presence of “mon-e-doos” (manitous, or spirits) have been usurped by the pursuit of material wealth, the “mon-e-doo” replaced by the monetary. Copway’s poem thus belies the very moral he attaches to it in his own commentary. In introducing the poem to the reader, he claims to have been deeply moved by the spectacle of Boston’s merchant vessels, wharves, factories, and railways, which he depicts as praiseworthy signs of “the prosperity of the white man.” Recalling the scene and the tears it brought to his eyes, he quotes a passage from the Old Testament, exclaiming, “‘Happy art thou, O Israel; who is like unto thee, O people saved by the Lord!’” (Copway 1850b, 107). It is interesting to note that in the passage from Deuteronomy that Copway quotes here, Moses concludes the blessing he offers to the Israelites by telling them that “thy enemies shall be found liars unto thee; and thou shalt tread upon their high places” (Deut. 33:29). Standing, as he does, atop the State House in Boston, Copway places himself upon one of America’s “high places,” and the questions his poem addresses to the “Palefaces” suggest that at some level he sees the myth of an exemplary America (“who is like unto thee…?”) as a lie perpetrated by the enemies of his people. Of course, since he wished to win the sympathy of his white reading audience, Copway couldn’t say such things directly, except on those occasions where he could couch his criticisms in the language of shared Christian values. For example, in his Traditional History, he dismissed the common Euro-American claim that the Indian is subject to a mysterious “fate … bent on his destruction” as a “preposterous” lie, wryly noting that it was the white man’s trade in alcoholic spirits, not the “great Good Spirit,” that was responsible for his people’s “misery and mortality” (1851b, 96). In this implicit appeal to Christian temperance, Copway can call out a lie without running the risk of alienating his readers. More often in his books and lectures, however, his criticisms of European and American society took veiled forms, as they do in many passages from his travelogue Running Sketches of Men and Places, in England, France, Germany, Belgium, and Scotland (1851), examined below. In the Traditional History, Copway paints a portrait of his people that is remarkable in part for the relationship it depicts between them and the physical makeup of their traditional territory. “When I look

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upon the land of the Ojibways,” he writes, “I cannot but be convinced of the fact that in no other portion of the world can there be a territory more favored by Heaven. The waters are abundant and good; the air bracing and healthy; and the soil admirably adapted for agricultural purposes. It is not much to be wondered at that in such a climate, such a strong, athletic and hardy race of men should exist, as the Ojibways are generally acknowledged to be. In fact, they could scarcely be otherwise” (Copway 1851b, 20). In short, according to Copway, an exemplary natural environment had produced an exemplary people. This is not to say that Ojibwe life was always easy. The winters in particular could be harsh indeed, and food was sometimes scarce. But in Copway’s account, these rigours only made the people stronger. “The mildness added to the coldness of the climate conduce[s] to the expansion of the ingenuity of my people. The old saying,” he declared, quoting household words drawn from Plato’s Republic, “‘Necessity is the mother of invention,’ finds a verification in them” (59). Far from being adversely affected by the North American environment and climate, as the Compte de Buffon argued in his influential theory of American degeneration (Sayre 85n11), Native Americans had, in Copway’s view, fared exceptionally well in their traditional territories. Moreover, as a people characterized by intellectual “ingenuity” and a capacity for “invention,” their culture was by no means static and unchanging, as bigoted whites so often claimed. Subtly yet firmly, such characterizations of Indigenous people and their relationship to the land resisted negative stereotypes that served to justify colonialism. As far as Copway was concerned, the only thing his already exemplary people needed to achieve full intellectual equality with Europeans was access to European-style education. “Did they possess the advantages of education possessed by the whites, many a bright star would shine forth in their ranks to bless and improve all mankind. What they want is education, but it requires culture” (Copway 1851b, 59–60). Although here, like many contemporary whites, Copway problematically defines education in a manner that excludes the transmission of traditional Indigenous knowledge, his remark is nevertheless interesting in its claim that the existence of “educated” Ojibwe people would “bless and improve all mankind,” not just Native Americans. Indeed, in the very act of publicizing his thoughts in articulate prose, Copway implicitly presents himself as an example of the “bright star” he envisions arising among his people. Furthermore, in describing his own education, he represents writing not as a foreign imposition, but

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as a force already inhabiting his inner being and merely waiting to be called forth: “The mind for letters was in me, but was asleep, till the dawn of Christianity arose, and awoke the slumbers of the soul into energy and action” (1850b, 3). In claiming “the mind for letters” as an inherent aspect of his Indigenous identity, he represents literacy as something that “reinforce[s] his Ojibway heritage” rather than causes him to “abandon it” (Reder 174). To quote Lisa Brooks, Copway’s discourse thus belies the persistent belief “that literacy is a mark of coercive colonialism and modernity inherently antithetical to Indigenous traditions” (2014, 536). In his discourse on the “the mind for letters,” Copway does not refer merely to the capacity to read and write. Rather, he advocates a system of education in which his people will be taught three things: “a good mechanical trade, a sound code of morality, and a high-toned literature” (1850a, 7). While enabling Native people to thrive materially and spiritually, such a well-rounded education would also allow them to “irrigat[e] the whole of [their] country with streams of literature and knowledge” (1851a, 318). To those who would consider this vision of a highly literate Indigenous civilization a radical departure from tradition, Copway asserts otherwise, arguing that the Ojibwe language is supremely well suited to literary expression. “After reading [in] the English language,” he states in his Traditional History, “I have found words in the Indian combining more expressiveness. There are many Indian words which when translated into English lose their force, and do not convey so much meaning in one sentence as the original does in one word.” For Copway, the Ojibwe language (Ojibwemowin) is supremely poetical: “there is in it that which few other languages possess; a force of expression, with music in its words and poetry in their meaning. I cannot fully express the beauty of the language” (1851b, 123). How ironic, then, is the epigraph Copway chose for his chapter on Ojibwe “language and writings”: “‘Here are a few of the most unpleasant words / That ever blotted paper’” (122). Slightly misquoted from Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, this epigraph creates an expectation that the chapter will depict Ojibwemowin in a negative light, perhaps illuminating what Egerton Ryerson, one of Upper Canada’s greatest educationists, called the “almost brutal” “state of vice and ignorance, wretchedness and degradation” in which the Mississauga Ojibwe ostensibly lived prior to their Christian conversion and education (Ryerson 1).6 Copway’s praise for Ojibwemowin is, as I argue later in this chapter, difficult to

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reconcile with his claim that Ojibwe children should learn to speak English and forget their Native tongue. As a member of the Crane clan, Copway was well suited for his new-found role as a writer and an orator. As the nineteenth-century Ojibwe historian William Whipple Warren observed, “this clan are noted as possessing naturally a loud, ringing voice, and are the acknowledged orators of the tribe; in former times, when different tribes met in councils, they acted as interpreters” (47). Using his own “ringing voice” to interpret his people’s history both on the page and in American and European lecture halls, Copway adapted his heritage as a Crane clan member to the communicative requirements of modern times. But if he saw himself as a “rising star” among his people, he demonstrated humility in his self-presentation, downplaying his literary skills and talents. In his preface to the Traditional History, he calls himself “incompetent for my work,” issuing the following apologia: “Though I cannot wield the pen of a Macaulay or the graceful wand of an Irving with which to delineate an Indian’s life, yet I move a pen guided by an intimate knowledge of the subject it traces out, the joys and the sorrows it records” (Copway 1851b, vii–viii). Here, at the outset of his Ojibwe history, Copway adopts a self-abnegating tone, but he does so in a manner that reinforces rather than denies his literary credentials. Far from being a factual statement, his claim to be “incompetent” is a conventional deployment of the modesty topos common to literary masters from Chaucer to Milton and Blake, each of whom begins major works by confessing his ineptitude for the task at hand. As aspects of literary convention, Copway’s self-effacing references to Thomas Babington Macaulay and Washington Irving thus work as much to place him in their company as to distinguish his writing from theirs. And although Copway’s claim to have “intimate knowledge” of his subject matter functions to guarantee the empirical accuracy of his account, his promise to reveal in writing his people’s “joys and sorrows” aligns him with the concerns of the Romantic movement and its literature of powerful feelings. Bernd C. Peyer’s description of Copway as “romantic” Indian (266) is certainly an appropriate one in this regard.

C o p way ’ s E u ro p e an Travels Copway’s literary fame would take him far from the shores of Turtle Island. In early July 1850, he left North America for the first and only

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time in his life, voyaging toward England on the steamship Niagara on the first leg of a journey that would bring him to Frankfurt, Germany, where he would attend the World Peace Conference as a non-elected and unofficial representative of the Christian Indians of North America. Informed at the mid-point of his Atlantic crossing that he was “half-way over the sea,” Copway contemplated his situation. As he wrote in his European travelogue, “I walked to the bow of the boat, and there stood, looking about me on all sides. Before me, nothing could I see – behind me I could see nothing but the faint track of the steamer – on my right, nothing was to be seen, and on my left, there was no visible object. Above me the stars shone brightly, and beneath me was the dark blue sea. Here is mid ocean; I can imagine myself suspended between the Old World and the New … The ocean where we are now – O how deep it is!” (Copway 1851a, 32). As he describes it, Copway’s mid-Atlantic “suspension” is a meet emblem for his circumstance as a man who straddled liminal space between the Native American world of his traditional Ojibwe upbringing and the European world into which his Christian conversion and literary education had impelled him. “To be suspended thus,” he told his readers frankly, “is not so pleasant” (47). As the Niagara skirted the shores of Ireland en route to the Port of Liverpool, Copway was moved to consider the plight of the Irish, which he compared to that of the Ojibwe: “I have heard a great deal about Erin. The fortunes of the Irish are as varied as those of my own people – the history of both is mostly a history of misfortunes. The Irishman has nobly struggled against the tide of adversity that has been bearing him downward, and though physically defeated, he is in mind unconquered, and he still has a name in the world” (Copway 1851a, 34). As one who already felt the pangs of homesickness for his own “native land” (12), Copway identified sympathetically with the Irish, despite the fact that part of his own home territory was now occupied by Irish emigrant farmers who had settled there after the British government tricked his people into surrendering “1,800,000 acres of good hunting land” (1850b, 14) for a mere pittance in the Rice Lake Treaty of 1818, a transaction that he angrily condemned in his autobiography. As he travelled along Ireland’s shores, however, such thoughts appear to have been far from Copway’s mind.7 “This is the Emerald Isle which I have seen the emigrant in Canada weep for!” he exclaimed. “A love of country is in my breast! There is none so devoid of feeling but that at times he sighs for home” (1851a, 36).

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In referring to the “tide of adversity” against which the Irish struggled under British rule, Copway invoked a metaphor often used to describe Indigenous people’s experience of European emigration to America during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As Henry Clay, the US Speaker of the House, stated in 1819, “the poor children of the forest have been driven by the great wave which has flowed in from the Atlantic ocean to almost the base of the Rocky Mountains, and, overwhelming them in its terrible progress, has left no other remains of hundreds of tribes, now extinct, than those which indicate the remote existence of their former companion, the mammoth of the New World” (qtd in Scheckel 4). Although Copway, like his erstwhile mentor Peter Jones, resisted the commonplace idea that Native Americans were destined for extinction as a result of colonial contact, he used the same tidal metaphor to describe the intense pressures Indigenous people experienced in the face of European emigration: “Wave after wave has rolled on, till now there appears no limit to the sea of population. The North resounds with the woodsman’s axe; the South opens its valleys to make room for the millions that are swarming from the Old World to the New” (Copway 1850a, 3). Since the continent’s northern and southern regions, like the American eastern seaboard, were being overwhelmed by settlers anxious to create a new homeland for themselves on Indigenous territory, America’s displaced Indians would, Copway imagined, be compelled to move ever westward “till the last Indian shall stand on the barren peaks of the Rocky Mountains, and gaze on the land which has been taken from him. The kind-hearted then will drop a tear for the fate of that race, which was once noble and free as the eagle that soars in the skies.” Although Copway here and elsewhere asks his “kind-hearted” white readers to sympathize with the Indians’ plight, he does not himself wish to be seen as an object of their pity. “Thank heaven, I am an Indian,” he writes. “Yes; were I to be the last to stand on the peaks of the Rocky Mountains, I would still raise my hand to the world as a part of a noble specimen of humanity, the representative of the Indians who once lived in this country.” And in addressing this imagined global audience, Copway declares that he would affirm his Aboriginal identity, stating, simply, “‘I am a native American’” (1850b, 192, 208). To some extent, Copway undertook his transatlantic voyage to try to counter the tidal pressures he depicts in his discussion of Indigenous people’s westward displacement in North America. Indeed, his invitation to attend the World Peace Conference gave him a real opportunity

