Irish and Scottish Encounters with Indigenous Peoples: Canada, the United States, New Zealand, and Australia 9780773588806

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ir is h a n d s c o t t ish encounters w it h in d ig e n o us peoples

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Irish and Scottish Encounters with Indigenous Peoples Canada, the United States, New Zealand, and Australia

Edited by

grae m e m o rto n a n d dav id a . wilson

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

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© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2013 ISBN ISBN ISBN ISBN

978-0-7735–4150-4 (cloth) 978-0-7735-4151-1 (paper) 978-0-7735-8880-6 (e P DF ) 978-0-7735-8881-3 (e P UB)

Legal deposit second quarter 2013 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec “The Great European Migration and Indigenous Populations” © Donald Harman Akenson 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 Research Institute of Irish and Scottish Studies at the University of Aberdeen. McGill-Queen’s University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Irish and Scottish encounters with indigenous peoples: Canada, the United States, New Zealand, and Australia / edited by Graeme Morton and David A. Wilson. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-7735-4150-4 (bound). – ISBN 978-0-7735-4151-1 (pbk.) ISBN 978-0-7735-8880-6 (P DF ). – ISBN 978-0-7735-8881-3 (e P U B) 1. Indigenous peoples – Colonization.  2. Irish – Colonization.  3. Scots – Colonization.  4. Ethnic relations.  5. Irish – Foreign countries – History. 6. Scots – Foreign countries – History.  I. Morton, Graeme  II. Wilson, David A., 1950–  III. Title. jv305.I75 2013

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C2013-900495-5

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

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Contents

Figures vii Acknowledgments Introduction Dav id A . Wi l son

ix 3

1 The Great European Migration and Indigenous Populations Don a ld Ha r ma n A k e nso n 22 2 James Mooney (1861–1921): The “Indian Man” and the “Irish Catholic” Pá dr a i g Ó Si a d ha i l 49 3 Jeremiah and Alma Curtin’s Indian Journeys John E ast l a k e 71 4 Transnational Dimensions of Irish Anti-Imperialism, 1842–54 C ia n T. M c Ma hon 92 5 Shamrock Aborigines: The Irish, the Aboriginal Australians, and Their Children A n n M c Gr at h 108 6 “It Is Curious How Keenly Allied in Character Are the Scotch Highlander and the Maori”: Encounters in a New Zealand Colonial Settlement B r a d P at t e rso n 144

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vi

Contents

7 A Thorough Indian: Lord Edward Fitzgerald, Thomas Moore, Adam Kidd, and Irish Identifications with Aboriginal Culture in Canadian Literature Mic hele H ol mgr e n 170 8 Michael Power, the Catholic Church, and the Evangelization of the First Nations Peoples of Western Upper Canada, 1841–48 Ma r k G . M c Gowa n 195 9 Observations of a Scottish Moralist: Indigenous Peoples and the Nationalities of Canada A n dr ew Hi nso n a nd Gr a e me M o rto n 220 10 “Going to the Land of the Yellow Men”: The Representation of Indigenous Americans in Scottish Gaelic Literature Mic ha el Ne wton 236 11 Transatlantic Rhythms: To the Far Nor’Wast and Back Again Patr ic ia A . M c C or mac k 253 12 The Fur Traders’ Garden: Horticultural Imperialism in Rupert’s Land, 1670–1770 B ev er ly So l oway 287 13 Arctic Encounters: Twentieth-Century Scots in the Hudson’s Bay Company Ma r jory H a r p e r 304 14 Aboriginal Fiddling: The Scottish Connection A n n e Le de r ma n 323 15 “Teller of Tales”: John Buchan, First Baron Tweedsmuir, and Canada’s Aboriginal Peoples K ev in H ut c h i ngs 341 Contributors Index

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Figures

  6.1 Turakina and the Rangitikei block  148   8.1 Portrait of Michael Power 198   8.2 Map of southern portions of the Diocese of Toronto  200 11.1 The Orkney Islands  261 11.2 The Isle of Lewis  264 14.1 “McDonald’s Reel” (nineteenth-century version of the eighteenthcentury Scottish tune “Lord Alexander MacDonald’s Reel”)  326 14.2 “Le p’tit bûcheux,” André Alain, Quebec (Quebec version of “Lord MacDonald’s Reel”)  326 14.3 “MacDonald’s Reel,” Manitoba  327 14.4 “Duck Dance,” Allan Benjamin, Old Crow (a version of the Scottish “Fairy Dance”)  330 14.5 “Drops of Brandy” (Scottish)  331 14.6 “Le brandy,” Quebec  331 14.7 “Drops of Brandy,” Walter Flett, Manitoba  331 14.8 “Grande gigue simple,” La Bottine Souriante, Quebec  333 14.9 “The Red River Jig,” Laurence “Teddy Boy” Houle, Winnipeg, Manitoba  333

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Acknowledgments

We thank Cairns Craig and the Research Institute of Irish and Scottish Studies at the University of Aberdeen for their support, without which this book would never have seen the light of day. At St Michael’s College, special thanks go to Jean Talman, whose organizational skills and attention to detail are unmatched. We also thank the Scottish Studies Foundation for their support in Guelph. At McGill-Queen’s University Press, Kyla Madden’s editorial acumen, enthusiasm, and sunny disposition have helped us along every step of the journey. And we express our appreciation for the work of copyeditor Robert Lewis, who transformed a bewildering variety of footnote and bibliographical styles into a consistent presentation.

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ir is h a n d s c o t t ish encounters w it h in d ig e n o us peoples

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Introduction David A. Wilson

This is an early attempt to examine a surprisingly neglected component of the Irish and Scottish diasporas – the encounters that arose among Irish and Scottish migrants and Indigenous peoples in North America and the Antipodes. It is not, of course, the first; historians such as Sylvia Van Kirk, Fintan O’Toole, Colin Calloway, and Kevin Kenny have produced excellent work in the field.1 Behind their studies lie large questions. To what extent, if any, did the condition of being Irish or Scottish affect settlers’ attitudes to Indigenous peoples? Did Scottish Highlanders, whose own culture and language were coming under threat, perceive any parallels between their experiences and those of Indigenous peoples? Did Ulster Scots settlers view American Indians through the same lenses that they viewed Irish Catholics? Were Irish Catholics more likely to identify with Indigenous peoples as fellow victims of colonialism? Did Indigenous peoples perceive Irish and Scots settlers as being different from each other and separate from the English? What might patterns of intermarriage between Irish and Scots migrants on the one hand and Indigenous peoples on the other reveal about colonial encounters? How did such patterns compare with those between English migrants and Indigenous peoples? In what ways did gender relations affect the nature of such settler-Native interaction? Simply to pose such questions is to reveal how much work needs to be done. Insofar as the contributions to this volume are indicative of current historiography in the field, the gaps in our knowledge are enormous. The Irish and Scots are generally treated as subjects, and Native peoples as objects. The subjects might be ethnographers,

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religious missionaries, politicians, or settlers; the objects are there to be studied, converted, controlled, or displaced. Not only that, but the subjects have most of the sources; in the chapters that follow, the Irish and Scots get most of the space, whereas Indigenous peoples are crowded out. In this sense, the historiography follows historical realities. It is difficult to see any way around this, given the imbalance of sources; indeed, the task might well be impossible. Drawing on Native oral history would provide the best remedy, but thus far such oral histories about encounters with Scots and Irish are in short supply.2 And then there are the conceptual problems involved in this kind of undertaking. When we talk about the Irish and the Scots, whom do we mean? Are we talking only about immigrants or about their descendants as well? If we include the descendants, how many generations do we consider, and how do we factor in intermarriage with other ethnic, immigrant, or Indigenous groups? What are the working definitions of “Irish” and “Scots”? Do they include Irish Protestants as well as Catholics, Scottish Lowlanders as well as Highlanders? How useful, if at all, is the term “Indigenous peoples,” when it covers a multiplicity of social, cultural, and linguistic groups? The confusion is reflected in the terminology. Our authors use words such as Native Americans, Indians, Aborigines – words that in some national or social contexts are perfectly acceptable but that in others are deeply offensive. And all this is merely to scratch the surface; the deeper we go, the more intractable the problems become and the more suspect our generalizations appear. What, then, can be said in our present state of knowledge? We begin with Donald Harman Akenson, who challenges the traditional Eurocentric model of the Great Migration of 1815–1914. This was no ordinary story, he writes, and cannot be comprehended in anodyne terms of people from overcrowded and land-hungry societies who found free space and free land in various New Worlds. On the contrary, it was “the greatest single period of land theft, cultural pillage, and casual genocide in world history.” True, there were “eccentric eddies” in which Indigenous peoples and settlers worked with one another or in which Indigenous peoples temporarily got the better of settlers. But the overall results were catastrophic for Indigenous peoples, just as they were for the millions of African slaves who replaced them as a labour force. All the Europeans who participated in this system, Akenson argues, became oppressors and

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exploiters. It did not matter whether they participated directly or indirectly in the system, whether they moved west in wagon trains or stayed at home and received remittances from emigrant relatives – all were benefitting from the destruction of Indigenous peoples in the so-called New Worlds. Nor did it make much difference whether they were from Ireland, Scotland, England, or continental Europe or whether they had experienced oppression and exploitation themselves. Despite a marked reluctance to recognize the reality, he concludes, the Irish and Scots were imperialists to the core. Akenson’s view flies in the face of those historians and literary critics who argue that Irish nationalists frequently identified with nonwhite victims of colonialism. One thinks, for example, of Luke Gibbons’s attempt to show that United Irish émigrés in the United States sympathized with the plight of Native Americans or of the connections that have been made between Roger Casement’s antiimperialism in the Belgian Congo and the Amazon and his support for revolutionary nationalism in Ireland.3 Or again, the prominent role of Irish American ethnographers in studying the folklore and culture of nineteenth-century Native Americans appears to fit neatly into the anticolonial paradigm. Consider, in this respect, the career of James Mooney, the Irish American “Indian Man” who worked for the Bureau of American Ethnology during the late nineteenth century. With Catholic parents who left Ireland during the Famine, a father who was a labourer, and a mother who transmitted memories of the Old Country to her children, Mooney supported the Land League and the Gaelic League in their struggles against economic injustice and British cultural hegemony in Ireland. His initial foray into folklore dealt with Irish customs and beliefs while anticipating much subsequent work in the field. It would be natural to assume, then, that his interest in Native American culture stemmed directly from a consciousness of common oppression and that his Native American studies were an extension of his interest in Irish folklore. A similar argument could be made for Jeremiah Curtin, whose work as a collector of Irish myths and folktales had been preceded by his less well-known but critically important fieldwork with Native Americans. The conclusion seems clear: people who came from a threatened and marginalized culture in Ireland were identifying with a threatened and marginalized culture in North America. And yet Pádraig Ó Siadhail’s chapter on Mooney and John Eastlake’s chapter on Curtin contend that such a view is seriously

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mistaken and that what appears obvious actually turns out to be illusory. As Ó Siadhail points out, there is no evidence for the view that Mooney’s Irish ethnicity lay behind his interest in Native American culture and some evidence to the contrary. True, Mooney’s early Irish folklore essays included some passing remarks on Native American culture, and he once remarked that a “Keltic inheritance” could help an ethnographer “look into the soul of primitive things and interpret their meaning.” But at no point in his career did Mooney make any connection between his Native American ethnography and his Irish background – not even in his chapter on “Parallels in Other Systems” in his classic The Ghost-Dance Religion and the Sioux Outbreak of 1890, where one would most expect to find it. Mooney’s daughter explicitly denied that his interest in “underdogs” stemmed from his “knowledge of oppression in Irish history”; it was, she said, a matter of principle, not ethnicity. Similarly, Eastlake finds no link between Curtin’s Irish Catholic origins and his work among Native Americans. Curtin’s Irish parents had no qualms about settling on land in Wisconsin from which Native Americans had been forcibly relocated, and there was nothing in his own childhood to suggest any affinity with dispossessed Natives. Curtin became involved in Native American studies relatively late in life and was driven primarily by the intellectual quest to develop a scientific understanding of humankind by studying the “primitive.” This is not to suggest that he adopted a passive or detached stance toward the oppression of Native Americans. On the contrary, he exposed and condemned the 1864 massacres of the Yana and Wintu in California and presented the survivors’ petition for land to President Benjamin Harrison. But again, there is no evidence that such a position was related in any way to his Irish Catholic roots. As Ó Siadhail points out, this should come as no surprise. There is no inherent reason why members of one community who regard themselves as victims should identify with another such community. In fact, as Akenson has argued in a different context, a sense of victimhood, insofar as it existed, could actually perpetuate the “victimvictimizer” cycle.4 Ó Siadhail reminds us that many Irish Americans were more interested in exterminating Indians than in studying them and that figures such as Mooney were no more typical of their community than those who believed that the only good Indians were dead Indians; indeed, they may well have been less typical. In any

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case, neither Mooney nor Curtin can be incorporated into a “consciousness of common oppression” model without engaging in a significant degree of wishful thinking. There was, however, a connection between Curtin’s Irish experiences and his Native American fieldwork, although it runs in the opposite direction from what might be expected. It was not a case of his Irishness influencing his work among Native Americans but rather of his Native American studies influencing his approach to Irish folk culture. On a practical level, Curtin employed in Ireland the same myth-collecting techniques that he and his wife had developed in Native American communities. And on a theoretical level, he placed Irish myths within a conceptual framework of the “primitive” that he had adumbrated in North America. Irish and Native American myths, Curtin believed, provided an entry point into the shared worldview of so-called “primitive man,” and in this sense they were inseparable from one another. Taken together, they opened a window into the earliest stages of human development – or so Curtin believed. Whereas ethnographers such as Curtin found, or thought they found, connections between primitive Native Americans and almostas-primitive Gaels, Irish nationalists grappled with their own questions about the relationship between the Irish and Indigenous peoples. For many, it was the very whiteness of the Irish that justified Home Rule, or complete independence; that they were not “savages” meant they were entitled to govern themselves. It was a commonplace among Irish nationalists in Canada, for example, to complain that the Irish people were the only white race without responsible government.5 Others, however, were more likely to view Indigenous peoples as fellow victims of British imperialism, even though such nationalists often had difficulty shedding their own conscious or unconscious racism. In his chapter on Young Ireland, Cian McMahon examines the  internationalist and anti-imperialist component of nationalist thought and discusses whether a sense of co-victimhood trumped race. He shows that prominent Young Irelanders such as Thomas Davis, Charles Gavan Duffy, and John Mitchel connected the cause of Irish independence with a global struggle against British imperialism – although Davis and Duffy also believed that Ireland should remain linked with the British Crown. After the failed Rising of 1848, the revolutionary leaders who were exiled to Australia were

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forced directly to confront the relationship between settlers and Natives. Many of these settlers, of course, were from Ireland; faced with this reality, the Sydney-based Freeman’s Journal insisted that the dispossession of Aborigines could be justified only if it was accompanied by “fair and proportionate compensation” and a serious effort to improve their conditions. Among the Young Ireland exiles, William Smith O’Brien felt much the same way. In some respects, he shared classic colonial values, believing that Ireland should remain within the British Empire and viewing Aborigines as “barbarians” who had no right to monopolize the land. Yet he also drew on his Irish background to point out that the language of civilizing benighted Natives could and did serve as a cloak for imperialist aggression; in this sense, McMahon argues, Smith O’Brien was applying Young Ireland internationalism to his encounters with Aboriginal peoples. Only one of the exiles, Patrick O’Donohoe, unequivocally argued that Aborigines had full rights to the land; however, after he broke parole, his paper was shut down and his voice was silenced. In McMahon’s view, the “international dimension” of Irish nationality was much more significant than any ambivalence over empire and anticipated the demands for an independent Irish foreign policy that would be voiced by figures such as Charles Stewart Parnell, James Connolly, Arthur Griffiths, and Eamon de Valera. As Ann McGrath suggests, the views expressed by the Sydney Freeman’s Journal and endorsed by Smith O’Brien belonged to a remarkably persistent Irish Australian self-image of benign colonization. The leading historian of the Irish in Australia, the New Zealand–born Patrick O’Farrell, tapped into this when he contended that the Irish generally treated Aborigines as equals and that IrishAboriginal intermarriage was common. Arguing that O’Farrell’s evidence was unreliable and that his egalitarian assumptions were highly problematic, McGrath points out that the myth of the “good colonizer” fitted nicely with attempts by Irish to distinguish themselves from the English (who were, of course, “bad colonizers”). In the process, she notes, examples of Irish violence, coercion, rape, and murder were simply airbrushed out of the picture. At the same time, however, many Aborigines – especially those who were also of Irish descent – came to embrace the “good colonizer” myth and to apply Catholic Irish struggles against British imperialism to their own campaigns against Australian authority. In

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their fight against discrimination and repression in Australia and in their battle for land rights, Aborigines could and did find inspiration in the long history of Irish Catholic resistance to British rule. “Irishness,” argues McGrath, “has been successfully mythologized not only as a historical victimization epic but also as a subversive anticolonial and working-class ‘battler’ identity.” The notion of the Irish as fellow victims of colonial oppression counted for more than did the realities of Irish participation in colonialism in Australia and elsewhere; the requirements of a serviceable myth carried the day. To what extent, if any, did the image of gentle colonialism apply to the Scots who settled in the Antipodes? In his case study of the Rangitikei-Turakina district of New Zealand, Brad Patterson shows that a combination of converging interests and pragmatic leadership produced remarkably harmonious Scottish-Maori relations, at least in the short run. The Ngati Apa in the area welcomed European settlement, on the grounds that it would provide much-needed protection against the incursion of rival tribes to the north. As a result, the Native leader Aperahama Tipae and the Tiree-born civil servant Donald McLean were able to negotiate a mutually satisfactory land treaty. When Gaelic-speaking Presbyterian Highland Scots started moving in, they coexisted peacefully with the Ngati Apa, who adjusted rapidly to the new situation. Many of the Natives became successful farmers, intermarried with the newcomers, sent their children to Scottish schools, embraced Presbyterianism, and became enthusiastic participants in Highland Games. In the longer run, however, changing economic conditions undermined these harmonious relations. The coming of the railway, the concentration of land ownership with the emergence of vast sheep farms, the influx of cheap outside labour, and the erosion of reserve lands (with the complicity of some tribal leaders) diluted the original Scottish character of the settlement and left the Ngati Apa as an impoverished and marginalized community. Patterson makes no claim that Turakina was typical of broader Scottish-Maori relations and notes that the situation was very different to the north, where land disputes erupted into full-scale war during the 1860s. (The Ngati Apa, fearing the northern tribes more than European settlers, took up arms, dressed themselves in kilts and tartans, and pledged to “live with the white people and die in their defence.”) But neither can Turakina be dismissed as an aberration; in  fact, it reveals a great deal about the importance of colonial

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conditions in shaping settler and Native relations – a point to which we will return. The remaining chapters focus on Irish and Scottish migrants who came to Canada. As Michele Holmgren shows, late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century Irish travellers such as Edward Fitzgerald and Thomas Moore, along with the immigrant Adam Kidd, believed that British North America was a much more congenial environment for Indigenous peoples than was the United States. At the same time, Fitzgerald and Kidd fashioned idealized images of Native peoples as a critique of European social values. Native society, from their perspective, was natural, egalitarian, free, familial, and organic – the direct opposite, in short, of everything that characterized European society. In Fitzgerald’s case, such views reinforced the radical cast of mind that subsequently propelled him into United Irish revolutionary republicanism. For Adam Kidd, born after the Rising of 1798, they fed into support for Catholic Emancipation in Ireland. The Irish, following the example of Indigenous peoples, should judge each other by their intrinsic worth rather than by artificial distinctions, Kidd insisted. And just as Canadian Indians had become faithful subjects of the Crown, he continued, Irish Catholics would prove their own loyalty when treated with fairness and respect. Meanwhile, another Irish Canadian writer, Standish O’Grady, used the hierarchical and organic characteristics of Native society to buttress his argument that the Protestant ascendancy constituted the natural leadership of Ireland; North American Natives, it seemed, could dance to very different Irish tunes. Holmgren also perceives a parallel between Fitzgerald and Kidd and the Natives they actually encountered, as opposed to the Natives they imagined. Native chiefs such as Joseph Brant straddled two cultural and political worlds, as they sought to protect and promote the interests of their people within a British imperial framework. Similarly, she argues, Fitzgerald and Kidd inhabited different worlds – Irish and British, colonized and colonizers – as they sought to protect and promote the interests of their countrymen. In this sense, she suggests, Fitzgerald and Kidd had more in common with the Natives than they may have realized. Whether or not this was the case, there is another dimension to  Fitzgerald’s position that is worth considering. With his AngloIrish aristocratic background, Fitzgerald enjoyed the company of

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politically astute aristocratic Native chiefs, even as he idealized the natural equality of Native society. In much the same way, he inhabited an upper-class social milieu in Britain and Ireland, even as he projected romanticized democratic republican ideals onto the Irish people. The results in Ireland were disastrous, but his position as an aristocratic leader of a revolutionary movement served to enhance his reputation; that he was a lord carried more weight than his selfimage as a citizen. It is no coincidence that one of his recent biographers, Stella Tillyard, repeatedly refers to him as “Lord Edward,” combining faux first-name intimacy and deference to his social status with admiration for his radical politics.6 Whereas Fitzgerald and Kidd (and O’Grady) provide a window into Irish political and cultural images of Indigenous peoples, the career of Bishop Michael Power opens up the question of Irish Catholic missionary endeavours among the First Nations of Canada. Born of Irish parents in Nova Scotia, Power became bishop of western Upper Canada in 1842, with a vast diocese that included a wide variety of Indigenous peoples. As Mark McGowan argues, Power needed to get experienced and effective missionaries out to the frontier – and he was singularly unimpressed by his Irish priests, some of whom had been shovelled out to Canada by bishops who did not want them in Ireland. Instead, Power turned to Frenchspeaking Jesuits, who operated at Walpole Island (in the southwest) and Manitoulin Island (in the northwest). As it turned out, the Jesuits ran into serious difficulties, ranging from Native hostility to competition from Anglicans and Methodists, as well as institutional indifference or thinly veiled hostility from the Indian Department. At Walpole Island, the Jesuit priest made the fatal error of building his cabin on an ancient burial site and was eventually ordered to leave. Things went better at Manitoulin Island, where an Irish Anglican missionary failed to prevent the Jesuits from establishing a base for further activities. Still, McGowan’s account demonstrates that for Michael Power, Catholicism was much more important than Irishness. Power’s ethnic background, in short, was simply irrelevant to his missionary strategy. As well as Catholic and Irish Anglican missionaries, there were also Scottish Presbyterians who recorded their encounters with Indigenous peoples in Upper Canada. Among them was William Bell, who arrived in the settlement of Perth during the post–Napoleonic War period and whose attempt to impose civilized Christian values on “a

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moral as well as a natural wilderness” is described and discussed by Andrew Hinson and Graeme Morton. Possessed by a seemingly limitless capacity to be shocked by his fellow human beings, Bell was appalled by the drunkenness, swearing, and Sabbath-breaking of his fellow immigrants. Given to making instant judgments based on ethnic stereotypes and quick to condemn other religious denominations, he dismissed Scottish Highlanders as an ignorant bunch who were almost as bad as the Irish. Upholding a stern and severe morality, he was unsparing in his denunciation of sinners. If his Hints to Emigrants were our only source about the settlers in Perth, we would conclude that it was the most depraved place on the planet. And yet, when it came to Indigenous peoples in the area, different standards applied. The settlers were supposed to be civilized, even if most of them behaved like savages; the Native “savages” were supposed to be savage, and one could expect nothing better from them. Recognizing that Indigenous peoples lived in a harsh environment, he displayed some sympathy for their stoicism – thus conforming to a common stereotype about Scottish Presbyterians. On the occasions when he encountered Native thoughtfulness and politeness, he registered mild surprise at such admirable behaviour from such an uncivilized people. When settlers got drunk, he fulminated against their wickedness; when Natives got drunk, he seemed to accept this as part of the natural order. When Irish immigrants begged, he denounced their laziness and fecklessness; when Natives begged, he simply observed that they lived for the day, enjoyed what they had, and endured whatever hardships arose. As Hinson and Morton point out, such attitudes stemmed from the conviction that Indigenous peoples were inherently inferior to the settlers. Bell’s double standards were built on the rock of racism; beneath his tolerance of Native culture lay the deepest disdain of all. At no time did Bell perceive any affinity or similarity between Highland and Native society; on the contrary, he saw a fundamental racial division that could not be bridged. Other observers, however, have suggested that Highlanders and Natives shared some common characteristics, such as a rich oral culture, a social structure based on kinship networks, and a shared experience of colonization. Against this, Silke Stroh has argued that “Gaelic discourses often reflected an eagerness to embrace the opportunity to rise from the position of intra-British colonized to the status of overseas colonizer.” In discussing Stroh’s view, Michael Newton reminds us that Gaelic images

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of Indigenous people were refracted through literary conventions, intertextual allusions, and predetermined rhetorical aims. Thus, he argues, they cannot be taken as reliable or realistic portrayals of relations between Scottish Gaels and the First Nations of Canada. Some of the texts that Newton examines do indeed correspond with Stroh’s “overseas colonizer” argument and portray Indigenous peoples in racist terms as the inferior other. During the Seven Years’ War, for example, a poem in the Gaelic “war incitement” tradition bracketed the French and the “Forest-folk” as enemies of the British Empire. In this context, Indigenous peoples became foils against which Gaels could demonstrate their own loyalty and dissociate themselves from lingering suspicions of Jacobitism. Or again, the early-nineteenth-century song by the Nova Scotia immigrant Ailean the Ridge took a disparaging view of North America as the “land of the ‘yellow’ men / And of the black niggers.” Here, Newton points out, the composer was drawing on an earlier song in which the Lowlanders were cast in the role that Native Americans and AfroAmericans now occupied; by highlighting the differences in colour, Ailean the Ridge was aligning the Gaels with whiteness and imperialism. A third example, from the later nineteenth century, is a poem warning the Gaels against emigration to Manitoba, where the dangers included not only the bitter cold and fierce wolves but also “wild Indians / Who make us afraid, day and night, / As black as soot is their hide / And soap will not improve their appearance.” Possibly written in Scotland during the 1880s, when the Land League was campaigning against emigration in general, the poem was clearly intended to counter propagandist images of the Prairies as a utopia for European settlers. But Newton also finds glimpses of Gaelic empathy with Indigenous peoples, intimations of identification between the lives of traditional Highlanders and those of the Natives they encountered. A poem from the early nineteenth century implied that the Gaels had been manipulated into “chasing after” the “Indians.” Another poem, written later in the century, portrayed the Mi’kmaw in terms traditionally associated with Highlanders. And a third poem, written by a Gaelic immigrant who settled in Manitoba in 1877, depicted the clothing and decorative habits of “Indians” in a way similar to that of traditional descriptions of Highlanders. Although these hardly amount to “striking Gaelic statements of solidarity,” as Newton claims, they do suggest that racist Gaelic perceptions of Indigenous

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peoples are not the whole story. In any case, as he points out, literary texts are not an adequate basis on which to make generalizations about Gaelic-Native relations. The major meeting ground for Scots and Natives in Canada, of course, was the fur trade, beginning with the Hudson’s Bay Company in 1670, persisting through the competition with the North West Company during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and continuing into the late twentieth century. In her overview of Scottish involvement in the fur trade, Patricia McCormack emphasizes the diverse origins of the men who encountered Indigenous peoples in the Canadian North. The Orkney Islanders were there right from the start; coming from a society characterized by independent landowning and acquiring a reputation as “careful, steady and sober” workers, they were mainly wage labourers on three- to five-year contracts with the Hudson’s Bay Company. Another source of recruits was the Gaelic-speaking clan society of the Highlands and Lewis, where rent increases during the late eighteenth century and the clearances of the early nineteenth century produced high rates of emigration and military enlistment. The Highlanders and Lewismen in the fur trade, however, were not the poorest members of society; like the Orcadians, they generally belonged to family networks with extensive Canadian connections and returned home at the end of their contracts. Originating from different societies and speaking different languages, the Orcadians and the Highlanders may well have initially communicated with each other in the Cree language. On McCormack’s evidence, it seems that the social and linguistic differences among the Scots had no influence on their relations with Indigenous peoples. No matter where they were from, fur traders lived and worked with Indigenous peoples, spoke their languages, and learned their survival skills. Intermarrying with Native women, many fur traders became integrated into Indigenous kin groups and contributed to the formation of Métis cultures. At the same time, this was not integration among equals. Some fur traders who married and produced children with Native women took their new responsibilities seriously. But others who were only in it for the sex abandoned their Canadian families when they left for home – and in some cases returned home to the arms of their “real” wives and children. More generally, McCormack reminds us, the fur traders tried to squeeze profits from the Indians in much the same way that

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landlords at home tried to squeeze profits from their tenants. “The sad reality,” she writes, “is that the once-exploited Scots did not hesitate to exploit Aboriginal people and even to replicate the abuse they themselves had suffered.” In contrast to McCormack’s general analysis, Beverly Soloway adopts a more specialized approach, focusing on the hitherto unexamined influence of Scottish horticultural practices on the Indigenous peoples of Hudson’s Bay and James Bay during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In successfully transferring domestic gardening practices from the Orkneys to the northern Canadian environment, she argues, Scottish fur traders introduced the idea of planted food resources to the Muskekowuck inhabitants of the region. Before the fur trading posts with their kitchen gardens were established, the Muskekowuck engaged in plant gathering as well as hunting and fishing for sustenance; in the process, they made no distinction between food and medicine. The emergence of Scottish kitchen gardens transformed both the physical and the cultural landscape. Land was cleared for planted produce, the soil was improved by the use of composting and manure, and the inadvertent introduction of alien species altered the area’s plant life. Along with kitchen gardens came the idea of food ownership, the notion that food was separate from medicine, and the undermining of traditional food-gathering practices. “Indigenous populations that once depended on gathering as a means of food diversity,” Soloway concludes, “became increasingly dependent on a limited variety and supply of planted food crops.” Whereas Soloway examines the first phase of Scottish involvement in the fur trade, Marjory Harper takes the story up to the twentieth century – to the time when fur traders arrived by plane rather than by dogsled, canoe, and York boat, when Caterpillar tractor trains brought in winter supplies, when Native children were taken out of  their communities and taken into residential schools far to the south. The traditional nickname for the Hudson’s Bay Company – “Here Before Christ” – no longer applied. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the company had drawn mainly on contract labourers from the Orkney Islands. In the early twentieth century, it  recruited resourceful, educated school-leavers who could keep books, learn Native languages, and become good leaders. Young men from Aberdeenshire, driven by a sense of adventure and the prospect of money, began to replace the Orcadians who had dominated the trade, although the contract system remained in place.

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Drawing largely on interviews and personal correspondence with former fur traders and their relatives, Harper shows that their memories of encounters with Indigenous peoples were overwhelmingly warm and positive. One fur trader, Angus Pelham Burn, spoke affectionately of his interpreter, or “interrupter”; another remembered being rescued in a snowstorm by an Inuit elder. There were stories of social mixing in the trading posts, of listening to “the most amazing fiddlers” play Orcadian music at Big Trout Lake, and of providing impoverished Cree with pots of Scotch broth. Aware that he was witnessing “the tail end of the nomadic way of life of the Inuit people,” one trader recalled the sadness of Inuit parents as their children were forced into residential schools. From the Hudson’s Bay area, Angus Pelham Burn noted that the children who returned to their communities had picked up the vices of the South; things started to go missing, he said, in a place where there had once been complete honesty. Because of her sources, Harper has more to say about the Scots than about the Indigenous peoples whom they met; accounts of the Cree and Inuit are filtered through the fur traders’ perspectives. All this underlines the need to conduct similar sets of interviews with the Cree and the Inuit and to examine how they perceived the Scots and how the Scottish presence affected Native culture. Some work along these lines has taken place in the field of music, where Anne Lederman has conducted extensive fieldwork among Indigenous and Métis fiddle players in western Manitoba, James Bay, Yukon, and the Northwest Territories. The picture, or rather the sound, that emerges is a fascinating mixture of Scottish, French, Old Time, and Indigenous music. It is possible that those “amazing fiddlers” at Big Trout Lake were indeed playing Orcadian music; but it is much more likely that they were combining a variety of traditions and transforming the “Old Scotch Reels” into something new. Fiddle tunes in northern Canada were characterized by driving foot rhythms, probably derived from Quebecois and Acadian traditions. A strong Shetland influence can be found in the fiddle tunings, the up-bow on the beat, the relative lack of ornamentation, and the absence of strathspeys. At the same time, the striking changes in rhythm and in the melodic structure of the tunes testify to ways that Indigenous and Métis players reshaped Scottish tunes. Fiddlers such as Grandy Fagnan and Laurence “Teddy Boy” Houle from western Manitoba injected five-beat bars into tunes that had originally been in common time; they were also much more likely than Scottish

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fiddlers to begin the tunes in the upper register and move downward in the scale. Both elements are characteristic of Indigenous musical patterns; when combined with traditional Scottish tunes, the result was – and is – a style of music at once familiar and foreign to the folks back home. In the course of her research, Lederman found that Scottish ancestry among Métis fiddle players carried more status than did French origins. Another example of positive Native attitudes to the Scots comes from Kevin Hutchings’s chapter on John Buchan’s (or Baron Tweedsmuir’s) career as governor general of Canada from 1935 to 1940. As Hutchings shows, Buchan combined racist and paternalistic imperialist attitudes with a romanticized view of the wilderness and its inhabitants. His romanticism manifested itself in a quest to discover “unspoiled” precolonial Natives – and although Buchan never quite found what he was looking for, he found enough to write warmly and sympathetically about the democratic and social values of Native culture. At the same time, his familiarity with the grinding poverty of Indigenous peoples, together with his sense of benevolent imperialism, turned him into an advocate for practical reforms. Despite the nonpolitical nature of his office, he pushed for expanded and exclusive Native trapping grounds, better medical services, and economic diversification that would raise living standards. For their part, Natives from the Maritimes to the Pacific Northwest welcomed Buchan into their communities and invited him to participate in their ceremonies. This conduct was not, of course, entirely altruistic; such invitations sometimes served as attempts to publicize and safeguard Native interpretations of land treaty rights. But there was also genuine affection, most dramatically demonstrated when Chief Swimmer of the Cree overcame ill health and a long journey to deliver condolences to Buchan’s family after his sudden death in 1940. With all this in mind, let us return to the general question at the heart of this volume: to what extent did Irishness or Scottishness affect attitudes toward Indigenous peoples? Straight away, Akenson’s major point comes into play: Irish and Scottish attitudes are of little or no importance in assessing the overall impact of colonialism on Indigenous peoples. Whatever their subjective position, objectively Irish and Scots settlers and their beneficiaries participated in a system that destroyed or maimed Native communities and cultures on

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a global scale. So far, so bad; but we also need to consider the extent to which the condition of being Irish or Scottish produced a sense of identification or empathy with Indigenous peoples. Among Irish nationalists, there were certainly strands of sympathy; we see this in romantic images of Native American culture and in the writings of Irish Australian exiles such as William Smith O’Brien and Patrick O’Donohoe. We see that Aborigines picked up these strands and found in Irish anti-imperialism a source of inspiration for their own struggles; the extent to which other Indigenous communities shared such attitudes has yet to be investigated. It is also clear, however, that a wide gap existed between ideology and reality. Whereas some prominent Irish nationalists denounced imperialism in Australia, many Irish settlers put it into practice – and sometimes in its worst form. A similar pattern appeared in North America, where any consciousness of common oppression was overshadowed by Irish participation in the displacement and destruction of Native communities. When it comes to Scottish migration, William Bell’s racist attitudes to the Algonquins and Mississauga he encountered around Perth in Upper Canada may well have reflected wider Lowland assumptions about Indigenous peoples – although, again, more research is needed. When it comes to Highlanders’ attitudes to Indigenous peoples, the evidence is mixed; examples of racism and exploitation coexist with a sense of mutual respect, as evinced in musical interchange, in the writings of the Highlander Robert MacDougall,7 and in the New Zealand case of Turakina. In attempting to make sense of these sometimes complementary and sometimes contradictory patterns, it might be useful to shift our angle of vision and approach the issue not from the perspective of settlers’ points of origin but from the perspective of their points of destination. This is not to deny the importance of origins. How else could one explain the romantic views of Edward Fitzgerald and Adam Kidd, the benign imperialism of William Smith O’Brien, the anti-imperialism of Patrick O’Donohoe, or the Presbyterianism and racism of William Bell? But it is to suggest that the specific circumstances that Irish and Scottish settlers experienced were even more important determinants of attitudes and behaviour. Consider, in this sense, Kevin Kenny’s work on the relationship between “Scotch-Irish” settlers and “Indians” in colonial western Pennsylvania. In a cauldron of conflict with the Delaware Indians and their imagined allies, many Scotch-Irish preached and practised

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genocide against the “savages” who threatened them. At first sight, it seemed like a continuation on American soil of the same fight that their forebears had waged against Catholic natives in Ulster. But, as Kenny shows, it had nothing to do with any putative Scotch-Irish predisposition to wipe out the enemies of civilization and everything to do with the immediate conditions on the frontier. Settlers from Germany and New England who came into the region were equally concerned with land and security – and equally adept at hating Indians. It was, above all, an American story.8 Now compare this with the experiences of those Scottish Highlanders who emigrated to Turakina in New Zealand during the 1850s. Here, they encountered an entirely different set of circumstances – a warm welcome from the Ngati Apa, who viewed them as a deterrent to depredations from tribes to the north. Under these conditions, it was possible to reach a land settlement that was satisfactory to both sides. Brad Patterson’s study reveals that local conditions, situational pressures, and particular personalities were more important than any putative Scottish predisposition to benign colonialism in shaping the character of Native-settler relations. It was, above all, a New Zealand story. The same reasoning helps to explain why “Irishness” was irrelevant to the careers of late-nineteenth-century Americanized ethnographers such as James Mooney and Jeremiah Curtin and to the mid-nineteenth-century Canadianized bishop Michael Power. It also illuminates Patricia McCormack’s observation that it made no difference to Scottish-Native relations whether the Scottish fur traders came from the Orkneys, the Highlands, or Lewis. What really mattered was the economic imperative of trading relations with Natives. Under these circumstances, it is not surprising that patterns of intermarriage and musical interchange emerged. True, there were also instances of exploitation but nothing remotely approaching the genocidal picture that characterized settler-Native relations as a whole. It was, above all, a Canadian story. If, by some devilish cantraip sleight, it had been possible to move the Scotch-Irish settlers in eighteenth-century Pennsylvania to nineteenth-century Turakina, it is highly probable that relatively amicable relations with the Ngati Apa would have ensued. Conversely, if the Highland settlers in Turakina could have been transplanted to the eighteenth-century western Pennsylvania frontier, there is little doubt that they would have preached and practised genocide themselves.

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From this perspective, the controlling metaphor comes from the eighth-century Irish mythological tale “The Voyage of Máel Dúin.” During their journey, Máel Dúin and his men encounter a series of islands, each of which has its own distinct set of characteristics. There is, for example, the Island of Black Mourners, where everyone is weeping and wailing; when one of Máel Dúin’s foster-brothers lands there, he too weeps and wails and is lost forever. Another fosterbrother steps onto the Island of Laughter and spends the rest of his days laughing uncontrollably. There is also an Island of Black and White, partitioned by a brass palisade, with black sheep on one side and white sheep on the other; when the shepherd tosses a sheep from one side to the other, it immediately changes colour. When Máel Dúin, from the safe distance of his ship, throws a white wand onto the black side, the wand immediately turns black. It mattered where Máel Dúin and his men came from. But it mattered more where and when they landed.

no t e s 1 Van Kirk, Many Tender Ties; O’Toole, White Savage; Calloway, White People; Kenny, Peaceable Kingdom Lost. 2 On the challenges and opportunities presented by a study of Native oral traditions, see Hulan and Eigenbrod, eds, Aboriginal Oral Traditions. 3 Gibbons, “‘Return of the Native’”; Mitchell, “Roger Casement.” 4 Akenson, If the Irish. 5 See, for example, the remarks of W.P. Burns, the Nova Scotia chairman of the Self-Determination for Ireland League of Canada, who argued that “civilized” people had the right to self-determination and observed that “the Irish people are the only white race without responsible government.” Quoted in McLaughlin, “Irish Canadians,” 218. 6 Tillyard, Citizen Lord. 7 MacDougall, Emigrant’s Guide, 30–40. 8 Kenny, Peaceable Kingdom Lost.

B i b l i ogr ap h y Akenson, Donald Harman. If the Irish Ran the World: Montserrat, 1630– 1730. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1997.

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Calloway, Colin. White People, Indians, and Highlanders: Tribal Peoples and Colonial Encounters in Scotland and America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. Gibbons, Luke. “‘The Return of the Native’: The United Irishmen, Culture and Colonialism.” In Thomas Bartlett, David Dickson, Dáire Keogh, and Kevin Whelan, eds, 1798: A Bicentenary Perspective, 52–74. Dublin: Four Courts, 2003. Hulan, Renée, and Renate Eigenbrod, eds. Aboriginal Oral Traditions: Theory, Practice, Ethics. Black Point, NS: Fernwood, 2008. Kenny, Kevin. Peaceable Kingdom Lost: The Paxton Boys and the Destruction of William Penn’s Holy Experiment. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. MacDougall, Robert. The Emigrant’s Guide to North America. 1841. Reprint, ed. Elizabeth Thompson, Toronto: Natural Heritage, 1998. McLaughlin, Robert. “Irish Canadians and the Struggle for Irish Independence, 1912–1925: A Study of Ethnic Identity and Cultural Heritage.” PhD diss., University of Maine, 2004. Mitchell, Angus. “Roger Casement: The Evolution of an Enemy of Empire – I.” In Eóin Flannery and Angus Mitchell, eds, Enemies of Empire: New Perspectives on Imperialism, Literature and Historiography, 40–57. Dublin: Four Courts, 2007. O’Toole, Fintan. White Savage: William Johnson and the Invention of America. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005. Tillyard, Stella. Citizen Lord: Edward Fitzgerald, 1763–1798. London: Chatto and Windus, 1997. Van Kirk, Sylvia. Many Tender Ties: Women in Fur-Trade Society in Western Canada, 1670–1870. Winnipeg: Watson and Dwyer, 1980.

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1 The Great European Migration and Indigenous Populations Donald Harman Akenson

P a rt O n e Our collective enterprise is to examine in some detail a slice – a significant one but a slice nevertheless – of one of the most important phenomena of human history to occur in the past 500 years. This mega-phenomenon at one time was called the “expansion of Europe,” which is not an inapposite term, unfashionable though it may now be. However, this huge and messy mélange is beyond our present remit. We are engaged with a separate segment that in the literature is usually called the “Great European Migration.”1 The usual estimates are that about 55 to 60 million Europeans left the European continent (including the British Isles) between the end of the Napoleonic Wars and the beginning of the First World War.2 They fetched up, at least for a time, in one of the several New Worlds that seemed suddenly to have opened to them.3 This is an extraordinary number, and it represents a diffusion over huge patches of the globe: South America, New Zealand and Australia, the West Indies, Africa, and North America. To keep the diffusion from degenerating into mere confusion, the common procedure is to wall off as much as possible the period before the Great European War that ended in 1815 from what came after and to build a similar barrier between the period before the Great European War that began in 1914 and what came after. This construction – sometimes called the “true nineteenth century” – fits well with the actual migration data and is justified as long as the time barriers are not totally impermeable

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to  suggestions that there are some continuities between the Great Migration and its predecessors and successors. Here, let me give a brief summary narrative of what was happening in this Great Migration. It is from a standard theory as taught in some departments of all universities in the English-speaking world. And this implied narrative is theoretically nuanced in the true sense. That is, it is derived from a theory that actually produces testable hypotheses – and the probative data confirm the hypotheses. Here is the story. In the European transoceanic migration of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, everybody wins. This is the case because in this period migrants were not especially skilled. Most of them came from the agricultural sector. Without out-migration, populations would have grown in the migration-sending countries and therefore the amount of agricultural resources (especially land) available per worker would have declined. Not only would this have dampened the wages of farm labourers and lowered the profits of self-employed farmers, but it would also have lowered the entire national level of per capita income. On top of that, almost certainly the reduction in wages would have produced maldistribution effects: big landlords would have won, and those lower on the scale would have lost. Hence the millions of persons who went to the several New Worlds made everybody better off. As labourers in new lands or as farmer-settlers, the migrants received higher wages or profits than they would have earned at home, those left in the homeland had more resources (e.g., larger farms to work with), and the receiving countries acquired a new labour force with which to create a neo-European economy. Now, in fact, when one looks for confirmation of this view, it is there: the economies of the European world and of the several neoEuropes converged during the nineteenth century. Largely from the free trade in human labour (via migration) and free-ish trade in commodities, capital, and manufactured goods, everyone seemed to be becoming better off. It is really very tight, this theory, embracing many of the most important measures of nineteenth-century economic and social history and relating them to each other with a high degree of probative success. But this is not very satisfying. Why? In part, because such a theory depends on a mode of accounting that leaves a lot of costs untabulated, this being based on the assumption that the lands and natural resources of the several New Worlds were available nearly cost-free

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– not a story one really wants to tell the Mohawk or the Maori or anybody on the losing side of a series of transactions that made economic life so much better (in the present case) for Scottish and Irish persons, whether or not they emigrated. So that you understand that I am not burlesquing the work of other scholars, here is a statement by Kevin O’Rourke, one of the world’s leading cliometric historians, and this is his view of the entire expansion of Europe: “The voyages of discovery were motivated by a desire for commodities that were scarce and therefore valuable. We know now that they were far more important economically than originally intended, precisely because they stumbled upon a resource so abundant that it was effectively free: New World land.”4 Obviously, the narrative I give above is the classic narrative from economic historians, one that has become newly revivified by the dominance of neoconservative economists amid cliometricians. The second reason for my dissatisfaction with the standard narrative of the Great European Migration, which is produced by this dominant school of economic historians, is that in purely intellectual terms (never mind the moral amnesia), it is just a bit too comforting. If most scholars of the Great European Migration have one thing in common, it is the desire to see pattern. And almost all would suggest that pattern implies repetition and regularity, even if only regularity of development. A good example is the work of Jeffrey Williamson. He is among the leaders of a school of cliometricians who see the Great European Migration as a nicely regularized phenomenon that at heart was simply a convergence of Western national economies. Acting like good Milton Friedmanesque molecules, European workers moved to places where their wages were better (only the United States is seriously considered as a possible destination in this model). And, voilà, the world became more like the United States.5 Walter Lippman, in a piece of Second World War propaganda entitled The U.S. War Aims (1944), publicized the phrase the “Atlantic Community,” and ten years later Frank Thistlethwaite summarized the Great European Migration as follows: “The hegira which conquered and settled the North American Continent was part of a great folk movement which embraced the whole Atlantic basin. American growth was part of the growth of a wider community on both sides of the  Atlantic, a community which included not only Canada and the West Indies, but the British Isles and later North Germany and

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Scandinavia. This Atlantic community was perhaps the greatest achievement of the expansion of Europe.”6 These and scores of similar attempts at showing the Great European Migration to be a regular and, indeed, normal phenomenon are necessary. They are perhaps arrogant – sometimes overweeningly self-confident – but are necessary because they are emotionally comforting. Comforting: why would that be desirable in scholarly examinations of a set of social occurrences? Because by excluding the hideously distressing worldwide context in which the Great European Migration took place, the events appear to be not just regular but also normal. The Great European Migration seems to be predictable, to be based upon the rational self-interest of the participants, and thus in some sense to be democratic and therefore moral. In reality, it was anything but. Far from being normal, the Great European Migration was one of the truly freak-phenomena in human history. It was not simply a case of Ravensteinian hydraulics working smoothly in the Atlantic community (although these forces played their part) but mostly a case of human beings scrambling up shingle beaches amid boiling surf. It is possible to celebrate accurately the economic benefits that certain groups in the Atlantic community experienced by virtue of the nineteenth-century migrations because the exact same period of time – 1815–1914 – was also the greatest single period of land theft, cultural pillage, and casual genocide in world history. There is a word for this – imperialism – but it has lost its power to engage most scholars, chiefly because of the interminable wrangles about the term during the late-Marxian era. The word is worth cleansing of its ideological overtones and employing in the classical descriptive sense to refer both to the acts and to the spirit of empire – that is, to a government or a people ruling over lands and populations that were not initially its own. The clearest instantiation that the expansion of Europe ought to be viewed in the context of imperialism comes from the “scramble for Africa.” This is as close to being a laboratory case as one can find concerning the Great European Migration, for it indicates European imperial attitudes without their being an imperative of land grabbing for mass settlement since relatively few Europeans migrated to Africa. If one had taken a photograph of a map of Africa in, say,

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1850, there would have been a few spots of European power (the Belgian royal properties in the Congo, the Cape Colony, French bits of North Africa), yet the map would have been mostly empty. But if we could start in 1876 – when Leopold II of Belgium convened an  unofficial international conference in Belgium that resulted in the Congo Free State being declared a country under European governance – and could then take a photo of the map every two years until 1914, like a time-lapse X-ray of a carcinoma capturing a lung, we would see the rapidity with which the entire African continent came under European government and, at least to some degree, European control. The historical literature on how and why this occurred is huge and contentious, particularly about the degree to which grand geo-strategy or finance capital was causal, but these questions are not relevant here.7 What counts is simply the obvious point that European nations had the self-decreed right to seize control of militarily weaker lands and peoples. This, the spirit of imperialism, is the core of the mental wiring that made the Great European Migration possible. One can make much the same point by using the paint-the-mapred habit that was known to every British schoolchild up to roughly 1950. (Why the British chose red as the iconic colour to mark cartographically their colonies, dominions, and mandates is a mystery.) If one started just after the American Revolution, one would have the Canadas, India, and a few odd specks, such as West Indian islands, in crimson. Thereafter, despite an official governmental reluctance to spend money and manpower to acquire and to govern colonies, the United Kingdom’s migrants to the colonies and dependencies seemingly just started arriving, like iron filings drawn to a magnet. So, by the end of the Versailles Treaty negotiations after the First World War, the United Kingdom in one way or another painted a quarter of the earth’s land surface red. Ultimately, more important was the low-grade, long-duration imperial fever that produced the mature iteration of the United States of America. This matter is one of those strange instances in historical writing when official state propaganda has overwhelmed the professional historians, a group that usually prides itself on checking the authenticity of the hallmarks on the family silver. The standard-issue government view of the United States and imperialism has been that the United States is a nation founded by an anti-imperial revolution and that it cannot therefore ever have been

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imperialist, at least not domestically. This view has been placed beside the unexamined, and therefore hard-to-disprove, belief that the present continental boundaries of the United States are in some way natural and were nearly inevitable. Actually, that the United States expanded from a handful of seacoast settlements into a single imperium nearly the size of Europe was a historical longshot and was made possible only by a mixture of random luck and an implacable desire to grasp. The Louisiana Purchase of 1803 was a piece of luck that fell out of the Great State rivalries in Europe. The War of 1812–14 with the United Kingdom and the Canadas yielded the 49th-parallel border and thus an uncontested path nearly to the northwest coast. And the wars on Mexico led to the annexation of Texas, of California, and of the territory between these two north of the Rio Grande in 1848. Fundamental to the U S imperial expansion within North America – and thus to the Great European Migration – was the Land Ordinance of 1785. This was a quiet document, yet its importance was equal to that of the trumpet-toned Constitution of 1787. It did not deal with ethereal concepts such as the pursuit of happiness but instead declared in practical terms how the land from the Appalachian Mountains up to the Mississippi River was to be conquered. This was to be done by surveyors’ chains, each twenty-two yards in length. The measuring began at an arbitrary point in the Ohio Territory, and invisible lines were drawn on the land to form a grid of perfect rectangles marked by cairns, iron bars, and the occasional brass plate cemented onto a masonry base. Each of the rectangles had its own map reference, and as the U S imperium expanded, the grid eventually reached the Pacific coast and stretched between Mexico and British North America. The lines on the land not only conquered natural topography but also made possible the liberation of parcels of land from their previous occupants and their efficient allocation to newcomers.8 Finally, the once-massive residua of the Spanish and Portuguese Empires in South and Central America shared one of the signal characteristics of the U S experience: countries that broke away from European empires and then operated their own programs of internal conquest. The Spanish and Portuguese Empires were tattered, albeit still hanging on (indeed, the Portuguese royal family had fled to Brazil in 1808) at the end of the European War in 1815. A series of independence movements produced effective levels

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of local autonomy: Ecuador (1809), Paraguay (1811), Mexico (1813), Venezuela (1813), Brazil (1815, confirmed 1822 and 1825), Argentina (1816), Chile (1818), Colombia (1819), Peru, Guatemala, Panama, and Santo Domingo (1821), Bolivia (1825). For the rest of the nineteenth century, these states swirled around in a series of confederations and counterbalancing successions, but they were running their own internal colonial policies. (The chief exceptions were Spanish Cuba, which the United States attacked in 1898 and occupied by force from 1906 to 1909, and Panama, which had been part of Colombia and in 1903 gained nominal independence as a US puppet state.) Each of the independent South and Central American countries had its own land-and-population policy, but the overall pattern is easily recognizable by anyone familiar with the way the Norman marcher-lords dealt with the fringes of England and Wales. Essentially, the completion of the various imperial missions was carried out by hard men (now often taking the form of businessmen, factors, or employees of joint-stock companies) who were acting as subcontractors for the state, which took land and sub-infeudated it with new settlers.

P a rt T wo The ubiquity of imperialism, international and domestic, as a prerequisite for the Great European Migration is undeniable. Where the case for tying together destruction of Indigenous populations, theft of territory, and the Great European Migration is perhaps strongest is in the contexts of North and South America. And because of the tight braiding together of these phenomena, it is also the hardest place to find accurate information. The data problem affects our knowledge of both European and Indigenous populations, but the latter much more severely. As a footnote to the Historical Statistics of the United States observes concerning the historical estimates of the Native US population, “There seems to be a perpetual dispute among historical demographers about the robustness of these numbers, and indeed their relative magnitude.”9 The historical difficulties that hold for the geographical boundaries of the United States are several-fold more challenging for anyone attempting to deal historically with the entire range of North and South America. The source of the problem is simple enough – there was no census of the Aboriginal population(s) in 1492, or

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1592 or 1692 or 1792, and those that were conducted in the nineteenth century were at first methodologically ropey and in later years often affected by cultural exclusions. So one enters an academic free-fire zone. Estimates for the pre-twentieth-century Aboriginal populations in both South and North America are split between those whom David Henige, in a fiercely contrarian but unavoidably important study, has called the “High Counters” and those of more moderate sensibilities. Without entirely accepting Henige’s views, one endorses his two main points. He argues convincingly that the direct data and the  circumstantial evidence of early Amerindian population levels are very weak and must be treated with the utmost delicacy. And he notes that in general the scholarly estimates of the past 100 or so years have been trending upward, generally raising the estimates of pre-Contact and early Indigenous populations, sometimes by multiples of several hundred per cent, like bias in a democratic auction. Henige’s explanation (both directly stated and implied) for these changes is that increasingly scholars – the High Counters – have built big numbers by creating theoretical populations on shards of evidence that should be treated as porcelain rather than used, as the High Counters do, as concrete construction blocks. He further notes that building this form of intellectual architecture has direct career advantages because in academics it is generally advantageous to have a big subject rather than a small one, and he observes, more critically, that in the past forty or so years, the growing field of Amerindian studies (however arranged in universities) and the lawyers’ goldmine of Indigenous land claims have placed a premium on high numbers.10 All of this is consequential for contextualizing the Great European Migration because one would like to know with some rough accuracy the dimensions of the Indigenous populations of the Americas that the Europeans encountered in the early 1800s, what was done to these populations by early Contact, and what continued to occur throughout the nineteenth century. The evidentiary base is simply stated. It is five-fold. First, occasional direct estimates of segments of the Aboriginal population were made by contemporaries – priests and military and civil officials. Second, more often compilations of certain social categories – most often the size of Indigenous armies – are used as surrogate censuses through the expedient of multiplying these categories by some factor. Third, from archaeological sites

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it is possible to estimate certain local populations. Fourth, circumstantial ecological evidence about the human carrying capacity of a given region (say a well-defined floodplain) is sometimes introduced. Unfortunately, these four modes of assay do not knit together very well and do not produce large-scale (national or even provincial) population series over time. So most of the counting – high and low – relies most heavily on the fifth basis, projections backward in time from official and quasi-official (church and mercantile) censuses. The basic process works this way: find the nadir in the level of the Native population one is studying and then find some earlier data, and thus work out a set of compounding coefficients that allow one to project backward in time to what the “real” population must have been in 1800, or 1700, or at Contact. Unfortunately, very few of the historians and ethnologists engaged in this activity have been trained in historical demography. In practice, the various coefficients are kicked up and down considerably, according to pieces of circumstantial evidence concerning, for example, Indigenous vulnerability to specific pathogens. This is not entirely satisfactory. Still, if the specific numbers have a huge wobble in them – I would trust only even the best seventeenth- and eighteenth-century (and most nineteenth-century) estimates plus or minus 30 per cent – we still must deal with the undeniable fact that the Americas once had an Indigenous population that was markedly larger before Contact than it was by the end of the Great European Migration. The most useful broad-scale, long-time series estimates with which I am acquainted come from the work of William Denevan, supplemented here with additional information from the work of Russell Thornton.11 (On Henige’s scale, Thornton, but not Denevan, would be considered a High Counter.) Denevan’s 1976 estimate for the base Aboriginal population of the western hemisphere is simplified in Table 1.1.12 This is in the middle of the range of twentieth-century estimates of the 1492 Indigenous population, which run from somewhat over 8 million to well over 100 million.13 Here, we must break off South America (including Mexico) from the discussion because it has unique difficulties. Even for the present day, no one knows what the Amerindian numbers are. Francisco Salzano and Sidia Callegari-Jacques, respectively geneticist and statistician, wrote in the late 1980s that the number of Amerindians in South America (excluding Mexico) was between 7 and 15 million persons. For a modern population, this range shows a striking degree

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Table 1.1 North America – north of the Rio Grande and inclusive of Greenland, Alaska, and Canada South America – including Mexico (21.4 million) Caribbean Islands Tota l

4.40 million 47.05 million 5.85 million 57.3 million

of indeterminacy.14 William Denevan estimated that between 25 and 26 million Natives lived in the same area at Contact. Obviously, between Contact and the late twentieth century, serious population loss occurred. But this is not the real story, for the population numbers for the period between these two estimates did not follow a straight line. We do know that Amerindian numbers have been recovering from their nadir population for at least a century, but we must conjecture when this nadir was. It would have been different for each regional population; for most, the low point was probably sometime in the second half of the nineteenth century or later. The various figures for North America, which are sometimes applied to South America, put the nadir populations at between 4 per cent and 20 per cent of the pre-Contact numbers.15 The multipliers are conceptually intriguing but have little empirical demonstration and an extreme degree of variance. However, one thing is clear: by the end of the Spanish and the Portuguese Empires, the “X” of rising European populations and of declining Aboriginal populations had already crossed. In the Spanish Empire (including Mexico), probably 750,000 migrants had arrived by 1760 and 1,072,000 by the end of the imperial period. The number from Portugal (meaning, basically, to Brazil) is less certain: under half a million by 1760 but 500,000 by 1825.16 In each case, a sufficient European population had committed to living in the New World so as to permit a permanent European or European-creole society to increase itself numerically. At the start of the Great European Migration (1825 is the date in this case), Spanish America is reckoned to have had a white population of 3,290,000 and Brazil 920,000.17 At that point it is best to stop, with the Indigenous population still dropping, with the New World – born European population and European-creole cohort growing somewhat, and with migration from Europe about to increase.

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Fortunately, mainland North America (defined as everything north of present-day Mexico) is slightly less of a mystery, albeit still quaky ground. To help us get a handle on things, recall the earlier summary table put together by William Denevan, where he suggests that the North American Aboriginal population in 1492 was 4.4 million, inclusive of Greenland and Alaska. Because the real story we wish to define has to do with what is at present known as Canada and as the “contiguous United States,” we can remove Greenland and Alaska from Denevan’s estimate.18 This leaves an estimate by Denevan of a Contact population of 4.23 million.19 Proceeding further, one can forensically infer that when Denevan put together the 4.23 million estimate, it was comprised of a Contact population for the contiguous United States of 3.76 million and for Canada of 0.47 million.20 Stay with Canada, but forget the literary trope of “1492,” for in  western Canada many Amerindian groups did not experience Contact until late in the eighteenth century. Denevan’s heuristic estimate of about 475,000 Canadian First Nations persons at Contact is an interesting and not excessive contrast to the nadir population of slightly over 101,000 in 1906.21 However, drawing a straight line of decline is not defensible (after the American Revolution, the population actually may have grown as the Native allies of Great Britain were given treaty rights to move north and settle), and what the number was in 1815 can only be conjectural. Indeed, what the European population was in 1815 is not certain, although the best estimate is fairly solid: 511,000 in 1811.22 The earliest year for which official sources provide a number is 1851, when the Canadas had a European population of 2.44 million. This had risen to 7.21 million by 1911.23 Obviously, as far as North America is concerned, the contiguous United States is the heart of the matter. Frank Thistlethwaite asserted in his classic 1960 paper that three-fifths of the European out-migration between 1821 and 1924 – that is, about 33 million persons – went to the United States.24 This is a serviceable estimate as long as one is cognizant of the fact that a lot of the in-migrants either moved on to other countries or went home again. Thistlethwaite guessed that “perhaps one-third” of the 33 million re-emigrated from the United States.25 This proportion is probably somewhat too high – it is based on a backward projection of re-emigration data that became available only as of 1907 – and probably overstates the case for most of the nineteenth century.26 But even by this (probably low) figure, 22 million European persons moved permanently into

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the United States during the “long nineteenth century.” When combined with the excess of births over deaths in the U S population, this yielded a massive jump in European-derived numbers – from 7.9 million in 1820 to 81.8 million in 1910.27 Such extraordinary expansion was possible only because of the destruction of most of the Native inhabitants and the imperialization of the overwhelming majority of their former economic resources. This is scarcely a matter of controversy: the main imponderable question is when most of the ethno-racial cleansing occurred. And this matter takes us back into the scholarly fog of early Amerindian population estimates. The nadir of Native Americans in the contiguous United States was 237,000 in 1900. The earliest solid (albeit far from perfect) figure from the U S Census Bureau was 401,000 in 1850.28 Now even if one assumes that the Native American rate of population loss was constant from 1815 to 1900 (which seems unlikely, as one is dealing with a flattening syncline curve whose low point over a several-century period is 1900), the Native population was over 700,000 at the beginning of the Great European Migration. And this figure can usefully be compared with Denevan’s conjectural 4.23 million in “1492.” (This date we can take to mean “first contact,” which for a few tribes in the central mountains of the West was not long before 1850.) What this means is that most of the Amerindians of the contiguous forty-eight states had been cleared away before the Great European Migration but also that a considerable number remained to be dealt with29 – and this was to be no matter of kind and gentle mercies. So what have we observed? First, in areas where the European invasion began before the late eighteenth or early nineteenth centuries (meaning primarily the western hemisphere), the bulk of the Aboriginal populations had been reduced to a fraction of their original numbers before 1815. Second, in these same areas, the process of ethno-racial reduction continued throughout the nineteenth century. Third, in late-conquered areas – New Zealand and Australia – the nineteenth century was the period of Indigenous reduction. Fourth, although certain local bands of Natives sprang back from population decline quite quickly, the general era of nadir populations was in the period 1900–1920 and a decade later in Australia. Fifth, during all of the time from Contact onward, the European population in these imperialized areas grew – unsteadily at first and then at a colossal rate in the era of the Great European Migration.

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Table 1.2 Year

Population

1750

140

1800

187

1850

266

1900

401

1929

478

It is instructive to compare the declination in Aboriginal numbers worldwide not only with European migration to Aboriginal lands but also with the population of Europe itself. If one uses Walter Willcox’s classic estimates, even granting their imperfections, his order of magnitude correctly shows a trend that is the direct opposite of the curve for Indigenous peoples. Table 1.2 lists Europe’s population, expressed in millions.30 Despite Europeans’ proclivity for killing each other during these years in scores of wars and despite off-loading millions of the populace to New Worlds, the explosion in numbers was massive; one can only wonderingly conjecture what the European numbers would have been if the home continent had been peopled by peaceable homebodies.

P a rt T h ree Manifestly, to deal with the Great European Migration as if it were anything other than one of the most amoral freak-moments in all of world history is to miss entirely what it was all about. There never has been – and never again will be – the colonization of “empty” New Worlds of the magnitude of those sub-infeudated during the Great European Migration. There probably never again will be the seizure of territories of a magnitude equal to that grabbed by the European powers, vast lands that were subsequently developed as independent neo-Europes. We may, however, sometime in the future see a combination of war, genocide, disease, and famine reduce populations the way that Contact did among the several Aboriginal populations of the New Worlds. The relationship of the Great European Migration to the imperialization and ethno-racial cleansing of so much of the world is clear but not simple, and we do not understand it with any degree of

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sophistication. The relationship was not a simple linear one, with Europeans the winners and Natives the losers. There existed eccentric eddies in the overall pattern, in which both groups prospered or in which the Natives did rather better out of Contact than did the Europeans. (One thinks, for example, of early European traders being scammed by Maori and of course of battles won by First Nations, even on their way to losing wars.) The point that is most apt to be resisted by historians of those nations that participated in the Great European Migration is that everyone – every person who boarded an emigration vessel, every European peasant farmer who cashed a remittance order from his children in the New World, every missionary, priest, civil servant, and hawker of ballads and newspapers from the old homeland – was part of a single system. This system – call it capitalism, call it democratic market economics, it really does not matter – joined together in a single network the societies of nineteenth- and early-twentiethcentury Europe and the marching army ants who were conquering the New Worlds. It is undeniable that many of the migrants from Europe left deplorable conditions and that many had themselves been victims of several forms of exploitation and abuse. This unassailable fact, however, has led most historians of national migrations to ignore the equally unassailable fact that these same individuals, when in a New World, themselves became oppressors and exploiters, sometimes directly, sometimes only systemically, but always inevitably. Ronald Robinson, one of a previous generation’s most influential commentators on imperialism, pointed to “the ideal prefabricated collaborator” with imperialism: the white settler.31 Robinson articulated his idea with Africa in mind, but it works equally well on the Pampas, the Outback, and the American prairies. True, it might apply to settlers, but one is apt to hear cries that my great-greatgrandfather spent his life stoking coal furnaces in Pittsburgh or my great-grandmother took in washing (and produced babies) in New Haven, Connecticut, and never saw a Native American in life, except once when Wild Bill Cody’s show came to town. It matters not. The systemic character of the market-based economic system means that the man at the blast furnace shovelling coal from mines dug on lands alienated from their original owners and the housewife doing laundry and mending for men who worked in the Winchester Repeating Arms factory were just as much part of the conquest of

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this particular New World as if they had been building a sod hut on the Kansas prairies. How one should incorporate the moral foundational imperialistic aspect of the Great European Migration into the history of any individual national or ethnic migration to a New World is a large and impure mystery. I have yet to see it done fully successfully, but perhaps it has escaped me.32 What is dead certain, however, is that Europe’s “huddled masses yearning to be free” were, from the perspective of the people they dispossessed, Vandals and Huns. Granted, at an abstract level, few historians would reject the idea that the Great European Migration was massively detrimental to Indigenous populations. Yet, in professional historians’ myriad discussions of individual national or regional groups who were part of the migration flow, one too rarely finds any hint that their particular group was part of the Indigenous population’s cruel reduction. I am talking about today; of course, in the late-nineteenth- and early-twentiethcentury celebrations of the alleged heroics of the pioneer generation in battles with Aboriginals, one finds a good deal of blood-andbullets history dealing with fights between the virtuous settlers and the barbarous and untrustworthy Natives. However, in works of migration or ethnic history written since roughly the mid-twentieth century, only rarely does one find a recognition of the fact that every migrant, by virtue of the economic and social system that made migration to the various neo-Europes possible, was an inter-actor with the Natives. And only rarely is there acknowledgment that the better life for Europe’s migrants was paid for in part by a worse life for the dispossessed. To be completely unambiguous: both the Scots and the Irish migrants to the various New Worlds did very well for themselves, and in part this was because they participated in a system that, at best, was gargantuan theft – and, at worst, genocide. At some distant time, the disjuncture in each nation’s history between the pain so many migrants experienced at home and the pain they inflicted in their new land will be joined into a single narrative. For the present, recognizing the dissonance between these two portions of the story is the best we can do.

P a rt F o ur There is more. And one wishes there were not. Yet not only was the Great European Migration the human face on the gargoyle of

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nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century imperialism as it affected the Indigenous populations of several New Worlds, but it was also a free-rider on some (not all, some) of the exploitation of Africans as chattel-slaves. The history of the interpenetration of early capitalism and the African slave trade is a whole scholarly field of its own. For our purposes, the characteristics of the slave trade and of early capitalism that play into the story of the Great European Migration can be seen as part of an unfolding logic tree. The first segment of this tree is the fact that New World slavery was not a matter for whites – except as masters. Only recently have David Eltis and David Brion Davis brought to the forefront of historians’ consciousness how strange this characteristic is. Throughout most recorded European history, whites had enslaved whites, and it all seemed quite natural. “Slave” came from the Latin-Greek sclavus and referred to those unlucky Bulgarians, Serbo-Croats, Poles, Czechs, Moravians, Slovenes, and some Russians, but especially inhabitants of the Caucasus, who were captured by Tartars and other slave traders and hawked around Europe. (As an exception to the middle-European pattern, consider the lives of the Irish captured in the late eighth through mid-tenth centuries by Scandinavian sea raiders and subsequently sold as slaves into the German principalities or Russia.) For reasons that are still not understood, “by the sixteenth century, it had become unacceptable for Europeans to enslave other Europeans.”33 Exceptions were made for felons (such as those sent to Australia), political prisoners (such as Royalists sent by Republicans to the West Indies), and lowrank enemy soldiers (such as captured Irish soldiers sold to the owners of German salt mines), but even these were not really chattel-slaves, and in any case, their status was not hereditary.34 Europe in the early mercantile age could get along without slave labour in the home countries, but the opening of the western hemisphere in the sixteenth century provided an immense labour problem – not very many Europeans wanted to be draught animals on the far margins of the earth. The first response, therefore, was to attempt to enslave significant numbers of Natives. They had the advantage of being on-site and of being adapted to local climate and nutritional conditions, and not being Europeans, they were fair game. This happened in every New World (including, later, individual instances in Australia and New Zealand), but where it really counted was in the Spanish Empire. The most devastating direct impact was upon

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Nicaragua, where approximately 400,000 Amerindians were enslaved and moved to other parts of the Spanish Empire in the first half of the sixteenth century.35 The Spanish case was the worst, but in most places enslaving Natives did not work very well because the Native New World populations were highly susceptible to Old World diseases. Curiously, at an official level, mostly convinced by some abstruse theological considerations, the Spanish began to try to protect Indigenous populations and in 1542 outlawed their enslavement (enforcement of this edict was another matter). The ironic aspect is that the protectors of the Amerindians suggested the importation of Africans as a way to keep the New World Natives safe.36 Therefore, the logic tree ran very simply to a tragic conclusion: that the mines and later the plantations of the New World needed labourers and that since whites would not do the jobs and Aboriginal slaves were not serviceable, the only alternative source was Africa. So slavery became a blackwhite matter, something it never previously had been. Thus began a trading pattern that comprised a pioneer international industry. “The slave trade was possibly the most international activity of the pre-industrial era,” observes David Eltis. “It required the assembling of goods from at least two continents (many different parts of Asia and Europe), the transporting of those goods to a third, and their exchange for forced labour that would be carried to yet another continent.”37 The complex financial underpinning (venture capital, risk management, debt collection) was almost global in its tendrils, and the logistics of moving large numbers of African human beings long distances were later adapted to transporting even larger numbers of Europeans around the world. The magnitude of the African slave trade from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries indicates why experience in the slave trade was capitalism’s apprenticeship in the complexities of mass longdistance human transportation. Table 1.3 is a summary of free and slave transportation according to national jurisdiction for the period 1500–1760.38 When we move the calculation point up to the early 1820s – to just the lip of the Great European Migration – Table 1.4 shows the net migration of Africans and Europeans to the western hemisphere in round numbers (which for Europeans was significantly different from the gross).39

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Table 1.3 Juridical nation

Europeans departing the nation

Africans shipped from Africa

Slaves comprising all migration (%)

Spain

678,000

120,000

15.0

Portugal

523,000

1,691,000

76.4

France

100,000

506,000

83.5

20,000

401,000

95.2

Britain

746,000

1,662,000

69.0

Total

2,067,000

4,380,000

67.9

Netherlands

Table 1.4 Total Africans

8,399,000

Total Europeans

2,365,000

This is to say that up to the period of the Great European Migration, approximately 78 per cent of all previous human transport to the western hemisphere had been from Africa. This changed less quickly than is usually believed. Because at the start of 1808 it became illegal for ships under the flags either of the United Kingdom or the United States to participate in the slave trade, it is easy to miss the fact that Spain and Portugal kept on trading and, indeed, at an increased rate. Spain, in fact, became a major carrier only after 1808 when other nations no longer provided sufficient bodies for Puerto Rico and especially for Cuba. Portugal, to serve Brazil, also increased its rate of transport.40 Only with Brazil’s stopping of imports in 1850 and Cuba’s in 1862, did the transoceanic slave trade promise to become a thing of the past; 1866 is usually taken as the end date. 41 Only during the 1830s did net European migration to the western hemisphere begin to exceed that of African slaves, but even then not in every year; not until the 1840s did the transport of free Europeans come to exceed that of coerced Africans as a continuing and permanent phenomenon.42 These dates cross into the era of events that historians usually think of as making the modern world, things such as the Industrial Revolution and the transformation, through mass diasporas, of much of the world into neo-Europes. Yet, from

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the dominant historical literature on the Great European Migration, it seems as though most of the data on the peopling of the western hemisphere are adjudged to be irrelevant – or are for some reason culturally invisible to us – because they deal with black peoples. There is, indeed, a simple explanation, although not an excuse. I  shall overstate matters for the sake of clarity: for the most part, the international trade in human transport delivered its free cargo (Europeans) to temperate and reasonably healthy places and its Africans to places of discomfort, disease, and of course forced labour. One effect was that the Africans had a shorter lifespan. This explains why, in the years 1500–1820, Africans comprised 78 per cent of the migrants to the western hemisphere but were, in the 1820s, only 47.6 per cent of the total white-black population.43 (These numbers exclude Aboriginal inhabitants.) However, something more is at play. Recall again the classic estimate, referred to earlier by Frank Thistlethwaite, that 55 million persons left Europe between 1820 and 1924, and then note again his addendum: “thirty-three million, or three-fifths went to the United States.”44 Table 1.5 compares this acceptable rough estimate of the distribution of the African slave trade from 1500 to 1866 by place of original disembarkation.45 If historians were obtuse, they might claim that the Great European Migration was mostly a matter of US history, whereas the western hemisphere’s slave trade was mostly somebody else’s affair. Yet they do not do so; in fact, there exists a large literature on the history of slavery in the United States, and there are at present scores of very good historians working on aspects of the topic. But (with a few notable exceptions) historians of the slave trade and of the Great European Migration have segregated themselves from each other. And this has occurred among historians on both sides of the Atlantic; it is not a matter of US parochialism.46 In the contiguous United States during the era of the Great European Migration, the European-derived population grew from 7.9 million (1820) to 81.8 million (1910), the Native American population dropped (as estimated earlier) from roughly 700,000 (c.  1815) to 237,000 (1900), and the African-derived population grew from 1.8 million (1820) to 9.8 million (1910).47 That is, the European-derived population was growing mostly by in-migration but also by natural increase; the African-descended population was growing impressively, almost entirely by natural increase; and the

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Table 1.5 Area of arrival

Rounded number

North America – north of the Rio Grande

Percentage of total

361,000

3.8

Caribbean Islands

4,252,400

44.9

Mainland South and Central America

4,854,800

51.3

Tota l

9,468,200

100.0

Indigenous population seemingly was edging toward extinction. (Many groups did indeed succumb.) Here, one is witnessing a historical sirocco, an unprecedented and unpredictable whirl of forces, wherein cause and effect are indistinguishable because each element feeds back into all the others. Tying them all together was, first, preindustrial mercantile capitalism and then, later, the new capitalism of the industrializing world. Massive as it was, the Great European Migration was only a single vector in a world that was being vertiginously rearranged.48

Not e s 1 I am not denying the reality of the major migrations in Europe – the other “Great Migration” – that occurred in the fourth through seventh centuries of the Common Era. 2 One can easily compile a list of more than 100 books and articles that incorporate this estimate. They run from Frank Thistlethwaite’s paper that began the modern era of European diaspora research to state-of-the-art econometric histories by Jeffrey Williamson. See Thistlethwaite, “Migration from Europe Overseas,” 35; and Hatton and Williamson, Age of Mass Migration, 3, where the number is 55 million for 1850–1914. See also O’Rourke and Williamson, Globalization and History, 119, where the number is 60 million for 1820–1920, a comparable figure. 3 Whether or not the 55–60 million figure is adequately cited, the widely used estimates are extrapolated from one of the amazing scholarly productions of the early twentieth century, the first volume of editors Walter F. Willcox and Imre Ferenczi’s International Migration (1929). The second volume (1931), which was not a seminal work, was a collection of interpretive essays by various scholars with Willcox as sole editor.

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4 O’Rourke, “European Grain Invasion,” 775. 5 See note 2 for Williamson’s most relevant books. 6 Thistlethwaite, “Atlantic Partnership,” 1, emphasis added. Thistlethwaite explicitly recognized his indebtedness to Lippman’s book The U.S. War Aims, especially pages 73–88. Thus the following statement by Lippman at page 87 is noteworthy: “The national differences within the Atlantic region are variations within the same cultural tradition. For the Atlantic Community is the extension of Western or Latin Christendom from the Western Mediterranean into the whole basin of the Atlantic Ocean.” 7 For a synoptic summary, see Flint, “Britain and the Scramble for Africa.” 8 For economy of exposition, I have included British North America under the mention of the British Empire. However, for reference, in the period of this study, the Canadas became largely self-governing in 1867, with four provinces (Ontario, Quebec, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick). These were joined by Manitoba (1870), British Columbia (1871), Prince Edward Island (1873), Saskatchewan (1905), and Alberta (1905). 9 Snipp, “Population and Tribes,” table Ag1-16. His skepticism recorded, Snipp relies mostly on Thornton, American Indian Holocaust. 10 Henige, Numbers from Nowhere. 11 Denevan, ed., Native Population; Thornton, American Indian Holocaust. Thornton’s book, although always inclined to choose the upper limits of most possibilities, has the advantage of being rigorous in providing reference to estimates by earlier scholars, and when he simply has to make his own estimate, he says as much. 12 Denevan, “Epilogue,” 291. 13 Thornton’s own total (not spelled out in any table) was 72-plus million. See Thornton, American Indian Holocaust, 25, 42. 14 Salzano and Callegari-Jacques, South American Indians, 26. 15 Thornton, American Indian Holocaust, 24, referring to the work of Henry F. Dobyns, suggests 4 to 5 per cent; see Dobyns, Their Numbers Become Thinned. This leads to the extreme High Count. For other, lower degrees of Indigenous population decline, see Shoemaker, American Indian Population, 2–3. This is the appropriate point to note that the sort of careful regional work, based on a knowledge of the technical mechanics of historical demography, done by Shoemaker is most apt to lead either to a breakout from the present scholarly guessing game or to a modest recognition that some things are just not knowable with any degree of precision. The Smithsonian Institution’s Handbook of American Indians (projected at twenty-plus volumes, beginning in 1978) may help in this process because

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18

19

20 21 22 23

24 25 26

27

43

of its concentration on regional entities. However, thus far, the methods and results of the various sectors do not fit together very well. Sanchez-Albornoz, “First Transatlantic Transfer”; Eltis, “Free and Coerced,” table 3, 278. Eltis, “Free and Coerced,” table 3, 278. The Indigenous population of Brazil at Contact has been calculated as being about 2,944,000; see Denevan, ed., Native Population, 155. Applying the same destruction rates to Spanish America (admittedly a leap of faith), the 1820 Amerindian population of Spanish America was markedly below the white. This is not quite as cavalier as it may at first seem. Alaska was not tallied as part of the U S census in Aboriginal matters until 1960, so including it skews comparisons to the “lower 48” data. It is best set aside. As for Greenland, it really is not part of the story of the Great European Migration as it affected what are now Canada and the United States. One can do this revision, despite Denevan’s not having spelled out his Greenland and Alaska numbers, because he states that he took his data from the work of Douglas H. Ubelaker and simply doubled Ubelaker’s numbers; see Denevan, “Epilogue,” 291n. One finds Ubelaker’s 1976 estimates in Thornton, American Indian Holocaust, table 2–7, 29. Again, compare Denevan with Ubelaker, as cited above. Also, see Ubelaker, “Sources and Methodology.” Thornton, American Indian Holocaust, 30, citing a 1928 study by James Mooney in Swanton, ed., Aboriginal Population, 33. McInnis, “Population of Canada,” 379. Leacy, ed., Historical Statistics of Canada, table A2-14. Although Canada had a large gross in-migration during the period of the Great European Migration, it experienced almost as large an out-migration. Therefore the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century increase in the Canadian European-derived population should be recognized as primarily a function of natural increase. Thistlethwaite, “Migration from Europe Overseas,” 35. See note 2 above. His source was Ferenczi, “Historical Study,” no page number given. Thistlethwaite, “Migration from Europe Overseas,” 35. Thistletwaite’s references are found in ibid., 58n35. The entire issue of return migration is one of the most difficult in the Great European Migration because it goes to the heart of whether one is dealing with lifelong migration or a form of labour transience. As an introduction, see Morawska, “Return Migrations.” Historical Statistics of the United States, table Aa22-35.