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to stand before “the world” as a “representative of the Indians” whose cause he advocated (even though, it should be emphasized, his representative status was politically fictitious since it was not sanctioned by any Native American group). Aside from enabling his participation in the Peace Conference itself, his Atlantic crossing allowed him to publicize his political cause in Britain’s lecture halls and in the tête-àtête meetings he hoped to have with benevolent Britons, including members of the Aborigines Protection Society who had previously assisted Peter Jones. To realize these goals, he knew he would have to gain the respect of the people he would meet during his travels in order to counter the negative stereotypes so often aimed at Native Americans and thereby open their hearts and minds to his people’s plight. Therefore, after arriving in England, he vowed, “I will uphold my race – I will endeavor never to say nor do anything which will prejudice the mind of the British public against my people – In this land of refinement I will be an Indian” (Copway 1851a, 55). As a result of his Christian conversion and Western education, Copway had undergone processes intended to assimilate him to the “Paleface’s” culture. However, his emphatic and repeated self-identification as “an Indian” shows that this part of his personal history had not robbed him of the pride he felt in his ancestry. Unlike some of the colonial subaltern characters featured in twentieth-century post-colonial literatures, Copway was no victim of “manichaean” psychopathologies (JanMohamed passim) caused by the internalization of racist assumptions about one’s own colonized culture. In Running Sketches, Copway depicts his Atlantic crossing as a journey from his “lovely,” dearly familiar homeland to a completely alien environment and culture. He tells readers that he is “going to a country where the people will be strangers to me, and whose language will be different from mine – whose habits and manners will be altogether their own” – a country where even “the sky” and “the waters” appear foreign and “strange” (Copway 1851a, 12, 11, 44–5). By emphasizing the cultural and environmental differences that separate him from the British, Copway – despite his self-presentation as a “civilized,” Christian Indian – claims a kind of objective authority for the explicit criticisms he subsequently levels at British society, while at the same time exploiting his white readers’ desire to construct him as an exotic Other. As Peyer notes, Copway’s narrative participates in a generic tradition, reaching back to the sixteenth century, of “Apocryphal accounts” produced by European writers but “attributed

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to real or imagined Indian travelers, or ‘rational savages’ who cast a critical eye on European customs.” What distinguishes it from most other accounts written in this genre is its status as a bona fide “firsthand account by a flesh-and-blood Indian ‘tourist’ in mid-nineteenthcentury Europe” (Peyer 273). While European readers were accustomed to reading exotic narratives of foreign journeys produced by European travel writers, Copway’s travelogue offers what Deirdre Coleman calls “the prospect of an inverted colonial gaze” (19). Upon first arriving in the Port of Liverpool – at the time the world’s busiest industrial port – Copway complains of the city’s polluted air. In contrast to “the country of the Ojibways,” where the atmosphere is “bracing and healthy, and the “sweet fragrance” of wildflowers is “borne on every southern breeze” (1851b, 20, 14), Liverpool’s air is disgustingly filthy. On the uncovered decks of the city’s ferry boats, he remarks, “the soot falls on your linen, or on your face, until you make beautiful, fine, delicate streaks across your cheeks and nose in wiping the sweat from your forehead” (1851a, 45, 49). Here, Copway seems to be having a bit of fun at Liverpool’s expense, constructing himself as a naive traveller who views the city through rose-tinted spectacles, his ironic references to beauty, fineness, and delicacy transforming filthy air into something desirable, and soot-covered commuters into human works of art. Elsewhere, in contemplating England’s industrial landscapes, Copway shifts the terms of his critique, moving from a consideration of the industrial economy’s environmental consequences to its moral implications. Having witnessed much poverty among his fellow Indigenous North Americans, it is hardly surprising that he expresses sympathy for the English working classes, lamenting the “hovels of wretchedness” in which they are forced to dwell, and voicing pious concern for their “fettered souls.” At the same time, he hopes that England’s commercial development will eventually alleviate these problems, bringing prosperity to the masses and “gladden[ing] the homes of poverty” (Copway 1851a, 93–4, 104). Despite this optimism, Copway expresses ambivalence when he considers the great industries that drive England’s commercial development and employ its urban labourers. Describing “the great city of Birmingham,” for example, he writes: “This is the head of manufactures. The steel which is here made will accomplish the double work of doing good and doing evil – good in the way of subduing the wilderness and causing it to minister to the life of man, and

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evil in the way of destroying life and making the earth desolate. Implements of husbandry, and the arts on the one hand, and swords, knives, rifles and muskets on the other” (Copway 1851a, 85–6). Although Copway confidently distinguishes between “good” and “evil” forms of technology and industrial production, his logic becomes questionable when one considers the uses to which these products were put in North America. Since “swords, knives, rifles and muskets” played key and ongoing roles in the military conquest and subjugation of Native America, their association with evil is unsurprising. But are the “implements of husbandry” that Copway opposes to these weapons as innocent as he claims when he praises them, like a good Christian convert, for “subduing the wilderness and causing it to minister to the life of man”? As I have suggested elsewhere, Copway’s praise for agriculture is problematic when considered visà-vis his defence of traditional Ojibwe practices and his critique of colonialism (Hutchings 2009b, 222–3, 231–4). As noted in chapter 1, nineteenth-century settlers, colonial administrators, and other interested parties regularly invoked agricultural “improvement” to justify the expropriation and destruction of Indigenous hunting territories and the attendant displacement of Native peoples. Moreover, since intensive farming sometimes led to soil exhaustion and the introduction of invasive species,8 the “implements of husbandry” that “minister to the life of man” could themselves play a role in “destroying life and making the earth desolate.” Copway’s praise for British agriculture is sometimes effusive, as in the following description of the English countryside: “What a beautiful country! … Groups of trees, and cultivated fields spreading as far as the eye can reach, on both sides. Beautiful green hedges, and fields of grain, some being reaped, and some still standing, waving gracefully as if inviting reapers to the harvest” (Copway 1851a, 82). This portrait is remarkable not only for its description of the landscape’s varied forms of physical beauty but also for the harmony implicit in its depiction of the land’s relationship to its human labourers. Rather than being compelled to work by a human overseer, rural swains are “invit[ed] … to the harvest” by the “beautiful” and “gracefully” “waving” fields of grain themselves – an image of pastoral plenitude reminiscent of Alexander Pope’s “Windsor Forest,” wherein fields of ripened grain “in waving prospect stand, / And nodding tempt the joyful reaper’s hand” (1.341, lines 39–40).9 Invoking the pastoral tradition, Copway, like Pope and other British poets, presents an image

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of perfect harmony between humans and their improved rural environment. Ultimately, however, Copway allows his bucolic portrait of the English countryside to crumble as he scrutinizes the actual condition of British field labourers. Although he concedes that England’s landscape is “vastly superior” to America’s “in point of cultivation,” he asserts that England’s farm workers remain comparatively deprived due to insufficient “cultivation of mind”: “Unfortunately, they who till the soil have generally little time, and still less opportunity, for mental improvement. Without this, all this landscape beauty is but an outside shell, and when our country shall have become as old as England now is, we may excel the English in cultivation and refinement” (Copway 1851a, 82). For Copway, efforts to improve the physical landscape are praiseworthy only if they are accompanied by opportunities to improve the minds of the land’s human inhabitants,10 He thus expresses hope that England’s working classes will ultimately be freed from their degraded condition by education and the acquisition of knowledge (94). As an exercise in rational critique, Copway’s remarks are perhaps intended to showcase his own “mental improvement” – and thus his intellectual superiority to the British labourers whose mental condition he laments. And yet, as Timothy Sweet notes, Copway does not speak here as an Indian, nor as a British subject, but as an American (1997, 72). Comparing England unfavourably to the United States, he deftly exploits the nationalist prejudices of his white American reading audience, hoping, perhaps, to gain their sympathy by doing so. Indeed, by using the plural pronoun “we,” Copway claims kinship with his American readers, thereby asserting his equality with them. As an advocate for Indigenous education, he envisioned a future in which his people would, like educated whites, “excel … in cultivation and refinement.” In his remarks on the “cultivation of mind,” he thus rejects the common stereotype that Native people lacked the mental capacity for “civilization.” For Copway, education would not only help his people to free themselves from the ravages of poverty and alcoholism but also enable them to demonstrate their fundamental equality with the white settlers who coveted their lands. The issue of Native intellectual capacity was an important one in Upper Canada. As noted in chapter 4, LieutenantGovernor Sir Francis Bond Head justified his proposal to remove Ojibwe people from regions occupied by white settlers on essentialist grounds, arguing that Indians could never learn the arts and practices necessary for them to mingle successfully with the white population:

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“One might as well endeavour to persuade the eagle to descend from the lofty region in which he has existed to live with the fowls in our court-yards, as to prevail upon the red men of North America to become what we call civilized” (Head 1846, 124). A vocal critic of Sir Francis and his Indian removal policies, Copway dismissed this argument with contempt, asserting in his Traditional History that “the introduction of Christianity” among his people had already “changed customs as old as any on the earth. It has dethroned error, and has enthroned truth. This fact is common enough to convince any one of the unjustness and falsity of the common saying, that, ‘the Indian will be Indian still.’” In a poetic flourish, Copway crowns his argument by invoking the eagle, deploying the same metaphor used by Sir Francis but doing so to support the opposite conclusion: “Education and Christianity are to the Indian what wings are to the eagle that soar[s] above his home. They elevate him; and these given to him by men of right views of existence enable him to rise above the soil of degradation and hover about the high mounts of wisdom and truth” (Copway 1851b, ix). Interestingly, in a discussion of the removal efforts associated with the 1836 Manitowaning Treaty, which Sir Francis justified on the basis of the Indians’ supposed inability “to become … civilized,” Copway, having twice called Upper Canada’s former lieutenant-­ governor by his proper name, refers to him as “Sir Francis Broadhead.” Although this misnomer may have been accidental, it seems more likely that Copway was indulging in some clever verbal irony meant to highlight the narrow-mindedness he associated with Sir Francis’s “impolitic acts of governance” (185–9). In Running Sketches, however, Copway takes his argument for Indigenous education to a troubling extreme, arguing that “the sooner we are taught the English language, the sooner we will be introduced into the wide fields of the past, as well as the literature of the white man; and by reading, learning, transforming gradually the entire feelings, the thoughts, the actions, the very emotions of the Indian, we become even as the noble white man that loves his God. But because we have been taught in our own language, we have been perpetuating our own ideas from one to another” (Copway 1851a, 308–9). Like the contemporary German ethnologist Johann Georg Kohl, Copway believed that his people’s “thinking and experience” – indeed, their “entire life and conduct” – are “reflected in their language.” But unlike Kohl, who valued “the bright light that the [Ojibwe] language shines on the path of the ethnographer” (465–6) and therefore wished to

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see it preserved, Copway argued that the sooner his countrymen “learned the almost universal English and forgot the Indian, the better” (1850a, 9). Given that language is a primary vehicle of cultural expression and identity, Copway’s discourse suggests his complicity with the colonial practice of “cultural genocide,” a term coined by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada to signify “the destruction of those structures and practices that allow [a] group to continue as a group” (3). And yet, given Copway’s praise, noted above, for the superior “beauty” and “expressiveness” of Ojibwemowin (1851b, 123), it is hard to take him at his word when he champions his people’s linguistic assimilation to the colonizing culture via a total immersion in English language and literature and an abandoning of traditional languages. Ultimately, Copway seems to have believed, like some of the British Romantics before him, that language and literature were poor substitutes for direct experience in nature. As “one of Nature’s children,” he balances his literary enthusiasms with an awareness of literature’s limitations, a position that becomes apparent in his European travelogue as he recounts his boat trip on the Rhine. Enjoying the “delightful” view of the passing countryside, Copway observes a white man “who seems not to know that there is anything to admire in the scenery around him. In his hands is a novel, and his soul, if he has one, is wrapped up in that. It is not merely every creature that has four legs that is an animal. If any of my own acquaintance were to fix their eyes on a book when passing over such a beautiful country as this, I would jerk their heads up at the risk of offending them, and tell them to see the glorious attire with which nature adorns herself” (Copway 1851a, 266–7). This diatribe against bookishness is reminiscent of the argument William Wordsworth dramatizes in his 1798 poems “Expostulation and Reply” and “The Tables Turned” (1990, 129–31), wherein the characters “Matthew” and “William” debate the merits of text-based learning. In response to Matthew’s question, “Where are your books?” (“Expostulation,” line 5), William tells his friend to “Close up those barren leaves,” urging him to “Come forth into the light of things,” and “Let Nature be your Teacher.” Although in his critique of books, Wordsworth’s “William” goes further than Copway by depicting “Nature” (rather than the Bible) as the preeminent source of moral wisdom (“Tables,” lines 30, 15–16, 21–4), Copway’s critique is nevertheless an extreme one, as suggested by his depiction of the book-absorbed tourist as a species of potentially