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28 Shoemaker, American Indian Population, table 1.1, 4. 29 These two linked conclusions would hold even if one used Ubelaker’s preContact estimate of one-half of that proposed by Denevan. 30 Willcox, “Increase in Population,” table 14, 78. 31 Robinson, “Non-European Foundations,” 124, original emphasis. 32 I attempted an analogous exercise concerning an earlier period in Akenson, If the Irish. 33 Eltis, “Europeans and the Rise,” 1419. See also Eltis, Rise of African Slavery, 1–28; and Davis, Inhuman Bondage, 27–47. 34 One still encounters strained attempts to equate white indentured labour with African slavery, particularly for the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. These efforts, although often linguistically sophisticated, keep crashing into a real-world chasm: a five-to-seven-year term as a contract labourer, no matter how unpleasant, was vastly different from lifetime servitude not merely in duration but also in kind, as indentured labourers were not actually owned by their employers (the labour product was owned, not the worker); and crucially, African slavery was a heritable condition, something that applied to no contract labour. For a recent, slightly oblique attempt to escape from the recognition of race as the defining character of New World slavery, see Donoghue, “‘Out of the Land of Bondage.’” 35 Radell, “Indian Slave Trade.” David Radell makes a strong case that slaving triggered a population collapse that, accelerated by European diseases, reduced a population of more than 1 million to fewer than 10,000 within a sixty-year period. A related practice – forced labour – was common in parts of the early Spanish Empire, but though coercive, it was not slavery since it was for a finite time. Indeed, it was similar in form (albeit more demanding) to the forced labour exacted by most European governments. On practical details of this Spanish imperial practice, see Lovell, Conquest and Survival, 104–13. 36 Davis, Inhuman Bondage, 55–6, 98. 37 Eltis, Rise of African Slavery, 136. 38 Derived from ibid., table 1–1, 9. This is the appropriate point to pay homage to two scholarly projects, each outstanding in its own generation. One of these is David Eltis’s recording and tabulation of virtually every available shipping record concerning the long-distance migration trade in the slave era. This work is especially admirable for being made available as a resource to be shared with other scholars; see Eltis et al., Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. The other work deserving immense respect is Curtin, Atlantic Slave Trade. Despite being compiled before the computer era, it is confirmed in most of its calculations by the later, much denser data set that

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39 40 41

42 43 44

45

46

47 48

45

Eltis was able to compile and manipulate electronically. The most significant difference is that Curtin calculated that in the period 1500–1866, 290,000 more slaves were shipped to North America than Eltis found to be the case. Calculated from Eltis, “Free and Coerced,” table 3, 278. Rawley, with Behrendt, Transatlantic Slave Trade, 18–90, esp. table 2.1, 21. See also Eltis, “Volume and Structure.” Slavery ended in Brazil in 1888, in Puerto Rico in 1876, and in Cuba in 1886. On the entire history of abolitionism, see Drescher, Abolition. One should add that in addition to illegal transatlantic slavery (in unknown fugitive numbers), a transpacific trade existed, the so-called “blackbirding,” which consisted of the seizure of Melanesians and Polynesians and their sale to South Americans in the last one-third of the nineteenth century. Eltis, “Free and Coerced,” table 1, 256. Calculated from ibid., table 3, 278. Thistlethwaite, “Migration from Europe Overseas,” 35. For an elaboration of these figures that uses the same basic sources, see Baines, Emigration from Europe, table 1, 8. Calculated from Eltis, “Volume and Structure,” table 3, 45. There are no comprehensive data on secondary transfers of slaves – that is, sales of slaves onward from their disembarkation point – and thus the North American numbers may be low. One is not ignoring the fact that Canada served as a transshipment point (by way of the St Lawrence River) for slaves headed to the United States or that slavery was legal in Canada until it was abolished by the Westminster Parliament, effective in 1834. However, the number of actual slaves in Canada was always small. French Canada in 1759 had an estimated 4,000 slaves, of whom two-thirds were Native Americans. After the American Revolution, this number was augmented by an unknown number of slaves brought north by Loyalists to Upper Canada or the Maritimes. A series of legal cases and semi-successful legislative enactments by local assemblies had produced the cumulative effect by 1820 of causing slavery to be a dying practice. (The last person to have spent any part of his life in Canada as a slave lived until 1871.) The standard and still regnant study is Winks, Blacks in Canada. Historical Statistics of the United States, table Aa22-35. My main point in contextualizing the present study is that Indigenous depopulation and African-derived forced migration at minimum have to be explicit starting points for any discussion of the Great European Migration. That noted, I am confident that future scholars will also be

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able to identify and explain some of the ways that the three phenomena intertwined. As an example, see Collins, “When the Tide Turned,” which deals with the possibility that the Great European Migration delayed by decades the movement of large numbers of former slaves or their descendants northward in the United States.

B i b l i ogr ap h y Akenson, Donald Harman. If the Irish Ran the World: Montserrat, 1630– 1730. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1997. Baines, Dudley. Emigration from Europe: 1815–1930. London: Macmillan, 1991. Collins, William H. “When the Tide Turned: Immigration and the Delay of the Great Black Migration.” Journal of Economic History 57 (September 1997): 607–32. Curtin, Philip D. The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969. Davis, David Brion. Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. Denevan, William M. “Epilogue.” In William M. Denevan, ed., The Native Population of the Americas in 1492, 289–94. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1976. – ed. The Native Population of the Americas in 1492. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1976. Dobyns, Henry F. Their Numbers Become Thinned: Native Population Dynamics in Eastern North America. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1983. Donoghue, John. “‘Out of the Land of Bondage’: The English Revolution and the Atlantic Origins of Abolition.” American Historical Review 115 (October 2010): 943–74. Drescher, Seymour. Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery. Cambridge, U K : Cambridge University Press, 2009. Eltis, David. “Europeans and the Rise and Fall of African Slavery in the Americas: An Interpretation.” American Historical Review 98 (December 1993): 1399–1423. – “Free and Coerced Transatlantic Migrations: Some Comparisons.” American Historical Review 88 (April 1983): 251–80. – The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

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– “The Volume and Structure of the Transatlantic Slave Trade: A Reassessment.” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 58 (January 2001): 17–46. Eltis, David, et al. The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade: A Database on C D-ROM. Cambridge, U K: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Ferenczi, Imre. “An Historical Study of Migration Statistics.” International Labour Review 20 (1929): 356–84. Flint, John E. “Britain and the Scramble for Africa.” In Robin W. Winks, ed., Historiography, 450–62. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Hatton, Timothy J., and Jeffrey G. Williamson. The Age of Mass Migration: Causes and Economic Impact. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Henige, David. Numbers from Nowhere: The American Indian Contact Debate. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998. Historical Statistics of the United States. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Leacy, F.H., ed. Historical Statistics of Canada. 2nd ed. Ottawa: Statistics Canada, 1982. Lippman, Walter. The U.S. War Aims. Boston, MA : Little, Brown and Company, 1944. Lovell, George. Conquest and Survival in Colonial Guatemala: A Historical Geography of the Cuchumatan Highlands, 1500–1821. Rev. ed. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1992. McInnis, R. Marvin. “The Population of Canada in the Nineteenth Century.” In Michael R. Haines and Richard H. Steckel, eds, A Population History of North America, 371–432. Cambridge, UK : Cambridge University Press, 2000. Morawska, Ewa. “Return Migrations: Theoretical and Research Agenda.” In Rudolph Veccoli and S.M. Sinke, eds, A Century of European Migrations, 1830–1930, 277–92. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991. O’Rourke, Kevin H. “The European Grain Invasion, 1870–1913.” Journal of Economic History 57 (December 1997): 775–801. – and Jeffrey G. Williamson. Globalization and History: The Evolution of a Nineteenth-Century Atlantic Economy. Cambridge, MA : MIT Press, 1999. Radell, David R. “The Indian Slave Trade and Population of Nicaragua during the Sixteenth Century.” In William H. Denevan, ed., The Native Population of the Americas in 1492, 67–76. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1976. Rawley, James A., with Stephen D. Behrendt. The Transatlantic Slave Trade: A History. Rev. ed. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005.

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Robinson, Ronald. “Non-European Foundations of European Imperialism: Sketch for a Theory of Collaboration.” In Roger Owen and Bob Sutcliffe, eds, Studies in the Theory of Imperialism, 117–42. London: Longman, 1972. Salzano, Francisco M., and Sidia M. Callegari-Jacques. South American Indians: A Case Study in Evolution. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988. Sanchez-Albornoz, Nicolas. “The First Transatlantic Transfer: Spanish Migration to the New World, 1493–1810.” In Nicholas Canny, ed., Europeans on the Move: Studies on European Migration, 1500–1800, 26–36. Oxford: Clarendon, 1994. Shoemaker, Nancy. American Indian Population Recovery in the Twentieth Century. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1999. Snipp, C. Matthew. “Population and Tribes.” In Historical Statistics of the United States, table Ag1-16. Cambridge, UK : Cambridge University Press, 2006. Swanton, John R., ed. The Aboriginal Population of America North of Mexico. Washington, DC : Smithsonian Institution, 1928. Thistlethwaite, Frank. “Atlantic Partnership.” Economic History Review, 2nd ser., 7, no. 1 (1954): 1–17. – “Migration from Europe Overseas in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries.” In Sixteenth International Congress of the Historical Sciences, Rapports V: Histoirée Contemporaine, 32–60. Stockholm: Almqvist and Wiksell, 1960. Thornton, Russell. American Indian Holocaust and Survival: A Population History since 1492. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987. Ubelaker, Douglas H. “The Sources and Methodology for Mooney’s Estimates of North American Indian Populations.” In William H. Denevan, ed., The Native Population of the Americas in 1492, 243–88. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1976. Willcox, Walter F. “Increase in Population of the Earth and of the Continents since 1650.” In Walter F. Willcox, ed., International Migration, vol. 2, 4th ed., 31–82. Cambridge, M A: National Bureau of Economic Research, 1931. – and Imre Ferenczi, eds. International Migration. Vol. 1. New York: National Bureau of Economic Research, 1929. Winks, Robin. The Blacks in Canada: A History. 2nd ed. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queens University Press, 1997.

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2 James Mooney (1861–1921): The “Indian Man” and the “Irish Catholic” Pádraig Ó Siadhail

James Mooney’s career was a New World immigrant success story. Mooney’s background was humble. His parents, James Mooney and Ellen Devlin, natives of north County Meath, Ireland, arrived in New York via Liverpool during the Great Famine, married in New York in 1852, and moved to Richmond, Indiana, where their son, James, was born in 1861. The elder James Mooney earned his living in Richmond primarily as a labourer. After her husband died when young James was only an infant, Ellen Mooney worked long and hard to raise her three children. One daughter became a teacher; another took her vows as a nun. James, after an early career as a journalist in Richmond but already with an abiding passion for Native American studies, moved to Washington, D C, in 1885 to seek employment with the Bureau of American Ethnology (BAE ), a unit within the Smithsonian Institution.1 Mooney was part of a generation of self-trained amateurs who became professional investigators in the field of ethnology before anthropology emerged as a recognized university-based academic discipline. During his years with the BAE , he took numerous fieldtrips to Native communities, living among the people there and working at learning their languages. In the process, Mooney researched and penned an extensive list of publications on Native American culture, including Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees (1891), The Siouan Tribes of the East (1894), Calendar History of the Kiowa Indians (1898), and Myths of the Cherokee (1900). His best-known work, however, was The Ghost-Dance Religion and the Sioux Outbreak

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of 1890 (1896), which investigated the background to and circumstances surrounding the mass killing of Indians by the Seventh Cavalry at Wounded Knee in South Dakota in December 1890. As L.G. Moses notes in The Indian Man, the only published biography of Mooney, most anthropologists still view the Ghost Dance text as a “classic.”2 Much of Mooney’s work remains in print to the present day and is the initial point of introduction for many readers, both academic and general, who wish to learn about Native American culture. Mooney’s professional career was marked by high achievement, and his reputation as a significant scholarly researcher and pioneer in his field of studies seems assured. Although it is easy to list his accomplishments, it is sometimes difficult to get a sense of Mooney as an individual. During his early years with the BAE , he became known as the “Indian Man”; since then, he has also been commonly described as an “Irish Catholic.” This chapter explores the problems associated with these terms, assesses their usefulness in allowing us to understand Mooney’s professional motivation and his personal view of the world, and compares Mooney’s work with that of other “Irish Catholics” in the field. In labelling Mooney the “Indian Man” in August 1893, the Chicago Inter Ocean newspaper sought to highlight his expertise in Native American culture and traditions. Writing for the newspaper, the journalist Lida Rose McCabe concluded, “Probably the man who knows more of the North American Indians than anybody else in the  world is James Mooney, of the Ethnological bureau of the Smithsonian Institution.”3 Similarly, Douglas Hyde, president of the Gaelic League, Irish folk culture collector and scholar, and one-time dabbler in Native Canadian storytelling, wrote, “ní dóigh liom go bhfuil fear eile i nAmerice a bhfuil oiread eólais ar na hIndianachaibh aige agus atá aige-sean” (I don’t think there is another man in America who knows as much about the Indians as he does).4 Neither McCabe nor Hyde, of course, was an expert in the field of Native studies. Yet it is clear that Mooney’s contemporaries and subsequent researchers in the field share an overwhelmingly positive view of his scholarship and contribution. If the initial coining of the epithet the “Indian Man” was for journalistic effect, L.G. Moses’s use of it as the primary title of Mooney’s biography has bestowed a certain validity on the term, although the

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author and publishers were probably merely seeking a catchy title.5 In a literal sense, the epithet was clearly inaccurate: Mooney had no Indian blood. Some people, including senior members of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, thought he had gone Native – this would damage, in effect derail, his active research projects later on – but in fact he spent most of his life working and residing in Washington, D C . Indeed, the “Indian Man” epithet could readily have been applied to  any number of Mooney’s equally gifted colleagues in the field of  Native American studies. A good example is Frank Hamilton Cushing, “the precocious young genius of Bureau ethnology,” who lived with the Zunis in New Mexico for a number of years, leading to rumours that he was a “White Indian.”6 In Mooney’s case, the term the “Indian Man” was a code proclaiming that here was a white man who had learned so much about Native American culture that he could explain to his fellow white men the intricacies of the world of Indians and the workings of – to quote Mooney, using the terminology of the time for what was deemed a primitive people – the “mind of a savage.”7 The implication behind the term the “Indian Man” was at best patronizing and at worst outright offensive toward Native Americans. No real Indian was up to the task of making sense of Natives and their ways. Only a white man could do that. Mooney left scant records, either in the form of public comments or written statements, detailing how and why he became interested in Natives and their world. Disappointingly, his slim collection of extant personal papers contains little that is self-revelatory.8 His biographer, L.G. Moses, and William Colby, who completed a doctoral thesis on Mooney, separately drew on Mooney family lore, specifically information provided by Mooney’s children, to help fill the gaps in detailing Mooney’s early years, including his burgeoning interest in Native American studies.9 Inevitably, one must query the accuracy of this family lore. With few primary sources to explore and chart the “inner” Mooney, the best that his biographer could come up with was: “James Mooney dated his interest in Indians from hearing a chance remark in 1873, at the time of the Modoc War in northern California and southern Oregon, that every little Indian uprising brought to light another unknown tribe.”10 Epiphany is a fine big-bang narrative device, but after the moment of revelation it does not explain why an individual continues the hard work that it takes to become an expert. At any rate, we know that Mooney became fascinated in his youth with Native Americans. Colby states,

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“Curious about the original inhabitants of this continent, he began systematic studies when other boys his age played mumblety-peg or fished in creeks. Mooney’s hobby soon became an obsession, and later it blossomed into a lifetime profession.”11 The young Mooney began reading about Indians, accumulating information about them, and preparing lists, maps, and data. It has also been suggested that his exposure to the work of Earlham College, a Quaker educational institution in Richmond, nourished this interest, as Quaker missionaries and educators were active among the Natives, although this must remain a matter of conjecture.12 Moving to the “Irish Catholic” descriptor, contemporary scholars such as L.G. Moses and Curtis M. Hinsley Jr have on one level merely sought to be factual.13 Mooney was a first-generation American, the child of recently arrived struggling Irish Catholic immigrants. Moses argues that Mooney’s mother raised her children “in the fear of God, the love of the Blessed Virgin, and a firm belief in the stolen grandeur of Ireland.”14 As an adult, however, Mooney turned his back on the Catholic Church. He seldom attended its celebrations or received its sacraments – although as a father he enrolled his children in Catholic schools in Washington, DC.15 This suggests that if there is any meaning to the term “Irish Catholic” as it relates to Mooney, it is as a statement of cultural identity rather than of active religious affiliation. Mooney’s interest in his Irish background manifested itself in three different ways and at three different stages in his career. In Richmond in 1880, he was one of the organizers of the local branch of the American Land League, the United States wing of the Irish Land League established a year earlier in Ireland by Michael Davitt and Charles Stewart Parnell to secure rent reduction and security of tenure for tenant farmers. In 1880 Davitt and Parnell toured the United States to raise funds for their cause. Jay Dolan, a recent historian of the Irish in America, notes, “At its peak the American Land League had as many as fifteen hundred branches located in nearly every state and territory and raised five hundred thousand dollars to support Ireland’s Land League.”16 The Irish population in Indiana in general and specifically in Richmond was not particularly large.17 But the presence of a branch of the American Land League in Richmond linked it not just to a national campaign within the United States but also to a transatlantic one. Thousands of miles separated Irish immigrants and their children from their homeland, but there

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was still an emotional attachment and potential for giving practical support, including financial aid, for the campaign back home known as the Land War. L.G. Moses suggests that political factionalism among the Irish in  Richmond caused Mooney to distance himself from continued involvement in the city’s Irish politics.18 But Mooney could not stay in Richmond if he wished to pursue a career researching and studying Native American culture. The BAE was the place to be, and Mooney headed to Washington. Years later, however, he was one of the founders and first president of the Gaelic Society of Washington, DC , established in 1907. The society organized regular lectures and cultural and musical events in the city for a number of years until it found itself caught up in the controversy surrounding the Abbey Theatre’s tour of the United States in 1911. Established by Lady Augusta Gregory and W.B. Yeats, the Dublin-based Abbey had earned the enmity of sections of Irish Catholic opinion owing to what were deemed offensive stage representations of aspects of Irish society, including Irish womanhood. After Lady Gregory lectured to the Gaelic Society in November 1911 – with Mooney, by then the past president, on hand to honour her – the society suffered a series of resignations, apparently including that of its president, Thomas Shahan, rector of the Catholic University of Washington, resignations from which it never recovered.19 By far the most important and enduring manifestation of Mooney’s interest in his Irish identity, however, was his short series of Irish folklore lectures and essays. During his early period in Washington, Mooney read three lengthy and detailed papers at meetings of the American Philosophical Society on aspects of Irish folk culture: “The Medical Mythology of Ireland” (April 1887), “The Funeral Customs of Ireland” (October 1888), and “The Holiday Customs of Ireland” (May 1889). These papers were published in the Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society for those years.20 Although writers such as Moses refer to the articles, it is only recently that Irish folklore scholars have become aware of Mooney’s Irish essays; the material had not been cited in any major publication dealing with Irish folk culture, including Béaloideas, the long-running Irish folklore journal, and bibliographies of Irish folk literature.21 One can view Mooney’s Irish essays as an attempt to demonstrate his potential as researcher and author to the BAE before he concentrated on his true life-mission as a professional Native American

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investigator. But these essays are fascinating for a whole raft of reasons. Mooney had collected folk material from Irish immigrants in the United States, including Richmond and elsewhere, and had at least one correspondent in Ireland. (There is no evidence that Mooney had been in Ireland by the late 1880s.)22 The rich and eclectic range of material, both in Irish and in English, includes verses of a caoineadh (a literary keen) that were not known to folklore collectors in Ireland. Mooney also sought to draw comparisons between Irish customs and Native American traditions.23 It is difficult to view Mooney as a pioneering figure in Irish folklore studies if we interpret the term “pioneer” as one who not only does groundbreaking work but also influences those who follow; because Irish folklore scholars did not know about his work, it had little or no impact in Ireland. However, Mooney, working on his own initiative in America in the 1880s long before the commencement of formal folklore studies in Ireland, anticipated later individual and institutional efforts by collecting a cornucopia of material about folk medicine and cures, fairy belief, wake and funeral customs, and the folk calendar – subjects that remain fruitful areas of study within the field of Irish folk culture. Mooney wrote no more essays on Irish folklore after 1889, as he directed his energy and time into his Native American research. Although he had included in his Irish folk culture essays some comparative examples from the Indian world, he did not draw on his Irish material in providing a comparative framework for his Native studies – not even in his classic work, The Ghost-Dance Religion and the Sioux Outbreak of 1890. There is only one Irish reference in The Ghost-Dance Religion. At the start of chapter 1, entitled “Paradise Lost,” one finds the following two-line quotation, attributed to “Moore”: “There are hours long departed which memory brings / Like blossoms of Eden to twine round the heart.”24 Moses identifies “Moore” as Thomas Moore (1779–1852), the well-known Irish poet and songwriter who had in the early 1800s travelled across North America.25 The biographer suggests that Moore’s writings were part of the cultural baggage possessed by Ellen Mooney and passed on to her children in Richmond.26 However, there is no evidence that Moore actually composed these lines, which are strikingly similar to lines in the poem “Retrospection” by the American poet James Gates Percival (1795–1856): “There are hours, there are minutes, which memory

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brings, / Like blossoms of Eden, to twine round the heart.”27 More important than whether Mooney got it right, however, is that he believed he was quoting Moore. If so, it was an unfortunate choice. The Irish-born Adam Kidd (c. 1802–31), an immigrant in North America, was the author of The Huron Chief, and Other Poems, a  volume dedicated to Moore. But Kidd also rebuked Moore for promoting falsehoods – “information from the enemies of the poor Indians” – about how Natives killed off their own infirm relatives.28 Of course, Mooney was likely unaware of Kidd’s reproach of Moore. In advance of the publication of Mooney’s The Ghost-Dance Religion, his superiors in the B A E and Smithsonian expressed concerns about chapter 16 of the text, entitled “Parallels in Other Systems,” in which Mooney sought equivalents for the messianic, millenarian, and prophetic aspects of the Ghost Dance phenomenon in other cultures.29 In particular, Mooney’s superiors worried about negative political reaction to comparisons between the experiences and activities of “savages” and those of white European Judeo-Christians and their descendants in the New World.30 As Moses notes, these fears were unjustified, and there was a positive reaction to Mooney’s scholarly attempt to frame his description and analysis of the Ghost Dance within a broader examination of human experience.31 In the chapter, Mooney moved from a discussion of “the Biblical Period” to specific examples such as Joan of Arc and a range of religious sects from the Flagellants in the Middle Ages to the Adventists in the nineteenth century. However, he did not limit himself to manifestations from the Judeo-Christian tradition. He also included a section on “Mohammedanism” (i.e., Islam). Bearing in mind his extensive knowledge of Irish folk tradition and beliefs, and the supporting literature, it is surprising that he did not cite any examples from the large body of messianic, millenarian, and prophetic material in the Gaelic tradition, which formed part of Gaelic Ireland’s reaction to the loss of power, land, and religious freedom during the colonial era. It is possible that Mooney was not familiar with the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century material that attached itself to as diverse a cast as Gaelic chieftains and the royal Stuart dynasty with its pretenders to the triple crown of England, Scotland, and Ireland.32 But it seems unlikely that his mother and his Irish informants of her generation would not have told him about similar traditions from the early nineteenth century, especially the prophecies

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associated with “Pastorini” about the defeat of Protestantism33 and popular stories about “The Liberator,” the larger-than-life Irish Catholic politician Daniel O’Connell (1775–1847).34 The belated realization of the “Indian Man’s” accomplishments as an Irish folklore scholar has forced us to revise the early history of Irish folk culture studies and, of particular relevance here, to recognize that Jeremiah Curtin (1835–1906) was not the only Native Indian scholar who made a significant contribution to the advancement of Irish folklore studies in the late nineteenth century. Curtin’s myth-seeking investigations among Native Americans resulted in major publications, including Creation Myths of Primitive America in Relation to the Religious History and Mental Development of Mankind (1898). His work in collecting folktales in Ireland is well documented, not least in his posthumously published Memoirs (1940). It is worth noting that Mooney delivered his first paper on Irish folk culture two months before Curtin sailed for Ireland to collect mythological tales in the summer of 1887. This Irish fieldtrip resulted in the publication of Curtin’s Myths and Folk-Lore of Ireland (1889) and encouraged him to return to Ireland for subsequent story-gathering fieldwork.35 Curtin’s labours earned him an honoured position in the history of Irish folk culture studies, primarily due to his pioneering endeavours among informants in Irishspeaking districts in the west of Ireland. Given their common Irish Catholic background and their shared interest in Native American traditions, one would expect Mooney and Curtin to have sought each other out. Surprisingly, however, this  was not the case. There is no mention of Mooney in Curtin’s Memoirs, although it should be noted that the published volume bears the definite mark of the hand of Curtin’s widow, Alma Cardell Curtin.36 There are only a few references to Mooney in Curtin’s private papers, and there is no evidence that the two men were anything more than acquaintances.37 One factor may well have been their different backgrounds. Curtin’s family had arrived in the United States before the Great Famine, and although his father died when Jeremiah was a young man, they were settled and modestly well off in Milwaukee. In contrast, Mooney’s parents were part of the generation scarred by the Famine, and Mooney himself suffered economic hardship in a way that Curtin had never experienced. Curtin, who had received his

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postsecondary education at Harvard, was a globetrotter and a polyglot; Mooney, in contrast, was a humble high school graduate who had only his reading from books to fall back on before beginning to work for the B A E. These different experiences affected their views of the world. According to Hinsley, Curtin was “not alienated from or critical of his civilization” and was a disengaged collector with little interest in the living tradition or in cultivating relationships with his informants. Referring to a period that Curtin spent among Natives on the Pacific coast of America, Hinsley notes that “Curtin was more a detached consumer than a committed investigator: ‘Whenever one Indian failed me, I sent for another and, while waiting, I kept my nerves steady by reading Persian,’ he wrote of one visit. In sum, Curtin was never really more than a sojourner anywhere, even in Washington.” Curtin’s goal, states Hinsley, was “to contribute to the library of humanist knowledge, not to participate in history or pass judgment on it.”38 However, as is clear from John Eastlake’s chapter in this volume, Hinsley was too harsh in his judgment of Curtin, as the latter occasionally sought to seek redress from the authorities for Natives with whom he had worked. Hinsley views Mooney as an Irish Catholic outsider, an engaged journalist who was estranged from the mainstream of American culture and who was “associated and concerned with politically and culturally oppressed peoples – Irish or Native American.” “From these roots,” Hinsley continues, “came the central questions of his anthropology: How do oppressed people transmit the binding elements of their culture from one generation to the next? How do those who are defeated and dispersed nonetheless preserve identity and tradition?”39 Despite these differences, Mooney’s and Curtin’s interests and achievements in the spheres of both Native American and Irish folk culture studies mark them out as exceptional. They were not, however, the only “Irish Catholics” who were prominently involved in investigating and writing about Aboriginal American culture in the latter part of the nineteenth century. Two other figures merit attention: the surgeon-scientist Washington Matthews (1843–1905) and the soldier-scientist John Gregory Bourke (1846–96). The two men were friends and colleagues, and they had informal connections with the B A E ; Matthews, in particular, had a close working relationship with Mooney and in many respects became his mentor.

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Matthews was a native of Killiney, County Dublin.40 His father, a medical doctor who named his son after George Washington, took his young family to America after his wife’s death; after returning to Ireland, they finally settled in Iowa. During the American Civil War, Washington Matthews enlisted on the Union side as an assistant surgeon. Fascinated by Aboriginal American culture, he began learning Native languages, continued his study and research while stationed as a surgeon at various military forts, and published primarily about the Navajo. William Lyon describes Matthews as “the founding father of Navajo scientific studies.”41 Unfortunately, there has been only limited scholarly research on Matthews. Writing in 1983, Paul Zolbrod lamented “the continued obscurity of Washington Matthews, who really deserves to be better known. Although today a handful of scholars recognize the value of his even-handed, objective observations and admire him as a pioneer anthropologist, his works are largely out of print and many details of his life remain sketchy. Those who do know of his accomplishments have not succeeded in broadcasting them very widely.”42 Since then, Katherine Halpern and Susan McGreevy have published the first full-length book on his work, the edited collection Washington Matthews: Studies in Navajo Culture, 1880–1894,43 and Zolbrod has continued to publicize Matthews’s groundbreaking career.44 Moreover, a significant number of Matthews’s texts are now readily available as e-books. Much of what we know about Matthews’s life comes from the long obituary written by James Mooney.45 They met when Matthews was posted to the Army Medical Museum in Washington, D C, between 1884 and 1890. Eighteen years older than Mooney, Matthews came from a middle-class family that had no direct experience of the Great Famine. Nevertheless, the two men became friends, and Mooney deeply admired Matthews’s work. Although Lida Rose McCabe and Douglas Hyde viewed Mooney as the pre-eminent scholar in the field of Native American Studies, Mooney himself believed that it was Matthews who deserved this honour: “I consider that you rate highest of Indian authorities for scientific knowledge and close personal acquaintance,” he told Matthews in 1897.46 As Hinsley notes, “Matthews offered Mooney four points of guidance for field work: learn the language; be authoritative but sympathetic; record everything precisely; and avoid preconceptions.”47 This was sound advice that Mooney would benefit from in his fieldwork among the Indians,

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even if he did not always follow it. Colby states, “His strong aversion to the mention of sex in print led him to expurgate racier passages from Cherokee myths and other field notes.”48 To be fair to Mooney, Matthews also contravened his own advice. “It appears that Matthews arbitrarily deleted passages dealing overtly with sex,” declares Zolbrod, writing about Matthews’s translation of The Navajo Origin Legend (1897).49 In this respect, at least, Mooney and Matthews were very much men of their times. Bourke was an army colleague of Matthews on the Indian frontier and his ally in the political and ideological struggles within the field of ethnological studies.50 Born in Philadelphia, Bourke was the son of Irish parents. His mother was a Protestant who converted to Catholicism when she married Edward Bourke, an Irish-speaking bookstore owner who “was a student of the Gaelic folktales of western Ireland. He passed his love of this lore to his children.”51 Edward Bourke ensured that his son was tutored in Irish, Greek, and Latin. Bourke’s biographer notes his subject’s denominational allegiance: “A devout and earnestly practicing Catholic throughout his life, John Bourke remained sensitive to attempts by Catholics to force their doctrines on the unwilling or uninterested. He also revealed an occasional distrust of Protestants and their works.”52 As a career army officer, John Bourke moved from fighting and killing Indians to chronicling, with much insight and sympathy, the worlds and cultures of the Apache, the Hopi, and other tribes in the American Southwest, until his untimely death before the age of fifty. Bourke’s biographer refers to his diaries, his research notes, and his published works as “an enduring and detailed portrait of the Indian and non-Indian West of his time. This is the monument and the legacy of Bourke.”53 Mooney, Curtin, Matthews, and Bourke: here we have four “Irish Catholics” whose careers working, researching, and publishing within the broad field of Native American studies overlapped. One can list the professional and personal connections: the practical assistance provided,54 the reviews of each other’s work,55 the writing of obituaries,56 the friendships and – with Curtin – the acquaintanceships,57 and the companionship that Mooney, Matthews, and Bourke shared when they were active within the Anthropological Society of Washington.58 Curtin stood somewhat outside this group, partly because his work and interests took him far beyond North

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America but also because he appeared to be the dispassionate one when it came to his relationships with Native Americans. Of course, if the field of studies was expansive, the number of active scholars was limited, and one would expect to find similar professional collegiality and personal relationships among its practitioners, irrespective of any common ethnic background. The main element linking these four “Irish Catholics” was not their ethnic or denominational backgrounds but their shared interests and experiences as Native American investigators and scholars. There is no doubt that Mooney and the others were cognizant of  their Irish background. However, the closest any of them came to making an assertion that their background had any relevance to their professional careers was in Mooney’s obituary of Matthews: “By a faculty of mingled sympathy and command he won the confidence of the Indian and the knowledge of his secrets, while by virtue of that spiritual vision which was his Keltic inheritance, he was able to look into the soul of primitive things and interpret their meaning as few others have done.”59 According to Hinsley, Mooney himself sometimes used his Irish background to build a sense of trust with Native Americans. In the summer of 1887 at Cherokee, North Carolina, during his first fieldtrip with the B A E, Mooney was struggling to collect tribal charms until he declared to a local shaman that he could summon a dead person from the grave. He then proceeded to put on a performance involving a series of actions and the reciting of “some Gaelic formulas,” which so impressed the shaman that he consented to trade his own secrets.60 As Hinsley puts it, The key to Mooney’s Cherokee work was his ability to penetrate and participate in this system of knowledge exchange. Gaining trust to enter this exclusive circle of knowledge required time and sensitivity; and, of course, Mooney had to have something to give as well. Matthews’s success among the Navaho shamans in the same period was due largely to his standing as a physician, which permitted a cross-cultural exchange of privileged information: his anthropology was in part professional dialogue. Mooney did not formally possess similar expertise, but he had amassed a large store of Irish lore, stories, and medical remedies. With these he was able to claim a place of respect within the dwindling circle of Cherokee medicine men.61

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Folklorists have not explicitly attempted to connect Curtin’s, Matthews’s, and Bourke’s attraction to Native American culture with their Irish Catholic background. But in using the term “Irish Catholic” about Mooney, American scholars who have no specialist knowledge of Ireland have strayed beyond the incontrovertible fact of his ethno-religious origin and into the dubious area of assumption as to its significance. Seeking to explain Mooney’s interest in and fascination with Native Americans, these scholars have implied that Mooney carried with him religious, ethnic, and cultural baggage from his background and experience as a nineteenth-century Irish Catholic, baggage that caused him to identify and empathize with the plight of a fellow oppressed people. One regularly encounters statements to this effect. Some, such as Hinsley’s comments cited earlier, are nuanced; the same can be said of the following observation by Mooney’s B A E colleague John R. Swanton: “Mr. Mooney’s attitude toward the subjects of his study was not merely scientific. He took an intense personal interest in them, was always ready to listen to their troubles, to lay their difficulties before those who might be able to adjust them, and to spend time and money in aiding them to obtain any and all advantages which he believed to be their just due … This attitude was oftenest in evidence in defense of a subjugated race or an oppressed class, for which the circumstances of his ancestry were no doubt largely responsible.”62 Although Mooney’s biographer, L.G. Moses, acknowledges the importance of Mooney’s personality, he also emphasizes Mooney’s “ethnic heritage.”63 William Colby wisely cautions, “It would be simplistic to state that because of his Irish-Catholic background and limited education he identified with the downtrodden, both white and Indian, but his writings, addresses, and political views did point in that direction.”64 Alas, Colby fails to heed his own advice when he states, “Mooney’s Irish-Catholic heritage predisposed him to empathize with people who had experienced physical and cultural deprivations.”65 George Ellison concurs, declaring, “It seems clear enough that Mooney saw the Indians’ struggles to preserve their various cultures and identities as not dissimilar from the Irish struggle toward the same ends. They were struggles in which he readily participated.”66 Yet one cannot accept as fact the broad statement that it is natural for one community that believes it has been victimized to empathize

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with another community in similar straits. A single illustration suffices: the infamous line “The only good Indians I ever saw were dead” is attributed to General Philip Henry Sheridan (1831–88), the New York State–born son of Irish Catholic immigrants from County Cavan.67 Regardless of context (were the words spoken humorously, and if not, did they not merely reflect a mentality that was not uncommon at the time?) and even regardless of denials from Sheridan that he uttered the statement, it is neither logical nor credible to expect homogeneity in the way that any community will respond to an issue. Just as Sheridan did not represent Irish Catholics at home or abroad, Mooney did not represent them either. Mooney’s worldview was his own. We cannot discount the impact of family and cultural background – or that of the Quakers from his childhood in Richmond, for that matter – on Mooney’s view of the world. However, the voice that is silent on this issue is, of course, that of Mooney himself, who left insufficient personal records to permit a definite conclusion about this question. In the circumstances, his daughter, Alicia Mooney, has provided the soundest comment about Mooney. Rather than accepting the primacy of his Irish Catholic identity in shaping her father and his personal philosophy, she challenged the “assumptions some writers have made that James Mooney was sympathetic to one group or another or to underdogs and that this followed from the knowledge of oppression in Irish history. He was respectful toward what deserves respect in all people, and wanted justice and truth to prevail. Since those who receive the most injustice are the minorities and the poor, his efforts for justice were mostly on their side.” Mooney was a man, she declared, who “dealt from principles.”68 And he was a man of principle. In his final years, the Bureau of Indian Affairs banned Mooney from visiting Indian reservations. He had violated the bureau’s policy and the spirit of the age when he supported the rights of Natives to use peyote, a cactus that has psychoactive effects when ingested, as part of their religious rituals. This prohibition meant that Mooney could not actively continue his research.69 Long afflicted by heart problems, Mooney was sixty years of age when he died in Washington, D C , in 1921. In conclusion, the epithet bestowed on James Mooney, the “Indian Man,” is now a redundant and patronizing term, but it has to be viewed in the context of the times when it was first coined. The

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descriptor “Irish Catholic” is of no use in trying to understand Mooney’s motivation or view of the world, in the absence of supporting documentation. More correctly, we have in Mooney a figure still highly regarded and rightly lauded as a major scholar of Native American culture and, although we missed it for over 120 years, an important early Irish folklore scholar. In light of what we now know about James Mooney, it is time to jettison any simplistic assumptions and to begin an informed critical reassessment of Mooney’s career and achievements in totality.

Not e s Sections of this chapter were first published in Ó Siadhail, “‘The Indian Man’ and the Irishman.” I would like to thank the editor of New Hibernia Review for permission to reprint this material.

1 This biographical information is taken from Moses, Indian Man. For an

2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

10 11 12

account of Mooney’s family connections in Ireland, see Ó Siadhail, “Man from Largy.” Moses, Indian Man, 96. McCabe, “‘Indian Man.’” An Craoibhín Aoibhinn, Mo Thurus go hAmerice, 161, my translation. “An Craoibhín Aoibhinn” was Hyde’s long-established pen name. The title of Lester George Moses’s doctoral dissertation is “James Mooney, U.S. Ethnologist: A Biography” (University of New Mexico, 1977). Hinsley, Savages and Scientists, 192, 195. Mooney, “Medical Mythology of Ireland,” 147. James Mooney (1861–1921) Collection, National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution Museum Support Center, Suitland, Maryland. For example, note Moses’s comment in Indian Man, 3, that “James Mooney left few records from his childhood, but fragments are preserved in the memories of his children.” Ibid., 1. Colby, “Routes to Rainy Mountain,” 35. Ibid., 35, states, “Not all of his early Indian education was from newspaper accounts and history books; Quaker missionaries associated with Earlham College in his hometown frequently lectured on their experiences with native Americans.” Moses, Indian Man, 7, writes, “With Earlham College close by, he [Mooney] came into contact with people who were

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active in Indian affairs and Indian education. He even met a few Indians who attended the Quaker schools in Richmond. Earlham’s library provided him access to books about Indians, reports of the leaders of the western surveys, and the writings of ethnologists, especially those of Lewis Henry Morgan, then regarded as the leading American ethnologist.” Unfortunately, neither Colby nor Moses provides a source for his comments. Quakers had a long involvement with Natives, contributing to their welfare and education, “albeit with uncertain results” (Hamm, Earlham College, 46). The first Indian student at Earlham College arrived in 1880 (ibid.). There is reference to at least one lecture “on the Indians” (Thornburg, Earlham, 161). The Ionian, a male literary society, was active in organizing lectures and debates and may have provided a forum for discussing Native issues (Hamm, Earlham College, 57). However, it is not clear from the two histories of Earlham College published to date how frequent or extensive were the opportunities afforded its students, not to mention a nonstudent and nonQuaker such as Mooney, to hear from Quaker missionaries and educationalists among the Natives or to encounter Native students. Nor is it known whether Mooney was able to gain access to a fairly small college library that placed strict restrictions on its use by female students (mornings) and male students (afternoons) (Thornburg, Earlham, 142–3). Moses, Indian Man, 64; Hinsley, Savages and Scientists, 207. Moses, Indian Man, 3. Ibid., 114, 195. Dolan, Irish Americans, 193. According to the 1850 census, there were 12,787 Irish-born people in Indiana out of a population of 988,416 (i.e., 1.29 per cent of the population). By 1860 the Irish-born contingent had nearly doubled to 24,495 (1.8 per cent of a total population of 1,350,428). The number of Irishborn residents peaked in 1870 (28,698) but declined at first slowly and then precipitiously in subsequent decades (Giffin, Irish, 38). Figures for Irish-born in Wayne County, which includes Richmond, are 884 in 1860 (we have no figures for 1850), rising to 956 in 1870, and then starting to decline, with 852 in 1880 and 593 in 1890 (ibid., 41). Moses, Indian Man, 6. Ó Siadhail, “‘Indian Man’ and the Irishman,” 40–1. Mooney, “Medical Mythology of Ireland”; Mooney, “Funeral Customs of Ireland”; Mooney, “Holiday Customs of Ireland.” My article in Béaloideas appears to have been the first reference to Mooney’s Irish folk culture essays in a publication dealing with Irish folklore (Ó Siadhail, “James Mooney, ‘The Indian Man’”).

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22 W.W.N. suggests that Mooney had been in Ireland in the late 1880s. (‘W.W.N.’ was W.W. Newell, the corresponding secretary of the American Folk-Lore Society.) In a review of Curtin’s Myths and Folk-Lore of Ireland, he referred to Mooney as “a visitor from America, who had learned Gaelic for the purpose of studying the traditions of his ancestral country” (W.W.N., “Review of Myths and Folk-Lore of Ireland,” 250). But to date, there is no other evidence to support this suggestion. Indeed, in a passing reference to Mooney’s Irish essays, Curtin highlights the fact that Mooney had investigated folk medicine beliefs “among the Irish in Washington and Indiana” (Curtin, “European Folk-Lore,” 56). 23 For three such comparisons, see Mooney, “Medical Mythology of Ireland,” 144, 146–7, 156. Overall, Mooney’s Irish essays contain only a limited number of Irish – Native American comparative examples. 24 Mooney, Ghost-Dance Religion, 657. 25 Moses, Indian Man, 87. 26 Ibid., 3. 27 Percival, Poetical Works, 15. There is no reference to the lines ascribed by Mooney to Moore in Thomas Moore, Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore Collected by Himself with Explanatory Notes http://www.gutenberg. org/cache/epub/8187/pg8187.html (accessed 14 September 2011). 28 King, “‘Stranger to Our Sympathy,’” 87. 29 For more on aspects of messianism, millenarianism, and prophecy in the Judeo-Christian tradition, see Cohn, Pursuit of the Millennium; and Wilson, History of the Future. 30 Moses, Indian Man, 91. 31 Ibid., 93. 32 See Ó Buachalla, Aisling Ghéar, 447–662. 33 See Donnelly, Captain Rock, esp. 119–49. 34 For stories and discussion about O’Connell in the Irish popular tradition, see Uí Ógáin, Immortal Dan. 35 For a discussion of Curtin’s fieldwork in Ireland, see Bourke, “Myth Business.” 36 Ibid., 143. 37 I thank Dr John Eastlake, University College Cork, who discussed with me his in-depth knowledge of the Jeremiah and Alma (Cardell) Curtin Papers in the Milwaukee County Historical Society Research Library, Milwaukee. 38 Hinsley, Savages and Scientists, 215. 39 Ibid., 207. 40 Poor, “Washington Matthews,” does not mention Matthews’s denominational background. Nor do Halpern and McGreevy, eds, Washington

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41 42 43 44 45 46

47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54

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Matthews. Hinsley states that Mooney and Matthews “shared an important ethnic and religious bond” (Hinsley, Savages and Scientists, 210). Matthews’s widowed father had remarried in Iowa. One of his sons by his second marriage was Judge Matthew C. Matthews, about whom it was written, “In religious views Judge Matthews is an adherent of the Roman Catholic faith, as were his forefathers” (Oldt, History of Dubuque County, Iowa, 794). Lyon, “Navajos,” 256. Zolbrod, “Poetry and Culture,” 222. See also Link, “From the Desk of Washington Matthews”; and Poor, “Washington Matthews.” Halpern and McGreevy, eds, Washington Matthews. Zolbrod, “On the Multicultural Frontier.” J.M., “In Memoriam.” See also W.W.N., “In Memoriam.” Quoted in Poor, “Washington Matthews,” 53. As regards their friendship, it is worth noting Halpern’s comment about the lack of specific information: “The three brief letters from Mooney in the Matthews Papers … contain no significant personal data on their relationship” (Halpern, “Washington Matthews,” 14–15n18). Hinsley, Savages and Scientists, 210. Colby, “Routes to Rainy Mountain,” 41. Zolbrod, “Poetry and Culture,” 226. Hinsley, Savages and Scientists, 192; Lyon, “Navajos,” 256. Porter, Paper Medicine Man, 1. Ibid., 2. Ibid., 310. In early 1888 when Mooney was working on his Irish folk essays, Curtin sought to obtain books from Ireland for Mooney. Alma Curtin Diary, 1888– 89, 20 January 1888, box 8, folder 146, Jeremiah and Alma (Cardell) Curtin Papers, Milwaukee County Historical Society Research Library, Milwaukee. Mooney reviewed Curtin’s Myths and Folk-Lore of Ireland (Mooney, “Review of Myths and Folk-Lore of Ireland”). He also reviewed Matthews’s Navaho Legends (Mooney, “Review of Navaho Legends”). Matthews reviewed Mooney’s The Ghost-Dance Religion, closing his highly complimentary review with the following witty comments: “It is customary for a reviewer, before concluding his review, to find some fault with the book, if for no other purpose than to show his own superior knowledge. We have read this ponderous tome through, with care, in the hope that we might find some noteworthy blemish; but we are forced to admit that we failed in our praiseworthy quest” (Matthews, “Review of The Ghost-Dance Religion,” 249). He also reviewed Mooney’s Calendar

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57

58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67

68

69

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History of the Kiowa Indians (Matthews, “Review of Calendar History of the Kiowa Indians”). Moreover, Matthews reviewed Curtin’s Creation Myths of Primitive America (Matthews, “Review of Creation Myths of Primitive America”). Matthews published an obituary of Bourke (Matthews, “In Memoriam”). Mooney wrote Matthews’s obituary (J.M., “In Memoriam”). He sought to do the same for Curtin; see Mooney to Alma Cardell Curtin, 23 February 1907, box 11, file 188, Jeremiah and Alma (Cardell) Curtin Papers, Milwaukee County Historical Society Research Library, Milwaukee. It is hard to know what to deduce from the absence of any reference to either Matthews or Bourke in Curtin’s Memoirs, but it is difficult to imagine that he did not know the two personally and was not familiar with their work. Porter, Paper Medicine Man, 272. J.M., “In Memoriam,” 520. Moses, Indian Man, 24. Hinsley, Savages and Scientists, 211. [Swanton], “James Mooney,” 210–11. Moses identifies Swanton as the author of the obituary (Moses, Indian Man, 220). Moses, Indian Man, xiv. Colby, “Routes to Rainy Mountain,” 35. Ibid., 41. Ellison, “James Mooney and the Eastern Cherokees,” 4. Thompson, Native American Issues, 145. Thompson suggests that Sheridan may have uttered the words in jest in 1869, but a year earlier Congressman James M. Cavanaugh – likely of Irish Catholic descent – had announced in the House of Representatives in Washington, DC, “I have never in my life seen a good Indian – and I have seen thousands – except when I have seen a dead Indian” (ibid.). Alicia Mooney to Bill Colby, 22 January 1977, box 1, “File on Mooney and Use of Mooney Material,” James Mooney (1861–1921) Collection, National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution Museum Support Center, Suitland, Maryland. Moses, Indian Man, 216–17.

B i b l i ogr ap h y An Craoibhín Aoibhinn. Mo Thurus go hAmerice nó Imeasg na nGaedheal ins an Oileán Úr. Dublin: Foillseacháin Rialtais, 1937.

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Bourke, Angela. “The Myth Business: Jeremiah and Alma Curtin in Ireland, 1887–1893.” Éire-Ireland 44, nos 3–4 (2009): 140–70. Cohn, Norman. The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages. Rev. ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1970. Colby, William Munn. “Routes to Rainy Mountain: A Biography of James Mooney, Ethnologist.” PhD diss., University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1977. Curtin, Jeremiah. “European Folk-Lore in the United States.” Journal of American Folk-Lore 2, no. 4 (January-March 1889): 56–9. – Memoirs of Jeremiah Curtin. Ed. Joseph Schafer. Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1940. – Myths and Folk-Lore of Ireland. Boston, M A : Little, Brown and Company, 1911. Dolan, Jay P. The Irish Americans: A History. New York: Bloomsbury, 2010. Donnelly, James S., Jr. Captain Rock: The Irish Agrarian Rebellion of 1821–1824. Cork: Collins, 2009. Ellison, George. “James Mooney and the Eastern Cherokees.” In James Mooney’s History, Myths, and Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees, 1–30. Fairview, N C: Historical Images, 1992. Giffin, William W. The Irish. Vol. 1, Peopling Indiana. Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Society Press, 2006. Halpern, Katherine Spencer. “Washington Matthews: Army Surgeon and Field Anthropologist in the American West, 1843–1905.” In Katherine Spencer Halpern and Susan Brown McGreevy, eds, Washington Matthews: Studies in Navajo Culture, 1880–1894, 3–15. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1997. Halpern, Katherine Spencer, and Susan Brown McGreevy, eds. Washington Matthews: Studies in Navajo Culture, 1880–1894. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1997. Hamm, Thomas D. Earlham College: A History, 1847–1997. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1997. Hinsley, Curtis M. Savages and Scientists: The Smithsonian Institution and the Development of American Anthropology, 1846–1910. Washington, D C: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1981. J.M. [James Mooney]. “In Memoriam: Washington Matthews.” American Anthropologist ns 7, no. 3 (1905): 514–23. James Mooney (1861–1921) Collection. National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution Museum Support Center, Suitland, Maryland. Jeremiah and Alma (Cardell) Curtin Papers. Milwaukee County Historical Society Research Library, Milwaukee.

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King, Jason. “‘A Stranger to Our Sympathy’: Radical Romanticism and the Image of the Native American in Adam Kidd’s The Huron Chief and The Vindicator.” Canadian Journal of Irish Studies 33, no. 1 (2007): 82–90. Link, Margaret Schevill. “From the Desk of Washington Matthews.” Journal of American Folklore 73, no. 290 (October–December 1960): 317–25. Lyon, William H. “The Navajos in the American Historical Imagination, 1868–1900.” Ethnohistory 45, no. 2 (1998): 237–75. Matthews, Washington. “In Memoriam: John Gregory Bourke.” Science ns 4, no. 101 (4 December 1896): 820–2. – “Review of Calendar History of the Kiowa Indians, by James Mooney.” American Anthropologist ns 3, no. 3 (July–September 1901): 542–4. – “Review of Creation Myths of Primitive America in Relation to the Religious History and Mental Development of Mankind, by Jeremiah Curtin.” American Anthropologist ns 1, no. 2 (April 1899): 377–8. – “Review of The Ghost-Dance Religion, by James Mooney.” Journal of American Folk-Lore 10, no. 38 (July–September 1897): 248–9. McCabe, Lida Rose. “The ‘Indian Man.’” Inter Ocean, 20 August 1893, illustrated supplement. Mooney, James. “The Funeral Customs of Ireland.” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 25, no. 128 (July–December 1888): 243–96. – The Ghost-Dance Religion and the Sioux Outbreak of 1890. 1896. Reprint, Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1991. – “The Holiday Customs of Ireland.” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 26, no. 130 (July–December 1889): 377–427. – “The Medical Mythology of Ireland.” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 24, no. 125 (January-June 1887): 136–66. – “Review of Myths and Folk-Lore of Ireland, by Jeremiah Curtin.” American Anthropologist 3, no. 2 (April 1890): 191–4. – “Review of Navaho Legends, collected and translated by Washington Matthews.” American Anthropologist 10, no. 6 (June 1897): 192–5. Moses, L.G. The Indian Man: A Biography of James Mooney. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2002. Ó Buachalla, Breandán. Aisling Ghéar: Na Stíobhartaigh agus an tAos Léinn, 1603–1788. Dublin: An Clóchomhar Tta, 1996. Oldt, Franklin T., ed. History of Dubuque County, Iowa. Chicago, I L : Goodspeed Historical Association, 1911. http://www.archive.org/ stream/historyofdubuque02oldt#page/794/mode/2up (accessed 26 January 2011).

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Ó Siadhail, Pádraig. “‘The Indian Man’ and the Irishman: James Mooney and Irish Folklore.” New Hibernia Review 14, no. 2 (2010): 17–42. – “James Mooney, ‘The Indian Man,’ agus Béaloideas na hÉireann.” Béaloideas 77 (2009): 1–36. – “The Man from Largy: James Mooney, Native American Scholar and the Meath Connection.” Ríocht na Midhe 23 (2012): 259–80. Percival, James Gates. The Poetical Works of James Gates Percival, with a Biographical Sketch, in Two Volumes. Vol. 1. Boston, MA : Ticknor and Fields, 1859. Poor, Robert Marshall. “Washington Matthews: An Intellectual Biography.” MA diss., University of Nevada, Reno, 1975. Porter, Joseph C. Paper Medicine Man: John Gregory Bourke and His American West. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1989. Schafer, Joseph. “Introduction.” In Joseph Schafer, ed., Memoirs of Jeremiah Curtin, 1–30. Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1940. [Swanton, John R.] “James Mooney.” American Anthropologist ns 24 (1922): 209–14. Thompson, William N. Native American Issues: A Reference Handbook. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLI O , 1996. Thornburg, Opal. Earlham: The Story of the College, 1847–1962. Richmond, I N: Earlham College Press, 1963. Uí Ógáin, Ríonach. Immortal Dan: Daniel O’Connell in Irish Folk Tradition. Dublin: Geography Publications, 1995. W.W.N. “In Memoriam: Washington Matthews.” Journal of America FolkLore 18, no. 70 (July-September 1905): 245–7. – “Review of Myths and Folk-Lore of Ireland, by Jeremiah Curtin.” Journal of American Folk-Lore 3, no. 10 (July-September 1890): 250–2. Wilson, David A. The History of the Future. Toronto: McArthur, 2000. Zolbrod, Paul G. “On the Multicultural Frontier with Washington Matthews.” Journal of the Southwest 40, no. 1 (1998): 67–86. – “Poetry and Culture: The Navajo Example.” In Brian Swann, ed., Smoothing the Ground: Essays on Native American Oral Literature, 221–44. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1983.

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3 Jeremiah and Alma Curtin’s Indian Journeys John Eastlake

Jeremiah Curtin is an established figure in the field of Irish studies, remembered primarily as a collector of traditional Irish narratives. His anthologies of traditional Irish myths and tales have endured better than many others from the late nineteenth century, and he made an unquestionable impact as one of the first fieldworkers in Ireland to collect Irish-language narratives from Irish-speaking storytellers.1 His work in Ireland’s Irish-speaking areas predated the foundation of the Gaelic League (1893) and anticipated the focus of subsequent collectors.2 And yet Ireland played only a part in his career. His life began on a modest Wisconsin farm, which proved no barrier to his personal quest for knowledge and recognition as a writer and scholar. After graduating from Harvard College in 1863, he became a diplomatic secretary in the United States legation in Saint Petersburg, Russia and later achieved some renown as a linguist, ethnologist, and editor on the basis of public lectures and published collections of Russian, Irish, and Native American traditional narratives (1890–98). His linguistic abilities took on a legendary hue over time, to the extent that after his death in 1906 he was eulogized by President Theodore Roosevelt as one of “America’s top two or three scholars” and was praised for having known seventy languages.3 Curtin was best known in his own lifetime as the translator of the works of Polish novelist Henryk Sienkiewicz and other Polish and Russian authors. It may be noted that Curtin’s grasp of Polish was less than fluent, especially at the outset, and he relied on his

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Russian and French for personal communication when travelling in Poland. Nonetheless, his translation of Quo Vadis (1896) sold over 600,000 copies in just two years. In the last decade of his life, Curtin’s great love and focus was Russian, Buriat, and Mongol history; indeed, the Russian language may have been dearer to him than even English. Since his death, however, Curtin’s Polish and Russian translations and histories have been largely supplanted, his diplomatic work has become a footnote, and his reputation as a linguist has diminished as the discipline has evolved.4 Today, Curtin is perhaps best known, especially in Irish studies, for the three anthologies of Irish material he collected and published, selections from which remain popular and ubiquitous choices for anthologies of “Irish folklore and folktales.”5 The development of his life and work, including his groundbreaking fieldwork in Ireland, was shaped significantly by his employment in the Bureau of American Ethnology (B A E ) from 1883 to 1891. He and his wife, Alma Cardell Curtin, conducted extensive fieldwork with Native Americans across North America in the employment of the B A E , during which time they refined the methods and aims they would utilize in Ireland. Curtin was born in 1835 in Detroit, Michigan, to Irish parents who  migrated to America via Quebec and settled in Greenfield, Wisconsin, just outside of Milwaukee. His father, David Curtin, was from the village of Knockaderry, east of Newcastle West in County Limerick; his mother, Eileen Furlong, came to Quebec at the age of five with her father, from Fermoy, County Cork. The language of the family home was English, although his father also spoke Irish. Curtin grew up on the rapidly developing farmlandfrontier of American society. Indeed, David Curtin’s purchase of land in Greenfield was made possible by the forced relocation of the Potawatomi and other Native Americans from Wisconsin to the Indian Territory in the 1830s. Although Jeremiah was raised as an Irish Catholic, he cast off his confessional identity in early adulthood, avoided Christian services of any type, and embraced agnosticism. Although proud of his Irish ancestry, boasting of the learning of the MacCurtins in Ireland, he saw himself first and foremost as an American. He was intensely Anglophobic, although this may have stemmed more from his sympathy with Russian causes than from his identification with Ireland.6 And although he abhorred

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British imperialism, he saw nothing untoward about Russian imperialism in Poland during the same period. Some have romanticized Curtin’s relationship with Indigenous Americans by suggesting that he was practically reared by Indians and learned several of their languages from infancy. In the opinion of Séamus Ó Duilearga, long-serving head of the Irish Folklore Commission, for example, “[Curtin’s] knowledge of Indian languages stood him in good stead; in his youth on the frontier in Wisconsin he had learned to speak some Indian languages.”7 This was not, in fact, the case and is not substantiated either by the published Memoirs of Jeremiah Curtin or by his or his wife’s surviving papers and diaries.8 Although Curtin certainly met many Europeans and EuroAmericans in Wisconsin growing up, the chance of him meeting Native Americans, who had been forcibly removed from the area where he lived, was small. In short, Curtin reported no childhood contact with Indians – except those who were dead. In seeking admission to Harvard in 1859, he brought “a remarkably fine Indian skull which had been found on the ‘Cook farm’” to the paleontologistbiologist (and proponent of polygenesist theories of human descent) Louis Agassiz in the hopes of impressing him.9 At this stage of his life, it is hard to see any evidence that Curtin had any particular sympathy for or firsthand knowledge of Native Americans or their communities. The attraction of seeing Curtin as a man with a special sympathy for Indian cultures and languages stemming from childhood experiences draws on at least two powerful ideas. One is the widespread and persistent European and American fascination with the figure of the “white Indian”: a white man (usually) with a supposedly superior understanding of Indian culture and language whose competencies are often portrayed as exceeding those of actual Natives. The other has emerged from the tendency in Irish postcolonial thought to align Irish experiences of colonialization with the experiences of other colonized and Indigenous peoples in a reductive and simplistic fashion. Joy Porter has made this point in relation to the work of scholars such as Elizabeth Butler Cullingford on the relationship between “postocolonial Ireland” and “Indian America”: Cullingford argues that this sort of reaching out exemplifies, in Luke Gibbons’ phrase, “lateral journeys along the margins which

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short-circuit the colonial divide.” This idea may seem attractive, especially to an Irish readership, since short-circuiting colonial divides sounds radical and positive. Unfortunately, in great part nothing like this has occurred when Irish culture has reached out towards Indian culture. Instead, if anything, Irish imagic relationships to Indians have reinscribed stereotype and reinforced colonial divisions. Why? Because it has not been actual Indian cultures that Irish art has sought connection with at all, but, instead, with invented colonial caricatures of Indianness that have served, and continue predominantly to serve, the varied interests of the non-native world.10 Reading Curtin as an essentially “Irish” figure whose interest in Native Americans was rooted in his essential “Irishness” may be an extension of a self-congratulatory and uncritical mode of criticism, which seeks principally to draw easy parallels between Irish and Indian experiences. The poet and scholar Eamonn Wall, in seeing the potential abuses present in such a tempting mode of thought, wrote, “It is not easy to speak [of Native America and the Black Hills], however, because, inevitably, I will be tempted to explore the common ground between the experience of the Irish and the Lakota. It is easy to be drawn into fallacy, to feel, as it were, that because one has lived one life, one understands another. Yet certain issues – of land, language, identity, religion, culture – make our histories comparable. Also, such terms as genocide and colonization can be used in discussions of both.”11 Wall goes on to share several insights stemming from his experiences as an Irish person in Irish studies, and he wonders, “Why should I raise my voice on the subject of the Black Hills? It’s certainly not needed. Too many whites have misunderstood Native American culture; why should I add my name to the list?”12 What, then, if not childhood experience, was the source of Curtin’s interest in Native Americans? The Memoirs present his motivation as general scholarly aspiration and indicate that he followed a circuitous route toward his eventual work as mythographer and folklorist. “‘Shall I go to college, or shall I stay on the farm?’” Curtin asked himself. “After a while I got into the wagon and lay down on the fresh hay. It was a clear, dark, moonless night … I lay there looking up into the heavens, and somehow, all at once, the decision came, never to be questioned again: ‘I will find out all that it is possible for me to find out about the world and this vast universe of ours. I will

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have, not the second best, but the best of all the knowledge there is.’ And from that wonderful night … I have been a seeker after knowledge.”13 The desire to have the “best of all knowledge” led Curtin to the ambitious plan of attending Harvard, where admission required a knowledge of Latin and Greek, which he had to attain in a mere seven months to pass the entrance exams. This he managed, with a good deal of ingenuity and, in part, by purposefully arriving late in the term so that he would have to be examined orally one on one, where his forceful and charming personality could be brought to bear. He was twenty-four years old when he entered Harvard, six years older than most of his classmates, but he made several fast friends and acquaintances, studied many languages (including Irish but not any Native American languages), and secured endorsements from notable professors such as F.J. Child, H.W. Longfellow, and J.R. Lowell.14 At Harvard he evinced no particular interest in Native American cultures, although he did recall a revealing encounter with Ralph Waldo Emerson. Travelling to Concord, mostly on foot, to meet the poet, Curtin discovered that Emerson “cared no more for the history of savage peoples than for the history of so many wolves.”15 Although this anecdote was told well after the fact, with the full benefit of hindsight, it conveyed Curtin’s indignation at the dismissal of “primitive” achievements, particularly the development of sophisticated mythologies, as being unimportant or subhuman. Curtin’s indignation stemmed from his belief that knowledge of the “primitive” was essential for a scientific understanding of human history, not from any objection to the application of the category of the “primitive” in descrbing and defining Native Americans and their cultural achievements. Upon graduating, Curtin seems to have flirted with the idea of becoming a lawyer. Instead, he gravitated toward Russian, the study of which he began in college and now improved with the aid of sailors from the Russian fleet docked in the harbour in New York City. Having improved his grasp of spoken Russian, he sought to secure a position with the United States legation to Russia under Cassius M. Clay. In this venture, he succeeded, although he and Clay would eventually fall out.16 During his time in St Petersburg, Curtin availed of leave time to travel extensively in eastern Europe and developed a plan to write a cultural history of Russia. When he lost his post with the legation, he returned to America, where he was instrumental in

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organizing the state visit of the Grand Duke Alexis to Milwaukee, Wisconsin. According to the Memoirs, Jeremiah met Alma Cardell during the Grand Duke’s visit in January 1872 and married her six months later.17 Alma was to be Jeremiah’s constant companion for the rest of his life and became an integral part of his work, accompanying him on all of his travels. Later in the decade, Curtin attempted to start a timber business in the Caucasus, which he was eventually forced to abandon following the outbreak of war between Russia and Turkey in 1877. Returning to the United States, he gave lectures on Slavic literature, culture, and oral tradition and on the topic of comparative mythology. Curtin had kept pace with English and European scholarship on Aryan, or Indo-European, languages and mythology following his studies at Harvard. He was familiar with the work of Max Müller and kept abreast of the linguistic school of comparative mythology, as well as  with developments in evolutionary perspectives and theories.18 During this period, he also studied the languages of India, including Hindi and Bengali. As a result, he was well placed in 1883 to join the Bureau of American Ethnology as a linguist. Curtin became part of the bureau’s team of collectors, linguists, and ethnologists tasked with the production of a linguistic map of Native American languages, a project at least partially promoted and funded on the basis of its perceived utility in dealing with “Indian problems.” At the B A E, under the direction of John Wesley Powell, Curtin was tasked primarily with collecting samples of Indian languages, mostly in the form of short vocabularies, according to a schedule, or template, developed by Powell himself. These would later be analyzed to determine language groupings and demonstrate genetic relationships between languages, often on the most basic evidence, such as phonetic similarities between nouns (“terminological priority”); this was predicated upon a divergence model of language differentiation, similar to that accepted for Indo-European. This research was eventually collated and published as Indian Linguistic Families of America North of Mexico (1891), which was attributed to Powell and included the work of nearly a dozen scholars.19 In the field, however, Curtin spent much of his time collecting traditional narratives – or “myths and mythology,” as he called them – and leaving vocabulary collection for those all-too-frequent occasions when he could not find people able or willing to tell him myths.

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Following a period of preparation in Washington, D C, Curtin undertook his first fieldwork assignment with the Seneca living near Versailles, New York, in 1883. He had already begun to study their language and was gifted with the name of Hiwesas, or Seeker of Knowledge.20 Later that year, at Powell’s direction, he left for the Indian Territory, where he and Alma worked until August 1884. Here, he collected materials from members of the Creek or Muscogee, Yuchi, Choctaw, Modoc, Sac and Fox and Potawatomi, Otoe, Iowa, Kickapoo, Seminole, and Wyandot communities, most of whom had been forcibly relocated from their homelands by the United States government and its agents. Because he was operating in mixed linguistic communities, with significant time constraints and pressures to complete his vocabulary schedules, his work became less detailed than it was with the Seneca. Although Curtin had not been able to study any of the contact languages in advance, he learned Creek, Choctaw, and Modoc to some degree and collected vocabularies using the B A E’s orthography, where Curtin’s gift with phonology was certainly a benefit. At the same time, he continued his quest for narratives. Working with the Modoc at the Quapaw Agency near Seneca, Missouri, he met Ko-a-lak’-ak-a (Hard Working Woman) in February 1884.21 Curtin later identified her as one of the most remarkable people he had ever met in all his travels the world over. He also singled her out, along with Norel-Putis, a Wintu elder, as one of only two Native Americans whom he considered truly remarkable.22 She “had in her mind all the lore her people possessed a hundred years ago. She was the daughter and granddaughter of a chief and when a child her grandfather taught her the wisdom of the Modocs. She had a wonderful memory. Though she was no longer young and her health was poor, she was willing to give me the myths and beliefs of her tribe. She had more stories in her head than I dreamed it possible for any one to learn and keep without aid of books.”23 But there were also informants who “let down” the Curtins in their work. Alma frequently expressed indignation at Native Americans who wanted more pay as informants (the set rate was one dollar a day) and frustration about others who were “too lazy to translate for us.”24 Her diary suggests that the Curtins could sometimes be pushy and impatient with their informants and that they tended to dismiss resistance to their impositions as emanating from mere laziness or stupidity. Alma generally framed her experiences and accounts in terms of

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opposition to her own sense of home and normalcy, rooted in her childhood in Warren, Vermont. Her attitude to Native Americans oscillated between the poles of “dirty” and “pleasant.” On the rare occasions when she found an Indigenous person “pleasant” rather than “dirty,” she was usually referring to the degree to which that person had adopted standards consistent with her conceptions of how things ought to be done. Their next assignment was in northern California, where they worked their way north from Chico and Redding, visiting Indian “ranches” and agencies as well as temporary settlements and collecting myths and vocabularies among numerous communities. Enduring privation, the difficulties of travel and transport in rough territory, and climatic extremes, they were not always in a sympathetic frame of mind. Alma’s diaries record petty frustrations and bigotry toward the very Indigenous people they were seeking out. Reducing the processes of colonization and assimilation, seen as right and necessary or at least as inevitable, to biological metaphors of blood, she had remarked while still in the Indian Territory that “the Wyandottes seem to have mostly forgotten their stories as their blood has run white.”25 This became a common complaint as they travelled through communities devastated by genocide and colonization: the Native Americans they met were no longer “Indian” enough to provide the information that the Curtins sought. Another feature of her diary is her contempt for and disgust with Euro-American “squaw men” who took Indian wives, often outside conventional marriage; in her view, such men were social degenerates who were debasing not only themselves but also the white and Indigenous communities in which they lived. The extent to which Jeremiah shared these views remains unclear, as most of his personal journals are no longer extant – although it seems reasonable to consider that husband and wife may have held similar opinions. At the same time, they were also highly critical of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, of the state of the mission and residential schools, and of the prevalence of corruption and greed they observed in white officialdom. Jeremiah was not a detached, passive observer of Native American culture, and on several occasions, he attempted to get some justice for the Indians with whom he worked. A prominent example can be found in his Creation Myths of Primitive America (1898), where he gave a clear, unflinching,

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and critical account of the 1864 massacres of the Yana people (and  some Wintu people) against the background of the larger Californian genocide and extirpation. Before writing this book, Curtin had been directly involved in seeking some redress for the Yana and the Wintu. In November 1889 members of both communities in Redding, California, granted him power of attorney to act on their behalf, after which he delivered their petition to President Benjamin Harrison: Obtain for us some small sufficient share of land out of that which was once our possession. Obtain for us some means of beginning to live like white men on that land and some means of instructing our children so they may live after us in decent fashion. We ask this payment of the land we lost and for the blood of our kindred which has been shed. Should you our high chief be unable to obtain this justice which would be of small cost to the American Nation, but precious to our peoples, then we beg you to inform us so we may see our position and know at last that for us there is neither justice nor equality in this white man’s Republic.26 Curtin subsequently reported that his intervention on their behalf met with some success, within the constraints of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Harrison appointed an agent who found land for the Wintu and Yana – although Curtin also pointed out that the boundaries were imprecise, that white settlers continued to encroach on their territory, and that further action was needed to safeguard their holdings.27 The thrust of the petition and report was unequivocally assimilationist; the point, after all, was to enable Indians “to live like white men.” Nevertheless, Curtin’s efforts in a stark, violent, and even murderous anti-Indian climate demonstrated that he did have an activist side, even if the results of his activism were mixed.28 As he conducted his fieldwork, Curtin relied heavily on local civil, military, or religious authority figures, such as agents, mayors, priests, shopkeepers, or ministers, to locate “old men” who knew “the myths and folklore of their people.”29 Contrary to the image presented in the Memoirs, he always employed a local interpreter or translator. He or, more frequently, Alma would transcribe their

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interviews in English. Sometimes, Curtin may have synthesized the back and forth between teller, translator, and himself by retelling the story from memory to Alma, who then made a transcription. Very occasionally, he transcribed short passages from the contact language in Roman phonetics using his own system of diacritcal marks. This system may have been an extension of that employed in his work on the vocabularies. Although he did not transcribe entire narratives in transliterated form, he consistently used Roman phonetics to record, in the contact language, the names of places and actors in the stories, even when he might have substitued a common English noun for a character such as “Coyote.” From the field transcript, or working copy, he made editorial corrections, from which Alma made a fair copy; Jeremiah then proofread the copy and sent it to his publisher or deposited it in the B A E archives. Over the course of her life, Alma copied thousands upon thousands of pages, often by candlelight in crude accommodations. During their three visits to Ireland in 1887, 1891–92, and 1899, the Curtins employed the same approach – relying on local authority figures to find informants, operating from temporary bases, using interpreters, and collecting long traditional narratives, usually identifiable with the Irish genres of fiannaíocht or scéalta iontais.30 In areas where they could not find material that Jeremiah regarded as being sufficiently mythic, they moved on quickly. As Angela Bourke has argued, in addition to being fieldworkers and collectors of myths, they were also tourists and did the things that modern tourists do in Ireland.31 As such, they found travelling to more promising localities a pleasant enough solution to most difficulties. All in all, however, they found a cornucopia of material. By the time they finished, they had published three vibrant anthologies of Irish narratives, many of which they first published in fifty serialized newspaper columns in the New York newspaper The Sun. The Curtins’ efforts to collect Native American and Irish myths, and to explain their significance, were grounded in late-nineteenthcentury assumptions about the psychological unity of humankind and about the unilinear and universal progression of all human societies. For Curtin, “myth-narratives,” as he called them, were “the ideas of primitive races [collected] from actual experience or from competent testimony,” which could be properly understood only in a comparative context.32 In contrast to the Finnish historic-geographic

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method of the twentieth century, which attempted to document the diffusion of traditional narratives over time and space, Curtin simply assumed the relationship between myths through the use of internal evidence. This was similar to Powell’s method of linguistic work, which essentially consisted of juxtaposing vocabularies from different languages and drawing conclusions about their relationship or lack thereof on the basis of manifest similarity or dissimilarity. Curtin’s use of “myth” as a category was simultaneously destructive and constructive: destructive, as it did not countenance Indigenous classifications of genre or discourse as significant; and constructive, as it created a levelling framework or theoretical space in which the achievements of all cultures could be appreciated as part of a universal history of human achievement. Applying an understanding of “myth” rooted in a tradition of European scholarship based on interpretations of classical Indo-European literatures left little room for the assertion of the importance or authority of Indigenous peoples’ systems for organizing and understanding their own narratives. Curtin had a great respect for the mental achievements of the primeval and distant figures whom he referred to as the “myth-makers,” those “primitive” men who had transformed observations of physical and moral natures into narratives. Ironically, his respect for the “myth-makers” was not extended to their descendants, whom Curtin often regarded with impatience and frustration. From his perspective, the key function of such people was “saving for science” the myths of their ancestors. He certainly never considered that “myth-making” was an ongoing process that could produce any worthwhile or significant narratives in historical time. By the late 1880s, based on his own experience of more than a score of cultures, Curtin had created a synthetic narrative about all mythology, which amounted to an essentializing, streamlining, reifying version of Native American myth. He explained this at length in the introductions to Creation Myths of Primitive America (1898) and Hero-Tales of Ireland (1894) and referred to it throughout his writing. In his synthesized account of “primitive” creation myths, the first beings, usually conceived of in a pre-existing place, were transformed by various processes of change into natural forces, animals, and environmental features before the arrival of humans. From an “unknown great, indefinite number” of “self-exisiting personages or divinities” who lived in “the first world,” the present world was created by processes of transformation applied universally to its

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inhabitants. These transformations might arise from “the struggle of  hostile personages” or from the special power of the hero. In all cases, Curtin observed these transformations to correspond to a revelation of the essential characteristics of the transformed, such that even though the metamorphoses seemed imposed, they actually revealed the form “which really belonged.”33 He saw Indian myth as being fundamentally about transformation amid conflict rather than about ex nihilo creation. The process was, he believed, comparable to the nebular hypothesis in late-nineteenth-century cosmogony: [Mythology is] quite as far-reaching for the world of mind as is the nebular hypothesis for the world of matter. According to the nebular hypothesis, the whole physical universe is evolved by the rotary motion of a primeval, misty substance which fills all space, and which seems homogenous. From a uniform motion of this attenuated matter, is produced that infinite variety in the material universe which we observe and discover … In the theory of spiritual evolution, worked out by the aboriginal mind of America, all kinds of moral quality and character are represented as coming from an internal movement through which the latent, unevolved personality of … these “first people,” or gods, is produced.34 Curtin’s synthetic “Indian” myth, which he drew from hundreds of Indian narratives, became the yardstick against which he measured the individual texts he collected in his fieldwork. Those texts that he judged as mythic were assigned the highest value; those that he regarded as adulterated myth were lower down the scale; and stories about local history or current events were regarded as being of minor importance, although Curtin believed that many of them contained fragments of myth in their raw materials. In making these judgments, in explaining his theory of mythology, and in elucidating specific myths, Curtin believed that his Native American fieldwork had provided him with the key to understanding all mythology. Native American mythology, he believed, was the most ancient and unaltered in the world and provided insight into the earliest stages of human development. “All myths have the same origin,” he wrote in 1889, “and all run parallel up to a certain point, which may be taken as the point to which the least-developed people have risen.”35 Irish mythology, he believed, emanated from the same source, the “primeval, misty substance which fills all space.” As a result, it

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“shows survivals of that ancient time which will throw light on many myths, and aid in connecting non-Aryan with Aryan mythology; thus rendering a service which we should look for in vain elsewhere.”36 For Curtin, Irish myths formed the bridge between non-Aryan Native American myths and the Aryan, or Indo-European, myths that were the primary focus of contemporary debate. This created a continuous spectrum of myth through all its developmental stages, in Curtin’s estimation, that would further the science of mythology. In effect, Curtin’s work with Native Americans established important precedents for his better-known work in Ireland. His fieldwork methodology was largely a direct product of the years he spent collecting myths and vocabularies in North America for the BAE . His interests were sharpened and shaped by these experiences. And most important, his fundamental assumptions about the nature and value of myth were developed through his work with Native Americans. It is no coincidence that in writing the notes to his second collection of  Irish narratives, Curtin constantly drew on his experience with Indian myth to argue for the mythic status of his Irish material. In reference to the Irish story of Coldfeet, for example, he remarked, “This is a good hero … What a splendid cowboy he would be in the Indian Territory … The bottle of water that is never drained, is like the basket of trout’s blood (also water) in the Indian [Wintu] tale of Walokit and Tumukit.”37 On some occasions, the flow of ideas was reversed. Consider, for example, the way that Curtin framed a story he had collected from “an Orleans Bar Indian”: There was a poor Indian living near the Klamath river, who was imposed upon by his neighbors. They would come to his house, and say, “We are going to take your wife, you haven’t paid enough for her.” They took several wives away from him, but each time the poor man got a new wife. They took his dried salmon and broke down his salmon dam. He was a good-natured man, who wouldn’t fight. At last he had a wife that he didn’t want to part with. One day, when he was sitting on a rock by the river, thinking how lonesome he would be if they took her away, he began to cry. Just then a voice, that seemed to come out of a crack in the rock, asked, “What are you crying about. Tell me, maybe I can help you.”

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“Bad men take my wives away from me,” said the poor man. “I have a good wife now, if they take her I shall never be happy again.” The voice said, “Go home and take care of your wife, I will give you strength to kill those men. Here after you needn’t be afraid of anybody.” The man was happy now and on the way home he tried his strength. He found that he could break a big tree, with his hands. The next morning three strong men came for his wife. He caught hold of one man by the arm; the arm came out of the body. He did the same to the second man; the third one ran away. From that time the poor man was respected and feared. The Indians say that that rock by the river is the home of Fairies, and if a man goes there when he is in trouble and the fairies pity him, they will give him strength, or whatever he needs most.38 Curtin entitled the story “The Fairies: Myth Told by an Orleans Bar Indian: Indians Believe that Fairies Give Them ‘Powers.’” By using the word “fairy,” rather than “spirit,” to describe the voice coming out of the rock, he reframed a Native American story in terms of Irish sí-scéalta, or fairy narratives – which themselves frequently dealt with personal and social problems revolving around marriage. There is no doubt that Jeremiah and Alma collected much material that would otherwise have gone unrecorded and that not enough attention has been given to the cross-cultural significance of their work. To some degree, that lack of attention stems from the fact that much of their Native American fieldwork was never published (and has been accessible only through collections of the Milwaukee County Historical Society and the National Anthropological Archives).39 Their encounters with Indigenous people in the United States were never on equal terms, and much of their work was exploitative and appropriative. At the same time, the Curtins’ experiences with Native Americans shifted their perspective on the meaning of Irish traditional narratives in the context of an axiomatic belief in the universal human inheritance of mental achievements and religious development. In doing so, these experiences raised questions that are still worth asking, including one especially pertinent to the present collection: how are we best to understand Irish traditional narratives in the wider context of contemporary scholarship on indigeneity and narrative?