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soulless “animal.” Given that the trope of zoomorphism – the attribution of animal characteristics to human beings – was commonly used in Western stereotypes that questioned the humanity of Indigenous people, Copway’s questioning of the tourist’s humanity might itself be seen as an example of “the tables turned.” In an era when the ability to be moved by the beauty of nature was considered a sign of high moral character, his response to the tourist’s obsessive bookishness can be understood as an assertion of his own fully fledged humanity. During his travels in Great Britain and Germany, Copway was generally well received, meeting with dignitaries and members of the social elite, and finding receptive audiences for his lectures on temperance and Native American religion. In London, he enjoyed the company of such public officials as Richard Cobden and Lord Brougham (D. Smith 2013, 195–7), and he was such a popular guest on the city’s social circuit that he had little time for himself, complaining of being “engaged … for dinner every day” (Copway 1851a, 125). Although, like John Norton and Peter Jones before him, he encountered people on his European travels who suspected he might be a humbug, he was also generally well received in Germany, meeting in the late summer of 1850 “with numerous … public figures in Frankfurt, Heidelburg [sic], Wiesbaden, Düsseldorf, and Cologne” – where the German poet Ferdinand Freiligrath asked him to become godfather to his youngest son – and finding appreciative audiences for his lectures (D. Smith 2013, 197). In the autumn, Copway returned to Britain, where, among other things, he “endeavored to seek the aid and countenance of the so-called ‘Aboriginal [sic] Protection Society’ – and instead of being any benefit I had to just leave off everything when so many obstacles were thrown in my way.” Without explaining the circumstances leading to the failure of this visit, Copway concluded that he “had made a false estimation of this body,” calling the society “a great name without any power,” a “body without a knowing aim, and less energy of purpose” (1851a, 278). Given that the Aborigines Protection Society had taken a keen interest in the treatment of the Mississauga in Upper Canada, and that its members were, like Copway, particularly critical of the policies of Sir Francis Bond Head,11 Copway’s response to the society is curious. Perhaps its members, whose knowledge of events in Upper Canada was impressive, had heard about Copway’s troubles with church and government authorities in Upper Canada and thus refused to receive him as a respectable Aboriginal delegate; or perhaps they suspected that his claims to be a “Chief of the Ojibway Nation”12

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and a practicing missionary were false. Given that Copway visited Britain with the avowed hope of garnering sympathy and support for his people, one can only wonder what kinds of “obstacles” the Aborigines Protection Society threw in his way, and whether or not they were justified. That said, this setback did not pose any major problems during Copway’s visit to Britain. He found a strong public demand in London for his lectures on the importance of temperance, conversion, and other themes relevant to his work as an Indigenous Christian activist, and his appearance at “the great temperance meeting at London’s Drury Lane Theatre” in late October attracted the attention of the Illustrated London News (D. Smith 2013, 197). Subsequently, to crown his European travels, Copway turned toward the north of Britain, not only to continue his lecture tour but also to fulfill a long-time dream of visiting Scotland, “the famed country so much honored with the songs of the two best poets in their day – Robert Burns and Sir Walter Scott” (1851a, 282). During his sojourn in “the land of the Scots” (282), he visited and lectured at Dundee, Perth, Glasgow, Paisley, and Edinburgh, finding Edinburgh particularly attractive due to its situation in what he called “a romantic and abrupt country.” In one of the most exuberant outbursts of his entire European travelogue, the Ojibwe Romantic later reflected on his visit to Scotland’s capital city: “O what a lovely sight it is to see in this wild scene monuments to the memory of Scott and Burns! I can hardly see Nelson’s on account of these others” (295). His literary enthusiasms seemingly gratified by this secular pilgrimage, he journeyed home to the United States in December 1850, where he set to work completing the account of his travels.

C o da Running Sketches of Men and Places appeared in 1851. Compared to Copway’s Life and Traditional History, it is in some ways a disappointing book: about half the volume comprises previously published material, including numerous local reviews of his European lectures and performances. As an American commentator complained shortly after the book’s publication, Copway had reprinted so many lengthy “extracts from commonplace sources” (qtd in D. Smith 2013, 198)13 that his own perspectives often fell by the wayside. For contemporary readers who wished to contemplate a Native American’s response to Europe – and who had strong ideas concerning what such a response

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should look like – the book was therefore less than fully satisfactory. Nevertheless, as I have tried to demonstrate, Running Sketches reveals important insights concerning Copway’s complex sense of self-identity. Among other things, the book highlights his ongoing effort to adapt Christian and Romantic perspectives to defend Indigenous culture and criticize the effects of colonialism and capitalism on both Native Americans and labouring-class Britons. Although some of Copway’s claims are problematic – including his effusive praise for the transformative effects of the English language on Indigenous culture – Running Sketches remains indispensable to an appreciation of his transatlantic celebrity and a full understanding of his extraordinary career as an author and activist. One of the most remarkable things about Copway was his ability to shift among subject positions or to occupy liminal spaces between possible identities. Sometimes he would speak as “one of Nature’s children,” sometimes as a “noble Christian convert,” sometimes as a Romantic critic of modernity, sometimes as modernity’s champion14 – often in several voices at once. Contemporary readers sometimes found these shifting perspectives confusing and, as a result, questioned Copway’s integrity (D. Smith 2013, 198–9). But as Robert Dale Parker has observed, “Indian cultures, like any cultures, have always been changing, and … Indian cultures’ adaptation to the white invasion does not necessarily make their forms any less Indian, even though they are differently Indian” (64). In his time, Copway was certainly a “different” kind of Indian, and the challenge he posed to conventional stereotypes in his writing and in his self-construction makes him an endlessly fascinating figure in nineteenth-century transatlantic literary history.

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A f t e rword

Paths Not Taken Here one might remain a week or more and not get to the end of those curiosities which it does pay a man for viewing. We leave it for the present. George Copway, Running Sketches of Men and Places, in England, France, Germany, Belgium, and Scotland

When I first started working on this book in 2009, I planned to cover a much broader historical period, researching the relationship between literature and Indigenous governance not just in Upper Canada but also beyond Confederation and into the early decades of the twentieth century. In addition to investigating the writings and policies of colonial administrators such as John Strachan, Sir John Beverley Robinson, and Sir Francis Bond Head, I intended to examine those of Duncan Campbell Scott, the Canadian poet who was deputy superintendent of the Department of Indian Affairs from 1913 to 1932, and John Buchan, the British novelist who (as First Baron Tweedsmuir) was Canada’s governor general from 1935 to 1940 and who, during that time, was made an honourary chief of several First Nations. After a couple of years of research, however, I realized that my original plan was much too ambitious. As the Aboriginal and European writers studied in this book demanded increasingly more attention, I hived off the research I had already done on Buchan1 and put the brakes on my investigations into Scott. Ultimately, I found the literary history of British-Indigenous relations in Upper Canada so rich and complex that I resolved to study the small British colony in its own right, and not as part of a larger project extending into the twentieth century. My primary academic training lies in British Romantic studies, so I knew from the start that Romanticism would play a key role in

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this project. Fortunately, scholars such as James C. McKusick (2000) and Lance Newman, Joel Pace, and Chris Koenig-Woodyard (2006) had championed an Atlanticist approach to Romantic study several years before I started working on this book, so I had some important role models to help me get going. Whereas studies of Canadian Romanticism have tended to focus on the Confederation poets, I became fascinated by the rich Romantic (and anti-Romantic) discourses that had circulated in British North America decades earlier, not only in the memoirs of Sir Francis Bond Head and Anna Brownell Jameson but also, in translated form, in the writings of Aboriginal authors such as Jane Johnston Schoolcraft and George Copway. As I have shown in these pages, even writers such as John Strachan, who rejected Romanticism outright, or those such as Robinson, John Norton, and John Brant, who approached it with skepticism, went to great lengths – literally crossing the Atlantic – to connect with actual British Romantic-era poets, including Thomas Campbell and (in the case of Norton and Robinson) Walter Scott. As it turned out, Romanticism was ubiquitous in Upper Canada, if not always as a valued aesthetic and political philosophy then as something to react against. As a Canadian for whom the British Romantics have always felt a little distant despite my British ancestry, I was delighted to find a field of inquiry that was meaningful to me in a more immediate and personal way. This study has enabled me (as I noted in the Preface) to face my country’s colonial history; to acquire knowledge that would help me understand what it means to be a member of Canada’s settler society in an age of truth and reconciliation; and to share this new understanding at home, in the classroom, and in public spaces both in Canada and abroad. And yet, at the outset of this project, when I told one of my colleagues – a leading light in British Romantic studies – that I was writing a book on Romanticism in Upper Canada, he cautioned me that “nobody would read it” – by which he meant nobody working in mainstream Romantic studies (which despite the recent “Atlantic turn” has tended to focus on European and, occasionally, American literary contexts). Unfortunately, my friend’s warning was not unwarranted. In my numerous experiences attending conferences of the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism, the British Association for Romantic Studies, and the International Conference on Romanticism, papers dealing with Canada have been (to quote Thomas Campbell) “like angel-visits, few and far between” (1907, 33). The few token panels I have attended on Canadian

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Romanticisms have not tended to attract large audiences. I will be more than happy if this book’s main audience comprises scholars primarily interested in researching nineteenth-century Indigenous, colonial, and Canadian studies; nevertheless, I hope it will play a small role in helping to nudge Upper Canada a little closer to the mainstream of Romantic studies. Ultimately, what I found most enjoyable about researching the authors examined in Transatlantic Upper Canada were the numerous connections between them, which manifested not only in terms of shared thematic interests in Indigenous issues but also often in direct or indirect interactions and confrontations. When I first visited the Archives of Ontario to read the John Beverley Robinson Papers, I was fully prepared to find documents relating to Robinson’s political allies John Strachan and Sir Francis Bond Head; I did not expect to find letters written by Anna Jameson and Thomas Campbell, or reminiscences of a lively visit with Walter Scott, or extended commentaries on John Norton’s role in the War of 1812 and his first diplomatic visit to London. And when I journeyed to Edinburgh to examine Head’s letters in the John Murray Archive, I hoped to find some information on the 1836 Manitowaning Treaty and Head’s dealings with Peter Jones and the Credit River Mississauga. I was unprepared to discover letters indicting Anna Jameson’s Canadian memoir, including outraged allegations of her skull collecting at an Indigenous interment site. And although I hoped to learn more about Jameson when I visited Manitoulin Island’s Ojibwe Cultural Foundation to present an invited talk on Head’s skull-collecting allegations, I did not foresee that as a result of my visit I would learn about the Métis voyageurs Louis Solomon and Jean Baptiste Sylvestre, the Aboriginal witnesses to Jameson’s skull collecting. By the time I noted Solomon’s familial connection to Jameson’s Irish-Ojibwe friend and fellow author Jane Johnston Schoolcraft, who was a reader of Scott and also of Campbell, the latter of whom bore the brunt of Chief John Brant’s fury at his misrepresentations of Haudenosaunee history and who sought a meeting with Chief John Norton in London – well, I was beginning to think that transatlantic Upper Canada was a small world indeed, despite its spanning of continents. As my study progressed, the effort to explore and untangle this Gordian knot of relationships became a key motivator – and one of the great pleasures – of my research. It was in part by following this network of connections that this book’s scope and arguments took shape.

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And so, despite its ambitious title, this book does not pretend to deal comprehensively with Upper Canada’s transatlantic literary, environmental, and intercultural histories. Therefore, in closing, I wish to acknowledge some key omissions and, in doing so, suggest some possibilities for future research. The early Canadian military officer and author John Richardson is perhaps the best case in point. As Margery Fee remarks, he has often been received or interpreted “as an exemplary Loyalist literary forefather,” having “long been read into a nationalist narrative as the founder of Canadian literature” (13). Although I quote a couple of brief passages from Richardson’s famous novel Wacousta; or, the Prophecy (1832) in this book, it would have been a fruitful exercise to consider the author’s life and career in detail, and not strictly in the context of the Canadian national literary teleology Fee mentions. Worthy of exploration are his interest in Indigenous equality (Fee 68), his transatlantic travels and literary exchanges (including his debts to Milton, Schiller, and Byron), and his connections to Chief John Norton and other authors examined herein, not to mention his participation in the controversies surrounding the Welland Canal, which had such a profound effect on the Grand River Six Nations community (Beasley). A second author whose transatlantic experiences and literary activities would have suited this study is the Scottish novelist John Galt, whose literary output included a “Statistical Account of Upper Canada” (1807) and two Canadian novels, Lawrie Todd (1830) and Bogle Corbet (1833), which helped to establish his “stature as a New World author” (Hall and Whister). A chapter on Galt’s prominent role in the creation of the Canada Company, and his involvement in its effort to sell Clergy and Crown reserve lands (including vast tracts of First Nations territory in western Upper Canada), would have made an interesting contribution to this book, especially when considering tensions introduced by his “tolerance and his sympathy for the Six Nations Indians, whose land claims he had represented in England in 1825.” Although Galt’s advocacy for the Grand River Six Nations made him unpopular “in the narrow and partisan society of York” (Hall and Whister), he made substantial contributions to the growth of European settlement in Upper Canada as a founder of both Guelph and Goderich. Moreover, although my opening chapter features some close readings of key passages quoted from Susanna Moodie’s pioneer memoir Roughing It in the Bush (1852), a more comprehensive discussion

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would also have considered Moodie’s sister, Catharine Parr Traill, author of The Backwoods of Canada (1836) and Canadian Crusoes (1852). As Gillian Whitlock has noted, Moodie and Traill wrote and published their books during the same general period in which George Copway worked on his autobiography, history, and European travels, and Traill mentions Copway’s Life in Canadian Crusoes (1852) (Whitlock 60). The possibilities for a rich comparative discussion of Copway’s and Traill’s texts are abundantly demonstrated in Deanna Reder’s fine analysis (158–76), which explains crucial differences between settler and Indigenous perspectives on the land in Upper Canada. Finally, although Peter Jones’s niece, Catharine Sutton (Nahnebahnwequay, or Upright Woman), did not write any major literary works, some consideration of her life and correspondence might have provided a more complete portrait of the Credit River Mississauga and their cross-Atlantic connections (see D. Smith 2013, 68–97). Although these suggestions for further research point toward some of the paths not taken here, I hope this book’s discussions will play a small role in helping to encourage further scholarship on Upper Canada’s transatlantic literary cultures.