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No t e s My thanks to Pádraig Ó Siadhail for his groundbreaking work on James Mooney. It has benefited me greatly in my current research on Jeremiah and Alma Curtin. This research has been made possible by support from the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences, for which I am very grateful. I am also grateful for the assistance of the curators of the Milwaukee County Historical Society’s Harry H. Anderson Research Library: Steve Daily and Amanda Wynne. Finally, my thanks to Roinn an Bhéaloidis, University College Cork, for generously hosting my research. 1 The anthologies are Myths and Folk-Lore of Ireland (1890), Hero-Tales of Ireland (1894), and Tales of the Fairies and of the Ghost World Collected from Oral Tradition in South-West Munster (1895). The first contained texts collected in 1887, and the second and third contained texts drawn from Curtin’s extensive fieldwork in Ireland from 1891 to 1893. Many of these were published initially by prior arrangement in the New York newspaper The Sun, by editor Charles A. Dana. In 1944 Séamus Ó Duilearga collected and reprinted a number of Curtin’s Sun articles in a fourth anthology: Irish Folk-Tales Collected by Jeremiah Curtin (1835– 1906). They all contain English-language versions of material, much of which was collected in the Irish language with the assistance of local interpreters. Curtin never published any Irish-language texts and only rarely recorded any material in Irish, as far as archival materials can attest. 2 Curtin was not unique in this regard. The fieldwork team of William Larminie, folklorist, and James Lecky, phonologist, was also actively gathering Irish-language narratives in the 1880s, although as a result of Lecky’s untimely death, far less of their work was published (see MacMahon, “British Phonetics”). Curtin’s first English-language collection, which was published in 1890 and drew on fieldwork from 1887, was recognized as an important milestone by no less a figure than Douglas Hyde (Hyde, Beside the Fire, xv). 3 See Theodore Roosevelt’s introductory remarks in Curtin, Mongols: A History. The “fact” that Curtin knew seventy languages was widely circulated in newspaper obituaries and columns at the time of his death, and this notion persisted for many years – even appearing in an episode of Ripley’s Believe It or Not! in 1931. 4 For a brief overview of Curtin’s career, see Eastlake, “Jeremiah Curtin.” 5 For example, selections from Curtin’s work are included in Glassie, Irish Folk-Tales; and O’Sullivan, Folktales of Ireland.

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6 For instance, see Curtin’s comments on the British state’s aggression during the Boer War, in which he describes Great Britain as “the greatest foe on earth of democracy” (Curtin, Memoirs, 770). 7 Curtin, Irish Folk-Tales, x. 8 Curtin, Memoirs, 31–51. The Memoirs of Jeremiah Curtin were prepared largely after Curtin’s death in 1906 by Alma Curtin, his wife. She drew heavily on her own diaries as well as on Curtin’s notes and correspondence, and many passages in the Memoirs are verbatim transcriptions of her own diaries with the first-person pronoun merely signifying Jeremiah rather than Alma. Although the Memoirs generally accord with the diaries on dates and names, they introduce significant distortion as well, especially as Alma tended to elide her own presence. Alma’s shaping of the text also invariably worked to portray Jeremiah in the most flattering light possible. As a result, comparison between the Memoirs and the corresponding diary, where extant, is usually instructive. 9 Ibid., 47. 10 Porter, “North American Indians,” 263. 11 Wall, “Black Hills,” 118. 12 Wall, ibid., 119, records some of his experiences informing his commentary: “Sometimes, when underprepared yet well-intentioned American ‘experts’ discuss Ireland, I am struck by the fact that these speakers do not believe Ireland to be a culturally separate entity but rather see it as an extension of the United States. These experts, who give Irish Studies a bad name, have learned in seminar rooms the rudiments of Jungian theory, colonialism, postcolonialism, and so on, and feel equipped to understand every other place because, in their view, one place is pretty much the same as the next: Pine Ridge, the Bogside, Soweto, and Kinshasa are interchangeable. At such times, I have felt that my experience of growing up in Ireland, of feeling so bound to its soil that I could taste it in my mouth, is a thing without currency or value.” 13 Curtin, Memoirs, 43. The phrase “a seeker after knowledge” was perhaps a deliberate echo of the name that he was given by the Seneca with whom he worked in and around Versailles, New York (see ibid., 319, and below). 14 Curtin consistently gave his year of birth as 1838, instead of 1835, making himself out to be twenty-one when he entered Harvard (see Schafer, “Place and Date,” 345). 15 Curtin, Memoirs, 62. 16 For an overview and partial assessment of the Clay-Curtin dispute, see Schafer’s introduction to the Memoirs, in ibid., 7–27.

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17 Alma Curtin’s diaries and letters, held in the Curtin Collection of the Milwaukee County Historical Society’s Research Library, offer a wealth of information about their married life together after 1874. 18 For an overview of Müller’s work on comparative mythology, see Dorson, “Eclipse of Solar Mythology.” 19 See Sturtevant, “Authorship”; and Kroeber, “Powell and Henshaw.” In fairness, Powell’s linguistic classifications held up tolerably well for several decades, in contrast to his generalizations about language and culture, which were quickly outmoded (see Holder, “Preface,” vii). 20 Curtin, Memoirs, 319. 21 Entries in Alma’s diaries suggest the possibility that “Ko-a-lak’-ak-a” was the same woman elsewhere identified as “Jennie Lawber’s mother.” Unfortunately, the diary entries are ambiguous on this point, as in the following: “Annie Long John and Etta’s grandmother came to tell us stories. They were rather good, but those of Jennie Lawber’s mother far excel them. This old lady seems to enjoy a story which inclines to the indecent better than the more mythological ones as this had probably been her disposition through life the result is that she has a greater supply of this kind than of any other. She is very old, long ago a great grandmother” (Curtin, Alma Curtin Diary March–June 1884, 5 March 1884). 22 Curtin, Memoirs, 331. 23 Ibid. 24 See, for example, Curtin, Alma Curtin Diary March-June 1884, 23 March 1884. 25 Ibid., 13 March 1884. 26 Curtin, “From Wintu and Yana”; Curtin, Memoirs, 439. 27 Curtin, Creation Myths, 489. 28 In Ireland, during 1887 and 1891–93, Curtin avoided politics, particularly those touching on the Land War, but he did attempt to establish scholarships in West Kerry for the benefit of promising Irish-speaking students. (It is uncertain whether this plan came to anything, as Canon Timothy Brosnan of Cahirciveen was apparently unenthusiastic about it.) In similar fashion to his claims about the effects of the petition on behalf of the Wintu and Yana, Curtin claimed credit for disrupting the enactment of American legislation detrimental to the Irish, which he alleged was the work of Ambassador Lord Lionel Sackville-West: “In a San Francisco paper that I received November 1st was a telegram from New York telling how Patrick Forde, editor of the Freeman, had shown that Senator Morgan of Alabama, Collins, and others, had tried to get an

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extradition bill through congress with a wording detrimental to the Irish. Forde would not have known of this bill till too late to act, had not a representative read it to me. I saw at once what the English, through West, were working for; I secured a copy of the bill and sent it to Forde. I was glad that he had made such good use of it” (Curtin, Memoirs, 414–15). Ibid., 373. Whether in Native America or in Ireland, Curtin consistently sought out the “old men” as informants. In this respect, the extraordinary Modoc woman, Ko-a-lak’-ak-a, was a major exception for Curtin, as he frequently scorned working with women, believing that only old men would have useful information for him. This placed a major constraint, to say the least, on the parameters of his fieldwork. For a thorough discussion of the Curtins in Ireland, see Bourke “Myth Business.” Ibid., 156. Curtin, Creation Myths, xxxviii. Ibid., xii–xiv. Curtin, Hero-Tales of Ireland, xii. Curtin, Myths and Folk-Lore of Ireland, 27. Ibid., 29. Curtin, Hero-Tales of Ireland, 553. Curtin, “Fairies.” It is not possible to identify Curtin’s informant definitively. The manuscript in question gives no more information than “an Orleans Bar Indian.” Juxtaposing various pieces of evidence, including other manuscripts labelled “Orelans Bar” and Alma’s diary entries, it is possible to speculate that the informant was a Karuk speaker. However, this conclusion is complicated, as these other sources suggest that most of the fifteen or so Karuk stories collected were given by a woman named Maggie in Somes Bar on the Salmon River. Also, Maggie may or may not have been willing to tell this story about a man acquiring spiritual power to address the disruptions of his marriages. From Alma’s diary, it is clear that there were also Klamath speakers and Hupa speakers in Orleans Bar, as well as Karuk speakers, when the Curtins were there in March 1889. All of this speculation depends heavily on the assignation of “Orleans Bar” on the fair copy manuscript as well, although there is no particular reason to think that Alma or Jeremiah were inaccurate on this point. Alma Curtin made a concerted effort to publish the majority of Jeremiah’s unpublished works after his death in 1906. In the case of the Native

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American material, she published only Myths of the Modocs, containing Modoc texts collected both in the Indian Territory and in Oregon. Her efforts to publish a more comprehensive collection were not successful. Others working in the field published some of Curtin’s fieldwork as well. J.N.B. Hewitt published most of the Seneca material collected by Curtin (Hewitt, ed., Introduction to Seneca Fiction). Roland B. Dixon published some of the Achomawi (Pit River) material (see Curtin, “Achomawi Myths”). Edward Sapir published a large selection of Wasco texts collected by Curtin (Sapir, Wishram Texts).

B i b l i ogr ap h y Bourke, Angela. “The Myth Business: Jeremiah and Alma Curtin in Ireland, 1887–1893.” Éire-Ireland 44, no. 3 (2009): 141–70. Curtin, Alma. Alma Curtin Diary 1884. Box 8, file 145, Milwaukee County Historical Society. – Alma Curtin Diary March–June 1884. Typescript copy. Box 8, file 145, Milwaukee County Historical Society. – Alma Curtin Diary 1884–1885. Box 8, file 145, Milwaukee County Historical Society. – Alma Curtin Diary 1885–1886. Box 8, file 145, Milwaukee County Historical Society. – ed. “Jeremiah Curtin, Scrapbook 5.” Box 13, Milwaukee County Historical Society. Curtin, Jeremiah. “Achomawi Myths, Collected by Jeremiah Curtin and Edited by Roland B. Dixon.” Journal of American Folklore 22 (September 1909): 3–7. – Creation Myths of Primitive America in Relation to the Religious History and Mental Development of Mankind. 1898. Reprint, Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Company, 1911. – “The Fairies: Myth Told by an Orleans Bar Indian: Indians Believe that Fairies Give Them ‘Powers.’” Box 06, file 123, Milwaukee County Historical Society. – “From Wintu and Yana to Pres. Benjamin Harrison.” Letter of 26 June 1890. Box 02, file 50, Milwaukee County Historical Society. – Hero-Tales of Ireland. Boston, M A: Little, Brown and Company, 1894. – Irish Folk-Tales Collected by Jeremiah Curtin (1835–1906). Ed. Séamus Ó Duilearga. Dublin and Cork: Talbot, 1944.

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– A Journey in Southern Siberia: The Mongols, Their Religion and Their Myths. Boston, M A : Little, Brown and Company, 1909. – Memoirs of Jeremiah Curtin. Ed. Joseph Schafer. Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1940. – The Mongols: A History. 1908. Reprint, Cambridge, M A : Da Capo, 2003. – The Mongols in Russia. Boston, M A: Little, Brown and Company, 1908. – “Mythology and American Myths.” Science 11, no. 277 (25 May 1888): 244–6. – Myths and Folk-Lore of Ireland. Boston, MA : Little, Brown and Company, 1890. – Myths and Folk-Tales of the Russians, Western Slavs, and Magyars. Boston, M A: Little, Brown and Company, 1890. – Myths of the Modocs. Boston, M A: Little, Brown and Company, 1912. – Tales of the Fairies and of the Ghost World Collected from Oral Tradition in South-West Munster. London: David Nutt, 1895. http:// www.archive.org/details/cu31924029910563 (accessed 5 October 2010). Dorson, Richard. “The Eclipse of Solar Mythology.” In Alan Dundes, ed., The Study of Folklore, 57–83. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1965. Eastlake, John. “Jeremiah Curtin: Cross-cultural, Collaborative Textual Production of Irish and Native American Mythologies.” Béascna 6 (2010): 36–44. Foreman, Carolyn Thomas. “Jeremiah Curtin in Indian Territory.” Chronicles of Oklahoma 26, no. 3 (1948): 345–56. Glassie, Henry. Irish Folk-Tales. New York: Pantheon, 1985. Gogol, Nikolai. Taras Bulba: A Historical Novel of Russia and Poland. Trans. Jeremiah Curtin. New York: John B. Alden, 1888. Hewitt, J.N.B., ed. Introduction to Seneca Fiction, Legends and Myths, Collected by Jeremiah Curtin and J.N.B. Hewitt. Washington, DC : Government Printing Office, 1919. – ed. Seneca Fiction, Legends, and Myths. Washington, DC : Bureau of American Ethnology, 1918. Holder, Preston. “Preface.” In Preston Holder, ed., Introduction to Handbook of American Indian Languages and Indian Linguistic Families of America North of Mexico, v–ix. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1966. Hyde, Douglas. Beside the Fire: Irish Folk-Tales Edited and Translated from the Gaelic by Douglas Hyde. 1890. Reprint, Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1910.

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Kroeber, A.L. “Powell and Henshaw: An Episode in the History of Ethnolinguistics.” Anthropological Linguistics 35, no. 1 (1960): 1–5. http://www.jstor.org/stable/30028242 (accessed 20 June 2012). Larminie, William. West Irish Folk-Tales and Romances. Shannon, Ireland: Irish University Press, 1972. MacMahon, M.K.C. “British Phonetics in the 1880s: The Work of James Lecky.” Historiographia Linguistica 6, no. 1 (1979): 47–56.   O’Sullivan, Sean. Folktales of Ireland. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1968. Porter, Joy. “The North American Indians and the Irish.” Irish Studies Review 11, no. 3 (2003): 263–71. Sapir, Edward. Wishram Texts (Volume II) Together with Wasco Tales and Myths, Collected by Jeremiah Curtin. Leyden: American Ethnological Society, 1909. Schafer, Joseph. “The Place and Date of Jeremiah Curtin’s Birth.” Wisconsin Magazine of History 22, no. 3 (March 1939): 344–59. Sienkiewicz, Henryk. The Deluge: A Historical Novel of Poland, Sweden and Russia: A Sequel to “With Fire and Sword.” Trans. Jeremiah Curtin. 2 vols. Boston, M A: Little, Brown and Company, 1891. – Pan Michael: A Historical Novel of Poland, Ukraine and Turkey. Trans. Jeremiah Curtin. Boston, M A: Little, Brown and Company, 1894. – Quo Vadis: A Narrative of the Time of Nero. Trans. Jeremiah Curtin. Boston, M A: Little, Brown and Company, 1896. – With Fire and Sword: A Historical Novel of Poland and Russia. Trans. Jeremiah Curtin. Boston, M A: Little, Brown and Company, 1891. Sturtevant, William C. “Authorship of the Powell Linguistic Classification.” International Journal of American Linguistics 25, no. 3 (1959): 196–9. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1263798 (accessed 19 October 2009). Wall, Eamonn. “The Black Hills, the Gorey Road, and Object Lessons.” In From the Sin-é Café to the Black Hills: Notes on the New Irish, 109–26. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1999.

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4 Transnational Dimensions of Irish Anti-Imperialism, 1842–54 Cian T. M c Mahon

In the summer of 1935, Benito Mussolini was preparing to recapture the ancient glory of Italian imperialism by invading Ethiopia. In Geneva the head of the Irish Free State government, Eamon de Valera, warned the League of Nations’ diplomats of the threat that Mussolini’s actions represented. “Make no mistake,” he urged, “if on any pretext whatever we were to permit the sovereignty of even the weakest State amongst us to be unjustly taken away, the whole foundation of the League [of Nations] would crumble into dust.” A year later, after Mussolini had captured Addis Ababa, de Valera lamented, “All the small States can do, if the statesmen of the greater States fail in their duty, is resolutely to determine that they will not become the tools of any great Power.”1 This is a significant moment in the history of modern Ireland, for it intertwines two important themes whose historical roots have sometimes been neglected. First, it shows that Irish nationalists were capable of sympathizing with nonwhite victims of imperialism. Second, it illustrates an acknowledgment that Irish anti-imperialism was part of a wider, international struggle for freedom and selfgovernment. This chapter analyzes the nineteenth-century roots of this internationalist posture. “Anyone seeking to sketch a history of Irish anti-imperialist discourse,” wrote Stephen Howe in Ireland and Empire (2000), “soon finds it to be, until one reaches the very recent past, a surprisingly thin subject.” Mid-nineteenth-century Irish nationalists “hardly ever identified their situation or cause with that of other, non-European

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subject peoples in the British Empire or beyond.” There were racial reasons for this, Howe argued, as well as political ones. After all, no influential public figures in Britain at the time were seriously advocating self-government for nonwhites. Irish nationalists feared, therefore, that linking their struggle for political independence to colonial parallels in Afghanistan or China could only undermine their cause. There were occasions when major players like Daniel O’Connell and Charles Stewart Parnell voiced sympathy for Africans, but recognition of affinities between the Irish and nonwhite colonial subjects, concluded Howe, “was the exception rather than the rule” in the nineteenth century.2 Thanks in part to Howe’s book, the past ten years have witnessed a flowering of work from a variety of angles on the tangled issue of Ireland and empire. Thankfully, most have transcended the wellworn question of whether Ireland was really a colony. Kevin Kenny’s edited volume on Ireland and the British Empire (2004) investigated how Ireland’s relationship to the British Empire changed over time and space, offering a more complicated picture than previously available. Michael de Nie’s The Eternal Paddy (2004) considered how questions of race and empire influenced the development of British and Irish identities, and Joseph Lennon’s Irish Orientalism (2008) examined the intellectual and literary links between Ireland and Asia from the medieval period to the twentieth century. Niamh Lynch’s work has shown how anti-imperialism became an increasingly important motif in Irish nationalism during the nineteenth century, and Bruce Nelson has argued that for turn-of-the-century separatists such as Michael Davitt and Erskine Childers, “whiteness was the essential foundation of the right to self-government.”3 Nelson’s work has also unearthed the words and actions of colourblind intellectuals in Ireland and beyond, yet there is still much work to be done to determine the degree to which nineteenth-century Irish nationalists explicitly identified their struggle with that of nonwhite, colonial subjects. Did co-victimhood trump race? This chapter breaks new ground by offering a transnational illustration of how and why Irish nationalists living in the middle decades of the nineteenth century drew clear connections between Irish and nonwhite struggles against British imperialism. The years between 1842 and 1854 offer a fruitful field for inquiry into this subject. Millions of square miles were added to the British Empire between 1815 and 1914, making the period unquestionably Britain’s “imperial century.”

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The middle decades, in particular, witnessed flashpoints in the ongoing “Great Game” between Britain and Russia for control of Central Asia, and an “informal” imperialism tightened British economic hegemony in places such as China. During the early 1840s, the movement to win political independence for Ireland by repealing the Act of Union was in full swing under Daniel O’Connell, who had harnessed a mass movement of farmers, artisans, and the clergy. Until 1846 O’Connell could count among his lieutenants a group of energetic men in their late twenties and early thirties whom the London press labelled “Young Ireland.” Dedicated to employing the printed word to raise nationalist consciousness in the country, the Young Irelanders founded a weekly Dublin newspaper called the Nation, which immediately enjoyed a wide and loyal readership. Following the outbreak of the Great Famine in 1845, a radicalized Young Ireland parted ways with O’Connell’s constitutional approach to Repeal. This coterie of editors and journalists is a useful test case for the present study precisely because anti-imperialism was a common theme in the columns of their newspaper. Following their abortive rebellion in 1848, several of the Young Ireland leaders were exiled to Australia, which had its own ambivalent relationship with the British Empire. These mid-nineteenth-century Irish anti-imperialists situated their struggle against British oppression in an international context. Unafraid to associate themselves with nonwhite colonial subjects, they were not narrow-minded bigots who, as one historian has claimed, “rarely looked further than their Irish noses.”4 Instead, writers and readers alike of the Irish nationalist popular press saw British oppression as part of an international, universal problem of human freedom. Rather than undermine their domestic project, associating themselves with nonwhite victims of colonialism gave Irish nationalists both a moral high ground and a supranational edge that transcended the day-to-day politics of home. In retrospect, it should come as no surprise that Irish nationalists situated their national struggle in an international context. The 1840s and 1850s witnessed the global migration of more than a million Irish people. This hard fact encouraged (or forced) Irish people to acknowledge the outside world to a degree that they had not needed to do before. There was also a more calculating edge. British imperial hegemony controlled the transmission of news and opinion between Ireland and the outside world. By associating themselves

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with co-victims of oppression, Irish nationalists subverted the British “story” of empire with their own, alternate version. In so doing, the Young Irelanders internationalized Irish nationalism. Thomas Davis and his colleagues had high hopes for the Nation when its first issue appeared on the morning of Saturday, 15 October 1842. It was an “able, Irish, and independent” weekly newspaper dedicated to guiding “the popular mind and the sympathies of educated men of all parties to the great end of nationality.”5 Independence imbued everything the Young Irelanders did. “We make this newspaper with the hard labour of many hands and heads,” Charles Gavan Duffy proclaimed. “We create it out of rags and blacking, and when the work is done we call it our own with a safe conscience.”6 Full sovereignty required having contacts with the outside world unmediated by Britain and the British Empire. The popular press would facilitate these connections. “It is peculiarly needful for Ireland to have a foreign policy,” wrote Davis. “A People known and regarded abroad will be more dignified, more consistent, and more proud in all its acts.” “By cultivating Foreign Relations, and growing intimate with foreign states of society,” he argued, “we will hear a free and just criticism on England’s constitution and social state.”7 From the start, therefore, the Young Irelanders approached Irish independence from a transnational perspective. As part of their internationalization of Ireland’s struggle, the Dublin Nation expressed explicit and vehement support for fellow victims of British imperialism. In only its second month, the Nation lamented the British victory at Ghizni in Afghanistan. “Tyranny has conquered – crime has triumphed,” it declared. “The patriot and the true are vanquished or dead. The blood of the brave is upon the hillsides of Affghanistan [sic].” Thomas Davis encouraged his fellow Irish to have pity on “these poor brave Asiatics.” “Justice and pity,” he reminded his readers, “know no distinctions of clime or race, or  time.” By contrast, the Chinese, who capitulated to the English by  signing the Treaty of Nanking in August 1842, were derided as  effeminate wimps. “Poor China – big, feeble, bed-ridden old woman – why did it enter thy crazy night-capped head that … thy mother-o’-pearls swords, and crockery fortifications, could save thee” from English “villainy”? “Brave men, lavish of blood, and fierce of fight for native land” deserved sympathy. Let the “poltroon and the imbecile” sink “unless he has the spirit to swim.”8 British

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oppression was, in other words, a transnational phenomenon that simultaneously sacrificed “the innocent and amiable Bengalese,” “butchered” the Chinese, and “sunk … the old and glorious races of Ireland.”9 The Young Irelanders disdained England’s “motley and tyrannous flag” and the claim that “her tottering and cruel empire [was] the needful and sufficient guardian of our liberties.”10 Irish anti-imperialism was especially stirred in late 1842 when it emerged that the Dublin Corporation was considering offering the freedom of the city to British generals who had served in Afghanistan and China. The O’Connellite Freeman’s Journal declaimed these “brigand chiefs who robbed the Chinese and slaughtered the Affghans.” “Do the citizens of Dublin sympathise with England in her recent crusade against the liberties of the Affghan nation [and] war of plunder against the unoffending Chinese?” it demanded to know. “Assuredly not.” For the Freeman’s Journal, the issue facing the citizens of Dublin was simple. “Do you sympathise with those who slaughtered the defenceless infants, violated the women, butchered the aged, and left famine in their track,” it asked, “or are your sympathies with the innocent victims of British policy?”11 The Nation joined the chorus of opposition. “The first step to nationality is the open and deliberate recognition of it by the People themselves,” declared Thomas Davis. “Once the Irish People declared the disconnexion of themselves, their feelings, and interests from the men, feelings, and interests of England, they are in march for freedom.” Ireland’s “interests are separate, and her rights peculiar,” he wrote. “We are not English – let us thank God for it. England’s history is not ours; we are not involved in her crimes, and need not fear their punishment, unless we provoke it by making common cause with her.” At this point, however, in the relaxed days before the Famine, Davis could envision a happy, independent Ireland operating within a broader British framework. “We owe allegiance to Victoria, Queen of Ireland,” he maintained, but “We owe no allegiance either in law or conscience to the prosperity of English crime.” He described those who would vote for the Dublin Corporation’s resolution as “unhappy men, who, professing to be Irish, voted against their country and their consciences to conciliate Saxon patrons, or propitiate Saxon insolence.”12 Perhaps the most virulent opposition to the Dublin Corporation’s pro-imperialist proposal came not from the editors of Dublin’s nationalist press but from the readers themselves. One of the

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remarkable aspects of the anti-imperialism of the paper’s correspondents was the degree to which they situated themselves and their history within an international context. China was “whipped into subjugation and slavery,” lamented “Patricius,” “because she would not tamely submit to the demoralization of her children, through the  infamous traffic in a deleterious drug [opium]!” The Dublin Corporation members should consider the parallels with Irish history before supporting this behaviour. “Perhaps, by looking into the pages of Irish history,” wrote “Patricius,” “they would find, in the treatment of their martyred ancestors by the Saxon invader, cases parallel to [China] … the reminiscence conjuring up a blush of shame [that] might check the reproachful laudation.”13 Similarly, “A Milesian” refused to claim “joy or approbation of the conduct of the English in China, where scenes of devastation and murder have been committed on an unoffending people.” “If the Irish identify themselves with the English in these deeds of slaughter,” warned “A Milesian,” “how can they come forward to claim a repeal of the Union at the hands of the murderer and the incendiary?”14 The Freeman’s Journal also published letters to the editor that linked the oppression of the Irish and the Asians. After praising “your talented journal [for] being ever foremost in denouncing the oppressor, and defending the oppressed,” “A Burgess of the Linen Hall Ward” in Belfast expressed his disbelief that the Dublin Corporation was considering passing a vote of support for “the paid and willing instruments of tyrannical power … who have violated the laws of God and man in their unjustifiable, brutal, and sanguinary assault on the unoffending Affghans and Chinese.” He reminded his readers that British officials had “practiced as much of the same sort of bravery! in Ireland in ’98.”15 Similarly, an open letter from “A Citizen” claimed that the English invaded Afghanistan “for the purpose of devastating a land that they could not conquer.” “Dare you as men, as Irishmen, as Christians shout plaudits for such deeds?” he asked. “British bayonets – British yeomen once traversed this fair land of yours. Do you forget it? I do not.”16 Nationalism in Ireland waxed and waned during the middle years of the 1840s. The success of the Dublin Nation in 1842 was followed by Daniel O’Connell’s declaration that 1843 was “Repeal Year.” A series of carefully planned “monster meetings” occurred across the country, some attended by hundreds of thousands of people, and O’Connell’s “Repeal Rent” boosted funds. Yet when a

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proposed meeting at Clontarf in the autumn of 1843 was proclaimed by the government, O’Connell cancelled it out of fear of army violence. His submission knocked the wind out of the Repeal movement. In 1845 the outbreak of the Famine, the collapse of the American Repeal clubs, and the premature death of Thomas Davis robbed Irish nationalism of much of its energy. O’Connell’s death two years later further weakened the movement. As the Famine continued, however, Irish nationalism became increasingly radicalized. With the fiery northern Presbyterian John Mitchel now working as head editor of the Dublin Nation, the newspaper’s transnational anti-imperialism took on a sharper edge. English imperialists were at work around the world, warned Mitchel, “swallowing up the nationhood and individual character of innumerable kindreds, and tongues, and people, (which is national death,) and crushing down, with their accursed dead weight, the healthy, vital energies of mankind.”17 “We do not feel tempted to imitate those ‘virtues’ of conquest displayed by this neighbor of ours, Britannia,” he scoffed in April 1847. “We do not envy the Babylonian woman her scarlet.”18 He took a scathing view of Irishmen who served in the British army. “While Ireland yields her blood and treasure to perpetuate these impious crimes against the human race,” he wrote, “while she permits Irishmen to bear the murderous flag of England over the graves of other nations – while we are the tools of English robbery, we shall ever be, and deserve to be, the victims of it too.”19 The following summer, after Young Ireland’s rebellion had broken out and the majority of the Nation’s staff had been arrested, an imprisoned Charles Gavan Duffy smuggled out one last editorial for publication. Crushed by hunger and coerced by an alien government, he claimed that the Irish had no recourse but to arms. Success against the British forces would represent a victory “for all the races scattered over that wide desert of sordid tyranny upon which the sun never sets.”20 To the bitter end, therefore, the Young Irelanders and their supporters situated Irish resistance to Britain within a broader, supranational struggle for human freedom. Despite his leading role in the Dublin Nation, Charles Gavan Duffy was never convicted of a crime in 1848. His friends and colleagues were not so lucky. Many, like Thomas D’Arcy McGee, John Blake Dillon, and Richard O’Gorman, evaded arrest and escaped to the

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United States, where they became leaders of an Irish-American community that was being dramatically inflated by the mass migration that accompanied the Great Famine. Seven of the Young Irelanders were arrested, put on trial, and sentenced to exile in Van Diemen’s Land (present-day Tasmania) off the southern coast of Australia. John Martin and Kevin Izod O’Doherty were convicted of treasonfelony and sentenced to ten years’ transportation. William Smith O’Brien, Thomas Francis Meagher, Terence Bellew McManus, and Patrick O’Donohoe were found guilty of high treason. Sentenced to  death, their punishments were commuted to life transportation in Australia. They would have to make new homes in the farthest reaches of British settlement. The seventh Young Irelander exiled to the Antipodes was John Mitchel. Having left the staff of the Dublin Nation in early 1848 after falling out with Charles Gavan Duffy, Mitchel founded a vitriolic new weekly entitled the United Irishman. His inflammatory articles soon got him in trouble with the British government, which, fearing the kind of revolution that had wracked France in February, employed a packed jury to convict him of treason-felony. Mitchel was sentenced to fourteen years transportation and, although initially imprisoned in a floating hulk off the coast of Bermuda, was eventually sent to join his fellow Young Irelanders in Van Diemen’s Land. During his years of exile on the high seas and in Australia, Mitchel kept a diary that was subsequently published in book form as Jail Journal. In it, Mitchel continued to situate his brand of Irish antiimperialism within a broader, transnational framework. The hierarchy of races and nations was not, Mitchel reasoned, fixed across time and space. Instead, the progress of the human species “is circular,” such that “some nations that do now bestride the narrow world will learn lessons of true philosophy, but not new philosophy, in sackcloth and ashes. And other nations, low enough in the dust now, will arise from their sackcloth and begin a new national life.” Wherever one went in the world, one saw England’s racial heritage at the root of British imperial commercialism. “Your Anglo-Saxon race worships only money, prays to no other god than money, would buy and sell the Holy Ghost for money,” complained Mitchel, “and believes that the world was created, is sustained, and governed, and will be saved by the only one true, immutable Almighty Pound Sterling.”21

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Although living in a remote spot in the South Pacific, the Irish in Australia found ways to get unfiltered news directly from home. Writing to a friend in Ireland, John Martin explained that although the news printed in local newspapers was mediated by London, this did not prevent friends and family from mailing copies of Irish newspapers directly to Australia, where they were subsequently passed around among friends. Martin’s colleague Thomas Francis Meagher “has received a good many Weekly Freemans [Dublin Freeman’s Journal] and an old school fellow of Mitchel’s and mine whom we have lately met here” shared his collection too.22 Most important was the connection with Charles Gavan Duffy, who, after the collapse of his trial for treason, reopened the Dublin Nation in September 1849. He immediately started mailing copies of the weekly directly to the prisoners in the Antipodes. “Three months ago I sent you a file of the Nation up to that time,” he told Meagher in late 1850. “I now send you three complete files of the first year.”23 Two years later, William Smith O’Brien could boast of running “a sort of circulating library [of Irish newspapers and books]” for friends and fellow exiles.24 So, despite overwhelming obstacles, the Irish in Australia were capable of staying in touch with the outside world to a greater degree than some historians have previously suggested.25 This undoubtedly contributed to the international dimension of their Irish nationalism. In a move that would have pleased Thomas Davis, the Irish Australian Freeman’s Journal, based in Sydney, promised its readers “copious and authentic news from our suffering but faithful Fatherland” when it was founded in the summer of 1850.26 As settlers in the farthest outpost of the British Empire, carrying collective memories of oppression at home, the Irish in Australia found themselves in an ambivalent position. On the one hand, they sought to justify imperial sprawl by pointing out that only a scattering of Aborigines peopled the vast lands of Australia. In the view of the Sydney Freeman’s Journal, the mainstream voice of Irish Australian Catholicism, “The only consideration to justify any State or Nation in seizing whole tracts of uncultivated lands occupied before by the rude children of Nature must be drawn from the fact of such state, undertaking by every reasonable means within its power, to improve the condition of those untutored beings whose natural inheritance they have thus usurped.” Short of this, it was unfair to take land “without offering some fair and proportionate compensation to the injured and dispossessed original inhabitants of the soil.”27

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On the other hand, the paper had an anti-imperialist edge that sought to illustrate connections between the oppression of the Irish in Ireland and that of Natives around the world. “It is natural for men who have themselves felt the heavy hand of oppression … to feel for their fellow-men struggling under similar grievances,” it argued in January 1852.28 Two aspects of “England’s colonization” stood out in bold relief. First, “that England has far surpassed all other European nations in their attempts at colonizing distant and uncivilized regions for the last hundred years.” Second, “that wherever England has undertaken the work of colonization, there the Aboriginal races, the Lords of the Soil, have almost totally disappeared in the course of a few generations!” In particular, the Freeman’s Journal was disturbed by “the systematic destruction of the Tasmanian Aborigines” in Van Diemen’s Land. In time, the paper warned, the “Almighty Father” would punish those “who have thus trampled on the common rights of humanity.”29 The Young Ireland prisoners themselves similarly associated the Irish struggle for independence with the dispossession of Natives in Australia and around the world. William Smith O’Brien, the moral leader of the Irish exiles, certainly expressed such sentiments in his diary. One of his biographers, Richard Davis, has characterized Smith O’Brien’s political position on imperialism as one that “attempted to combine a genuine Irish nationalism with a belief in the British empire and monarchy.”30 The evidence certainly bears out Davis’s conclusion. In the months before the 1848 rebellion, Smith O’Brien told a meeting of nationalists in Ireland that “we seek no more than national independence under the sway of the sovereign of the empire.” And yet, at the same meeting, he also asserted that “our sympathies ought never to be withheld from nations suffering under oppression.” Irish nationalists must always ensure “that no injustice be perpetrated or sanctioned by the British government, without such remonstrance, upon our part, as will exonerate us from participation in the guilt of unprovoked aggression.”31 Smith O’Brien’s ambivalence toward British imperialism survived the voyage to the Antipodes. On the one hand, his journal entries supported the European settlement of Australia on the grounds that “a few barbarian tribes scattered over the surface of an immense territory” had no right to monopolize the land.32 On the other hand, the history of English colonization in Ireland showed how “the introduction of ‘civility’ and pure religion” could sometimes serve as

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a justification for “every aggression however wicked and indefensible.”33 “The Red Indian in North America, the aborigines of Australia, the Kaffirs in South Africa,” he lamented, “are gradually exterminated from the soil which gave them birth,” and the Chinese are “compelled to receive as masters, those who originally obtained a footing in eastern lands under the guise of merchants or friends.”34 Irish service in the British Army only heightened the drama. Smith O’Brien derided those Irish-born “mercenary soldiers who go forth to distant lands to fight in maintenance of England’s perfidy or injustice. Our young ‘heroes’ fall in inglorious warfare,” he complained, “against naked savages of Kaffirland who nobly dare to defend their mountain passes against an unscrupulous invader.”35 Despite seeing great potential for hearty European yeomen in the empty lands of Australia, his time in Van Diemen’s Land indelibly marked Smith O’Brien’s heart with sympathy for Aboriginal Australians. After reading John West’s The History of Tasmania (1852), he wrote that “perhaps in the annals of mankind there is no page more dark than that which records the extinction of the Aborigines of Tasmania.”36 Despite their vast experience with editing newspapers, only one of the Young Ireland exiles, Patrick O’Donohoe, founded a weekly newspaper in Van Diemen’s Land. Established in January 1850, the Irish Exile and Freedom’s Advocate refused to “pander to power, or shrink before oppression, but will be ready to defy tyranny in every form and in all places, and to S U S T A I N T H E O P P R E S S E D O F EV ER Y C LI ME , C R E E D, A ND C OL OU R.”37 O’Donohoe denied that the Australian-born children of European settlers could lay claim to the land by “birthright.” It was, rather, “the copper-coloured natives, with their hearts full of red blood, to whom and to whom only, this sunny land appertained.” Aboriginal Australians, like the dispossessed Irish in Ireland, were victims of “robbing [British] adventurers.”38 When short on original material, O’Donohoe often reprinted editorials and lectures from other Irish newspapers around the world to drive home his belief that the Irish were co-victims of British imperialism. A lecture by Joseph Brenan originally delivered in New York, for example, claimed that the chain Britain “forged for India and Ireland … will yet encircle itself. The blood-drops of the murdered Sikh and the famine-stricken Irishman arise, like accusing murdered spirits, to God, and he will return them in drops of fire to [British imperialism’s] heart.”39 Although it did not last for very long, the Irish Exile and Freedom’s Advocate was a loud voice

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dedicated to subverting the imperial ideal in Australia and connecting Aboriginal dispossession to the Irish experience. The seven Young Ireland prisoners were sentenced to between ten years and life imprisonment in Van Diemen’s Land, but in fact none of them stayed longer than five years. Between March 1851 and June 1853, four of them escaped to the United States, including John Mitchel, who declared that “wherever the British flag throws its poisonous shadow I may find a prison, or a grave, but a home never.”40 The following year, news reached Australia that the remaining prisoners (John Martin, Kevin Izod O’Doherty, and William Smith O’Brien) had been granted conditional pardons and were free to leave the Antipodes. The Irish Catholic population of Australia rejoiced at the news, and several meetings were arranged to see the men off. At a public meeting held in Sydney in honour of the prisoners, Father John McEncroe, founding editor of the Australian Freeman’s Journal, reminded his audience of the motivations that had driven the actions of the men of 1848. “All that the Irish people sought previous to 1848,” he declared, “was that they should be placed on the same footing with regard to national and constitutional rights and privileges as the other peoples which constituted the empire.”41 In his reply, Smith O’Brien illustrated his amenability toward British imperialism while simultaneously situating the Irish struggle for freedom in a transnational context. “If Ireland be well governed, agitation will be disarmed of its power,” he said. “[I]f ill governed, even the feeblest of our refugees may become a formidable enemy to the empire upon whose territory the sun never sets.”42 The words and experiences of the Young Irelanders at home and abroad throw into sharp relief the ambivalence over empire that lay at the heart of mid-nineteenth-century Irish nationalism. Although dedicated to repealing Ireland’s membership in the United Kingdom, many of the moderates were willing to countenance a role for Ireland in the British Empire. By portraying the vast, seemingly empty lands of Australia as a God-given arena for European agriculture, these men were in keeping with the general currents of contemporary social thought. The Sydney Freeman’s Journal was excited by the potential lying dormant in massive tracts of uncultivated land, and Smith O’Brien objected to the notion that a few scattered “barbarian tribes” could monopolize such huge areas of potential farmland. If properly managed, British imperial outposts

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like Australia could provide Irish settlers with the kind of farmsteads they lacked at home. At the same time, these mid-nineteenth-century Irish nationalists situated the British oppression of Ireland within a broader, international framework that included nonwhite colonial subjects in Asia and Africa. “We are battling for Ireland,” exhorted Thomas Davis in 1843, “if we conquer, ‘twill be for mankind.”43 His readers agreed, including “Patricius,” who was convinced that anyone who looked into “the pages of Irish history … would find, in the treatment of their martyred ancestors by the Saxon invader, cases parallel to [China].”44 Although directly benefiting from British colonial settlement of Australia, the Irish in the Antipodes did not forget this international anti-imperialism. Even the mainstream Sydney Freeman’s Journal believed that it was “natural for men who have themselves felt the heavy hand of oppression … to feel for their fellow-men struggling under similar grievances.”45 Indeed, they rued “the systematic destruction of the Tasmanian Aborigines” in Van Diemen’s Land.46 All of this sheds new light not only on the question of Ireland and empire but also on Irish nationalism more generally. One year into his editorship of the Dublin Nation, Thomas Davis reflected on the accomplishments of the new weekly. By keeping British imperial malefaction ever in the columns of the Nation and by explicitly linking these international affairs to the domestic struggle for independence, the Young Irelanders had given birth to an independent Irish foreign policy. “If the conduct of England in Affghanistan and China is understood here [in Ireland] now,” wrote Davis; “if foreign nations know our strength, our discontent, our wrongs, our resolves; if they express sympathy for, and know that we feel too much gratitude of them … to attach or assist in attacking them, save in our defence, we believe The Nation deserves part of the credit of such a commiseration.”47 O’Connell had internationalized the Irish independence movement when he fostered a transatlantic Repeal movement in Ireland, Britain, and the United States. But the Young Irelanders globalized Irish independence in a different way. By demanding that Irish nationalists develop an independent foreign policy unmediated by Britain and the British Empire, they fostered a tradition that would continue throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

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It should come as no surprise, therefore, that when de Valera became head of the Free State government in 1932, the one ministerial portfolio he reserved for himself was that of External Affairs. Nor should it raise any eyebrows that the imperialist bullying of Ethiopia in 1935 played a critical role in the adoption of Irish neutrality during the Second World War. De Valera, like Thomas Davis, Charles Stewart Parnell, James Connolly, and Arthur Griffith, recognized the international dimension of nationality.

No t e s 1 de Valera, Peace and War, 45–6, 59. 2 Howe, Ireland and Empire, 43–5, 49. 3 Kenny, ed., Ireland and the British Empire; de Nie, Eternal Paddy; Lennon, Irish Orientalism; Lynch, “‘Live Ireland’”; Lynch, “Defining Irish”; Nelson, Irish Nationalists, 175. 4 Porter, Critics of Empire, 312, cited in Howe, Ireland and Empire, 46. 5 Vindicator (Belfast), 1 October 1842. 6 Duffy, ed., Voice of the Nation, 174, emphasis in original. 7 Nation (Dublin), 22 April 1843, emphasis in original. 8 Ibid., 26 November 1842. 9 Ibid., 5 November 1842. 10 Ibid., 22 April 1843. 11 Freeman’s Journal and Daily Commercial Advertiser, 5 December 1842. 12 Nation (Dublin), 10 December 1842, emphasis in original. 13 Ibid. 14 Ibid. 15 Freeman’s Journal and Daily Commercial Advertiser, 6 December 1842, emphasis in original. 16 Ibid., emphasis in original. 17 Nation (Dublin), 9 May 1846. 18 Ibid., 3 April 1847. 19 Ibid., 17 April 1847. 20 Ibid., 29 July 1848. 21 Mitchel, Jail Journal, 29, 81. 22 Ibid. 23 C.G. Duffy to T.F. Meagher, 13 September 1850, Kevin Izod O’Doherty Papers, pos. 1396, National Library of Ireland.

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24 W.S. O’Brien to Lucy O’Brien, 29 September 1852, W.S. O’Brien Papers, ms. 8653 (28), pos. 8394/5, National Library of Ireland. 25 Campbell, Ireland’s New Worlds; O’Farrell, Irish in Australia. 26 Freeman’s Journal (Sydney), 29 August 1850. 27 Ibid., 26 November 1853. 28 Ibid., 29 January 1852. 29 Ibid., 26 November 1853, emphasis in original. 30 Davis, Revolutionary Imperialist, 370. 31 Nation (Dublin), 13 November 1847. 32 Davis et al., eds, “To Solitude Consigned,” 91. 33 Ibid., 131. 34 Ibid., 396n677. 35 Ibid., 371. 36 Ibid., 397. 37 Irish Exile and Freedom’s Advocate (Hobart Town), 26 January 1850, emphasis in original. 38 Ibid., 28 September 1850. 39 Ibid., 14 December 1850. 40 John Mitchel to W.S. O’Brien, 6 October 1852, W.S. O’Brien Papers, ms. 444/2813, National Library of Ireland. 41 Freeman’s Journal (Sydney), 22 July 1854. 42 Ibid., 19 August 1854. 43 Nation (Dublin), 25 March 1843. 44 Ibid., 10 December 1842. 45 Freeman’s Journal (Sydney), 29 January 1852. 46 Ibid., 26 November 1853. 47 Nation (Dublin), 14 October 1843.

B i b l i ogr ap h y Campbell, Malcolm. Ireland’s New Worlds: Immigrants, Politics, and Society in the United States and Australia, 1815–1922. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2008. Davis, Richard. Revolutionary Imperialist: William Smith O’Brien, 1803– 1864. Sydney: Crossing Press, 1998. – et al., eds. “To Solitude Consigned”: The Tasmanian Journal of William Smith O’Brien, 1849–1853. Sydney: Crossing Press, 1995. de Nie, Michael. The Eternal Paddy: Irish Identity and the British Press, 1798–1882. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004.

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de Valera, Eamon. Peace and War: Speeches by Mr. De Valera on International Affairs. Dublin: M.H. Gill, 1944. Duffy, Charles Gavan, ed. The Voice of the Nation: A Manual of Nationality. Dublin: James Duffy, 1844. Howe, Stephen. Ireland and Empire: Colonial Legacies in Irish History and Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Kenny, Kevin, ed. Ireland and the British Empire. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. Lennon, Joseph. Irish Orientalism: A Literary and Intellectual History. Syracuse, N Y: Syracuse University Press, 2008. Lynch, Niamh. “Defining Irish Nationalist Anti-Imperialism: Thomas Davis and John Mitchel.” Éire-Ireland 42, nos 1–2 (2007): 82–107. – “‘Live Ireland, Perish the Empire’: Irish Nationalist Anti-Imperialism, c. 1840–1900.” PhD diss., Boston College, 2006. Mitchel, John. Jail Journal. Ed. Thomas Flanagan. Dublin: University Press of Ireland, 1982. Nelson, Bruce. Irish Nationalists and the Making of the Irish Race. Princeton, N J: Princeton University Press, 2012. O’Farrell, Patrick James. The Irish in Australia: 1788 to the Present. South Bend, I N: University of Notre Dame Press, 2001. Porter, Bernard. Critics of Empire: British Radicals and the Imperial Challenge. New York: Macmillan, 1968.

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5 Shamrock Aborigines: The Irish, the Aboriginal Australians, and Their Children Ann M c Grath

“Shamrock Aborigine” is the sentimental nickname to denote Aboriginal Australians of Irish descent. The shamrock’s green, roundleafed trinity has become a national and religious symbol of Irishness, associated with both Saint Patrick and good luck. This humble wild plant suggests closeness to the earth and a grounded sense of place. As a signifier for a rural people, it also evokes many intangible socalled national characteristics, such as a quirky sense of humour, a cherished memory of magical creatures (or faeries), a storytelling “gift of the gab,” and a love of emotive ballads.1 Moree’s Aboriginal rugby team is called the Shamrock Aboriginal Warriors.2 They wear green, white, and a shamrock emblem. Earlier clues that Aboriginal people may have adopted the emblem include an 1890s nulla nulla (hunting stick) with a shamrock carving. From the Tablelands district of New South Wales, it is now held in the Australian Museum.3 Some contemporary Darug people believe their ancestors intermarried with the Irish to provide immunity from the near-devastating contagion of smallpox.4 In January 2009 controversial commentator Andrew Bolt used law professor Mick Dodson’s Irish ancestry to question his assertions of an “Aboriginal” identity.5 Dodson, the 2009 Australian of the Year, replied that he had not needed to fight racism due to his Irish ancestry, as he had to do for his Aboriginal ancestry.6 In August 2009 the newspaper Irish Echo published a list of the top 100 Irish Australians. This included bushranger Ned Kelly, the former prime minister Kevin Rudd, Aboriginal singer Kev Carmody,

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and Aboriginal athlete Patrick Johnson. Although yearning for ancestral stories may be a common human trait, descendants of New World immigrants have turned the quest for Irish relatives into a favourite hobby. As though their roots have not sunk deeply enough into their settler soil, Irish-born Australians have also sought a sense of belonging from more ancient histories with deeper connections to place.7 For different reasons, people of Irish-Aboriginal descent are also becoming increasingly interested in their Irish ancestry. Little research has been conducted on the relationships between Irish immigrants and Aboriginal Australians or on how Irish and Aboriginal peoples and their descendants have envisaged their relationship. By revisiting the work of the leading historian of the Irish in Australia, Patrick O’Farrell (1933–2003), this chapter reconsiders his influential assertions and suggests directions for further work in the field. It then considers why the offspring of Irish-Aboriginal parents currently appear more willing to publicly entertain Irish ancestry and family associations than are the offspring of Aboriginal parents and other European ethnic groups. It questions commonly held assumptions about the Irish and Aborigines, especially contemporary historical memory of sexual and marital intermixing. It also considers earlier assertions that the Irish were “good colonizers” in Australia or, at least, were comparatively more benign colonizers than the Scots or English. From the earliest convict intrusions onto Aboriginal soil, heterosexual unions and intermarriage took place between Aboriginal people and Irish – usually between Irish men and Aboriginal women. Aboriginal mothers and some Irish mothers produced offspring with Irish-Aboriginal identities. Early Irish arrivals to Australia were predominantly working-class and free immigrants and included opponents of British rule in Ireland. Forced convict transportation8 and, in later years, extensive poverty-propelled immigration brought them to Australia. Although many Irish emigrants improved their fortunes in Australia, others suffered more hard times, with mantras such as “the luck of the Irish” and a plethora of sad ballads and stories echoing poignant historical memories.9

C o n n e c t in g H emi s pheres Irish Australian ethnic identity has generally been associated with a common history of settler whiteness, which is the colour of colonizers and imperial power. Although the Irish were a “founding people”

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in the story of white Australia, these founding moments also served to position Australia as a new locale for continuing conflicts over the British domination of Ireland, with a proportion of Irish convicts being punished as rebels against British rule. Furthermore, the majority of Catholic Irish arguably became “white Indigenous,” promoting themselves as “true Australians,” as opposed to the “British” fellow-colonists. Although the Irish are now retrospectively normalized and homogenized as part of the group known as “white pioneers,” there remains great ambivalence, if not deep contradictions, regarding the place of the Irish in what is labelled the British colonizing project.10 We must not forget that at least 20 per cent of the Irish immigrants to Australia were Protestant. These were more likely to be middle- and upper-class, and some were inclined to identify more closely with Englishness and Britishness than with Irishness. Immigrant journeys from the Old World to the New World span hemispheres and centuries. Amateur family histories and other publications have conceptually linked the chains of Irish poverty and oppression with the chains of convict transportation to Australia. The American historian Richard White has explored his Irish roots in Remembering Ahanagran, a book that offers a meditation on uprooted yet continuing memory.11 Several books explore Irish Australian family histories. The Australian novelist Christopher Koch’s The Many Coloured Land: An Irish Memoir describes travels in Ireland that linked him with an Irish convict ancestor transported to Tasmania.12 For many, Irish Australian journeys provide opportunities for a more introspective, familial, or ancestrally connected kind of identity tourism. As demonstrated by Oliver MacDonagh’s The Sharing of the Green: A Modern Irish History for Australians,13 the concept of diaspora allows for more than one homeland. To complicate this, however, since the last decades of the twentieth century, Australians of Aboriginal descent have also been publicly identifying as Irish, and some have journeyed to connect with Old World places and people. Indigenous Australian participants have performed their music, singing, and storytelling at Celtic festivals in various parts of Ireland, as well as in Brittany, France. As Aboriginal art has gained an international following, Indigenous artists and art exhibitions have toured various Irish cities and towns. When visiting the Country Clare Museum in Ennis in 2007, I noticed Aboriginal art for sale in the entrance to the old town centre building. Deeper inside was an exhibition on the great migration of Clare’s population

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to the New World. In 1990, during the very early phase in the commercial Aboriginal art movement, Kathleen and Temerre Petyarre travelled to Dublin to open an exhibition at the Royal Hibernian Academy. The significant Robert Holmes à Court collection of batiks was entitled Utopia: A Picture Story.14 These artworks, which travelled to Limerick and Cork galleries, depict deep personal connections with “country,” as Indigenous people call their traditional lands in English, which include places of ancestral dreaming journeys. An Australian historian attending this event, Bob Reece, described Gaelic poetry readings that promoted a “natural, indeed a primeval, cultural bond between Irish and Australian Indigenous peoples” – a “Hiberno-Australian indigenality.”15 Whatever the different players make of such travels and exchanges, this Aboriginal Australian and Irish nexus is starting to reroute the old migration and historical itineraries.16

A s s im il ators ? What is the explanation for this relatively congenial and increasingly connected relationship between Irish and Aboriginal roots? In his influential book The Irish in Australia, historian Patrick O’Farrell argues that the assimilationist tendencies of the Irish in Australia set them apart from Irish immigrants elsewhere. Unlike the Irish who migrated to the United States, they did not form ethnic enclaves. This was partly due to their willingness to speak English but more so due to their practice of intermarrying with Scots, English, and Welsh. These patterns led to social assimilation and integration into the wider Australian community.17 O’Farrell’s observations on the subject of Irish-Aboriginal interactions have been particularly influential. O’Farrell states, “Relations between the Irish and Aborigines were generally of the kind indicated by the Aboriginal writer Faith Bandler, recalling her childhood in northern New South Wales. In contrast to Protestant paternalist or exploitative whites, Irish Catholics treated the Aborigines as human beings, as equals.”18 Bandler, however, was not Aboriginal. She based her popular book Wacvie upon her father’s experience as a Pacific Island indentured labourer.19 Although O’Farrell places his own comments in parenthesis – almost as an aside – he goes on to extend his intermarriage hypothesis beyond British integration. Indeed, O’Farrell daringly argues that the Irish were not as sexually

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exploitative as other ethnic groups. Further, the Irish viewed Aborigines with “an equality extending to marriage, as distinct from the sexual exploitation common in white relations with Aborigines: the  ‘shamrock / Aboriginal’ names prominent among contemporary Aboriginal activists testifies to that relationship.”20 In other words, the Irish were the group more likely to cohabit with, acknowledge, and rear children with Aboriginal women. These comments have crucial relevance to the wider history of British colonialism in Australia. It is difficult to know whether O’Farrell is simply echoing a more widely held belief, following a personal hunch, or drawing on more solid knowledge gleaned from his extensive historical readings. So we need to look at the only supporting evidence he cites: surnames. Although “shamrock Aboriginal” names may now be common, Irish surnames provide neither proof of an Irish person’s paternity nor public recognition of the children. Under the new colonial and state administrations, a “surname” was required for records of such things as blanket handouts, the census, and general identification. Aboriginal people spoke their own languages and practised complex naming protocols according to age, kin, events, and other factors, but none involved patrilineal “surnames.” Initially, it was the police or officials who were required to enter “surnames” in their records, but sometimes the Aboriginal mothers volunteered suitable names. Children of mixed Aboriginal and other descent were often named after their parents’ employers – and sometimes this, too, was an actual indication of the likelihood that these could be the actual biological fathers. Adults were also commonly named after the stations on which they lived. In various jurisdictions, the local police – many of Irish stock – collected the census data. They allocated their own names to local Aboriginal people for official purposes. Or so they said.21 Although they did not openly acknowledge or rear them, many such policemen biologically fathered children with Aboriginal casual or long-term partners. Cohabiting with Aboriginal women carried a social stigma among the colonizer community. By the end of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century in Queensland, Western Australia, and the Northern Territory, it was illegal for white men to cohabit with Aboriginal women, and they had to seek special permission to marry them.22 Many of the male partners permitted to marry under state law were prompted not so much by egalitarianism as by the threat of large fines and imprisonment.23 For many, however, it took

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courage to openly declare these illicit partnerships and to try to keep families together, which some did. O’Farrell’s other assertion – that the Irish were less paternalistic and exploitative and were essentially egalitarian toward the Aborigines – must also be viewed with caution. It would be extremely difficult to substantiate this from an empirical survey. How does one assess benevolence versus malevolence on the frontier? Possibly a scholar could revisit massacre statistics and try to research proportionately how many murders were committed by Irish men and women, but owing to the nature of the sources, this would be highly problematic, if not impossible. Furthermore, the intimate, often hidden sphere of sexual and familial relations is frequently missing from the archival record. Although they were travellers themselves, many of the early Irish Australians held unflattering notions of seminomadic and travelling people. They had been internal migrants in the United Kingdom, convict deportees, and free immigrants whose single men became highly mobile workers travelling around the countryside. Newcomers alienated from their own country had plenty to fear from the Aboriginal people whose lands they were usurping. When convicts ventured onto the lands of Aborigines, they lacked armed protection, and it was hardly surprising they were at first terrified by the strangers. (In contrast, the more highly educated, intellectually curious, and military-backed governors, such as Arthur Phillip and Lachlan Macquarie, could sometimes afford to be more humane and tolerant.)24 Some Irish convicts had a bad reputation. In the early nineteenth century, the London Missionary Society’s Lancelot Threlkeld reported horrific incidents of rape, robbery, and general ill treatment of Aborigines by “croppies,” escaped convicts living as bushrangers or outlaws.25 Members of a convict underclass could be more likely to be cruel to their social inferiors, being under greater direct threat from them. Yet cooperation and collaboration could ensure their survival; a peace could be made between Aborigines and Irish men and women who formed relationships of mutual dependence. Immigrants keenly sought Aboriginal women for sexual and marital partnerships, especially given the disproportionate numbers of immigrant men in the frontier districts. Yet some accounts of Irish colonizing anxiety are disturbing.26 Pastoralist Alexander Crawford, an Ulster man who had moved onto Aboriginal lands in what is now the Murchison district of

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New South Wales, was one of the better-off Protestant immigrants from Ireland. O’Farrell’s collection of letters awkwardly places Crawford’s correspondence in a section entitled “Love Story.” Yet Crawford’s neighbours called him a tyrant because, unlike other masters, he would not allow the men working on his station to “keep black women” there.27 Crawford was neither egalitarian nor likely to marry an Aboriginal woman. However, perhaps in expressing his distaste for such mixed liaisons, he protested too loudly. Crawford was certainly involved in violent captures and cruelties toward Aboriginal men killing sheep, and in May 1883 Aboriginal people nearly killed him in retaliation.28 Back in Ireland, Crawford’s family was appalled at having a relative on a murdering rampage. His father foresaw more trouble, warning in his charming style, “I hope you are getting on with the natives better, your Aunt Matty says kindness goes far with them. Probably if you tried some of this you might do better. But I am sure you are kind naturally, yet you are too much inclined to drive men more than lead. But most likely your views on this point may have been modified before now. My mother used to say never use the broken reed if love will do the deed.”29 Letters from his beloved Australian-based cousin Lillie Mathews ridiculed him for not learning enough of the local Aboriginal language to be understood.30 Another violent skirmish on the property thwarted Crawford’s plans to marry Lillie. If only he had listened to Aunt Matty’s pointed advice, he might have married her sooner. With Crawford still seeking vengeance against Aborigines for taking his sheep, Lillie wrote to admonish him: “It is a dreadful thing to be continually hunting down ones [sic] fellow creatures, for they are our fellow creatures and have precious and immortal souls. Oh my darling keep your hands free from your fellow creature’s blood. For you to need to fire on them makes me feel miserable. It seems dreadful when really in your heart you cannot blame them for taking the sheep. They don’t know right from wrong.”31 Lillie tried to remind Crawford of the common humanity of the Aboriginal people: “We are, I know, apt to look down on them as something little better than beasts, but remember darling they have souls as well as we, and don’t let them rise up in judgement against us in the last great day … Oh my darling keep yourself free from any stain of these poor creatures.”32 Crawford’s Irish-based Protestant relatives feared not only that his Australian experience had corrupted him personally but also that it might endanger the souls of

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his entire family. They and Lillie were worried as Christians, seemingly concerned less about Crawford’s safety than about their own immortal fates. The majority group, the Catholic Irish, suffered racism in nineteenth-century Australia and its members were derogatively compared with Aboriginal people.33 Contemporary commentators such as Dr A. Thompson asserted that the Irish were intellectually inferior to the Australian Aborigines. Pastor Samuel Marsden classed the Irish convicts as a “wild, ignorant and savage Race.”34 Others stated that the Irish were “pre-modern, pre-industrial, their very existence superseded by progress, commerce, science, invention, the arrogances of the nineteenth century: like the Aborigines, the Irish were primitive, backward, outmoded, the butt of impatience and contempt.”35 The Irish were even equated with chimpanzees and orangutans and ridiculed as being of “africanoid” appearance.36 Although the Scottish were also considered lowly, the Irish were consistently rated as inferior to them too.37 Throughout much of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Australia, anti-Irish and antiCatholic thinking reinforced social, class, and political divisions.

C o n t r as t in g C o l o n i zi ng Colours Whiteness studies have analyzed the power of the category “white,”38 which became especially relevant in the context of settler colonialism.39 However, “whiteness” needs to be carefully historicized in different periods and contexts. Historian Don Watson has demonstrated how the Caledonians (or Scottish Highlanders) were classed as “black” and compared with “Aborigines.”40 American author Noel Ignatiev’s How the Irish Became White dramatizes this in race and labour relations and identity studies.41 Jon Stratton argues that by the 1880s, the likes of influential federationist Alfred Deakin needed to recast the Irish as “white” as part of a homogenized sense of an Australian race and future “white” nation.42 Empowered by their imperial status, settler colonizers had stakes in differentiating themselves from Indigenous Australians. After all, they were in the process of ousting them from their land. Although the term “Anglo-Celt” indicated cultural fusion, it could also suggest greater unity and common purpose than actually existed in the colonies at any specific historical moment. Initially, according to O’Farrell, some of the Irish immigrants in nineteenth-century Australia spoke

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Gaelic, and most of the others sounded different to the English, not only in accent and intonation but also in the way they expressed themselves and thought. They saw themselves as ethnically distinct, and they were predominantly Catholics rather than Protestants.43 Although some may have shared a specific identity, dressed differently, and looked distinct, the convict label saw Irish and English lumped together wearing similar attire. Although race categories were fluid in the first half of the nineteenth century, such that living and working alongside each other could lead to rapid cultural fusions, according to O’Farrell, the Irish sometimes saw themselves as more than just an ethnic sub-group of Britishness or a mere faction of the  white colonizers.44 What O’Farrell’s generalizations sometimes gloss over, however, are the class differences and the 20 per cent of Protestant Irish hailing from many different parts of Ireland, some of whom were prominent and wealthy citizens of influence. By giving so much attention to “skin,” the whiteness studies umbrella could further homogenize “race” and ethnic categories, missing the significance of class, ethnic, religious, and national identities.45 For example, Chris Healy’s From the Ruins of Colonialism: History as Social Memory does not contain a single index entry on the Irish.46 Historian Ann Curthoys’s important article “Expulsion, Exodus and Exile in White Australian Historical Mythology” fuses Anglos and Celts into one group. She explains how Australian colonizer narratives emphasize histories of expulsion and exile,47 a strategy that enabled them to see themselves as victims and to avoid being guilty “colonizers” at all. Although Curthoys’s repeated references to “Anglo-Celt” narrative strategies accurately reflect fused national narratives, surely it would be worth disentangling and effectively probing the specific development and influence of Celtic (or Irish) strategies. As Bob Reece’s Exiles from Erin: Convict Lives in Ireland and Australia suggests, the Irish have understood themselves as colonialism’s victims in quite distinctive ways.48 Perhaps renewed emphasis is now required not only on the differences among the Asian, Pacific, and other ethnic groups that settled in Australia but also on difference within the British and Irish colonizers in various timeframes.49 Only by separating the strands of “Anglos” and “Celts” can historical studies of colonialism and memory tease out Irish from other influences. Recognizing the significance of the Irish to Australian Labor Party and trade union history, Prime Minister Bob Hawke launched

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O’Farrell’s monumental The Irish in Australia in 1987. No fan of Aboriginal land rights or symbolic recognition of Aboriginal oppression, O’Farrell sees Aboriginal oppression as part of a longer historical trajectory of oppression by Britain. Just as he entertains no hopes for the indigenous Irish regaining lost lands, O’Farrell entertains no hopes of special entitlements for the Aborigines. Although he recognizes the complexity, divisions, different historical memories, and conflicting “fairy tales” among his chosen subjects, his is a sentimental, nationalistic mission to provide a fond and humane account of the Irish in Australia. He writes eloquently, “At any time, these were ambivalent, ambiguous people, thinking Irish, talking English; hating the tyranny, serving the tyrant.”50 His Irish were a flawed lot. But for him to go further – to feature them as Godless, immoral sexual exploiters or indeed as violent colonizers themselves – is personally abhorrent. Not only would it do his ancestors too great a disservice, but it would also equate them too much with the English. Finding something in common with the Aboriginal people would be more agreeable. In the twentieth century, many Irish men and women, like other poor whites, travelled to northern frontier districts to make a living. Drover Matt Savage told a story of an Irish cook, Mick Sharkey, who eked out his subsistence by killing Aboriginal people’s dogs around Bradshaws Run in the Victoria River district in the 1910s; a bounty on scalps netted good cash returns. When an angry group of local Aboriginal people confronted him, brandishing clubs, he started weeping, lamenting his loneliness and his distance from his homeland and blubbering in fear that they would kill him. Before very long, the local Aboriginal people were weeping in sympathy for the poor displaced national. As the story goes, they then helped him obtain the scalps of a few more “useless dogs.”51 The Irish – and historians of Irish descent – as well as the Aboriginal people they encountered were all keen to find agreeable narratives. Although some may have appreciated the benefits of a more fluid Australian society and perhaps even thanked the monarch who presided over it, the Irish brought a range of stories of British imperialism to Australian shores, and distinctly Irish nuances soon appeared early in colonizing narratives. Accepting that intermarriage between Anglos and Celts justified identity fusion, Irish descendants still had strong historical and emotional reasons to discretely identify themselves as colonialism’s exiled victims. Additionally, the shared oppression of the Aboriginal and Irish people by the British gave them common

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historical ground as the “colonized” class – even if they ended up later fighting over the same Australian ground and over the same Aboriginal women.

T h e C h il dren Since the publication of the Bringing Them Home Report in 1992, the topic of Australia’s “stolen children,” or the removal of children of Aboriginal or of Aboriginal and mixed descent from their Aboriginal families, has gained considerable attention.52 Labor prime minister Kevin Rudd’s apology in Parliament in February 2008 became a national moment of recognition for the historical suffering of Indigenous Australians.53 The report itself contains horrendous stories of cultural loss and of emotional and familial damage. Until the 1970s in New South Wales, the Northern Territory, Western Australia, and elsewhere, Aboriginal children and particularly those of mixed descent were removed from their parents. Although generally we imagine that removal severed Aboriginal people from their Aboriginal families, child removal also severed many of them from Irish, English, or Chinese fathers and occasionally from Irish mothers. It severed them from immigrants who returned to Ireland. In the burgeoning field of autobiography of the 2000s, numerous people of Aboriginal descent now refer to their mixed European, Asian, and family backgrounds. Some have also pursued their family histories in England, Europe, and China.54 New, reflexive Indigenous narratives interpreting colonizing history also continue to emerge. In the intimate unions between Irish and Aborigines that followed the convict arrivals from Britain after 1788, there was a meeting of at least two histories of colonialism with complex and fraught legacies. The ambiguous status of the Irish in the British colonizing project contained challenges for the children of Irish and Aboriginal parents. In the sexual and familial relations between Indigenous and Irish Australians, and in the generations that followed, the categories of “invader” and “invaded” – colonizer and colonized – become unstable.55 However hapless they might have considered themselves, Irish Australians formed a large chunk of Australia’s “settlers” (or colonizers), and there could be no getting away from being implicated in dispossessing Indigenous Australia. When the Irish tried to fuse an older historical identity as an

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oppressed people with a new one in which they were labelled oppressors, a narrative rupture arose. Whether poor or wealthy, many Irish fathers found child removal a useful tool to hide their secrets and sins.56 Policies varied between different colonies and states, and in northern Australia during the twentieth century, such unions were legally restricted. However, the known cases suggest that married Irish Catholic pastoralists were as likely as other colonizers to banish the offspring of their Aboriginal mistresses. Many were simply shirking financial responsibility. Some wealthy fathers paid for Catholic boarding schools, but this did not mean that they publicly recognized the child as their own offspring. (Over the past ten years, some of these children and grandchildren have come forward to tell their previously suppressed stories.)57 If not improving heavenly prospects, colonial life provided opportunities for Irish men’s and women’s economic and social advancement and status. Therefore, an additional reason for Irish men to keep their partnerships quiet was that any marriage with Aboriginal women, who were part of the class dispossessed of all land and property, would destroy prospects of social respectability. If education in English and intermarriage were dual tools of ethnic assimilation, we have to ask who was assimilating whom – were the English assimilating the Irish, or were the Irish assimilating the English? After all, the influence of the Irish on Australian national traditions is widely accepted. Although the influence of Indigenous culture and lifeways upon Irish and other immigrants should not be dismissed, neither the extant research nor the space available here permits an assessment of this kind of cultural influence. One of the government justifications for Aboriginal and mixed-descent child removal was certainly to provide literacy and Western-style education.58 Here again, the Irish in Australia would empathize with their homeland situation, as English was often used in preference to Gaelic as the language of learning and of state, legal, and religious authority. Keen to gain social mobility, Irish immigrants in Australia voluntarily opted to blend in with the general white population rather than asserting difference. Aboriginal people suffered a government-enforced cultural assimilation policy. During the post–Second World War era, Aboriginal assimilation aimed at cultural and economic “uplift,” yet racial discrimination against Aboriginal people and their offspring eroded many of the possibilities for social and economic advancement enjoyed by immigrants.59 Furthermore, immigrants often had prior knowledge of how

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to deal with displacements and relocations that took place in Britain and Ireland. Amid the state project of land takeover, Aboriginal people’s ongoing desire and struggle to hold onto their lands often forced them into a direct oppositional relationship with the state. What is more, owing to discriminatory laws, policies, and racial attitudes, throughout much of the twentieth century, many Aboriginal people sensibly avoided identifying themselves as Aboriginal. Only after improved civil rights from the 1970s were more Aboriginal Australians of mixed descent willing to positively identify themselves as Aboriginal and expose their families to the consequences. Identity politics then turned full circle. Aboriginal rights activists urged people of mixed descent to identify as “Aboriginal” – and only Aboriginal. Although the McGinness family of Darwin cherished their Kungarakany culture and were the first group to have their traditional land claim heard in the Northern Territory, Kathy Mills (nee McGinness) objected to being described as “part Aboriginal” but not also as “part European” or Irish. When she presented a paper to this effect at the 1980s Women and Labor Conference in Melbourne, the audience was not yet ready for such multiple identities, but times are changing.

T he H is to r ic a l R e p u tat i on of the I ri s h Until the 1980s, Irish studies and Irish history in Australia represented a core strand in Australian historical study. Historians noted the large proportion of Irish convicts and their major role in forming the basis of the Australian population, ethos, and nation. They explored their radical challenge to the English-led state, their roles in key rebellions, their outlawry, and their other challenges to authority. Russel Ward’s Australian Legend, particularly his chapter “Celts and Currency,” regarded Irishness as foundational to the evolution of an egalitarian, working-class culture that morphed into a distinctive (white male) Australianness.60 The feminist historian Miriam Dixson’s The Real Matilda took the shine off the masculinist legend, attributing Irish influence to many less admirable national characteristics, including Australia’s drinking culture and some of its sexist practices.61 More recently, historian Anne O’Brien has reminded us how, during the 1810s and 1820s, the Irish were feared as a threat to the British settlement. In the earliest convict settlements of the late

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eighteenth century, the English authorities even feared that the Irish would join ranks with the Aborigines and “overtake the colony.”62 With the rise of race relations and Aboriginal history studies from the late 1970s,63 the history of the Irish in Australia gradually came to be seen as less attractive: as white, masculinist, and mainstream – part of the dominant group of colonizer invaders. Worse, Aboriginal activists and historians started to discuss white men’s rape and sexual exploitation of Aboriginal women.64 When the National Museum of Australia opened in 2001 under the conservative John Howard regime, it was attacked for favouring the so-called “black armband” view of Australian history and accused of exaggerating frontier violence and giving too much prominence to Aboriginal history over white. In this context, a proposal to stage an exhibition on the Irish, including their usual bunch of rebels and radicals, was comparatively reassuring, if not exactly “relaxed and comfortable.”65 Although this venture did not proceed, a major Irish exhibition was staged at the National Museum in 2011. In 2002–03, the museum had staged the exhibition Outlawed! Rebels, Revolutionaries and Bushrangers, where no one could match the drawing-card status of the national Australian hero Ned Kelly. Yet Kelly’s Jerilderie letter, an intriguing piece of literature rich in metaphor and allusions to Ireland, was written when he was on the run from police and leading a notorious bushranging gang. It was hardly inclusive, spitting out bitter, murderous, and ever-colourful messages proclaiming ethnic Irish anger at English injustice.66 In the twenty-first century, popular blogs like that of Bob Gould67 keep alive both Irish nostalgia and a powerful desire for not only nationally redemptive narratives but also ethnically specific Irish ones. The “Iron Outlaw” site, dedicated to the history and legacy of the Kelly gang, contains many references to Irish oppression.68 As neither Marxist nor Aboriginal, Ned Kelly has come to epitomize the cherished, albeit controversial, generalization of Irish anger as white Australian anger at English authority in the form of class and state oppression.

H e av e n o r Hell My own family’s story is instructive on the selectiveness of Australian identity narratives, for we grew up thinking that we

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were Irish through and through. My Australian-born grandmother, Nana Morris, was a Clancy of Irish stock. My grandfather was an Australian-born son of a Galway-born McGrath. My paternal grandmother, however, was Scottish-born and raised in Kirkintilloch until the age of sixteen before immigrating. Being Catholic and immigrants from Ireland only a few generations back, these Scottish Egans identified themselves as both Irish and Scottish. Then, on my  father’s side, my great-grandmother was born illegitimate in Manchester. My maternal grandfather was Australian-born of English Anglican stock. So, despite an English-born great grandmother on one side, an English-born great grandfather on the other, and a Scottish-born grandmother, we were still “Irish” and did not question why only our Irish roots were to be valorized. Like many other intermarried Australian families, ours was not exclusively Irish by birth or ethnic background, but we imagined ourselves to be Irish. Essentially, Irish was our preferred identity. Furthermore, the Australian Catholic Church, which ran a comprehensive system of primary and secondary schools around Australia, encouraged the love of Erin. Catholic-run Aboriginal missions in remote Australia and the powerful Australian-run Catholic school system in rural towns and cities spread the virtues of Irishness to white and black children. Their teachers were often from poor backgrounds themselves, and they often accepted children excluded from New South Wales government schools on the basis of Aboriginality and inability to pay.69 During the 1950s to 1970s, numerous nuns and priests had come from Ireland or were of Irish stock.70 The school and church system powerfully reinforced a collective Irish Australian identity from the earliest years, with its special Catholic school textbooks and publishers. In the 1960s even the Australian-born nuns who taught me railed against the media practice of referring to the “Roman Catholic Church,” for they insisted they were not Roman. If religion had to have a nationality, they would settle only for Irish Catholic. When I  visited Ireland for the first time during the Settler Colonialism Conference in 2008, I saw the same religious decor of my childhood’s 1960s Australian churches, with an identical selection of pious and maternal Virgin Mary statues, celibate French saints like St Therese of Liseux, and Sacred Hearts of both Jesus and Mary.71 Australian Catholic religious identity became a form of Irish identity.

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Since the 1990s the links between Australian Indigenous and Irish convict dispossessions have created new alliances between church and Indigenous communities. The Catholic left was prominent in Reconciliation. After Australia’s High Court delivered the Mabo judgment in 1992, the doctrine of terra nullius (or land belonging to no one) was overthrown and Native title was recognized for the first time. Catholic nuns were influential in arguing for Native title and led organizations like Women for Wik, which lobbied for recognition of Aboriginal rights to pastoral properties. The Catholic Church supported the stolen children campaigns for an apology and compensation for Aboriginal and mixed-descent children removed by the state from their parents, and it proposed inclusive Indigenous theological approaches and church services. In 2009 Aboriginal singer Archie Roach sang at a fundraiser to stop the Catholic Church’s sale of St Brigid’s church, which was established in the 1850s by victims of the Famine who immigrated to Victoria. The bond here was not common ancestry, for he is not associated with Irish identity, but rather common dispossessions and enforced community ruptures. Roach is a Gunditjmara man, and it was his traditional lands where the Famine refugees settled and built the church.72 Over the past fifteen years, historians of empire have begun to pay serious attention to intermarriage across colonizing frontiers.73 “Bodies in contact” created a key tension and anxiety for colonizers and empire. Intermixing and intermarriage were commonplace between non-Aborigines and British of various ethnicities from the early nineteenth century through to the present.74 Several scholars, including myself, have written on the subject.75 But unless discussing “Asians” and nonwhite “others,” these studies inevitably refer to Aborigines intermarrying with “white” men or women. To date, scholars have neither singled out Irish intermarriage for special attention nor considered its impact on dual identity formation. Perhaps this is not surprising, as fact finding about Irish-Aboriginal intermarriage is difficult. Who truly fits into the category of Irish? How are they identified as such? Do we include only Irish-born or also second- and third-generation Irish people? Is Irishness based on birthplace, culture, religion, or parentage? If we accept the latter, can the parent be born in Australia or in other parts of Britain outside of Ireland? Can he or she also be born in America? Do both parents have to be Irish or just the mother, father, or a grandparent? What is

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the appropriate descent percentage? If one’s Irishness is a matter of self-identification, this evidence is not available. Although colonial and later state regulations did create their own special marriage archives, it is difficult to quantify Irish unions with Aboriginal women and to measure the degree of acknowledgment of the children. Some archival repositories prevent the use of real names, and recent scholars have chosen to obscure them for privacy reasons. Possibly, the best evidence can be gleaned only from insider perspectives when more Aboriginal people research their own family histories. Traps abound for any researcher. For example, bush traveller and author Bill Harney (1895–1962) was one of a few white men who openly acknowledged and published accounts of his relationships with Aboriginal women during the first half of the twentieth century. His autobiography seems to fit O’Farrell’s ideas about Irish men’s behaviour when partnering with Aboriginal women. Although known to have enjoyed numerous Aboriginal girlfriends, Harney had legally married the seventeen-year-old Aboriginal Kathleen Linda Beattie at Groote Eylandt Chapel. Harney was a hard-living “bush raconteur” of the irreverent kind glorified in the Bulletin and in Ward’s Australian Legend.76 That he found his Aboriginal nickname Bilarney or Blarney such a great joke led me to assume he was of Irish descent. The famous Blarney Stone of Ireland’s Blarney Castle near Cork was a nice allusion to his penchant for storytelling. The Irish legend has it that whoever kisses the Blarney Stone acquires eloquence, or in local parlance, the “gift of the gab.” The Blarney Stone has another twist – that of “soft talk” meant to deceive without necessarily offending.77 The colloquial “a lot of blarney” was used in Australia for a made-up story, “bullshit,” or in Aboriginal parlance “gammon.”78 The Blarney legend mocks and scoffs at its own promise, perhaps reflecting not only the Irish penchant for storytelling but also a sense of humour and self-mockery the Irish had in common with, and enjoyed sharing with, Aboriginal people. Harney and his wife had children together during the 1920s and  1930s, but both his wife and the children died young.79 His child with another woman – this time a Wardaman woman in the Katherine area in 1936 – took the name Bill Harney, identifying as the author’s son. Although similar to his father in appearance and character, he was not reared by him but by his mother, Ludi Yibuluyma, and his Aboriginal stepfather. Bill junior is a renowned storyteller of Indigenous creation stories.80 Despite his liking for the

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Bilarney / Blarney appellation, Bill Harney senior may not have been Irish at all. Possibly, he encouraged it as an attractive, suitable label for a roving bushman who rebelled against propriety. My assumptions about his Irishness were first thrown by a quick check of the Australian Dictionary of Biography, which states his parents were London-born. Harney is both an Irish and an English name. However, it is also possible that the Harneys hailed from the “London Irish,” earlier displacements leading to their emigration.81 Even in a relatively well-known life, his story thus demonstrates some of the difficulties of identifying possible “Irishness.” His namesake’s story provides an example of a child’s, and perhaps the mother’s, adoption of a surname to signify paternity although the child was not raised or necessarily officially acknowledged by his biological father.