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Notes

P r e fac e   1 The Haudenosaunee (or “People of the Longhouse”) include the Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas, Cayugas, and Senecas who together comprise what the French called the Iroquois Confederacy. The Anishinaabe (plural form Anishinaabeg) are an Algonquian-speaking group whose members include the Ojibwe (often referred to contemporaneously as Chippewa or Ojibway, and sometimes as Mississauga), Odaawaa (Ottawa) and Potawatomi nations.   2 Corbiere 2011c, passim.

I nt roduct i o n   1 Significantly, the Aborigines Protection Society mentions both Head and Jameson in its report, condemning the former as an “oppressive and fraudulent” treaty maker (4), and quoting the latter’s 1838 travelogue Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada to champion the Credit River Mississauga’s cause against him (British and Foreign 44–77).   2 See plate 3, lines 26–7.   3 These are Indigenous names for North America. See Noodin, 175.   4 Giles uses the term “autochthonous” in reference not to First Nations societies but to naturalized forms of British and American cultural identity, just as he refers elsewhere to mainstream American literature’s “indigenous representations” (2002, 2). Although the identification of such literatures as “autochthonous” and “indigenous” is problematic, Giles’s assertion that mainstream American “representations of the

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‘natural’ tend to revolve tautologously, reinforcing themselves without reference to anything outside their own charmed circle” (2002, 2) is undoubtedly true with regard to the ways in which European and ­settler-society literatures all too often effaced Aboriginal perspectives on the land and its productions.   5 I thank Judyta Frodyma, University of King’s College, Halifax, for bringing Wordsworth’s sonnet to my attention.   6 Donald Smith notes that Ojibwe wildlife management practices extended to the lakes and rivers as well, where Ojibwe people built fish weirs to “guid[e] fish into inaccessible areas where they could be speared or netted” (2013, 247).   7 The requirement, according to Strachan, was “to clear five acres upon each hundred granted” (1820c, 55).  8 In The Civil War of 1812, Alan Taylor notes that Upper Canada’s “ambitious newcomers … resented the British policy that locked up two-sevenths of the province’s land as Crown and Clergy reserves. Dispersed within almost every township, the reserves slowed settlement, harbored wild predators, and increased the road-building ­burdens borne by the early settlers” (141–2).   9 To discourage land speculators from holding lands without developing them, the attorney general, John Beverley Robinson, created a wildlands tax in 1819 (Brode 108–9). 10 It should be noted that the Wendats were asserting their right to lands also claimed by the Anishinaabe people. 11 Although literary critics have often associated Schoolcraft and Copway with American rather than Canadian history, these writers’ connections to Upper Canada, and to an extended Anishinaabe culture that transcended colonial borders, make them fit subjects for the present discussion. Copway’s familial roots at Rice Lake, his career as a Methodist missionary in Upper Canada prior to his emigration to the American eastern seaboard, and his frequent commentary on British Indigenous governance policy highlight the key role he played in the history of Indigenous letters in Upper Canada. And although Schoolcraft was born in what is now northern Michigan, the region fell under the British rather than the American sphere of influence in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries (Parker 12); in addition. members of the Schoolcraft family, including Jane’s sister Charlotte, resided in or often visited Upper Canada (Konkle 97). 12 Sir Francis Bond Head to John Murray, 23 December 1838. John Murray Archive, National Library of Scotland, ms. 42280.

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243

13 As Robert Warrior has argued, “a critical Native history can and should highlight the extent to which the speed of Native adjustment to modernity, not always the adjustment itself, has been the most difficult challenge Native people have faced” (191).

C ha p t e r O n e   1 Cf. T. Taylor, 29; and Home 1778, 1.341.   2 Writing of land-use practices in the colonial United States, Thomas R. Cox et al. note similarly that as European settlers built their homesteads, “they sought to construct what they had known in their ‘old Cultivated Country.’ Having no other models, they innocently assumed that achieving their goals meant eliminating the forests that had no place in their vision.” So intent were these settlers on re-­creating their old world that, “in some areas, not even a tree that promised shade for the settler’s cabin during the heat of summer was spared” (Cox et al. 1985, 37).   3 For an expanded discussion of Waterton’s American tour, see Hutchings 2011, 163–5.   4 John Beverley Robinson Diary entry for Tues., 17 Oct. 1815, John Beverley Robinson Papers, Archives of Ontario, f44 (ms 4, reel 2).   5 This term, like Anishinaabemowin (Noodin 178), refers to the Ojibwe language (Konkle 82).   6 From the standpoint of the Anishinaabeg, the border between the United States and Upper Canada was a colonial imposition cutting through the heart of their traditional territory. Thus, despite Schoolcraft’s status as “the first writer of Indigenous language poetry in what is now the United States” (Konkle 82), it is problematic to categorize her as an American (or for that matter a British) author. Schoolcraft herself crossed into Upper Canada on several occasions. For example, as Maureen Konkle notes, she “went to stay with her sister Charlotte at Dundas in Upper Canada” during her husband Henry Rowe Schoolcraft’s European 1842 tour to promote his book Algic Researches (97). Moreover, as noted in chapter 4, members of Schoolcraft’s extended family lived and worked on the British side of the border, including her nephew, Lewis Solomon, who (as noted in chapter 4) was arguably Anna Jameson’s most important travelling companion during her canoe voyage through Lake Huron’s Manitoulin archipelago in the summer of 1837.

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  7 For a more detailed discussion of this poem and its relationship to the history of Canada’s Indian residential school system, see Hutchings, “Cultural Genocide and the First Nations of Upper Canada” (2016, passim).   8 For an incisive Indigenous critique of the dualistic “landscape” concept, see Leslie Marmon Silko (265–6).   9 Schoolcraft’s engagement with Campbell is apparent, for example, in her couplet entitled “When the Stormy Winds Do Blow, After Thomas Campbell” (159).

C ha p t e r T wo   1 Strachan 1846, 20.   2 This trope was also common among contemporary Aboriginal Christians such as Peter Jones, who wrote in his posthumously published History of the Ojebway Indians of “planting the gospel amongst the aborigines of North America” (1861, 32).  3 See Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality among Men, where Rousseau praises the morality of Native peoples such as the Caribs who, he claims, had “departed least from the state of Nature” (1992, 39).   4 Cf. the Presbyterian minister William Bell, who, in Hints to Emigrants in a Series of Letters from Upper Canada (1824), wrote: “On looking around me … I saw a moral as well as a natural wilderness, requiring cultivation with regard to a great majority of the settlers” (qtd in Hinson and Morton 221).   5 Elsewhere in his review of Jarvis’s book, Strachan quoted Jarvis’s claim that “‘all false religions are, in a greater or less degree, departures from the true’” (qtd in 1820b, 175).   6 Wanda Campbell notes that in Strachan’s manuscript, “the page on which the poem begins is headed by the line ‘Wrote a Poem entitled the Missionary’,” but that another short poem intervenes before the long poem itself begins. For her full thoughts on the poem’s title, see W. Campbell, 184.   7 See, for example, Paul as well as Brown.   8 In the Introduction to his edition of the John Strachan Letter Book, George Spragge provides evidence, generally accepted by Strachan scholars, that John Strachan authored A Visit to the Province of Upper Canada in 1819 but had it published under his brother James’s name. See Spragge, xxiv; and Strachan 1946, 202.

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  9 Strachan said much the same thing in a letter written in September 1813 to a recipient identified as “Your Excellency” (probably Upper Canada’s acting lieutenant-governor Francis de Rottenburg): “My leading ideas are that the conquest of the Canadas particularly Upper Canada is with the Enemy the true cause of the war in order to dissolve our connection with the Indians [and] that the other causes alleged are mere popular baits” (Strachan 1946, 46). See also the letter written in November 1812 to the Marquis of Wellesley in which Strachan claims that an American conquest of Upper Canada would put the Indians “entirely at their mercy” (1946, 30). 10 As Wanda Campbell notes, Logan’s speech as presented by Jefferson is “of questionable veracity” (195, note to line 5).

C h a p t e r T h re e   1 John Beverley Robinson (hereafter jb r ), memorandum written at Brown’s Point, 14 October 1812. John Beverley Robinson Papers (hereafter jbr Papers), Archives of Ontario (hereafter ao), f4 4 (ms  4, reel 9).  2 Ibid.  3 Ibid.   4 Katherine M.J. McKenna notes that historians have “unjustly and inaccurately” depicted Anne Powell “as a woman who spent the better part of her adult years in obsessive pursuit of John Beverley Robinson. Reducing her distress to the consequences of her failure to attract a man trivializes and distorts her life, which stands as a sad testament to the consequences of violating strict social norms” (McKenna 206). For an example of the kind of reading that McKenna opposes, see Brode 77–9.  5 j b r Diary entries for 3 and 19 January 1816, j b r Papers, ao f4 4 (ms 4, reel 2).  6 j b r Diary entry for 24 April 1816, jb r Papers, ao f4 4 (ms 4, reel 2).  7 j b r Diary entry for 31 May 1816, j b r Papers, ao f4 4 (ms 4, reel 2).   8 Thomas Campbell to jbr, 26 July 1816, j b r Papers, ao f4 4 (ms 4, reel 1).   9 J.R. Miller writes that in the wake of the War of 1812, the British authorities’ “fear of Aboriginal strength that had earlier underlain Indian policy disappeared. Simultaneously, among the settler

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population itself, regard for Indian peoples was in rapid decline from the 1820s onward. Now that Aboriginal people were not obviously useful to the non-Native population as military allies or trading partners, they increasingly took on the role of obstacles to settler ambitions for economic development” (Miller 102). 10 Thomas Campbell to jbr, 26 July 1816, j b r Papers, ao f4 4 (ms 4, reel 1). 11 jbr Diary entry for 24 April 1816, jbr Papers, ao, f44 (ms 4, reel 2). 12 j b r to J. Ridout, 25 Nov. 1815, jbr Papers, ao, f4 4 (ms 4, reel 8). Cf. Susanna Moodie, who made much the same observation in Roughing It in the Bush (1852): “In a colony, society is seen in its first elements, the country itself is in its rudest and simplest form. The colonist knows them in this primitive state, and watches their progress step by step. In this manner he acquires an intimate knowledge of the philosophy of improvement, which is almost unattainable by an individual who has lived from his childhood in a highly-complex and artificial state of society, where everything around him was formed and arranged long before he came into the world; he sees the effects, the causes existed long before his time” (Moodie 247). 13 j b r to Emma Walker, 8 April 1817, jb r Papers, ao, f4 4 (ms 4, reel 1). 14 Ibid. 15 Ibid. 16 j b r to Emma Walker, 25 April 1817, j b r Papers, ao, f4 4 (ms 4, reel 1). (This is the second of two letters written on the same date.) 17 j b r to Emma Walker, 27 April 1817, j b r Papers, ao, f4 4 (ms 4, reel 1). 18 Ibid. 19 Ibid. 20 Susan Oliver to Kevin Hutchings, e-mail correspondence 13 August 2015. I am grateful to Professor Oliver for generously sharing her thoughts and speculations regarding Scott’s interest in forests and planting. 21 j b r to Emma Walker, 27 April 1817, j b r Papers, ao, f4 4 (ms 4, reel 1). 22 Ibid. 23 j b r to Emma Walker, 13 April 1817, j b r Papers, ao, f4 4 (ms 4, reel 1). 24 j b r to Emma Walker, 8 and 13 April 1817, j b r Papers, ao, f4 4 (ms  4, reel 1).

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247

25 j b r to Emma Walker, 8 April 1817, j b r Papers, ao, f4 4 (ms 4, reel 1). This letter is damaged; the words inserted in square brackets represent my best efforts to decipher Robinson’s hand. 26 j b r to Emma Walker, 17 April 1817, j b r Papers, ao, f4 4 (ms 4, reel 1). 27 Ibid. 28 Ibid. 29 See The Prelude, Book 11, lines 258–65 (Wordsworth 1990, 565).