S h a m ro c k A bori gi nes Let us now turn to the prominent Australian Aboriginal people who have identified as Aboriginal Irish. My website survey of some contemporary Aboriginal identities reveals several high achievers now choosing to publicly identify as Aboriginal Irish. Artist Kevin Dolman, a member of Artists in the Black, describes himself as “AboriginalIrish Australian.” His website states, “His mother is from the Eastern Arrernte people of central Australia, near Alice Springs and his father is an Irish immigrant from Derry in Northern Ireland.”82 Singer and songwriter Kev Carmody’s web biography proclaims his family’s amalgamation of Irish and Murri oral history and storytelling traditions.83 Canberra-based Indigenous poet Jennifer Martiniello celebrates her mixed Chinese-Irish and Arrernte ancestry. She explains that her granddaughter, who excels at Irish dancing, was “[b]orn to it, a natural.”84 The website entry for athlete Patrick Johnson describes him as “Aboriginal / Irish.” After his Yarrabah-based mother died in a car accident when he was quite young, he was brought up on fishing boats by his determined Irishborn fisherman father.85 His fellow athlete Kyle van der Kuyp states his ambivalence about the singularity of “Aboriginal identity”: “In an awkward way it feels well I might be getting profiled because I’m an Aboriginal. If I was just a normal, you know, normal white Australian guy, you know, would I have a profile, probably not. I want people to know Kyle and not Kyle who’s Aboriginal Irish. No one asks me about Irish but I’m half and half.”86

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Aboriginal Irish identity could also be deployed to explain injustice. It was used to make political sense of the plight of Dawn Casey, the founding director of the National Museum of Australia. Although a government-appointed review had sung her praises,87 the conservative Howard government and its appointed Museum Council labelled her as too sympathetic to the so-called “black armband” view of Australian history.88 Indigenous leader Professor Mick Dodson blamed racism, as stated in a report of his angry farewell speech to Casey: An emotional Prof Dodson, who heads the Australian National University’s indigenous studies unit, referred to their shared Aboriginal-Irish heritage. He described Ms Casey as an inclusive director who embodied the spirit of Aboriginal womanhood and centuries of Irish struggle. “Perhaps if you were white and had a dick and were of Anglo descent, you would have been treated with greater decency,” Prof Dodson said. “But then again, the Anglos haven’t been about treating blacks or Irish with any decency.” Prof Dodson’s tribute was choked by emotion and interrupted by his tears.89 The Indigenous historian Wayne Atkinson has suggested numerous notable people not on my list, including artist John Moriarty, painter of the Qantas planes; the “father of reconciliation” Pat Dodson; and the “mother of reconciliation” Lois O’Donoghue, who was removed from her Aboriginal family while young.90 The self-identified category of “Aboriginal Irish” in Australia is becoming a familiar one. Aboriginal German, Aboriginal Chinese, and Aboriginal Japanese are more likely to be used than other British ethnicities; it is rare indeed to hear of anyone identifying as “Aboriginal English,” “Aboriginal Scots,” or “Aboriginal Welsh.” Yet in several regions of New South Wales during the first half of the nineteenth century, unions between Aborigines and Scots or English were not uncommon.91 When referring to “shamrock Aborigines” activists, O’Farrell may well have been thinking of activists and trade unionists such as Jack and Joe McGinnis and Gary Foley. The McGinnesses were prominent leaders in Darwin and nationally, arguing against restrictions

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on Aboriginal rights and citizenship.92 With others, during the 1960s, they helped to propel the famous walk-off from Wave Hill of the Gurindji, who argued for land rights and equal wages, popularly seen as the beginning of the modern land rights movement.93 In June 1967, as president of the Federal Council for the Advancement of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders, Joe was also influential in the referendum movement, which secured “citizenship” for Aboriginal Australians. Although pleased about the win, he continuted to be a great fighter for Aboriginal rights. His siblings Val and Vai McGinness proudly continued this fighting spirit, which they identified as “Irish.” Val stated that his father was born on a “Dublin ship” in New York Harbour.94 Cheryl Buchanun, Lionel Fogarty, and other activists were leading figures in the famous 1972 Tent Embassy established outside Canberra’s Parliament House. It is difficult today to fully appreciate the courage of these individuals in opposing the state, for Aboriginal and mixed-descent people had been subject to an extremely oppressive history of discriminatory legislation, violent punishment, incarceration, and removal. According to some of their children, it was their “fighting Irish” fathers who gave the shamrock Aborigines the gall to fight the English, and authority in general, whatever the consequences.95 Although a Hibernophile, Burnum Burnum, the imposing Aboriginal man who planted the Aboriginal flag on the white cliffs of Dover during the 1988 Australian Bicentenary celebrations, sharply criticized the shamrock Aborigines for the “Irish anger” of their protest tactics.96 However, the Irish line is just as likely to be associated with survival strategies. The Indigenous story that Darug people married Irish to ensure smallpox immunity denotes historical agency that is congruent with the positive “survival” theme of the 1988 Indigenous celebrations.

Ir is h as t h e G o o d Coloni zers? That many Indigenous Australians can claim some Irish ancestry does not necessarily prove the “good colonizer” theory. As we have seen, there is little nineteenth-century historical evidence available to back the contention that Irish or Irish Australians were historically more likely than other ethnic groups to either marry Aboriginal women or rear their own children with them. Indeed, in the absence of evidence, it might well be “blarney.”97 In Queensland, Irish men

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were probably less likely to marry Aboriginal women than were Asians and Pacific Islanders. Owing to the problems of categorizing “the Irish,” the quest is not only difficult but also misguided. We could fall into the same traps as the 1980s feminist historians who sought to measure whether “white women” were less likely to be racist and violent than white men. The chimera of the “good missus” – the redemptive, well-behaved colonizer – has been debunked.98 Feminist and Indigenous historians have critiqued white women’s repressive and often misguided complicity in “rescuing” the “colonized.”99 The prospect of any colonizing group – whether analytically segregated on the grounds of gender, class, ethnicity, or religion – successfully maintaining the label of “good colonizers,” therefore, seems like wishful thinking. Although the ruling English attract the blame for Australia’s colonizing cruelty, the Irish themselves were hardly blameless. Like men from English and Scots backgrounds, Irish men were among the police, squatters, pastoralists, and others known for corrupt and murderous behaviour toward Aborigines. The police charged with removing the mixed-descent children in Australia included many Irish-born or second-generation Irish Australians. Among the “good,” downtrodden Irish fathers and humanitarian heroes were also plenty of violent and corrupt police, rapacious frontiersmen, timber getters and boat crew, unscrupulous and murderous squatters, and dubious missionaries.100 Nonetheless, the Irish have fared well in some Indigenous narratives, including those of the North Australian Gurindji. These strongly support the Irish “good colonizer” myth – at least when it comes to Ned Kelly and the notion that his country “Island,” which I suspect meant Ireland, was a good place. Unlike the Englishman “Captain Cook,” who travelled in the “morally wrong” direction and thus did things the wrong way in regard to Aboriginal law, Ned Kelly is mythologized in Gurindji stories as having travelled across their country from “Island” in the right direction, along the right song-line, and on the “good tracks” – all according to the prescribed Indigenous law of the country.101 He would do good for them. The Gurindji must have heard about the legendary Irish Victorian Ned Kelly from white fellow stockmen or later trade unionists, some of whom were Irish or Aboriginal Irish, such as Jack McGinness.102 In the Wave Hill Walk-Off, the Gurindji had to take on many authority

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figures: the managers, the British company led by Lord Vestey, the local managers, and police. Ned Kelly may have inspired them to hold out in the bush with little food during the long 1960s strikes. The Gurindji did not believe people from afar arrived in their country accidentally but rather that the earth, the land’s dreaming, had actually “called” such people as Ned Kelly, author Frank Hardy, and the radical Irish Australian trade unionists to travel there and assist in their fight for their land and country.103 Australians of all backgrounds embraced the embittered Irish Australian plotline of the Kelly legend. In becoming the iconic outlaw and national hero for all Australians, Ned Kelly transcended Irishness, yet Irishness remains intrinsic to his story.104 In Australian popular culture and labour history, Irishness came to be seen as a class and ethnic protest against English moral, class, political, and “race” superiority. Irishness has been successfully mythologized not only as a historical victimization epic but also as a subversive anticolonial and working-class “battler” identity. Not only did those with mainstream Australian colonial identities self-consciously distinguish themselves from the British, but they also embraced such “Irish” values. Although the Irish in Australia may have become “assimilated,” and although the Australian people perhaps absorbed or were assimilated by Irishness, this did not lead the Irish to lose their cultural identity entirely. Nor is it surprising that when “white” Irish descendants got to write their own history, they chose to be the “good colonizers.” In the 1980s O’Farrell’s project distinguished the Irish from other settler colonizers. He selected culturally desirable moral markers of Irish difference (and superiority to the English). Indeed, the purported qualities of Irish Australian men remain morally appealing today: egalitarian, less racist, and arguably more ethical, as they recognized both their Aboriginal female partners and their children. There is no mention of violence, coercion, rape, or murder. It is as though they were involved in a more benign, inclusive colonialism – as though they were without sin.

S h a m ro c k A b o r ig in es Reconsi dered The Australian hobby of travelling vast distances to find appealing Irish-origin narratives is no longer the exclusive preserve of settler and migration identity quests. As with other Australians, the

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“Aboriginal Irish” select from a range of potential ancestors. In addition, like other Australians, Aboriginal Australians of mixed ancestry seem to prefer to identify as Irish rather than English. However blurred by collective nostalgia, shamrock Aboriginal declarations represent a renewed agency around identity claims. They also remind us that, from the earliest generations, many Irish Australians were also Aboriginal Australians and vice versa. Through marriage, children, and family, not only did the Irish in Australia “become white,” but some also “became black.” With each journey of Aboriginal Irish Australians to connect with family histories of Old World dispossession, with each route connecting strands across the seas, aspects of settler colonialism’s narratives can be read anew. However ephemerally, these journeys evoke the possibility of reverse journeys from the New World to the Old. Between hemispheres and across complicated diasporas and older and newer histories of conflict and convergence, the diasporic kinship relations widen and complicate the genealogical charts. When Aboriginal Irish venture back to Ireland, it is as though the origins journey is coming full circle: two old worlds, two deep pasts, converge in memory and imagination. Both the Catholic Irish and the Australian Aborigines have histories of suffering, tragedy, and resilience amid deep troubles and mixed luck. They share a selfimage and a popular reputation for having a fighting spirit, a mischievous humour, and an ability to create melodic and powerful stories. And they have more to share too. In 1999 an Aboriginal delegation travelled to Ireland on a trip to raise awareness of Indigenous issues. In the case of the Aboriginal Irish, subversive reputations, political strategies, and imaginative convergences and alliances flow between hemispheres. In 2002 Aboriginal leader Patrick Dodson visited Belfast on a reconciliation mission. As well as making statements in support of repatriation of Aboriginal human remains from European museums, he met up with a Protestant youth worker who had grown up thinking that Catholics were “the enemy.” A former Jesuit priest once excommunicated from the church, Dodson had brought a message of national reconciliation.105 Whereas the Catholic Irish are known for their “love of Erin,” Aboriginal Australians, with at least 50,000 years on the continent, can certainly outdo anyone when it comes to deep roots and longevity in one land. In Ireland hunter-gatherers arrived only in

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about 8,000 B C . However, Irish Catholics outstrip Aborigines in the centuries they fought against colonization and oppression. Although cultural loss for Aboriginal Australians has been great, after decades of being defined and identified by others, the shamrock Aborigines have been creating anticolonial but very Irish Australian self-narratives. Although Aboriginal Irish identification may be deeply emotional, reflecting a desire for connection with close and distant kin, it serves another purpose too. By linking Indigenous Australia’s 210–year-old history of oppression with an internationally known history that is at least two and a half centuries longer than theirs, they gain a greater degree of rhetorical and analytical clout. In partially displacing other histories of shame, but also connecting them, the Irish story is less psychologically confronting than Australian colonialism at home – a history in which their ancestors were complicit. The intimate ties that bind Ireland, Irish Australia, Aboriginal Australia, and indigeneity include paternity, maternity, family, and kinship. Not only do Australians of Indigenous and Irish ancestry literally change the complexion of these ancestral adventures, but they also complicate their chronologies and reimagine canonical narratives of power. Exiled sons become exiled fathers. Furthermore, they continue to create multiple and informative historical stories that connect distant worlds. Shamrock Aborigines draw strength from the appealing fit of Ireland’s enduring histories of colonization and displacement. In the latest travel itineraries, role reversals and fusions cannot be denied; the once colonized becomes the colonizer, and the once Indigenous becomes the non-Indigenous.

Not e s I would like to acknowledge Wayne Atkinson, John Docker, the organizers of the Settler Colonialism Conference of 2007, and historian Malcolm Campbell, the latter for his encouraging advice. I thank Heidi Norman for leads on the Shamrock Aboriginal Warriors rugby team. Above all, I would like to thank my former colleague at the University of New South Wales Patrick O’Farrell, who died in 2003. His writings inspired me, as did his encouragement at an early stage of my career.

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1 Reece, “Irish and the Aborigines.” 2 Norman, “Modern Day Corroboree,” 185. 3 Patrick and White, Australian Museum’s Aboriginal Collections. Before jumping to conclusions, however, I note that a native clover plant liked by grazing animals has also been referred to as a shamrock, so this object requires more research. I also wonder whether the image may have come from playing cards, as a heart is also featured. Despite my doubts, the example remains intriguing and is listed as a shamrock in the museum’s collection. 4 Radio National, Morning Program, 23 February 2010. 5 Bolt, “Myths Made and Rewarded.” 6 Personal communication, mentioned in keynote speech by Mick Dodson at the A I A T S I S Conference, Canberra, 29 September 2009. 7 Read, Belonging. 8 Reece, Origins of Irish. 9 Campbell, Ireland’s New Worlds; O’Brien, “‘Kitchen Fragments’”; Reece, “Irish and the Aborigines.” 10 See Walter, Outsiders Within. 11 White, Remembering Ahanagran. 12 Koch, Many Coloured Land. Bergin, Kilkenny to Buninyong, is a selfpublished example. 13 MacDonagh, Sharing of the Green. 14 Brody, Utopia. 15 Reece, “Irish and the Aborigines,” 192. 16 Ibid., 193. He notes the actions of Irish Australians such as Paul Keating. Keating was the first prime minister to acknowledge historical wrongs, which he did in his Redfern Speech, and he brought in Native title legislation. 17 Ignatiev, How the Irish; O’Farrell, Irish in Australia; Walker, “‘Lost Tribes’”; Ward, Australian Legend; White, Inventing Australia. 18 O’Farrell, Irish in Australia, 72; Swain, Single Mothers. Reece, “Irish and the Aborigines,” admirably covers many aspects of this topic. 19 As an activist in Aboriginal rights struggles during the 1960s, Bandler’s dark complexion and strong identification with the Aboriginal rights movement led others to make the same error. See Lake, Faith; Bandler, Wacvie; and Bandler, Time Was Ripe. 20 O’Farrell, Irish in Australia, 72. 21 McGrath, Born in the Cattle, 68–94. 22 Grimshaw et al., Creating a Nation; McGrath, Born in the Cattle.

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23 McGrath, “Golden Thread”; McGrath, “Consent, Marriage and Colonialism.” 24 Clendinnen, Dancing with Strangers; O’Brien, “‘Kitchen Fragments.’” 25 Neil Gunson, cited in O’Brien, “‘Kitchen Fragments,’” 156; Reece, “Irish and the Aborigines”; Stratton, “Borderline Anxieties.” 26 O’Farrell, Letters from Irish Australia. 27 Cited in ibid., 71. 28 Cited in ibid., 73. 29 Cited in ibid., 74. 30 Cited in ibid., 79. 31 Cited in ibid., 76. 32 Cited in ibid., 79, emphasis added. 33 Ibid., 72. 34 The Irish Catholics also did a lot to discredit Marsden. 35 Ibid. 36 Stratton, “Borderline Anxieties,” 230–2. 37 Watson, Caledonia Australis. 38 Moreton-Robinson, ed., Whitening Race. 39 See Lake and Reynolds, Drawing the Global. 40 Watson, Caledonia Australis. 41 Campbell, Ireland’s New Worlds; Ignatiev, How the Irish. 42 Stratton, “Borderline Anxieties,” 233–5. 43 O’Farrell, Irish in Australia, 17. 44 Ibid., 6. 45 Dyer, White; Edwards and Yuanfang, eds, Lost in the Whitewash; Hage, White Nation; Hokari, “Anti-Minorities History”; Moreton-Robinson, ed., Whitening Race; Riggs, ed., Taking up the Challenge. 46 Healy, From the Ruins. 47 Curthoys, “Expulsion, Exodus and Exile.” 48 Lake and Reynolds, Drawing the Global; Reece, ed., Exiles from Erin. 49 This has also changed in recent times, as evidenced by autobiographical writing like Kinnane, Shadow Lines. 50 O’Farrell, Irish in Australia, 5. 51 Willey, Boss Drover, 17–18. 52 Haebich, Broken Circles; Read and Edwards, Lost Children. 53 Haebich, Broken Circles; Kevin Rudd’s apology motion, cited in A B C News, “The Apology.” 54 Ah Kit, “Chinaman in the Woodpile”; Kinnane, Shadow Lines; Martiniello, “As Strands of Plaited Music.”

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55 Ellinghaus, “Absorbing the ‘Aboriginal Problem’”; Ellinghaus, Taking Assimilation to Heart; Haskins and Maynard, “Sex, Race and Power”; McGrath, “Consent, Marriage and Colonialism.” 56 For a related article on paternity, see Probyn-Rapsey, “‘Uplifting’ White Men.” 57 Haebich and Mellor, Many Voices; Wilson, Bringing Them Home. 58 Van Toorn, Writing Never Arrives Naked. 59 Haebich, Spinning the Dream. 60 Ward, Australian Legend. 61 Dixson, Real Matilda. 62 Neil Gunson, cited in O’Brien, “‘Kitchen Fragments,’” 156. 63 Curthoys and Moore, “Working for the White People”; Saunders and Evans, eds, Gender Relations. 64 Saunders and Evans, eds, Gender Relations. 65 The then prime minister John Howard stated that Australians should be able to feel more than shame and guilt about their history; rather they should feel “relaxed and comfortable” about it. For a fuller examination of the history wars, see Macintyre and Clark, History Wars. 66 McDermott, ed., Jerilderie Letter. 67 Gould, “Fate and Future.” 68 “Ned Kelly Australian.” 69 Goodall, Invasion to Embassy; Mason, “Looming Battle”; Reece, “Irish and the Aborigines.” For a valuable comparative study, see Coleman, American Indians. 70 Catholicism also featured in mid-century politics, with a key split in the Labor Party and the formation of the Catholic-based Democratic Labor Party. 71 Campion, Australian Catholics; Massam, Sacred Threads. 72 The Standard, 22 June 2009, http://www.standard.net.au/news/local/news/ general/sellout-event-raises-10000-for-church-lifeline/1546512.aspx (accessed 10 October 2011). See also http://eurekastreet.com.au (accessed 6 September 2012). 73 Ballantyne and Burton, eds, Bodies in Contact; Cooper and Stoler, eds, Tensions of Empire; Stoler, Haunted by Empire; Stoler, Race and the Education. 74 McGrath, “Consent, Marriage and Colonialism.” 75 Ellinghaus, Taking Assimilation to Heart; Haskins and Maynard, “Sex, Race and Power”; Hannah, “Constituting Marriage”; Henningham, “‘Due Consideration and Kindness.’”

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– ed. Exiles from Erin: Convict Lives in Ireland and Australia. Foreword by A.J.F. O’Reilly. Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1991. Riggs, Damien W., ed. Taking up the Challenge: Critical Race and Whiteness Studies in a Postcolonising Nation. Adelaide: Crawford House, 2007. Saunders, Kay, and Raymond Evans, eds. Gender Relations in Australia: Domination and Negotiation. Sydney: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992. Seal, Graham. The Outlaw Legend: A Cultural Tradition in Britain, America and Australia. Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1999. “Shamrock: The Irish Search Engine.” http://www.ireland-information. com/engine (accessed 22 September 2008). Stoler, Ann Laura. Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. – Haunted by Empire: Geographies of the Intimate in North American History. Durham, N C: Duke University Press, 2006. – Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995. Stratton, Jon. “Borderline Anxieties: What Whitening the Irish Has to Do with Keeping out Asylum Seekers.” In Aileen Moreton-Robinson, ed., Whitening Race: Essays in Social and Cultural Criticism, 222–38. Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2004. Swain, Shurlee. Single Mothers and Their Children: Disposal, Punishment and Survival in Australia. Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Taffe, Sue. Black and White Together: FCA A TSI – The Federal Council for the Advancement of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders, 1958–1973. Brisbane: University of Queensland, 2005. Van Toorn, Penny. Writing Never Arrives Naked: Early Aboriginal Cultures of Writing in Australia. Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2006. Vincent, Michael. “Australian Sprinter Patrick Johnson Breaks 10 Second Barrier.” World Today, 6 May 2003. http://www.abc.net.au/worldtoday/ content/2003/s848491.htm (accessed 22 September 2008). Walker, Brian. “‘The Lost Tribes of Ireland’: Diversity, Identity and Loss among the Irish Diaspora.” Irish Studies Review 15, no. 3 (August 2007): 267–82. Walter, Bronwen. Outsiders Within: Whiteness, Place and Irish Women. New York: Routledge, 2000. Ward, Russell. The Australian Legend. Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1958.

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Watson, Don. Caledonia Australis: Scottish Highlanders on the Frontier of Australia. Sydney: Random House, 1997. White, Richard. Inventing Australia: Images and Identity, 1888–1980. Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1981. – Remembering Ahanagran: Storytelling in a Family’s Past. New York: Hill and Wang, 1998. Willey, Keith. Boss Drover. Adelaide: Rigby, 1971. Wilson, Ronald. Bringing Them Home: Report of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families. Sydney: Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, 1997. Wolfe, Patrick. “Nation and Miscegenation: Discursive Continuity in the Post-Mabo Era.” Social Analysis, no. 36 (October 1994): 93–152.

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6 “It Is Curious How Keenly Allied in Character Are the Scotch Highlander and the Maori”: Encounters in a New Zealand Colonial Settlement Brad Patterson

Let us travel back to the New Zealand summer of 2006, late January, blue skies, temperature around thirty degrees Celsius. The setting is Turakina, a small lower North Island settlement cluster of insufficient size to now be considered more than a village. Situated on State Highway 3, about midway between the township of Bulls and the  city of Wanganui, its resident population is fewer than 100.1 Superficially, there is not a great deal that is striking about Turakina, one of those sleepy little New Zealand main road settlements, relicts of an earlier era, that motorists pass through scarcely noticing. Yet for one day in each year Turakina is temporarily transformed: traffic streams into the village from both north and south; people congregate at the Turakina Domain, the adjacent fields being packed with cars; and for a few hours the population soars, on occasion up to 2,000. The attraction is Turakina’s Highland Games, in their 142nd year in 2006. All the traditional ingredients greet the visitor: dancing boards, piping and drumming boards, clan tents, equipment for the field events, and stalls offering a range of ethnic goods.2 By mid-morning the Domain is a scene of colourful bustle and a cacophony of sound. Yet there is one feature that sets these games apart from others in  New Zealand and elsewhere: a demonstrable Maori presence. Among the spectators, whether in Highland costume or more skimpy

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summer attire, there are curious combinations of dress, such as kilts blending with bush singlets and thongs, and several burly males sport elaborate shoulder tattoos. Young Polynesian women dominate the field events, whether tossing the sheaf, putting the stone, or the women’s caber. Parking is under the supervision of polite young uniformed Maori men, resplendent in blue tunics and white caps, and the liquor booth is also under Maori supervision. The modest entry fees are levied by cheerful, middle-aged Maori matrons, seemingly already known to most attendees. How has this mingling of races and cultures come about? This chapter reflects on the historical interactions between Highland Scots and Maori in one New Zealand settlement. Although the findings may be suggestive, it is not claimed that they should be considered representative of relations between these groups elsewhere in New Zealand, even in adjacent districts. As yet, there is insufficient in-depth research to justify wider generalizations. Despite the fact that Scots made up nearly a quarter of all migrants to New Zealand to 1914, they have arguably been the least studied of all the country’s major migrant groups. It was recognition of this lacuna that motivated the launch of the Scottish Migration to New Zealand project in 2005, in which an international research team funded by the Royal Society of New Zealand has undertaken to probe many aspects of migration, settlement, and cultural legacies.3 From the outset, the relations between migrant Scots and New Zealand’s Indigenous people were acknowledged as a major underlying area of inquiry, and as a consequence a number of exploratory shafts are currently being sunk in several parts of the country.4 From these collective efforts, it is hoped that a much clearer picture will emerge. The title of the chapter comes from an early 1891 lead article in the Rangitikei Advocate, a small local newspaper serving that district, its English-born editor musing at some length upon the apparent affinity between the races.5 At that point, Highland Scots and Maori had been neighbours in the Rangitikei for just over four decades, the systematic colonization of New Zealand having commenced in late 1839 with the activities of the New Zealand Company, a London-based joint stock enterprise, whose business was the trading of land and the introduction of immigrants.6 Partly as a result of the venture’s activities, the British government resolved to establish sovereignty over the islands of New Zealand, this objective being validated in 1840 through the Treaty of Waitangi, signed by the

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British Crown and the New Zealand tribes.7 The treaty purported to extend equal citizenship to Maori in the new colony and to guarantee them possession of their lands and resources, which could be alienated only through the Crown. Port Nicholson, or Wellington, at the foot of the North Island, had been selected as the New Zealand Company’s “first and principal settlement,” with approximately 4,200 immigrants being introduced between 1840 and 1844.8 What soon became evident, however, was that it would be quite impossible to accommodate all of the migrants in the vicinity of the first settlement nucleus, this circumstance leading to the planning of the company’s satellite settlements at Wanganui, around 120 miles to the northwest, and at Manawatu, roughly midway between Wellington and Wanganui. Actually planting settlers at the satellite sites, however, was not without difficulties. The New Zealand Company claimed to have purchased the lands in question from the resident tribes before the Treaty of Waitangi was signed, but this was vigorously disputed, and when unilateral incursions were attempted, armed conflict broke out.9 It was not until late in the 1840s, and then only with the colonial administration taking the lead, that agreements were negotiated with Maori to relinquish land at Wellington and Wanganui, the claim to Manawatu having to be at least temporarily abandoned.10 Given the pressure on both the New Zealand Company and the colonial administration to secure land for the introduced settlers, it was probably inevitable that Pakeha (European) eyes would soon fall on what were viewed as near-empty lands lying between the disputed Manawatu and Wanganui blocks, the Rangitikei-Turakina block.11 Bounded to the south and north by the valleys of the Rangitikei and Turakina Rivers, the district possessed large tracts of flattish land, with swamp and sand hills predominating toward the coast, and farther inland there were low rolling hills. Although there were isolated dense forest stands, the dominant vegetation cover was scrub, tree ferns, and flax. Regardless of wishful settler thinking, however, the land between the two rivers was far from uninhabited. Indeed, it constituted a major part of the tribal area (rohe) of Ngati Apa, a tribal grouping of relatively recent origin.12 Estimates suggest that in the 1840s around 300 Ngati Apa were located in the district, scattered in fortified settlements (pa), three of them in proximity to the Turakina River Valley, the focus of the present investigation.13 Prior to the 1820s these people had been a loose grouping, linked to adjacent tribes and subtribes, but an aggressive push south in that

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decade by tribes from the north of the island, armed with muskets, particularly Ngati Raukawa, Ngati Toa, and Te Atiawa, radically changed the situation.14 These incursions were not just random raids, such being commonplace, but a sustained bid by the intruders to secure new lands and resources. Eventually, after extended skirmishing, an accommodation with the newcomers was reached, but nervousness undoubtedly fostered solidarity among the longstanding occupiers of the district. Ngati Apa received de facto recognition of their new status when the Treaty of Waitangi was signed by three local chiefs at the mouth of the Rangitikei River in May 1840.15 The more than symbolic importance of this was to become fully apparent when the dispute over the adjacent Wanganui purchase was finally settled in 1848. Although not directly involved in the conflict, Ngati Apa’s interests were recognized, “all the lands between the rivers Turakina and Wangaehu” being set aside as “a place for all the members of the Ngatiapa [sic] tribe to collect and settle on.”16 It was the forerunner of an even more significant transaction. In May 1849, after further negotiations, the Crown purchased almost the whole of the 225,000-acre Rangitikei-Turakina block for £2,500 (around 2.6 pence per acre).17 Although the inequity of this transaction is apparent to modern eyes, what is striking is that at the time it was unquestionably a case of eager buyers and willing sellers. For the Crown, it was an opportunity to quiet the clamour of purchasers from the New Zealand Company, many of whom had been waiting nearly a decade for delivery of purchased lands; for Ngati Apa, willingness to sell was spurred by a belief that the permanent presence of Europeans would guarantee their longer-term security. Two individuals bestrode the transaction. On the Crown side, the official delegated to negotiate the purchase, Donald McLean, born on Tiree in 1820, initiated the first significant Highlander–Ngati Apa links. He was to become almost certainly the most influential of all nineteenth-century New Zealand civil servants.18 A fluent Maori speaker, well versed in Maori custom, he already had a track record, having been responsible for the resolution of the Wanganui dispute. Although McLean never actually took up residence in the district, he was to maintain a keen interest in the affairs of both Ngati Apa and the settlers until his death in 1876, corresponding regularly with both, ever ready to help resolve misunderstandings. For Ngati Apa, the lead figure was Aperahama Tipae.19 As far as can be established, Aperahama was already near fifty years of age in 1876. He had thus

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Fig. 6.1 Turakina and the Rangitikei block Source: Based on Buick, Old Manawatu, facing 168

experienced, firsthand, the traumas of the northern invasion and, despite a close family tie with Ngati Raukawa, retained deep suspicion of their inclinations. Recourse to McLean’s extant contemporary correspondence suggests that Aperahama had been urging purchase of the Rangitikei-Turakina lands from at least late 1847. In September 1848 he wrote somewhat impatiently to McLean, “You are holding the prize in your hand. Will you not quickly arrange the matter?”20 He was even more insistent a few weeks later: “Let it come soonest … so that there would be many Pakeha [Europeans] for me. Lots to cover my land.”21 McLean’s instructions had been to “reserve such tracts for the natives as they may now or at a further time require,” but he chose

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to interpret this rather narrowly.22 Arguing that the 30,000-acre tract previously set aside across the Turakina River as part of the Wanganui block settlement was ample, he restricted the Ngati Apa reserves to 900 acres at Turakina and 1,600 at Parewanui in the south, both sites of major pa, also setting aside a number of smaller lots such as traditional burial grounds.23 With the way now clear, in early 1850 the New Zealand Company announced that lands purchased on its behalf at Rangitikei-Turakina were open for selection by holders of land orders and compensation scrip.24 Keen interest was exhibited by past purchasers at both Wellington and Wanganui, and especially prominent among the early takers was a group of Scottish settlers, almost exclusively Highlanders, who had embarked for New Zealand on the Blenheim at Greenock in August 1840. Numbering around 200, most had been recruited at Fort William by Donald MacDonald, a senior Invernesshire official commissioned by the New Zealand Company to lead the party.25 Arriving in December 1840, they received the unhappy intelligence that their Wanganui lands were unavailable and likely to remain so for some time. Consequently, for most of the 1840s they formed what was termed “the Scots settlement” at Kaiwarra, on the northern outskirts of the infant town of Wellington.26 Although certainly some of the younger members of the community sought to improve their lot by moving elsewhere, the group remained remarkably cohesive until the death of MacDonald in early 1849, at which point the bonds began to weaken. News that land was now available at Turakina thus came at precisely the right time. With selections made from maps in the Wellington Land Office, a series of foot treks up the western coast’s beaches ensued, and by mid-1850 a number of Highland families had taken up land at the northern end of the block.27 The identity of the first Scottish settler in the lower reaches of the Turakina River Valley need not detain us, but there were a number of Cameron families, Grants, Frasers, McKenzies, McQuarries, MacDonalds, and MacFarlanes.28 Turakina became the settlement nucleus for the whole of the Rangitikei-Turakina block, a number of families stopping there briefly before taking up lands farther to the south.29 The first years were hard: crude huts had to be built; lands had to be cleared and burned off; and grain had then to be sown in the ashes and chipped in. In all of these activities, the settlers’ Maori neighbours lent a hand, the newcomers being actively welcomed, guided, and supported. A child at the time, Eliza Rockel later

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recorded her fond impressions of “these restless and incredible people who [were] never still.”30 What must be noted, however, is that for most of the Highlanders, these were not their first encounters with Maori, many of those who had lived at Kaiwarra, with a pa hard adjacent, having already come to know Maori ways and to develop firm friendships with Maori. Rockel further notes that, at Turakina, Maori frequently had meals at her family’s house and moved freely in and out of the dwellings, and there were also occasional return visits to Maori homes.31 To be sure, there were sometimes misunderstandings, she writes, but generally these were overcome by mutual goodwill. By 1858 a ribbon of village, backed by developing farms, had emerged along what was already known as the Great North Western Road. At this point, the European population was 168, around 789 acres had been fenced, there were 84 acres in wheat and 85 in oats, and 2,825 sheep and 1,550 cattle were being grazed.32 Alongside the settlers, members of Ngati Apa were themselves switching to farming on European lines. In contrast to this apparent harmony, elsewhere in the North Island the 1860s opened with interracial tension, which was destined to soon morph into hitherto unprecedented armed conflict.33 The epicentre was farther to the north, in the Province of Taranaki, and once more the contestation was over the acquisition of Maori land. The first shots were fired in March 1860, and within three months there were rumours of a pending attack on Wanganui, the panic inevitably spreading the few miles south to Turakina, which brought calls to establish a local force of volunteers.34 To help allay fears, Aperahama Tipae convened a meeting at Turakina pa, which was attended by Ngati Apa from throughout the block and from Wanganui, support for the settlers being unanimously pledged.35 From early 1861 to 1863 an uneasy truce prevailed on the North Island’s western coast, but in May of the latter year fighting again broke out in Taranaki, soon spreading to the Waikato and other upper North Island districts. This time the threat was far more real. In response, the settlers established a company of Turakina Rifle Volunteers, contributed to the Rangitikei Cavalry, and set about erecting a redoubt on the perhaps aptly named Cemetery Hill, near the centre of the village.36 The alarm became even more acute in  1864, when conflict actually reached the northern outskirts of the  town of Wanganui, but at Turakina the entente remained. Significantly, following a public meeting held in Turakina in May

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1864, the Wellington Independent reported that Aperahama Tipae, “the principal Turakina Chief,” had “expressed himself in a more loyal manner than ever he had before.”37 Very soon afterward, it was reported in the same newspaper that Ngati Apa had expressed their “readiness to do any amount of fighting for the Queen … [on the understanding] … the Government would supply edibles, wearables, arms and ammunition.”38 Although the offer was no doubt appreciated, it is likely other reasons also influenced the apparent Ngati Apa willingness to take up arms. Tensions between the Rangitikei Maori and the tribes farther to the south had again built up, the dispute this time being over the adjacent Rangitikei-Manawatu block.39 When the RangitikeiTurakina block had been sold in 1849, opponents of the sale (particularly Ngati Raukawa and Ngati Toa) had been adamant that no further acreage south of the Rangitikei River would be alienated, irrespective of Crown wishes or further Ngati Apa claims. Yet there was never much prospect that this would be accepted by a colonial government eager to acquire the land or by Ngati Apa, which was determined to uphold “rights.” The upshot was squabbling for more than a decade, the tribes being on the brink of their own private war by 1863, the flashpoint being the distribution of returns from renting lands in the retained block to European squatters. It was in this heated atmosphere that Ngati Apa unilaterally offered their interests in the Rangitikei-Manawatu block to the Crown.40 Taking this unilateral step was one thing, but securing the consent of the other tribes was quite a different matter. It took a further three years, with violence a constant prospect, to persuade all concerned to meet together at Parewanui in December 1866 to finalize terms. The occasion has been described in detail by an unexpected attendee, Sir Charles Wentworth Dilke, the English Liberal and reformist politician, in his Greater Britain, first published in 1868. His description of the Ngati Apa, prominent among the “thousand kilted Maoris … [clad in] brilliant tartans and scarlet cloth,” is especially appealing.41 Despite the vigour of the proceedings, which extended over several days, there was little prospect of a degeneration into combat. “We had previously been told,” Dilke recorded, that “the Maoris never fight upon a sudden quarrel: war is with them a solemn act, entered upon only after much deliberation.”42 However reluctantly on the part of Ngati Raukawa, the assembly concluded with a decision to sell, a further 220,000 acres passing to the Crown for £25,000

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(£15,000 to Ngati Apa and £10,000 to Ngati Raukawa).43 The roughly two shillings and six pence per acre was at least an advance on the 1849 rate. There was to be only one further scare in the course of the 1860s. By early 1868 most thought the hostilities were over, but this illusion was to be dispelled by what was termed Titokowaru’s Outbreak, fighting once more stretching down toward Wanganui.44 When rumours of a war party approaching the settlement from inland began to circulate, Turakina was again “thrown into a state of painful excitement.”45 Once more Ngati Apa stood alongside their Pakeha neighbours. In the words of Kawana Hunia, described as having “the appearance of a great Highland Chieftain,” “We will remain on the side of the Europeans, whatever the consequences … we will live with the white people and die in their defence.”46 Fortunately, there was to be no need for Ngati Apa to make this sacrifice. By March 1869 the war on the western coast of the North Island was at an end, and despite the traumas, by the close of the 1860s Turakina was seemingly facing a bright future. Whereas settlements farther north had felt the full destructive force of the fighting, Turakina was physically unscathed. Indeed, it had actually benefited from the unsettled times, serving as a centre for rest and recreation when 2,000 imperial troops were stationed in Wanganui, and detachments of Armed Constabulary had also been periodically stationed in the settlement. As early as 1867 the Wellington Independent was impelled to observe that what had been a quiet and rather primitive little village in the 1850s was fast becoming a bustling township: “the grating of the saw and the tap of the hammer everywhere indicates the rapid progress of the settlement.”47 Buildings and businesses were springing up on all sides. Turakina was viewed as a clear leader over Marton and Bulls, farther south in the block, and for more than two further decades this district ascendancy continued. By the mid-1870s Turakina accommodated three hotels, a boarding house, three grocers, three butchers, a shoemaker, two bakeries, two blacksmiths, two saddlers, two saleyards, a courthouse, a police station, and three churches.48 It serviced a growing European population of around 600, whereas the Maori population still hovered around 300. Moreover, the adjacent countryside had assumed a more developed appearance, with neat fields and the roads bounded by sod banks topped with gorse hedges. There could be “no snugger locality in which to live,” wrote one visitor. “Here a man could be extremely

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happy were he the possessor of a good-tempered thrifty wife and a clutch of a dozen children.”49 And, at least on the surface, it was not only the Highlanders and their families who were doing well. In May 1876 Resident Magistrate James Booth reported that during the preceding year “the Natives have grown larger grain crops than I have noticed for many years past. They are also improving their stock … Many of them own small flocks of sheep, and at every village may be seen ploughs, harrows, carts etc … They seem on the whole, to be prosperous and contented.”50 In the following year, Booth’s successor, Robert Ward, ventured that “the natives at Turakina have some of the finest grazing farms in the district.”51 Most now lived in European-type dwellings, and strong drink had been banned from the villages. In marked contrast to the tribes to the north and south, their numbers were actually increasing. A constant theme among contemporary observers was the apparent harmony between the races at Turakina, the settlement being advanced as a model for other districts, with the close affinity between members of Ngati Apa and the Highland settlers especially noted.52 Yet, although there was certainly a propensity for the former to adopt European ways, the cultural traffic was by no means always one way. The case of Alexander MacDonald evidences the degree of respect that existed between the Scots and their Maori neighbours.53 Born in the Highlands, the son of Donald MacDonald, leader of the Blenheim migrants, he was just twelve years of age when he arrived in New Zealand. As a youth, Alex struck up friendships at Kaiwarra pa, becoming fluent in the Maori language and steeped in Maori customs, which was to stand him in good stead. As he was to later write, in his experience, “Highlanders who have learnt to speak the Maori tongue can enter into the feeling of a Maori … better than most Europeans.”54 Although after 1850 MacDonald was to lead a peripatetic life, variously making his home at Wanganui, Rangitikei, and Manawatu, that he married a Turakina Cameron effectively anchored him to that settlement. What sets MacDonald apart from most of his fellow Scots settlers is that he left extended manuscript reminiscences, and the passages therein may be taken as indicative of mindsets.55 The Maori, he argued, were a strong, brave, and honourable people. Anticipating arguments that were to be advanced more than a hundred years later, he made a strong case that the Treaty of Waitangi had never been honoured. Maori had been guaranteed possession of their lands, which could

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be alienated only through fair and honest purchase. This, he stated, had never been the case, and land had been the catalyst for most of the hostilities in the colony, something that Scots were well placed to understand. Unusually, MacDonald was prepared to act in conformity with his beliefs, a willingness clear from his involvement in the aftermath of the Manawatu-Rangitikei purchase. At this point employed as a government-appointed sheep inspector, he was approached in 1867 by a group of Maori (“as honest and straightforward people as God’s sun shone on”) whose claims to reserve lands in the sold block were being ignored by the Crown.56 For a half-dozen years, MacDonald variously appeared for them before the Native Land Court and paid for their representation before higher tribunals, in the process being dismissed from his public employment. When all legal efforts failed, he adopted a more direct approach. Destroying survey stations on the disputed land, an earlier protest, had been of little effect, so when the Crown sought to legitimize the passage of coach traffic across the block, he brought the situation to a head by shooting the leading horse of the first team that attempted to cross.57 Arrested and tried, he was sentenced to three years penal servitude. MacDonald went to jail with his resources exhausted and his family near destitute, and, as might be expected in a close Highland community, family and neighbours rallied round. But the most touching gesture was the transfer by Maori of around 800 acres from their remaining lands to his wife and family, together with a sum of money for their support raised through mortgage.58 It would probably be too much to suggest that such strong bonds, such mutual support, were the norm in Turakina, but there is sufficient evidence to indicate sturdy and wide-ranging interracial links. At Turakina, as in Scotland, church and school were bound together, the Highlanders in the main being Free Church of Scotland folk who clung strongly to their somewhat austere faith.59 Initially, their spiritual needs were attended to by itinerant clergy, but it should be no surprise that within a half-dozen years a church and manse had been erected and a resident Presbyterian minister secured.60 It is surely significant that although Catholic and Church of England churches were subsequently built, in 1868 and 1883 respectively, at no point in the nineteenth century was there a resident priest or vicar. At Turakina the Free Church ethos prevailed, and successive ministers were the guardians, none more so than the Reverend John Ross, a

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Caithness man, who served the parish from 1871 to 1903.61 A distinguished graduate of the University of Edinburgh, his influence was evident in regular services in Gaelic, stress on the importance of education, and a commitment to the Temperance Movement. A sign of his stature is that in 1881, notwithstanding his backblocks domicile, Ross was elected moderator of the Presbyterian Church of New Zealand.62 Among Maori, however, the Presbyterians were slower in establishing a pastoral foothold. Indeed the Church of England, through what it termed its Native missionaries, held greater sway in the 1850s and 1860s, and it was not until the 1870s, then conceivably at the instigation of Ross, that the Presbyterian missions adopted a more proactive approach. Although there were itinerant Presbyterian missioners from the 1850s, it was not until 1889 that a full-time Presbyterian missioner took up residence at Turakina pa.63 What is without question, however, is that, regardless of denomination, Turakina acquired a reputation as a God-fearing settlement, and the preoccupations tended to be the same for both races. Schooling was slower getting under way. Through the 1850s attendance was fee-paying and voluntary, a disincentive in an establishing settlement, and by 1861 the Turakina Common School, one of several in the first decade, still catered to no more than 25 pupils.64 But the numbers grew when the Wellington Education Board assumed responsibility in 1865, with the roll climbing to around 100 in the ensuing decade.65 Little attention was initially given to the provision of schooling for Maori children. Several high-born individuals were sent to an Anglican Church school in Wanganui, but it was not until the mid-1870s that a school for Maori, associated with the Presbyterian Church, opened. In 1877 an inspector noted that some 20 pupils were enrolled in the Native School, that considerable progress was being made, and that it was “a source of pleasure to hear them singing Sankey’s hymns.”66 Yet the Native School lasted little longer than four years, children from both races then combining in  one school for the first time. In 1881, when 14 Maori children were attending the government school, their diligence was described as “unbounded,” and they were said to have a “lively sense of discipline.”67 A common member of the various school boards, the Reverend Ross was instrumental in offering a combined educational stream, but his influence extended well beyond the primary institutions. It was through his initiative that a secondary boarding school was founded in Turakina in 1878, at first co-educational but soon

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evolving into a “Ladies Classical School.”68 In the latter guise, it attracted boarders from across the North Island, winning a high reputation. At the same time, the Reverend Ross operated what amounted to a de facto theological college at Turakina, offering tuition to candidates for the Presbyterian ministry before they completed their studies at the Theological Hall in Dunedin.69 Despite its modest size, Turakina was a hub of North Island Presbyterian activity. The seemingly free mingling of the races was also evident in a number of leisure activities. A prime example was Maori involvement in the annual Turakina Caledonian Games, among the earliest regularly mounted in New Zealand and first conducted on an organized basis in 1864.70 Maori, predictably, lacked the training to participate in the piping and dancing competitions, but they soon made themselves felt in the athletics contests. In the second year the games were held, the field events were won by recent migrant William Ritchie, but the New Zealand Spectator noted, with surprise, that he had been pushed hard by “a half-caste, James Rutherford,” who had also featured in the jumps.71 A Maori identified only as “Blackie” had won the 600-yard flat race. Such results were far from uncommon. Young Maori did especially well in the running events, and in the late 1870s “Colin,” surname unstated but also a Maori, won distinction in the caber tossing.72 This pattern continued in the 1880s, with greater emphasis being placed on athletics than on traditional Highland competitions. By this point, despite the disapproval of some settlement leaders, Maori and Pakeha were jointly indulging in a new passion: horse racing. The unsettling character of what was generally hailed as “the fête day of Turakina” was observed both by the Reverend Ross and by the teacher at the Native School, but to little avail.73 Race meetings had been held earlier in adjoining settlements, but the first in Turakina was in March 1878.74 Although at every meeting there was a race for horses owned, trained, and ridden by Maori (the Ngawiriki Stakes), generally for a purse of twenty sovereigns, Maori horses competed freely throughout the race cards. In 1884, for example, Maori-owned horses placed second in the Handicap Hurdles, first and second in the Maiden Plate, and third in the District Handicap.75 The meetings remained a highlight of the Turakina year until the first decade of the twentieth century. Mixed rugby football also became a Turakina feature in the 1880s. Clubs had been formed in Wanganui in 1872 and farther south in Marton

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and Bulls in 1876, with Turakina being considered a handy intermediate point for matches.76 Indications are that a Turakina club was formed several years later, but it was not until the mid-1880s that the local team participated in regular competitions, principally with teams from the Wanganui district and Feilding. Nevertheless, the Saturday matches soon became considerable local events, great interest being exhibited by both communities. In July 1890 a visitor from Wanganui noted, if somewhat sniffily, “the ground being crowded, the native element predominating, as the Maoris … rolled up to see their dusky brethren play.”77 He was even more surprised that “several of the Maoris played without boots.” What puzzled him was how they “managed to kick the ball with their bare feet” and the way that they “rushed into the scrums quite regardless of their nude understandings.” Nonetheless, Turakina triumphed on the day, by six points to two. After the game was over, a haka was danced and all adjourned to the Ben Nevis Hotel. On the evidence advanced so far, it might be suggested that, after the traumas of the 1860s, in this one New Zealand settlement there was a certain complementarity of economic endeavour between the Highland settlers and Ngati Apa (even if the resources were far from equally shared). There was also shared religious commitment and shared appreciation for the value of education, and there was ready social mixing and joint pursuit of at least some avenues of leisure. What, then, of more intimate relations? What, for instance, was the incidence of intermarriage between settlers and Maori at Turakina? It must be conceded at once that properly answering these questions will require a great deal more research, particularly a careful study of extant marriage registers that have yet to be accessed.78 For the moment, all that can be offered are first impressions, based on anecdotal evidence and isolated newspaper reports. A knowledgeable local historian, a descendant of one of the original Highland families and the holder of a degree in history, strongly suggests that scarcely one of those families was devoid of a Ngati Apa connection, whether through marriage or less formalized congress.79 A current Ngati Apa elder (kaumatua) endorses this proposition, stating that at Turakina a close-knit and racially intermingled community developed: “We formed in our own minds a whanau [or extended family] of Turakina – a whanau of Maori, Scots and some other settlers.”80 Mute evidence of this sits on Cemetery Hill, overlooking the village, the site

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of the 1860s redoubt. There, on a thin scatter of stones, Maori Christian names offer prima facie confirmation of the closeness of family links. If further is needed, in the mainly European hilltop cemetery, eight Ngati Apa kaumatua rest alongside their Scots contemporaries, testimony to mutual respect and friendship. It may well seem that the account of Highlander–Ngati Apa interactions that has been presented is an almost idyllic one. Further, if the reconstruction were accurate, the harmony and special character of the settlement would ideally have been carried through well into the twentieth century. Sadly, this was not the case, or was so only to a limited degree. As early as 1914 it was possible for James Glenny Wilson, native of Hawick, Roxburghshire, a migrant to New Zealand in 1873 and subsequently a substantial landowner in the south of the Rangitikei-Turakina block, to lament that Turakina had largely lost its Highland flavour.81 “Turakina will never have the same fascination for me,” he wrote in his now classic memoir Early Rangitikei. “The old people are all being replaced by ordinary colonists.”82 The early settlement leaders had almost all passed on; no longer were everyday conversations in Gaelic the norm; the hold of the church was weakening; and scions of the settler families were increasingly making their lives elsewhere. But it was not just the Highland flavour that was disappearing. Ironically, the Maori presence in the immediate vicinity of the settlement was also greatly reduced. The 1907 Stout-Ngata Commission, investigating Maori land tenure, might well praise the standard of Maori farming in the district, but the numbers so engaged were relatively few.83 The Turakina Maori were by now largely confined to remnants of their reserved lands. In effect dispossessed, members of Ngati Apa were becoming invisible in their own rohe, young Maori steadily drifting away to low-status jobs in other districts. It might be argued that this blurring of ethnic origins was a natural outcome of the passing of the first and second contact generations, and this no doubt was a major contributing factor, but there were other underlying forces at work. For a start, the advent of the railway in 1877, linking Turakina first to Wanganui, then to settlements farther south, and ultimately to Wellington, the colonial capital, undoubtedly reduced its distinctiveness.84 Turakina was no longer a destination but more a place to be passed through. Moreover, although locals initially anticipated that rail access would provide a boost to the township and environs, this proved not to be the case.

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Symptomatic of the misplaced confidence was the surveying-out for sale of 140 residential sections in the vicinity of the railway stations by local landowner George Yates Lethbridge.85 Two decades later most remained unsold. Lethbridge’s speculative actions nevertheless highlight a phenomenon that hitherto has largely gone unrecognized: the passing of more and more Turakina land into fewer hands as the late nineteenth century passed. As early as 1876 the Wanganui Herald railed against land monopoly, the natural concomitant of the activities of those it termed “the great land gourmands.”86 As in the old country, sheep were taking the place of human beings, thereby stunting the growth of the district. Any who doubted this were invited to “traverse the main road from Turakina to Bulls … [for up to seven miles], see on one side of the road the absence of homesteads … [and then] realise the fact that upwards of 30,000 acres belong to one great monopolist.” This estate, Heaton Park, was the property of leading Wellington merchant Captain W.B. (Barney) Rhodes, a Lincolnshire man, one of the richest men in the southern North Island, arguably in the colony, and a classic absentee landlord.87 Heaton Park had been meticulously assembled over a quarter-century through compensation grants, Crown purchases, and aggressive acquisitions from earlier selectors.88 Heaton Park ran from the main road line to the coast. To the north of the road, George Yates Lethbridge was in the process of pulling together a comparable, if less consolidated, estate.89 A Devonshire man who had made his fortune supplying imperial troops in Taranaki in the early 1860s, he secured his first foothold through the purchase of 2,000-acre Ann Bank from James Wilson in 1867. Unlike Rhodes, Lethbridge was a  resident, and he set about establishing himself as the squire of Turakina (it was no coincidence that the Turakina Highway Board soon became the Lethbridge Highway Board). By 1892 he and his sons owned or leased 13,000 acres in the district, as well as extensive holdings elsewhere.90 Collectively, critics charged, these landowners exerted a “withering and blighting influence” on Turakina. Original smaller landholders were hemmed in, then squeezed out. With no room for settlement expansion, family members were forced to try their luck elsewhere. The large pastoral estates effectively precluded subdivision for closer settlement, at least until the spread of dairying in the early twentieth century made it profitable. And there was another consideration: properties such as those held by Rhodes and Lethbridge almost constituted village settlements in their own

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right, and there was a propensity for the landowners to seek cheap outside labour. “Turakina … was originally, we believe, a Scotch settlement,” commented an 1883 traveller. “[W]e should almost say the Hibernian element is now predominant.”91 The pressure on Turakina land also had another destabilizing effect. Under the Native Land Acts of 1862 and 1865, the reserve lands earlier set aside for Maori were steadily whittled away.92 To the mid-1860s these totalled some 30,000 acres between the Turakina and Wangaehu Rivers and a further 3,000 acres within the Rangitikei- Turakina block itself. With only a portion of these lands in cultivation at any one time, there was an initial willingness on the part of Ngati Apa to negotiate leases for some of the acreage with settlers, an arrangement that was seen to be mutually advantageous. In July 1869 it was stated that almost £4,000 annually was being paid to Turakina’s Maori landlords.93 Yet it was always likely the fortunate leaseholders, particularly the major district landowners, would ultimately seek a more secure form of tenure, and the Native Land Acts, with subsequent amending legislation, provided the means. When first surveyed out, the reserves were held under customary tenure; that is, they were vested in the tribe. The 1860s Native Land Acts, and subsequent amending legislation, however, sought the individualization of title after hearings in the Native Land Court, but there was little dissent when “ownership” was reposed in tribal leaders.94 The problems arose when kaumatua – including, it must be said, Aperahama Tipae and Kawana Hunia – agreed to sell lands that were essentially held in trust. Attempts to block the sales in the 1880s and 1890s by dissident tribal members proved fruitless.95 By 1907 no more than a few thousand acres remained in Ngati Apa hands. On the eve of the First World War, James Glenny Wilson, now comfortably ensconced on his Bulls property, considered Turakina to be “a very picturesque village, with many beautiful trees and neat hedges,”96 but it was a settlement that had regressed as the more southerly townships of Marton and Bulls had forged ahead. In his view, Turakina was likely to drift further into comfortable obscurity, becoming indistinguishable from most other small New Zealand rural settlements. Yet closer examination suggests there were to be  several important ongoing legacies from the mid- and latenineteenth-century encounter years. For a time Turakina continued to be a centre of Presbyterian education. With the retirement of the

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Reverend John Ross in 1903, the Turakina Ladies Classical School closed. This loss, however, offered an opportunity. Supported by Ross, the Reverend H.J. Fletcher, Maori missioner at Turakina, proposed the opening at the manse of a secondary school for Maori girls, who would be trained in the Christian faith and homecrafts as well as given a general education.97 Launched with thirty pupils in April 1905 by Prime Minister Richard Seddon, the Turakina Maori Girls School soon acquired a colony-wide reputation,98 and it was to be a feature of Turakina life for a further twenty-three years before, despite strong opposition, its relocation to Marton, still as the Turakina Maori Girls College. Conceivably also influenced by the deep religious feeling fostered in the district, the Ratana movement took root just across the Turakina River in the 1920s.99 Born near Bulls in 1873, Tahupotiki Wiremu Ratana, a Maori farmer, experienced a vision in 1918 in which the Holy Spirit instructed him to preach the gospel to Maori people. Celebrated as a faith healer, he initiated a sweeping religious revival in the 1920s, his New Zealand– wide adherents numbering nearly 12,000 by 1926. In consequence, a makeshift village on the Ratana farm speedily metamorphosed into a modern township, up to 600 being in residence at any one time. By the 1930s the religious dimension was matched by a pantribal political initiative, with Ratana candidates, in alliance with the New Zealand Labour Party, taking all four Maori seats then available in the New Zealand Parliament. Ratana was to remain a force until the present day. Meanwhile, Turakina’s Highland heritage was  kept alive, if sometimes fitfully, by the Turakina Caledonian Society.100 Inevitably, the membership, largely drawn from the early settler families, attenuated, the society’s most significant contribution being the annual staging of the Highland Games, a proud boast being that the games went ahead notwithstanding war, depressions, or adverse climatic conditions. Even so, attendances shrank and the gatherings came to bear little resemblance to those of earlier years. How, then, to conclude? What has been presented is no more than a vignette, a case study of one set of Highland-Maori encounters. What the evidence does suggest is that both major race-relations interpretations so far advanced by New Zealand historians are a little too simplistic to satisfactorily encompass the situation. The first, which held sway until the 1970s and is still embraced by some, stressed that, certainly in comparison with other former settler colonies, race relations in New Zealand were relatively benign and

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beneficial.101 The second, which has gathered strength in recent years, emphasizes the adverse impacts of colonization on Maori, wilful dispossession, and cultural genocide.102 Arguably, the Turakina experience falls between the two. Yet even this conclusion must be considered interim. The study to date has been essentially based on European (settler) sources, namely printed and manuscript records. To be fully balanced, Ngati Apa tribal traditions and oral history must also be taken into account. This will be the next step in the investigation. A modern-day footnote is in order. Under the Treaty of Waitangi Act 1975, Maori tribal groups may seek redress for historical actions and omissions by the Crown deemed to have breached promises made in the 1840 treaty. With the great majority of Ngati Apa now living outside of the tribal area, the Tribal Council (Te Runanga o Ngati Apa) has sought compensation for the historical loss of around 500,000 acres, as well as recognition of significant cultural sites. After extended negotiations, a draft agreement between Ngata Apa and the Crown was signed in October 2008, with a bill to be placed before the New Zealand Parliament.103 This bill will make provision for substantial monetary compensation (N Z $16 million), the return of a number of sites, and other cultural redress measures. It is hoped the compensation will assist Ngati Apa to re-establish a vigorous presence in their rohe. Although the Tribal Council is now based in offices in Marton, the cultural nerve centre will remain Tini Waitara marae (the term for a communal or sacred place) adjacent to Turakina. There is tribal acknowledgment that there is now a shared heritage in the district, an insistence that the marae is a meeting place for everyone in the Turakina community. Nearby, the Ratana pa continues to expound wider community values. And, to round the story out, the Highland descendants at Turakina are also enjoying a renaissance. In the late 1980s the stalwarts keeping the games afloat engineered a return to roots, making them a more faithful replication of what they had once been.104 They are now the most traditional Highland Games held in New Zealand. Moreover, just as tribal members are being attracted back to Tini Waitara, so have descendants of the Blenheim families been returning for the annual gathering. Moreover, the Celtic revival has extended beyond the games, with an influx into the district and with old links to the Scottish homeland reforged. Earlier, the chapter cited a Maori elder’s suggestion that at Turakina a family group (whanau)

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encompassing Maori, Scots, and indeed some other settlers has evolved over time. It should perhaps not be a surprise, then, that this elder and leading members of the Turakina Caledonian Society are in fact blood relations.

Not e s 1 For a review of the scattered past writings on the village and district, see Annabell, “Smoke in the Hills?” 2 Patterson, “Turakina’s Highland Games.” 3 Patterson, “Stirring the Porridge.” 4 In addition to the present study, Angela Wanhalla and Tom Brooking have worked on intermarriage in the south of the South Island, and Rosalind McClean is supervising a study of race relations in the Hokianga district at the top of the North Island. 5 Cited in Bruce Herald, 27 March 1891. 6 Burns, Fatal Success. A dated, but still useful, account of the New Zealand Company’s activities is Marais, Colonisation of New Zealand. 7 The standard work is Orange, Treaty of Waitangi. See also Kawharu, ed., Waitangi. 8 Miller, Early Victorian New Zealand. 9 Wards, Shadow of the Land, chs 7 and 10. 10 “Rangahaua Whanau Research Report, District 12,” ch. 2; “Rangahaua Whanau Research Report, District 9,” 22–36. 11 Vogel, Official Handbook, 192–3. 12 Downes, “Early History of Rangitikei.” 13 H. Tacy Kemp to Colonial Secretary New Munster, 1 January 1850, New Zealand Government Gazette (Province of New Munster) 3, no. 16 (21 August 1850): 78. 14 Huwyler, “Ngati Apa.” 15 Ibid. 16 “Notes Relating to the Purchase of Rangitikei Lands, 15 May 1849,” Alexander Turnbull Library (hereafter A TL), Donald McLean Papers, MS Papers 0032–0003. 17 “Rangahaua Whenua Research Reports, District 12,” 65. 18 Fargher, “Best Man Who Ever Served the Crown.” See also Ward, “McLean, Donald, 1820–1877.” 19 See Aperahama Tipae’s obituary in Wanganui Chronicle, 12 August 1891. There are also isolated references to Aperahama Tipae in such works as

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20 21 22

23 24 25 26 27

28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43

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Wilson, Early Rangitikei, 39–40, 46, 237, but he is a curious omission from the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography. For an account of his role in the 1849 negotiations, see Donald McLean’s report to Lieutenant Governor Edward John Eyre in New Zealand Spectator and Cook’s Strait Guardian, 16 June 1849. Aperahama Tipae to Donald McLean, 25 September 1848, A TL, Donald McLean Papers, series 2, Inwards Letters (Maori). Aperahama Tipae to Donald McLean, 25 September 1848, A TL, Donald McLean Papers, series 2, Inwards Letters (Maori). Alfred Domett to Donald McLean, 12 September 1848, Appendices to the Journals of the House of Representatives (hereafter AJHR), 1861, C1, 251; “Rangahaua Whanau Research Report, District 12,” 65. Turton, ed., Maori Deeds of Land Purchases, 213. New Zealand Spectator and Cook’s Strait Guardian, 29 June 1850. “Onslow Settlers of the 1840s.” For a detailed analysis of the migrant party, see Horn, “Blenheim’s Highland Migrants, 1840.” Patterson, “‘It brings to mind the wild valleys.’” “Return of Nominal List of All Purchases of Land in the Province of Wellington,” Acts and Proceedings of Wellington Provincial Council (Session 3, 1855–56), Council Paper, 7–9. Wilson, Turakina, 13–14; Wilson, Early Rangitikei, 112–14. The question of the first settler is addressed by Annabell, “Smoke in the Hills?” 27–31. See, for example, Knight, Poyntzfield; and Clapham, Pukehou. Knight, Poyntzfield, 42. Ibid. “European Census Returns.” Belich, New Zealand Wars, 73–88; Day, ed., Contested Ground. Wanganui Chronicle, 21 June 1860. Wellington Independent, 30 October 1860. Wellington Independent, 25 August 1863, 8 September 1863. Wellington Independent, 28 May 1864. For background on the threat at Wanganui, see Voelkerling and Stewart, From Sand to Papa. Wellington Independent, 16 June 1864. “Rangahaua Whanau Research Report, District 12,” ch. 5; Dawe, “Rangitikei-Manawatu Purchase”; Buick, Old Manawatu, ch. 4. Aperahama Tipae et al. to I.E. Featherston, 10 June 1865, Enclosure 2, in No. 4, “Papers Relative to the Rangitikei Land Dispute,” AJHR, 1865, E2, 8. Dilke, Greater Britain, 250. Ibid., 256. Turton, ed., Maori Deeds of Land Purchases, 214–30.

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54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75

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Belich, I Shall Not Die. Evening Post, 5 December 1868. Evening Post, 12 December 1868. Wellington Independent, 31 January 1867. Jurgens and Crawley, “Turakina,” 16. Wellington Independent, 12 September 1872. James Booth to Under Secretary Native Department, 31 May 1877, AJHR, 1876, G1, 36. Robert Ward to Under Secretary Native Department, 25 May 1877, AJHR, 1877, G1, 20. Annabell, “Smoke in the Hills?” 42–6. Ibid., 12–13; Wilson, Early Rangitikei, 93–7, 161–3, 187–9. Most writers on Turakina have drawn from MacDonald’s reminiscences, later transcribed by Sir Michael Fowler as “Alexander MacDonald, My Story,” A T L , M S Papers 6628. “Alexander MacDonald, My Story,” ATL, MS Papers 6628, 36. Alexander MacDonald, “Reminiscences” (1904), A TL, MS Papers 1167. “Alexander MacDonald, My Story,” ATL, MS Papers 6628, 65. Ibid., 71; Evening Post, 1 May 1874, 8 June 1874. “Alexander MacDonald, My Story,” ATL, MS Papers 6628, 72–3; Wilson, Early Rangitikei, 188. Annabell, “Smoke in the Hills?” 31–3; Dickson, History of the New Zealand Presbyterian Church, 510–13. Wilson, Turakina, 22–5. Ibid., 34–46. See also Register of New Zealand. Wilson, Turakina, 41. Ibid., 53. Turakina School Jubilee, 27. Ibid., 34. Robert Ward to Under Secretary Native Department, 25 May 1877, A J HR 1877, G1, 20. Wanganui Chronicle, 21 May 1881, 10 June 1881. Wilson, Turakina, 49–53. Ibid., 47. Wanganui Chronicle, 7 January 1864. New Zealand Spectator and Cook’s Strait Guardian, 11 January 1865. Wanganui Herald, 19 March 1878. Wanganui Chronicle, 14 February 1878. Wanganui Herald, 2 March 1878. Feilding Star, 1 March 1884.

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76 Wanganui Herald, 28 August 1876, 8 September 1876. 77 Wanganui Chronicle, 9 July 1890. 78 I am grateful to Gerard Horn for information about the possible location of registers for the Turakina district. 79 Bruce Cameron, personal communication, 10 July 2006. 80 “A whanau (family) of Turakina.” 81 Brooking, “Wilson, James Glenny”; Wild, Life and Times. 82 Wilson, Early Rangitikei, 115. 83 Wanganui Herald, 26 March 1907. 84 Evening Post, 18 May 1877; Leitch, Railways of New Zealand, 46–7. 85 Turakina School Jubilee, 34. 86 Wanganui Herald, 20 January 1876, 3 April 1876. 87 Patterson, “Rhodes, William Barnard.” 88 Ferguson, “Building of W.B.” 89 See George Yates Lethbridge’s obituary in Wanganui Chronicle, 25 September 1894. 90 “Further Report by the Commissioner of the Land and Income Tax Department,” 16 September 1892, AJHR, 1892, B20A, table 5. See also “Lethbridge and Sons.” 91 Feilding Star, 9 June 1883. 92 On the general operation of Land Acts, see Williams, “Te Kooti Tango Whenua.” 93 Wellington Independent, 1 January 1869. 94 Wellington Independent, 24 July 1869. 95 Wanganui Herald, 9 August 1887, 6 December 1888. 96 Wilson, Early Rangitikei, 114. 97 Wilson, Turakina, 53–6; Otago Witness, 25 November 1903. 98 Wanganui Herald, 6 July 1907; Evening Post, 26 March 1910. 99 Newman, Ratana Revisited. 100 Patterson, “Turakina’s Highland Games.” 101 Useful examples include Sinclair, “Why Are Race Relations Better?”; and Howe, Race Relations. 102 For instances, see essays in Byrnes, ed., New Oxford History. 103 A draft of the Ngati Apa (North Island) Claims Settlement Bill is available from the website of the New Zealand Parliamentary Counsel’s Office, http://www,legislation.govt.nz (accessed 12 April 2010). See also the website of Ngati Apa’s Tribal Council, http://www.ngatiapa.iwi.nz (accessed 12 April 2010). 104 See the website of the Turakina Caledonian Society, http://www.turakinahighlandgames.co.nz (accessed 8 May 2010); and Patterson, “Turakina’s Highland Games.”

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B i b l i ogr ap h y “A whanau (family) of Turakina.” Caption notes for the exhibition The Scots in New Zealand. Te Papa Tongarewa: Museum of New Zealand, 2007. Annabell, Jessie. “Smoke in the Hills? Representations of Turakina’s Past.” B A research paper, Massey University, 1993. Belich, James. I Shall Not Die: Titokowaru’s War, New Zealand 1868–9. Wellington: Allen and Unwin, 1989. – The New Zealand Wars and the Victorian Interpretation of Racial Conflict. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1986. Brooking, Tom. “Wilson, James Glenny, 1849–1929.” In Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, vol. 3, 585–6. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1993. Buick, T. Lindsay. Old Manawatu. Palmerston North: Buick and Young, 1903. Burns, Patricia. Fatal Success: A History of the New Zealand Company. Auckland: Heinemann Reed, 1989. Byrnes, Giselle, ed. The New Oxford History of New Zealand. South Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 2009. Clapham, Ian. Pukehou: The Frasers of Lower Rangitikei. Feilding: Fraser Family Reunion, 1996. Dawe, B.N. “The Rangitikei-Manawatu Purchase.” MA thesis, Victoria University of Wellington, 1948. Day, Kelvin, ed. Contested Ground: The Taranaki Wars, 1860–1881: Te Whenua i tohea. Wellington: Huia, 2010. Dickson, John. History of the New Zealand Presbyterian Church. Dunedin: J. Wilkie, 1899. Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, vol. 2, 1870–1900. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1993. Dilke, C.W. Greater Britain: A Record of Travel in English-Speaking Countries. 8th ed. London: Macmillan, 1885. Downes, T.W. “Early History of Rangitikei, and Notes on the Ngati Apa Tribe.” Transactions and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New Zealand, no. 42 (1909): 74–114. “European Census Returns.” Government Gazette (Province of Wellington), 2 November 1858. Fargher, Ray. “The Best Man Who Ever Served the Crown”: A Life of Donald McLean. Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2007. Ferguson, A.L. “The Building of W.B. Rhodes’s Heaton Park Estate, Rangitikei, 1850–1915.” B A research paper, Victoria University of Wellington, 1989.

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Horn, Gerard. “The Blenheim’s Highland Migrants, 1840.” Unpublished paper, 2007. Howe, K.R. Race Relations in Australia and New Zealand: A Comprehensive Survey, 1770s-1970s. Wellington: Methuen, 1977. Huwyler, Grant. “Ngati Apa – Ngati Apa Identity.” In Te Ara: The Online Encyclopedia of New Zealand. http://www.teara.govt.nz/en/ngati-apa/2 (accessed 15 March 2010). Jurgens, Dorothy, and Judith Crawley. “Turakina: A District History.” Historical Record (Wanganui), no. 11 (1980): 14–24. Kawharu, I.H., ed. Waitangi: Maori and Pakeha Perspectives of the Treaty of Waitangi. Auckland: Oxford University Press, 1989. Knight, Rob. Poyntzfield: The McKenzies of Lower Rangitikei. Lower Hutt: R.J. Knight, 1975. Leitch, David B. Railways of New Zealand. Newton Abbot: David and Charles, 1972. “Lethbridge and Sons.” In The Cyclopedia of New Zealand, vol. 1, Wellington Provincial District, 1338–9. Wellington: Cyclopedia Company, 1897. Marais, J.S. The Colonisation of New Zealand. London: Oxford University Press and H. Milford, 1927. Miller, John. Early Victorian New Zealand: A Study of Racial Tension and Social Attitudes, 1839–1852. London: Oxford University Press 1958. Newman, Keith. Ratana Revisited: An Unfinished Legacy. Auckland: Reed, 2006. Orange, Claudia. The Treaty of Waitangi. Wellington: Bridget Williams Books, 1987. “Onslow Settlers of the 1840s: Donald MacDonald – The Laird of Kaiwarra.” Onslow Historian, no. 18 (1988): 4–11. Patterson, Brad. “‘It brings to mind the wild valleys of lovely Glencoe’: The Scots in Early Wellington.” Paper presented at Friends of the Turnbull Library Winter Lecture, May 2006. – “Rhodes, William Barnard, 1807?-1878.” In Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, vol. 1, 361–2. Wellington: Allen and Unwin, 1990. – “Stirring the Porridge: Turakina and the Study of New Zealand’s Scottish Communities.” Paper presented at the New Zealand Historical Association Conference, University of Auckland, November 2005. – “Turakina’s Highland Games: Maintaining a Gaelic Tradition?” Immigrants and Minorities 30, no. 1 (2012): 98–117. “Rangahaua Whanau Research Report, District 9 – The Whanganui District.” Waitangi Tribunal, Wellington, n.d.

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“Rangahaua Whanau Research Report, District 12 – Port Nicholson, Hutt Valley, Porirua, Rangitikei Manawatu.” Waitangi Tribunal, Wellington, n.d. Register of New Zealand Presbyterian Ministers, Deaconesses and Missionaries, 1840–2009. http://presbyterian.org.nz/archives/page195. htm (accessed 10 April 2010). Sinclair, Keith. “Why Are Race Relations Better in New Zealand Than in South Africa, South Australia or South Dakota?” New Zealand Journal of History, no. 5 (1971): 121–7. Turakina School Jubilee, 1852–1984. Turakina: Turakina School Jubilee Committee, 1984. Turton, H.H., ed. Maori Deeds of Land Purchases in the North Island of New Zealand. Vol 2. Wellington: Government Printer, 1878. Voelkerling, Rex H., and Kevin L. Stewart. From Sand to Papa: A History of the Wanganui County. Wanganui: Wanganui County Council, 1986. Vogel, Julius. The Official Handbook of New Zealand. London: Wyman and Sons, 1875. Ward, Alan. “McLean, Donald, 1820–1877.” In Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, vol. 1, 255–8. Wellington: Allen and Unwin, 1990. Wards, Ian. The Shadow of the Land: A Study of British Policy and Racial Conflict in New Zealand, 1832–1852. Wellington: Government Printer, 1968. Wild, L.J. The Life and Times of Sir James Wilson of Bulls. Christchurch: Whitcombe and Tombs, 1953. Williams, David V. “Te Kooti Tango Whenua”: The Native Land Court, 1864–1909. Wellington: Huia, 1999. Wilson, James G. Early Rangitikei. Christchurch: Whitcombe and Tombs, 1914. Wilson, Malcolm W. Turakina: The Story of a Country Parish. Christchurch: Presbyterian Bookroom, 1952.