C ha p t e r F o u r   1 The John Beverley Robinson Papers contain letters pertaining to Jameson which, to the best of my knowledge, have not yet been examined by modern-day Jameson scholars. For example, in letters written before and after her “summer rambles,” respectively, Jameson thanks Robinson for writing her a letter of introduction to Colonel Thomas Talbot (20 June 1837) and expresses her gratitude “for all [the] kind attentions & valuable … instructions” he provided to assist her on her journey up the lakes (undated). The archive also contains a letter from Talbot to Robinson in which the former enthuses about Jameson’s “exceedingly agreeable and intelligent” character (26 July 1837). John Beverley Robinson Papers (hereafter j b r Papers), Archives of Ontario (hereafter ao ), f 44 (m s 4, reel 1).   2 See Hutchings 2009a, 155, 156.   3 I am grateful to Alan Ojiig Corbiere of the Ojibwe Cultural Foundation for bringing the narratives of Solomon and Sylvestre to my attention shortly after my 2013 visit to Manitoulin Island, and for generously sharing his knowledge of Head’s and Jameson’s sojourns among the Anishinaabe people. I first mentioned Solomon’s and Sylvestre’s narratives in an online article entitled “Teaching Transatlantic Romanticism and the Aboriginal Atlantic” (Hutchings 2017b).   4 Lee Clark Mitchell notes that nineteenth-century enthusiasts of salvage anthropology advocated the establishment of the Smithsonian Institution. In his discussion, he quotes one of Jameson’s contemporary American admirers, Margaret Fuller, who wrote in Summer on the Lakes (1843) of the need for “a national institute containing all the remains of the Indians” including relevant documents, artworks, and artifacts, as well as “a collection of skulls from all parts of the country” (Mitchell 116–17).

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Notes to pages 113–16

  5 In their studies of colonial skull collecting, Stephen J. Gould and David Hurst Thomas point to the work of pioneering anthropologist Franz Boas, who believed that the knowledge derived from skull measurement was important and ultimately philanthropic. While digging for skulls at an Indigenous burial ground near Victoria, British Columbia, Boas remarked that “it is most unpleasant work to steal bones from a grave, but what is the use, someone has to do it” (qtd in D.H. Thomas 59). Gould observes that Boas used his skull collection to refute rather than to support the claim that skull measurement could provide an accurate index of human racial distinctions (1981, 108).   6 See Coleridge’s 1834 Annotations to Francis Bond Head’s Bubbles from the Brunnens of Nassau, John Murray, Bodleian Library, Oxford University, shelfmark vu l no. 96. For sympathetic discussions of Head’s influence on “the single most important piece of writing of the Spanish American Independence period” (M.L. Pratt 185), the Life of Juan Facundo Quiroga (published in 1854 by Domingo Sarmiento, Argentina’s president from 1868 to 1874), see Walker; Cicerchia; and Jagoe.   7 Sir Francis Bond Head to John Murray, 4 November 1838. John Murray Archive, National Library of Scotland (hereafter nls), ms. 42280.   8 In a letter of 18 February 1839, John Beverley Robinson informed his wife Emma that he had accidentally run into Jameson in Cavendish Square, London, and that she “looked I assure you a conscience smitten Caitiff” (jbr Papers, ao, f44; m s 4, reel 8). If we can credit Robinson’s account of this meeting, Jameson’s supposed embarrassment at the sudden encounter implied an unspoken acknowledgment that she had treated Toronto and its elite residents, including Robinson himself, too harshly in her Canadian memoir.   9 Head to Murray, 23 December 1838. nls ms. 42280. 10 Referring to Jameson’s book in a letter to Head (which Head later ­forwarded to John Beverley Robinson), Murray wrote: “Did you ever read such a tissue of inflated absurdity as Mrs Jameson’s Canada – and such abominations as it contains, I was obliged to abduct it from my family … Pray favour me with your opinion of this work” (Murray to Head, 22 December 1838, jbr Papers, ao, f4 4 (ms 4, reel 1). 11 Head to Murray, 13 January 1839. n l s ms. 42280. 12 Quoted from Jameson’s undated memorandum entitled “A brief and definite statement of certain principles regarding the social & relative

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position of women,” Anna Brownell Jameson’s letters to Ottilie von Goethe, Goethe- und Schiller-Archiv, Weimar, Germany, shelfmark gsa 40/vi i i , 9, 4 (letter 9). I thank Esther Bertram for bringing Jameson’s letters to Ottilie von Goethe to my attention (including the one quoted in n19, below) and for helpful research assistance during my visit to the archive. 13 On Jameson’s failed marriage, see Clara Thomas (2008, 589–93). Having been separated from her husband since 1829, Jameson came to Canada in the hopes of reaching “an amicable and financially acceptable separation agreement” with him (593). 14 Head to Mr [S.?] Dundas in care of John Murray, 19 February 1839. nl s ms . 42280. 15 Head’s essay “The Red Man,” from which the foregoing quotations are taken, was originally published in the Quarterly Review 65, no. 130 (March 1840): 384–419. 16 On Jameson’s philosophy of nature and its engagement with Romanticism, see Matthews, passim. 17 Jameson’s generalization is at odds with her description of three Indigenous emissaries – “‘The White deer–’ … & two attendants ‘the Beaver’ & ‘the Buffalo’,” who visited her in Toronto on 18 January 1837 while on “a friendly mission” to petition Lieutenant-Governor Head for “a supply of provisions.” Far from being subject to “degeneration,” these men were “tall” and “strong” and “quite unembarassed [sic] & graceful in their manners and gestures” (Anna Jameson’s letters to Ottilie von Goethe, Goethe- und Schiller-Archiv, Weimar, Germany, shelfmark g sa 40/v i i i , 5 [letter 45]). In an e-mail dated 22 May 2019, Alan Corbiere informed me that “The White deer” was a chief from the Saugeen Peninsula named “Waabadik (Waub-atick)” or “the White Caribou,” and his companion “the Buffalo” was likely a chief named Waiskey, who would later become Jameson’s adoptive “uncle.” The fact that these chiefs were seeking provisions from the British government in January 1837 indicates that the Saugeen people were experiencing difficulties in the wake of the Head’s Manitoulin Island treaty, which they joined at Manitowaning in August 1836. 18 Perceptions were obviously relative. Although Head and Jameson thought of Mackinaw as a place relatively free from colonial contamination, William Johnston (Jane Johnston Schoolcraft’s brother) sought to collect traditional stories “uncontaminated by European influence” by visiting Ojibwe groups “farther afield” (Konkle 89, 88).

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19 Jennifer Henderson argues that Jameson’s statement “needs to be read as a strategic challenge to the homogenizing [colonial] arrogance that would assimilate a different culture to a scale of improvement” (93). Although one might argue that Head’s statement similarly challenges assimilationist policy, his reference to Indigenous “nature” suggests a racialist essentialism that Jameson’s statement does not seem explicitly to support. 20 The embedded quotations in this passage are from Wordsworth’s The Excursion (Wordsworth 2007, 128, Book 3, lines 942–3). 21 For discussions of less than positive depictions of Indigenous people in The Excursion, see Gravil, 48; and Deirdre Coleman, 102–3. 22 Manitoulin Island’s location at the top left-hand corner of this map (where it pushes beyond the map’s frame) highlights its status in the 1830s as a highly remote part of Upper Canada’s frontier. 23 For a discussion of this resistance, see chapter 7 in this book. See also Binnema and Hutchings, 131–3. 24 For an expanded discussion of Copway’s critique of paternalism, see Hutchings 2009a, 168–70. See also Fulford, 286–90. 25 For more on Head’s deconstructive critique of the savage / civil binary opposition in “The Red Man,” see K. Flint, 153–4. 26 Sir Francis Bond Head had planned to travel with his son to Manitoulin Island in the summer of 1837 but was prevented from doing so due to circumstances associated with the death of King William IV. One wonders what Jameson’s trip would have been like if Sir Francis had been among her travelling companions. 27 I am grateful to Sophie Anne Edwards of Manitoulin Island for bringing Jameson’s association with the Combes to my attention. 28 In my discussion of Jameson’s visits to Indigenous gravesites, I am indebted to my former research assistant, Blake E. Bouchard. See Hutchings and Bouchard, 175–8. 29 Chief Peter Jones also mentions Mackinaw’s “Skull Cave” and its associated lore in Jones 1861, 45. 30 See, for example, Stevens, passim. 31 For a discussion of the negotiations surrounding this treaty (which is also known locally as the Manitowaning Treaty and the Bond Head Treaty) from an Anishinaabe perspective, see Corbiere 2011a and 2011b. 32 On the figure 4.1 map of Upper Canada, Georgian Bay is called by one of its early designations, Lake Iroquois. 33 In counting the travellers with whom she shared her canoe, Jameson’s text is at odds with her sketch (figure 4.3): the text references a total

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of twelve travellers (including Jameson herself); the sketch depicts only eleven. 34 Although Jameson here makes landing the canoe sound like an easy task, it occasionally posed some challenges. In his discussion of Jameson’s canoe voyage, Lewis Solomon notes that it fell to the “lot” of one Neddy McDonald to carry “Lady Jameson … on his back from the canoe to the shore occasionally when a good landing was not found. As Mrs Jameson was of goodly proportions, it naturally became a source of irritation to Neddy, which he did not conceal from his fellow voyageurs” (qtd in Osborne 135). 35 For example, Judith Johnson praises Jameson’s “open and sympathetic discussions of … native people” (117); Wendy Roy mentions the “tolerance that Jameson’s personal contact with First Nations people produced” (2005, 46); and Helen Buss gives Jameson credit for eschewing “the point of view of an objective, superior observer,” so common in the writings of her European contemporaries, by “involv[ing] herself completely” with the Indigenous people with whom she interacted (1993, 101). Although I don’t mean to suggest that these readings are incorrect, the fact that they were written without knowledge of Jameson’s skull collecting – knowledge that Jameson deliberately ­withheld from her readers – might indicate the need to recontextualize their informing arguments. 36 See Haig-Brown and Nock’s Introduction to With Good Intentions: Euro-Canadian and Aboriginal Relations in Colonial Canada, passim.

C h a p t e r F i ve   1 For an informative account of Norton’s early upbringing in the parish of Crail, Scotland, see Morgan, 19–22.   2 Some earlier scholarship agrees with Benn’s affirmation of Norton’s Cherokee paternal ancestry. According to Carl F. Klinck’s biographical study, “Every reference to this subject in [Norton’s] Journal tends to dissolve the doubts entertained by Canadian officials about John Norton’s half-Indian origin. The Cherokees accepted him and helped him to find his relatives” (1970, xxiv).   3 J.R. Miller attributes the increasing difficulties Norton and other Indigenous leaders faced in dealing with Upper Canada’s colonial authorities as the result of a “dramatic transformation of the personnel of the Indian Department. From its inception in 1755 until the 1820s, the Department was staffed with men whose familiarity with

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Notes to pages 145–56

First Nations derived either from relations with them in the fur trade or diplomacy and military association with them, or both.” This familiarity helped to promote a respectful form of relationship that “came to an end, symbolically, when Britain shifted responsibility from military authorities to civil administrators in 1830. From the 1830s on, the Indian Department steadily became more influenced by products of the settler society who had never learned to appreciate First Nations’ commercial, diplomatic, and military skills, and who consequently had less consideration for them than their bureaucratic forebears” (Miller 104–5).   4 For a detailed and illuminating account of Norton’s lecture and performance at Cambridge, see Morgan, 26–30.   5 Campbell’s critique of Norton’s Mohawk performance is in some ways similar to his critique of poet Sydney Owenson’s Irish performances: each one, in Campbell’s view, was inauthentic. Saying that Owenson “danced a jig in the drawing rooms of the oppressor,” Campbell accused her of “social climbing” and “sycophancy to the English ­aristocracy,” claiming that she had “tam[ed] the wild harp of Erin into a musical snuffbox” (qtd in Hoagwood 52).   6 John Beverley Robinson (hereafter jbr) Diary entry for 31 Jan. 1816; j b r Papers, Archives of Ontario (hereafter ao), f4 4 (ms 4, reel 2).  7 j b r Diary entry for 31 Jan. 1816, jbr Papers, ao f4 4 (ms 4, reel 2).   8 For Karl F. Klinck, Norton’s non-egocentric mode of writing is surprising given that he wrote his journal during the Romantic period when Byron was at the height of his fame. “When one remembers how Lord Byron romanticized his journey through the Mediterranean in the very years which saw Norton on the Ohio and the Tennessee, the Canadian’s lack of egotism becomes remarkable” (1970, xvi).  9 j b r Diary entry for 16 Feb. 1816, j b r Papers, a o f 4 4 (m s 4, reel 2). Norton was in fact promoted to the rank of major not lieutenant-colonel. 10 j b r Diary entry for 16 and 17 Feb. 1816, j b r Papers, ao f4 4 (ms 4, reel 2). 11 Klinck mentions Norton’s meeting with Robinson at Sheaffe’s residence in London (lxxx), but to the best of my knowledge, Norton scholars have heretofore remained unaware of Robinson’s letter to Campbell and the information it relates about Norton’s activities in London at this time. 12 As I note in chapter 6, such legal niceties would rob Joseph Brant’s son John (Chief Ahyonwaeghs) of a seat in the provincial parliament after his election victory in 1832.

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Chapter Six   1 Sarah Green notes that Thayendanagea is a Mohawk word meaning “two sticks of wood bound together” (38).   2 The pages in Chadwick’s short genealogy of the Brant family are unnumbered; the entry for John Brant appears on the fifth full page of text (not counting the title page).   3 Most scholarship on John Brant appears in passing in biographical discussions of his father Joseph Brant (e.g., Stone; Kelsay 1984). Occasionally, John Brant’s life is confused with that of his father; for example, in a 2012 article, former lieutenant-governor of Ontario James Bartleman, in praising Aboriginal participation in the War of 1812, mistakenly claimed that Mohawk warriors from the Grand River fought at the Battle of Queenston Heights “under chiefs Joseph Brant and John Norton” (A3).   4 Following Stone’s lead, subsequent nineteenth-century accounts by Reville (134) and Chadwick (5) also emphasized the role that literary study played in Brant’s education.   5 For an extended close reading of this poem’s depiction of Native Americans, including Joseph Brant, see Hutchings 2009a, 134–53.   6 Interestingly, unlike his mentor Strachan, John Beverley Robinson appears to have been unworried about Gertrude of Wyoming’s historical inaccuracies. As noted in chapter 3, his letter to Campbell of 23 July 1816 (in which he presented the gift of an authentic Indian calumet) indicates not only that he found the poem inoffensive but also that he positively admired it. One might speculate that Robinson admired the poem in part because of its historical inaccuracy: in blaming Chief Joseph Brant and his warriors for the Wyoming massacre’s violence and bloodshed, Campbell let the British Canadians off the hook to some extent (since the actual historical massacre was led not by Chief Joseph Brant but by Colonel John Butler of the British army – a man nowadays officially recognized in Canada as a military hero). Always anxious to promote Canada’s reputation abroad, Robinson would have had no reason to challenge the historical inaccuracies informing Campbell’s poem.   7 John Norton’s brief account of the Wyoming incident supports Strachan’s account insofar as it depicts the American rebels as “insulting foes” and aggressors who were themselves largely responsible for the massacre’s outcome (275–6).   8 In a review of Gertrude published in the Tory Quarterly Review, Scott wrote that “feeling as Englishmen, we cannot suppress a hope that

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Notes to pages 166–72

Mr Campbell will in his subsequent poems chuse a theme more ­honourable to our national character” (1809, 243). Since the Tory Strachan was a reader of the Quarterly, it is not surprising that his own remarks seem to echo Scott’s.   9 For an illuminating discussion of “The Rhetoric and Practice of Scalping,” see Brown, passim. Brown’s essay demonstrates the extent to which views such as Strachan’s of Indigenous cruelty in warfare were the products of colonial stereotyping and wartime propaganda during the late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century conflicts between the United States and Britain. 10 Citing the Minutes of the Executive Council for 9 July 1806, Isabel Kelsay notes that Brant’s name was added to the “famous list” of United Empire Loyalists at the chief’s own request (1984, 646). 11 Rick Monture notes that Revolutionary War “battles such as those at Cherry Valley and Wyoming are best remembered by Americans for how cruelly Brant treated ‘helpless’ revolutionary settlers,” despite the fact that “many of these accounts have been proven false and, in fact, further research has revealed how humane Brant was in comparison to both British and American military leaders during this conflict.” Monture goes on to defend “the ferocity with which Brant and the other Six Nations warriors fought” on the basis “that they were, in large part, defending their homeland as the conflict wore on” (35–6). This “ferocity” is all the more understandable given that “American settlers claimed Mohawk territory by conquest” during the Revolutionary War, “having taken their towns by fire” (Brooks 2014, 549). 12 This seems to be a response to Strachan’s rather hyperbolic claim that Wyoming, far from being a peaceful paradise, “was more contaminated with rancour and animosity than any other part of the United States; and instead of being pure and innocent, &c. the inhabitants were lawless and cruel” (1819b, 147). 13 The docility suggested by Hall’s and Redding’s reference to Elizabeth Brant’s ostensible “Oriental softness” was by no means accurate. One of Elizabeth’s visitors, Ann Elizabeth Wayland, was impressed by “the haughty curl” of Elizabeth’s “lip as she speaks of those who depreciate her people, its sarcastic curve when she alludes to the so-called delineations of her father’s character” (qtd in Stone 2.535). Given Thomas Campbell’s role as one of Joseph Brant’s most notorious detractors, one can easily imagine Campbell – at least prior to his published retraction – as a deserving object of such scorn. 14 I quote Hall’s description of John Brant near the beginning of this chapter. For his full description of Elizabeth, see Hall, 135.

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15 Had he actually met John and Elizabeth Brant during their visit to London, the meeting might well have verified the doctrine of “improvement” central to The Pleasures of Hope. Like other British contemporaries, Campbell would have regarded the Brant siblings’ Europeanized appearance and manners as evidence proving the success of the so-called civilizing mission in British North America. In a qualified apology for Campbell’s defamatory representation of Chief Joseph Brant as a monstrous cannibal, Cyrus Redding declared that anyone could have made such a mistake: “It must be admitted, that with the state of information in England, even in 1808 [when Campbell was composing Gertrude of Wyoming], it might as well have been imagined that the St Lawrence should flow to London as that the people represented, and believed in England to be horrible savages, putting prisoners to unheard-of tortures, and scarcely attaining beyond animal existence, should find an individual in their number who could be as sensitive as [John] Brant was about his father’s fair fame. Time and [the] march of information had in twenty years done wonders in England as well as in America” (Redding 1860, 1.289). Here, as far as Redding seems concerned, is an example of “bright Improvement” indeed – on both sides of the Atlantic. 16 I thank Virve Wiland of the Six Nations’ Woodland Cultural Centre Research Library in Brantford, Ontario, for bringing Baltaz’s historical novel to my attention during my research there. 17 Wordsworth’s assessment is troubling given that Campbell’s depiction of such bonds relies to a great extent on the depiction of Joseph Brant as a monstrous foil. In the poem’s reception history, the best example of a concern for “relationship, strong simple emotions, and bonds of love and loyalty” are arguably those demonstrated by John Brant’s abiding concern for his father’s reputation. 18 Addressing Joseph Brant’s modern-day reputation, Rick Monture writes that “while it is perhaps tempting, and all too convenient, for the Haudenosaunee to look upon Brant’s legacy from our own postOka perspective and label him as far too complacent in his response to colonial authority, I suggest that he often drew upon a traditional understanding of Six Nations sovereignty to promote a peaceful nation-to-nation relationship with the British, and that his beliefs were strongly opposed to English authority” (Monture 30). 19 The school opened in 1824 with a class of twenty-one pupils. See Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development, Indians of Ontario (A Historical Review), Archives of Ontario, A.E. Williams Papers, f4337-13-0-14 (unpaginated). Chief Peter Jones of the Credit

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Notes to pages 177–8

River Mississauga was so impressed by Brant’s success with the New England Company that he hoped his own people might share in the largesse. In a journal entry dated 11 December 1829, Jones noted that he had “called upon Captain John Brant … for the purpose of getting him to recommend to the New England Corporation Company, to appropriate the sum of £500 annually, to the Canada Methodist Missionary Society, towards aiding the civilization and education of the Indians in the Methodist connexion” (Jones 1860, 266). At this point, the Brant siblings had already been involved in Jones’s Grand River school for several years, as the Mississauga missionary and chief noted in a diary entry dated 21 May 1825: “Mrs W.J. Kerr [Elizabeth Brant] … visited our School, and gave the children several articles as presents, which were sent to her from the benevolent ladies of the town of Niagara. Mrs Kerr was highly pleased with the improvements made by the Indian children” (Jones 1860, 24). 20 For a discussion of some modern-day implications of the Two Row Wampum, see also Daniel Coleman, passim). For a description of the wampum belt said to have been presented to John Brant, see the digital collections catalogue of the Six Nations Public Library at http://­ vitacollections.ca/sixnationsarchive/results?fsu=John+Brant (accessed 30 May 2016). 21 Aitken quotes a letter Robinson wrote to Merritt dated 13 December 1833, several years after the first Welland Canal opened. 22 Quoted from a report authored by the select committee to inquire into the management and expenditure of the Welland and Burlington canals, as excerpted from the Journal of the House of Assembly of Upper Canada (8 Jan.–6 Mar. 1830); cited in Extracts from the Journal of the House of Assembly, 1826–1827, dealing with the Welland Canal. Archives of Ontario, ms 163, Reel 1 (no fond number assigned to this material). The remarks quoted here were made, respectively, by Robert Randall and John Wilkinson, both members of the House of Assembly. 23 For an insightful discussion of Niagara Falls’ European aesthetic ­history and its literary origins, see D.M.R. Bentley, 81. 24 Mactaggart, the civil engineer who as previously noted was among John Brant’s British admirers, visited the canal during its construction in 1827. The words quoted here were included in a report he subsequently wrote at St Catharines for Major George Hillier, civil secretary and aide-de-camp for Lieutenant-Governor Sir Peregrine Maitland, on 24 March 1827.

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25 Qtd from the Minutes of the Welland Canal Company, 1 Jan. 1829, as excerpted by Styran and Taylor (203). 26 John Brant to George Hamilton, MP for York, 16 January 1829. John Brant Letterbook, Woodland Cultural Centre Research Library, Brantford Ontario (Library microfilm, uncatalogued; no accession number: hereafter jbl, w ccrl). A copy of the same letter was also sent to MPs John Nelson and Robert Dixon. 27 John Brant to members of the Upper Canada House of Commons, 4 February 1829 (jbl, w ccrl). 28 John Brant to Z. Mudge, 11 December 1829 (j b l, wc c r l). In a ­subsequent letter to Mudge, Brant provided a detailed accounting of Six Nations losses related to flooding caused by the dam. 29 Quoted from a report authored by the select committee to inquire into the management and expenditure of the Welland and Burlington canals, as excerpted from the Journal of the House of Assembly of Upper Canada (8 Jan.–6 Mar. 1830); cited in Extracts from the Journal of the House of Assembly, 1826–1827, dealing with the Welland Canal. Archives of Ontario, ms 163, Reel 1 (no fond number assigned to this material). 30 Robinson was sworn in as the seventh chief justice of Upper Canada on 13 July 1829, a little over four months prior to the opening of the Welland Canal. 31 See the Journal of the House of Assembly of Upper Canada (8 Jan.–6 Mar. 1830), Extracts from the Journal of the House of Assembly, 1826–1827, dealing with the Welland Canal. Archives of Ontario, m s 163, Reel 1 (no fond number assigned to this material). 32 In English translation, the word neshkatezeh (also spelled nishkaadizi) means “He is angry.” I am grateful to Alan Ojiig Corbiere for providing this translation in private e-mail correspondence (24 June 2016). 33 For a detailed discussion of Head’s Romanticism, see Binnema and Hutchings, passim.

C h a p t e r S e ve n   1 I borrow this phrase from the title of Brian W. Dippie’s The Vanishing American: White Attitudes and US Indian Policy (1983).   2 According to Margaret Noodin, although Jones’s Ojibwe name is commonly translated as “Sacred Feathers,” it “more literally means ‘forever with a feather sitting’” (178).

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Notes to pages 191–215

  3 Jace Weaver notes that the thunder god under whose “guardian care” Jones resided is the “animekeek, or thunder manitouk” (2014b, 174).   4 Strachan to Rev. O’Meara, 4 Aug. 1847, John Strachan Letter Book 1844–1849, Archives of Ontario, f983 -2 (ms 35, reel 12). As noted in chapter 2, Strachan became virulently anti-American in the wake of the War of 1812. It is thus likely that his disdain for Methodism sprang partly from the fact that it was promoted in Upper Canada by American missionaries (Fulford 256).   5 Jones’s claim is borne out by the fact that the Ojibwe poet Jane Johnston Schoolcraft, who lived at the distant northern reaches of Lake Huron, authored a poem entitled “On reading Miss Hannah Moore’s [sic] Christian morals and Practical Piety” (153).   6 For photographs of Jones posing in his ornate Ojibwe dress, see K. Flint, 213–15.   7 I borrow this concept from Margaret Szasz’s edited collection Between Indian and White Worlds: The Cultural Broker (1994).   8 Den Otter quotes Jones’s remarks from the Christian Advocate, 23 August 1830.   9 For a detailed discussion of Sir Francis Bond Head’s Aboriginal governance policies and their relationship to Romantic philosophies of nature and culture, see Binnema and Hutchings, passim. 10 The Manitoulin archipelago is nowadays known as the 30,000 Islands (though it was thought, during Head’s administration, to contain 23,000 islands, many of which might more aptly be considered large rocky shoals). At approximately 750,000 acres, the largest of the islands, the Great Manitoulin Island (often referred to simply as Manitoulin Island), is the largest freshwater island in the world. 11 I quote from Appendix 2 of Pearen’s Four Voices (2012), a Manitoulin Island history in which the author provides a full transcription of Head’s treaty, the “1836 Provisional Agreement for the Surrender of the Manitoulin Islands and the Islands on the North Shore of Lake Huron” (169–70). 12 See Binnema and Hutchings, 132–3, and Hutchings, 2009a, 162–3.

chapter eight   1 On the development of Ojibwe orthography, see Schenck, xxii–xxv.   2 See, for example, Fulford, 280–91, and Hutchings, 2009a, 164–75; 2009b, passim.