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7 A Thorough Indian: Lord Edward Fitzgerald, Thomas Moore, Adam Kidd, and Irish Identifications with Aboriginal Culture in Canadian Literature Michele Holmgren

Some of the earliest works of Canadian literature owe their themes and preoccupations to a complex web of literary and political connections between Irish visitors and Aboriginal peoples. For example, Isaac Weld and Thomas Moore, Irish visitors who wrote about Canada, created enduring images and symbols for later Canadian writers.1 Moore, who travelled through Upper Canada in 1804, was one of the most famous poets to visit Canada at the time, and he drew on Aboriginal, voyageur, and other legends and songs for poems that appeared in Epistles, Odes, and Other Poems (1806). He later wrote The Life and Death of Lord Edward Fitzgerald (1832), the first book-length biography of Lord Edward Fitzgerald, in which Irish, English, American, and Canadian audiences were able to read selections from Fitzgerald’s private family letters describing his travels through Upper and Lower Canada from June 1788 to May 1789. In addition, Moore’s poetry on Irish and North American subjects had a direct influence on the Irish-born Adam Kidd, the writer of an early Canadian long poem, The Huron Chief (1829). Kidd’s appreciation of Moore’s poetry may have inspired him to link the historical and political situations of the Irish and the Aboriginal peoples of Canada “indirectly through language and form to his ‘oppressed Ireland.’”2 (For instance, he uses a ballad form similar to that of Moore for the speeches of his Aboriginal figures and complains in

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the poem about sectarian intolerance.) Moore was consequently the earliest presenter of Fitzgerald’s Canadian experience and a direct influence on Kidd. Although Kidd would not have read Moore’s biography of Fitzgerald, he may have retraced some of the Irish lord’s travels a generation later, and he created very similar portraits of Aboriginal life in his prose and poetry. The letters that Moore selected for his biography of Fitzgerald often seem to echo his own favourable impressions of Upper Canada in poems such as “Ballad Stanzas,”3 which he presented in sharp contrast to his less complimentary portraits of America in Epistles, Odes, and Other Poems.4 Although he admired Fitzgerald, Moore was far more ambivalent about republicanism. Moore claimed that he “went to America with prepossessions by no means unfavourable,”5 but in his preface to the poems, he admits that he “indulged in many of those illusive ideas, with respect to the purity of the government and the primitive happiness of the people, which I had early imbibed in my native country, where, unfortunately, discontent at home enhances every distant temptation, and the western world has long been looked to as a retreat from real or imaginary oppression; as, in short, the elysian Atlantis, where persecuted patriots might find their visions realised and be welcomed by kindred spirits to liberty and repose.”6 Once there, however, he saw American society as regressing to a “close approximation of savage life.”7 On the surface, Moore’s use of the term “savage” seems ironic since his portrait of Fitzgerald emphasizes the United Irish leader’s innate nobility through his fascination with “savage” life in North America; in his romanticized portrait, Fitzgerald becomes a form of “noble savage.” In other ways, Fitzgerald’s fascination with life in Nova Scotia and Upper and Lower Canada justifies Moore’s own view of the Canadian colonies as a site where a moderate, as opposed to “illusive,” form of liberty is possible. Moore offers Fitzgerald’s letters as an explanation for his later philosophy and actions: their “romance … of savage happiness … among the solitudes of Nova Scotia, could not fail to render his mind a more ready recipient for such doctrines as he found prevalent on his return to Europe.”8 If Fitzgerald had not become famous as a United Irish leader, his letters may have given him his own humble place in the Canadian literary canon alongside other early visitors. They present a detailed snapshot of settler, military, and Aboriginal life in Upper and Lower Canada and America at a time when national boundaries were being

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set and when class, racial, and cultural notions were being either challenged or solidified. Fitzgerald was writing at a time when North American Aboriginal people were offered as illustrations of various political views. As Moore observed, the picture Fitzgerald drew of Aboriginal society borrowed “much of the colouring … from civilization” and “had been already, it is well known, arrived at, through all the mazes of ingenious reasoning by Rousseau.”9 Luke Gibbons argues that European impressions of North American Aboriginal people “offered to radical thinkers in the West an image of ‘natural liberty,’ a journey back in time to witness the origins of natural rights.”10 However, in the practical world of politics and military strategy, the Aboriginals Fitzgerald met were not noble savages but people negotiating their place in a rapidly changing society. For instance, in a study of Aboriginal portraiture during the period of Fitzgerald’s visit, Leslie Reinhardt observes, “At this time, Indians were not subjugated or defeated, as we sometimes assume from later periods or other colonial contexts, but potentially powerful allies.”11 Fitzgerald’s rather disingenuous descriptions of his visits to Aboriginal villages underplay the fact that he was being recruited into the Iroquois’s final attempt to retain their power to influence the British and American colonies. He becomes a further example of a  visitor who was “influenced and changed”12 by contact with Aboriginals; in Fitzgerald’s case, his brief sojourn in North America may have had a history-changing effect, if indeed his experiences in North America shaped his United Irish ideology. In May 1788 Fitzgerald, then a young British officer, arrived in Halifax on his way to join his regiment stationed in Saint John, New Brunswick. In a letter to his mother he described the inhabitants’ accents as “all Irish, at least in this town; the brogue is not in higher perfection in Kilkenny.” But he also wrote that he looked forward to leaving a place that in some ways seemed familiar and even comforting in order to venture into a country that was by “all accounts wild and beautiful.” He looked forward to this trip as “a journey after my own heart,”13 and Moore implies that he was trying to get as far away as he could from heartbreak at home, after he had been barred from courting the woman he loved, Georgiana Lennox.14 From Saint John he moved to St Anne’s, a hundred miles farther into New Brunswick. During the winter of 1788–89, with a small party of woodsmen, another officer, and his African American servant, Tony, Fitzgerald made an overland journey of 175 miles

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from St Anne’s to Quebec along a route that had not been attempted by Europeans and that had been traversed by only a few Aboriginal people. On this journey, the small group found the route nearly impassable,15 and according to some accounts, all would have died if they had not been rescued by an Aboriginal hunting party.16 In his own way, he was a trailblazer; Moore notes that the route he helped to discover reduced by half the travelling distance from New Brunswick to Quebec.17 A few weeks later when he was granted leave, he returned to Europe by a journey that took him across Lake Ontario, on to Detroit, then to Michilimackinac, and eventually to the Mississippi and down to New Orleans, a journey equalling or surpassing the more well-known exploits of other travel writers, including Isaac Weld.18 The trailblazing that he boasts about was probably not undertaken merely out of amusement or curiosity. Fitzgerald claimed that his surveys had both strategic importance and implications for settlement, remarking that it is necessary for British officers “to see the country, if ever there is a war,” and that the land where “in all probability, there had never been but one person before … will be now soon settled.”19 This observation suggests that he was aware not only of illegal settler incursions into Aboriginal territory in the United States but also of the legal implications of land possession, especially when he asserted that the land under British control that was to be settled was uninhabited.20 Finally, his journey may well have had diplomatic aims since he described being obliged “to carry a few presents for the Indian villages I pass through,”21 gifts from the British to the Iroquois having historically been used to cement their alliances against the French and later the Americans.22 In his travels from New Brunswick and Quebec, Fitzgerald was able to observe how conditions in North America allowed settlers, including Irish emigrants, to prosper in North America, which in turn meant that the society they were creating had the potential to  be far more simple and egalitarian than that of Europe. He described rivers “so full of fish that you kill them with sticks” and lands containing “all the finest wood and pasture, but quite in the state of  nature.”23 He noted with approval that the frugality and self-sufficiency of settler life made “the old settlers … as wild as Indians,” suggesting that even early in his visit, he viewed Aboriginal life as an appealing alternative to European society, although he complained that the settlers did not seem to appreciate their good

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fortune.24 Eventually, he came to identify more with Aboriginals than with his emigrant compatriots. Early on in his letters, he told his mother, “I have been out hunting, and like it very much, – it makes me un peu sauvage, to be sure.”25 As an aristocrat in the wilderness, Fitzgerald was by no means alone in this; as Harry Liebersohn has argued, there was “a peculiar affinity between the destiny of warrior elites from the two worlds.”26 This affinity was clearly demonstrated when Fitzgerald in 1788 met Chief Joseph Brant, a Mohawk, who was also a British officer and ally. “[W]e have taken very much to each other,” Fitzgerald remarked to his mother.27 In some ways, Brant, like the settlers, was self-made; the Scots traveller and writer Patrick Campbell described him as “a renowned warrior” who “is not of any royal or conspicuous progenitors, but by his ability in war, and political conduct in peace, has raised himself to the highest dignity of his nation, and his alliance and friendship is now courted by sovereign and foreign states.”28 However, the hospitality that Brant likely showed Fitzgerald was far removed from the simple settler life he described and admired. It is probable that Fitzgerald met with a reception similar to that enjoyed by Campbell, with tea on fine china, organ music, dinner served by African slaves, copious liquor, and Scottish reels.29 Brant would have wanted to impress someone with Fitzgerald’s connections in England, such as his cousin Charles Fox, a potential ally if the opposition should get into power.30 When Fitzgerald met Brant, the chief was enmeshed in European politics as Britain and the United States negotiated for territory that the Iroquois regarded as rightfully their own. Brant had recently returned from England to find out why the Iroquois had not been part of the peace treaty negotiations between the British and Americans, even though Iroquois land claims were involved, and to seek compensation for property that had been lost during the War of Independence.31 Loyal above all to the Iroquois Confederacy, which he was so desperately trying to hold together, Brant had the eloquence and deportment to appeal to an Irish gentleman. He introduced Fitzgerald to his closest friend, Chief David Hill of the Bear Tribe. If Fitzgerald appreciated Brant’s manners and hospitality (although probably not his slaves),32 he may have equally taken to Hill, whose deportment was praised by the Loyalist settler Amy Powell: “I had some curiosity to see how a chief of the six nations would pay his compliments, but little did I expect the elegance with

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which he addressed me. The Prince of Wales does not bow with more grace than Captain David.”33 Powell’s observations support Harry Liebersohn’s contention that “Indian societies seemed to their admirers more aristocratic than Europeans themselves.”34 Fitzgerald’s affinity with Brant and Hill might actually “typif[y] his caste more perhaps than we might expect of a future revolutionary.”35 The eloquent, authoritative, and hospitable demeanour of Brant and Hill may have appealed to Fitzgerald’s temperament, at least as described by Moore, who characterized him as possessing “a valour almost chivalrous,” along with “natural freshness of mind and heart” and a “natural simplicity and independence.”36 Moore used Fitzgerald’s ability to befriend Aboriginal leaders who straddled two worlds in order to reinforce his perception of Fitzgerald’s own innate nobility. It seemed that Aboriginal culture could appeal to different facets of Fitzgerald’s character, which, at least as portrayed by Moore, was not necessarily at odds with a culture in which freedom was seen as a natural state of man. In fact, from the time that Fitzgerald was travelling and into the early nineteenth century, there was still debate about the nature of Aboriginal societies and what they could tell European observers about themselves. Descriptions in literature, travel writing, and history ranged from the poet Thomas Campbell’s “dread Indian” who “bath[es] in brains the murderous tomahawk”37 to Ann Powell’s admiring depiction of Hill as an untutored gentleman who instinctively conformed to the highest standards of British etiquette. Aboriginal people and their political structures were used to justify all sorts of political arguments in Europe. For example, in his 1829 long poem The Emigrant, the conservative Irish Canadian poet Standish O’Grady argued that the privileges of the Anglo-Irish ascendancy were as naturally ordained as those of Aboriginal chiefs. According to O’Grady, each person at each level in the hierarchy was looked after, as long as all knew their natural place. Aboriginals followed nature’s law ... that guides each social band To act obedient to their chief’s command When none abandoned, none that tie forsakes Which binds that link our modern virtue breaks.38 Fitzgerald, then, was one of many Europeans who used Aboriginal society to support their own political views. At the same time,

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Aboriginal peoples viewed Europeans through their own lenses. As Richard White observes, when Brant welcomed Fitzgerald, he was responding to pressures from Europe that transformed the way the Iroquois Confederacy thought about issues such as nation and race, as reflected in his politics and rhetoric, which used examples from white colonial organization to configure Aboriginals as a distinct culture and peoples.39 Fitzgerald was one more voice in a discussion taking place during a period of intense cultural observation and interaction that was changing the self-perceived identities of Natives and newcomers alike. Adoptions were one way that the Iroquois tried to control these cultural interactions in order to gain beneficial alliances and trading advantages. Hill adopted Fitzgerald as a Mohawk in a declaration written in Mohawk and English, which Fitzgerald kept for the rest of his life: “I, David Hill, Chief of the Six Nations give the name of Eghnidal to my friend Lord Edward Fitzgerald, for which I hope he will remember me as long as he lives. The name belongs to the Bear Tribe. Michilimackinack, July 9, 1789.”40 Fitzgerald’s delighted response was to write to his mother to announce that he had been “adopted by one of the Nations and am now a thorough Indian.”41 Rather than reflecting a European’s return to the pure and original template for human political organization, however, Fitzgerald’s official adoption reflected just how elastic were the boundaries of the notion of “Indian” in his time. That Hill provided a recognizably “official” bilingual document that Fitzgerald preserved as evidence of his transformation into a “thorough” Indian reflects the final stages of a more hybridized, “common world”42 that White argues was created briefly by Aboriginals, settlers, and soldiers in North America, although it was doomed by the outcome of the American Revolution and the constant pressure from settlers appropriating Aboriginal land.43 When Fitzgerald met Brant and Hill, they were still placing their hopes on an alliance with the British. (Unknown to them, the British had already made the decision to cede Iroquois territories to the Americans.) However, it does not stretch credibility entirely to view Brant’s ultimate goal as similar to some of the United Irish aims since the Iroquois hoped that different Aboriginal nations could work together to defend their interests against both American and British colonialism, much as the United Irish tried to find common ground among different sects and classes in Ireland. However, Brant’s dream

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of an Indian confederacy supporting the common good, imagined as “a dish with one spoon”44 that was bolstered by trade and military alliances with the British, is not mentioned in Fitzgerald’s letters in Moore’s biography. As Stella Tillyard observes, he knew that “Brant and Hill were men of two worlds,” and the complex political realities of their lives may not have conformed to his Rousseau-influenced preconception of Aboriginals.45 A less official adoption that seems to have reflected Fitzgerald’s ideals occurred when he “fell in with some savages” on the way to Quebec (or was rescued by them, according to Gahan).46 As Fitzgerald recounted to his mother, [T]hey were very kind to us and said we were “all one brother” – all one Indian. They fed us the whole time we were with them. You would have laughed to see me carrying an old squaw’s pack, which was so heavy I could hardly waddle under it. However, I was well paid whenever we stopped, for she always gave me the best bits, and most soup, and took as much care of me as if I had been her own son: in short, I was quite l’enfant chéri. We were quite sorry to part: the old lady and gentleman both kissed me very heartily. I gave the old lady one of Sophia’s silver spoons, which pleased her very much.47 In this excerpt, the notion of being “all one Indian” is presented in terms of family ties rather than Brant’s pan-Indian strategic political allegiances. Fitzgerald’s gift of a silver spoon to the woman who treated him as a son seems incongruous at first, but as it belonged to his sister Sophia, it seems sentimentally appropriate as a way to reciprocate, bringing the woman into his family, as she did him. The focus on family, as opposed to political loyalties, is in keeping with Fitzgerald’s view of Aboriginals living as nature intended humans to live, in an environment in which survival depends upon people being “kind” – that is, caring for each other according to kinship ties and basic human needs. This seems especially apparent when Fitzgerald remarks in the same letter that on his return to “civilization” in Quebec, he was turned away by several white innkeepers on account of his ragged appearance.48 Moreover, given Fitzgerald’s personal preoccupation with separation from his family and his resentment at being prevented from marrying the woman he loved due to his rank as a younger son, Aboriginal life offered an appealing alternative, as he explained to his mother in a letter dated 2 September 1788:

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Savages have all the real happiness of life, without any of those inconveniences, or ridiculous obstacles to it, which custom has introduced among us. They enjoy the love and company of their wives, relations, and friends, without any interference of interests or ambition to separate them … Instead of being served and supported by servants, every thing here is done by one’s relations – by the people one loves; and the mutual obligations you must be under increase your love for each other. To be sure, the poor ladies are obliged to cut a little wood and bring a little water … Oglivie and us boys, after having brought in our game, would be lying about the fire, while our squaws were helping the ladies to cook, or taking care of our papouses; all this in a fine wood, beside some beautiful lake.49 This letter rejects the master-servant relationship based on rank and title, instead emphasizing both family connections and the connection with nature enjoyed by the Aboriginals who cared for Fitzgerald’s party. Luke Gibbons argues that Fitzgerald viewed Aboriginal societies as “suffused with communal warmth and care for others, without any of the instrumental exchanges that pass for civil society in the West.”50 Although Fitzgerald and the more conservative emigrant poet O’Grady came from extreme ends of the Irish political spectrum, Fitzgerald’s portrait also anticipates O’Grady’s ironic assertion that “modern virtue breaks” the ties that Aboriginal peoples know instinctively to honour and preserve. In other letters, Fitzgerald continues to criticize the constraints – moral, societal, and material – that alienate families and tear lovers apart: “If we had been Indians … instead of Lord **’s being violent against letting me marry G**, he would be glad to give her to me, that I might maintain and feed her. There would be then no cases of looking forward to the fortune of children … no separations in families … no devilish politics, no fashions, customs, duties or appearances to the world, to interfere with one’s happiness.”51 Fitzgerald fantasizes continually about turning his back on European society. (In one of his letters, he tells his mother, “I believe I shall never again be prevailed on to live in a house.”)52 Although Fitzgerald’s response to his experience among the Indians is figured in emotional terms and focused on family relations, Moore is probably right in suggesting that his time in Canada had more impact on Fitzgerald’s politics than did his earlier campaign in America.

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Fitzgerald would not see what became of his Mohawk brothers, and his own advocacy for the rights of Irish regardless of creed or class would end in failure. Nevertheless, his travels, actions, and subject matter anticipated the writing of another Irish writer, Adam Kidd, who published the Canadian long poem The Huron Chief in 1830. Kidd was among a later wave of Irish emigrants following those whom Fitzgerald encountered in Halifax and Upper and Lower Canada, although he seems to have been less optimistic about his prospects, fleeing a “hopeless and sinking situation” in the north of Ireland merely to seek “a scanty pittance in a foreign land.”53 He was born in a small village in County Tyrone in 1803 to a Protestant farming family before emigrating in his early twenties. Like Moore, Fitzgerald, and Weld, he travelled in the United States before arriving in Montreal around 1824. An ardent admirer (and according to some of his contemporaries, a plagiarist)54 of Thomas Moore, Kidd died in 1831, just before Moore published his biography of Fitzgerald, so he probably did not know about Fitzgerald’s experiences in Canada, although he may have retraced some of Fitzgerald’s steps in his own travels. Kidd’s The Huron Chief was written nearly a generation after the United Irish Rebellion and the treaty negotiations that resulted in a flood of Iroquois refugees from America into British territories, where Kidd claimed they were “now prospering, and happily enjoying the manly protection of the British Government.”55 In spite of this assertion, his poem is elegiac and sometimes inadvertently reinforces the stereotype of the doomed “noble savage.” The Huron Chief is told from the point of view of a white narrator who also visits Aboriginal communities and, like Fitzgerald, is rescued and befriended by them. In the poem, the lost narrator meets Skenandow, the ancient and wise chief of the Huron, who brings the narrator to a Huron camp, where he witnesses their singing and dancing and hears stories drawn from their legends and from the events in recent history that caused them to take refuge in Canada. He also witnesses a comic reunion of an Aboriginal woman and her “Sioux” lover, but a party of white invaders cuts the wedding celebrations short. The attack is thwarted by Skenandow and by the timely appearance of Tecumseh, the Iroquois leader and British officer. White prisoners are released in a show of mercy, but once Tecumseh leaves, the smaller group of Huron is attacked again, and Skenandow dies defending his tribe.

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Like Fitzgerald, Kidd at his most lyrical presents the Aboriginals as somehow outside time, living in an Eden-like world, a theme that recurs in writing about Indigenous peoples in early and modern Canadian literature, as demonstrated by Terry Goldie.56 Nevertheless, as in Fitzgerald’s letters describing Hill and Brant, Kidd’s notes to the poem also hint at Aboriginal communities living with the aftermath of European colonization; he refers to individual Aboriginals as historical actors, some of whom he regards as influential allies who have helped to determine recent history in both America and Canada. Moreover, in letters that he wrote at the time of the poem’s publication, he linked the plight of modern Aboriginal communities in Canada to the situation of Irish Catholics in his homeland. Although not as radical as Fitzgerald, Kidd challenged the status quo that favoured the Protestant ascendancy in Ireland by attending pro-Emancipation meetings and by writing in pro-Irish newspapers such as Canadian Freeman and the Vindicator, the latter founded by Dr  Daniel Tracey to support the Friends of Ireland societies that promoted Daniel O’Connell’s nonviolent Catholic Emancipation movement throughout the British Empire.57 Like Fitzgerald, Kidd felt that Aboriginals could teach European society about naturally ordained rights, and he applied what he learned to current Irish political issues. Although Fitzgerald and Kidd present scenes of Aboriginal life that reinforce the stereotype of the timeless “noble savage,” Kidd also introduces more contemporary historical actors into his poem who illustrate the values that he feels British and Irish society should emulate. In the poem and other writing, Kidd also presents the Aboriginals as able and eloquent defenders of their cultural distinctiveness, particularly when he has his Aboriginal characters accuse the Americans of trying to “seek the Indian to destroy” and “blot away his name and nation.”58 In maintaining pride in their nations’ culture and identity, Kidd’s Aboriginal speakers are valuable models, especially to the Irish. From this perspective, Kidd challenged those who opposed O’Connell’s campaign for Catholic Emancipation in a letter to the Vindicator dated 20 January 1829: The Indian, who enjoys the bounties of his wild inheritance, contends not for superiority over the brothers of his tribe – every man stands on an equal footing, until he has signalised himself by some noble achievement, which entitles him to distinction;

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and then, as a matter of right, he becomes the elevated of his nation … [T]ell me if you do not feel ashamed of your imaginary superiority, and of your right to disqualify your fellow-subjects, on account of their religious profession: I say, to disqualify men whose magnanimous and noble spirits have proved, in every emergency, that they are, and ever have been, the unshaken defenders of the British Throne, and still love to rally round their King, with hearts as firm as their Island rock, that braves the fury of the ocean.59 Despite frequently claiming his own loyalty and that of the Irish to the British government in the shorter poems that accompanied The Huron Chief, Kidd’s relationship with Britain is often ambivalent, no doubt owing to his knowledge of both recent events in Irish and Aboriginal history. (For instance, in the poem Cathleen, Kidd meets a forsaken emigrant whose plight, he argues, could not help but stir “the soft emotions” in “man’s proud breast,” and “As spirits flash resentment on the foe – Quick swell to rage – he strikes, and takes revenge.” In the same poem, he feels compelled to defend his  “pen [which] too oft has freely strayed from … allegiance” to “England’s king.”)60 Kidd, like many of his Aboriginal characters, does not forget the historical wrongs that both Aboriginals and Irish suffered, but like his Aboriginal heroes, he is willing to forgive past injuries in order to gain Irish rights in the present. He shares this sentiment with Moore, who in his biography of Fitzgerald distanced himself from the most revolutionary aspects of Fitzgerald’s philosophy by noting that the granting of Emancipation and Reform had addressed some of the grievances that compelled Fitzgerald and the United Irishmen to rebel.61 Writing on the eve of Emancipation, Kidd also implies that if the Irish Catholics’ demands for fairness are met, they too will remain loyal. Kidd shares some political and poetic sentiments with both Fitzgerald and Moore, but like Moore he seems to prefer the Britishruled Canadian territories to the republican United States since most of his accounts of white cruelty are supported by American examples in his notes to the poem.62 However, he also describes Ireland admiringly as “the land of Fitzgerald”63 in one of the occasional poems in his collection. The Huron Chief, like Fitzgerald’s travels, is partly a response to personal circumstances. Whereas Fitzgerald’s letters comment on both political and domestic drama back home,

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Kidd’s poem was spurred by his quarrel with the Anglican clergy in Montreal, particularly the Mountain family, who held many high positions in the Anglican Church. While in Montreal, he initially studied to be a clergyman but was declared an unsuitable candidate, possibly because of a relationship with an Aboriginal woman.64 As Kidd hints in his preface, the poem is in part, in the words of C.D. Mazoff, “an antidote to the pain and rejection he has experienced as a result of … refusal of preferment”65 by the man who oversaw his divinity studies, the Venerable Archdeacon George Jehoshaphat Mountain (later the third bishop of Quebec).66 Once he abandoned his divinity studies, Kidd made a precarious living from his journalism and from subscriptions for his long poem and a projected book of “Tales and Traditions” that he claims he “personally collected” on his travels with various Aboriginal communities, particularly the Hurons at the Jeune Lorette settlement in Quebec.67 In recounting the circumstances in which the poem was composed, Kidd describes a literary journey that in language and imagery greatly resembles Fitzgerald’s own “journey after my own heart,” in which he turns his back on civilized forms to venture, figuratively and possibly literally, deep into the Canadian woods. In his preface, he compares his poem to a “little birch canoe in which I have safely glided through the tranquil lakes of the Canadas,” by way of apology “for the defects which it may possess, knowing that a poem of such length can scarcely be free from errors; and particularly when written, without much opportunity for correction, on the inner rind of birch bark, during my travels through the immense forests of America, and under many difficulties and privations, arising from causes that I must, for the present, avoid mentioning.”68 Written on naturally available materials and carried on his travels, the poem functions a bit like Fitzgerald’s treasured adoption paper; each is a written text that nevertheless tries to connect its possessor with a people and an oral tradition removed in time and distance from European society.69 Like Fitzgerald’s letters, Kidd’s poem often expresses a desire to escape his own society and problems, yet it offers a portrait of Aboriginal leaders proficient in the writingcentred, multilingual culture that by necessity they adopt to survive. Although Kidd was not formally adopted by this community, as Fitzgerald had been by the Bear Tribe, he could boast of a modest initiation of his own: “The poem of the H U RO N CH I E F has made such an impression on the Indian warriors to whom it has been

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communicated, that it will be translated into their respective tongues, by S A W E N N O W A N E , and other Chiefs, equally celebrated and intelligent, who speak and write several languages.”70 Although the Aboriginal chiefs’ apparent endorsement of Kidd’s poem is probably intended to establish the authenticity of its style and subject matter for a white audience, it may also reflect his interest in the ways that Aboriginal leaders were contributing to and sustaining their culture in a contemporary world. He links Aboriginal culture directly to Irish culture through the poem’s epigraph, taken from James Macpherson’s supposed translation of Ossian: “Where are our Chiefs of old? Where our Heroes of mighty name? / The fields of their battle are silent – scarce their mossy tombs remain!” On one level, Kidd links two cultures that could be associated with a remote golden age: the vanished Celtic heroes of the Irish sagas and the “dwindling”71 Aboriginal nations. On another level, he notes the way that the oral traditions of both cultures contribute to their sense of identity in the present when he observes in a footnote that “the oldest Chief of the village of Lorette … willingly furnished me with an account of the distinguished warriors, and the traditions of different tribes, which are still fresh in his memory, and are handed down from father to son, with the same precision, interest, and admiration that the Tales and exploits of Ossian and his heroes are circulated in their original purity, to this day, among the Irish.”72 Kidd’s allusion may be significant since the Irish oral and manuscript accounts of Ossian popularized by Macpherson were also recovered and translated by Irish scholars in the eighteenth century, some of whom were cultural nationalists sympathetic to the Patriot and later the United Irish movements.73 In his notes, Kidd admired similar attempts by the Huron to preserve their culture, engendering a similar sense of pride and purpose. In the poem and its notes, Kidd’s and the narrator’s experiences recall Fitzgerald’s delighted impressions of Aboriginal hospitality. Fitzgerald notes, “If you only stop an hour, they have a dance for you. They are delightful people; the ladies charming, and with manners that I like very much, they are so natural.”74 Kidd describes his own visits with the Huron and with “several Chiefs belonging to the Iroquois and Algonquin tribes”75 in his notes to the poem: “There is a peculiar softness in the singing of the young Indian girls. The first time I heard the songs of these daughters of the forest, was during a visit … and never were music, time and place so happily

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blended.”76 Like Fitzgerald, he uses his visits to Aboriginal communities to make implicit criticisms of European life: “Dancing is one of the most favourite amusements of the Indians – and exhibits to an European something more singularly grand than he has ever been accustomed to witness among the artificial assemblies of a more polished, but a less interesting people. With the Indian, the pure feelings of the heart are the only guide in the happy hour of his playful festivities – which are unencumbered by that cold reserve and mawkish ceremony, practiced in the studied dance of our own speculating times.”77 The sentiments of the poem often echo Fitzgerald’s wistful desire to “join the savages” in order to escape both personal disappointment and the social and moral constraints of European society. The narrator of the poem, who may or may not be Kidd, sees the world inhabited by the Huron as an escape from civilization and a place to heal his “wrecked heart” caused by “the pain / a Mountain Demon flung before it,”78 a specific reference to Kidd’s own disappointments. Just as Fitzgerald had fantasized about living with Georgiana in Canada in several of his letters,79 Kidd sees Aboriginal life as a more general remedy for the constraints and frustrations of European society, fantasizing that “Huron’s Banks” would be the ideal setting for wandering lovers, with “No tyrant hand to check our love.”80 The tyrant, possibly the Montreal Anglican community or European religion and state in general, is contrasted with Skenandow, the Huron chief of the title. His name suggests that he was modelled in part on the famous Chief Skenandoa,81 or Skenandon, an Oneida in-law of Joseph Brant, who reputedly lived past one hundred years82 and was an “Oneida nationalist”83 who went against Brant by supporting the Americans in the revolution.84 Unlike Kidd’s Skenandow, he was a convert late in life and thus did not see the Christians as “foe-men,”85 and he certainly would not have sought the “manly protection” of the British. Nevertheless, like Kidd’s Huron chief, who was “once known afar / When first the white man felt the rage, / Of Indians, in defensive war,”86 Skenandoa “was terrible as the tornado in war,” according to an obituary issued by the Church Missionary Society, but was better remembered for his clemency: “How many of the living and the dead have been saved from the tomahawk and scalping-knife, by his friendly aid, is not known, but individuals and villages have expressed gratitude for his benevolent interpositions.” In old age, the obituary notes, “[a]lthough he could

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speak but little English … yet his company was sought. In conversation he was highly decorous.”87 Described by Kidd as both “sage” and “saint divine,”88 Skenandow is equally courteous in his treatment of the narrator despite the latter’s inadvertent trespass onto Huron territory, and he is generally forgiving of the historical trespasses of Europeans, thus putting their Christian values to shame, just as Chief David Hill’s courtesy supposedly surpassed that of the crowned heads of Europe. Kidd’s narrator is treated to an equally gracious display: Such nobleness of word and thought, So highly every feeling wrought, That here I could not once refuse, The friendship of his invitation.89 Like Fitzgerald during his sojourn with the hunting party that rescued him, the poem’s narrator observes an ideal society existing in the depth of the Huron woods, and he would willingly give up “Europe’s pomp … to dwell within his groves of pine”:90 Oh! What a beauteous, charming scene, On that pure, downy, tufted green, To see the children of the grove, With hearts that felt no touch but pleasure, Thus linked in social, tender love, Where flowing joys seemed without measure, Beneath a verdant maple shade, Which Nature’s God alone had made.91 Kidd also shared Fitzgerald’s view that Aboriginal society valued “social” ties and obligations reinforced by love and kinship, as evidenced by the natural respect, love, and loyalty that Skenandow’s people display in their relations with their chief. Whereas Fitzgerald blamed obsession about class and wealth for much European injustice, Kidd deplores “missionary evils” and “sectarian seeds,” European introductions that lead to “the social tie of friendship breaking” among Aboriginals.92 (The language may suggest that he was also thinking about the suspicion and prejudices behind the disqualification of Irish Catholics, as well as the threat that Christian missionaries had posed to Aboriginal culture.)

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In the poem, historical and fictional examples of Aboriginal people’s fidelity in the face of repeated betrayals by their white allies put supposedly Christian and civilized colonizers to shame. The scenes of Aboriginals living as nature intended and praying to “the Spirit of the great and free” to be protected “from the white man’s laws” suggest that Kidd,93 like Fitzgerald, believed that Aboriginals’ dignity and capacity for forgiveness arose naturally from their culture. However, rather than simply maintaining that his Aboriginal models are remote in distance and time, Kidd shows their values working in very recent history. At the time of his death, fighting alongside the British in the War of 1812, Tecumseh was one of the most wellknown leaders of an alliance of Shawnee and other Algonquian tribes, including the Huron, under pressure from further American demands for their lands. (He allied himself with the British rather more reluctantly than Kidd’s poem implies.)94 Admired by the British general Isaac Brock – “a more sagacious or a more gallant Warrior does not … exist”95 – Tecumseh, like Skenandow, is celebrated in Kidd’s poem for treating prisoners of war mercifully, for which he was renowned.96 Tecumseh’s and Skenandow’s clemency toward a captured band of white marauders is presented as a distinctly Aboriginal trait: TEC U M SE H spoke the words of peace With full persuasion, to release The captive foe. – He would not shed A tyrant’s blood, when conquered – standing In chains, like those who bend the head In sadness here – with grief commanding The finer feelings of the heart, To let them now unhurt depart.97 Although Tecumseh survives the action of the poem, Kidd’s knowledge of the circumstances of his death seems to have influenced its tragic ending. According to a footnote to the poem, Tecumseh died after British soldiers fled the battle, “leaving the flag of Great Britain alone to be defended by the brave, but unsupported Indians, against the overwhelming numbers of a powerful enemy.”98 In the poem, however, Tecumseh departs in a canoe, having saved the day, and the white marauders whom he has just forgiven and released again

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ambush the smaller group of Huron left behind. Tecumseh’s death likewise marked the doomed last attempt of the Algonquians, Iroquois, and Huron to form a confederation that would allow them to defend their traditional lands, a defeat that forced many Huron to become refugees in Canada as Skenandow’s “remnant” of a tribe.99 Although the Irish writers discussed here often present a simplistic, idealized portrait of both Aboriginal and settler societies, their writing nevertheless hints at a more complex historical reality in both North America and Ireland. Before Fitzgerald arrived, Aboriginals had been shaping and influencing European policy for at least two centuries. If they did indeed inspire Fitzgerald, they also cast a shadow on Irish events, just as European contact affected Aboriginals in turn. Fitzgerald’s portraits of the Europeanized world of Brant and of the more “natural” hunting parties represent two views of Aboriginal life, two realities existing side by side during a time of transition. Kidd, following his mentor Moore, who himself was deeply affected by the United Irish Rebellion, found a naturally just and Eden-like society in the Canadian woods, free from sectarian division. Kidd’s portrait of Aboriginal life also reveals a deep ambivalence about the British treatment of both Irish and Aboriginal subjects. Ireland was in as great a transition in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as the Huron and Iroquois nations. Whether they wanted to be or not, Fitzgerald, Moore, and Kidd were critics and observers of, as well as participants in, the British colonization of North America. Luke Gibbons argues that when Fitzgerald compared Aboriginal hunting parties to his own family, he “saw the Indians as very much his contemporaries,”100 and he saw a people who could teach the Europeans about social ties.101 In the end, Fitzgerald was officially adopted not by the hunting parties he admired but by Hill, a man straddling different cultures. Kidd’s poetry also fantasizes about abandoning his contemporary society to live in an Aboriginal Eden, but his notes to the poem reveal a culture that confronted the same challenges faced by Irish nationalists: how to preserve a distinctive history and how to defend and advance Aboriginal interests in a medium and style that would gain a sympathetic audience in Britain and Canada. As much as both may have wished to be “thorough” Indians, Kidd and Fitzgerald were as much men of two worlds as the Aboriginal history makers they encountered in North America.

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Not e s 1 See Bentley, “Thomas Moore’s Construction”; and Bentley, “Isaac Weld.” 2 Edwards, “Kidd, Adam,” 376. 3 Fitzgerald’s lengthy description of one settler couple creates an atmosphere that is strikingly similar to that of Moore’s poem “Ballad Stanzas,” based on his later visit to Upper Canada in 1804. On 18 July 1788 Fitzgerald wrote, “Conceive, dearest mother, arriving about twelve o’clock in a hot day at a little cabin upon the side of a rapid river, the banks all covered with woods, not a house in sight – and there finding a little old clean tidy woman spinning, with an old man of the same appearance, weeding salad.” He described an evening spent with this couple, emphasizing “the contented thoughtfulness of their countenances, which was increased by their age and the solitary life they had led, the wild quietness of the place, not a living creature or habitation to be seen, and me, Tony, and our guide sitting with them all on one log” (Moore, Life and Death, 45–6). Moore’s “Ballad Stanzas,” in Poetical Works, 124, opens with a similar landscape and mood: I knew by the smoke, that so gracefully curl’d Above the green elms, that a cottage was near, And I said, “If there’s peace to be found in the world, “A heart that was humble might hope for it here!” It was noon, and on flowers that languish’d around In silence repos’d the voluptuous bee; Every leaf was at rest, and I heard not a sound But the woodpecker tapping the hollow beech-tree. 4 Bentley, “Thomas Moore’s Construction,” 6. 5 Moore, Poetical Works, 94. 6 Ibid. 7 Ibid. 8 Moore, Life and Death, 55. 9 Ibid., 54–5. 10 Gibbons, “‘Return of the Native,’” 52. 11 Reinhardt, “British and Indian Identities,” 298. 12 Ibid. 13 Moore, Life and Death, 43. 14 Ibid., 42; Tillyard, Citizen Lord, 74. 15 Gahan, “Journey after My Own Heart,” 86. 16 Ibid., 98. 17 Moore, Life and Death, 71.

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18 Gahan, “Journey after My Own Heart,” 98. 19 Moore, Life and Death, 64, 63. 20 Bentley, “Concepts of Native Peoples,” explores the legal implications behind the ways that land and Aboriginal peoples were described in both early Canadian literature and travellers’ accounts. The perceived level of civilization attained by Aboriginal peoples, the issue of whether they actually occupied the land, and the extent to which they had modified the land were all factors raised in the legal system to determine rightful ownership of land. 21 Moore, Life and Death, 77. 22 White, Middle Ground, 315. 23 Moore, Life and Death, 42–3. 24 Ibid., 44. 25 Ibid., 64. 26 Liebersohn, Aristocratic Encounters, 1. 27 Moore, Life and Death, 75. 28 Cited in Kelsay, Joseph Brant, 526. 29 Ibid., 527. 30 Gahan, “Journey after My Own Heart,” 99–100. 31 Kelsay, Joseph Brant, 526. 32 Tillyard, Citizen Lord, 106. 33 Reinhardt, “British and Indian Identities,” 299. 34 Liebersohn, Aristocratic Encounters, 2. 35 Gahan, “Journey after My Own Heart,” 89. 36 Moore, Life and Death, 52–3. 37 Campbell, Pleasures of Hope, 34. 38 O’Grady, Emigrant, lines 975–8. 39 White, Middle Ground, 39. 40 Moore, Life and Death, 76. 41 Ibid., 76. 42 Ibid. 43 Ibid. 44 Kelsay, Joseph Brant, 416. 45 Tillyard, Citizen Lord, 108. 46 Gahan, “Journey after My Own Heart,” 98. 47 Moore, Life and Death, 67. 48 Ibid. 49 Ibid., 50. 50 Gibbons, “‘Return of the Native,’” 66. 51 Moore, Life and Death, 50, emphasis in original.

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52 Ibid., 62. 53 Edwards, “Kidd, Adam,” 375. 54 In a letter addressed to the Montreal Gazette and dated 7 June 1830, an anonymous reviewer complained that “the Author … has plagiarized a little from other writers; but he has contracted a ‘pretty considerable’ debt in the way of borrowing from Tom Moore” (Steele, “Appendices,” 110, emphasis in original). 55 Kidd, “Preface,” 1. 56 Goldie, Fear and Temptation, 161. 57 Verney, O’Callaghan, 38–9. 58 Kidd, Huron Chief, lines 1493–4. 59 Steele, “Appendices,” 127. 60 Kidd, Huron Chief, and Other Poems, 173–4. 61 Moore, Life and Death, iii–iv. 62 See, for example, his account of the life of Iroquois leader John Logan in Kidd, Huron Chief, lines 685–760. 63 Kidd, “Monody to the Memory,” 203. 64 Edwards, “Kidd, Adam,” implies that a relationship with an Aboriginal woman may have led to his disqualification for holy orders, but outside of the poem itself, there are few documents to support this. Bentley, “Introduction,” i, speculates that this assumption may have come from the fact that the narrator of the poem declares himself in love with most of the Aboriginal women he meets; the frequency of women’s names in the long poem and in the occasional verses suggests Kidd may have spent simply too much of his study time pursuing young women. Like Kidd, Fitzgerald found “the [Aboriginal] ladies charming, and with manners that I like very much” (Moore, Life and Death, 75). He confided to his mother on 20 June 1789 that “Entre nous, I am in a little sorrow, as I am to part to-morrow with a fellow traveller who has been very pleasant and taken great care of me: ‘–les plus courtes folies sont les meilleures’” (Moore, Life and Death, 76). Where Kidd’s narrator recounts a similar leave-taking from Kemana, a Huron woman “that by love’s magic bound me,” his mentor Job Deacon scrawled in the margin of his copy of the published poem, “Perverted taste to be first attracted by a Squaw!” (Bentley, “Explanatory Notes,” 86). 65 Mazoff, Anxious Allegiances, 39. 66 Bentley, “Introduction,” xii. 67 Ibid., xxxvii. 68 Kidd, “Preface,” 1.

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69 In some ways, Kidd and Fitzgerald resemble literary figures that recur in Canadian, Austrialian, and New Zealand writing, who are characterized by Terry Goldie as the “Celtic savage.” The characters in “these works imply that the process of indigenization is easier for the Celts, because of their own association with an unstructured, free nature” (Goldie, Fear and Temptation, 27). 70 Kidd, “Preface,” 1. 71 Ibid. 72 Kidd, Huron Chief, line 673n. See also Holmgren, “Ossian Abroad.” 73 For a study of United Irish cultural programs, see Thuente, Harp Re-strung. For a detailed look at Kidd’s cultural nationalism and his allusions to the United Irish movement, see Holmgren, “Native Muses”; and Holmgren, “United Irishmen in Canada.” 74 Moore, Life and Death, 75. 75 Kidd, Huron Chief, line 1275n. 76 Ibid., line 1261n. 77 Ibid., line 1275n. 78 Ibid., lines 795–6, emphasis in original. 79 Moore, Life and Death, 46, 50. 80 Kidd, Huron Chief, lines 1, 32. 81 Bentley, “Explanatory Notes,” 76, connects Kidd’s chief with this historical figure. 82 Ibid. 83 Taylor, Divided Ground, 379. 84 Ibid. 85 Kidd, Huron Chief, line 1377. 86 Ibid., lines 190–2. 87 “Death of Skenandon,” 294. 88 Kidd, Huron Chief, lines 157–60. 89 Ibid., lines 369–74. 90 Ibid., lines 319–20. 91 Ibid., lines 429–36. 92 Ibid., lines 1371, 1250, 1256. 93 Ibid., lines 841–2. 94 White, Middle Ground, 510–12. 95 Ibid., 515–16. 96 Ibid. 97 Kidd, Huron Chief, lines 1547–54. 98 Ibid., line 1315n.

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99 Ibid., line 613. See also White, Middle Ground, 517. 100 Gibbons, “‘Return of the Native,’” 66. 101 Ibid.

B i b l i ogr ap h y Bartlett, Thomas, David Dickson, Dáire Keogh, and Kevin Whelan, eds. 1798: A Bicentenary Perspective. Dublin: Four Courts, 2003. Bentley, D.M.R. “Concepts of Native Peoples and Property Rights in Early Canadian Poetry.” In Canadian Poetry: An Electronic Resource. http:// www.canadianpoetry.ca (accessed 18 September 2009). – “Explanatory Notes.” In Adam Kidd, The Huron Chief, 65–106. London, ON : Canadian Poetry Press, 1987. – “Introduction.” In Adam Kidd, The Huron Chief, xi–xliii. London, ON : Canadian Poetry Press, 1987. – “Isaac Weld and the Continuity of Canadian Poetry.” In James Noonan, ed., Biography and Autobiography: Essays on Irish and Canadian History and Literature, 223–36. Ottawa: Carleton University Press, 1993. – “Thomas Moore’s Construction of Upper Canada in ‘Ballad Stanzas.’” Canadian Poetry: Studies, Documents, Reviews 35 (1994): 1–10. Campbell, Thomas. The Pleasures of Hope with Other Poems. London: Longman, Hurst, Rees Orme Brown, and Green, 1825. “Death of Skenandon, an Oneida Chief.” In Missionary Register for MD C C CXVI , 202–4. London: Watts, 1816. Edwards, Mary Jane. “Kidd, Adam.” In Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 6, 375–7. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987. Gahan, Daniel. “‘Journey after My Own Heart’: Lord Edward Fitzgerald in America, 1788–90.” New Hibernia Review 8 (2004): 85–105. Gibbons, Luke. “‘The Return of the Native’: The United Irishmen, Culture and Colonialism.” In Thomas Bartlett et al., eds, 1798: A Bicentenary Perspective, 52–74. Dublin: Four Courts, 2003. Goldie, Terry. Fear and Temptation: The Image of the Indigene in Canadian, Australian, and New Zealand Literatures. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1989. Halpenny, Francess G., ed. Dictionary of Canadian Biography. 11 vols. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1983. Holmgren, Michele. “Native Muses and National Poetry: NineteenthCentury Irish-Canadian Poets.” PhD diss., University of Western Ontario, 1997.

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– “Ossian Abroad: James Macpherson and Canadian Literary Nationalism, 1830–1994.” Canadian Poetry: Studies, Documents, Reviews 50 (2002): 51–81. – “United Irishmen in Canada: Adam Kidd’s The Huron Chief Reconsidered.” Canadian Poetry: Studies, Documents, Reviews 60 (2007): 46–67. Kelsay, Isabel. Joseph Brant: Man of Two Worlds. Syracuse, NY : Syracuse University Press, 1986. Kidd, Adam. The Huron Chief. Ed. D.M.R. Bentley, with contributions and appendices by Charles R. Steele. London, ON : Canadian Poetry Press, 1987. – The Huron Chief, and Other Poems. Montreal: Herald and New Gazette, 1830. – “Monody to the Memory of the Right Hon. George Canning.” In The Huron Chief, and Other Poems, 202–4. Montreal: Herald and New Gazette, 1830. – “Preface.” In The Huron Chief, 1. Ed. D.M.R. Bentley, with contributions and appendices by Charles R. Steele. London, ON : Canadian Poetry Press, 1987. Liebersohn, Harry. Aristocratic Encounters: European Travelers and North American Indians. Cambridge, U K: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Mazoff, C.D. Anxious Allegiances: Legitimizing Identity in the Early Canadian Long Poem. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1998. McCormack, Eric. The Dublin Paper War of 1786–1788: A Bibliographical and Critical Inquiry. Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1993. Moore, Thomas. The Life and Death of Lord Edward Fitzgerald. New York: P.M. Haverty, 1855. – Poetical Works. London: Oxford University Press, 1929. O’Grady, Standish. The Emigrant. Ed. Brian Trehearne. London, ON: Canadian Poetry Press, 1989. Reinhardt, Leslie. “British and Indian Identities in a Picture by Benjamin West.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 31, no. 3 (1998): 283–305. Steele, Charles R. “Appendices.” In Adam Kidd, The Huron Chief, 109–32. Ed. D.M.R. Bentley, with contributions and appendices by Charles R. Steele. London, ON : Canadian Poetry Press, 1987. Taylor, Alan. The Divided Ground: Indians, Settlers, and the Northern Borderland of the American Revolution. New York: Vintage, 2006. Thuente, Mary Helen. The Harp Re-strung: The United Irishmen and the Rise of Irish Literary Nationalism. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1994.

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Tillyard, Stella. Citizen Lord: The Life of Edward Fitzgerald, Irish Revolutionary. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1997. Verney, Jack. O’Callaghan: The Making and Unmaking of a Rebel. Ottawa: Carleton University Press, 1994. White, Richard. The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

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8 Michael Power, the Catholic Church, and the Evangelization of the First Nations Peoples of Western Upper Canada, 1841–48 Mark G. M c Gowan

Thirty years ago ethno-historian Cornelius Jaenen and his former student Olive P. Dickason challenged the assumption that the colonial contacts with and evangelization of First Nations peoples in the Americas by the French were characterized by a génie civilisatrice. Comparing the French colonization with that of contemporary imperial powers – Spain, Portugal, and England – Jaenen and Dickason observed that, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the French had the advantage of arriving in “vacant” lands in the St Lawrence Valley because the Laurentian Iroquois whom Cartier had met in 1534 had “vanished” from the territories of Donnacona and Stadacona. In addition, the French Crown placed restrictions on the “settlement frontier” owing to internal ministerial tensions about whether to expand seigneurial territory or maintain their compact colony. Jaenen also argued that the French had a very specific legal understanding of territorial occupation that accommodated French notions of sovereignty while satisfying First Nations’ autonomy and usufructuary rights over the lands claimed by New France. Although these accidental, political, and legal characteristics of French colonial activity in the ancien régime hardly amounted to a génie as intended by the mythmakers, they did, according to these historians, account for the unique relationship between Canada’s First Nations peoples and the French.1

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Perhaps we might pose a similar question: what kind of génie did Irish Catholics possess in their encounters with the First Nations of British North America? Unlike the colonial powers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Irish Catholics and their clergy were merely fellow travellers within and, at times, agents of a larger British imperial presence, and their contact with First Nations peoples was only one dimension of a multifaceted set of relationships – political, military, economic, and religious – between Great Britain and Canada’s First Nations. The Irish Catholic Church’s opportunity to engage First Nations peoples came when new dioceses were established in British North America. From this foundation, the bishops of Halifax and eventually Toronto proposed evangelization schemes in the service of both the Catholic Church and the British Crown. In the early nineteenth century, Upper Canada (later, as of 1841, Canada West and now Ontario) became the largest stage upon which the proposed evangelization of First Nations peoples by Irish clerics played out. This chapter focuses on Michael Power, the first Roman Catholic bishop of Toronto, who oversaw a diocese created in 1841 that covered an enormous territory that even today would take two full days in an automobile to cross. As bishop, Power brought with him a burgeoning sense of ultramontane Catholicism and a strong loyalty to the British Crown. Both of these characteristics would figure prominently in his desire to ally the First Nations peoples in his diocese with his church and would contribute to the social and cultural stability of the frontier for the greater good of the Crown. As will be seen, his efforts met with mixed results, and there was very little sense of a distinctive génie irlandaise at work in his two principal mission centres: Walpole Island, near the current city of Windsor, Ontario; and the “reduction” of Wikwemikong on Manitoulin Island. The irony in the case of Power lies in the fact that he had very few Irish priests to whom he could turn in recruiting men for missionary activity among Upper Canada’s First Nations peoples. Given his own experience as a missionary in Quebec early in his priesthood, Power attempted what he considered to be the best option for his diocese under the circumstances: he recruited French-born members of the Society of Jesus and French Canadian secular priests with appropriate linguistic skills to serve on the Upper Canada frontier. In  the case of Michael Power, the génie irlandaise was based less on  actual Irish labour among First Nations and more on Irish

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coordination of a “Native mission” policy that ensured linguistically competent and, at times, culturally relativistic priests were placed in the mission stations. Michael Power was born in Halifax, Nova Scotia, in October 1804. His father, Captain William Power, was a native of Waterford City, and his mother, Mary Roche, had been born in Youghall. In 1802 they had married in Halifax, Britain’s most important shipping, mercantile, and naval installation in the North Atlantic colonies. Power grew up an Irish Catholic in a British world, and he drank deeply from the wellsprings of loyalty to Catholicism and the Crown, offered freely by his pastor, Father Edmund Burke, soon to be the first bishop of Nova Scotia (later Halifax).2 Because of the imposition of the Penal Laws in Nova Scotia and the restrictions placed upon Catholics in public life in the colony, Power was sent to Montreal to be educated by the Sulpicians and in 1827 was ordained a priest of what would become the Diocese of Montreal. He became a frontier pastor and was gifted in languages, able to speak English, French, Latin, and Abanaki, an Algonquin language he learned while working with that nation on the south shore of the St Lawrence River.3 In time, he became a confidant of Ignace Bourget, the bishop of Montreal, was promoted to vicar general, and travelled to Rome during Bourget’s ad limina visit of 1841. He was unequivocally loyal to the British cause during the failed rebellions by French Canadian Patriotes in 1837 and 1838 and even endured house arrest by the rebels.4 Recognizing his ultramontane piety, loyalty, and indefatigable pioneering spirit, Rome, with the approval of the Colonial Office, appointed Power the first bishop of western Upper Canada, where it was hoped he would apply these three aspects of his character for the glory of the church and the enhancement of the interests of the state. In Lower Canada (Canada East as of 1841 and now Quebec), Power had become accustomed to the social, cultural, and political weight of being part of the province’s majority; his new flock, however, would be a tiny minority amid a powerful Anglican and Protestant ascendancy. In Upper Canada there was very little visible presence of the Catholic Church in public life. Catholics in the province numbered 78,000 in a total population 476,000. As a religious group, they ranked fourth behind Anglicans (120,000), Presbyterians (114,000), and Methodists (100,000). In his own diocese, Power estimated that he was shepherd to between 40,000 and 50,000 Catholics, although it was difficult to estimate the total number of settlers who eluded

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Fig. 8.1 Portrait of Michael Power Source: Archives of the Archdiocese of Toronto

enumeration on the frontier.5 Power reported that this minority status was made all the more precarious by the fact that his flock was divided into forty parishes and two chapels, operated by nineteen clergy, only four of whom were born in Canada.6 Even these numbers were deceiving given that the total number of parishes with mission stations inflated the areas served to fifty-seven, which in theory gave each priest approximately three stations where he was responsible for administering the sacraments.7 Power’s new diocese was also a study in contrasts. Although it contained Toronto, the former capital of the province and its most

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important commercial centre and city,8 the diocese also encompassed some of the most rugged terrain and sparsely settled areas of Canada. Power’s jurisdiction began in the east at the boundary of the Newcastle District and Whitby Township, which contained the village of Oshawa at its eastern frontier; the diocese then extended westward to the town of Sandwich, on the east side of the Detroit River, directly across from the United States. In the south, Power’s domain was bordered by Lake Ontario, the Niagara River, and Lake Erie; in the north, it included all the lakes and rivers that comprised the watersheds of Lake Huron, Georgian Bay, and the northern part of Lake Superior.9 Given the vastness of the territory, it is little wonder that the Vatican simply designated the diocese as encompassing “Western Upper Canada,” leaving it to Power himself to determine where the official seat of ecclesiastical authority ought to be located. His selection of Toronto was the more obvious choice given its already well-established reputation and influence in the province. The largest portions of Power’s diocese sprawled to the north and west of Toronto, with the exception of the farmlands to the east in Pickering and Whitby townships (later the southern portion of Ontario County). By 1842 the townships bordering the rivers and lakes in Upper Canada had been settled and full for nearly a generation, leaving immigrants to buy up unclaimed land in the back townships, which would eventually comprise Ontario’s landlocked counties.10 The province’s rather primitive road system linked Toronto with most of the major areas of settlement to the west, east, and north. By 1842 these roads and regular steamship service linked Power’s episcopal see with important centres of Catholic population at Hamilton and the Niagara Peninsula.11 Elsewhere, crude stump-laden roads had been hacked through the dense bush to connect the former capital with Dundas, Brantford, Woodstock, London, Chatham, and finally Sandwich and its surrounding villages. Although a few toll roads still existed, with the intent of having users directly pay for road improvements, most public roads in the province were in desperate need of maintenance and repair.12 Beyond the lakes and major thoroughfares between the principal towns and cities of the southwest lay the more remote regions of the diocese, which still required at least rudimentary communication routes to Power’s Toronto headquarters. In 1827 construction had begun on the Huron Road linking Guelph with the port of Goderich on Lake Huron.13 This road became an important colonization road

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Fig. 8.2 Map of southern portions of the Diocese of Toronto Source: Canadian Catholic Historical Association

for Irish Catholic immigrants, who would carve out farmsteads in Perth, Huron, Waterloo, and Wellington Counties. For Power, the social frontiers of his diocese would pose as many challenges as the physical frontiers. Despite its Anglo-Protestant ascendancy, Upper Canada contained a rich tapestry of cultural groups, languages, and varieties of Christianity. As he would discover in his own summer rambles through the diocese, First Nations peoples – notably the Odawa, Ojibwa, Mississauga, Saugeen, Nipissing, Pottawatomi, Chippewa (Sauteaux), and those of the Six Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy – were conspicuous by their presence in great numbers in the northern and western portions of Upper Canada.14 Segregated by reserves and nonceded territorial lands around the upper lakes and areas beyond the pale of European settlement, members of the Anishinabe / Algonquin linguistic family were the dominant peoples of the northern region of the diocese.15 In the southern areas, closer to the farms, towns, and cities of the EuroCanadians, were a mixture of Iroquoian- and Algonquin-speaking peoples, the largest concentration of whom were on the Six Nations Reserve, a huge tract of land straddling the Grand River, ceded by the British Crown to Iroquoian Loyalists who supported the British during the American Revolution. Power had few religious concerns here,

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principally because Anglican and Methodist missionaries had already evangelized the Native peoples in the Six Nations territory.16 Not surprisingly, Power’s tone when writing to the Society for the Propagation of the Faith was urgent as he begged for financial aid: “Comme tous les Évêchés paraissant, le mieux est pauvre et sans aucun établissement religieux, et ne donnera guerres á Son Évêque le moyen de faire tout le bien qu’attend naturellement de lui.”17 Shortly after arriving in Toronto in 1842, Power visited the northern and western sections of his diocese. On 21 July he intended to visit Manitoulin Island and attend the annual gift giving by the British authorities to the First Nations peoples of the upper lakes. By the end of August, he had sailed as far north as Sault Ste Marie, headed back to the south via Manitoulin, landed at Penetanguishene, carted overland to the village of Coldwater, and pushed farther south by foot, canoe, and wagon back to Toronto.18 In only two and a half months of his formal episcopacy, Power had ventured over 600 miles and still had only covered a small portion of his vast diocese. In addition to learning about the peoples of the northern reaches of the province, he set the precedent of summer visitations, which he would continue throughout the rest of his tenure. With these visits, and their attendant problems in mind, he could declare that his diocese was truly at the “outside edge of the civilized world.”19 What he discovered on these first journeys disturbed him and confirmed many of his fears about the state of the faith in western Upper Canada. Bringing in more missionary priests was urgent given the non-Catholic missionary endeavours he had witnessed in the north.20 People lived too far from the nearest Catholic church or chapel, a problem that could be remedied by the recruitment of more priests. He had too few priests and too many churches and missions in need of pastoral leadership. Power was increasingly frustrated not only by the numbers game but also by the quality of the priests, mostly Irish, who were already in the field or had been recruited from Europe. They had sometimes brought their Old World problems with them, and their former bishops were delighted to be rid of them. Others entered the diocese without official papers; in some cases, con artists who had never had been ordained in the Old or New Worlds played the role of priest to draw a quick income from unsuspecting frontiersmen. In a two-year span, from 1843 to 1844, Power refused to accept the requests of fifteen itinerant priests who entered the diocese, believing that they would bring nothing but scandal to the

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church. He confided to his colleague Bishop Pierre-Flavien Turgeon of Quebec, “The good priests here are lacking!”21 Although disappointed by the state of his diocese, Power was by no means defeated; within his first year in Upper Canada, he began one of the most important initiatives of his episcopate: the recruitment of priests from the Society of Jesus. He had made his initial contact with the Jesuits in 1841, when in Rome with Bourget. Before leaving Canada, he had opened to them his former parish at Laprairie in the Diocese of Montreal, thus allowing them to return to the seigneury they had once held for the French Crown during the ancien régime. This action alone appeared to endear him to the Society of  Jesus,22 paving the way for a mutually beneficial relationship between the diocese and the Jesuits in the future. It was no coincidence that Power invited the Jesuit Pierre Chazelle to direct the first diocesan retreat in Toronto,23 thus solidifying his relations with the core group of Jesuits who were already in Canada. With these initial contacts in place, on 12 November 1842 Power formally invited the Jesuit general in Rome, Father Jan Roothaan, to send a company of his order to Upper Canada. His action was more a statement about an Irish Canadian bishop seeking the best help possible for his missions and less an identification of Irish priests or the Irish Catholic Church per se as the principal agent of evangelization in the diocese. Power’s vision for his Jesuit recruits was twofold: first, he wanted to address the need for missionaries for Native peoples in the province; and second, he regarded the Jesuits as being able to help with the education of the children of Irish immigrants, who were increasing in numbers every year.24 He outlined to Roothaan that in his pastoral visitation to the upper lakes that summer, he had noted about 6,500 Natives, of whom he reckoned about 2,500 were Roman Catholics, including some 600 whom he described as “fervent Christians” living on Manitoulin Island. He had only one missionary in the region, the diocesan priest Jean-Baptiste Proulx, and there had been requests from the Native peoples themselves for additional missionaries.25 In the eyes of Power, Proulx, and the Catholic Natives, the situation of the Catholic Church in the region had nearly reached a crisis given the increased presence of Anglican and Methodist ministers among the Native peoples. Accordingly, Power sounded the alarm that if the church did not mount a more effective effort on the mission frontier, the Protestants, who were supported by the state,

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would succeed. In his closing remarks to Roothaan, Power even employed nostalgia, tugging on Jesuit heartstrings and pride by insinuating that the work they had started in the seventeenth century had not been completed: “This country has already been watered by the sweat of your veteran fathers, the Brebeufs, the Lallements, the Jogues.”26 The bishop also laid out the financial arrangements, assuring Roothaan that the proven generosity of the Society for the Propagation of the Faith in Lyon and Paris would assist in this mission. In fact, letters to the Society for the Propagation of the Faith, bearing all of the same arguments and often the same language used with Roothaan, were sent to France the same week.27 The Jesuits took little convincing, although Roothaan was uncertain as to the availability of the personnel serving in the French province.28 Pierre Chazelle was clearly Power’s most enthusiastic ally, and he made Roothaan well aware of the advantages of Power’s proposal. Although they had been in Montreal less than a year, Chazelle and his compatriots were upset with Bourget, who had wanted them to take over a heavily indebted school in Chambly. Thus Chazelle regarded the invitation by Power as a wonderful opportunity to work with Native peoples. He also reminded Roothaan that he had conducted the retreat for the priests of the diocese and had found Power to be a man of “elevated and wise views … [and] filled with zeal and activity.”29 In Chazelle’s eyes, this was a project that merited preference for the Jesuits in Canada, and he urged Roothaan to grant Power’s request, particularly given the bishop’s promise that funding would be secured from the Society for the Propagation of the Faith.30 With such enthusiastic support for the plan, as evidenced in Chazelle’s frequent reports to his superior general, by May 1843 Roothaan had agreed to Power’s invitation, and so had the superior of the French Jesuits in Paris. On 30 July, Fathers Jean-Pierre Choné, S J and Pierre Point assumed control of Our Lady of the Assumption Parish at Sandwich (Windsor), soon to become the base of Jesuit operations in the northwest.31 In the summer of 1843, Power placed the Jesuits in the western flank of his diocese. In 1844 they extended their influence to Walpole Island northwest of Sandwich in order to establish a mission among the predominantly Animist and Protestant First Nations peoples of the area.32 One year later, the Jesuits replaced the diocesan priest Jean-Baptiste Proulx on Manitoulin Island, employing it as their bridgehead for missions in Penetanguishene and on the north shore

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of Lake Huron. This move into the upper lakes prompted the Jesuits to establish a presence in what is now Sault Ste Marie, and eventually, by 1848, they had founded the Mission of Immaculate Conception among the Ojibwa near Fort William at the head of Lake Superior.33 At this time, Pierre Point was the dean of the entire western territory, including all francophone Catholics, a position given him by Power in 1847 before the bishop’s departure for Europe.34 Delighted with how the plan for the west had unfolded, a jubilant Power told the first Jesuits assigned to the region, Dominic Du Ranquet and Jean-Pierre Choné, that he never ceased praying for God’s blessings on their mission “for the glory and interest of the Church.”35 The presence of the Jesuits on the mission frontier, however, was not always welcomed by the First Nations peoples there or by the Anglican and Methodist clergy who had already been deployed to “civilize” and save souls. Power was soon facing troubles both on Walpole Island at Lake St Clair and at Wikwemikong on Manitoulin Island. In each case, the Jesuits whom he had hoped would Catholicize the frontier were at the centre of controversy involving Native factions, rival Christian denominations, and the Indian Department. There are several recorded versions of what actually transpired at Walpole Island, each generated by a faction with vested interests – different voices in a protracted storm that would eventually destroy Power’s plan to extend the influence of the church along the St Clair River. In April 1844 Chazelle sent Father Dominique Du Ranquet, who had just finished his study of the Algonquin language, to Walpole Island, in what the superior described as a response to local First Nations’ call for a priest.36 There were estimated to have been over 1,000 Native peoples in the area, prompting both the Methodists and Anglicans to send missionaries to the island, even though the low number of conversions provided little hope for Christian endeavour there in the future.37 Chazelle, Power, and Du Ranquet believed that because there were four Catholic families on the island who wanted a priest, they had the liberty to travel there, with the approval of the local superintendent of the Indian Department, John Keating.38 In fact, as early as March, Chief Superintendent Samuel Jarvis instructed Keating that if there were Catholics on the island who desired a missionary, “it would not be right to prevent their having a priest.”39 Du Ranquet soon discovered that his mission would not be easy. The young French priest, however, did not help his own cause. The

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local Anglican missionary and several Ojibwa accused him of denouncing the Church of England, of cutting down an ancient grove of oaks, and of erecting his cabin on what the Natives claimed was “the place where the bones of our fore fathers and Fathers … are buried.”40 Claiming that the Jesuit had not been invited in the first place and that he had defiled their sacred space, the Ojibwa council met and agreed that Du Ranquet ought to be removed from Walpole. The Ojibwa claimed that any entitlement by Catholics to preach was null and void since the three or four Catholic families were “strangers on the Island,” having been Natives from Michigan and “two half Frenchman” (presumably Métis).41 The Anglican missionary John Carey and the chiefs requested that the government ban Catholic missionaries from the island. Rejecting their request, the Indian Department reiterated that the Catholics had a right to be there but had no right to cut timber or build without the permission of the Council of Chiefs. That the latter had been done was blamed on Keating, who had failed to instruct Du Ranquet and prevent his actions.42 In response, Du Ranquet and the Jesuits claimed that they had Keating’s permission to enter the island and establish a house, school, and chapel.43 On 31 July 1844, having met with the Council of Chiefs, Pierre Chazelle was able to win a temporary stay of the proposed expulsion of his missionaries.44 The battle, however, was by no means concluded, and what ensued was an ongoing debate between the Jesuits and civil authorities over the question of the continuation of the Catholic mission on the island. As bishop, and as the one who commissioned the Jesuits to evangelize the First Nations peoples in the west of his diocese, Power supported the Jesuit interpretation of the incident. Power’s frustration was twofold. First, he insisted that the Catholic Church, since 1763, had been at liberty to evangelize and practise its faith freely in  Canada. The charges directed at Du Ranquet, and the manner in  which he was undergoing “incredible persecution” at Walpole Island, were, in Power’s mind, a violation of these liberties.45 Second, Power recognized that the Walpole Island case called into question whether all Christian churches were being treated fairly by the Crown because, given the evidence presented to him from Walpole, clear favouritism was being shown to Anglicans, Methodists, and Presbyterians. Sensing conspiracy, he insinuated that local Protestant missionaries had incited the controversy in the first place by telling Natives that they would be denied their government presents if they

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attended the priest.46 As he wrote to his former colleague and lifelong friend Father Hyacinthe Hudon of Montreal, “We do not demand a single favour: but we want to preach the Gospel to the Infidels without the Government having the right to interfere.”47 The bishop also consulted with his political friend Dominick Daly, and the corridors to the governor general were opened to him. In August 1845, armed with statements from S.F. Jarvis, secretary at the Indian Office, that Catholics were at liberty to preach at Walpole if there were Catholics among the Natives and armed with testimony from Du Ranquet that he acted with the department’s permission, Power met with Governor General Sir Charles Metcalfe, who reassured him that the Crown had nothing to do with the attempts to force the Jesuits off the island and reiterated that they had a right to be there if none of the Natives’ land was taken without their consent.48 Metcalfe, however, who was dying of cancer, was unable to bring closure to the issue, and Power was forced to petition his successor, Governor General the Earl of Cathcart, to ensure the continued Catholic presence on Walpole. Nonetheless, in October 1846 Cathcart ordered Du Ranquet “to quit the Island.” With a directness rarely witnessed in his engagements with the state, and despite saying that his remarks were made in a “positive and solemn manner,” Power described Cathcart’s order as an “open act of persecution and gross violation of the rights of ministers and members of the Catholic Church.”49 With his patience worn thin, Power told Daly that given the rate of change among Her Majesty’s governors in Canada, it would take three years before anything was done about the matter.50 In response to Power, Cathcart sided completely with the Walpole Band, stating, “A very large majority of Indians professing the Christian faith has hitherto uniformly declared themselves to be thoroughly opposed to the interference of the Roman Catholic Missionary in their spiritual affairs and have urgently and repeatedly requested his removal from the Island.”51 Determined to exact justice in the matter, Power raised the issue at the Colonial Office when he visited London in 1847 (en route to Rome for his ad limina visit). He restated his case to Earl Charles Grey, demanding that justice be done, that Du Ranquet’s name be restored, and that Catholic missionaries be unmolested in their work. Power also let Grey know that he wanted the matter to be settled privately because he did not want to make public that there was any “misunderstanding” between “civil and ecclesiastical authorities.”52 As incensed as

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he was over this issue, he held fast to the belief that Catholicism and the British Empire were not at odds and could work cooperatively for the good of both. Unknown to him at the time, on 30 March 1847 a Provincial Commission of Enquiry, headed by J.B. Clench, ruled that the Jesuit was guilty of all charges; Clench ordered that the mission should be closed and the property returned to the First Nations peoples.53 The matter still festered at the time of Power’s return, and he died without knowing the final resolution. The government stuck to the decision made in March; the Jesuits were ordered to leave. But as late as 1848, local Catholic Natives protested the treatment accorded Du Ranquet and objected to his removal.54 Although the First Nations had been caught up in bureaucratic politics, differences between church and state, and sectarian squabbling, their majority faction had the final word. When the mission closed in 1849, the locals burned Du Ranquet’s chapel to the ground. Power’s second battle in the First Nations missions was not as personally intense or as threatening to his relations with the state, but he encountered more challenges at Wikwemikong, where the Jesuits found themselves in open competition with the Church of England and the provincial government’s Indian Department. The mission predated Power’s appointment, having been established in 1836 by Bishops Alexander Macdonell and Remi Gaulin (coadjutor) in response to a formal request by the First Nations peoples living near Coldwater on the mainland between Lake Simcoe and Georgian Bay.55 The first missionary, diocesan priest Jean-Baptiste Proulx, arrived on the island just as civil and Anglican authorities were engaged in a two-pronged effort to Anglicize and Christianize the Ojibwa and Odawa peoples of Manitoulin Island and the surrounding area. In 1835 Lieutenant Governor Sir John Colbourne had envisioned the Island as one big reserve, and his successor, Sir Francis Bond Head, required all bands on Manitoulin to cede their land to the Crown.56 At Manitowaning, the Upper Canada government financed an Anglican mission centre, workshops, and a school, where it was hoped that the local Ojibwa would thoroughly adopt English and Protestant ways, become sedentary, learn farming techniques, and acquire skilled trades. The mission was initially staffed by two Anglican (formerly Church of Ireland) clergy: Charles Crosbie Brough, from 1838 to 1841, and Frederick Augustus O’Meara, a native of Wexford, from 1841 to 1859.57

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Most Catholic Ojibwa and Odawa refused to attend the Church of England mission, and worse for the Indian agent, Captain Thomas Anderson, the Natives refused to cede their territory to the Crown, a huge portion of Manitoulin Island that remains unceded to this day.58 Instead, the Catholic First Nations people, under the influence of the church, formed their service centre and settlement at the village of Wikwemikong, eighteen miles to the southeast of Manitowaning. In 1838 Father Proulx had erected the village’s first mission church, Holy Cross, and proceeded to encourage Native independence from government programs while working with the Ojibwa and Odawa in their own language, a method of evangelization that was not used initially in the English-only environment of the Church of England mission.59 Thus Power assumed spiritual responsibility for a growing Catholic Ojibwa and Odawa community, close to 1,500 in number, which he visited in 1842. But the Manitoulin mission was also a hotbed of sectarian discord, with the potential for a frontier standoff among the Catholic Church, Irish Anglican clergy, and the Canadian government.60 During his visit to Manitoulin, Power recognized several sources of difficulty in the mission. Although he had questions about Proulx’s lackadaisical recordkeeping practices, he was much more concerned about the status of the missionary’s housekeeper, fearing that the young woman’s presence in the rectory might engender scandal, which would hurt the church. He asked Father George Gordon, the trusted pastor at Penetanguishene, to “secretly and confidentially” monitor the situation, fearing that Protestant rivals in the region might use any indiscretion as a cause to discredit the Catholic mission. In the interim, Power recalled Proulx to Toronto for the winter, where he could live with Power and his secretary, Father J.J. Hay. For Power, the risk of scandal in this volatile region was to be avoided at all cost, although the bishop struggled with the thought of leaving the local First Nations peoples without the services of a priest.61 After Proulx’s return to the island in the spring, Power became increasingly concerned that the government’s Indian Department was not only aiding the Anglican mission at Manitowaning but also openly discriminating against Proulx and the Catholic First Nations people at Wikwemikong. Father Proulx reported that Catholic Natives were prohibited from living near Manitowaning, that the Catholic mission was receiving no financial aid from the government

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for education, and that no government salary was being provided for him, as it was for the Anglican missionary.62 That the Ojibwa and Odawa of Wikwemikong had refused to cede their lands, which constituted 100,000 acres,63 may have been the source of their inequitable treatment by civil authorities. Given Proulx’s defence of Native claims and the rivalry between his mission and the Anglican one, the government parsimony was seen by Power as a means to “starve” the Catholic mission into submission to Anglican and imperial objectives. Power decried the Indian agent’s actions as yet another example of “persecution” and perfidy by the government on the frontier, and in 1844 he added the problems of Manitoulin to the list of complaints delivered in person to Governor General Metcalfe. Power interpreted what he witnessed in Manitoulin as the government’s interference in the work of the church, holding the conspiratorial notion that when the government offered the church money, it could be construed as a way for the state to direct or influence the affairs of the church. If such was the case, he informed Bourget, he would refuse all government money: “La Pauvreté et l’indepéndence de l’Eglise seront toujours prefereables a cette boue qu’on appele or, et a l’esclavage.”64 In 1844, knowing the stress under which Proulx was working, Power relieved his priest at Wikwemikong and sent in his place two  men: Ferdinand Roque, a translator, and Father Jean-Pierre Choné.65 The latter served as superior of the mission from 1844 to 1848, effectively becoming Power’s frontline officer in the ongoing conflict with the local Anglican pastor, the Reverend O’Meara, who openly despised Catholics and was marshalling both his own Ojibwa allies and the government to thwart the Wikwemikong mission. Unlike Charles Crosbie Brough, his predecessor, O’Meara had mastered Ojibwa and had produced a translation of the New Testament, which enabled him to provide religious instruction in Ojibwa and thereby to reverse the English-only policy of the Manitowaning mission.66 Perhaps this change in pedagogy was too little too late. Over time, Choné noted that the Anglican hold over Manitowaning weakened, as did the resolve of the government to continue pouring money into what appeared to be a failing venture. In fairness, the Irish Anglicans were facing the near impossible task of transforming the majority of their flock, Ojibwa hunter-gatherers, into sedentary farmers on poor land, whereas their Catholic rivals were shepherding the Odawa nation, whose members aleady had

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extensive experience cultivating corn.67 By 1860 the Manitowaning experiment had failed; O’Meara had been recalled, and the government channelled its monies elsewhere. In contrast, despite its poverty, the Wikwemikong mission appeared to be flourishing. The Jesuits, who were fluent in the Anishinabe languages and took considerable time to study and record the stories and rituals of Native spirituality, reported that they were slowly adding Catholic neophytes to the one chief and twenty-six other Catholics who had always lived as a minority in the Anglican mission.68 In the unceded territory, Choné established his own industrial school among the 327 residents of Wikwemikong, and by 1846 he had acquired the services of Jean Véroneau, a Jesuit brother, who was skilled in the building trades and blacksmithing, in addition to possessing some culinary skills.69 In 1848, under the new superior Father Nicholas Point, the Jesuits constructed new storehouses to facilitate First Nations trade and agricultural work in the region.70 Recognizing Manitoulin as a bridgehead from which to expand the northern missions, Power requested that Choné and the Jesuits extend their operations to include First Nations peoples and EuroCanadians living along the shores of Georgian Bay. In what was tantamount to an offensive by Power into “Protestant-held territory,” Choné established a mission at Owen Sound with the express purpose of converting the resident Methodist First Nations peoples to Catholicism.71 Similarly, the Holy Cross (St-Croix) Mission became the Jesuit base of operations for additional missions to the north shore of Lake Huron, the Parry Sound District, and Sault Ste Marie. In 1846 Fathers Choné and Clément Boulanger (who had been instrumental in convincing Roothaan to re-establish the Jesuits in Canada) visited the Hudson’s Bay Company post at Fort William and commenced evangelization among 2,000 Native peoples to the west of the lakehead. Mistakenly, Power thought that this region beyond the lakehead, in what is now north-western Ontario, was part of his diocese, whereas in reality it came under the jurisdiction of Norbert Provencher, bishop of Red River.72 By 1847 moderate successes by the Jesuits in the upper lakes region transformed Power’s attitude about the mission frontier from a defensive posture to one of assertiveness. Both the Walpole Island and Manitoulin episodes exemplify how difficult it was for Power to place the frontier and its First Nations peoples under Catholic influence. In the settlement frontier inhabited

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by Euro-Canadian Catholics, with its existing parishes and parishes in the planning stages, he could exert his control through pastoral visitation, by enforcing church discipline of the laity and the clergy, and by taking ownership of the local church real estate. But this was not the case on the margins of the diocese. First Nations peoples, either showing little interest in conversion to Christianity or having already been allied to non-Catholic missionaries, provided significant resistance to any dream of mass evangelization by Toronto’s Irish Canadian prelate. Although Protestant-Catholic relations in the more settled areas might have been peaceful, in the country stalked by the “black robes” it was more of a sylvan re-enactment of the Reformation of the sixteenth century. Anglicans, Methodists, and Jesuits fought one another for the souls of Aboriginal peoples, who were less than enthusiastic about embracing the white colonials’ creed. Just as his patience could be strained by what he acknowledged was anti-Catholicism on the mission frontier, Power was equally stung by the manner in which government bureaucracy, cronyism, and favouritism hampered the work of his priests in the upper country. When coupled with the indifference he experienced when he petitioned Colonial Office bureaucrats in London in 1847, his experiences with petty local-government appointees, Indian agents, and civil servants dealing with Walpole and Wikwemikong certainly made him question British fair play when it came to religious rights. This conflict between the faith he loved and the Crown he respected troubled him: “Your Lordship [Bourget] knows my sincere and inviolable attachment to the Majesty’s government … For 18 months, I have been patient and I hoped that I would never be forced to give publicity to the most iniquitous persecution that has ever taken place in the country. The only opposition that has been given to all of their scheming is that of passive Resistance and silence.”73 Power felt the promises made to him by Governor General Sydenham in 1842 about the church’s freedom to evangelize the frontier had been broken. His faith in the British colonial apparatus was certainly damaged, although not completely destroyed. Can the Power episode be described as a génie irlandaise? Probably not. Power certainly had a mission strategy that was to serve the interests of both the Catholic Church and the state. The ecclesiastical aspect of the plan made no accommodation for Irish priests to move to the frontier. He placed those priests whose services and character he valued in strategic Euro-Canadian communities within

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the diocese; the majority of his priests, whom he found annoying, indifferent to church rules, and often downright defiant of episcopal authority, he dared not send to the missions for fear of a complete collapse on the frontier. In their place, he recruited some of the most highly skilled missionaries of the time – French-speaking Jesuits. This was hardly a frontline génie irlandaise. Insofar as the Crown was concerned, his loyalty, which was not uncommon among many Irish Catholics in the colonies, was rudely shaken when his missionary interests conflicted with the Indian Department’s Erastian-style support of the Anglican Church and its missionaries, who ironically were Irish Protestants with considerable “old country” baggage and thus despised the Catholic competition. The showdown on Manitoulin saw the Catholic mission at Wikwemikong prevail, and the life of the Holy Cross Mission was sustained by its Odawa farmers and their sedentary lifestyle, by the inculturation practised by the Jesuit clergy on what was essentially their Upper Canada “reduction,” and by the overall strategy of Michael Power, an Irish Nova Scotian, who never witnessed its success. In October 1847, while tending to the sick and dying refugees of the Irish Famine in Toronto, Power contracted typhus and died nine days before his forty-third birthday.

No t e s 1 Jaenen, Friend and Foe, 7–11; Dickason, Myth of the Savage; Canadian Historical Association, Report. 2 McGowan, Michael Power, 16–22. 3 Archives of the Archdiocese of Quebec (AA Q), R G 21, register 13, p. 30, Bishop Bernard-Claude Panet to Father Laurent Amiot, 16 September 1826; and A A Q , fonds 210-A, register 13, pp. 128–9, Panet to Father Laurent Amiot, 14 February 1827. 4 McGowan, Michael Power, 100–4. 5 Archives of the Roman Catholic Archives of Toronto (A R C A T ), Letter Book 02.004, Power to Monseigneur De Jessé, Association for the Propagation of the Faith, Lyon, 10 May 1842; ARCAT, Letter Book 02.028, Power to Monseigneur De Jessé, Association for the Propagation of the Faith, Lyon, 16 November 1842; The Mirror, 19 June 1842. The population statistics from the Mirror were gleaned from the census of 1842: Church of England, 120,000; Presbyterians, 114,000; Methodists, 100,000; Catholics,

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78,000; Baptists, 20,000; Other Protestants (i.e., Quakers, Lutherans, Congregationalists, Mennonites, and Dutch), 19,000; Jews, 1,000; and Other, 24,000; see Archives of the Archdiocese of Kingston (AAK), Letter Book 1833–1868, Census of the Catholic Population in Upper Canada, 1834, 17–18. At that time, the portion of Upper Canada that would become Power’s diocese contained twelve of the thirty-six parishes and 24,248 of the province’s 52,248 Catholics. Immigration and natural population growth had shifted the Catholic population in favour of Power’s diocese in less than one decade. See also Library and Archives Canada (LAC), Rapports sur Les Etat des Missions, Society of the Propagation of the Faith (SPF), Toronto, F 199, nos 12,345 to 12,419, 1842 to 1874, microfilm; LAC, Power to Msgr Choiselat-Galliea, 15 February 1843, 12,350; LAC, Report of Michael Power for 1843 [sent 1844] to SPF, 12,348. A R C A T, Letter Book 02.042, Hay to Douglas Harrington, 19 December 1842; L AC, S PF , Report from Michael Power to SPF, 12,349. A R C A T, Power Papers, A Directory of the Diocese of Toronto, December 1843. Careless, Union of the Canadas, 28. A R C A T, Report to Bishop Milde of Vienna; A R C A T, Letter Book 02.229, Power to Archbishop Milde of Vienna, 16 January 1845; Archives of the Pontifical Mission Works, Montreal, Power to the President of the Society for the Propagation of the Faith, 10 May 1842, copy. Craig, Upper Canada, 127. McCalla, Planting the Province, 118–21. Ibid., 134–7; Craig, Upper Canada, 143; Jameson, Winter Studies, 270; Bagnato and Strange, eds, Footpaths to Freeways, 27–8. Guillet, Pioneer Travel, 158; Bagnato and Strange, eds, Footpaths to Freeways, 31. Smith, “Dispossession,” 25–7; Smith, Sacred Feathers, 17–33. Schmalz, Ojibwa of Southern Ontario. Fahey, In His Name, 39–41; Grant, Profusion of Spires, 109–10. A R C A T, Letter Book 02.004, Power to De Jessé, 10 May 1842. A R C A T, Letter Books 01.035, 01.036, 01.039, 02.052, and 02.080; The Catholic, September 1842. A R C A T, Letter Book 02.028, Power to De Jessé, Association for the Propagation of the Faith, Lyons, 16 November 1842; Archives of the Archdiocese of Montreal (AAM), Toronto Correspondence, 255.104, doc. 843–4, Power to “cher monsieur” [Marcoux], 5 July 1843. A A M, Toronto Correspondence, 255.104, doc. 842–2, Power to Bourget, 16 July 1842.

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21 A A Q , fonds 320-CN, vol. 6, p. 24, Power to Turgeon, 2 September 1844. 22 A R C A T, Power Papers, AB 10.05, Jan Roothaan to Michael Power, 5 April 1843. 23 Curran, Return of the Jesuits, 93. 24 Archivum Romanum Societas Iesu (ARS I), C I, 1001 (1842–63), vol. 3, fasc. 9, Michael Power to Roothaan, 12 November 1842. 25 ARCAT, Power Papers, AB 14.08, Letter from John Ainance, J.B. Tagewinine, P. Chegechi, J.R. Anowatin, requesting funds from government be sent to Power for priest at Georgian Bay, [c. 1842–43]. 26 A R S I , C I , 1001 (1842–63), vol. 3, fasc. 9, Power to Roothaan, 12 November 1842. 27 A R C A T, Letter Book 02.028, Power to De Jessé, Association for the Propagation of the Faith, Lyon, 16 November 1842; LA C , SPF , Paris, F 199, Diocese of Toronto, Reports on the State of the Missions, 1842–74, docs 12,345–6. 28 A R C A T, Power Papers, AB 10.05, Jan Roothaan to Michael Power, 5 April 1843. 29 A R S I , C I , 1001 (1842–63), vol. 1, fasc. 2, Chazelle to Roothaan, 20 January 1843. 30 Ibid.; and ARSI, CI, 1001 (1842–63), vol. 1, fasc. 2, Chazelle to Roothaan, 30 January 1843. 31 A R S I , C I , 1001 (1842–63), vol. 1, fasc. 2, Chazelle to Roothaan, 20 May 1843 and 8 August 1843; ARCAT , Power Papers, A B 10.10, Roothaan to Power, 12 October 1843; “Pierre Chazelle,” 56; A A M, Registre des Lettres, 138–9, Bourget to Turgeon, Quebec, 22 July 1843. 32 A R S I , C I , 1001 (1842–63), vol. 3, fasc. 9, Chazelle to Roothaan, 20 June 1844. 33 Archives of the Archdiocese of Detroit (aad ), Pierre Paul Papers, Paul to Power, 24 April 1845, regarding Sault Ste Marie; A R C A T, Letter Book 02.244, Power to Bourget, 29 May 1845, regarding Manitoulin, Proulx, and the Lake Superior Country; Arthur, ed., Thunder Bay District, xxix, 13–16. 34 A R C A T, Letter Book 02.286, Power to Point, 22 November 1846; and A R C A T, Letter Book 02.293, Power to Point, 1 January 1847. 35 A R C A T, Letter Book 02.150, Power to Du Ranquet and Choné, 26 April 1844. 36 A R S I , C I , 1001 (1842–63), vol. 1, fasc. 2, Chazelle to Roothaan, 20 May 1843. 37 A R S I , C I , 1001 (1842–63), vol. 1, fasc. 2, Chazelle to Roothaan, 11 September 1843. The limited successes are alluded to by Anglican missionary

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39 40 41 42

43 44 45 46 47 48

49 50

51

52 53

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John Carey; see Archives of the Society of Jesus Upper Canada Province (A S J UC P), C-406, no. 1, Testimony of John Carey, 20 May 1844. Although biased, the Jesuits were aware of Protestant difficulties on the Island; see “Le Père Pierre Point,” par. 18, 165. A R S I , C I, 1001 (1842–63), vol. 3, fasc. 11, Chazelle (Port Sarnia) to Roothaan, 20 June 1844; ARCAT , Letter Book 02.209 and 02.211, Note from Power appended to a letter to Father H. Hudon, Vicar General, Diocese of Montreal, 7 December 1844; A R C A T, Letter Book 02.212, copy of a letter from Samuel Jarvis (Kingston) to John Keating, 8 May 1844 [actually 10 March 1844]. A S J UC P , C-401, no. 1, Samuel Jarvis to Keating, 10 March 1844. A S J UC P , C-401, no. 1, To Our Great Father the Governor General at Montreal [Metcalfe], 25 July 1844; Grant, Moon of Wintertime, 80. A S J UC P , C-401, no. 1, To Our Great Father the Governor General at Montreal [Metcalfe], 25 July 1844. A S J UC P , C-401, no. 1, Keating to J.M. Higginson, Civil Secretary, Indian Department, Montreal, 1 September 1844; LA C, R G 10, vol. 456, Agents, Western Superintendency, Civil Secretary Higginson to Keating, 13 September 1844, contained in microfilm reel C-13328, item 256. “Le Frère Joseph Jennesseaux,” 176–87. See also “Le Père Pierre Point,” 165. “Le R.P. Chazelle,” 188–96. A R C A T, Letter Book 02.209, Power to Hudon, 7 December 1844. A R C A T, Letter Book 02.269, Power to Dominick Daly, 15 June 1846. A R C A T, Letter Book 02.209, Power to Hudon, 7 December 1844. A R C A T, Letter Book 02.269, Power to Dominick Daly, 15 June 1846. For the evidence from Du Ranquet, see ARCAT, Letter Book 02.280, Du Ranquet to Indian Department Secretary Vardon, 29 September 1846, copy. A R C A T , Letter Book 02.291, Power to the Right Honourable Earl of Cathcart, Petition, 17 December 1846. Ibid., Letter Book 02.269, Letter from Power to Dominick Daly, 15 June 1846; A R CAT, Letter Book 02.291, Power to the Right Honourable Earl of Cathcart, Petition, 17 December 1846. A R C A T , Letter Book 02.298, Power to Earl Grey, enclosure quoting Cathcart entitled “Memorial to the Earl of Cathcart,” 19 February 1847, emphasis in original. Ibid. A S J U C P , C-401, no. 3, “Queen vs. du Ranquet,” Province of Canada, Western District, J.B. Clench, 30 March 1847; A S J U C P , C-401, no. 3, Proceedings of the Enquiry, 29–30 March 1847.