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  3 I quote Schlegel’s Lucinde from The Project Gutenberg’s online EBook of The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. See Schlegel.   4 Although Copway misquotes Byron’s reference to “pomp” as “power,” Byron’s term suggests the power that is associated with political ­spectacle rather than spiritual energy.   5 Copway quotes Byron’s poetry on a number of occasions. In Recollections of a Forest Life (1850b), the British edition of his autobiography, he chooses a chapter epigraph from Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (145) and another from “To the Countess of Blessington” (16). In his European travelogue Running Sketches (1851a), he quotes the short passage from Childe Harold examined above as well as the poem’s extensive description of the Rhine (204–6). On Byron’s interest in Rousseau, see Rigby, 160.   6 Ryerson here quotes from the “Report of a select committee on the Religious condition of the Province, adopted almost unanimously by the Commons Assembly of Upper Canada” (1).   7 Granted, later in Running Sketches Copway mentions the great nineteenth-century Irish leader Daniel O’Connell, thereby demonstrating an awareness of issues related to British colonialism in Ireland (1851a, 168).   8 See, for example, Moodie, 236–7, and Gourlay, 1.156.   9 Since, as noted in chapter 1, Copway cites Pope’s work in his Traditional History (1851b, 24), he was likely familiar with “Windsor Forest.” 10 In his discourse on the relationship between pastoral labour and mental improvement, Copway expresses sentiments similar to those of John Strachan, Lord Bishop of Toronto, who in an idyllic poetic portrait of labouring “swains” argued that “so long as mental pleasures cease to flow … Britain’s precious gifts” would fail to rouse her subjects “to glory or amend the heart”: “For when a fertile field no culture knows, / The Sun his genial warmth in vain bestows” (Strachan 1996, 53, lines 101–10). 11 Much of the society’s Report on the Indians of Upper Canada is devoted to a critique of Sir Francis Bond Head’s Indigenous governance policies. See British and Foreign Aborigines Protection Society, passim. For a discussion of the society’s history and its “contradictory and paternalistic position” (Blackstock 51) on Indigenous rights, see Blackstock 2006, passim.

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Notes to pages 233–6

12 This claim appears on the title pages to each of Copway’s three major books. 13 Smith cites the New York Tribune, 14 September 1851. 14 See Kate Flint’s claim that in Running Sketches, Copway “[comes] across … as an admirer of Western modernity” (218).

A f t e rword   1 See, for example, Hutchings 2013, passim.

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274 Bibliography Moodie, Susanna. 1989. Roughing It in the Bush. 1852. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. More, Hannah. 1996. “Slavery a Poem.” 1788. British Literature 1780– 1830. Eds. Anne K. Mellor and Richard E. Matlak. Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace, 206–9. Morgan, Cecilia. 2017. Travellers through Empire: Indigenous Voyages from Early Canada. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Morrisseau, Norval. 1997. Norval Morrisseau: Travels to the House of Invention. Toronto: Key Porter Books. Moses, Daniel David. 2016. “The Trickster’s Laugh: My Meeting with Tomson and Lenore.” Introduction to Indigenous Literary Criticism in Canada. Eds. Heather Macfarlane and Armand Garnet Ruffo. Peterborough, on : Broadview, 235–9. Newman, Lance, Joel Pace, and Chris Koenig-Woodyard, eds. 2006. Transatlantic Romanticism: An Anthology of British, American, and Canadian Literature, 1767–1867. New York: Longman. Nixon, Rob. 2011. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge, m a, and London: Harvard University Press. Noodin, Margaret. 2014. “m eg a baabaa miia aya aya a ng diba ajomoya a n g : Anishinaabe Literature as Memory in Motion.” The Oxford Handbook of Indigenous American Literature. Eds. James H. Cox and Daniel Heath Justice. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 175–84. Norton, John. 1970. The Journal of Major John Norton. 1816. Eds. Carl F. Klinck and James J. Tallman. Toronto: The Champlain Society. O’Brien, Karen. 1999. “Imperial Georgic, 1660–1789.” The Country and the City Revisited: England and the Politics of Culture, 1550–1850. Eds. Gerald MacLean, Donna Landry, and Joseph P. Ward. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 160–79. Oliver, Susan. 2009. “Planting the Nation’s ‘Waste Lands’: Walter Scott, Forestry and the Cultivation of Scotland’s Wilderness.” Literature Compass 6, no. 3: 585–98. – 2013. “Sir Walter Scott’s Transatlantic Ecology.” The Wordsworth Circle 44, no. 2–3: 115–20. Osborne, A.C. 1905. “The Migration of Voyageurs from Drummond Island to Penetanguishene in 1828.” Ontario Historical Society Papers and Records 3 (1905): 123–66. Owenson, Sidney, Lady Morgan. 1822. The Mohawks: A Satirical Poem. London: Henry Colburn.

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Bibliography 275 Palgrave, Francis Turner. 1883. “The Lay of the Last Minstrel.” “The Lay of the Last Minstrel” and “The Lady of the Lake.” Ed. Francis Palgrave Turner. London: Macmillan. Facsimile reprint n.d. Whitefish, mt: Kessinger Publishing, 7–14. Parker, Robert Dale. 2007. “Introduction: The World and Writings of Jane Johnston Schoolcraft.” The Sound the Stars Make Rushing through the Sky. Ed. Robert Dale Parker. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1–84. Paul, Daniel N. 2006. First Nations History: We Were Not the Savages. 3rd ed. Halifax: Fernwood. Pearen, Shelley J. 2012. Four Voices: The Great Manitoulin Island Treaty of 1862. Ottawa: Shelley J. Pearen. Peyer, Bernd C. 1997. The Tutor’d Mind: Indian Missionary Writers in Antebellum America. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Pope, Alexander. 1967. The Works of Alexander Pope. Ed. John Wilson Croker. 10 vols. New York: Gordian Press. Pratt, Mary Louise. 1992. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. New York: Routledge. Procter, George. 1824. Review of John D. Hunter’s Memoirs of a Captivity among the Indians of North America, from Childhood to the Age of Nineteen; with Anecdotes descriptive of their Manner and Customs, &c.; and James Buchanan’s Sketches of the History, Manners, and Customs of the North American Indians. Quarterly Review 31, no. 61: 76–111. Rackham, Oliver. 1986. The History of the Countryside. London: J.M. Dent. Randal, Robert. 1831. “First Report of the Welland Canal Commissioner.” Journal of the House of Assembly of Upper Canada (7 Jan.–16 Mar.). York, Upper Canada: John Carey. Read, Colin. 1982. The Rising in Western Upper Canada, 1837–8: The Duncombe Revolt and After. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Reaman, G. Elmore. 1967. The Trail of the Iroquois Indians: How the Iroquois Nation Saved Canada for the British Empire. Toronto: Peter Martin Associates. Redding, Cyrus. 1858. Fifty Years’ Recollections, Literary and Personal, with Observations on Men and Things. 3 vols. London: Charles J. Skeet. – 1860. Literary Reminiscences and Memoirs of Thomas Campbell. 2 vols. London: Charles J. Skeet. Reder, Deanna Helen. 2007. “Âcimisowin as Theoretical Practice: Autobiography as Indigenous Intellectual Tradition in Canada.” PhD dissertation, University of British Columbia.

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280 Bibliography – 1997. “George Copway (Kah-ge-ga-gah-bowh).” Dictionary of Literary Biography: American Travel Writers, 1776–1864. Vol. 183. Eds. James Schramer and Donald Rosse. Detroit: Gale, 68–72. Szasz, Margaret, ed. 1994. Between Indian and White Worlds: The Cultural Broker. Norman, ok, and London: University of Oklahoma Press. Tallman, James J. 1970. “Historical Introduction.” The Journal of Major John Norton. 1816. Eds. Carl F. Klinck and James J. Tallman. Toronto: The Champlain Society, xcix–cxiv. Tasker, Paul. 2017. “Conservative Senator Defends ‘Well-Intentioned’ Residential School System. cbc News (8 March 2017): www.cbc.ca/ news/politics/residential-school-system-well-intentioned-conservativesenator-1.4015115 (accessed 25 September 2017). Taylor, Alan. 2010. The Civil War of 1812: American Citizens, British Subjects, Irish Rebels, and Indian Allies. New York: Vintage. Taylor, Thomas. 1792. A Vindication of the Rights of Brutes. London: Edward Jeffery, 1792. Thomas, Clara. 1967. Love and Work Enough: The Life of Anna Jameson. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. – 1985–2019. “Murphy, Anna Brownell (Jameson).” Dictionary of Canadian Biography, www.biographi.ca/en/bio/murphy_anna_brownell_ 8E.html (accessed 5 June 2019). – 2008. Afterword to Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada. By Anna Brownell Jameson. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart / New Canadian Library, 589–93. Thomas, David Hurst. 2000. Skull Wars: Kennewick Man, Archaeology, and the Battle for Native American Identity. New York: Basic Books. Thrush, Coll. 2016. Indigenous London: Native Travelers at the Heart of Empire. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. 2015. “Canada’s Residential Schools: The History, Part 1, Origins to 1939.” The Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. Vol 1. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press. www.trc.ca/ assets/pdf/Volume_1_History_Part_1_English_Web.pdf (accessed 20 September 2019). Turner, Frederick. 1980. Beyond Geography: The Western Spirit against the Wilderness. New York: Viking. Valaskakis, Gail G. 2016. “Parallel Voices: Indians and Others, Narratives of Cultural Struggle.” Introduction to Indigenous Literary Criticism in

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282 Bibliography Wise, S.F. 1969. “Introduction to the Carleton Library Edition.” Sir Francis Bond Head, A Narrative, with Notes by William Lyon Mackenzie. Ed. S.F. Wise. Toronto: Carleton Library / McClelland and Stewart, xi–xxxi. Wordsworth, Jonathan. 1991. “Introduction.” Gertrude of Wyoming 1809. By Thomas Campbell. Ed. Jonathan Wordsworth. Oxford and New York: Woodstock, 1–3. Wordsworth, William. 1820. The River Duddon: A Series of Sonnets. London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown. – 1990. William Wordsworth. Reprinted ed. Ed. Stephen Gill. Oxford: Oxford University Press. – 2004. Guide to the Lakes.1820. Ed. Ernest de Sélincourt. London: Frances Lincoln. – 2007. The Excursion. 1814. Eds. Sally Bushell, James A. Butler, and Michael C. Jaye. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. Worster, Donald. 1994. Nature’s Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas. 1977. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Index

Abbot, Joseph, 178 Aborigines Protection Society, 3–4, 70, 80–1, 156, 233–4; and Peter Jones, 207–8, 210–11 Adams, John Quincy, 25 Adelaide, Queen, 201 Adolphus, John, 170 agriculture, 15–21, 194–5, 205–7, 216, 228–30; “civilizing” influence of, 25–6, 36; Indigenous agriculture, 16, 41, 189, 194–5, 212 alcohol, 79–83, 180, 190, 221; temperance, 189–90, 212, 234 Alexander, J.E., 187 American Revolutionary War, 72–3 animals: extirpation or extinction of, 53, 187, 194. See also hunting Anishinaabeg, 241n1 anti-Americanism, 59–60, 72, 258n4 Apess, William, 64 Assiginack, Jean-Baptiste, 206–7 Bannister, Saxe, 168–9 Battle of Queenston Heights, 87–92 Bell, William, 244n4 Beyak, Lynn, xx

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bimaadiziwin (Anishinaabe environmental ethic), 26–7 Black, Conrad, xix–xx Blackstock, Cindy, xix Blaeser, Kimberly, 6 Blake, William, 9, 42, 216–17 Boas, Franz, 248n5 Bond Head, Sir Francis. See Head, Sir Francis Bond Brant, Catharine, 161, 176 Brant, Elizabeth, 168, 170, 176, 254n13, 255–6n19 Brant, John (Ahyonwaeghs), 160– 85; and “improvement” at Grand River, 174–7, 180, 255–6n19; and Joseph Brant, 165, 167–72; and T. Campbell, 168–74, 255n15, 255n17; trip to England, 168, 174–5; and Welland Canal, 177, 179–81, 185 Brant, Joseph (Thayendanegea), 138–9, 144–9, 255n18; in Gertrude of Wyoming, 162, 164–5, 174; and John Strachan, 137, 165–8 Brock, General Isaac, 87, 91, 149

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284 Index Buchan, John, 1st Baron Tweedsmuir, 236 Buchanan, James, 176 Buffon, Comte George Louis de, 117, 222 Burke, Edmund, 73, 90 Burns, Robert, 234 Byron, Lord, George Gordon, 51–2, 217, 218–19, 252n8, 259n5 Campbell, Thomas: Gertrude of Wyoming, 72, 75–6, 162–74; and J. Norton, 146–8, 155–6; The Pleasures of Hope, 37–8, 48, 163–4; and J.B. Robinson, 92–6, 162–3 cannibalism (stereotype of), 151–2, 164–5 Catlin, George, 187 Christianity: “civilizing mission,” 61–71, 175–6 Clapham Sect, 146 Clare, John, 48 Clarke, Adam, 201 Claus, William, 145, 148 Clay, Henry, 226 Cockburn, Bruce, xvii, xx Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 114, 164 Combe, Cecilia, 128 Combe, George, 113, 128–9 Copway, Elizabeth, 25, 214 Copway, George (Kahgegagahbowh), 41, 49–53, 214–35; on alcohol, 189, 221; critique of colonialism, 64, 121–2, 178–9, 188, 219–21; critique of English culture, 228, 230; early life and missionary work, 49, 213–14; European travels of, 224–30, 232–5; on hunting, 27, 50–2, 216; on

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language and ­literacy, 222–4, 231–2; and Romanticism, 9–10, 215–21, 224, 259n5 Corbiere, Alan Ojiig, 206–7, 247n3, 249n17 craniology, 127–8, 248n5 cultural genocide, ix–xx, 231, 244n7 Darwin, Erasmus, 43 deforestation. See forests Deloria Jr, Vine, 10 Douglas, Thomas, Lord Selkirk, 21–2, 26 Du Ranquet, Dominic, 42 enclosure, 19, 35, 48, 53 Evans, James, 214 Evelyn, John, 33–4, 35 Family Compact, 28, 108, 109–10, 181–2 farming. See agriculture Ferguson, Adam, 55, 59 Field, Eliza. See Jones, Eliza First Nations studies. See Indigenous studies forests, 33–45, 184; aesthetics of, 33, 38–40; deforestation, 21–2, 32, 37–43, 48, 53; Indigenous perspectives on, 41–5, 48–53; as sacred spaces, 39–42, 196 Freiligrath, Ferdinand, 233 Fullagar, Kate, 12 Fuller, Margaret, 247n4 fur trade, 80–1, 142–3 Galt, John, 239 Gilpin, William, 33, 34 Glenelg, Lord (Charles Grant, 1st Baron Glenelg), 202, 208–9

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Index 285 Goethe, Ottilie von, 114 Gore, Francis, 154 Gourlay, Robert, 162, 166 Grand Medicine Lodge. See Medewiwin Society Grand River (O:se Kenhionhata:tie): damming of, 179–81, 183–5 Grand River Conservation Authority, 185 Grand River Navigation Company, 181, 183

“Improvement,” 18–27, 32–53: effects on First Nations, 19, 20–7, 177, 179, 193; in England, 34–6, 230; environmental effects of, 53, 163–4, 177–9, 185, 187; and land title, 20–1, 143–4 Indian Department, 145, 251–2n3 Indian Removal Act (US), 205 Indigenous studies, 5–6, 13 Irving, Washington, 11, 92, 168, 224

Hadden, J. Cuthbert, 174 Haldimand, Frederick, 144, 158, 175 Haldimand Proclamation and tract, 144–5, 148, 150, 175 Hall, Francis, 162 Hazlitt, William, 163 Head, Sir Francis Bond, 40–1, 112– 29, 135–6, 184: anti-feminism of, 114–17, 125; Indian removal policy of, 69, 120–1, 205–8, 211, 230–1; on Indigenous people, 118–21, 124, 205–7; and A. Jameson, 112–20, 123–5, 136; and P. Jones, 205–8, 211–12; his Romanticism, 114, 117–19 Head, George, 126, 132 Headley, Lord. See Winn, Charles Allanson Hemans, Felicia, 23–4 Home, Henry, Lord Kames, 25–6, 36, 43, 50, 142–3 Howell, Elizabeth. See Copway, Elizabeth hunting, 15–18, 50–2, 69: ethics of, 27, 216; and “savagery,” 16–17, 50–1 Hurons. See Wendats

Jackson, Andrew, 205 Jameson, Anna Brownell, 39–40, 111–36, 157–8, 173, 247n1; ­critique of F.B. Head, 116, 121, 128–9, 136; environmental philosophy of, 39–40, 42–3; on Indigenous people, 118–21, 129–36, 187–8, 249n17; Romanticism of, 114, 117, 120; as skull collector, 115, 123–7, 134–5 Jameson, Robert, 111–12 Jarvis, Samuel Farmar, 56, 66–8 Jefferson, Thomas, 73, 80 Jeffrey, Francis, 98 Johnston, William, 249n8 Jones, Augustus, 190–1 Jones, Eliza, 195, 204 Jones, Peter (Kahkewaquonaby), 15–17, 134, 166, 183, 188–214; on agriculture, 16, 41, 189, 194– 5, 212; on alcoholism, 189, 212; and British monarchs, 201–3, 207, 209–11; Christian conversion of, 192–3, 196–7, 212; and F.B. Head, 70, 207–11; missionary work of, 189, 194–9, 255– 6n19; on nature, 41, 43; and

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286 Index “vanishing Indian” trope, 41, 188–9; visits to Britain, 199–204, 207–12 Joseph, Mary, xvii King, Thomas, 6 Kohl, Johann Georg, 40, 41, 216, 231 land: ownership of, 18–21, 156, 182, 204–5, 216; place names on, xiv, 23–4. See also agriculture, forests, hunting, improvement Locke, John, 18 Logan, John, 75 Macaulay, Thomas Babington, 224 McGill, Ann Wood. See Strachan, Ann McGill, James, 58–9 Mackenzie, William Lyon, 110, 173 Mactaggart, John, 162, 178, 256n24 Maitland, Sir Peregrine, 175, 197–8, 202 Malthus, Thomas, 19, 186 Manitoulin Island Treaty (1836). See Manitowaning Treaty and settlement Manitowaning Treaty and settlement, 69–71, 120–1, 206–11, 231, 249n17 Maracle, Lee, 6–7 Marshall, William, 34–6 Medewiwin Society, 213–14 Merritt, William Hamilton, 177 Methodism, 56, 68, 192, 197–9, 202 Millar, John, 14, 71 Moodie, J.W.D., 40

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Moodie, Susanna, 19–20, 40, 187, 239–40, 246n12 Mookomaanish (Odaawaa chief), 206 More, Hannah, 199–200, 258n5 Morrisseau, Norval (Copper Thunderbird), xvi–xvii Moses, Daniel David, 140 Mudge, Zachariah, 180–1 Niagara Falls, 177–8 Northumberland, Duke of (Hugh Percy), 17–18 Norton, Catherine (Karighwaycagh), 153, 157, 158 Norton, John (Tehonakaraa), 153, 157 Norton, John (Teyoninhokarawen), 137–59; on agriculture, 142, 143–4, 149, 157; on anti-Native stereotypes, 139–41, 145; cultural hybridity of, 138, 139; and Joseph Brant, 138–9, 144–5, 148–9, 166; his Journal, 138, 141–4, 152–4, 158–9; military career of, 88–91, 138, 149–51, 153–4; and J.B. Robinson, 151, 153–7; visits to Britain, 144–8, 153–7; and Walter Scott, 147, 151–3 O’Connell, Daniel, 259n7 Pantisocracy, 164 pastoral, 47–8, 229–30 paternalism, 109–10, 121–3 phrenology, 123, 127–9 Pinay, Dwight D., xv–xvi Pope, Alexander, 50, 229 postcolonial studies, 6

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Index 287 Powell, Anne, 91, 245n4 progress, 24. See also “Improvement” race, 139, 193–4 Rackham, Oliver, 53 Redding, Cyrus, 163, 172, 173, 255n15 residential schools, 45–6, 63–4 Rice Lake (Pequahkoondebaymenis), 18–19 Rice Lake Treaty, 225 Richardson, John, 40, 239 Robertson, William, 18, 55 Robinson, William Benjamin, 109 Robinson, John Beverley, 65, 84–110, 112, 164; and T. Campbell, 92–6, 98, 162–3, 253n6; legal career of, 84–5, 86, 92, 107–8; literary interests of, 85–6, 91–6, 101–7, 108–9, 168; and J. Norton, 88, 153–7; political career of, 85, 91, 108–10; on rural Britain, 40, 96–8, 101–2; and War of 1812, 87–92, 93–5, 150–1 Rogers, Samuel, 147 Romanticism, 8–11, 32–53, 192–3, 232–3, 236–8; and deforestation, 17, 42–3; and ecology, 8–9, 32–53; Indigenous influences on and appropriations of, 9–10, 14–15, 44, 47–8, 215–21; transatlantic Romanticism, 15, 237 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 56, 216 Ryerson, Egerton, 193, 223 “savagery,” 74–7, 192–3; the “noble savage,” 216–17, 218–19; “white savagery,” 64–5, 76–7, 81, 193–4, 199

31691_Hutchings.indd 287

Sawyer, Chief Joseph (Nawahjegezhegwabe), 70, 206–7 scalping, 21–2, 153, 165–6, 254n9 Schlegel, August Wilhelm von, 114 Schlegel, Karl Wilhelm Friedrich, 217 Schoolcraft, Henry Rowe, 45, 129–30 Schoolcraft, Jane Johnston (Bamewawagezhikaquay), 44–9, 129 Scott, Thomas, 151–3 Scott, Sir Walter, 94–5, 124–5, 147, 168, 151–3 Scottish Enlightenment, 36, 55, 59, 77 Sheaffe, General Roger Hale, 88–90, 154–5 Shelley, Mary, 186 Shingwaukonse, Chief, 71 Simcoe, John Graves, 23 Sinclair, Murray, xix skull collecting, 112–13, 123–8, 132, 134–6 Slight, Rev. Benjamin, 25 Smith, Adam, 55 Smith, Donald B., 215, 218 Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in New England (New England Company), 175–6, 180 Solomon, Lewis, 125–7, 134 Southey, Robert, 164 squatting, 143, 158, 203–4 stadial theory, 25–6, 65, 77, 142–3, 193–4 Stone, William L., 167, 172–3 Strachan, Ann, 58–9 Strachan, John, 38–9, 54–83, 85–6, 168, 259n10; his

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288 Index anti-Americanism, 59–60, 72, 258n4; on Grand River Iroquois, 137–8, 139; on Indigenous religious beliefs and Christian conversion, 56, 61–4, 65–70, 82–3; and Joseph Brant, 137, 165–8, 171–2; on Methodism, 56, 68, 197–9, 202; poetry of, 57–8, 71–83; on US Indian policy, 73–5, 80; and War of 1812, 59, 72–5, 150 Stuart, John, 73, 84 Sutton, Catharine (Nahnebahnwequay), 240 Sylvestre, Jean Baptiste, 125, 127, 134 Taylor, Alan, 74, 90 Taylor, Thomas, 43 Tecumseh, Chief, 28, 87, 169 Tekarihogen, Sarah, 190 Tennyson, Alfred, 108 Thrush, Coll, 12 Tieck, Johann Ludwig, 114 Traill, Catharine Parr, 240 transatlantic studies, 11–18; and Romanticism, 15, 237 Treaty 45. See Manitowaning Treaty Treaty of Ghent, 95 trees. See forests Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (trc), xix–xx, 232 Tuhbenahneequay, 190, 191, 212 Two Row Wampum, 176–7, 256n20 Upper Canada Rebellion, 113, 173, 211

31691_Hutchings.indd 288

“vanishing Indian” trope, 41, 186–9, 207, 226 Victoria, Queen, 202, 207, 209–11 Volney, C.F., 25, 34, 50–1, 56 Waiskey (The Buffalo), 249n17 Walker, Emma, 101–2, 105 wampum, 210–11 War of 1812, 59, 73–5, 93–4, 149–51 Warren, William Whipple, 224 Warrior, Robert, 5–6 Waterton, Charles, 38 Waabadik (Waub-atick) or the White Caribou, 249n17 Weaver, Jace, 14 Welland Canal, 177–85 Welland Canal Company, 30, 161, 179, 181–2, 185 Wellington, Duke of (Arthur Wellesley), 85 Wendats, 23 Wesley, John, 198 Wilberforce, William, 73, 75, 146 William IV, King, 201–3 Wilson, Alexander, 36–7 Winn, Charles Allanson, Lord Headley, 145 Wordsworth, Jonathan, 174, 255n17 Wordsworth, William, 10, 14–15, 42, 47–8, 101, 232; The Excursion, 41, 47, 120–1, 187; Guide to the Lakes, 15, 34 World Peace Conference, 225, 226–7 Wyandots. See Wendats Wyoming massacre, 72, 164–5, 170, 253n7, 254n11

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