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54 L A C , R G 10, vol. 439, Superintendency Records, Western (Sarnia) Superintendency, Correspondence of J.B. Clench, 1842–54, Oshaogimaw Nautel to Clench, 5 May 1848. 55 A R C A T, Macdonell Papers, Louis Labasque and Others to Bishop JeanJacques Lartigue, 27 June 1833; Cadieux, SJ , “Aperçu Historique,” 8. 56 Bleasdale, “Manitowaning,” 148; Cadieux, “Aperçu Historique,” 11. 57 Millman, “Frederick Augustus O’Meara.” 58 “Wikwemikong Unceded First Nation,” 258–9. 59 Leighton, “Jean-Baptiste Proulx,” 714–15; Bleasdale, “Manitowaning,” 152–4. 60 Toupin, S J, “La Vie Interne,” 35–6; Cadieux, “Aperçu Historique,” 14–16. 61 A R C A T , Letter Book 02.010, Power (at Manitoulin) to Jean-Baptiste Proulx, 15 August 1842; A R C A T , Letter Book 02.031, Power to Proulx, 22 November 1842; A R C A T , Letter Book 02.032, Power to George Gordon, Penetanguishene, 22 November 1842. 62 A R C A T, Letter Book 02.092, Proulx to Samuel P. Jarvis, Chief Superintendent of Indian Affairs, Kingston, 15 May 1843, copy. 63 Nazar, S J , “Introduction,” 9. 64 A R C A T, Letter Book 02.242, Power to Bourget, 21 May 1845. 65 A R C A T, Letter Book 02.244, Power to Bourget, 29 May 1845; “Le Père Choné,” 209–13. 66 Bleasdale, “Manitowaning,” 151; Morrison, “Upper Great Lakes,” 63. 67 Morrison, “Upper Great Lakes,” 62. 68 A R S I , C I , 1001 (1842–63), vol. 1, fasc. 15, doc. 4, Jean-Pierre Choné to Roothaan, 12 January 1846. This letter is rich in descriptions of Native religious practice and of the Ojibwa deities and stories; see also A R SI, C I, 1001 (1842–63), vol. 1, fasc. 15, doc. 9, Jean-Pierre Choné to Roothaan, 14 April 1847. Statistics for the Manitoulin missions are in A R SI , C I, 1001 (1842–63), vol. 1, fasc. 15, doc. 1, Choné to Roothaan, 2 February 1845. 69 “Jean Veroneau,” 337–8; ARSI, CI, 1001 (1842–63), vol. 1, fasc. 15, doc. 9, Jean-Pierre Choné to Roothaan, 14 April 1847. 70 Toupin, “La Vie Interne,” 46; Cadieux, “Aperçu Historique,” 21. 71 A R S I , C I , 1001 (1842–63), vol. 1, fasc. 15, doc. 6, Jean-Pierre Choné to Roothaan, 26 June 1846; ARSI, CI, 1001 (1842–63), vol. 1, fasc. 15, doc. 7, Jean-Pierre Choné to Roothaan, 16 December 1846. 72 ARSI, CI, 1001 (1842–63), vol. 1, fasc. 9, doc. 11, Pierre Point to Roothaan, 22 September 1847. The statistics for the northern missionary expansion are in ARSI, CI, 1001 (1842–63), vol. 1, fasc. 9, doc. 8, Point to Roothaan, 29 October 1846.

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73 A A M, Toronto Correspondence, 255.104, file 845–4, Power to Bourget, 28 May 1845; also archived in ARCAT, Letter Book 02.244, Power to Bourget, 28 May 1845.

B i b l i ogr ap h y Arthur, Elizabeth, ed. The Thunder Bay District, 1821–1892. Toronto: Champlain Society for the Government of Ontario and the University of Toronto Press, 1973. Bagnato, Sharon, and John Strange, eds. Footpaths to Freeways: The Story of Ontario Roads. Toronto: Ministry of Transportation, 1985. Bleasdale, Ruth. “Manitowaning: An Experiment in Indian Settlement.” Ontario History 66 (1974): 147–57. Cadieux, Lorenzo, S J. “Aperçu Historique.” In Lorenzo Cadieux, SJ, and Robert Toupin, S J, eds, Les Robes Noires a L’Ile du Manitou, 1853– 1870, 8. Sudbury, ON : Société historique du Nouvel-Ontario, 1982. Canadian Historical Association. Report. 1979. Careless, J.M.S. The Union of the Canadas: The Growth of Canadian Institutions, 1841–1857. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1967. Craig, Gerald. Upper Canada: The Formative Years, 1784–1841. 1963. Reprint, Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1979. Curran, Francis Xavier, S J. The Return of the Jesuits. Chicago, IL : Loyola University Press, 1966. Dickason, Olive P. The Myth of the Savage and the Beginnings of French Colonization in the Americas. Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 1984. Fahey, Curtis. In His Name: The Anglican Experience in Upper Canada, 1791–1854. Ottawa: Carleton University Press, 1991. Grant, John Webster. Moon of Wintertime: Missionaries and the Indians of Canada in Encounter since 1534. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984. – A Profusion of Spires: Religion in Nineteenth Century Ontario. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988. Guillet, Edwin C. Pioneer Travel in Upper Canada. 1933. Reprint, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1972. Jaenen, Cornelius J. Friend and Foe: Aspects of French-Amerindian Cultural Contact in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1976. Jameson, Anna Brownell. Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada. 1838. Reprint, Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1990.

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“Jean Veroneau.” In Dictionary of Jesuit Biography: Ministry to English Canada, 1842–1987, 337–8. Toronto: Canadian Institute of Jesuit Studies, 1991. “Le Frère Joseph Jennesseaux de la Compagnie de Jésus à un Frère Coadjuteur de la Même Compagnie, De L’Ile Walpole, 9 août 1844.” In Lorenzo Cadieux, S J, ed., Lettres des Nouvelles Missions du Canada, 1843–1852, 176–87. Montreal: Bellarmin, 1973. “Le Père Choné, Missionaire de la Compagnie de Jésus au Canada, à Son Supérieur en France, Ste-Croix de la grande Manitouline, 3 septembre 1844.” In Lorenzo Cadieux, S J, ed., Lettres des Nouvelles Missions du Canada, 1843–1852, 209–13. Montreal: Bellarmin, 1973. “Le Père Pierre Point, Missionaire de la Compagnie de Jésus dans le HautCanada à Son Supérieur en France, Sandwich, 10 mai 1844.” In Lorenzo Cadieux, S J, ed., Lettres des Nouvelles Missions du Canada, 1843–1852, 159–67. Montreal: Bellarmin, 1973. “Le R.P. Chazelle, Supérieur des Missions de la Compagnie de Jésus au Canada à Son Supérieur en France, Sandwich, 10 août 1844.” In Lorenzo Cadieux, S J, ed., Lettres des Nouvelles Missions du Canada, 1843–1852, 188–96. Montreal: Bellarmin, 1973. Leighton, Douglas. “Jean-Baptiste Proulx.” In Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 11, 714–15. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982. McCalla, Douglas. Planting the Province: The Economic History of Upper Canada, 1784–1870. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993. McGowan, Mark G. Michael Power: The Struggle to Build the Catholic Church on the Canadian Frontier. Montreal and Kingston: McGillQueen’s University Press, 2005. Millman, Thomas. “Frederick Augustus O’Meara.” In Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 11, 653–5. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982. Morrison, James. “Upper Great Lakes Settlement: The Anishinabe-Jesuit Record.” Ontario History 86 (March 1994): 63. Nazar, David, S J. “Introduction: Nineteenth-Century Wikwemikong: The Foundation of a Community and an Exploration of Its People.” Ontario History 86 (March 1994): 9. “Pierre Chazelle.” In Dictionary of Jesuit Biography: Ministry to English Canada, 1842–1987, 56. Toronto: Canadian Institute of Jesuit Studies, 1991. Schmalz, Peter S. The Ojibwa of Southern Ontario. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991.

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Smith, Donald B. “The Dispossession of the Mississauga Indians: A Missing Chapter in the Early History of Upper Canada.” In J.K. Johnson and Bruce G. Wilson, eds, Historical Essays on Upper Canada, 23–52. Ottawa: Carleton University Press, 1989. – Sacred Feathers: The Reverend Peter Jones (Kahkewaquonaby) and the Mississauga Indians. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987. Toupin, Robert, S J. “La Vie Interne de la Mission.” In Lorenzo Cadieux, S J , and Robert Toupin, S J, eds, Les Robes Noires à L’Ile du Manitou, 1853–1870, 35–6. Sudbury, ON : Société historique du Nouvel-Ontario, 1982. “Wikwemikong Unceded First Nation.” In Akwesasne to Wunnumin Lake: Profiles of Aboriginal Communities in Ontario, 258–9. Toronto: Ontario Native Affairs Secretariat and Ministry of Citizenship, 1992.

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9 Observations of a Scottish Moralist: Indigenous Peoples and the Nationalities of Canada Andrew Hinson and Graeme Morton

As a source of encounters between emigrants and Indigenous peoples, the Reverend William Bell’s Hints to Emigrants in a Series of Letters from Upper Canada (1824) appears, at first glance, to offer little insight into such occurrences.1 In contrast to emigrant works such as Susanna Moodie’s Roughing It in the Bush (1852) and Robert MacDougall’s The Emigrant’s Guide to North America (1841), it has no chapter focused exclusively on Native Americans; nor does it have the rich descriptions of Indigenous life that are scattered throughout the likes of John Howison’s Sketches of Upper Canada (1821). Even in Bell’s seventeen volumes of unpublished memoirs, there are only a few references to Native Americans. Yet as limited as these impressions are, their value can be seen in the context of Bell’s more detailed observations of the behaviour and actions of his fellow pioneers in and around the settlement of Perth, Upper Canada. A strict moralist who expected no less from those around him, Bell was taken aback by the incivility he encountered upon arrival from Scotland in 1817, which was so great that he feared Perth was in danger of descending into complete moral depravity. Although few settlers escaped his disparaging remarks, when Bell did write of the “savage Indians,” he did so without his characteristic judgments, often demonstrating curiosity about and compassion for the circumstances in which they found themselves. Many Scots around this period wrote approvingly of Native culture and

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customs, but Bell’s morose disposition made him an unlikely subscriber to such a viewpoint, thus warranting further investigation of his Indigenous encounters. The Associate Presbytery of Edinburgh ordained the Reverend William Bell as “Minister to the Scotch Settlers on the Ottawa River, in the Province of Upper Canada” on 6 March 1817. The Reverend George Brown from North Berwick was chosen to preach for the occasion, and the moderator, the Reverend Dr James Peddie, confirmed the candidate with the charge. Perhaps more prescient than their man of the troubles that lay ahead, those gathered furnished a generous collection to help the resolute minister with his mission.2 And it would turn out to be a challenging environment for Bell, who was expecting to join a relatively peaceful congregation grateful for  his coming. Instead, he found an entire settlement – religiously, ethnically, and socially heterogeneous – in dire need of guidance and supervision. Having been established in the aftermath of the Anglo-American War of 1812, Perth was initially populated by civilian settlers enticed by government-sponsored emigration programs, who were soon joined by a large number of military veterans from recently disbanded units, comprising a range of European nationalities. By 1817 the settlement’s population was nearly 2,000, of whom discharged soldiers and their families outnumbered all others by more than two to one. With satisfactory mechanisms of social regulation (i.e., laws, police, and courts) still to be put in place, and with no religious bodies present before his arrival, Bell faced a situation at which lesser characters would have baulked. As he recalled in Hints to Emigrants, “On looking round me … I saw a moral as well as a natural wilderness, requiring cultivation with regard to a great majority of the settlers; religion seemed to occupy no part of their attention. The Sabbath was awfully profaned; and drunkenness, swearing, and other vices were thought matters of course.”3 Believing that he was fulfilling the will of God, Bell embraced the opportunity to remedy this situation and immediately set about directing the moral and spiritual development of the region. Although Bell’s daily journals have not survived, his memoirs, which he began compiling in 1840, contain over 3,000 pages of manuscript and cover his entire life from 1780 until the time of his death in 1857.4 Hints to Emigrants was written for British readers, and although the manuscript was rejected by the major Edinburgh

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publishers, his son Andrew eventually sold it to Waugh and Innes for £12, considerably less than the £20 Howison earned for his Sketches of Upper Canada; nor did Bell’s manuscript achieve the reprints (for a further £10), including a German translation, that Howison’s achieved. Likely, the publishers’ reticence came from reading a text that indulged more in moral pronouncements than in descriptions of life in the Canadian wilderness. Bell’s biographer, Isobel Skelton, despaired at the difficulty of computing the voluminous sheets Bell devoted in his memoirs to the “Demon Drink,” and she herself provided only three pages identifying his encounters with Natives.5 Few people had internalized contempt for the immoral choices of others as early, it would seem, as William Bell. From his childhood, he remembered being troubled by the ungodly world that surrounded him. Writing of his time in Blackburn, East Lothian, in 1786, Bell recalled his fellow six year olds: “Most of the boys with whom I had the opportunity of associating were both ignorant and wicked … Some of my associates were guilty of swearing, lying, Sabbath breaking, and other vices practiced by those whose morals were neglected.”6 Rather than spending his childhood with the “follies of youth,” Bell was more comfortable with books, which from the age of four included the New Testament.7 Such assiduousness continued into adulthood. He wrote that as a young man “I never allowed myself to be idle. The day was spent in labour – the evening at my books or in the garden.” Upon gaining work in London in 1802, he was shocked at the Sabbath breaking he found, later admonishing a work colleague for claims of conquest with half the young servant girls of the parish.8 Married that year to Mary Black, Bell would return to Scotland to train for the ministry, and once his ordination was secured in 1815 his search for work found the oversupply of ministers too great to compete against. His first hope was New Zealand, but Mary refused to go, and the cost was too great. He turned his attention to British North America, writing to Earl Bathurst, secretary of state for the colonies, to request that free passage be made available to ministers and teachers.9 He had clearly made up his mind to leave Scotland, so when an opportunity arose with a petition to the Church of Scotland from the Presbyterians of Perth in Upper Canada, Bell was convinced this was his calling. Such was his haste, incredible as it may seem,

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that he told his wife only when plans were well under way, and he did so by letter while absent preaching in Dunbar. After Mary laid bare her opposition in her written reply, William’s response, despite making peace, insisted he would go regardless of her decision to accompany him: “My Dear Mary, I love you so much, but I love God more,” he wrote, before reminding her that “in Heaven you will see all your friends that are worth seeing, and I trust that you will find that to be your native country.”10 Mary relented and on 5 April 1817 she, William, and their six children set sail for Canada. Essentially an account of Bell’s early emigrant experiences, Hints to Emigrants begins with the Atlantic crossing on the timber ship Rothiemurchus, its below-deck full of people – to be replaced by gunpowder for its eastern return. As with his memoirs, it is based largely on his daily journals and provides what he claims to be an unbiased and at times “not so flattering an account” of the country.11 It is apparent from the outset that he saw being in print as no reason to show restraint in his assessment of those he encountered during the six years that followed. As with the accounts from his early life, Bell presents himself as a somewhat cheerless character who never seemed to tire of finding fault in those he met. From the outset, during the voyage west, he demonstrates his contempt for other Scots on several occasions, including the ship’s cook, its captain, and even a fellow minister whom he met while the ship was temporarily docked at Stromness.12 That being said, not everyone Bell encountered failed to meet his high moral standards. One of his first engagements after arriving in Quebec was with a friend who introduced him to “several serious Christians, whose company and conversation were quite refreshing.”13 Bell was particularly inclined to praise other Presbyterian ministers also resident in Upper Canada. He described one as “active and indefatigable in the discharge of his duty,”14 characteristics that could easily have been applied to himself, and he sympathized with another whose plans to promote improvement were meeting with opposition. In what could be a reference to his own experiences, Bell commented, “[b]ut this was to be expected. No reformation can be made without giving offence to some.”15 Clearly most comfortable among those with whom he could most morally relate, Bell was quick to determine that such people in his new home were to be favoured. As he approached Perth, he spent the night with another

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old friend, after which he reflected, “[h]ow comfortable and refreshing is Christian society in a country where real Christians are not numerous.”16 That William Bell had been in the country less than one month yet felt able to determine the state of its religion tells us much about the man. Although occasionally he would take into account the strains accompanying multinational settlement, he was in most cases quick to judge, often making broad generalizations based on the actions of a few, fed by prejudices already formed.17 As he made his way to Perth, Bell established his dislike of both French Canadians and Americans. Unhappy at the treatment of his luggage, he described his French-speaking carters “as the most ruthless race of beings I have ever met with,” adding, “though, at first sight, the Canadians appear smart and active, they are thoughtless inconsiderate people.”18 Bell was even more taken aback by his first encounter with Americans. Having observed a group unloading cargo from a barge, he wrote, “The men were young and active; but their manners and language were both coarse and disgusting and they swore most profanely. I confess I felt both mortified and disappointed; for, like many of my countrymen, I had imbibed a strong prejudice in favour of the American character, which at this first interview with them received a severe shock.”19 He was particularly critical of how, during this escapade, the young men dramatized Native American culture: “A little red lead having been accidently spilt on the deck, one of them painted his face with it in a hideous fashion, and began to dance in like manner, and we had an imitation of the war-whoop and dance, unattended by any of their dangers; though, probably, the Indians themselves scarcely ever exhibited a more savage appearance than did the actors in this scene.”20 Bell’s initial impressions stuck, and even after being in Canada for nearly a decade, he found that “[t]he impudence of people from the States, boasting of their liberty, is truly astonishing and sometimes gets them into trouble.”21 Prompting this observation was an American drunk on 4 July who “swore shockingly, created a riot, abused everyone, even government” and was not quietened “until thrashed by a discharged soldier.”22 The scene that greeted Bell when he arrived in Perth has already been described, and over the next several years as he addressed the  settlement’s moral shortcomings, his habit of making racial

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generalizations about the non-Native peoples continued. Amplified by his position as the sole religious leader of this frontier community in its formative years, Bell was better placed than most immigrants to comment on his own kind and those who comprised his neighbours. He immersed himself in their personal lives and the instruction of their children, each brought periodically into focus as Bell debated with the military leadership over social discipline and educational provisions. Subjected repeatedly to his slurs were the Irish, whose very appearance was a source of complaint. During a court trial being held in Perth, Bell could not hide his contempt for one of the witnesses, who “appear[ed] in true Irish style, covered with rags, a black eye and a handkerchief round his head.”23 In terms of their moral conduct, the Irish often came up short, there being several incidents where Bell pointed out that the perpetrators were, by default, Irish. On one occasion, he refused to baptize a child whose Irish parents were not present and, as he understood, “not believing.” Having been rebuked, the man and woman who were to be the godparents took the child to the Catholic priest, who carried out the baptism for half a dollar. About a month later the father called on Bell, requesting the child be rebaptized, which the minister refused to do. The man became insolent and left to complain to the local magistrate, before ending up in the tavern for the remainder of the day. On his way home, he collapsed in the snow on a bitter night and froze to death. When Bell saw the body being dragged past his house on a sleigh, he commented, “O that drunkards take warning by such examples, and avoid the beastly vice that led to his ruin.” He concluded his entry that day with a blithe comment on the weather, “dreadfully cold.”24 Again withholding compassion, he then used the burial of this man, and of his child who passed the same night, to berate the mourners on the dangers of drink.25 That Bell felt the Irish were among the settlement’s lowest ranks when compared with the other major ethnic groups is apparent. He admired industriousness in others, as he did in himself, and it was a quality the Irish appeared to lack in sufficient quantity: “They seemed to feel less aversion to begging than either [the] Scotch or English.”26 Although the latter two groups were less the focus of his racialized generalizations, few were exempt from Bell’s equally bigoted views on religion. The British government’s apparent favouritism toward the Church of England was one source of complaint, although nothing

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compared to his intolerance toward the Methodists, whom he claimed were “always relating wonders dreaming dreams[,] seeing visions and working miracles.”27 Even the people of Bell’s predominantly Scottish Presbyterian congregation were far from exempt from his disdain, with the Highland members being particularly singled out. Bell, himself a Lowlander, was often quite contemptuous of his Highland countrymen. He lamented “the detestable highland custom of coming to church the Sabbath before the communion and staying away immediately after it,” which he regretted had been imported to a “provoking extent.”28 He also made reference to their strong desire to have Gaelic preaching, claiming that even when they got it, they seldom attended.29 At one point Bell reflected, “till I came  to this country I had no idea of the ignorance still existing in the Highlands of Scotland.”30 These remarks followed a woman’s request that her child be baptized even though she had no religious knowledge herself. Bell was ashamed to learn that in spite of her religious shortfalls, when she was still living in Scotland, a minister from Inverness had baptized her other children without question.31 It is sometimes argued that a special affinity between Scottish Highlanders and Native Americans was identified by contemporaries and can be conceptualized by historians. In The Emigrant’s Guide to  North America, first published in Gaelic, Robert MacDougall (MacDhùghaill) drew several parallels between the two peoples, likening the role of tribal chief to that of the old Highland clan chief, comparing the hardworking character of Native women to that of Highland women, and even perceiving similarities between their respective languages. The Natives, according to MacDougall, had “a slow, soft, pleasant speech, merely a branch of the Gaelic language.”32 Or again, the similarities that the Scottish adventurer Sir William Drummond Stewart saw between the two cultures sustained his fascination with Native life during his seven-year journey through the American West. When he returned to his Perthshire home in 1839, he brought with him an abundance of Native American artefacts such as weapons, tools, and clothing. He also brought back the remnants of a herd of bison, a bear, a hunting guide, and two Native American gamekeepers.33 The respective backwardness of Highland society and Native society has been measured against more literate civilizations, and the two societies have also been paralleled in terms of their social organization and economic activity. Margaret Szasz argues in Scottish

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Highlanders and Native Americans that “[a]lthough these indigenous peoples lived on opposite shores of the North Atlantic, they shared a commonality evinced through their oral cultures, based on myth; their societies, based on kinship; and their mutual dependence on the natural resources available for their survival.”34 In White People, Indians and Highlanders, Colin Calloway notes that “Highland Scots and American Indians met within larger contexts of cultural collision and colonial encounter that governed their interactions. Having been colonized and ‘civilized’ themselves, Highland Scots sometimes identified and sympathized with Indian people they saw going through the kind of experiences they or their parents had suffered.”35 That being said, Calloway also notes that the Scots, including Highlanders, exhibited all of the prejudices and engaged in all of the exploitative practices of other immigrants. Although Highland history is inseparable from Scotland’s history, Bell’s disdain toward his Highland brethren is in marked contrast to his passivity toward Native Americans. There is no evidence that Bell recognized any affinity between the two peoples, and even if he did, this would have been unlikely to reduce his readiness to pass judgment. Bell certainly made no apology for the impact that he and his fellow settlers had on the Indigenous way of life. That he was aware of the earlier presence of Natives in the Perth settlement, that he knew they were first upon the land, is evident from the appendix to Hints to Emigrants, which includes letters written by his son Andrew detailing his own experiences of life in Upper Canada. Andrew described signs of earlier habitation by Native Americans, among them the remains of fires, where the bones and horns of deer were often found several inches below the surface of the soil. A large, highly-ornamented pot made of burned clay, estimated to have been 200 to 300 years old, was discovered, as were stone axes and even human skeletons. One such skeleton, Andrew commented, was found in a reclining posture, with its back against a hillock and a rough-made stone tobacco pipe lying beside it.36 William Bell himself acknowledged the impact of white settlers when he wrote that the Mississippi Lakes, eight miles to the north of Perth, were still being used as hunting grounds by Indians “who are far from being pleased with the encroachments our settlers are making on their territories.”37 Like most European settlers, Bell probably saw the forced removal of Indigenous people from their land as a necessary step in the

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progress of humanity. In The Imaginary Indian, Daniel Francis suggests that a recurrent theme in the works of several nineteenthcentury writers who travelled in Canada was the inevitability of progress. However much they regretted the plight of the Native population, they were convinced that their own civilization must prevail, that the Indian must assimilate or die.38 The image of the Indians as “savage” was used to rationalize this process, and it is one that on the surface Bell appears to have accepted – although, counter to the steady path of this narrative, he manifestly did not want them to emulate the vices he associated with the “civilized” settler population transplanted to their lands. So even though Bell often referred to Indigenous peoples as “savages” or as “uncivilized,” he feared that the distinctions between civilization and savagery might be crossed. During the previously mentioned “war paint” episode involving Americans, Bell claimed that “the Indians themselves scarcely ever exhibited a more savage appearance than did the actors in this scene,”39 and on another occasion when referring to the “odd appearance” of a congregation he was visiting, he stated, “I could scarcely persuade myself that I was not in an assembly of Indians.”40 The moral laxity that Bell perceived among his fellow settlers does in fact create the impression that they, rather than the Indigenous peoples, were the savages. Native Americans for their part were largely exempt from the minister’s jeremiads. Rather than embellishing any comparison of Native Americans with the people and society he knew, and almost universally castigated, Bell’s initial references to encounters with Natives are curiosity-driven. En route to Perth, shortly after the Atlantic crossing, his party came across some Natives who were fishing in a river from their canoes; they were, Bell commented, “a great novelty, being the first we had seen.”41 A more detailed ethnographic but not judgmental account was given of an encounter that took place not long after he settled in Perth when he spotted two Native American families in three canoes going down the Tay River. Having pitched their tent in the village, they brought out for sale deer, muskrats, and various kinds of fowl. After complaining about the price they were charging for the deer (a dollar for a quarter), Bell briefly described the Natives and their possessions. Their canoes were all of birch bark, about eighteen feet long, and three feet wide at the middle. They had, in each canoe, a fowling piece and several spring traps for taking game; and each man had a tomahawk. They all had black hair, brown complexions,

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and well-formed bodies. All of them, even the children, had silver ornaments in their ears. Most likely, his encounters were with either the Algonquins or the Mississauga, both of whom are known to have inhabited the area, although he did travel extensively and may have come across other bands. On one trip to Toronto, Bell and his son Andrew visited the Methodist Credit River settlement established in 1826, which was populated mostly by Mississauga. For Bell, this turned out to be a somewhat frustrating experience, as both the missionary and the interpreter were away at a Methodists’ conference in Hamilton. Bell estimated the reserve to be six miles long and two miles broad, with the Credit River running through the middle. “Many of the Indians we saw [were] in the woods, and around the village, shooting pigeons,” he wrote. “Some were on the banks of the river, spearing fish … The land is good, but the cultivation is confined to small bounds around the village. We visited the chapel, school house, and some of their dwellings, which we found clean and neat, but neither fields nor gardens showed many signs of industry.”42 That Bell visited this reserve again demonstrates his interest in and suggests some concern with the inhabitants’ general progress, for he focused on the physical manifestations of civil society and family formation: the church, the school house, and the fixed-dwelling house. On several occasions, he showed compassion toward the Natives he came across. When he and his wife visited a sick “squaw” on the riverside, for example, they brought clothing for her and her children.43 He was clearly moved by the state of another sick Native woman near the village: Dreadful are the suffering of the savages sometimes when they are left by travelling parties sick in the woods. On the morning of Sabbath the first of February in the coldest weather I ever experienced in Canada a young man came and informed me that there was a female Indian lying sick under a tree near the river side and that she would probably perish if she was not soon removed to some shelter. She belonged to a party of hunters which had passed along a few days before but having fallen sick she was left with a child at her breast about a year old – a brother 10, a sister 6, and an old woman supposed to be an aunt as nurse to the whole. There they had remained for some days under a large hemlock tree in a small wigwam composed of

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hemlock branches. I was shocked at the thought of human beings being exposed to such distress for the cold was at this time so severe that we found it difficult to keep our noses and ears from freezing in passing from one house to another.44 Bell saw to it that the woman was looked after, arranging for a widow at the local tavern to take care of her until she recovered. As well as revealing Bell’s hitherto unseen humanitarian side, what is interesting is that although the woman might certainly have died, he did not pass judgment on the decision to leave her. Bell could have chosen to depict this episode as the cruel act of an uncivilized people, so it is possible that his restraint reflected his understanding of the realities that their way of life presented. The abandonment of the old and infirm was sometimes the necessary action of a travelling band, which could not afford to jeopardize the safety of the larger group because of the weakness of a few. It was a necessary response to a  harsh environment.45 Colin Calloway argues that “[t]hose with experience in Indian societies could see that despite what they regarded as brutal, treacherous, immoral, and disgusting behaviour on the part of the natives, man’s state depended on his situation and environment rather than the colour of his skin.”46 Bell more than most was familiar with this environment. In Hints to Emigrants he claimed to have travelled upward of 4,000 miles since his arrival in 1817, stating that “no one who has never been in a new country, can form a just idea of travelling, where one has to climb over rocks, and fallen timber, wade through swamps, and ford rivers in every journey he makes.”47 Added to the challenges of terrain were the extremes of weather, from the blistering heat of summer, with the accompanying mosquitoes, to the freezing temperatures and snowstorms of winter. Duty bound to his parishioners both near and far, Bell described many journeys in which he was subjected to appalling conditions. He recalled one occasion in considerable detail: I walked along a creek, about two miles; but the ice at one place being bad, I broke through, and got wet to the knees. In less than half a minute my clothes were as hard as boards, the frost being intense. It is in a case of this kind that freezing is most to be dreaded … Knowing that I was now in great danger, I travelled with the utmost expedition; but I had not proceeded half a mile farther when I again broke through at a spring. The sun was just

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setting, and I was still three miles from home. I turned from the creek, and struck into the wood. My trousers, stockings, and shoes were now as hard as stone, which greatly retarded my progress. My situation at this time was somewhat hazardous, my body being in a state of perspiration, and my extremities freezing.48 From here, Bell became disorientated and lost his way. After about an hour of strenuous exertions, as his strength was beginning to fail and he was about to “resign myself to my fate,” he saw a thinning in  the woods where he found a hut and tracks he could follow to safety.49 With such firsthand experiences, Bell did not have to imagine the  hardships faced by Indigenous people on a day-to-day basis. Coupled with his awareness of the added difficulties imposed by encroachments on their hunting and fishing territories, these experiences may have made him sympathetic to their situation. Yet given that he had been passing judgment on others since the early stages of his youth, this does not seem an entirely satisfactory explanation. Although Bell was certainly intrigued by and could show compassion toward Native peoples, an incident that occurred on his way home one evening when he came across a company of Natives, whom his horse refused to go past, gives rise to another possibility. Bell wrote, “The natives of the wood on seeing the dilemma in which I was placed, with a politeness which would have done honour to more civilized people, went off the road till I had passed.”50 This uncharacteristically laudatory assertion that their behaviour was admirable for an uncivilized people suggests that Bell held them to a different standard than his fellow settlers. More than just in keeping with the language of the time, his use of the term “savage” could have reflected his genuine belief (which was shared by others) that those with dissimilar physical features and unrecognizable social rituals were not just different from, but also inferior to, Caucasians.51 Regarding his horse Kate’s behaviour upon coming across Native peoples, Bell readily accepted that this was due to her awareness of a fundamental imbalance: “Some horses discover great alarm at the sight and even the smell of Indians. One day when I was driving in to Lanark I met some of these aborigines at which my mare took fright, ran off the road and nearly dashed the sleigh to pieces. Another day, when she was standing at the gate with the bridle on the post some Indians passed behind her at the distance of 100 yards.

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She smelt them and began to snort so that she would not be pacified and exhibit[ed] signs of terror till they were past.”52 This experience of fear, understood to have been occassioned by a racial distinction registered by a favoured animal, added weight to Bell’s reluctance to ascribe common ground to the Scots and Native Americans. There is no doubt Bell would have agreed with Howison that Indians had been corrupted and degraded by their encounters with European settlers. But whereas Howison thought Indians were open to “improvement,” Bell believed they would always be stuck in their savagery. From this viewpoint, he assumed that the criteria by which he judged fellow settlers were not applicable to Natives. One day when passing a Native hut where the inhabitants were reclining at their ease, he observed: “By going round the village, and calling at a few houses, they obtain what will supply the wants of nature, and this is all they require. Few of them take thought for the morrow. They let the morrow take thought for itself. If they have plenty they enjoy it – if they have not, they endure it patiently.”53 Compare this praise for the Natives’ success at supplying their needs by going from house to house with his criticism of the Irish for begging. Or again, although he rarely lost an opportunity to berate settlers for drunkenness, he appeared to assume that this was the normal condition of Natives. When Bell learned that the sick Native woman who had been recovering in a tavern was expelled for drunkenness and fighting, he made no comment at all. The silence is revealing of the racial dimension of his morality, which was hermitic in its construction. In many ways, Bell’s accounts of his encounters with Native Americans are uncharacteristic of the man. Unlike the negative opinions he quickly formed of French Canadians and Americans and in contrast to the racial and bigoted views he held of Highland Scots and other ethnic and religious groups, his descriptions of Indigenous people were much more restrained. Although this may have reflected his awareness and appreciation of the harsh environment in which they had to survive, the more likely explanation for his restraint, in light of his sullen personality, is that he did not see them as equals – or even comparable – and thus did not hold them to the same or even corresponding moral standards. Natives are largely absent from his voluminous jottings because they did not register in his allconsuming concern with cultivating the moral wilderness around him. Contrary to the impression gained from a first reading of Bell’s

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accounts, his attitude toward Indigenous peoples was in fact even more disdainful than his attitude toward those Highland Scots and others who were subjected to his relentlessly intolerant, racist, and bigoted tirades.

Not e s 1 The authors’ thanks go to Richard Reid and Doug Richmond for sparking their fascination with Bell. 2 Caledonian Mercury, 6 March 1817. 3 Bell, Hints to Emigrants, letter 14. 4 William Bell Fonds 2402, Queen’s University Archives (hereafter Bell, Memoirs). His standard biography remains Skelton, Man Austere; see also Bridgman, “Bell, William.” 5 Skelton, Man Austere, 229–32, 235, 332. 6 Richmond, “‘There Is a Moral Wilderness,’” 23. 7 Ibid., 20–2. 8 Ibid., 28–9. 9 Ibid., 37–8. 10 Bell, Memoirs, vol. 1, 165. 11 Bell, Hints to Emigrants, letter 20. 12 Ibid., letters 2 and 3; Evans, “William Bell,” 131. 13 Bell, Hints to Emigrants, letter 7. 14 Ibid., letter 13. 15 Ibid. 16 Ibid., letter 8. 17 Reid, “Reverend William Bell,” 110. 18 Bell, Hints to Emigrants, letter 7. 19 Ibid., letter 17. 20 Ibid. 21 Bell, Memoirs, vol. 4, 181. 22 Ibid. 23 Ibid., vol. 2, 174. 24 Ibid., vol. 2, 61–2. 25 Ibid., vol. 2, 61. 26 Ibid., vol. 5, 1, emphasis in original. 27 Ibid., vol. 3, 30. 28 Ibid., vol. 6, 24.

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Ibid., vol. 6, 165. Ibid., vol. 5, 55. Ibid. MacDougall, Emigrant’s Guide, 39. Strong, “American Indians,” 129. Szasz, Scottish Highlanders, 6. Calloway, White People, 17. Bell, Hints to Emigrants, appendix letter 1. Ibid., letter 23. Francis, Imaginary Indian, 58–60. Bell, Hints to Emigrants, letter 17. Ibid. Ibid., letter 6. Bell, Memoirs, vol. 6, 148. Ibid., vol. 3, 93. Ibid., vol. 3, 87. Calloway, Crown and Calumet, 93. Ibid., 112. Bell, Hints to Emigrants, letter 20. Ibid., letter 18. Ibid. Bell, Memoirs, vol. 4, 118. Miller, Skyscrapers Hide the Heavens, 97. Bell, Memoirs, vol. 3, 67. Ibid., vol. 5, 83.

B i b l i ogr ap h y Bell, William. Hints to Emigrants in a Series of Letters from Upper Canada. Edinburgh: Waugh and Innes, 1824. Bridgman, H.J. “Bell, William.” In Dictionary of Canadian Biography Online, vol. 8, 1851–1860. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985. http://www.biographi.ca/009004-119.01-e.php?&id_nbr=3779 (accessed 11 October 2012). Calloway, Colin. Crown and Calumet: British-Indian Relations, 1783– 1815. Norman and London: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987. – White People, Indians and Highlanders: Tribal Peoples and Colonial Encounters in Scotland and America. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.

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Evans, A. Margaret. “William Bell.” In W. Stanford Reid, ed., Called to Witness: Profiles of Canadian Presbyterians, vol. 1, 128–43. N.p.: Presbyterian Publications, 1975. Francis, Daniel. The Imaginary Indian: The Image of the Indian in Canadian Culture. 1992. Reprint, Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp, 2004. Howison, John. Sketches of Upper Canada, domestic, local, and characteristic to which are added practical details for the information of emigrants of every class, and some recollections of the United States of America. Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1821. MacDougall, Robert. The Emigrant’s Guide to North America. 1841. Reprint, ed. Elizabeth Thompson, Toronto: Natural Heritage Books, 1998. Miller, J.R. Skyscrapers Hide the Heavens: A History of Indian-White Relations in Canada. 1989. Reprint, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991. Moodie, Susanna. Roughing It in the Bush. London: R. Bentley, 1852. Reid, R. “The Reverend William Bell: One Emigrant’s Adjustment to Upper Canada.” Scottish Tradition 10 (1980): 105–21. Richmond, R. Douglas. “‘There Is a Moral Wilderness Requiring Cultivation’: Religious and Social Regulation in Perth, Upper Canada, 1817– 1829.” M A thesis, University of Guelph, 2007. Skelton, Isobel. A Man Austere: William Bell, Parson and Pioneer. Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1947. Strong, Lisa. “American Indians and Scottish Identity in Sir William Drummond Stewart’s Collection.” Winterthur Portfolio 35, no. 2 (2000): 127–55. Szasz, Margaret. Scottish Highlanders and Native Americans: Indigenous Education in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2007.

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10 “Going to the Land of the Yellow Men”: The Representation of Indigenous Americans in Scottish Gaelic Literature Michael Newton

The perception that the anglophones of England and Lowland Scotland had subjected Scottish Gaeldom to centuries of cultural, linguistic, geographical, and political marginalization was well established in Gaelic consciousness by the time that emigration to North America began in the eighteenth century.1 John MacInnes has summarized the Gaelic oral tradition’s long view of Lowland-Highland relations: “from the Gaelic point of view, we the Gaels are the disinherited, the dispossessed.”2 Contemporary Gaelic sources imply that Highland society was exposed to hostile, alien forces after the defeat of the Battle of Culloden (1746), and into the early nineteenth century at least some Gaelic commentators saw emigration as the culmination of a series of injustices.3 Historians have pointed out, on the other hand, that many Highland emigrants who joined the flow of people, material culture, ideologies, and power structures that established themselves in North American colonies enjoyed an upgraded status by virtue of their membership in the British Empire and the emerging ideology of  “whiteness.”4 Indeed, some scholars have claimed that despite sharing very similar patterns of dispossession and marginalization, Highland emigrants did not or were not able to extend their empathy to Indigenous Americans.5 Silke Stroh has gone so far as to assert, “The impression that many Gaelic colonizers did not seem to feel any scruples about displacing indigenous peoples is also borne

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out by their literature … Gaelic discourses often reflected an eagerness to embrace the opportunity to rise from the position of intraBritish colonized to the status of overseas colonizer – a transition open to them because they were, after all, white Europeans … Significantly, most Scottish declarations of transperipheral solidarity with overseas postcolonial nations and cultures date from the time after the British Empire had been lost.”6 Although there are Gaelic texts that demonstrate Highlanders were quite capable of absorbing and regurgitating ideologies of race and empire,7 these form only part of the corpus documenting Gaelic perceptions of and relations with First Nations. In fact, expressions of compassion and solidarity are visible by the 1820s, well before the decline of the British Empire, alongside antipathetic comments. The diverse conditions and factors that surround Gaelic imaginings of and encounters with Indigenous Americans cannot be generalized easily; we must instead unpack each case individually. In this chapter I analyze a selection of Gaelic texts representing a range of perceptions and depictions of First Nations, presented in roughly chronological order from participation in the British regiments fighting in the Seven Years’ War (1756–63), through the early period of migration and settlement, and up to the settlement of the Prairies (1880s). A close reading of these sources demonstrates that texts mentioning Indigenous Americans were not always intended to be literal and sincere representations of real persons: just as often, these literary representations had more to do with the rhetorical aims of the author than with an attempt to provide realistic portrayals.

S e v e n Y e a rs ’ War Scottish Highlanders came to North America in large numbers only after they were enlisted in British regiments during the Seven Years’ War. Several surviving song-poems describe the war and the views of soldiers involved in them. A new ethnonym in Gaelic, Coillteach (pl.  Coilltich), was coined for Indigenous Americans in this period (besides the common transliteration Innseanach). It appears to be a translation of English “savage” – from Old French sauvage (wild), from Latin silvaticus (of the woods) – and thus was likely created by a literate, bilingual Gael, probably a minister or regimental chaplain. The earliest surviving example of its use comes from a poem composed by the Reverend James MacLagan upon the Black Watch’s

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initial departure for North America in 1756. MacLagan himself did not go to North America until the War of Independence, when he became regimental chaplain. His descriptions of Indigenous Americans may thus rely on his imagination and written sources in English. A relevant excerpt reads, Leoghnaibh garga de’n fhuil Albannaich Leanaibh ri’r n-airm ’s ri’r n-éideadh; Faighibh targaid eutrom bhall-bhuidh’ Ghabhas dearg’ thuagh Choillteach; ’S cuilbheir earr-bhuidh’ n làimh gach sealgair, Seòid a’ marbhadh chaol-damh: O ’s mithich dh’Albannaich dol a shealg Air Frangaich chealgach ’s Coilltich.

Fierce lions of Scottish descent Be loyal to your arms and to your uniform; Get your nimble, brightly decorated shields That will absorb the blows of the axes of Forest-folk; A bright-ended musket in every huntsman’s hand, Gallant youths killing slim stags: O, it is time for the Scots to go hunting After treacherous Frenchmen and Forest-folk.8

The song could be classified as a brosnachadh (war incitement) in Gaelic literature: its function is to depict the theatre of war they are about to enter, to explain the nature of the threat posed by enemies, and to depict them as a focus for their aggression. One could hardly expect a sympathetic portrayal of First Nations in this context, but it says little of substance about them specifically.9 Furthermore, Gaels were still using the motif of the tree in their panegyric literature about themselves at the time (and even down to the present day). Associating First Nations with forests does not, therefore, constitute some kind of strategy for essentialist or racialist distancing. The ethnonym Coillteach reappears in a song celebrating the return of Highland soldiers at the conclusion of the war. Although the song is anonymous, the internal evidence of the text suggests that the author did not actually participate in combat but remained resident in the Highlands. Again, then, this seems to be an imaginative representation of what he had heard about the conflict, magnifying the threat of the enemy to make victory seem all the more impressive:

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Bha Frangaich is Coilltich air gach taobh is mu’r coinneimh Mar dhuilleagan foghair ’gam froiseadh le gaoith …

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The French and Forest-folk were in front of you and on all sides Like autumn leaves strewn by the wind …10

Highlanders believed that they conspicuously demonstrated their mettle and their loyalty to the Crown by their efforts in the Seven Years’ War, not least on the Plains of Abraham. These contributions are strongly emphasized in Gaelic verse commemorating the conflict, indicating that the victory in Quebec convinced many “to  embrace the triumphalist discourse of imperial hegemony.”11 Although Indigenous Americans were also players in these conflicts, they do not feature prominently in (surviving) Gaelic verse because they were secondary to the authors’ aims of demonstrating loyalty to Britain and distancing themselves from their Jacobite past and previous associations with the French. Warfare against particular First Nations did not produce alienation from Indigenous Americans in general (as demonstrated, for example, by cooperation during the American Revolutionary War). One of the most striking Gaelic statements of solidarity is made in a well-known lullaby commonly referred to by its first line, “Dèan Cadalan Sàmhach” (Sleep Quietly). I have argued previously that it  was composed in a North American colony by a woman from Argyllshire, possibly as early as the Seven Years’ War.12 The earliest variant of this song was collected by the Reverend Donald MacNicol no later than 1802. In one stanza, the author implies, with a note of regret, that Highland soldiers were used to combat Indigenous Americans who opposed the Crown’s forces: Gum bheil sibh ’nur n-Innseanaich cinnteach gu leòr A-mach ’s a’ choille ùdlaidh, gun sùgradh, gun cheòl ’S nan sgrìobhadh iad fìrinn a-sìos mar bu chòir Cha tigeadh na Gàidheil gu bràth air an tòir.

You are Indians sure enough Out in the dark forests, without mirth or music If they would only write down what is true, as they ought to The Gaels would never have to go chasing after them.13

By the 1860s, at least one oral variant was circulating around Kintail in which the Gaels identified with the plight of First Nations,

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essentially switching roles with them in the verse: the first line of the  excerpt above became “Tha sinn ’nar n-Innseanaich cinnteach gu leòr” (We are Indians sure enough). Since the aforementioned publications appeared, Domhnall Uilleam Stiùbhairt of Edinburgh University has provided me with a transcript from the Benjamin Urquhurt manuscripts demonstrating that this imaginative leap of empathy had already happened by 1820.14

O n t h e B oat to Ameri ca Ailean mac Alasdair Ruaidh Domhnallach, of the Sliochd an Taighe MacDonalds of Keppoch, was one of the most important Gaelic tradition-bearers and poets to settle in Nova Scotia. He emigrated from Lochaber in 1816 at the age of twenty-two, and the song that he composed on board the emigrant vessel records his thoughts and expectations about the journey and destination.15 The following is the text up to the point where he describes in rather unflattering terms the people of colour he expects to inhabit America: Mi an toiseach na luinge ’S neo-shocrach mo shuidhe ’S mi coimhead nan sruth tha tighinn oirnn; Chì mi thallad fo m’ shùilean A’ mhuc-mhara ’s i brùchdail Sruithean geala ’gan spùtadh bho sròin. Mi air barr nan tonn fiadhaich Falbh le luing air a fiaradh ’S caithream gaoithe bho’n iar ’s i ’na sròin. I ri acain ’s ri dìosgail Sreap a-suas ris gach fiadh-bheann B’fhearr nach fhaca mi riamh i fo seòl. Gura truagh leam a càradh Dol a-suas ris na màmaibh

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I am in the prow of the boat My position is unsettled As I watch the waters coming over us; I see over yonder, before my eyes The whale as it erupts White streams bursting from its nose. I am on the crest of the wild waves Travelling on a rambling ship With bursts of wind from the west in her prow. She [the boat] is sighing and creaking Climbing up each wild [sea] mountain I wish I had never seen her sailing. Sad to me is her situation Going up the summits

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“Going to the Land of the Yellow Men”

Cur nan cuartagan gàbhaidh fo tòin. Dol do thìr nam fear buidhe ’S nan nìgearan dubha ’S ann leam fhéin nach bu shùgach an glòir.

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Sending beneath her each dangerous eddy. Going to the land of the “yellow” men And of the black niggers Their speech is not pleasant to me.16

This is not a flattering portrayal of Indigenous Americans or AfroCanadians but is best understood in relation to ethnic relations in Scotland and the rhetoric of Gaelic clan panegyric. We need, in particular, to refer to the seventeenth-century text on which this song was modelled, “Cha taobh mi na srathan,” by Domhnall Donn Bhoth-Fhionntainn.17 As in other song traditions, Gaelic authors frequently recycle song airs, metres, and choruses; earlier songs form an implicit background to the newer song, whose meaning is enhanced by intertextual allusions that echo or contrast the statements or images of previous texts. The song “Cha taobh mi na srathan” begins very similarly, with the poet seated but unsettled; he is looking down at the stream of a glen and names several mountains he can see. The reason for Domhnall Donn’s anxious state is soon revealed: he is an outlaw who has been raiding cattle, especially in the Lowlands. He seeks help from a love interest but is afraid she may turn against him, as have many of the people in his home district.18 This song by Ailean the Ridge is the only song of emigration that I know of composed in iorram, a metre primarily used for clan panegyric and the celebration of heroic exploit. Reading the emigration song against the earlier song on which it was modelled allows us to see more clearly how Ailean is valorizing the voyage to America. Like his predecessor Domhnall Donn, Ailean is seated (at the prow of a boat) but unsettled, facing the waters of a perilous journey (the ocean); instead of mountains, he must cross the sea waves; instead of the cattle of the earlier poem, he and the other passengers are in awe of the enormous whales; like the older outlaw, Ailean and his family are fleeing from their homes, hoping to find refuge in a new land.19 Why does Ailean characterize North America by the people who are, from his point of view, its most exotic inhabitants? Perhaps this reflects his anxiety in encountering the people most alien to him and about whom he must have heard tales and rumours. I surmise that these rhetorical figures play an oppositional role in his heroic

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narrative that parallels the role of the Lowlander in Domhnall Donn’s song. Warriors prove their prowess by defending their interests and conquering enemies. An essentialized opposition between Gael and non-Gael (Gall) is an old one in Highland tradition, Lowlanders commonly being cast in the role of the Other by the sixteenth century.20 This precedent informed Gaelic perceptions of other non-Gaels in North America, especially in Gaelic literature; the term Gall is used for all manner of “foreigners” in the immigrant context.21 In fact, the deprecatory phrase “glòir nan Gall” (speech of the non-Gael) echoed in this song is used in a similarly derisive tone in reference to Lowlanders in a popular song from late-sixteenthcentury Lochaber.22 Ailean seems to characterize alien peoples in North America by their skin colours. The colour buidhe is probably used here to describe Indigenous Americans. The only other example of which I am aware is a song-poem from the late eighteenth century in praise of the Black Watch that depicts among their enemies in North America “fir bhuidhe le’n tuaghaibh” (yellow-men with their axes).23 The translation of Gaelic colour terminology into English is problematic not only because Gaelic divides the colour spectrum differently from English but also because of the semantic associations of colour terms. The term buidhe is used for a range of colours from light yellow to grey, but it also has associations with luck and thankfulness; the descriptor in this case may be a pun or may draw on both implications. This example illustrates some of the pitfalls of using English translations without considering Gaelic semantics. This song demonstrates a common cultural and psychological desire to turn the shame of dispossession into a narrative of selfdetermination and triumph. As is visible in other sources, Gaels considered Lowlanders to be inferior to themselves, and their domination by them in the post-Culloden period was a cause of humiliation. Rather than allowing this exile to demoralize him, Ailean frames migration in heroic terms by using the model offered by Domhnall Donn. The rhetorical purpose of the appearance of foreign peoples here merely seems to be to depict the potential dangers to the migrants in the alien land to which they are headed and thus to make their bravery and achievement all the greater. It is surely significant that Ailean projects the negative characteristics of the Gall upon people of colour rather than traditional rivals such as Lowlanders and Englishmen. This song was composed on

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the boat and does not reflect any actual experience in Nova Scotia. It is indicative, however, of the racial divisions that emerged in North America and foretokens the efforts of numerous immigrant groups later in the nineteenth century to improve their social status and access to privilege by distancing themselves from people of colour and affirming their inclusion in the white, “Anglo-Saxon” status quo.

S e t t l e m e n t a n d In t e rc ommuni ty Relati ons I have recently examined Scottish Gaelic oral narratives about first encounters in Nova Scotia (c. 1770s–c. 1820s), concluding that these tales reveal the Gael’s desire to explain their settlement of territories previously inhabited by First Nations in such a way as to minimize cognitive dissonance over the deprivation of Indigenous Americans.24 Although these tales often acknowledge conflict, they represent the two peoples encountering each other on equal terms and do not reflect the ideology of racialism. They also subtly acknowledge common experiences of subjugation and the Gaels’ sense of guilt about occupying Native territory.25 The earliest of the tales in my previous analysis dates from 1926, but I have since located other, earlier variants recorded between 1908 and the 1920s. This material also demonstrates that not all Gaels revelled in the declined fortune of their Indigenous neighbours, as implied by statements such as Stoh’s above; at least some were conscious of and regretful about their part in this marginalization. One of few ethnographic descriptions of Indigenous Americans (in the sense that they have no obvious agenda beyond depicting a person or cultural practice) that I have found is in the form of a song-poem. Only two stanzas survive, transcribed from traditionbearer Alasdair MacGilleBhàin of Port Hawksbury, who did not expect anyone else to remember it. The author was a MacLeòid of Margaree Harbour who had been dead forty years. It was believed to have been composed approximately fifty or sixty years before 1920 (i.e., between 1860 and 1870). An àm dìreadh na bruthaich Cha bhi uireasbhuidh airm air; Ged nach fhaiceadh tu ’aodann

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When it was time to climb the bank He was not lacking in weapons; Although you wouldn’t see his face

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’S math a dh’fhaodadh tu aithneachadh: Còta fada mu chaol-druim ’S e sgaoilte ’s an earball; ’S briogais chumhang mu’n chruachan Air a fuaigheal mu’n chalpa Mo rùn geal òg. Nuair a thigeadh an oidhche A rìgh! b’ oillteill gàirich! Le’m bàtaichean béilleig Agus blaze air barr handspike; Le’n gràpaichean iarainn Ag iarraidh na làthaich ’S iad ag éigheach ri chéile “Mada-wé magwa gàdach!” Mo rùn geal òg.

You could recognize him easily enough: A long coat around his waist Split at the back; Tight trousers around the hips Well sewn around his calves, My fair young love. When the night would come, God! What frightening shouts! With their bark canoes And a blaze at the end of a handspike; With their iron hooks Searching through the sediment As they yelled to each other “Mada-wé magwa gàdach!” My fair young love.26

Alasdair MacGilleBhàin understood the Mi’kmaw phrase at the end to mean that eels were scarce. Intertextual allusion to the Gaelic corpus is important in analyzing this text. It is based on the lament “Mo Rùn Geal Òg,” composed by Christina Ferguson for her husband, a Jacobite soldier killed at Culloden.27 As is common in laments, the original song amplifies the pathos by enumerating the subject’s many virtues and merits, praising his fair form and close-fitting clothing, and depicts him as a hunter and fisher (among other roles). The surviving two stanzas of this Cape Breton song preserve the choral refrain of the original song, “Mo rùn geal òg” (My fair young love), and reflect the style of traditional Gaelic panegyric. Like the Jacobite song, the subject is depicted heroically as a hunter whose shapely form is easily recognized, especially by the cut of his clothing. The way that the Mi’kmaw are depicted fishing for eels, with a torch and spike, bears an obvious similarity to traditional spearfishing practices in the Highlands (mainly aimed at salmon and eels).28 The insertion of a phrase in Mi’kmaw indicates a familiarity with the Native language. Without the rest of the song, it is difficult to offer a definitive interpretation, but the author appears to depict his Indigenous American subject in a favourable light, namely by casting him in

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the traditional mould of a Highland warrior. Given that the song is modelled on a lament for a Jacobite soldier killed at Culloden, it may suggest concern for an endangered people or way of life. This implied affinity suggests empathy and the opposite of racial distancing.

E m ig r at io n to t he Prai ri es The large-scale settlement of the Canadian Prairies by European immigrants was made possible by the genocidal wars perpetrated on First Nations in the 1860s and 1870s on the U S side of the border and by the defeats of the Red River Rebellion of 1869–70 and of the North-West Rebellion of 1885 on the Canadian side. These events demolished the already desperate Native population. In Scotland, on the other hand, the Land Agitation of the 1880s, in which crofters asserted themselves politically in a concerted manner for the first time, fuelled increased resistance to emigration schemes. Indigenous Americans are mentioned in a few Gaelic song-poems about migration to and settlement in Manitoba. The most negative of these was composed by Eachann N(iall?) MacGilleathain and appeared in 1897 in Mac-Talla,29 an all-Gaelic newspaper that was printed in Cape Breton with subscribers all across North America and Scotland. The author’s origin and location, and the year when the song was composed, are not stated, but from its content it is likely to have been composed in the 1880s. The title of the piece is “Bean Bhochd am Manitòba” (A Poor Woman in Manitoba); the poet assumes a female persona, which may serve to heighten the pathos and sense of vulnerability. Without further information, it is not possible to say whether the poet is imagining what it would be like to be a poor woman forced to emigrate to Manitoba or whether he is recounting the experience of an actual woman he knows or has been told about. The first four stanzas begin a relentless list of complaints that are followed through in the next seven (although the final verse praises the company of a fellow Gael): Is mise th’ air mo leònadh An dùthaich Mhanitòba ’Gam chiùrradh leis an lòinidh Is deud mo bheòil air fuasgladh.

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I have been pained In the land of Manitoba Being inflicted with arthritis As the teeth of my mouth fall out.

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Th’ am fuachd cho mór ’s an dùthaich seo ’S nach d’fhàg e neart no lùths annam Oir ged tha ’n fhiarag dùbailte Gun d’ reòthadh cùl mo chluasan. Tha madaidh-allaidh gharga Mar ghainneamh tràigh na fairge A’ donnalaich ’s an an-moch ’Cur farbhas oirnn is uamhas. Tha Innseanaich ro-iargalt’ Gach oidhch’ is là cur fiamh oirnn Cho dubh ri sùith th’ am bian ac’ ’S cha chuir an siabann snuadh air.

The cold is so great in this land That is has left no strength or energy in me For even if my head-wrapping is doubled The backs of my ears are frozen off. The fierce wolves Are as numerous as the grains of a sandy beach Howling in the evening Causing us terror and loathing. There are wild Indians Who make us afraid, day and night, As black as soot is their hide And soap will not improve their appearance.

This seems to be a callous portrayal of the Natives but not one that was necessarily meant to be realistic. The song is a warning to people contemplating settlement in the Prairies that they were not as perfect as portrayed in the idyllic propaganda used by emigration agents; it resembles the grievances voiced in other contemporary Gaelic texts.30 The rhetorical purpose of this image of Indigenous Americans is to augment the hazards and risks to be met by Europeans in Manitoba. It is impossible to say whether this song was composed from personal experience in Canada or from the imagination of someone in Scotland rallying fellow crofters just as anti-emigration movements were gathering steam, but it would be unwise to use it to generalize Gaelic perceptions of First Nations. Iain MacGilleathain, a native of Baile Phuill on the Island of Tiree, emigrated to Manitoba in 1877 along with all of his brothers save one.31 His song “Òran Mhanitòba” was composed within two years of his arrival. Although the beginning of the song expresses nostalgia for the old homeland and anxiety about current conditions, the last three stanzas are more optimistic:

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Am fearann a th’againn, ’s ann ainneamh tha ’shamhl’: Gun mhaide, gun chlach a bhacas an crann; Cho fad ’s a bhios sinne mar Thirisdich ann ’Se “Cnoc MhicGilleathain” bhios aige mar ainm. Chan fhaic thu ach Innseanaich, mìltean gu leòr, Cneapan mar sgathan ’nam fàinn’ air am meòir; A’ phlaid’ air a filleadh mu shlinnean ’na cleòc ’S a’ bhriogais tha fodha gun ghobhal gun tòn. Ged tha sinn an-dràsd’ fad o’r càirdean gu léir Ma bhios iad an làthair, thig càch le’n toil fhéin ’S nuair gheibh sinn an t-àite gu barr is gu feum Cha bhi cuimhn’ air na làithean a dh’fhàg sinn ’nar déidh.

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The land that we have hardly has any equal: Lacking sticks or stones that can impede the plough; As long as we are living here as Tiree-folk It will be known as “MacLean Hill.” All you see are Indians, thousands of them, Wearing mirror-like beads as rings on their fingers; Wearing a pleated plaid over their shoulders as a cloak And trousers without a seat in them. Although we are far away from all of our relations If they survive, the rest will come of their own volition When we improve the place to profitability We won’t remember the days we left behind.32

The poet tells us in the first stanza of this excerpt that his new home will be given a Gaelic name to commemorate the provenance of the Highlanders who settled there and that the use of this place name will be directly related to the survival of their identity as Tiree people. The existence of this name, then, is the symbol of both the existence of the community and its members’ memory of their origins. The poet tells us in his final stanza that he expects he will eventually succeed on his newfound land to the point where he will thrive economically and where a chain of migration will bring all of his kinsfolk to him. With this prosperity, they will forget the hardship they had to endure in the past; indeed, a selective editing of poverty out of communal memory has been noted elsewhere in Gaelic Scotland and North America.33

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The position of the stanza depicting Indigenous Americans, sandwiched in between the two stanzas about remembering and forgetting, seems significant to me: it is noticeably similar to earlier descriptions of Highlanders and their clothing and decorative habits. This was an era when Gaelic norms, values, and self-image were in rapid transition, and Gaels often saw a resemblance between their own recent past and the present conditions of First Nations.34 This song, then, seems to mark a moment of self-consciousness in which Gaels are fluctuating between remembering and expunging the past; the desperate plight of the Indigenous Americans around them could potentially remind them of the painful memories of their own poverty and oppression in Scotland. Gaels were deciding whether they would remember this past, and thus keep open a potential imaginative bridge to First Nations, or forget the shame of this past, which would make assimilation into the anglophone mainstream easier but empathy with other subalterns more difficult. C o nc l usi o n s The marginalization of Gaelic culture in Scotland in the medieval period and the more recent cultural subjugation subsequent to the defeat at Culloden were formative experiences that remained key points of reference in Highland cultural memory during the era of emigration. Many scholars have acknowledged the role of cultural imagination in the ways that history is constructed,35 but to date inadequate attention has been paid to Gaelic sources, to the linguistic and literary precedents that have conditioned the Gaelic worldview and its perceptions, and to the influence of these factors on the cultural expressions of the Gaelic immigrant community. We simply cannot afford to ignore these issues if we want to understand how Scottish Gaels felt and thought about their experiences, communicated them to their community, and participated in the ongoing process of making sense of their world and their lives. This chapter has analyzed examples of how Gaels made creative and selective use of tradition to express their perceptions of Indigenous Americans and, sometimes, their actual experiences of them. These depictions cover a range of sentiments, from hostility to empathy, all expressed in the native language of the emigrants, and exploit a range of literary devices, styles, and motifs from oral

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tradition, which was the community’s common heritage and primary means of expression. Indeed, it is not possible to glean the full meaning and implications of individual texts without reading them against the larger corpus of verbal artistry to which they make implicit and explicit reference. I have demonstrated that the figure of the Indigenous American in Gaelic literature is not always a literal depiction of an actual person but often a rhetorical device used to communicate a specific claim or idea to the poet’s audience. Particular care must be taken in considering each piece – the author, his or her background and agenda, the context, and so on – before assuming that the piece says anything substantive about Gaelic perceptions of and relations with First Nations. Although some of these texts contain negative and derogatory statements reiterating colonial ideology, these statements represent only one end of the spectrum: statements of empathy with First Nations also appear in texts composed by and for Gaelic communities well before the decline of the British Empire.

Not e s 1 Newton, We’re Indians, 42–7; Newton, Warriors, 44–79. 2 MacInnes, Dùthchas, 46. 3 MacDonell, ed., Emigrant Experience, 4–7; Newton, We’re Indians, 43–7, 52–6, 77–8, 91–2, 114–16; Newton, Warriors, 35–6, 71–3, 353–6. 4 Hunter, Dance Called America, 227–43. 5 There is considerable disagreement and debate about which ethnonym is most appropriate to designate the peoples indigenous to the Americas not only by members of the political apparatus of modern nation-states of Canada and the United States but also in and between local communities themselves. I have chosen, for the purposes of this chapter, to use “Indigenous Americans” to refer to individuals (despite my reservation that indigeneity is a dimension of culture not specific to any continent or ethnic group) and “First Nations” to refer to communities. 6 Stroh, “Transperipheral Translations?” 259, 263, emphasis in original. See also Stroh, Uneasy Subjects, 194–200. 7 Newton, We’re Indians, 231–5; MacInnes, Dùthchas, 360–4. 8 Newton, We’re Indians, 122. The earliest source, the Gillies Collection of 1786, does not name the author. MacLagan is named as the author in the MacPhàrlain collection of 1813 and in the papers of the Reverend Duncan

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10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

18 19 20 21 22 23 24

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MacFarlane of Drymen; see Glasgow University Library 1090, item 1090(84).9. I disagree with the assertion in Strohe, Uneasy Subjects, 159–60, that the poem contains “a colonial preoccupation with race and an image of nonwhite men as a sexual threat to white women.” Not only are the enemies – First Nations and French – lumped together, but this is too early a period for non-elite Gaels in Scotland (the audience of this song) to understand the implications of racialism. Newton, We’re Indians, 140. Dziennik, “‘Cutting Heads,’” 243. Newton, We’re Indians, 175–8, 239; Newton, “In Their Own Words,” 18–20. Newton, We’re Indians, 178. I will return to the development of this song and the legends surrounding its supposed author in a future publication. Rankin, ed., Às a’ Bhràighe, 17–18, 158–9. Ibid., 74, my translation. Sinclair, ed., Gaelic Bards, 116–18. Sinclair says that he was given this song by an unnamed informant who may well have been Alasdair the Ridge (son of Ailean). About Domhnall Donn, and the reliance of Sinclair upon Ridge sources, see Mac Gill-eain, Ris a’ Bhruthaich, 211–34. For discussion of Domhnall Donn in the context of seventeenth-century Gaelic outlaws and their poetry, see Stiùbhairt, “Highland Rogues.” Rankin, ed., Às a’ Bhràighe, 11–16. MacInnes, Dùthchas, 34–47; Newton, Warriors, 52–79; Stroh, Uneasy Subjects, 52–7. Newton, “Scotland’s Two Solitudes,” 220–4. Watson, ed., Bàrdachd Ghàidhlig, line 6810. Newton, We’re Indians, 110. The song was composed by Iain MacGriogair. For the case of a community within Cape Breton, see Bittermann, “Hierarchy of the Soil,” 42–4. For more general coverage, see Calloway, White People, 201–29. Newton, “Macs Meet the ‘Micmacs.’” Published in the Gaelic column of the Sydney Post-Record (Cape Breton), 13 November 1920, my translation. Black, ed., An Lasair, 174–9. Grant, Highland Folk Ways, 342. Mac-Talla, vol. 5, no. 32 (13 February 1897), my translation. It may have been submitted by a contributor from Manitoba (MacDhomhnaill Bhreabadair) whose letter appears on the first page of the issue.

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For example, see MacDonell, ed., Emigrant Experience, 149–55. Cregeen, Recollections, 204–5. Camshron, ed., Na Baird Thirisdeach, 228, my translation. Cregeen, Recollections, 112, 240, 249. Newton, “Celtic Cousins.” Cowan, “Scots Imagining.”

B i b l i ogr ap h y Bittermann, Rusty. “The Hierarchy of the Soil: Land and Labour in a 19th Century Cape Breton Community.” Acadiensis 18, no. 1 (1988): 33–55. Black, Ronald, ed. An Lasair: Anthology of 18th Century Scottish Gaelic Verse. Edinburgh: Birlinn, 2001. Calloway, Colin. White People, Indians, and Highlanders: Tribal Peoples and Colonial Encounters in Scotland and America. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Camshron, Eachann, ed. Na Baird Thirisdeach. Stirling: Tiree Association, 1932. Cowan, Edward. “The Scots Imagining of Canada.” In Peter Rider and Heather McNabb, eds, Kingdom of the Mind, 3–21. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2006. Cregeen, Eric. Recollections of an Argyllshire Drover and Other West Highland Chronicles. Ed. Margaret Bennett. Edinburgh: John Donald, 2004. Dziennik, Matthew. “‘Cutting Heads from Shoulders’: The Conquest of Canada in Gaelic Thought, 1759–1791.” In Phillip K. Buckner and John Reid, eds, Revisiting 1759: The Conquest of Canada in Historical Perspective, 241–66. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012. Grant, I.F. Highland Folk Ways. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975. Hunter, James. A Dance Called America. Edinburgh: Mainstream, 1994. Mac Gill-eain, Somhairle. Ris a’ Bhruthaich: The Criticism and Prose Writings of Sorley MacLean. Ed. William Gillies. Stornoway: Acair, 1985. MacDonell, Margaret, ed. The Emigrant Experience. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982. MacInnes, John. Dùthchas nan Gàidheal: Selected Essays of John MacInnes. Ed. Michael Newton. Edinburgh: Birlinn, 2006. Newton, Michael. “Celtic Cousins or White Settlers? Scottish Highlanders and First Nations.” In Kenneth Nilsen, ed., Rannsachadh na Gàidhlig

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5 / Fifth Scottish Gaelic Research Conference, 221–37. Sydney, NS: University of Cape Breton Press, 2011. – “In Their Own Words: Gaelic Literature in North Carolina.” Scotia 25 (2001): 1–28. – “The Macs Meet the ‘Micmacs’: First Encounter Narratives in Scottish Gaelic from Nova Scotia.” Journal of Irish and Scottish Studies 5, no. 1 (2011): 67–96. – “Scotland’s Two Solitudes Abroad: Scottish Gaelic Immigrant Identity in North America.” In Jodi Campbell, Elizabeth Ewan, and Heather Parker, eds, Shaping Scottish Identity: Family, Nation, and the World Beyond, 215–33. Guelph, ON : University of Guelph, Centre for Scottish Studies, 2011. – We’re Indians Sure Enough: The Legacy of the Scottish Highlanders in the United States. Richmond, VA : Saorsa Media, 2001. – Warriors of the Word: The World of the Scottish Highlanders. Edinburgh: Birlinn, 2009. Rankin, Effie, ed. Às a’ Bhràighe / Beyond the Braes. Sydney, NS : University College of Cape Breton Press, 2004. Sinclair, Alexander Maclean, ed. Gaelic Bards from 1411 to 1715. Charlottetown, PEI : Haszard and Moore, 1890. Stiùbhairt, Domhnall Uilleam. “Highland Rogues and the Roots of Highland Romanticism.” In Christopher MacLachlan, ed., Crossing the Highland Line: Cross-Currents in Eighteenth-Century Scottish Writing, 161–93. Glasgow: University of Glasgow, 2009. Stroh, Silke. “Transperipheral Translations? Native North American/ Scottish Gaelic Connections.” In Konrad Gross and Petra Rüdiger, eds, Translation of Cultures, 255–71. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2009. – Uneasy Subjects: Postcolonialism and Scottish Gaelic Poetry. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2011. Watson, William, ed. Bàrdachd Ghàidhlig. 3rd ed. Inverness: An Comunn Gàidhealach, 1959.

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11 Transatlantic Rhythms: To the Far Nor’Wast and Back Again Patricia A. M c Cormack

Fort Chipewyan is famous among Canadian fur trade historians as a historically important entrepôt in the Northwest, a launching point for travel farther north and west, and a site of fierce competition in the early 1800s between two prominent companies, the Hudson’s Bay Company and the North West Company.1 Situated on Lake Athabasca in what is today northern Alberta, at the confluence of the Athabasca, the Peace, and the Slave Rivers, it is usually thought of as an Aboriginal community, occupied by Indians (today known as First Nations) and by Métis.2 Yet it was founded by Europeans, mainly Scots and their Canadien (French Canadian) employees, and it has always featured a plural society, comprising non-Natives of multiple origins, two different groups of First Nations (Chipewyans and Crees), and three different groups of people known today as Métis. The surnames of two groups of Métis are French in origin, whereas the third group bears Scottish names: McKay, Fraser, Sutherland, and Campbell, of Highland heritage; and Flett, Wylie, Loutit, and Isbister, names that bespeak their origins in the Orkney Islands.3 In short, much of the local Métis population today is of mixed Scottish and Aboriginal ancestry, along with other European sources of ancestry, especially French. Many more men with Scots names and backgrounds stayed in and travelled through this community. The best-known was Alexander Mackenzie, from Stornoway in Lewis, who with his cousin Roderic McKenzie was responsible for the founding in 1788 of Fort Chipewyan, which he used as a base of operations for two famous exploratory trips in his search for an

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overland route to the Pacific Ocean.4 But there were also men named Drever, Firth, Grant, MacFarlane, McMurray, Rae, Thomson, and Traill, among many others. Fort Chipewyan is not unusual in its composition. The First Nations and Métis of other Canadian fur trade communities have their own distinct constellations of Scottish names and ancestries, both historic and modern.5 This circumstance speaks to the long and  intimate relationships between Aboriginal people and the men who came to the Northwest from a wide range of Scottish locales. Although we know this to be so, what is somewhat unexpected is how little we know about the processes involved, despite much in-depth study of the fur trade. In fact, it seems to be a wide-open field of scholarship, barely researched and poorly defined.6 One of the premises of this chapter is that there was a two-way street between Scots and Aboriginal people, which was influenced by the complex histories and cultures that men from different parts of Scotland brought with them to the Canadian Northwest. A second premise is that the fur trade had impacts on Scottish home communities, not just on fur trade communities. This chapter explores these two premises, pointing to some promising research directions. The chapter’s title speaks both to the historic relationships among Aboriginal people and Scots and to the potential for collaborative work by researchers. Although many Scots working in the fur trade and many people with Aboriginal ancestry went back and forth across the Atlantic, most researchers have not. It was fieldwork I did on the Orkney Islands and the Isle of Lewis in 1987, 1990, and 1992 that inspired me not only to rethink aspects of northern fur trade social history but also to consider as significant the cultural differences among people living in different parts of Scotland and the impacts of the fur trade on Scottish home communities.7 In particular, I heard strong statements in both Orkney and Lewis about their regional distinctiveness in culture, history, and identity. One of the biggest impediments to developing this new research terrain is that despite centuries of Scottish-Aboriginal involvement on both sides of the Atlantic, northern fur trade researchers have mostly ignored the breadth of relevant Scottish history, and for their part, Scottish researchers have had other research agendas. Although acknowledging that much scholarship is to be found within edited collections and monographs, this assessment of Scottish interests is based on a review of the contents of back issues of two journals: the

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Scottish Historical Review, especially articles speaking to directions in Scottish research, and Northern Scotland. Although there is much interest in Scottish emigration, it has mainly concerned Scottish settler societies abroad. In Canada the major focus has been even more narrow, on Scottish settlers in eastern Canada, with no more than isolated examples examined for the central and western provinces.8 Although it is beyond the scope of the chapter to review this literature, one of its outstanding elements is the persistent interest in the regional specificity of Scots emigrants in rural communities and in how distinctive cultural aspects have persisted in some of these communities.9 However, it is noteworthy that such detail tends to be lacking in discussions of Scots in other aspects of emigration history. These are separate topics from that of Scots in the fur trade, although the potential exists to draw links between them, such as former Scottish soldiers who became fur trade employees and the nineteenth-century popularity of tartans, which surely influenced the sale of tartan fabric to Aboriginal purchasers.10 Histories of the fur trade have been marginalized in the Scottish Historical Review, and articles about the Northern Isles, Orkney, and Shetland appear to have been largely relegated to the interdisciplinary journal Northern Scotland. Although Northern Scotland has been published since 1972, the first article to appear about fur trade relationships was just published in the magazine’s new series by Suzanne Rigg, “Scots in the Hudson’s Bay Company, c. 1779–c. 1821.”11 To pursue this new line of fur trade research, we need to bridge our respective isolations, study on the opposite shore, and bring this knowledge home with us. Just as Aboriginal people and Scots built new communities together in the context of the fur trade, Canadian and Scottish scholars can jointly build new research communities as we rethink dimensions of regional and national histories in both countries. This chapter explores four broad topics. First, it considers the diverse origins and cultural differences among the Scots who participated in the fur trade, which varied with time and place. Next, it addresses their relationships with Aboriginal people, followed by a brief discussion of Scottish identity in Canada. Finally, it raises questions about impacts in Scotland. Each of these topics could unfold into multiple dimensions, which will undoubtedly emerge with the pursuit of primary sources and genealogical ties between families on both sides of the Atlantic.

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Wh o W e r e t h e S c o t s in the Fur Trade? The first question is empirical: who were the Scots who took part in the Canadian fur trade? A great deal of information is available for this topic, thanks to rich archival resources found in repositories in Canada and Scotland. Canadian historians have always considered the fur trade an important stage in the development of Canada’s natural resources and social communities, and there has been much interest in who was involved and what they did, at least for the earliest fur trade era.12 The biographies of many pioneering Scottish traders have been published in the Dictionary of Canadian Biography, now available online. The Hudson’s Bay Company Archives is the repository most often singled out, and especially helpful are the post histories and the biography sheets that its archivists have prepared, the latter also available online. A biography sheet typically lists the worker’s parish of origin, his dates of birth and death, and the chronology and places of his service with the Hudson’s Bay Company. Many contain genealogical information. Much is known about the process whereby specific men from Scotland came to be part of the fur trade, although little is known about their personal motivations. Most recently, Suzanne Rigg has discussed recruitment and career opportunities for the company’s workers until 1821, and in the present volume Beverly Soloway covers their early settlement experience, and Marjory Harper considers the transatlantic working life of later generations.13 Orcadian historians such as J. Storer Clouston and William P.L. Thomson have focused on Orcadian involvement in the fur trade,14 and a few Canadian scholars have studied the labour experience. An important but little known source is Philip Goldring’s three-volume Papers on the Labour System of the Hudson’s Bay Company, 1821–1900. At the same time, Goldring published a related article with a similar title, and John Nicks published “Orkneymen in the HBC, 1780–1821.”15 In 2006 Scott P. Stephen completed a doctoral thesis, “Masters and Servants: The Hudson’s Bay Company and Its Personnel, 1668– 1782,” in which he considers the labour force in Rupert’s Land more generally as “one of many extensions of the British labour market,” with “the movement of men to and from the Bay … just one aspect of domestic labour mobility.”16 Information about the work histories and incomes of individual men is available from a careful reading of post journals and accounts,

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and more can be recovered to some extent from correspondence, censuses, and other primary sources. Nevertheless, little has been published about the lives of these men and their families, the stuff of social history as well as fur trade biography. This may be in part because Canadian interest in and discourse about the fur trade has focused on Aboriginal people, not Scots or other European workers. Further, other than highlighting Gaelic-speaking communities, it has tended to focus on Scots as a collectivity, as though they comprised a single ethnicity, rather than on distinctive Scottish ethnicities and cultures. The broader discourse about Europeans in the fur trade typically reflects the simplistic paired oppositions one finds in other Canadian literature – English and French, English and Scots, and French and Scots – but with a brief nod to the distinctiveness of Orcadians and Highlanders.17 Yet in early fur trade narratives, the broad category of “Scot” was not homogenized. There was much commentary about whether men were Orcadians, Highlanders, or from elsewhere and about how their origins related to their personalities and abilities.18 For example, in 1810 Lowlander William Auld at Cumberland House wrote about how the Hudson’s Bay Company workers faced ruthless intimidation by Canadiens – the French Canadian workers for the North West Company. The Orcadians working for the Hudson’s Bay Company were “‘careful, steady and sober’” and had been “‘hired to work and not to fight.’” In the face of the “batailleurs” (or “bullies”) of the North West Company, Auld claimed that the Orcadian men were as “old women who had not courage even to defend the furs which they had obtained.”19 Other detailed examples exist. A year earlier, James Tate, an Orcadian labourer for the Hudson’s Bay Company, had kept a journal that described a tragic encounter in September 1809, in which Aeneas Macdonell was killed. William Corrigal, another Orcadian working with Tate, had been trying to collect furs from an Indian who had brought them to trade to the Hudson’s Bay Company; North West Company men kept interfering. When Tate went to Corrigal’s aid, Macdonell – a Highlander and also a company bully – attacked Tate ferociously: McDonal [Aeneas Macdonell] struck me with his fist on my cheek. I then turned about to him and shoved him three or four steps backward and again tried to get the goods. Meanwhile he

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drew his sword and struck me several times on my shoulders with the back part of it so that I was cut and bruised in several places, then I was obliged to make the best of my escape from him … I again went to try to get the goods, but was soon observed by McDonal who came running as fierce as a lion with his sword in his hand and struck me on my neck, which stroke cut me severely and knocked me down on the launch quite senseless, but being in such agitation I soon recovered a little, and was endeavouring to get to the dry beach when McDonal again came after me and made a stroke for my head with his sword. I had the good fortune to guard off with my left arm but at same time cut my arm very severely.20 Macdonell also cut another man, John Corrigal, with his sword “to the bone” and tried twice “to run [John] Mowat through the body with his sword.”21 Mowat shot Macdonell in what Tate considered to be strictly an act of self-defence.22 Ten years later, George Simpson, in charge of Fort Wedderburne, the Hudson’s Bay Company post that opposed the North West Company post of Fort Chipewyan, mentioned several times that he considered the “cool phlegmatic” Orcadians to be superior fishermen, but it was Highlanders – presumably hot-blooded – who would have helped him in the fight.23 He gave the example of poor James Taylor, an Orcadian employee who was accused of trespassing on North West Company space and then badly beaten: “Before the man had time to reply one Wilburner a Canadian Half Bully, half Clerk, knocked him down, and while laying on the ground, beat and kicked him in a most inhumane manner.”24 George Back, who had travelled with Sir John Franklin on his first overland expedition and in the mid-1830s led his own exploratory party to the Great Fish River, identified the ethnicities of his crew of men: three were Highlanders (James McKay, Charles McKenzie, and John Ross), one was from Orkney (James Spence), and there was a man each from England (William Malley) and Ireland (Hugh Carron), in addition to two “Half breeds” (George Sinclair and Peter Taylor).25 But by this time the competition between the two companies had been over for more than a decade, and Back did not refer to any behaviours or tendencies associated with specific Scottish or other identities under the pressures of commercial rivalry.

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Scots from other areas also served in the fur trade. For example, Robert Longmoor, who joined the Hudson’s Bay Company in 1771, was thought to have been born in Edinburgh,26 as was the earliermentioned William Auld.27 Such Scots are not clearly identified in the literature, perhaps because in the fur trade world they emulated or acculturated to a fur trade variant of Highland Scot, a subject addressed by Jennifer S.H. Brown.28 However, the term “Highlander” is typically used without geographical definition and seems to mean anyone from the Western Isles to Wick, comprising the entire northwestern part of Scotland and sometimes even extended, inappropriately, to the Northern Isles. The distinctive histories and cultures of Orkney and Lewis have led me instead to think about Scotland as comprising several culture areas: the Northern Isles (Orkney and Shetland), the Outer Hebrides (within which lies the Isle of Lewis), the Highlands (including the adjacent Inner Hebrides), the Lowlands, and the Borders.29 Although administratively defined for the purposes of local government, dividing Scotland into discrete regions is complicated by the casual way that regional terms, especially “Highlands” and “Lowlands,” are often used to apportion all of Scotland to one of these two overarching categories.30 Looking at Scotland from the point of view of Orcadians and from fur trade aspects of Lewis history is hardly typical, but it opens a new lens on Scottish history. Men from these different areas became part of the fur trade at different times and in different ways. The starting point into this history involves asking questions about who these men were, what their origins and cultures were, and what can be learned about their personal histories of involvement in the fur trade. At a broad level, Scottish workers in the fur trade can be usefully divided by time and origin into three groups: Orcadians, Highlanders, and Lewismen. Each group has a distinctive profile that is anchored in the history and culture of its originating region; a brief regional overview is provided here for each one. Orcadians The earliest Scots who worked in the northern fur trade – and the term “Scot” is used here only in its most formal sense because the men would not have so identified themselves – were Orcadians

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recruited by the Hudson’s Bay Company in the town of Stromness, the second most important town in Orkney. Such recruitment began at the beginning of the 1700s, when the company itself was in its infancy, barely thirty years old. Most of the men came from what was then called Pomona, the largest island (now the Orkney Mainland), and from the southern Orkney islands, especially South Ronaldsay (see figure 11.1). The company continued to recruit in Orkney well into the twentieth century and evidently stopped only when prevented from doing so by Canadian immigration policy around 1930.31 The distinctiveness of Orcadians both within Scotland and within the Canadian fur trade reflects their lengthy history as part of the Norse empire until 1468.32 The Norse “odal” (freehold) landownership meant that many Orcadians were independent landowners; there were few large estates or large-estate owners. Walter Traill Dennison, writing in 1880, called these small landowners “descendants of gentlemen, and not sprung from the villeins of some petty feudal baron.”33 Issues about land were different from those in the Highlands and the Outer Hebrides, and Orcadians never experienced early emigration to the Americas or faced the traumatic enclosures that dominate much of the historical discourse even today in Lewis and the Highlands. Although some enclosures did occur, they were smaller in scale, were less traumatic overall, and are not a noticeable part of Orcadian discourse about their past. Orcadians were also unique in other ways. They spoke a distinctive language – Norn – which persisted into the eighteenth century as a spoken language. Although Norn was replaced by Scots English, much of its lexicon has persisted to the present day.34 Orcadians had a distinctive Norse architecture manifested in long stone houses. Even today, Orcadians maintain strongly that their very personalities and approaches to life differ from those of Highlanders and that although their lands are part of Scotland, they themselves are not Scots. Identifying the significance of these diverse cultural features for Orcadian interactions with Aboriginal people is a study yet to be undertaken and requires consideration of a wide range of Aboriginal and Scottish-Orcadian elements. Orcadians today represent themselves as diffident and self-effacing when they contrast themselves to Highlanders. Such a personal style may have resonated comfortably with many Aboriginal peoples, including Crees and Chipewyans of

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N

Orkney Islands

North Sea

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Lady

Pharay Eday Rousay

Birsay

Evie

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Fig. 11.1 The Orkney Islands Source: McCormack, “Lost Women,” 62, drafted by Wendy Johnson

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the central Subarctic region, who would have regarded Highland bullies as overbearing and even dangerous in their aggressiveness. Orcadians were desired as hard workers who could be employed for minimum wages. After 1700 a tradition of Hudson’s Bay Company service developed in Orkney as an important employment option, a chance for both adventure and profit. Men signed on as a kind of indentured servant. They signed contracts for service of three to five years, in return for which they were provided with transport to and from posts on Hudson Bay, room and board – most of which they provided themselves as a part of their employment responsibilities – and a guaranteed salary that increased over time if they learned their jobs and gave good service. They went to the “Far Nor’Wast” – their term for Rupert’s Land – to work, not to stay.35 They left behind parents and families; their wives were “fur trade widows.” Some men served only one term and then went home, but many reenlisted, often over and over again, either in Rupert’s Land itself or after a furlough at home. At least in the early days, they were not supposed to become intimately involved with Aboriginal women, but many of them did, producing children. Although Marjory Harper has called such men “temporary migrants,” this term is avoided here to prevent confusion with migrants (emigrants) who intended to stay in their new countries. In Lewis and the Highlands, the term “migrant” has a particular connotation related to the Scottish diaspora, enclosures, and poverty, all  of which are lacking from contemporary Orcadian discourse. Orcadians who signed on with the fur trade were simply wage labourers who moved for jobs. They did not go to the Far Nor’Wast intending to remain there, even though eventually many did – perhaps up to about 20 per cent. Highlanders and Lewismen A second group of fur trade workers originated in other parts of Scotland, especially the Highlands and to a lesser extent the Western Isles. Highland Scots of the mainland have a distinctive history of their own, participating on both sides of the brutal British pacification of their people that culminated with defeat at Culloden field (1746) and the confiscation of land and suppression of emblematic aspects of Highland culture that followed. As a response to this social and economic dislocation, many Highland survivors and their

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descendants then joined the Scottish regiments that allowed Great Britain to pursue colonization elsewhere, especially in the North American wars against the French and their Indian allies and in India against its indigenous people. The history of the Outer Hebrides is different from that of the mainland Highlands and the Inner Hebrides, which is why they have been deemed a separate Scottish culture area.36 Although both Lewis and Orkney became parts of Scotland, they did so through different routes and with different consequences for their subsequent cultures and histories (see figure 11.2).37 Nearly all land in both the Western Isles and the mainland Highlands was held on feudal terms, which opened the door for the chiefs – the owners of the large estates – to maximize their rents at the expense of their tenants.38 The impoverishment of the tenants set the stage for the great exodus of Scots to the Americas in the eighteenth century.39 They went to the Atlantic colonies, mostly North Carolina, New York, and the Maritimes.40 Lucille Campey called it “emigration frenzy.”41 There was significant emigration from the Outer Hebrides during the same period, including members of Alexander Mackenzie’s family.42 Mackenzie was born in Stornoway in 1764 and left for North America with his father in 1774, where they joined his uncle and aunts who had emigrated earlier. It was the eve of the American Revolution; the Mackenzie family members were Loyalists, and Alexander was sent to school in Montreal. From there, it was an easy move to the Montreal fur trade, where he got in on the ground floor. After a highly successful fur trade career, which gained him a knighthood, Mackenzie retired to Scotland, where he married a young wife, started a family, and acquired an estate, at Avoch, near Inverness. The same factors that drove emigration also led many men to enlist with the military and come to North America as officers or soldiers of the 77th Regiment (Montgomerie’s Highlanders) and the 78th Regiment of Foot (Fraser’s Highlanders), both raised for service in North America against the French (the latter raised in 1757). The 42nd (Royal Highland) Regiment of Foot also served in North America.43 All three served during the Seven Year’s War (in North America, known as the French and Indian War), which lasted from 1757 until 1763.44 It was during this war that British forces conquered New France, which was officially transferred to British rule by the 1763 Treaty of Paris. When the Fraser’s Highlanders were disbanded in Quebec in December 1763, officers and soldiers were

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uig

Harris

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Fig. 11.2 The Isle of Lewis Source: McCormack, “Lost Women,” 63, drafted by Wendy Johnson

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offered land if they chose to remain in Canada, and many stayed. According to J.M. LeMoine, “[O]nce the flag of Britain was firmly implanted in Canada, the Scot turned his mind to new fields of enterprise – to commerce and the tilling of the soil.”45 Lieutenant John McTavish of Garthbeg chose instead to return to Scotland in 1763, but his son Simon, then about thirteen years of age, emigrated to New York the following year, where he worked for a merchant and then became involved in the fur trade of the Great Lakes, an auspicious start to his later prestigious career in the Montreal-based fur trade. Simon McTavish remained in eastern Canada and bought land there as well as a Scottish ancestral estate.46 Both he and Alexander Mackenzie helped family members to find jobs and advance economically and socially, maintaining their connections to their extended families. British regiments were stationed again in the Canadian colonies after the American Revolution. In 1805 the Canadian Regiment of Fencible Infantry, whose predecessor had earlier been unsuccessful in recruiting in the Highlands, began recruiting in Lower and Upper Canada and later fought in the War of 1812.47 Many other regiments added to the ranks of British military during the War of 1812, including the Regiment de Meuron, some members of which later moved to the Red River Settlement.48 Some of these men may also have entered the Montreal-based fur trade, adding to the number of Highlander and other Scots fur trade workers during the nineteenth century. Scottish immigrants became involved with the fur trade all along the eastern seaboard, from Nova Scotia to Florida, a subject most recently summarized by Colin Calloway.49 Scots in Montreal replaced former French merchants after the fall of Quebec and reinvigorated the fur trade in western Canada that the French had pioneered in the first half of the century.50 These companies rapidly evolved into the North West Company. James Hunter calls the North West Company (and, after 1821, the reborn Hudson’s Bay Company) “in effect, commercialized clans in which sons followed fathers, nephews followed uncles, and cousins followed cousins into the fur trade,” as owners, managers, and workers.51 The history of these Scots seems to tell of men who were reasonably well-off when they came to North America, hardly the impoverished emigrant Scotsmen who have come to dominate popular culture about Scottish emigration.

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Although considerable research now exists about relationships between the Montreal-based Scottish fur traders and Aboriginal people, there is little focus on the culture and history that the Scots brought with them to the Aboriginal world. Research into the histories of specific men as well as the anecdotal material scattered widely in fur trade records may yield more information on this subject. Post-1821 Scots In White People, Indians and Highlanders, Colin Calloway has claimed that it was “men from the Highlands and western islands who came to dominate the fur trade.”52 This was certainly not the case in the fur trade before 1821, when the Hudson’s Bay Company and North West Company trades were separate and competitive, and the detailed information to support such a statement in Canada does not exist for the years after 1821, when the two companies amalgamated. Officers from the two companies joined forces in the new Hudson’s Bay Company, and it is true that Scots from the Highlands and Western Isles maintained their former importance. However, “dominance” is a tricky question, which must be considered for different levels of the fur trade: in the membership of the London Committee, among the wintering partners in Canada, and at individual districts and posts.53 After 1821 the Hudson’s Bay Company continued actively to recruit Orcadians. It also recruited men directly from Stornoway in Lewis and from Lerwick in the Shetland Islands.54 Men from these distinct locations mingled together at the fur trade posts to which they were assigned.55 Thanks to their cultural and linguistic distinctiveness, the men from the Northern Isles and the Western Isles probably could not even have talked to one another when they first met on a Hudson’s Bay Company ship. Whereas Orcadians spoke English, most Lewismen were probably monolingual Gaelic speakers. The first language they may have had in common was Cree, a common lingua franca, or whatever language was the linguistic rababou of the region.56 As before, these new workers were contract labourers who intended to return to their Scottish homes with savings that would allow them to buy land or crofts and improve their economic position and social status. For much of the Highlands and Western Isles, the nineteenth century was a period of traumatic land clearances.

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But researchers have yet to relate these home conditions to these fur trade workers and their spending patterns both in the Northwest and after they returned home. With so many people leaving the Western Isles and other areas of Scotland, why did so many of these men decide to return home? Did their decisions influence other family members to stay? Many men sent money home to their families and later brought home their savings, a capital infusion into island economies that was undoubtedly highly significant at times. Looking for the answers to these questions will require research in archival documents and surviving oral traditions for the nineteenth century, and they will help us focus on the regions of origin of specific workers – the particular circumstances and cultures there – and ideally begin to construct the personal histories of individuals, both in Scotland and during their years of fur trade employment.

H ow D id T h e s e M e n Become I nvolved w it h A b o r ig in al People? The previous section has focused on deconstructing the origins of the men from different parts of Scotland who became involved in the fur trade. The next question to consider is how these men became involved with Aboriginal people and the consequences of their involvement for other decisions, such as their spending patterns and decisions about remaining in Canada or returning to Scotland. On the surface, the answer seems simple: many men lived with Aboriginal bands, travelled and worked with Aboriginal people, and learned from them (and from their more experienced fellow workers) how to live in the country – how to hunt and fish, cut wood and build fires, keep warm in winter, construct boats and houses, and travel safely in both winter and summer. Suzanne Rigg has called these capabilities critical “country skills” that allowed them to cope with “perils” of life in the Canadian Subarctic.57 Longterm workers, in particular, mastered such skills, as their very survival depended upon it. The men also learned one or more Aboriginal languages and undoubtedly other European languages, especially English and French. Many married Aboriginal women, which integrated them directly into their wives’ kin groups. This part may have followed a shorter learning curve than we might think because the men came from societies in which extended kinship ties were already important to them.

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This sketch is broadly done. We know little about what the men, the women, or their relatives – Scots and Aboriginal alike – on either side of the Atlantic thought about their activities and these relationships. Although there is some evidence from correspondence, especially for men in management, little exists for the workers and virtually nothing for Aboriginal men and women, leaving us to try to infer their thoughts and values from what they did. Social communities stemming from fur trade marriages developed, based both on gens libres (or freemen, those who no longer had a contractual relationship with the Hudson’s Bay Company or with another employer) and on the men who remained formal employees. Although such social communities contributed to the eventual development of distinctive “Half-breed” or “Métis” identities in the Northwest, their members also enjoyed ongoing relationships to “Indian” people such as Crees and Chipewyans.58 Many questions about the complex social dynamics involved remain to be answered.59 In fact, just because both sides used the word “marriage” hardly means that the term carried the same understanding among all parties, as Jennifer S.H. Brown has pointed out.60 Scottish and other European fur trade workers took Aboriginal wives or companions even when they had wives and children back in their originating countries. What did the Aboriginal women think about this practice, and did it trouble the men who left them behind to return to Scotland? Some men evidently took their new family obligations seriously, remaining permanently with their Aboriginal wives or bringing their wives home to Scotland with them, whereas others just took advantage of sexual opportunities. Sir George Simpson has become emblematic of the latter, a fur trader who married in both the Northwest and in Scotland but abandoned his Aboriginal wife, Margaret Taylor, when he brought his new Scottish wife out to the fur trade country with him.61 In a somewhat parallel example, James Thomson from Lewis fathered a child with a Chipewyan woman shortly after he had married a woman back home while on furlough. What is unusual about his story is that his Lewis wife joined him at  his fur trade post, where they lived for several years. Thomson denied that he was the father of the child, and it seems likely that he had never expected his Lewis wife to join him.62 To counter the picture of evolving family structures, there is also evidence of men who were callously exploitative of Aboriginal men and women. For example, there are instances where Chipewyan

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women were taken from their families by force, sometimes to settle debts incurred by their husbands or fathers.63 Fur traders might berate Indian men for not producing enough furs, which would have been shameful, offensive, and deeply troubling to the Indians and may have contributed to the killings of Alexander Henry and other residents at Fort Nelson in 1813. In short, they tried to squeeze profit from the Indians, just as their homeland lords had tried to squeeze it from tenants. The sad reality is that the once-exploited Scots did not hesitate to exploit Aboriginal people and even to replicate the abuse they themselves had suffered.

W h at H a p p e n e d to the I denti ti es o f T h e s e P eople? We know that new identities developed over time in the fur trade country, but this topic has been glossed over by the simple expedient today of glibly assuming that most children of mixed ancestry became “Métis.” This is especially the case when the fathers were French Canadian. There has been less thought about the Scottish roots of many of today’s Métis. Yet to call someone a “Half-breed” or “Métis” in the past may have been simply an acknowledgment of mixed ancestry and not necessarily a label of identity, although today it is normally read as though it were. Work on this area will benefit from research into evolving fur trade terminologies. The various Scottish identities in fur trade communities may themselves have changed. Jennifer S.H. Brown has suggested that Orcadian men may have become more aware of their own uniqueness, more “tribal,” a result of their juxtaposition to Englishmen, “mainland” Scots (presumably Highlanders), and Indians. Their separate identity persisted at Red River into at least the midnineteenth century.64 She has proposed that a separate mainland Scots identity also sharpened for similar reasons and that these men developed an “ethnic identity and separateness of which they were previously less strongly aware.”65 Implicated in this topic is the evolution of a new Scottish identity in Canada in the nineteenth century. This identity was undoubtedly influenced by Scotland’s evolving discourse about its own increasingly romanticized history.66 Much thought has been given to the impacts of Scots on the development of Canadian history, although some of it belongs to a simplistic “how Scots founded Canada” genre.67 Scots

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have enjoyed a strong historic and cultural presence in Canada from coast to coast. Yet the Scots who peopled diverse localities came to Canada at different times, from different regions, and with different traditions. The relationships between these founding populations and evolving and contemporary Canadian Scottish identity(ies) are a story yet to be told.

What W e r e t h e Im pac t s o f Scotti sh Fur Trade W o r k e rs bac k H o m e i n Scotland? Several historians have written about retired fur traders – “gentlemen” – and their families in 1840s Britain, especially in Aberdeen and its environs in the northeast of Scotland.68 L.G. Thomas clearly thought that life must have been difficult for the wives, regarding them as “the victims of their husbands’ ambitions for their children.”69 More recently, attention has been paid to the families of the working-class servants who also returned to their homes in the Orkney Islands and Lewis, especially after 1821.70 As well, some children were sent to Orkney and elsewhere in Britain for schooling. Studying these families and their histories in the fur trade world and in Scotland is a fruitful and fascinating research direction. Although oral traditions about some of these families exist, they are scant in detail and would benefit from research into the wide range of available documentary sources, especially census and church records and land transactions. A critical step in this research will be a careful review of the ships’ logs, which provide the names of crewmembers and passengers, to provide a valuable list of the families (or family members) who went to Scotland and England. It should then be possible to reconstruct the subsequent history of these families in Scotland by using a combination of oral traditions and local documents, although complications exist with source survival and misidentification. Relatives who remained in Canada can be traced using similar methods. One goal is to build bridges between families whose knowledge of and ties to one another have been lost over time. Families on both sides of the Atlantic are now beginning to trace their kinship links to one another, greatly assisted by the many resources available online. For example, Alison K. Brown followed a trail of beadwork that had been donated to Glasgow Museums to locate families in Scotland

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and Manitoba that were related to one another through a fur trade marriage between Christina Massan, a Cree woman living in Churchill, Manitoba, and Henry Moir, from Aberdeenshire. When Henry died in 1920, Christina was prevailed upon to honour her husband’s wish to send their sons to live with his family in Scotland – first their Scottish grandparents and later Henry’s sisters. She sent the items of beadwork with her sons to help them remember their mother and her family, and at first she maintained contact with Sarah Moir, who eventually was the sister who raised the boys. Over time, contact ceased, and the descendants on both sides of the Atlantic lost all knowledge of one another. As Alison Brown pursued the story, she met Christina Massan (a granddaughter to the original Christina, who married again) and Alison Grant (a descendant of one of the sons). They became her fellow investigators and co-authors.71 In another family line, the Canadian mixed-ancestry descendants of Orcadian Peter Brass recently met their relative Iain Morrison, a mixed-ancestry man from Lewis. Peter Brass’s daughter Margaret had married John Smith, a Hudson’s Bay Company worker from Lewis, and they had two children together while they were still in the Northwest. When John’s contract expired in 1855, he, Margaret, and the children travelled to London on the Prince of Wales. From there, they made their way to Borve, in Lewis. They lost touch with their Canadian relatives. Mary Ann Maciver of Borve, another descendant, had introduced me to this family in 1992, and in 2010 Iain Morrison followed the kinship trail from Lewis to Orkney to Canada, culminating in an emotional Brass family reunion in Vancouver.72 Many other similar stories are waiting to be discovered. In Lewis, clusters of former fur trade workers with their Aboriginal wives and children lived toward the north end of the island, in the Borve region to the west and in Tolsta to the east. These two regions seem to be closely linked, and it may be that numerous fur trade workers originated there. Many Lewis residents knew and spoke about one or more of these families. In Orkney, descendants of Aboriginal wives seem to be distributed widely in the southern islands and mainland, which are the same areas from which most of the workers came. It is unclear whether any families clustered near one another, as they seem to have done in Lewis. In short, the dynamics of post-fur-trade settlement present another question.

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Just as their Scottish husbands had needed to learn a new way of life in the fur trade country, their wives and children needed to learn new religions, languages, and cultures in Scotland. In the Canadian Northwest, Aboriginal people were evangelized by Roman Catholic oblates, Anglicans, and Methodists, usually with one order dominating a region. Orkney and Lewis were largely Protestant. The two Moir children spoke only Cree when they arrived in Scotland, and they would have needed to learn the local English.73 This would have been the case for women and children moving to Orkney as well. In Lewis, family members learned to speak Gaelic. It is unlikely that most family members from the fur trade country were fluent in English or Gaelic prior to their arrival, although there was undoubtedly a range of competence in English or French. Children would have lost their Aboriginal language(s), unless they themselves went back to the fur country for work. The tasks of daily life were also quite different. Women burned peat in the houses instead of wood, and they would have learned to help dig and dry it. Even the smell of the smoke was different. They lived in long stone houses, not in houses of wood, which was scarce. Instead of hunting for most of their meat, they farmed and looked after domestic animals, which in winter were kept in nearby byres that were sometimes part of the house. The quality of their diets may have deteriorated compared to the protein-rich diets of the fur trade posts. Many husbands would have fished, but the fish and the techniques of preservation were different. The climate was different, and they endured what must have seemed to them to be endless rain and dampness.74 After living at Churchill, even Henry Moir seems to have found the Scottish climate difficult, and he may not have been the only Scot who learned to prefer the drier Canadian climate.75 Those of the first generation must have been both homesick and lonely. However, their children and subsequent generations assimilated to the cultures and traditions of their new homes, a process that Orkney historian William Thomson called “Orknification” with respect to his islands.76 We can presume that life was different, and probably better, for their husbands, who brought back their savings, which should have enabled their families to live more secure and comfortable lives, although this likelihood has yet to be documented. Their ability to buy land or crofts may have led to an improved social status. They may also have returned with new ideas about personal freedoms and knowledge of a way of life where no one paid

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rents to an overlord that may have influenced the course of later political actions back at home. The question about impacts in Scotland can be posed more broadly: is it possible to speak of the impacts of fur trade participation on Scotland or Scottish history? There is now considerable interest in Scotland’s impacts abroad and, in turn, the impacts of Scottish imperialism on Scotland itself.77 A logical first step in researching this question will be to conduct detailed research into the histories of parishes known to have substantial numbers of men returned from the fur trade, as well as into the histories of their families and descendants. The lengthy histories of fur trade involvement have also left their marks on perceptions about the trade in different regions of Scotland. These differences were strikingly obvious to an outsider and contributed to the focus of this chapter. Orcadians are very aware of their role in the fur trade, which is demonstrated by physical elements such as the town of Stromness, which developed due to the location of its harbour. Hudson’s Bay Company history is actively interpreted in Stromness, with signs indicating Login’s well, where ships would take on fresh water, and the cannon that was fired when the company ship was in town. A well-known imposing stone house was built by a retired servant who had done well for himself in the trade. The kirkyard at Stromness and other parish cemeteries contain markers to men who served with the company. Sir John Rae was born in a house that still stands, and he was buried in the kirkyard at St Magnus Cathedral in Kirkwall; the cathedral houses an evocative memorial sculpture dedicated to Rae. Orkney scholars have written about Hudson’s Bay Company history and have joined enthusiastically in its interpretation at conferences and local museums, fostering a local awareness of this dimension of their history. Such heightened awareness is lacking in Lewis and elsewhere in Scotland, although there is a plaque to Alexander Mackenzie affixed to Martin’s Memorial Church in Stornoway. With no exceptions, when I asked people in Lewis about young men going to the fur trade, they asked whether I was inquiring about emigration, which together with the enclosures and the poverty of the people still dominates local discourse about their history. The awareness about the fur trade that does exist is subtle, understated, and poorly interpreted, which suggests its marginalized role in Hebridean history. Yet in Lewis there seemed to be greater knowledge about Native

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ancestors than in Orkney, perhaps the result of work by local genealogist Bill Lawson. Although he brought some families to my attention, it seemed to me that the knowledge of these families was more widespread in Lewis than in Orkney, a curious contradiction.

E p il o g u e The fur trade was so lengthy and so important for Aboriginal people, for Canadian society, and for many Scots that it is surely time to try to understand the local impacts on both sides of the Atlantic. It affords an opportunity to address the question about the role of Scottishness in the Canadian fur trade as well as to study the consequences of fur trade participation in different regions of Scotland, both in terms of impact and perception. One benefit will be to reunite families that have long been separated, even if it means that some painful stories may be uncovered. Such investigations will lead us to more nuanced histories on both sides of the Atlantic, joined together by the fur trade and Aboriginal encounters. Perhaps we might think about a New Scottish History parallel to the New Western History of the United States, which considers the many different groups that have been involved in shaping the region and that could for the first time include Canadian Aboriginal people.

Not e s 1 The companies amalgamated in 1821 under the Hudson’s Bay Company name. 2 “First Nation/s” and “Métis” are today preferred usages in Canada for groups that were formerly known as “Indian” and “Half-breed.” This chapter respects these terms but follows more traditional language where it is appropriate to do so to maintain the integrity of historical sources. 3 One family with an apparently French name, “Mercredi,” originated in the early nineteenth century with an Irishman named Macardi or Mecredi. His descendants include people with both Métis and Chipewyan identities. 4 Direct contact in this region began a decade earlier in 1778, when Peter Pond travelled from the North Saskatchewan River across the Methye Portage to the Clearwater River, which was a gateway to the Mackenzie Basin. Pond was based in Montreal, and his successful trade contributed

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to the creation of the Montreal-based North West Company. For Mackenzie’s accounts, see Lamb, ed., Journals and Letters. For example, in her study of Métis families of Île à la Crosse, in northern Saskatchewan, Brenda Macdougall distinguishes between men who were transient and those who remained in the community, normally by marrying local women, and contributed their names to local families (Macdougall, One of the Family). Robert Alexander Innes has discussed the multicultural nature of social communities of the northern Plains as a result of intermarriage among Aboriginal and European peoples (Innes, “Multicultural Bands”). He showed that the Cowessess First Nation comprised people from five major groups, including both “Métis” and “English Halfbreeds,” the latter a common term for descendants of Scots who had married Indian women (ibid., 123). J.M. Bumsted has asked a similar question but with respect to Scots more generally: was “Scottishness” important to the fur trade, and if so, how? His review of fur trade historiography found that historians have failed “to engage adequately the questions of the dominance of the Scots in the fur trade” (Bumsted, “Curious Tale,” 72). My first trip to Scotland was funded in part by a Short-Term Study Grant awarded in 1987 by the Canadian Museums Association; the later trips were made possible largely by a Wenner-Gren Grant-in-Aid awarded in 1989. Both trips were supported by the Royal Alberta Museum, then the Provincial Museum of Alberta, where I was curator of ethnology. In Orkney, I was fortunate to work with Bryce Wilson of the Orkney Museum Service, who was keenly aware of Orcadian involvement in the fur trade and its impact on Orkney itself and instrumental in promoting knowledge of these Hudson’s Bay Company links. In Lewis I was greatly assisted by Angus MacLennan and Richard Langhorn, both with the Museum of the Western Isles; by genealogist Bill Lawson, the director of Co Leis Thu? Genealogical Research Service for the Western Isles of Scotland; and by authors Finlay MacLeod and James Shaw Grant. Many other people in Orkney and Lewis were generous with their time and information. A good example of such interests is Rider and McNabb, eds, Kingdom of the Mind. This volume contains two chapters related to the fur trade: Bumsted, “Curious Tale”; and Oberholtzer, “Thistles in the North.” Several other chapters could have addressed Scots and the fur trade or Aboriginal people but did not do so.

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9 Shannon O’Connor has argued that “the large majority of works written about Canada’s Scottish immigrant groups … have centered on rural, rather than urban Scottish communities” (O’Connor, “Scottish-Canadian Community,” 1). That is, interest in Scottish regional differences does not extend into studies of Scots in urban areas. 10 For example, see Klepak, “Man’s a Man”; and Stack, “‘Bonnie Lassies.’” 11 Rigg, “Scots in the Hudson’s Bay Company.” 12 Interest dwindles to virtually nothing for the late nineteenth century and the twentieth century, although Scots were still being widely recruited in the twentieth century to serve in Canada as fur trade workers. Harold Innis included a chapter on “The Industrial Revolution and the Fur Trade” in his major work The Fur Trade in Canada, and in 1990 Arthur Ray published an important work, The Canadian Fur Trade in the Industrial Age. Ray noted that the Hudson’s Bay Company held a “major recruitment drive in northern Scotland,” especially in Aberdeen in 1925 (ibid., 180), but he had little else to say about Scots in the twentiethcentury fur trade. Jennifer S.H. Brown has pointed to the way that Canadian histories “still subsume the fur trade into the national saga as part of a rather highly conventionalized chronological narrative” (Brown, “Fur Trade History,” 82). Most information about the fur trade after Confederation in 1867 is found in ethnohistories of Aboriginal people and studies of northern settlements (e.g., McCormack, Fort Chipewyan; Macdougall, One of the Family). 13 Rigg, “Scots in the Hudson’s Bay Company.” 14 For example, see Clouston, “Orkney: Part 1”; Clouston, “Orkney: Part 2”; and Thomson, “Sober and Tractable?” 15 Goldring, Papers on the Labour System, vols 1–3; Goldring, “Labour Records”; Nicks, “Orkneymen in the HBC.” 16 Stephen, “Masters and Servants,” 5. 17 A terminological history of fur trade identities has yet to be done and needs to extend into developing Aboriginal identities as well. 18 There seems to be little or no commentary about fur trade workers with Lowland origins. 19 Rich, ed., Journal of Occurrences, xxxii. William Auld was educated at the University of Edinburgh and may have come from that part of Scotland (Foster, “William Auld”). His remarks suggest that he saw himself as quite a different breed of man from his Orcadian subordinates, which may have reflected not only the events of the trade but also other notions circulating in Scotland and Britain more broadly about ethnic distinctions within Scotland.

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20 Williams, Hudson’s Bay Miscellany, 108. 21 Ibid., 109. 22 Tate’s journal describes the equally tragic aftermath, in which North West Company men took the three Orcadians captive. Mowat appeared before Northwester Angus Shaw at Fort William, and all three men eventually stood trial in Montreal, the home of the North West Company. The case against Tate and Corrigal was dismissed, but Mowat was found guilty of manslaughter, was sentenced to six months in prison, and had his thumb branded (Williams, Hudson’s Bay Miscellany, 1975). 23 Rich, ed. Journal of Occurrences, 64, 130, 137, 199. Simpson may also have been moved by the popular, even romanticized, image of the Highland warrior that had emerged by the early nineteenth century (Spiers, “Highland Soldier,” 79). In a late-nineteenth-century work on “The Scot in New France,” author J.M. LeMoine drew upon a much earlier work by Francisque Michel, “Les Ecossais en France,” whose premise was that thousands of Highland Scots went to France to fight the English (LeMoine, “Scot in New France,” 15; see also 4). Thus in France, “oft’ shall we meet with the brawny descendant of Bruce and of Wallace, fearlessly brandishing dirk or claymore in the busiest part of the fray” (ibid., 4). The Scots who settled in New France (Quebec) had added new roles to that of the warrior, including fur trader, businessman, farmer, and politician, among others (ibid., 4–5). Many of the earliest Scots in Canada who came directly from Scotland were members of Scottish regiments. 24 Rich, ed., Journal of Occurrences, 91. 25 The names of the two “Half breed” men in his crew indicate their own Orkney ancestry, through their fathers. The Chipewyan name for this river was the Thlew-ee-choh (Back, Narrative of the Arctic, 316). It is now called the Back River. 26 Rich, “Robert Longmoor.” 27 Foster, “William Auld.” 28 See Brown, “Parcel of Upstart Scotchmen.” Similarly, the category of “Englishman” seems to be lacking, despite the very large number of men from England who served with the Hudson’s Bay Company. Perhaps they were considered ethnically neutral even at this early time. 29 It is more common to find the Western Isles – Inner and Outer Hebrides – grouped together, and they are frequently considered part of the Highlands. Similarly, the Lowlands and Borders are often grouped together. 30 For an early example, see Bumsted, Scots in Canada, 3. Szasz, Scots in the North American West, 24, offers a recent example.

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31 Letter to author from Alastair MacLeod, Careers Officer, Orkney Islands Council Education Department, Kirkwall, 13 May 1987. Shetlanders were also recruited, if less regularly. Because they were culturally similar to Orcadians and because I have not examined Shetland historic literature in detail, they are not considered here. 32 There is no attempt in this chapter to review the extensive literature about the histories of either Orkney or Lewis, although both are important in setting the stage for fur trade emigration and employment. See, for example, Shaw, Northern and Western Islands. The events mentioned in this chapter are those that seem to be highly significant in shaping the two regions, many of which have remained part of local historical awareness. 33 “Old Orkney Life,” 177. 34 See Towrie, “Norn – the Language of Orkney.” Many people in Orkney are aware of the persistence of elements of Norn in their daily speech and instructed me in the differences between Norn and Scots English words. 35 The term “Nor Wast / Nor’Wast” is common in Orkney literature. For example, see Thomson, History of Orkney, 214; and Wilson, Sea Haven, 31. Rupert’s Land comprised all the lands that drained into Hudson Bay, an immense northern territory that was granted by King Charles II to the newly chartered Hudson’s Bay Company in 1670. After 1821, when the Hudson’s Bay Company amalgamated with the North West Company, its charter extended to include the lands of the Mackenzie Drainage and the upper Yukon Basin. 36 Mackenzie, Book of the Lews, 4–10. The Western Isles may never have been as fully Norse-dominated as the Northern Isles, which would have facilitated the post-Norse transformation that occurred there. Today, the inhabitants of Lewis seem much less well informed about their Norse heritage than are those of Orkney, despite a plethora of Norse place names and family surnames with Norse origins. For example, the very name Macleod, the “Lords of the Isles,” has a Norse root. Lewis discourse about the inhabitants’ past and about their current identity is focused strongly on the Gaelic side of their identity. 37 Mackenzie, Book of the Lews, 55–62. 38 Shaw, Northern and Western Islands, 64–5. 39 The first emigrant ship of Scots actually set out in 1622, carrying agricultural workers bound for Nova Scotia. The ship landed in Newfoundland by accident, and most passengers never reached their original destination (Price, “Introduction,” 1). Successful voyages to Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island began in the late 1790s and early 1800s, instigated by the

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enclosures in Ross and Sutherland counties in 1791 and later (ibid., 3–4). However, most wealthy Scots went to Montreal or Quebec (ibid., 19). For example, see Campey, Unstoppable Force, 5, 21; and Harper, Adventurers and Exiles, ch. 1. Harper has pointed out that until the 1760s, most Scots emigrants were from the Lowlands (presumably including the Borders) (ibid., 18). By the 1770s the Highlands and Western Isles had become more important sources of emigrants, with many travellers leaving in large groups on chartered ships and also paying their own fares (ibid., 20). My own McCormack ancestor may have been one of these early emigrants. They were not all the destitute and desperate people who have come to dominate the stereotype of “an unwilling and self-conscious diaspora” from Scotland (ibid., 327). Campey, Unstoppable Force, 17. For example, see ibid., 18–20. Klepak, “A Man’s a Man”; Muskets of the Crown, His Majesty’s 42nd Regiment; Muskets of the Crown, His Majesty’s 77th Regiment; ElectricScotland, “Scottish Regiments”; Project Seven Years’ War, 77th Foot; Project Seven Years’ War, 78th Foot; Fraser, Old 78th Regiment. According to Edward M. Spiers, Highlanders provided 4,200 out of 24,000 British troops in North America by 1758 (Spiers, “Highland Soldier,” 77). LeMoine, “Scot in New France,” 33. Ouellet, “Simon McTavish”; Hunter, “Angus McDonald,” 5. Canadian Regiment of Fencible Infantry, His Majesty’s Canadian Regiment. “Fencible” troops were intended for home defence (Spiers “Highland Soldier,” 77). Canadian Regiment of Fencible Infantry, His Majesty’s Canadian Regiment. Calloway, White People. For example, see Innis, Fur Trade in Canada, 91–9. Hunter, “Angus McDonald,” 11. Calloway, White People, 12. It is not clear whether he has subsumed Orkneymen under the “Highlander” label; they are not singled out as a distinct group in the book. Brenda Macdougall’s carefully constructed history of interconnected family structures at Île à la Crosse, an important fur trade centre in what is now northern Saskatchewan, has demonstrated how a successful trade was predicated on a particular social organization that persisted over multiple generations. Those families can easily be said to have

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dominated the operation of the trade at that location (Macdougall, One of the Family). For example, see Goldring, Papers on the Labour System, vol. 3. At Fort Chipewyan, the early Scots-Orcadian opposition in the labour force seems to have been supplanted by a collective Scots and Scots-Métis (“Half-breed”) identity, which was defined in part by its difference from that of both French-Métis (also known as “Half-breeds”) and local Chipewyans and Crees (McCormack, Fort Chipewyan). For a brief discussion of the concept of a rababou, see McCormack, Fort Chipewyan, 279n1. Rigg, “Scots in the Hudson’s Bay Company,” 40, 49. For example, see Peterson, “Many Roads to Red River”; Nicks, “Iroquois and the Fur Trade”; Nicks and Morgan, “Grande Cache”; Devine, People Who Own Themselves; McCormack, Fort Chipewyan; McCormack, “Lost Women”; and Macdougall, One of the Family. For example, among Hudson’s Bay Company employees, it seems to have been common for an Orkney man to marry the daughter of another Orkney man and his Aboriginal wife (typically Cree or Ojibwa). For example, in 1825 William Rowland from the Orkney parish of Birsay married the daughter (Betsy Ballendine) of John Ballendine, also from Orkney, and his Cree wife (Jane Cree) (Hudson’s Bay Company Archives, “Biographical Sheets”). These social groupings reconstituted a form of Orcadian community heavily influenced by Aboriginal values and traditions. In the nineteenth century, these marriages would also be with the children of Highlanders and Lewismen and then with the children of mixed-ancestry French-Native families. Brown, “Partial Truths.” Brown, Strangers in Blood; Van Kirk, “Many Tender Ties.” McCormack, “Lost Women,” 345n30. Malchom Ross, cited in Tyrrell, ed., Journals, vol. 6, 446, 449. Brown, “Parcel of Upstart Scotchmen,” 5–6. Ibid., 7. Chapman, Gaelic Vision; Trevor-Roper, “Invention of Tradition”; Ray, Highland Heritage. For example, see Cowan, How the Scots. Brown, “Ultimate Respectability: Part 1”; Brown, “Ultimate Respectability: Part 2”; Brown, Strangers in Blood; Van Kirk, “Many Tender Ties,” 141–2; Thomas, “Fur Traders.” Thomas, “Fur Traders,” 18. McCormack, “Lost Women.” Brown, with Massan and Grant, “Christina Massan’s Beadwork.”

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72 Hudson’s Bay Company Archives, C.1/846; McCormack, “Lost Women,” 82–5. I am grateful to Spencer Field for sharing with me his information about this family, as well as inviting me to the reunion. Iain Morrison arrived in full Highland dress for the occasion. The story of his quest, including the reunion, was made into a fine documentary film, Fuil Nan Innseanach (Transatlantic Ties) (2011), available in segments on YouTube. 73 Brown, with Massan and Grant, “Christina Massan’s Beadwork,” 93. 74 I have always found the Scottish climate to be damp, cold, and often uncomfortable, which points to my personal position as a long-term inhabitant of the Canadian parkland and Subarctic regions, with which I am intimately acquainted and comfortable, albeit from a contemporary perspective. This view contrasts markedly with Suzanne Rigg’s take on the Canadian Subarctic. In her article on Scots and the fur trade, she refers to the “extremely cold sub-arctic climate,” “a geographically remote and unforgiving environment,” and “the freezing tundra” (Rigg, “Scots in the Hudson’s Bay Company,” 36, 38, 40). Ironically, the Canadian fur trade was conducted primarily in the parkland and the Subarctic, not the Arctic (tundra). These regions have their own set of summer challenges, especially swarms of biting insects and extreme heat. 75 Henry Moir’s niece recalled that his family was “amused by Henry’s complaints about the Scottish weather, as they were used to his descriptions of lengthy, bitterly cold winters and heavy snowfalls” (Brown, with Massan and Grant, “Christina Massan’s Beadwork,” 98). 76 Thomson, “Pict, Norse, Celt,” 219. 77 For example, see Cameron, “Scotland’s Global Impact,” 6–7.

B i b l i ogr ap h y Back, George. Narrative of the Arctic Land Expedition. 1836. Reprint, Edmonton, AB : Hurtig, 1970. Brown, Alison K., with Christina Massan and Alison Grant. “Christina Massan’s Beadwork and the Recovery of a Fur Trade Family History.” In Sarah Carter and Patricia A. McCormack, eds, Recollecting: Lives of Aboriginal Women of the Canadian Northwest and Borderlands, 89–111. Edmonton, AB: Athabasca University Press, 2011. Brown, Jennifer S.H. “Fur Trade History as Text and Drama.” In Patricia A. McCormack and R. Geoffrey Ironside, eds, The Uncovered Past: Roots of Northern Alberta Societies, 81–8. Edmonton, A B : Canadian Circumpolar Institute, University of Alberta, 1993. – “A Parcel of Upstart Scotchmen.” The Beaver 68, no. 1 (1988): 4–11.

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– “Partial Truths: A Closer Look at Fur Trade Marriage.” In Theodore Binnema, Gerhard J. Ens, and R.C. Macleod, eds, From Rupert’s Land to Canada, 59–80. Edmonton, AB : University of Alberta Press. – Strangers in Blood: Fur Trade Company Families in Indian Country. Vancouver, BC: U BC Press, 1980. – “Ultimate Respectability: Fur-Trade Children in the ‘Civilized World’: Part 1.” The Beaver, outfit 308 [vol. 57], no. 3 (1977): 4–10. – “Ultimate Respectability: Fur-Trade Children in the ‘Civilized World’: Part 2.” The Beaver, outfit 308 [vol. 57], no. 4 (1977): 48–55. Bumsted, J.M. “The Curious Tale of the Scots and the Fur Trade: An Historiographical Account.” In Peter E. Rider and Heather McNabb, eds, A Kingdom of the Mind: How the Scots Helped Make Canada, 60–75. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2006. – The Scots in Canada. Ottawa: Canadian Historical Association, 1982. Calloway, Colin G. White People, Indians, and Highlanders: Tribal Peoples and Colonial Encounters in Scotland and America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. Cameron, Ewen A. “Scotland’s Global Impact.” Northern Scotland 1 (2010): 3–11. Campey, Lucille H. An Unstoppable Force: The Scottish Exodus to Canada. Toronto, ON : Natural Heritage Books, 2008. Canadian Regiment of Fencible Infantry. His Majesty’s Canadian Regiment of Fencible Infantry, 1803–1816. N.d. http://www.warof1812.ca/can_ fen.htm (accessed 13 November 2011). Chapman, Malcolm. The Gaelic Vision in Scottish Culture. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1978. Clouston, J. Storer. “Orkney and the Hudson’s Bay Company: Part 1.” The Beaver, outfit 267 [vol. 16], no. 3 (1936): 4–8. – “Orkney and the Hudson’s Bay Company: Part 2.” The Beaver, outfit 267 [vol. 16], no. 4 (1937): 38–43, 62. Cowan, Paul. How the Scots Created Canada. Edmonton, A B: Dragon Hill, 2006. Devine, Heather. The People Who Own Themselves: Aboriginal Ethnogenesis in a Canadian Family, 1660–1900. Calgary, A B: University of Calgary Press, 2004. ElectricScotland. Scottish Regiments, Montgomery’s Highlanders. N.d. http://www.electricscotland.com/history/scotreg/montgomery.htm (accessed 22 October 2011). Errington, E. Jane. “Webs of Affection and Obligation: Glimpse into Families and Nineteenth Century Transatlantic Communities.” Journal of the Canadian Historical Association 19, no. 1 (2008): 1–26.

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Peake, F.A. “Abraham Cowley.” Dictionary of Canadian Biography Online. 2000. http://www.biographi.ca (accessed 19 March 2009). Peterson, Jacqueline. “Many Roads to Red River: Métis Genesis in the Great Lakes Region, 1680–1815.” In Jacqueline Peterson and Jennifer S.H. Brown, eds, The New Peoples: Being and Becoming Métis in North America, 37–71. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 1985. Price, Lynda. Introduction to the Social History of Scots in Quebec (1780– 1840). Ottawa, ON : National Museums of Canada, 1981. Project Seven Years’ War. 77th Foot. http://www.kronoskaf.com/syw/ index.php?title=77th_Foot (accessed 22 October 2011). – 78th Foot. http://www.kronoskaf.com/syw/index.php?title=78_Foot (accessed 22 October 2011). Purdey, Cheryl Ann. “Orkneymen to Rupert’s Landers: Orkney Workers in the Saskatchewan District, 1795–1830.” MA thesis, University of Alberta, 2010. Ray, Arthur J. The Canadian Fur Trade in the Industrial Age. Toronto, ON : University of Toronto Press, 1990. Ray, Celeste. Highland Heritage: Scottish Americans in the American South. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001. Rich, E.E. “Robert Longmoor.” Dictionary of Canadian Biography Online. 2000. http://www.biographi.ca/009004-119.01-e.php?&id_nbr=2508 (accessed 21 October 2011). – ed. Journal of Occurrences in the Athabasca Department by George Simpson, 1820 and 1821, and Report. Toronto, ON: Champlain Society, 1938. Rider, Peter E., and Heather McNabb, eds. A Kingdom of the Mind: How the Scots Helped Make Canada. Montreal and Kingston: McGillQueen’s University Press, 2006. Rigg, Suzanne. “Scots in the Hudson’s Bay Company, c. 1779–c. 1821.” Northern Scotland 2, no. 1 (2011): 36–59. Shaw, Frances. The Northern and Western Islands of Scotland: Their Economy and Society in the Seventeenth Century. Edinburgh: John Donald, 1980. Spiers, Edward M. “Highland Soldier: Imperial Impact and Image.” Northern Scotland ns 1, no. 1 (2010): 76–87. Stack, Eileen. “‘Bonnie Lassies’ and a ‘Coat of Many Colours’: HighlandInspired Clothing at the McCord Museum.” In Peter E. Rider and Heather McNabb, eds, A Kingdom of the Mind: How the Scots Helped Make Canada, 149–63. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2006.

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Stephen, Scott P. “Masters and Servants: The Hudson’s Bay Company and Its Personnel, 1668–1782.” PhD diss., Department of History, University of Manitoba, 2006. Szasz, Ferenc Morton. Scots in the North American West, 1790–1917. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2000. Thomas, L.G. “Fur Traders in Retirement.” The Beaver, outfit 310 [vol. 59], no. 3 (1979): 14–21. Thomson, William P.L. History of Orkney. Edinburgh: Mercat, 1987. – “Pict, Norse, Celt, and Lowland Scot – a Thousand Years in the Melting Pot.” In R.J. Berry and H.N. Firth, eds, The People of Orkney, 209–24. Kirkwall, Orkney: Orkney Press, 1986. – “Sober and Tractable? The Hudson’s Bay Men in Their Orkney Context.” Scottish Local History 28 (1993): 22–4. Towrie, Sigurd. “Norn – the Language of Orkney.” 1996–2012. http:// www.orkneyjar.com/orkney/norn.htm (accessed 25 July 2012). Trevor-Roper, Hugh. “The Invention of Tradition: The Highland Tradition of Scotland.” In Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds, The Invention of Tradition, 15–41. Cambridge, UK : Cambridge University Press, 1983. Tyrrell, J.B., ed. Journals of Samuel Hearne and Philip Turnor, 1774–92. Vol. 6. Toronto, ON : Champlain Society, 1934. Van Kirk, Sylvia. “Many Tender Ties”: Women in Fur-Trade Society, 1670–1870. Winnipeg, M B : Watson and Dwyer, 1980. Williams, Glyndwr. Hudson’s Bay Miscellany, 1670–1870. Vol. 30. Winnipeg, M B : Hudson’s Bay Record Society, 1975. Wilson, Bryce. Sea Haven: Stromness in the Orkney Islands. Kirkwall, Orkney: Orkney Press, 1992.

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12 The Fur Traders’ Garden: Horticultural Imperialism in Rupert’s Land, 1670–1770 Beverly Soloway

Your husbandry in gardening is very satisfactory to us & desire you still to make what improvement you can, which will not onely helpe to save provisions but is alsoe healthful to those that inhabit with you.1

In 1670 the directors of the newly formed Hudson’s Bay Company (HB C ) gathered in London to plan their new venture in Rupert’s Land, thousands of miles away, across the Atlantic Ocean. The Company Charter, granted by King Charles II to Prince Rupert and his seventeen fellow investors, included the “provisions of victuals.”2 The directors assumed that the need to provide food for the men living and working in Rupert’s Land would be temporary, as the region had a substantial supply of fish, fowl, and game. The 1670 outfitting of the Rupert’s Land venture was similar to that undertaken for the Carolina Colony started by several of the HB C directors in 1669.3 In both instances, the principals felt that shipping food from England was a short-term endeavour that would end when the trading post (or colony) became self-sufficient.4 Thus grains and dried vegetables such as peas and beans were included on the annual resupply ships from England. Once the trading post gardens were established, edible plant foods would be readily available. The gardens, of course, would be similar to colonial enterprises elsewhere in the British Empire. The H BC governors looked at

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the example of Carolina, where, despite early difficulties adapting to gardening in America, the colonists had some measure of success.5 In Carolina some early gardens, such as that of Sir John Yeamans, exceeded expectation, raising enough food for his family and slaves as well as a surplus that Yeamans was able to sell in Barbados at a profit.6 It was hoped that the Rupert’s Land venture would be prolific enough to provide food for the fur traders, as well as outfitting the fur-laden ships returning to England with fresh produce for the long voyage. The Hudson’s Bay Company constructed seven fur trade posts along the shores of Hudson and James Bays during the first 100 years of the company’s existence. These were their only posts until the 1770s inland expansion. Examining the post gardens demonstrates that the horticultural enterprise of the HBC created changes to the physical and cultural environment of the fur trade posts on the shores of Hudson and James Bays. Furthermore, it suggests that the Scots fur traders employed by the HBC introduced the Indigenous people of the Canadian Subarctic (the Cree, or Muskekowuck) to the idea of planted food resources.7 This began a process that would eventually end Muskekowuck dependency on gathered vegetation. Horticultural imperialism also changed the physical environment around the fur trade posts and forts, further affecting the Muskekowuck people. The H B C men arrived at the fur trade posts with habits and expectations based on their home cultures. The H BC governors who remained in England were part of the British aristocracy. The company employees bound for Rupert’s Land were originally Englishmen. By the turn of the eighteenth century, however, these workers were predominantly of Scottish descent. The bulk of these trading post employees were from the Orkney Islands off Scotland’s northern coast. The company considered the Orkneymen to be ideal workers. The English governors assumed that an Orkney Island ethnic and geographical heritage entailed experience with hard work and living in a harsh environment.8 By 1702 the Orkney Island village of Stromness had become the H B C’s main recruiting ground. At the end of the century, more than three-quarters of the 530 H BC men working in Rupert’s Land were Orcadians.9 The non-Orcadians included the overseas governor and the factors, who were of English or mainland-Scottish descent but (supposedly) of no specific social class.10 It can be assumed, however, that these men were from a higher social stratum, as the writing and mathematical ability achieved through

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an early-modern education was required for the job. Understanding the class and ethnicity distinctions is important in the study of the HB C gardens in Rupert’s Land, as each group brought a different expectation to the venture, dependent on its members’ cultural, and horticultural, heritage. For the H B C -employed Scots fur traders arriving in Rupert’s Land at the end of the seventeenth century as well as in the eighteenth century, plant foods were part of the Scottish daily diet. There was, however, a substantial difference in the food consumed by the wealthy landowners and that of the tenant farmers and crofters.11 Landowners had more opportunity for meat in their diet than did tenant and crofter families, who relied upon cereal grains and vegetables for sustenance. All Scots, whether laird or labourer, expected their greens and roots to be grown or gathered, not purchased from the market.12 Stana Nenadic notes how the Scots, like most eighteenth-century people, spent much of their time procuring the necessities of life: “In 1700 … most foodstuffs were grown and consumed locally, often exchanged with neighbours for other commodities or as payment for work, with only limited commercial purchase through markets and fairs.”13 Each region had its own range of seasonal foods that included cultivated as well as collected plant foods. People used their ingenuity and resourcefulness to create the best meals from what was available, including foraged vegetation.14 In examining the role of vegetables and the kitchen garden in the diet of the early Rupert’s Land fur traders, it is necessary to remember that in their homelands, everyone ate some vegetables on a daily basis.

G a r d e n in g in R upert’s Land For the men who arrived in Rupert’s Land during the early years of the HB C venture, plant foods, both cultivated and gathered, were already part of their diet. The choice of produce to be planted in the trading post gardens depended on the seeds sent by the H BC as part of the annual provisions. A variety of seeds were sent each year, including carrots, onions, mustard, turnips, lettuce, spinach, kidney beans, cabbage, radish, corn, peas, and colewort. The 1725 manifest for the supplies of the post at Prince of Wales Fort (Churchill) included “3 ½ lbs. Garden seeds: vizt. 2 lbs turnip, 1 lb. radish, ¼  lb. rousia collert [Russian colewart], ¼  lb. lettuce seed.”15 The

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HB C governors in London selected the seeds destined for Rupert’s Land. The company understood the difficulty of gardening in an unknown landscape and realized that it would take some experimenting to discover which crops and methods would be best. In a 1680 letter to John Nixon at Albany Fort, the London-based directors advised, “Wee have now sent you severall sorts of seeds wch you will find in the Invoice as wee have formerly done to enable you to make Experiments.”16 The choice of seeds was based on two factors. First, it was initially assumed that because the forts were on the same latitude as Britain, the climate would be similar. The second factor was the cost of purchasing the seeds. The thrifty H B C governors chose the least expensive they could obtain. As a result, seed viability was often questionable. It was not unusual for the post factors to supplement the H B C seed with packages of seed sent from personal acquaintances at home. On some occasions, the posts in Rupert’s Land requested specific seeds as part of their required provision for the following year.17 Nonetheless, the decision on the quantity and quality of seed rested with the H B C ’s London office. Gardening in Rupert’s Land involved understanding a landscape that was new to the H B C men who took up residency in the Subarctic. The cold waters of Hudson and James Bays influence the climate of the region, creating a Subarctic environment quite unlike that of England and Scotland.18 Winters are long and cold, whereas summers are short and warm. Last frost dates often occur in June, with the first autumn frost occurring in late August or September. Annual precipitation is moderate.19 Successful gardening also depends upon the soil. The landscape of the early H B C posts challenged the attempts of the gardening fur traders. Pockets of permafrost are prevalent throughout the region. There are also numerous surface water sites ranging from streams and lakes to wetlands as well as tidal habitats. Soils tend to be a mixture of silt and clay and are often waterlogged and composed of organic matter.20 Among the first tasks undertaken in the construction of a new fur trade post was the digging of the garden. After the first group of H BC fur traders landed at the mouth of the Rupert River in the summer of 1670 and built their trading post and home, a garden was dug in preparation for spring planting. In March and April of 1671, peas

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and mustard were planted. The traders managed an early harvest before setting out for the return voyage to England.21 As each of the posts was created, garden seeds were considered an essential part of the supplies. Henry Sergeant was provided with gardening instructions for the start-up of Albany Fort in 1683: “We have furnished you wth severall sorts of seeds & graynes & will continue to doe soe from yeare to yeare & shall thinke it a very meritorious worke if you effectually prosecute it.”22 In the late 1700s, Scotsman Andrew Graham wrote about his twenty-six years with the HB C at posts in Fort Severn, York Factory, and Prince of Wales Fort. He noted the success of the fur traders’ gardens: “We have gardens round the Factories, which by care and manuring turn out very well, particularly on the south side, but it is in the month of June before the ground is thawed sufficient for digging and sowing. They produce excellent lettuce, cresses, radishes, onions, spinach, coleworts, turnips, pease, beans. Parsley, purslane, celery, carrots, parsnips, and several others kinds of seed are sown annually but with very little success.”23 Graham noted that in the spring the dandelions had “grown pretty luxuriant, made most excellent salad to our roast geese.”24 His discussions on the post diets included references to enjoying the radish crop, boiling the young turnip green tops, and eating a fine crop of lettuce.25 Indigenous vegetation on the shores of Hudson and James Bays differs according to region. Arctic tundra vegetation characterizes those regions closest to the Hudson Bay coast, whereas a closecanopied boreal forest dominates the more southern James Bay coast.26 Indigenous plants include a variety of trees, shrubs, and grass as well as mosses, lichens, berries, and other vegetation.27 The H B C employees were aware of the plant life surrounding their posts as well as the contribution it made to their diet. Joseph Robson, supervisor of building at the H B C post at York Factory, noted the indigenous vegetation in his early eighteenth-century report to the company: “There are gooseberries and black and red currants growing near the sea … those that I have seen grow so low that the grass covers them. Blackberries also grow upon the heath.”28 Andrew Graham, in addition to his role as an H B C employee, was interested in the botany of Rupert’s Land. He kept lists of the plants he encountered, including those noted in the following: “We have also wild tansy, mustard, celery, rosemary, thyme, white and blue

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violets, chickweed, angelica, different kinds of sorrel, Lady’s mantle, dandelion, a small kind of fern, scallions (i.e. a small kind of leeks), coltsfoot, nettles, borage, and infinite number of others whose names and virtues are unknown for want of a skilful botanist.”29 In the 1670s burdock was harvested by the H B C for shipment to England.30 The burdock root was a most prized addition to the diet and was said to taste like asparagus.31 If the H B C was shipping burdock back to England, it may also have been gathered for use in the trading post kitchens.

A b o r ig in a l P l a nt Foods Whereas grown and gathered plants were an expected part of the British diet, at the time of contact Aboriginal people residing throughout the Hudson Bay Lowlands used both hunting and gathering to provide sustenance.32 There were differences, however, between the British and Aboriginal ideology of vegetation as food. The Lowland Cree (or Muskekowuck), similar to other Aboriginal peoples, did not delineate between plants for sustenance and plants for medicine.33 Although many British people shared this ideology, by the end of the seventeenth century, contemporary Britons had begun the shift to socially constructing food and medicine as two separate entities, an idea found in present-day society.34 Documentation of the regional plants and their uses by Aboriginal people is scarce. Some vegetation, such as rock tripe, juniper, tamarack, wild onions, cattails, fireweed, and willow, has been documented as specifically being used by the Lowland Cree.35 The lack of  documentation regarding food gathering in the Hudson Plains region does not mean a lack of occurrence; instead, it indicates a lack of source material. Botanical sources list plants such as wild celery (angelica) as growing along the Hudson Bay coast.36 Therefore, when resources such as Harriet Kuhnlein and Nancy Turner’s Traditional Plant Foods of Canadian Indigenous Peoples list this plant as a favourite food of Aboriginal people across the Canadian, American, and Russian north, one can surmise that although the Hudson Plains people were not mentioned by name, they would be included.37 Angelica is also found growing wild in Orkney and has specifically been located in Stromness. We can surmise that HBC men arriving from Orkney would recognize the plant and its dietary uses.38 A wide range of edible wild plants that

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are found along the coasts of Hudson and James Bays are also found in Scotland. These include bracken, allium, and knotweed. Others, such as lambs quarter and dandelions, are found in Scotland yet are not native to the Hudson Bay region, although they are counted in a twentieth-century botanical survey.39 Kuhnlein and Turner collected information on approximately 1,050 species of Canadian plants identified as edible.40 Because our knowledge of the ethnic uses of Canadian edible plants is incomplete, they made the supposition that if a particular species had edible parts, Indigenous peoples would have used them. The “traditional plant foods” they investigated were derived from the natural environment and were used in traditional Aboriginal culture prior to Anglo-European contact.41 We can conclude, therefore, that as the fur traders depended on Aboriginal knowledge to help them survive in their new environment, knowledge of edible plant life along the coasts of Hudson and James Bays would also have been shared between Aboriginal people and HB C men. Unfortunately, the role of gathering was often overlooked by the fur traders recording sustenance activities during the first century on the bays and by historians examining the role of diet in early fur trade history. This is not unique to Rupert’s Land history. Scots historians have likewise assumed that without physical evidence of gathered food resources, little vegetative foraging took place – although Alexander Fenton has noted that this assumption is now being questioned.42 As the Muskekowuck supplying the trading posts with country provisions were often given food from the posts, they were aware of the planted garden as a source of food. Evidence of this knowledge comes from the writings of James Isham, who joined the H BC in 1732. Isham kept a list of “English and Indian” words, including several that reflect cultivated produce. “Sallet or Herbs” was translated as musk ko she can.43 “Pease” became ha ra che me nuck, and turnip was written as u’ta she gan. A “Reddish” (raddish) was u’scot ta scan uc, and “collowarts or lettice” became mus co she min.44 By the end of the eighteenth century, the Muskekowuck were allowed to glean potatoes and barley from the H BC post gardens. Additionally, some were used as garden labourers at fur trade posts. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the H BC trading post journals refer to Cree gardens north of The Pas, Manitoba, and throughout Rupert’s Land.45

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H o rt ic u lt u r a l Im peri ali s m In examining horticultural imperialism in Rupert’s Land, it is important to recognize that the Orkney fur traders had more success with gardening in the Canadian Subarctic than previously assumed. Historical accounts of the fur traders’ horticultural efforts suggest that the inclement climate contributed to a lack of garden success and a lack of vegetables in the H B C Orkneymen’s diet. It must be noted, however, that there is a difference between early-modern and contemporary gardening and vegetable consumption. The success of the H B C fur traders’ gardens introduced the Indigenous huntergatherer population to a method of achieving a sustainable food supply in a permanent location. There are two additional points to be considered in the historical analysis of the fur traders’ gardens. First, in the early-modern period, British (including Scottish) gardening was a year-round endeavour focusing on the entire plant from ground preparation through to seed harvest. The gardening process included planning for the next season of planting by sowing enough seed to ensure a crop of plantable seeds as well as edible vegetables. In Orkney one farmer grew turnips for winter animal feed as well as for his family. He also grew his own seed, and when the turnip seed crop was good, he sold the excess. Once the turnip plants had produced seed, the tops were cut and threshed by “being shaken on a large canvas sheet.”46 Thus in 1739 when Richard Stanton at Moose Factory on James Bay wrote, “as for pease and beans they grow and pods very well to eat when green and young, but never ripens but rots in the pod,” he was discussing the making of seeds rather than using “ripen” in today’s sense of “ready to eat.”47 The second point in this aspect of the Orkney fur traders’ gardens involves our understanding of eighteenth-century kitchen gardening and the consumption of produce. It was not until the mid-nineteenth century that people began to garden for specific parts of the plant, much as we do today. People in the early-modern period took it for granted that all parts of a plant were edible and ate the roots, the stalks, the leaves, the flowers, and the seeds.48 For example, when we plant radishes today, we await the little round, red root that we will consume as a cold salad vegetable or perhaps as an edible garnish. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, radishes were planted, and the harvest began with the first shoots of green. The root was eaten,

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but so were the leaves and the flowers. A portion of the radish crop was allowed to go to seed, providing seeds for planting next spring, as well as yielding a seed-grain that could be added to breads.49 In Orkney tending the kail in plantiecrues included eating the stronger seedlings as they emerged and allowing the weaker plants to develop more before it was time to transplant them into the kailyards.50 A primary difference between horticulture then and now is the definition of a successful garden. By contemporary standards, the  consumption of a specific part of a plant constitutes garden success. In the eighteenth century, a successful garden meant a succession of foods from the plant as it passed through the various phases of growth and a healthy harvest of seed for the following season.51 What was problematic for the fur trader gardeners in Rupert’s Land was that the whole gardening process often could not be carried out. This did not mean the fur trading posts lacked vegetable production. The assumption that fur traders had a minimal consumption of produce is based on the use of trading post journals in the analysis of garden history. Historians have commented on the role of gardening at the HB C fur trade post, analyzing trading post journal entries.52 These historians, among others, argue that the climate of the Hudson Plains meant gardening was not successful. These analyses are based on limited discussions regarding gardens in the trading post journals. There are three primary reasons for the dearth of vegetable and garden discussion in the journals. First, the journals were not personal records of how the HB C men passed their time or what their interests were. These journals were documents of record for the company’s directors and shareholders in London. As such, they were evidence that the fur traders and company servants had the H BC ’s best interests at heart and were undertaking business activities on the company’s behalf. Second, the food discussions in the journals focus quite heavily on the large number of wild fowl, game, and fish that the post received from Aboriginal hunters. In part, this is because of the prolific availability of these wild foodstuffs in comparison to the same items in Scotland and England. It is also because receiving this wild game was part of the trade process at the posts. The post factor (or his clerk) recorded a trade process with the Muskekowuck at the posts whereby the Muskekowuck hunters gave the post fowl, fish, and

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game in exchange for provisions (food imported from Britain) or ammunition for their guns. Thus the H BC factor was responsible for tracking those provisions that were paid for and shipped to Rupert’s Land by the H B C. Because the journals focus strongly on game and minimally on plant foods, historians have assumed that those residing at the posts seldom consumed vegetables. The third issue is in regards to the minimal reference to kitchen gardening in the trading post journals. This can be attributed to a factor other than climate: the role of the kitchen garden is such an ordinary and mundane part of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century life that it receives slight recognition. Food historian Joan Thirsk acknowledges this in the course of her research into food in earlymodern England, stating that “common folk ate greenstuff so regularly that it rarely attracted comment.”53 Likewise, Stana Nenadic noticed this trend in examining household accounts in Scotland: “Oatmeal was so ubiquitous that is was not even mentioned in household accounts … there is no record of oatmeal being consumed, though this would have appeared in some form at virtually every meal.”54 The HB C fur trade journals thus follow a common pattern of paying little attention to the ordinary, mundane, and ubiquitous events of daily life. When kitchen gardening is mentioned, it is usually at the bottom of the list of assignments that were given to the men at the post. The journal will note “the rest of our people digging the garden.”55 Other chores of daily living such as digging latrines, doing laundry, washing dishes, or cooking food are seldom mentioned. As a result, we do not read about the vegetables the cook picked from the garden or took from the preserved provisions. This does not mean that the activities did not occur but rather that they were not part of the trade economy or that the journal writer considered them too mundane or unimportant to record. Despite changes in the human diet from the seventeenth century to today, current research indicates that the H BC men in Rupert’s Land did not live on game alone. The company gardens changed the physical environment of the Hudson Bay Lowlands. First, they changed the physical landscape. The trading post gardens were quite extensive, with large sections of land being cleared of all plants and forest materials, including edible, indigenous vegetation. This left the soil exposed, allowing chosen crops to be planted as well as allowing unplanted (or weed-plants) to grow. Throughout the eighteenth century, many of these plants

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were gathered and eaten by the fur traders in addition to the planted produce. The indigenous unplanted vegetation was allowed to go to seed in the same manner as planted vegetation in order to assure a continuous supply. Some of these alien plants found the Canadian Subarctic to be a comfortable new home. Using animal manure for soil improvement also allowed undigested seeds from indigenous and nonindigenous plants to prosper. Nonindigenous plants were introduced to North America in  a variety of ways in addition to being purposefully planted. Numerous unplanned-for seeds were unintentionally included as contaminants with vegetable seeds. Other nonindigenous seeds arrived in the New World clinging to farm implements as packing material and to livestock as on-board feed for animals being transplanted by ship.56 The most recent study (1976–80) into the plant life in the Hudson Bay Lowland not only tabulated the vegetation currently present but also included a list of seventy-one non-native species widely introduced into the region.57 Included in this list are several species that were part of the H B C gardens. Dandelions, nettles, mustard, and flax were all garden plants brought to the fur trade posts by the H BC .58 Of the seventy-one known human-introduced plants, approximately 85 per cent have British origins. The remainder are migrants from other parts of North America.59 A second change to the physical landscape through Scottish gardening methods affected the existing soil composition. For the Orkneymen who came from an ancient agrarian culture, soil improvement methodologies were understood and encouraged. Rotting materials, animal manure, and scavenged seaweed were commonly used to improve Orkney kailyards.60 Composting was a part of the gardening process. The Orkneymen gardening in Rupert’s Land maintained compost piles using the same ingredients as gardeners back home. Additionally, as many of the posts had farm animals, their manure was valued as a garden additive. The need to improve the soil was stressed in correspondence from the HBC offices in Britain. For example, a 1693 letter from the HBC offices in London to James Knight, the governor at York Factory, explicitly instructed him to be sure to use “rich mould that has layne fallow.”61 Removing the natural turf and supplementing the garden soil altered the landscape to accommodate the HBC-selected array of cultivated plant foods with a variety of European heritages instead of indigenous vegetation.

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Horticultural imperialism in the Hudson Bay Lowlands also involved changes to the cultural environment of the Indigenous people. Before contact, Indigenous people in the Hudson Bay Lowlands relied upon gathering to supplement their hunted diet with vegetation-based nutrients. They used locally found seaweeds, berries, greens, and other vegetation. With the arrival of the H BC, Aboriginal people were introduced to the use of planted rather than gathered vegetables. This in turn changed the meaning of space. As vegetable gardens became increasingly important to the H BC, the land surrounding the posts became less valuable as a seasonal residence for the Aboriginal community. The space was reserved for fur traders’ gardens, not for Muskekowuck people to reside upon when they brought furs and country provisions to the posts. Moreover, Aboriginals were not given free access to the HBC vegetables, which were grown to supplement the trading post employees’ diet, not that of the Indigenous people. To a community used to unhampered access to natural food sources, the idea of food “ownership” could create cultural misunderstandings. The introduction of planted vegetable foods also changed the traditional Aboriginal belief system, replacing it with a socially constructed, European-based ideological emphasis on food as being separate from medicine.

C o n c l u s i on The vegetable garden produced alterations to the Muskekowuck diet and culture. Indigenous populations that once depended on gathering as a means of food diversity became increasingly dependent on a limited variety and supply of planted food crops. The H BC fur traders along with the Muskekowuck people living in Rupert’s Land gradually lost their food-gathering cultures. Both communities, however, learned new ways to survive in the Canadian Subarctic based on eighteenth-century Scottish horticultural knowledge.

Not e s This chapter is an expanded version of a paper presented at the R IISS Diaspora Conference: Irish and Scots Encounters with Indigenous Peoples, University of Guelph / University of Toronto, June 2010.

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1 Letter from Hudson’s Bay Company Director to Hudson’s Bay Company Governor James Knight at York Factory, May 1696, in Rich, ed., CopyBooke of Letters, 271. 2 Newman, Company of Adventurers, 175. 3 H B C principal “adventurers” (stockholders) Sir George Carteret, Anthony Ashley Cooper (Lord Ashley, Earl of Shaftesbury), George Monck (Duke of Albemarle), Sir William Craven (Earl of Craven), and Sir Peter Colleton (son of Carolina founder Sir John Colleton) were the lord proprietors of the Carolina Colony (later North and South Carolina) as well as partners in other colonial trade ventures. See Edgar, South Carolina, 38–9. 4 Ibid., 132. 5 Ibid. 6 Ibid. 7 Other aspects of material culture were also influenced by Scots fur traders and their connections to plants. For example, see Oberholtzer, “Thistles in the North.” Cath Oberholtzer examines the nineteenth-century introduction of the thistle to Cree beadwork. This chapter, however, restricts its examination to the role of gardens in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. 8 Newman, Company of Adventurers, 175. 9 Ibid., 176. 10 Ibid., 8. 11 Brown, Feeding Scotland, 6. 12 Thirsk, Food in Early Modern England, xiii. 13 Nenadic, “Necessities,” 137. 14 Thirsk, Food in Early Modern England, 226. 15 Davies, ed., Letters from Hudson Bay, 106. 16 Letter to Governor Nixon from London, 21 May 1680, signed by Rupert, J.A. Hayes, Chr Wren, Will. Yonge, Henry Meese, John Letten, Gerrard Weymans, Rich Cradocke, and Thomas Phipps, in Rich, ed., Copy-Booke of Letters, 9. 17 Davies, ed., Letters from Hudson Bay, 190. 18 Freedman, Environmental Science, 117. 19 Parks Canada, “Hudson Plains Ecozone.” 20 Natural Resources Canada, “Permafrost.” 21 Rich, ed., Hudson’s Bay Company, 67, 109. 22 Letter to Governor Henry Sergeant from London – By the Command of his Royal Highness the Duke of York Governor and the Committee of the said Company, Onesiphorus Albin, Secretary, in Rich, ed., Copy-Booke of Letters, 77.

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Graham, Observations, 134. Ibid. Ibid. Bernhardt, “Hudson Plains.” Freedman, Environmental Science, 117–18. Robson, Account of Six Years Residence, 42. Graham, Observations, 132. James V. Chism, Curator of Archaeology, Waskaganish Cultural Institute, Waskaganish, Quebec, personal correspondence with author, 2 May 2010. Thirsk, Food in Early Modern England, 31. Lytwyn, Muskekowuck Athinuwick, 5. Kuhnlein and Turner, Traditional Plant Foods, 1. Thirsk, Food in Early Modern England, 287. 35 Kuhnlein and Turner, Traditional Plant Foods, 35–170. Marles et al. Aboriginal Plant Use, 103–4. Kuhnlein and Turner, Traditional Plant Foods, 73. Spence, Flora Orcadenis, 29 Riley, Flora of the Hudson, 69–70. Ibid., 2. Ibid., 3. Fenton, Food of the Scots, 63. James Isham, Observations, 15. Ibid., 25–6. Thistle, Indian-European Trade, 82. Fenton, Northern Isles, 414. Davies, ed., Letters from Hudson Bay, 304–5. Wilson, Food and Drink, 234. Ibid. Fenton, Northern Isles, 104. Ibid. Francis and Morantz, Partners in Furs, 81; Moodie, “Gardening on Hudson Bay”; Payne, Most Respectable Place, 136. Thirsk, Food in Early Modern England, 285. Nenadic, “Necessities,” 139. Journal of Transactions at York Factory, 7 May 1743, Hudson’s Bay Company Archives, microfilm B.239/a/25. Evans, War on Weeds, 8. Riley, Flora of the Hudson, 70. Ibid., 69. Ibid., 72.

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60 Fenton, Northern Isles, 276. 61 Clark et al., “Letter to Governor Knight,” 208–9.

B i b l i ogr ap h y Bailey, Patrick. Orkney. Devon: David and Charles, 1995. Bernhardt, Torster. “Hudson Plains.” N.d. The Canadian Biodiversity Website. http://canadianbiodiversity.mcgill.ca/english/ecozones/hudsonplains/hudsonplains.htm (accessed 21 April 2010). Brown, Catherine. Broths to Bannocks: Cooking in Scotland, 1690 to the Present Day. London: John Murray, 1990. – Feeding Scotland. Edinburgh: National Museums of Scotland, 1996. Butler, Sally A. “Gardens.” In Susan Storrier, ed., Scotland’s Domestic Life, 400–17. Edinburgh: John Donald, 2006. Cahill, Hugh. “Book of the Month.” N.d. http://www.kcl.ac.uk/depsta/iss/ library/speccoll/bomarch/bomapril05.html (accessed 21 April 2010). Clark, Samuell, et al. “Letter to Governor Knight, 1693.” In E.E. Rich, ed., Hudson’s Bay Copy Booke of Letters, Commissions, Instructions Outward, 1688–1696, 208–9. London: Hudson’s Bay Record Society, 1957. Coles, William. The Art of Simpling: An Introduction to the Knowledge and Gathering of Plants. 1656. Reprint, Pomeroy, WA: Health Research Books, 2001. Davies, K.G., ed. Letters from Hudson Bay, 1703–40. London: Hudson’s Bay Record Society, 1965. Edgar, Walter. South Carolina: A History. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1998. Evans, Clinton L. The War on Weeds in the Prairie West. Calgary, A B: University of Calgary Press, 2002. Fenton, Alexander. The Food of the Scots. Edinburgh: John Donald, 2007. – The Northern Isles: Orkney and Shetland. Edinburgh: John Donald, 1978. Francis, Daniel, and Toby Morantz. Partners in Furs: A History of the Fur Trade in Eastern James Bay, 1600–1870. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1983. Freedman, Bill. Environmental Science: A Canadian Perspective. Toronto: Pearson Education, 2004. Graham, Andrew. Observations on Hudson’s Bay, 1767–1791. Ed. Glyndwr Williams. London: Hudson’s Bay Record Society, 1969.

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Isham, James. Observations on Hudson’s Bay, 1743. Ed. E.E. Rich. Toronto, O N : Champlain Society, 1949. Kuhnlein, Harriet V., and Nancy J. Turner. Traditional Plant Foods of Indigenous Peoples: Nutrition, Botany, and Use. Philadelphia, PA: Gordon and Breach, 1991. Laws, Bill. Spade, Skirret and Parsnip: The Curious History of Vegetables. Stroud, UK: Sutton, 2004. Lytwyn, Victor P. Muskekowuck Athinuwick: Original People of the Great Swampy Land. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2002. Marles, Robin J., et al. Aboriginal Plant Use in Canada’s Northwest Boreal Forest. Edmonton, AB: Natural Resources Canada, 2008. Moodie, D.W. “Gardening on Hudson Bay: The First Century.” The Beaver 309, no. 1 (Summer 1978): 54–9. Natural Resources Canada. “Permafrost.” N.d. http://gsc.nrcan.gc.a/ permafrost/wheredoes_e.php (accessed 21 April 2010). Nenadic, Stana. “Necessities: Food and Clothing in the Long Eighteenth Century.” In Elizabeth Foyster and Christopher A. Whatley, eds, A History of Everyday Life in Scotland, 1600 to 1800, 136–63. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011. Newman, Peter C. Company of Adventurers. Vol. 1. Markham, ON: Penguin, 1985. Oberholtzer, Cath. “Thistles in the North: The Direct and Indirect Scottish Influence on James Bay Material Culture.” In Peter E. Rider and Heather McNabb, eds, A Kingdom of the Mind: How the Scots Helped Make Canada, 99–121. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2006. Parkinson, John. Paradisi In Sol Paradisus Terrestris. 1629. Reprint, Charleston, S C: Proquest EEBO Editions and Bibliolife, 2010. Parks Canada. “Hudson Plains Ecozone.” N.d. http://www.pc.gc.ca/ apprendre-learn/prof/itm2-crp-trc/htm/ecozone_e.asp (accessed 21 April 2010). Payne, Michael. The Most Respectable Place in the Territory: Everyday Life in Hudson’s Bay Company Service York Factory, 1788 to 1870. Ottawa, ON : National Historic Parks and Sites, Canadian Parks Service, and Environment Canada, 1989. Reid, John. The Scots Gard’ner: Together with The Gard’ners Kalendar. 1683. Reprint, Whitefish, M T : Kessinger, 2008. Rich, E.E., ed. Copy-Booke of Letters Outward, 1679–1694. Toronto, ON: Champlain Society, 1948.

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– ed. Hudson’s Bay Copy Booke of Letters, Commissions, Instructions Outward, 1688–1696. London: Hudson’s Bay Record Society, 1957. Riley, John L. Flora of the Hudson Bay Lowland and Its Postglacial Origins. Ottawa, ON : N RC Research Press, 2003. Robertson, Forbes W. Early Scottish Gardeners and Their Plants, 1650– 1750. East Lothian: Tuckwell, 2000. Robertson, Una A. “Food.” In Susan Storrier, ed. Scotland’s Domestic Life, 418–39. Edinburgh: John Donald, 2006. Robson, Joseph. An Account of Six Years Residence in Hudson’s Bay: From 1733 to 1736 and 1744 to 1747. Toronto, ON: S.R. Publishers, 1965. Schiebinger, Londa. Plants and Empire: Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World. Cambridge, M A: Harvard University Press, 2004. Shaw, Frances J. The Northern and Western Isles of Scotland: Their Economy and Society in the Seventeenth Century. Edinburgh: John Donald, 2003. Spence, Magnus. Flora Orcadensis. Kirkwall: D. Spence, 1914. Thirsk, Joan. Food in Early Modern England: Phases, Fads, Fashions, 1500–1760. London: Hambledon Continuum, 2006. Thistle, Paul C. Indian-European Trade Relations in the Lower Saskatchewan River Region to 1840. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 1986. Wickham-Jones, Caroline. Orkney: A Historical Guide. Edinburgh: Birlinn, 1998. Wilson, C. Anne. Food and Drink in Britain: From the Stone Age to Recent Times. Middlesex: Penguin, 1973.

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13 Arctic Encounters: Twentieth-Century Scots in the Hudson’s Bay Company Marjory Harper

“I had the time of my life. It was the best thing I ever did. I learned to look after myself; how to sort of drive a dog team; how to sort of fly an aeroplane; how to help pull teeth. I learned all sorts of things that you’d never do nowadays … Tremendous fun.”1 The sheer excitement of an Arctic sojourn in the life of a young Scot is clearly reflected in this extract from the testimony of Angus Pelham Burn, who in the 1950s spent seven years in the employment of the Hudson’s Bay Company (HB C ) before coming back to Scotland to pursue a career as a farmer, banker, company director and vice lord lieutenant of the county of Kincardine. Angus did not learn these new skills unaided. Throughout his time with the H BC, he – like many of his countrymen – benefited enormously from the support and friendship of his Cree and Ojibwa neighbours and workmates. Angus Pelham Burn, and some of those alongside whom he worked, will reappear a little later in this survey of the exploits of Scottish fur traders in the twentieth century. By that time, Scots had been involved with the Arctic fur trade for more than 300 years, early on becoming its backbone at all levels of operation. Their exploits in the nineteenth century are particularly well known, initially because of the final eruption of the conflict between the North West Company and the Hudson’s Bay Company, which in 1821 secured the latter’s monopoly following what was effectively a

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Scottish civil war enacted on Canadian soil. Thereafter, the visibility of Scots in the HB C ’s service was maintained by individuals such as Governor George Simpson from Ullapool in Wester Ross, the socalled “Little Emperor of the Plains,” and Donald Smith from Forres in Morayshire. Elevated to the peerage in 1897 as Lord Strathcona and Mount Royal, Smith was governor of the company from 1889 until his death in 1914. He was also heavily involved in Manitoban business and politics, helped to finance the construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway, and served as Canadian high commissioner to Britain from 1896 until his death.2 At the same time, the high-profile work of men like Simpson and Smith was underpinned by battalions of anonymous Scottish factors and labourers who kept open the arteries of the fur trade throughout the Canadian North. Although Scottish participation was most evident – and dominant – in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Hudson’s Bay Company continued to recruit Scots well into the 1960s. It is on the expectations, impressions, and legacies of some of these latter-day fur traders that this survey focuses, encompassing their motives and ambitions, the objectives and strategies of those who recruited them, their experiences of life in the North, and their encounters with Indigenous peoples. It is based primarily on personal correspondence and interviews with former fur traders and their relatives, supplemented by documentary sources and facilitated by an ongoing project on Scots and Aboriginal Peoples in the Canadian Fur Trade developed by anthropologists at the University of Aberdeen.3

T h e R e c ru it m e nt Process The image conjured up by the HB C ’s recruitment strategy is probably primarily that of Orcadian labourers signing on at Stromness when the outgoing ships made their last port of call before heading across the Atlantic. The company had formalized the recruitment process as early as 1791, when it hired an agent, David Geddes, to be stationed permanently at Stromness, and the fashion for Arctic enlistment was well documented – not always entirely favourably – in contemporary sources such as the Statistical Account of Scotland. The minister of Orphir in particular vented his spleen against the hordes of young men who were lured by the promise of £6 a year to “hire themselves out for slaves in a savage land,” often returning,

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“after 8 or 10 years exile … with all the vices, without any of the virtues of savages; indolence, dissipation, irreligion, and at the same time a broken constitution.”4 As tensions with the North West Company increased in the 1790s and 1800s, the HB C began to cast its recruitment net across other parts of Scotland.5 The company continued to employ Scots throughout the nineteenth century and well into the 1900s, the spotlight shifting increasingly from unskilled labourers to school-leavers with initiative and leadership qualities, as well as bookkeeping skills. Just before the First World War there was a flurry of applications by young Scotsmen eager to join. This was partly in response to press advertisements in October 1913 and March 1914 for junior clerks, aged seventeen to nineteen, to engage for three years to work in the Athabasca and Saskatchewan districts – “either those who have just left school with training on the Modern Side or those with some experience of office work … of robust health and … able to withstand the rigours of a Northern Canadian winter.” As well as board and lodging, they were to receive a salary of £30 for the first year, £40 for the second, £50 for the third, a £20 bonus on the satisfactory completion of the contract, and a premium of £10 per annum once they were “able to speak the language of the tribe of Indians or Esquimaux amongst whom they work.”6 Jock Gibb, who joined the HB C more than three decades later, in 1949, recalled that phonetic similarities between the Cree / Ojibwa language and the northeast Scots dialect fortunately facilitated communication in the totally non-English-speaking community to which he was posted.7 The local newspaper advertisements placed in 1913–14 by the HBC’s agent in Aberdeen, G. Watson, resulted in a flood of applications from young men in the northeast of Scotland, as well as a trickle from farther afield. What was the attraction? As in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, wages were generally better than what was available in Scotland, but the quest for adventure was the recurring theme in the applications. Stanley Mitchell from Aberdeen was “desirous of a change from home,” while J. Urquhart from Nairn had “been on the mind of going to Canada whatever and I  would be pleased if I got something definite to go to.” From Stornoway in Lewis, John Marshall compared limited domestic horizons with the apparently boundless opportunities of Canada. “It is my ambition to get out West, as there are very few opportunities for young men here.” Norman McLeod from Aberdeen had “an inclination for the

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north of Canada. I’ve no tie here, as my parents are dead and there’s nothing to keep me here,” and “better opportunities and more congenial work” were anticipated by fellow Aberdonian, Charles Gauld. Another Aberdeen applicant, Alexander McPherson, had a cousin already working with the company, and Frank Gauld, who, like McPherson, lived on Watson Street, had returned from a sojourn in Australia only three months earlier. Two other applicants were older than the recommended age: D. Faulkner from Macduff was thirtyseven, and George Emslie from Aberdeen was thirty-six (and married).8 Most claimed to have a background that gave them the clerical and bookkeeping skills required by the company. Nor did the hiatus of the First World War deter would-be recruits. Research within the Department of Anthropology at the University of Aberdeen has identified a number of local recruits from the early 1920s, by which time the H B C ’s focus, as far as the fur trade was concerned, was to train managers for the Arctic. Labourers were hired locally, but clerks and store managers were sought primarily from the northeast of Scotland. Perhaps some of them were recruited by William R. Mitchell, who had joined the company in 1914, became inspector of the James Bay district, and in the 1920s was involved in selecting new apprentices.9 These men – from different parts of Aberdeenshire – fitted the same mould as their prewar counterparts. George Fowlie from Alford signed up for a five-year term in 1923, from a background in  a local bank, where he had gained the requisite experience in accounts and recordkeeping. Ernest Hampton from Banchory joined in 1924, after his brother-in-law, Harry Ambrose, who worked for the company at Great Whale River, Quebec, ignited his enthusiasm during a visit home. Similarly, Taylor Third from St Fergus joined the HB C in 1926, probably because an elder brother, George, had joined up four years earlier. Fowlie, Hampton, and Third all served together at York Factory, the post that had once housed the company’s governor but would eventually close in 1957, after better transportation links rendered it obsolete.10 Parties of recruits can also be identified from shipping records. On 16 June 1927, for instance, a contingent of twenty-nine young men  embarked at Ardrossan for Montreal, having been recruited as  apprentice clerks with the Hudson’s Bay Company. They were accompanied by two managers from London. That nine came from Aberdeenshire, primarily from the eastern part of the county, was

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probably a reflection of the enthusiastic work of another local agent, William Craighead from Maud, who in the 1920s advertised regularly in the press for fit young men “of good education and some business experience” who could – as he emphasized in the same terms as agent G. Watson in 1913 – withstand the rigours of a northern Canadian winter.11 Only two of the twenty-nine came from the traditional recruiting grounds in Orkney, but there was a smattering from England, including two plucked directly from St Bees Public School in Cumbria. The recruitment of the latter is explained by documentation in the archives of the Headmasters’ Conference demonstrating that during the interwar period circulars were sent to public school headmasters offering five-year apprenticeships to boys with a reputation for common sense, with the promise that “promotion is possible all the way up.”12 It was out of such a background that old Harrovian Angus Pelham Burn from Craigellachie joined the HBC in 1951, not directly from school but after studying at the Northern College of Agriculture in Aberdeen. Having seen two advertisements in the local paper encouraging readers to “Go lumbering in Queensland” or “join the romantic fur trade,” he applied to both. Only the Hudson’s Bay Company replied to his query, and at an interview in Glasgow he was one of just two successful interviewees from a batch of between twenty and thirty applicants.13 The emphasis in those early years after the Second World War was still on youths with enterprise and ambition, but a public school background had never been the norm, even after the involvement of the Headmasters’ Conference. According to Jock Gibb, who joined the company two years before Angus, there were two main reasons why Scots were still desirable recruits. One was their entrenched reputation as the backbone of the trade. The other was the rather more pragmatic argument that if they were afflicted by homesickness, it was too far for the Scots “to bail out and run for home,” unlike the Canadian employees whom the H BC had been obliged to hire after the Depression.14 Another postwar recruit, Alistair McGregor from Rothesay, recalled that when in the late 1970s the H B C was unable to employ Scots, the problem of retention reared its head, as the men who were hired locally would not stay for any length of time.15 In contrast, Gordon Brown from Inverkeithing, who joined the company in the 1950s, worked for more than a decade on Indian reserves in the Northwest Territories, and now lives in Saskatchewan, recalled a high turnover among the

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Scots, with only two of the companions who had signed up along with him still being in the HB C ’s employment after five years.16 Recruitment policy was therefore shaped by a mixture of tradition and pragmatism. The recruits themselves were characterized primarily by a quest for adventure, perhaps coupled with the desire to escape from a dead-end job and sometimes irrespective of where the opportunity might present itself. For some, it was serendipity or chance that directed their steps to the Canadian North as the location in which to enact their ambitions. In this, and in the work they did, they differed from the majority of their predecessors. Most Scots who laboured for the HB C in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries – particularly those who came from the northern and western isles – had probably been driven into the company’s service by the need to maintain family incomes through the remittances they sent home, although the minister of Kirkwall complained in the 1790s that “when they return, the money which they have earned instead of furnishing the means of industry, is almost always spent in idleness, and often in dissipation.”17 Most were servants rather than officers of the company – labourers and tradesmen, who did the heavy work of transporting supplies and maintaining the company’s infrastructure. Their twentieth-century successors, however, were more commonly traders and clerks, who maintained records, dealt with correspondence, oversaw trade with First Nations people, and generally ran the company’s posts. In 1948 Jock Gibb from Aberdeen failed his School Leaving Certificate examination in English and was doing an unskilled and uninspiring job in a local paper mill when, through his father, he met a man who had returned from the Arctic with enough money to start his own business. Fascinated by his tales, Jock vowed to follow in his footsteps. Before the end of the year, he had joined over 500 applicants for interview in only the second hiring drive in Scotland since the Depression and the war, becoming one of twelve successful recruits selected from the north.18 Jock Gibb’s contact was a personal one, but press advertising seems to have generated considerable interest, as it had done in 1913–14. Gordon Brown was working as a telegram boy with the Post Office in Rosyth in 1950 when he answered an advertisement in a Glasgow newspaper for apprentice fur traders, and, following a successful interview in Glasgow, he made his way to London to embark for Quebec. He opted for Canada simply because he had

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been thwarted by his parents in his original desire to go to Australia – they had refused to sign the release papers. Five years later, Les Ford, who had left Aberdeen Grammar School at the age of fifteen, also responded successfully to a press advertisement and was one of ten youths from the northeast who travelled from Greenock to Montreal on the maiden voyage of the RM S Ivernia.19 Fraser McIntosh, who was brought up in Inverness and Prestwick, had originally intended to go to New Zealand when in the late 1950s his father saw a newspaper advertisement for young men to train as managers for the H B C ’s northern stores. He was interviewed successfully in Glasgow and two months later found himself on board the HMS Corinthia at Greenock, along with twenty other Scots and two Irish, having signed a three-year contract. In similar vein, Alistair McGregor had been thinking of Australia – or the merchant navy – when he responded to a newspaper advertisement by the H BC ; he sailed from Gourock in a party of seventeen after being interviewed in Glasgow. It was also a press advertisement that directed the attention of seventeen-year-old John Wallace to the H BC in 1966 – an era when he estimates that about half of the company’s employees were Scots, but by which time a lower age limit was being imposed on recruits. Brought up in Aberdeen, he responded to an advertisement in the local paper, the Evening Express, applied to Beaver House in London, and was duly interviewed in Aberdeen – along with 200 others – by the HB C’s personnel officer, a Mr Phillips. His ninety-two-year-old mother, Nellie, speaking in April 2010, recalled John’s determination to pursue an overseas adventure: Of course, when you were at school he’d done a big project on Manitoba and even then he used to say, “I think I’ll go to Canada.” But at the interview, Mr Phillips did say, he says, “I really feel – John – I would like to take him, but our policy is not to take anybody under eighteen,” and he says, “John has a few more months to go.” So he said, thinking about it all, he says, we were interviewed on our own without John, and then John was brought back in, and Mr Phillips basically said, “How do you feel about his going?” So I says, “He’s determined to go, so there’s no point, if that’s what he wants to do, he’s got to do it.” And when he brought John back in, he said, “I really would like to take you – I will take you next year” and John said, “Well, if you won’t take me now, somebody else will.”20

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John Wallace would probably have opted for Australia if Phillips had not changed his mind, telephoned the family a fortnight later, and said the company would waive the rules in order to take him on in early August.

E x p e r ie n c e s a n d Encounters New recruits were heavily dependent on the expertise and advice of the Aboriginal people in the isolated locations to which they were sent. Such encounters were always part of the warp and weft of their lives in the Canadian North and generally involved a blend of work and leisure. As well as trading furs for supplies, they imparted hunting skills to the incomers, bailed them out when their inexperience got them into trouble, and, not least, acted as interpreters and cultural brokers in societies where the young Scots would otherwise have been unable to communicate with the original inhabitants. But before they encountered the Indigenous people with whom they would work, the new employees’ first adventure was generally the journey to their destination. Until the 1960s, sea travel was still the norm. James McGibbon, who was hired in 1912 by Ranald Macdonald, Cluny estate factor and H B C agent in Aberdeen, subsequently sent Macdonald a favourable report of his voyage on the S S Pelican, which in August had landed him, along with a colleague, Livingstone, at Port Burwell in Ungava Bay. There they were met by a clerk with a “small sail boat” and after eight days arrived at their initial base at Fort Chimo, where Livingstone remained.21 Most new recruits continued to sail on the company’s supply ships after the First World War, initially on the Ardrossan-built Nascopie (which was wrecked at the entrance to Cape Dorset harbour in 1947) and subsequently on the Pierre Raddison, which called at posts in the eastern Arctic, northern Quebec, and Labrador, before heading for Churchill or York Factory to pick up and deposit passengers and goods. Later generations of recruits normally foregathered at Winnipeg. In 1949 Jock Gibb sailed from Liverpool to Halifax, before continuing by train to Manitoba’s capital. Alistair McGregor, who joined the HB C in 1964, was in the last group to be shipped by sea. In 1966 John Wallace’s parents waved goodbye to him at Prestwick airport as he boarded a direct flight to Winnipeg en route to a posting in the Arctic division. Only in mid-air did the enormity of his decision come home to him. “It was the first time I’d ever been on a plane,

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then it kind of dawned on me, and I remember sitting back in my seat and thinking, ‘What have I done? I’ve left my Mum and Dad, sisters, brothers, friends. What have I done?’”22 On arrival in Winnipeg, the new recruits were billeted at the Marlborough Hotel, close to the company’s headquarters. Following further medical and dental checks, as well as orientation, they were sent off in all directions to the H B C’s trading posts. The requirement to be resourceful was just as relevant in the 1950s and 1960s as it had been in 1913, when James McGibbon wrote that a new clerk “is expected to put his hand to whatever is being done whenever necessary.” This he found “rather nice as I thus have not to do the same work day after day.” His colleague, Livingstone, was also allegedly “liking the life very well” despite the fact that “unfortunately he lost all his toes off his right foot through frost bite.”23 John Wallace too recalled an occasion in 1967 when, despite expert remedial attention from an Inuit elder and long-term employee of the H BC, the explorer Sebastian Snow succumbed to frostbite while staying with him at Pangnirtung on Baffin Island. Along with Chris Bonington, Snow was researching an article on Pangnirtung for the Sunday Times colour supplement: Sebastian froze his feet, because he wore glasses … You see, on the commatech, the dog team, you’re going along at a fair speed, and every once in a while it’s a good idea to jump off, run alongside the commatech, and jump back on, or it was back then. Sebastian had glasses. And he also had a parka – a hood – with fur trim, and his breathing fogged up his glasses – he couldn’t see, and that’s how he froze his feet … Anyway, he was brought back to Pangnirtung, to the house, and again, Jim Killibuck, this old guy, this Killibuck – I remember Sebastian in the kitchen there, Killibuck got me to get a basin full of snow, and that was the first thing Killibuck wanted Sebastian Snow’s feet to go in, was snow, not heat. And by this time too you could see Sebastian’s feet were all black and blue. Blue, I think, isn’t quite so bad as black. And I found out later, yeah, he did lose several toes. But anyway, Killibuck put him in snow first, and then slowly a little bit of lukewarm water, or cold water, and then lukewarm, and then slowly brought his temperature up. But again, didn’t save some of his feet. They were black! … And that was why – because he couldn’t keep his circulation moving because his glasses froze up, he couldn’t see.24

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New recruits generally started out as clerks and worked their way up the career ladder to managerial positions, learning the retail end of the trade, such as buying and grading furs, outfitting trappers, checking stock in the H B C stores, balancing the store books every month, and sending out encoded details about their transactions in order to thwart competition from “fly by night fur traders.”25 Until the Indian Health Services began to build and staff nursing stations at the larger communities in the 1950s, post managers also stored drug supplies for the community. As trainee clerks, the new recruits were generally transferred every six months but had longer postings when they attained managerial status. During his sixteen years with the HB C, Alistair McGregor had thirty postings – some for four weeks, some for four years – in locations ranging from northern Ontario to the Yukon. It was in the trading posts that most interaction between Scots and Aboriginal people took place. A key part of the latter’s work was trading furs, most of which were harvested in winter, when the pelts were thickest, and also in spring, when hundreds of musk rat  furs were brought to the posts, frost dried, baled, and sent to Montreal. According to Jock Gibb, one reason the company moved people around was that they thought if a manager became too friendly with his trapper customers, he could lose his effectiveness for the company.26 Working conditions for the Aboriginal people had not altered much over the centuries. In winter they lived out on the trap lines with their families, some in log cabins but most, Jock Gibb recalls, in large teepees covered with moss and floored with spruce boughs. They came in to trade every three months or so and in return for their furs would be given the supplies they needed to live in the bush and trap or shoot the animals.27 By the time John Wallace was a clerk in training at Pangnirtung, some Inuit lived in town, but others came down the fjord by dog team whenever they had furs to trade. There were, he recalls, about ten outlying camps in the hinterland, from 20 to 100 miles away, and each came in separately with furs and a shopping list: And these people were still living their old traditional way of life, hunting, but they knew the store, the Hudson’s Bay store was there, it had been there for about sixty years prior to me arriving there of course, so they would come in once in a while to trade. They would trade their furs, and the biggest thing they would

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want, well the women, they would want material for parkas and what not, and the men would want rifles and bullets and stuff like that, you know. I remember too, you know, quite often we’d buy the furs, and you’d hold them up to the light and you see right through the seal skin and if there was scratches, the price would be lower and you’d look at the hair itself, and if it was quite silvery looking, you’d get a higher price. And if it was well cleaned, well dried, you’d get a higher price for it. And this was with all types of fur. Quite often they’d put white flour in amongst the hair, and it looked perfectly white when it was brought in, but you held it up and shook it, and some days you’d end up with a pound of flour on the floor, and they’d look at your mischievously – it was a bit of a game. But the flour too was used to kind of dry it, to clear the fat, or to try and get the fat out.28 In the summer, the trappers would be based around the posts, where Les Ford recalled that “the store was a great social centre, especially in wet or colder weather.”29 Some built one-room cabins, but most pitched tents.30 One part of the tent would be a storebought one for sleeping in, with a tepee-style part attached, covered in canvas, for cooking, unless it was too hot, when they cooked outside. John Wallace recalled an occasion when there was a parachute drop of mail from a Hercules at Pangnirtung; the Inuit ignored the mail bags but rushed to retrieve the parachutes because they were good for making tents. Angus Pelham Burn recalled the procedure for buying furs at Big Trout Lake in northern Ontario, where the requirement to negotiate with over 1,500 Cree developed not only his business acumen but also the much more important skill of dealing with people and, indeed, “taught me everything I’ve learnt in life”: The Indians would come in. A lot of them were called Mackay. A lot of them – the vast majority of them were called Linklater – which of course is an Orcadian name. And as you know, the human mixed trade between Orkney and the North of Canada is enormous. And so Charlie Linklater would come in with his fur before Christmas, and he might have six or seven mink, he might have a lynx, he’d have five, eight beaver, he would have maybe a wolverine, possibly. He would have a number of stoats, and I

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would then grade them and offer him a price, and his credit – i.e., what I lent him to go out with two months earlier before the ice – let’s say, was $1,200, and he came back with $1,700 of fur. I would try and persuade him to pay off as much as he could and leave enough for him to get through his Christmas and buy some more stuff and then go out in the spring.31 Angus recounted particularly warm memories of his interpreter and friend, the late Henry Frogg, whom he last saw in 1958: “I called him my interrupter, because that was a better description! He was my interpreter at Big Trout Lake, and he was the most wonderful man. I often think about him; I think about him, oh, frequently. He was quite small, very heavy set, squat. Straight as a die. More than helpful, and I can’t help but think of him without smiling and laughing, which he always did.”32 Until the end of the nineteenth century, transportation in the interior was by dog team, canoe, and York boat. Float planes began to be used in the 1920s, although the H BC did not buy its first plane until 1939, and in northern Manitoba settlements were linked with new tracks laid by the Hudson Bay Railway between Winnipeg and Churchill. Several Scottish recruits, including Ernest Hampton in the 1920s and Jock Gibb and Angus Pelham Burn in the 1950s, were posted to Big Trout Lake, where Jock Gibb remembers the arrival of supplies by tractor train in winter, with huge Caterpillar tractors pulling six or eight sleighs. In the summer, float planes would bring replacement supplies if necessary, but since this was expensive, it was regarded as a last resort. At Pangnirtung, where John Wallace was based, the year’s supplies were delivered (and furs collected) by the Pierre Raddison. He recalled, “If you ran out, that was it, you ran out. We had no fresh milk. Eggs, they came in a can. Bacon too – quite nice bacon – but it came in a can. There was milk that was called ‘klim’ – that’s milk backwards – powdered milk.”33 As in earlier centuries, tragedies still occurred. In October 1913 Ranald Macdonald had to visit the parents of an Aberdeen recruit, C. Shepherd, taking with him the undelivered letters of their son, who had drowned two months earlier.34 More than half a century later, and four years into his employment, Glaswegian Robert Killin, acting manager at the most northerly community in Ontario – Severn on James Bay – was drowned in September 1964 along with a colleague while trying to recover a company-owned boat that was

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drifting in the bay.35 Although external communication obviously became easier as telephone and radio technology developed, it was still a challenge. Les Ford recalled that in some of the smaller northern posts, the settlements were cut off twice a year – during freeze-up in the autumn and break-up of the ice in the spring – times when no mail could be received or despatched and when no aeroplanes could take off or land. Like generations of emigrants before them across the world, many of the clerks maintained links with home through receiving and circulating Scottish newspapers. Alistair McGregor’s father sent him the local newspaper every week for forty years until he died, and his stepmother still carries on the tradition. John Wallace’s mother sent him bundles of the Sunday Post and Weekly News every month for forty years until it became too expensive and widespread use of the Internet eclipsed the need. As his mother recalled, these papers were highly popular among expatriate Scots, being “well used till they were falling apart.”36 Thirty years earlier, James and Christina Graham maintained “constant contact” with Scotland while based at Attawapiskat in northern Ontario in the 1930s. From Dundee and Bathgate respectively, they had met on the White Star liner Doric from Greenock to Quebec in 1926 and married five years later. James worked as a manager for the French fur company and H BC rival, Revillon Frères, until it merged with the H B C in 1936. Their daughter, Shirley Graham Fraser of Burlington, Ontario, recalled growing up in a very Scottish environment, both in Attawapiskat and in Brantford, where her mother’s family had settled and where the family relocated in 1936. All her parents’ friends were from Scotland, and their home was frequented by Scots, including HBC employees, officers of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (R CM P ), and ships’ officers. Her mother, she recalled, “was appalled by the poverty of the Crees, who lived in tepees, across the boardwalk from us. She made up big pots of Scotch broth, and stews, and had my father take them to the Indians to share.”37 Of course, work and leisure were Siamese twins. Hunting, fishing, and trapping were at the centre of both social life and the working environment, and the Inuit taught the Scots clerks how to really live – and indeed survive – in the Arctic. On one occasion John Wallace was rescued by an elder from Repulse Bay when he got lost in a whiteout during a caribou hunt. His response to being asked whether

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he adapted well to the ways of the North was emphatically affirmative. Explaining his success, he said, “I adopted the ways of the Inuit people and a lot of their lifestyle.” Moreover, he had seen “the tail end of the nomadic way of life of the Inuit people. In the Arctic there were no roads, no airstrips, no nothing, as it were but the Hudson’s Bay Company, the R C MP, the missions, and a few federal government employees. HB C in those days stood for ‘Here Before Christ.’” He felt he adapted “internally” to Canadian life because he adopted a lot of the ways of life of the Inuit, like hunting. “They didn’t talk too much, and I think I learned that too. When you’re hunting, the last thing you do is yap yap yap yap yap yap. And when it’s forty below, you don’t want to do that either. So all that now is part of my psyche, how I am.”38 But the legacy was a two-way street. Earlier generations of Scots had imported strong musical traditions, which to this day remain firmly embedded in local culture. Simeonie Keenainak is a wellknown accordionist from Pangnirtung who learned his skills from Scottish whalers and in 2009 was featured in Billy Connolly’s television documentary Journey to the Edge of the World.39 The distinctive fiddle music introduced by Orcadian fur traders is celebrated in the 1980 film The Fiddlers of James Bay, a tribute echoed by Angus Pelham Burn, who recalled “the most amazing fiddlers” at Big Trout Lake: They had dances, particularly in the winter, nearly every Saturday, which I’d go to the odd one. And they were the most amazing fiddlers, all Orcadian music, and there were perhaps ten playing the fiddle on the stage, and one would sort of fall off the perch, not because of drink, [but] because he’d played enough, and another one would come on the other end. And they’d go on, absolutely perfect timing. And their dancing and their abilities to play the fiddle were beyond compare, and all done by ear, and I never saw any music written on a bit of paper, and it was all Orcadian.40 Both Angus Pelham Burn and John Wallace have major reservations about the new way of life that was imposed on the Inuit, mainly through the children being sent away to school. According to Angus, by the 1950s children were being sent out from Big Trout Lake to board at Sioux Lookout, 300 miles away, having previously been

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educated in a local school run by the Department of Indian Affairs. It was only then, he said, that “the occasional thing started to go missing” in a community that hitherto had been characterized by complete honesty. Likewise, when John Wallace first went to Baffin Island, dishonesty had not been “in the vocabulary” of the local Inuit but “was all learned from the white man in later years.” John recalled children being sent 1,500 miles from Pangnirtung to Churchill in Manitoba, when “it seemed like very few of the people had any say in what their children were going to do”: The parents, in those days, they didn’t say anything, but they were sad, if that’s the right word, sad, to see their children being taken away from them. But the government – and I could say the government – you’re asking me, well, it was back in the, in the era that, I think the government wielded the big stick and sovereignty of the Arctic was a big thing with the Canadian government … Well, they’d come back with, you know, singing songs, rocking and rolling, the Beatles and what not, Elvis Presley and all that. They’d dress a little bit different, and that was the transition itself, was that, from wearing just a caribou parka or homemade, they’d come back with store-bought clothing, made to fit and all that, you know, and colours … They became more aware that there was a bigger world out there than just the town or village that they came from.41

C o n c l u s ion This analysis is limited by the narrowness of the source base on which it rests. The narratives that shape its structure and content come from a largely self-selecting group of men who are happy to recount the positive experiences of their youthful sojourns in the Canadian North, but the voices of their Aboriginal neighbours are silent. Nor – despite the fact that several managers were married – are we offered any firsthand female perspective on life in the Arctic to corroborate or challenge the male viewpoint.42 But despite its limitations, several recurring themes emerge from this testimonybased survey of latter-day Scottish fur traders. One theme is undoubtedly the ongoing significance of organized recruitment, as H B C agents scoured Scotland for suitable candidates. Equally striking is the rigorous selection procedure, with

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many young men being called for interview but few being chosen for service. There was also an ongoing cultural dialogue, manifested perhaps especially in the Orcadian-infused musical traditions of James Bay. But although the recollections are clearly dominated by adventure and enjoyment, they are also tempered with elements of regret over the death of the Hudson’s Bay Company and the destruction of a way of life, a recognition that the Indigenous people with whom the Scots interacted have suffered not only because of the demise of the fur trade but also as a consequence of insensitive external interference, especially the dictates of government schooling. “In my years in the North,” declares Jock Gibb, “I have watched a people move from being the lords of the land to being the wards of the state.”43 The last word, like the first word, goes to Angus Pelham Burn. When asked how his time with the Hudson’s Bay Company fitted him for what he did later in life, his testimony was glowing, unequivocal, and representative of the entire sample of interviewees: “Everything that I learned out there has been useful to me, and without that experience I wouldn’t have achieved a quarter of what I think I’ve achieved.”44 We await further research to amplify the picture from the perspective of others who were involved.

Not e s 1 2 3 4 5 6

Pelham Burn, “Material Histories.” Reford, “Donald Smith.” See also McDonald, Lord Strathcona. Pelham Burn, “Material Histories.” “Orphir, County of Orkney,” 406. Rigg, Men of Spirit. Saskatchewan Archives Board (hereafter SA B), MS 1162/28, correspondence related to the HBC concerning mainly applications for various posts in the company, 1913–14; S AB, M S 1162/29/1, accounts, testimonials, and associated papers related to the HBC , 1913–14; SA B, MS 1162/28, F.C. Ingrams to Ranald Macdonald, 30 October 1913. See also S A B , M S 1162/28, Ingrams to Macdonald, 10 March 1914. 7 Gibb, Tales from a Fur Trader, 24. 8 S A B, MS 1162/29/1, Stanley Mitchell, 169 King Street, Aberdeen (16 March 1913); J. Urquhart, 13 Seabank Road, Nairn (no. 176, 16 March 1914); John Marshall, 3 Francis Street, Stornoway (no. 178, 17 March

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9 10

11 12

13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21

22 23 24 25

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1914); Norman McLeod, 175 George Street, Aberdeen (17 March 1914); Charles Gauld, 41 Bedford Place, Aberdeen (16 March 1914); Alexander McPherson, 60 Watson Street, Aberdeen (14 March 1914); Frank D. Gauld, 56 Watson Street, Aberdeen (19 May 1913); D. Falconer, 42a Low Shore, Macduff (no. 180, 17 March 1914); George Emslie, 5 Berryden Road, Aberdeen (17 March 1914). Pelham Burn, “Material Histories.” For biographical details of Fowlie, Hampton, and Third, see Pelham Burn, “Material Histories.” For details on York Factory, see Gibb, Tales from a Fur Trader, 49–50. Press and Journal, 26 February 1925. Most of the recruits came from the area around Maud. Headmasters’ Conference, Bulletin no. 3, 1928, Hudson’s Bay Company Archives, Provincial Archives of Manitoba, quoted in Macinnes, Harper, and Fryer, eds, Scotland and the Americas, 160–1. Angus Pelham Burn, interview by author, Kincardine O’Neil, Aberdeenshire, 6 April 2010. Gibb, Tales from a Fur Trader, 5. Alistair McGregor, Vernon, British Columbia, to author, e-mail, 18 February 2010. Gordon Brown, Vibank, Saskatchewan, to author, e-mail, 18 February 2010. “Kirkwall, County of Orkney,” 551. Gibb, Tales from a Fur Trader, 5. Les Ford, Brandon, Manitoba, to author, e-mail, 4 February 2010. Nellie Wallace and John Wallace, interview by author, Portlethen, Aberdeen, 24 April 2010. S A B, MS 1162/29/1, James McGibbon to Ranald Macdonald, 20 January 1913. Macdonald was the controversial estate factor for the equally controversial Lady Emily Gordon Cathcart, of Cluny, who also had estates in the southern Outer Hebrides, as well as shares in the Hudson’s Bay Company and the Canadian Pacific Railway. For details, see Harper, “Enigmas in Hebridean Emigration.” Nellie Wallace and John Wallace, interview by author, Portlethen, Aberdeen, 24 April 2010. S A B, MS 1162/29/1, McGibbon to Macdonald, 20 January 1913. Nellie Wallace and John Wallace, interview by author, Portlethen, Aberdeen, 24 April 2010. Angus Pelham Burn, interview by author, Kincardine O’Neil, Aberdeenshire, 6 April 2010.

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26 Jock Gibb, Gibsons, British Columbia, to author, letter, 19 February 2010. 27 Gibb, Tales from a Fur Trader, 16, 19. 28 Nellie Wallace and John Wallace, interview by author, Portlethen, Aberdeen, 24 April 2010. 29 Les Ford, Brandon, Manitoba, to author, e-mail, 4 February 2010. 30 Gibb, Tales from a Fur Trader, 19. 31 Angus Pelham Burn, interview by author, Kincardine O’Neil, Aberdeenshire, 6 April 2010. 32 Pelham Burn, “Material Histories.” 33 Nellie Wallace and John Wallace, interview by author, Portlethen, Aberdeen, 24 April 2010. 34 S A B, MS 1162/29/1, Ingrams to Macdonald, 9, 13, 24 October 1913. 35 Pelham Burn, “Material Histories.” 36 Nellie Wallace and John Wallace, interview by author, Portlethen, Aberdeen, 24 April 2010. 37 Shirley Graham Fraser, Toronto, to author, e-mail, 4 August 2010. 38 Nellie Wallace and John Wallace, interview by author, Portlethen, Aberdeen, 24 April 2010. 39 Connolly, dir., Journey to the Edge of the World. See also National Film Board of Canada, dir., Fiddlers of James Bay, which follows two Cree fiddlers as they travel to Stromness to participate in a fiddlers’ rally with the Orkney Strathspey and Reel Society. 40 Angus Pelham Burn, interview by author, Kincardine O’Neil, Aberdeenshire, 6 April 2010. 41 Nellie Wallace and John Wallace, interview by author, Portlethen, Aberdeen, 24 April 2010. 42 According to Angus Pelham Burn, “most of them had wives, probably from Scotland.” Angus Pelham Burn, interview by author, Kincardine O’Neil, Aberdeenshire, 6 April 2010. 43 Gibb, Tales from a Fur Trader, 16–17. 44 Angus Pelham Burn, interview by author, Kincardine O’Neil, Aberdeenshire, 6 April 2010.

B i b l i ogr ap h y Connolly, Billy, dir. Journey to the Edge of the World. Documentary film. 2009. http://www.tvthrong.co.uk/billy-connolly-journey-edge-world/ episode-2 (accessed 3 October 2012).

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Gibb, Jock. Tales from a Fur Trader. N.p.: Rosetta Projects, n.d. Harper, Marjory. “Enigmas in Hebridean Emigration: Crofter Colonists in Western Canada.” In Phillip Buckner and R. Douglas Francis, eds, Canada and the British World: Culture, Migration, and Identity, 198– 214. Vancouver: U BC Press, 2006. “Kirkwall, County of Orkney.” Statistical Account of Scotland, 1791–99, vol. 7, no. 51: 529–69. http://stat-acc-scot.edina.ac.uk (accessed 3 October 2012). Macinnes, A.I., M.D. Harper, and L.G. Fryer, eds. Scotland and the Americas: A Documentary Source Book. Edinburgh: Scottish History Society, 2002. McDonald, Donna. Lord Strathcona: A Biography of Donald Alexander Smith. Toronto and Oxford: Dundurn, 1996. National Film Board of Canada, dir. Fiddlers of James Bay. Documentary film. 1980. http://ssa.nls.uk/film.cfm?fid=4373 (accessed 3 October 2012). “Orphir, County of Orkney.” Statistical Account of Scotland, 1791–99, vol. 19, no. 18: 394–419. http://stat-acc-scot.edina.ac.uk (accessed 3 October 2012). Pelham Burn, Angus. “Material Histories: Scots and Aboriginal Peoples in the Canadian Fur Trade.” 20 July 2007. http://www.abdn.ac.uk/ material histories/comment.php?id=1 (accessed 3 October 2012). Reford, Alexander. “Donald Smith.” Dictionary of Canadian Biography Online. http://www.biographi.ca (accessed 3 October 2012). Rigg, Suzanne. Men of Spirit and Enterprise: Scots and Orkneymen in the Hudson’s Bay Company, 1780–1821. Edinburgh: John Donald, 2011.

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14 Aboriginal Fiddling: The Scottish Connection Anne Lederman

Fiddling is one of the oldest documented immigrant folk music forms in Canada. The earliest references to violins in Canada are from Quebec, where the Jesuit Relations of 27 November 1645 record, “there were two violins for the very first time,” and a month later, “Martin Boutet played the violin,” although there is no record of what was actually played.1 For evidence of Scottish dance music, we must move forward 100 years or so to the Hudson’s Bay Company records from Moose Factory, Ontario, in 1749: “‘Having three Fidlers [sic] in the Factory,’ wrote the master, ‘viz Geo. Millar, Willm. Murray and James Short, our people celebrated the Evening with Dancing and Singing, and all were very merry.’”2 A century later, in 1843, we have an account of Aboriginal involvement in Scottish dance music from York Factory, Manitoba: “the sound of a fiddle struck upon our ears … On a chair, in a corner near the stove sat a young, good-looking Indian, with a fiddle of his own making beside him. This was our Paganini: and beside him sat an Indian boy with a kettle-drum on which he tapped occasionally, as if anxious that the ball should begin … we each chose partners, the fiddle struck up and the ball began. Scotch reels were the only dances known by the majority of the guests, so we confined ourselves entirely to them.”3 Although further references are scattered,4 such descriptions, together with anecdotal family stories from Aboriginal fiddlers interviewed in the 1980s,5 give us a picture of at least 150 years or so of Aboriginal involvment in the art of fiddling for dancing in the Northwest,6 much of it derived from Scottish tradition.

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Therefore, I am now delighted to take you on a journey not only into the world of traditional Aboriginal fiddling in its oldest known forms in Canada but also into the Scottish roots of this music. I came to the music entirely by accident. It was 1983. A friend of a friend had moved to Manitoba from southern Ontario, met a few of the local fiddlers, and sent back a tape that simply said on it, “Grandy Fagnan, Métis Fiddler MB [Manitoba].” I listened and was fascinated. I heard many things on that cassette: driving foot rhythms that, until then, I had only encountered from Québécois and Acadian fiddlers; bits of tunes I knew to be Scottish, French, and Old Time but changed so as to be almost unrecognizable; altered tunings on the fiddle; and phrases that seemed to stop too soon or to go on too long. I was soon on a mission. Where did this music come from? Why were the forms so unusual?7 Who were the people who had created it? And who now played it? Grants acquired and a registration at York University in graduate ethnomusicology in place, I was off to Dauphin, Manitoba, where I met the man who had sent the tape – musician, photographer, and reporter Will Henry. I also met the man on the tape, Grandy Fagnan, as well as many other wonderful elder players from his tradition throughout western Manitoba. They lived in, or came from, communities with such names as Ebb and Flow, Kinosota, Silver Ridge, Camperville, Pine Creek, Boggy Creek, and San Clara. Some are Aboriginal reserve communities, and some are communities that sprung up nearby, inhabited by people of mixed heritage without official First Nations status who are usually related to those on the reserve. I came home with recordings, and I listened more, to old Ojibwa music (which was part of the cultural background of many of the players)8 and to fiddling from any and all areas and traditions I thought might be related. Over the next twenty-seven years, I was also exposed to the music of James Bay fiddlers, and in 2005 I had the opportunity to hear and record many fiddlers of Métis and Gwich’in heritage in the Northwest Territories and the Yukon. Shortly after my first trip to Manitoba in 1985, I came to the basic conclusion that this music was truly a hybrid phenomenon, a mixture of the same cultural influences as those that characterized the people who played it: Scottish, French, and Aboriginal, with a few other things thrown in – a bit of Ukrainian here, a bit of Icelandic there. In fact, the music’s hybridity is reflected in the players’ names and in the languages they speak. Most of the First Nations people I

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met in Manitoba had either French surnames such as Fagnan, Houle, Desjarlais, and Beaulieu or Scottish surnames such as Mckay, Flett, Spence, Anderson, Campbell, and MacLeod. But they rarely spoke French and certainly not Gaelic (although there were Gaelic speakers in their ancestry, by oral account). They often spoke Ojibwa as their first language, usually in the dialect known locally as Saulteaux.9 Some also spoke Cree and / or Swampy Cree, and a few would say they spoke Michif (a hybrid language of Cree and / or Ojibwa, French, and often English).10 Grandy Fagnan claimed to speak ten languages, picked up from people he had worked with and for over the years, largely cutting bush “up north” – Cree, Swampy, Saulteaux, French, English, German, Ukrainian, Polish, Icelandic, and “Mexican.” (He had a Mexican grandfather.)11 Above all, the music’s hybridity is reflected in the tunes. The old tunes that I recorded in Manitoba rarely had names beyond the dance they were played for. If they were marches or reels used for quadrille sets (square dances done in groups of three – First Change, Second Change, and Breakdown), Grandy Fagnan would usually call them “Old Scotch Reels.” That there are many Scottish tunes (albeit in highly altered forms) in the repertoire is clear. Versions of the following all appear regularly: “Haste to the Wedding,” “Lord MacDonald’s Reel,” “Fisher’s Hornpipe” (generally in the more common North American key of D rather than the original Scottish F), “Devil’s Dream,” “Soldier’s Joy,” “Fairy Dance,” “The Keel Row,” “Jacket Trimmed in Blue,” “The Cuckoo’s Nest,” and “Caber Feigh” (The Deer’s Antlers).12 In James Bay, versions of “The White Cockade” and “Highland Laddie” are common.13 Many other tunes with Scottish characteristics of overall shape, intervallic structure, and implied harmonic progression have yet to be traced to an exact Scottish ancestor, especially in the repertoires of the oldest players, such as Grandy Fagnan.14 It must be noted, however, that similarities in the repertoire and style, along with our knowledge of population and migration patterns, indicate that many of these tunes probably came to the Northwest from Quebec, where similarly altered versions exist of these nineteenth-century Scottish “standards.”15 Figures 14.1, 14.2, and 14.3 represent examples of one such tune. The main deviation from the original Scottish tune in both the Quebec and Manitoba versions is in bars 5 and 6 of the B part, where both strongly move to the second degree of the scale for two

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Fig. 1 - McDonald's Reel

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                                                           



                                                      



Fig. 14.1 “McDonald’s Reel” (nineteenth-century version of the eighteenth-century Scottish “Lord Alexander MacDonald’s Reel”) [Figure 2 P'tittune bucheux] Source: One Thousand Fiddle Tunes, 2216 1. 2.                                            



           

1. 2.                                         

Fig. 14.2 “Le p’tit bûcheux,” André Alain, Quebec (Quebec version of “Lord MacDonald’s Reel”) Source: Hart and Sandell, Danse ce soir, 39

beats, adding an extra beat to the form. No other versions of the tune that I have come across in North America or Europe have this feature, strongly indicating a historical connection between the two.18 Few Aboriginal players of my acquaintance in Manitoba acknowledged the obvious similarities to Quebec repertoire and style. This may be due, in part, to simple unfamiliarity with Québécois tradition, but, in my experience, players with French surnames sometimes downplay or deny their French heritage altogether, saying that their

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[Figure 3 - Lord MacDonald's ]

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                   

                                                      

  

        

                                

                                                          

                                 

last A part

Fig. 14.3 “MacDonald’s Reel,” Manitoba Source: Transcribed by the author from the playing of Laurence “Teddy Boy” Houle, recorded at a workshop in Toronto, May 200817

ancestors were forced to take French names somewhere along the way and that their ancestry is really Scottish, not French.19 These casual accounts indicate that in the community more status is clearly attached to Scottish ancestry than to French; therefore, both the avowal of Scottish connections and the denial of French Canadian ones in the music and the culture must be assessed with this context in mind. Further evidence of the Scottish roots of the tradition is found in the dances, again probably largely filtered through Quebec. Along with the waltzes, polkas, two-steps, foxtrots, and quadrilles, there are several old Scottish dances: Drops of Brandy, the Sword Dance (also called the Scarf, Belt, or Handkerchief Dance), Reel of Four (often called La Double Gigue or Double Jig, which appears to be related to Scottish or Shetland four-hand reels), Reel of Eight, and

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possibly the Duck Dance (a six-hand reel). Above all, there is “jigging” (from the French “giguer,” meaning step-dancing). Done mainly to versions of one tune now, “The Red River Jig,”20 jigging also appears to trace its roots back to Quebec and ultimately to Scotland,21 Ireland, and England.22 However, to make the situation somewhat confusing, these Scottish dances are not necessarily done to tunes of Scottish origin anymore. Over the years, popular tunes of similar rhythm have often been substituted, and different communities often use different tunes for the same dance.23 Some dance tunes are still obviously from the old Scottish repertoire. For example, “Keel Row” is still popular for the Sword Dance, and versions of “Lord MacDonald’s Reel” are often played for the Old Reel of Eight, “Fisher’s Hornpipe” for the Reel of Four, and “Jacket Trimmed in Blue” for the Rabbit Dance. Other common dance tunes may be highly altered versions of old Scottish tunes, most notably the two most popular tunes – “Drops of Brandy” and “The Red River Jig.” Further evidence of the Scottish origins of much of the fiddle and dance repertoire in Quebec and Aboriginal communities is to be seen in the use of altered tunings on the violin, often called “scordatura.” In Canada this practice has been documented only in areas of heavily Scottish settlement (Cape Breton, Prince Edward Island, and other parts of the Maritimes) and in French and Aboriginal communities. In Manitoba I encountered four such tunings: 1 A D A E (from lowest string to highest) – used for “The Red River Jig” and other D-major tunes. This tuning is still very popular in the Shetland Islands and, in fact, is the standard tuning in the Cullivoe area. The first published notation of a tune in this tuning is probably “The Baggpipe [sic] Tune,” circa 1675, from the Dalhousie Castle Collection.24 2 A E A E – used for several A-major tunes, including “The British Grenadiers” and “Devil’s Dream.” It is sometimes rendered a tone down as G D G D. It appears in eighteenth-century Scottish publications25 and was also in common use in the Shetland Islands until recently.26 3 A E A C# – used for two old tunes, usually called “Devil’s Reel” and “Devil’s Waltz” on the Prairies. The reel is clearly a version of “Le reel du pendu” (Hanged Man’s Reel) of Quebec. The waltz does not seem to be common in Quebec but resembles

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American versions of a tune variously known as “Rye Whisky” or “The Drunken Hiccups,” all of which may date back to an old Scottish tune called “Drunk at Night and Dry i’ the Morning,” published in collections from 1743.27 4 D D A D – used for only one tune in my experience in Manitoba, of which only one part has survived. The tune is from Walter Flett, played by his son Laurence “Teddy Boy” Houle. This tuning, unlike the first three, does not turn up in Scottish publications but is in use in Appalachia. Although, as noted, the first three tunings were popular in the late eighteenth century in Scotland and appeared in several publications of the time, they largely died out in mainland Scotland in the nineteenth century but have survived in the Shetland Islands up to the present day.28 Now we come to three aspects of the tradition that reveal some interesting differences between Aboriginal and Scottish traditions. The first is bowing. The oldest documented bowing styles in western Aboriginal communities indicate a largely separate stroke approach to bowing, with occasional short slurs (mostly two- and three-note), common to many Scottish styles.29 However, whereas mainland Scottish practice of the nineteenth century involves largely bowing down-bow on main beats,30 Aboriginal practice is often somewhat different. James Cheechoo of James Bay (where there were direct connections with the Orkney Islands)31 strongly believes in what he calls “forward” (upbow on the beat) bowing.32 My experience with Manitoba players is mixed in this regard, with some frequently starting phrases up-bow and with others using a more Scottish down-bow approach. Gwich’in players, too, will frequently slur into the first longer note of a phrase (or two short notes) up-bow, making it easy to continue with “downbow on the beat” bowing as shown in figure 14.4. The second difference concerns ornamentation. In Manitoba there is some ornamentation in the form of grace notes and occasional triplets but nothing approaching the highly ornamented older styles of the Scottish Highlands, for example.33 The third difference is the almost complete lack of strathspeys or 12/8 marches in the repertoire of both Quebec and the Aboriginal communities of the Northwest. How do we explain these distinctly un-Scottish characteristics? Interestingly, all three – bowing up-bow on the beat, the lack of

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[Figure 4 - Duck Dance]

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      

3X                         - sometimes                       *see variations at bottom

                                    

                                                          Fig. 14.4 “Duck Dance,” Allan Benjamin, Old Crow (a version of the Scottish “Fairy Dance”) Source: Transcribed by the author from a video recording made by the author in Old Crow, Yukon, June 2005

complex ornamentation, and the absence of strathspeys – are typical of the Shetland Islands, where many employees of the Hudson’s Bay Company throughout the Northwest are known to have originated. This may indicate that the Shetland Islands are a stronger historical influence than mainland Scotland on both Quebec and, by extension, the Aboriginal tradition of the Northwest. However, it may also indicate influence from Ireland and other parts of the British Isles, such as Lowland Scotland, Northumberland, and other parts of England, through Quebec if not directly in the West. The following case study offers further evidence in this regard.

C as e S t u dy: “ D ro p s of Brandy” a n d “ T h e R e d Ri ver Ji g” “Drops of Brandy” and “The Red River Jig” are the best-known melodies in the Aboriginal repertoire throughout the Northwest and accompany the two most common dances of the same names. They both appear to derive from similar Quebec tunes, known respectively as “Le brandy” and “La grande gigue simple.” In the West they are irregular, whereas in Quebec they are frequently in regular 3/2 meter (or 6/4) – two of a handful of tunes to be found in Quebec

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[Figure 5- Drops of Brandy

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                                        

                                       

Fig. 6 - Le Brandy Fig. 14.5 “Drops

of Brandy” (Scottish) Source: Emmerson, Rantin’ Pipe, 156, from Wilson, Companion to the Ballroom

                                                   

                                            

                 1, 2, 3.

4.

Fig. 7 - Drops of Brandy

Fig. 14.6 “Le brandy,” Quebec Source: Hart and Sandell, Danse ce soir, 86, from the playing of Les Frères Brunet

                                  

                            

Fig. 14.7 “Drops of Brandy,” Walter Flett, Manitoba Source: Transcription by the author of recording made by Jim Flett (Walter’s son), Winnipeg, c. 1975, on Lederman, prod., Old Native and Métis Fiddling in Manitoba

in this meter. This meter was, and still is, common in certain parts of the British Isles (notably Northumberland) and, interestingly, in Scandinavia, from where it may have travelled to the Shetland and Orkney Islands and then to Canada. In Scotland the dance Drops of Brandy is generally associated with the 9/8 tune in figure 14.5.34 Quebec versions frequently have several parts that change keys, but the first two might be thought of as a duple-time version of the older 9/8 tune, in figure 14.6. Aboriginal versions generally have two, three, or four parts. Figure 14.7 is an example of this.

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In spite of the change of meter, there are some superficial similarities between the Scottish and Canadian versions – the largely oneoctave range, the constant use of the arpeggio, and the harmonic structure of two beats based on G arpeggio notes going to a third beat that begins on the fourth note of the scale.35 We also know that tunes exist in both simple and compound subdivision in both Aboriginal36 and British and Irish Isles traditions,37 indicating that the 9/8 Scottish version may have been adapted to duple time either in the British Isles or in Quebec and then further altered when it travelled west. Given that the 3/2 meter is vastly more familiar in parts of the British Isles than in Quebec, I would lean toward the possibility that there was a 3/2 version somewhere in the British Isles that is yet undiscovered and that made its way to Canada. “The Red River Jig” has an even less traceable history. The earliest western recording of it that we know of, made by Frederick Genthon in Winnipeg in 1940 for CJRC radio, was introduced by an announcer reading from notes prepared by Manitoba historian Margaret Arnett MacLeod.38 MacLeod told us, in part: “Mr. Genthon learned this tune from his father, who, in turn, learned it about the year 1842, from a man named Latourelle, newly arrived in Red River from Quebec. Mr. Genthon’s father said that this was the first time, to his knowledge, that the jig was heard in Red River and he had been informed by Mr. Latourelle that it was known in Quebec as ‘La gigue du Bas-Canada.’”39 This establishes the Quebec connection, but beyond that the trail goes cold. To date, no one has found an Old World version of “The Red River Jig.” However, its strong connection with solo stepdancing throughout French and Aboriginal Canada suggests that it came to Canada with this connection. It could have been a locally known step-dance tune in a limited area in the British Isles, never written down, that some intrepid young fiddler brought to the New World, complete with some knowledge of stepping. It seems a likely hypothesis that a dynamic dance tune, especially one associated with a bravura male display of solo prowess (as hornpipes were known to be in the nineteenth century), caught on and spread quickly in the entertainment-starved small communities of early Canada. It is also clear that there is Aboriginal influence in the repertoire. This has been discussed in detail elsewhere,40 but an overview of Aboriginal characteristics would include extended introductory phrases and endings, mixed phrase lengths (usually longer than those

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[Fig. 8 Grande gigue simple]

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                                   2. 1.                                           

                                         1, 2, 3.

4.

[Fig. 9 Red River Jig]

Fig. 14.8 “Grande gigue simple,” La Bottine Souriante, Quebec Source: Hart and Sandell, Danse ce soir, 53.

                            

                                          3

3

3                              3

 3    3                  



3

3

          



3

    

Fig. 14.9 “Red River Jig,” Laurence “Teddy Boy” Houle, Winnipeg, Manitoba Source: Transcription by the author of recording made by the author in 1986, on Lederman, prod., Old Native and Métis Fiddling in Manitoba

in the original Scottish versions but sometimes a beat shorter), asymmetric numbers of phrases, repeating motifs that are variable on subsequent repeats of the tune, and forms that vary widely from the Scots-Irish “norm” of two parts with four phrases each (including an especial fondness for phrases that are five beats in length). Further, there is a marked tendency for the tunes to have their high parts first, at a much greater rate than occurs in the Scots-Irish traditon. The tunes then, more or less, descend in contour throughout and end on

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a low tonic (see figures 14.4 and 14.9).41 These are all qualities of Aboriginal plains music, as documented in many sources.42 In conclusion, what we know is that there are several old Scottish dances and many old Scottish tunes in the Aboriginal tradition, which, in many cases, have become separated from each other over the past 200 years, with Scottish tunes being used for more recent dances of North American origin and vice versa. The obvious French origins of the names of dances and tunes, and the musical evidence in the tunes themselves, indicate that Quebec has had a large hand in the shaping of both music and dance traditions in Aboriginal communities in the Northwest, a fact that tends to be glossed over in the oral traditions of these communities.43 Further, certain aspects of style (especially bowing and ornamentation) and repertoire (the lack of strathspeys and the dominance of two tunes that seem to be derived from triple hornpipes) may indicate that the Shetland Islands and / or other parts of the British and Irish Isles outside Scotland were also a source of dance and music practices in both Quebec and western Aboriginal communities. There is also significant evidence of influence from the Aboriginal plains tradition in the forms and contours of the old repertoire as a whole. The ideas in this chapter are tantalizing indications of where future research could go. Although the historical record is frustratingly incomplete regarding accounts of fiddling and dancing in general and of Aboriginal involvement in particular, I believe that much evidence lies in the music and dance traditions themselves as documented in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries in Canada. All indications are that the nineteenth-century connections among the Shetland and Orkney Islands, the British and Irish Isles, Quebec, and the Aboriginal communities of the northern and western regions of Canada are there and waiting to be explored in greater detail.

Not e s To hear recordings of the tunes in this chapter, go to http://www.annelederman.com/encounters.htm. 1 The Jesuit Relations are now searchable online at http://puffin.creighton. edu/jesuit/relations (accessed October 2009).

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2 Bassett, “Christmas in the Fur Trade,” 18. 3 Ibid., 20. 4 See Laxer, “Musical Landscape”; and Laxer, “Instruments of Exchange.” Wilkins, “Notes from the Field,” has done field research in Aboriginal communities around James Bay, where Scottish roots are also evident in the fiddling. 5 Lederman, “Native and Métis Fiddling in Two Manitoba Communities”; Mishler, Crooked Stovepipe. 6 For the purposes of this chapter, the Northwest is defined as northern Ontario, the prairie provinces, Yukon, and the Northwest Territories. 7 The subject of form is largely outside the scope of this chapter, and I have discussed it at length elsewhere. In my view, irregularity of form in this tradition could be due to Shetland Islands, French Canadian, and Aboriginal influence. See Lederman “Native and Métis Fiddling in Two Manitoba Communities”; Lederman, “Old Native and Metis Fiddling”; and Lederman, “Drops of Brandy.” 8 The main source of recordings of old Ojibwa (Chippewa) music is those of Frances Densmore from Minnesota, originally made on wax cylinders from 1907 to 1909 and released in 1950 by the Library of Congress. See Densmore, Songs of the Chippewa. 9 “Saulteaux” is a French word meaning “jumpers” and seems to have come from nineteenth-century voyageur days. Oral accounts say, variously, that it referred to leaping through rapids in canoes and / or to the Aboriginal dance style. There is a strong desire among some to return to the Aboriginal word “Ojibwa.” 10 Similarly, their cultural self-identification might be Ojibwa, Cree, or Métis, depending on family history. For some, this designation changed with the Supreme Court ruling in 1985 that restored First Nations status to women who had married non-Aboriginal men. At least one fiddler of my acquaintance, Laurence Houle, had status as a child, lost it when his mother remarried a non-Aboriginal man after his father’s death, and then had it restored as a result of the ruling. During the time that he was legally without status, he often referred to himself as Métis, but he reverted to self-identifying as Ojibwa after the ruling. 11 Grandy Fagnan, interview by author, July 1985, Usherville, Saskatchewan. 12 Intriguingly, in Aboriginal communities, “Caber Feigh” is usually paired with other C-major tunes whose roots are not as easily identified. 13 Workshop with James Cheechoo, James Bay fiddler, Toronto, May, 2008. 14 Grandy Fagnan was a little unclear on the exact year of his birth but believed it to be shortly after the turn of the twentieth century.

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15 The Yukon and Northwest Territories had direct contact with the Orkneys in the mid-nineteenth century, in the form of many Hudson’s Bay Company employees at Fort Yukon; see Mishler, Crooked Stovepipe, 18. This is also true of James Bay; see Cheechoo, Shay Chee Man, C D notes. 16 One Thousand Fiddle Tunes is a 1940 reissue of Ryan’s Mammoth Collection, published by Elias Howe in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1883. It was culled from popular tradition in the United States, from fiddlers’ manuscripts, and from other published sources, probably Scottish, English, and Irish. Although the exact history of any particular tune or name in the collection is difficult to establish, it is considered a good indication of the common practice of the time, as well as being hugely influential on subsequent generations of fiddlers. 17 In the Quebec version, according to the original André Alain recording from which this transcription was made, Alain and his companion played the high and low versions of the B part simultaneously. In Manitoba players usually alternate, as shown in the transcription of Laurence Houle’s version. Some nineteenth-century Scottish publications, such as MacDonald, Skye Collection, 86, are in the same form as Houle’s; that is, the A part of the tune alternates with low and high B parts. 18 Further examples will be seen in the case study of “Drops of Brandy” and “The Red River Jig” later in the chapter. 19 Unrecorded conversations with the author. 20 The tune is actually an irregular reel, not a 6/8 meter jig. The English title “The Red River Jig” appears to be a phonetic Anglicization of “La gigue de la Rivière Rouge,” as does the word “jigging.” Another example of such Anglicization is the “Double Jig,” from the French “Double Gigue,” a step-dance for two couples, and the tune associated with it, usually versions of “Fisher’s Hornpipe.” 21 Hard-shoe step-dancing largely died out in Scotland in the twentieth century but has been documented by Flett and Flett, Traditional Step-Dancing. 22 Chartrand, “La gigue québécoise.” 23 See Gabriel Dumont Institute, Drops of Brandy. 24 Crampin, “Music of a Market Town.” 25 See, for example, McGlashan, Strathspey Reels. 26 See Anderson and Bain, Silver Bow, a seminal recording of Shetland music that contains several old tunes in this tuning. However, on a trip to the Shetland Islands in 2006, I observed that players tended not to retune their fiddles for these old A tunes anymore, preferring to play them in G major in standard tuning.

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27 Oswald, Caledonian Pocket Companion, vol. 2. Volume 12 also contains several tunes in A E A C# tuning. 28 They are also all common in Norwegian hardanger playing, a major influence in the Shetland Islands, which were originally settled by Norsemen and were under Norwegian rule from the ninth century until 1615 when they came under Scottish dominion. To date, there has been little research on possible connections between the Norwegian repertoire and that of Quebec or Aboriginal communities in Canada. 29 This assessment is based largely on my own recordings and observations of Manitoba, James Bay, and Gwich’in players. See the following C Ds: Lederman, Old Native and Métis Fiddling; and Gabriel Dumont Institute, Drops of Brandy. 30 These are documented in bowing treatises and tune books published in the nineteenth century, such as Skinner, Guide to Bowing. 31 Cheechoo, Shay Chee Man, CD notes. 32 James Cheechoo used the term “forward” in fiddle workshops he conducted in Toronto in May, 2008. 33 This ornamented approach can still be heard on the recordings of older Cape Breton players, such as MacLellan, Dusky Meadow; Chisholm, Early Recordings; and many others. 34 Probably originally a bagpipe tune, it is usually played by fiddlers in the key of G major. See Hunter, Fiddle Music. 35 Other Quebec versions exhibit a similar structure in the A part as well as the B part seen here. 36 I have documented this in the case of the “Rabbit Dance,” played as a reel by Bill Stevens, Gwich’in fiddler in Alaska, and as a jig by Eldon Campbell of Kinosota, Manitoba. For transcriptions of both versions, see Lederman, “Aboriginal Fiddling in the North.” 37 For example, “The Campbells Are Coming” is a 6/8 version of “Mrs. MacLeod of Raasay,” a duple reel. 38 Margaret MacLeod is known especially for her research on Métis culture. See MacLeod, Songs of Old Manitoba. 39 MacLeod is quoted by Gabriel Dumont Institute, Drops of Brandy, track 1. 40 For greater detail on Aboriginal influence, see Lederman, “Old Native and Metis Fiddling.” 41 This characterictic has also been documented by Alan Jabbour in North Carolina, Virginia, and West Virginia, a characteristic he attributes to Aboriginal influence in these areas as well. See Jabbour, “Cascading Tunes.” 42 See, for example, Densmore, Songs of the Chippewa.

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43 Two notable exceptions to Quebec as the immediate source of dances typically performed to Scottish tunes are the “Duck Dance” and the “Rabbit Dance,” neither of which is part of the Quebec repertoire, according to Pierre Chartrand of Centre Mnémo, a Quebec dancer, teacher, and researcher (private correspondence with author). The “Duck Dance” is also performed to drumming rather than fiddling in some Six Nations communities in the East. Although the origin of the dance has not been proven to be Scottish, six-hand reels in this formation (i.e., three couples, one behind the other) and with some of the same figures are documented by Flett and Flett, Traditional Step-Dancing. Interestingly, the figures, often done in a rhythm of three beats, suggest a triple hornpipe as the original music, along with “The Red River Jig” and “Drops of Brandy.” The “Rabbit Dance,” also not documented in Quebec, is thought by Mishler to be a version of the old English dance “Chase the Squirrel”; see Mishler, Crooked Stovepipe, 82.

B i b l i ogr ap h y Print Sources Alburger, Mary Anne. Scottish Fiddlers and Their Music. London: Victor Gollancz, 1983. Bassett, Harvey. “Christmas in the Fur Trade.” The Beaver, outfit 272 (December 1941): 18–23. Chartrand, Pierre. “La gigue québécoise dans la marge des celles des Îles britanniques.” Cahier Mnémo, September 2010. http://www.mnemo. qc.ca/spip/spip.php?article150 (accessed February 2011). Crampin, Jack. “Music of a Market Town.” N.d. http://www.campin.me. uk/Dalkeith/Market/Market.htm (accessed February 2011). Emmerson, George. Rantin’ Pipe and Tremblin’ String. 2nd ed. London, O N : Galt House, 1988. Flett, J.F., and T.M. Flett. Traditional Dancing in Scotland. London, Boston, Melbourne, and Henley: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964. – Traditional Step-Dancing in Scotland. Edinburgh: Scottish Cultural Press, 1996. Hart, Laurie, and Greg Sandell. Danse ce soir: Fiddle and Accordion Music of Quebec. Pacific, M O: Mel Bay, 2001. Hunter, James. The Fiddle Music of Scotland. Edinburgh: Chambers Harrap, 1979.

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Jabbour, Alan. “Cascading Tunes: On the Descending Contour of Fiddle Tunes in the Upper South.” Paper delivered at a meeting of the American Folklore Society, Rochester, New York, October 2002. Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents, 1610 to 1791. N.d. http://puffin. creighton.edu/jesuit/relations (accessed October 2009). Laxer, Daniel. “Instruments of Exchange: Music in the Fur Trade and the Arrival of European Instruments in the Canadian West, 1760–1821.” 2011. http://www.cums-smuc.ca/en/publications/award-winning-studentpapers/160-instruments-of-exchange-music-in-the-fur-trade-and-thearrival-of-european-instruments-into-the-canadian-west-1760-1821 (accessed February 2011).  – “The Musical Landscape of Paul Kane’s Western Journey, 1845–8.” Boulderpavement: Arts and Ideas 1, no. 1 (2010). http://www.boulderpavement.ca/issue001/the-musical-landscape (accessed February 2011).  Lederman, Anne. “Aboriginal Fiddling in the North: The Two Traditions.” In Ian Russell and Mary Anne Alburger, eds, Crossing Over: Fiddle and Dance Studies from around the North Atlantic, 130–47. Aberdeen: Elphinstone Institute, University of Aberdeen, 2010. – “Drops of Brandy: Several Versions of a Métis Fiddle Tune.” Canadian Folk Music Bulletin 24, no. 1 (1990): 3–11. – “Native and Métis Fiddling in Two Manitoba Communities, Camperville and Ebb and Flow.” M A thesis, York University, 1986. – “Native and Métis Fiddling: Portrait of a People.” Fiddler Magazine 8, no. 4 (2001): 4–10. – “Old Native and Metis Fiddling in Manitoba: Origins, Structure and the Question of Syncretism.” Canadian Journal of Native Studies 8, no. 2 (1988): 205–30. MacLeod, Margaret Arnett. Songs of Old Manitoba. Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1960. MacDonald, Keith Norman. The Skye Collection. 1887. Reprint, Sydney: Cranford, 1979. McGlashan, Alexander. Strathspey Reels, Book I. Edinburgh: N.p., 1778. Mishler, Craig. The Crooked Stovepipe. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1993. Oswald, James. The Caledonian Pocket Companion. 6 vols. London: N.p., 1743–59. One Thousand Fiddle Tunes. Chicago, I L: M.M. Cole, 1940. Skinner, J. Scott. A Guide to Bowing Strathspeys, Reels, Pastoral Melodies, Hornpipes, etc. C. 1900. Reprint, Edinburgh: Hardie Press, 1984.

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Wilkins, Frances. “Notes from the Field: The Cree Fiddlers of James Bay.” Canadian Folk Music/Musique folklorique canadienne 45, no. 4 (2011): 21–5. Wilson, Thomas. A Companion to the Ballroom. London: N.p., 1817.

Recordings Alain, André. Violoneux de St.-Basile-de-Portneuf. Cassette. 1986. Anderson, Tom, and Aly Bain. The Silver Bow. LP , 1976. Reissue, C D, London: Topic Records, 1995. Cheechoo, James. Shay Chee Man. CD. Moose Factory: Kwisiekan Productions, 1998. Chisholm, Angus. The Early Recordings of Angus Chisholm. LP . New York: Shanachie, 1978. Densmore, Frances. Songs of the Chippewa. LP. Washington, DC: Library of Congress, Division of Music, Recording Laboratory, 1950. Gabriel Dumont Institute. Drops of Brandy: An Anthology of Métis Music. 4 CD set. Saskatoon, S K: Gabriel Dumont Institute, 2002. La Bottine Souriante. Chic and Swell. LP . 1983. Lederman, Anne, prod. Old Native and Métis Fiddling in Manitoba. 2 C D set. Reprint of original vinyl recordings from 1987, Toronto: Falcon Productions, 2001. Les Frères Brunet. Magie. CD . 1995. MacLellan, Donald. The Dusky Meadow. C D. Cambridge, MA: Rounder Records, 2003. Stevens, Bill. Gwich’in Athabaskan Fiddle Music. C D. Fairbanks, A K: Bill Stevens, 1999.

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15 “Teller of Tales”: John Buchan, First Baron Tweedsmuir, and Canada’s Aboriginal Peoples Kevin Hutchings

Nowadays the Scottish author John Buchan (1875–1940) is most often remembered for his popular novels, including such “shockers” as Prester John (1910), a tale of colonial intrigue set largely in South Africa, and The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915), which Alfred Hitchcock adapted to the silver screen in 1935. But during his long career as a public servant, Buchan also held several key administrative, military, and political appointments. A two-year stint working in South Africa as private secretary to Lord Milner (1901–03) inspired in Buchan a life-long interest in colonial administration, a profession he later called “my first love.”1 Subsequently, after becoming a lieutenant in Britain’s Intelligence Corps in 1916, he was promoted to director of information, where he worked as Britain’s chief wartime propagandist (1917–18); and he later became a member of Parliament for the Scottish Universities (1927–35) and lord high commissioner to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland (1933–35). As Janet Fyfe has noted, this career path helped Buchan to develop the skills and reputation that led to his crowning achievement as a public servant: his 1935 appointment, as the Lord Tweedsmuir, to Canada’s governor-generalship, an office he held until his sudden death in 1940. In the ensuing discussion, I refer to Buchan as Tweedsmuir when considering his work as governor general, but when examining his published writings and his career before coming to Canada, I

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call him Buchan, the name under which he continued to write even after he accepted his peerage. Although Clive Rattigan surely went too far when he claimed in 1941 that Buchan’s “real qualification” for his rise to Canada’s vice regency was “his high reputation in the literary world,”2 there can be no doubt that his popularity as a writer endeared him to Canada’s citizens, helping to make him one of the most celebrated viceroys in the nation’s history. As Buchan’s friend Leonard Brockington put it, Buchan’s books were read “at many Canadian firesides and in many lonely places where there were none, long before he came to Canada,” and Canadians’ love of his literary and scholarly writing helped to make his appointment “an exciting national event.”3 But it was not only members of Canada’s settler societies who knew Buchan’s literature. Although it is difficult to determine whether Buchan had a significant Aboriginal readership prior to his arrival in Canada, at least two of the country’s Indigenous nations would recognize his literary reputation in their formal dealings with him, for in making him an honorary chief, the Hurons called him Hajaton (The Scribe), and the Crees called him Okemow Otataowkew or Otataowkewimow (Teller of Tales). This chapter investigates Tweedsmuir’s relationship to Canada’s Aboriginal peoples – a topic that has thus far received scant attention from Buchan scholars. To contextualize this discussion, I first consider Buchan’s Scottish and British backgrounds and his attitudes toward race and empire. Next I examine his views of and encounters with First Nations, including the formal ceremonies in which he became an honorary chief; and I examine his views on Canadian Aboriginal policy as articulated in reports he penned about his much-publicized 1937 journey to the Arctic. Finally, I consider the ways his views and policy positions informed his depictions of Aboriginal people in his final novel, the posthumously published Sick Heart River (1941), where Buchan made some effort to include First Nations and Métis people in his emerging vision of Canada’s multicultural fabric. Although he hoped during his early days in Canada to encounter a “fascinating world of old Indian life,”4 this hope was disrupted by modern realities that ultimately encouraged him to adopt a pragmatic approach to Aboriginal issues, including contemporary policies associated with Indigenous healthcare, economic opportunities, and contemporary land-use practices.

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S c o t t is h a n d Im p eri al Contexts As Peter Henshaw has noted, Buchan’s childhood experiences in Pathhead and Glasgow, Scotland, would come to influence his philosophy of modernity, for his experience of “heavy industry, pollution and social decay” in these urban settings helped him to develop a lifelong appreciation for rural and wilderness environments, the experience of which he would associate with the reinvigoration of Western societies in danger of “irretrievable moral and material decline.”5 As a youth, he was himself invigorated by his family’s extended visits to the Border countryside: “some effluence from its ageless hills and waters laid a spell on me which has never been broken,” he wrote in Memory-Hold-the-Door (1940), his posthumously published memoir. As his “chief passion,” the Border region haunted him throughout his life: “When I was absent from it I was homesick, my memory was full of it, my happiest days were associated with it.”6 According to Buchan’s own account, however, it was his experience at Brasenose College, Oxford – a place where he had sought to lose his Scottish idiom and develop a British imperial identity and role – that enabled him truly “to discover Scotland.” As one of the so-called “aborigines of Brasenose,”7 Buchan recalled, “I cultivated a sentiment for all things Scottish and brought the Highlands and the Isles into the orbit of my interest. A quarter of my blood was Highland and in that I developed a new pride, for it was a time when people talked of the ‘Celtic twilight.’”8 If the idea of a “Celtic twilight” shared something in common with the idea of the “vanishing American” Indian,9 Buchan was ultimately too rigorous a historian to give serious credence to either of these popular myths, for modern population statistics would refute the latter notion,10 and a long history of intercultural mixing belied the former. In a 1927 lecture on the histories of Scotland’s Highland and Lowland cultures, Buchan asserted that “It is not a question of Celtic and Saxon, or Celtic and Norseman. Let us get rid of the word ‘Celtic’ altogether. Every part of Scotland is more or less a racial mixture.”11 As Henshaw has shown, Buchan would come to see Scotland’s heterogeneous mixture of cultures as a model for similar multicultural interactions throughout the British Empire, a multiculturalism that, in Canada at least, would come to include Aboriginal people.12

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Buchan’s fascination with North America’s Indigenous peoples certainly predated his move to Canada. As he stated in MemoryHold-the-Door, “tales of Indians and the Wild West … entranced my boyhood.” For Buchan, the American landscape derived much of its poetry from Indigenous history: he loved “the hoar-ancient memorials of the first dwellers, names like symphonies – Susquehanna, Ticonderoga, Shenandoah, Wyoming.”13 Drawing on well-worn but popular clichés that had equated Highland and Native American societies since at least the eighteenth century, he sometimes compared his novels’ Scottish characters to Indians in their tracking and hunting abilities. In his bestselling novel John Macnab (1925), for example, Buchan’s narrator praises young James Fraser for his ability to move across the rugged Scottish landscape “with the speed of an Indian hunter”; and he calls the rustic Wattie Lithgow, whose uncanny hunting and tracking skills more than once save the day for the novel’s protagonists, “a perfect Red Indian at getting up to deer.”14 But Buchan did not hesitate occasionally to employ less benevolent racial stereotypes as a mechanism for character development in his novels. In Mr Standfast (1919), for example, readers learn that “the dirtiest apache is a Christian gentleman” compared to the villainous Moxon Ivery;15 and in Huntingtower (1922) the heroic working-class Scottish urchin Dougal, “chieftain of the Gorbals DieHards,” calls two of his antagonists “a pair of deevils, worse nor any Red Indian.”16 In these examples from novels written prior to his Canadian vice regency, Native Americans inhabit a spectrum of stereotypical significance ranging from noble to ignoble “savagery.” In Buchan’s early thrillers, the worst kinds of anti-Indigenous racism are connected to, and seemingly justified by, contemporary imperialist ideals. Prester John provides a case in point. Set largely in South Africa’s Eastern Transvaal, this novel tells the story of David Crawfurd, a young Scottish settler, whose courage and resourcefulness foil a native African uprising. Attempting to infiltrate the rebel movement, Crawfurd tells the Kaffir leader, John Laputa, words he would later “blush … to think of”: “I told him affectionately that I liked the natives, that they were fine fellows and better men than the dirty whites round about. I explained that I … believed in equal rights for all men, white or coloured.” In the novel’s closing pages, however, Crawfurd reveals his real views on race and empire. After defeating Laputa in a heroic struggle to the death, Crawfurd makes his point: “I knew then the meaning of the white man’s duty. He has

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to take all risks, recking nothing of his life or his fortunes, and [be] well content to find his reward in the fulfilment of his task. That is the difference between white and black, the gift of responsibility, the power of being in a little way a king; and so long as we know this and practice it, we will not rule in Africa alone but wherever there are dark men who live only for the day and their own bellies.”17 Although the context here is South African, Crawfurd makes it clear that his concept of “the white man’s duty” is applicable throughout the globe, wherever whites encounter “dark men.” Although it would be problematic to conflate Buchan’s own views with those of Crawfurd, who is after all a fictional character, Crawfurd’s Kiplingesque reference to “the white man’s duty” is revealing, for in his memoir’s reflections on South Africa, Buchan argued that Rudyard Kipling’s notion of “‘the white man’s burden’” was part of “a far-sighted native policy” involving “a new philosophy of politics, and an ethical standard, serious and surely not ignoble.”18 Arguably, in Prester John, Crawfurd is Buchan’s embodiment of this imperialist and racialist philosophy. There is little evidence to suggest that Buchan’s imperialism changed substantially in the decades following his colonial service in South Africa. In a speech delivered to the Canadian Club in London several months prior to the formal commencement of his governorgeneralship, he stated as his “firm belief” “that the task of … safeguarding the bulwarks of liberty and civilization, must fall mainly upon the British peoples.”19 Granted, the language of race that he used in Prester John gives way here to the language of nation as “the white man’s duty” becomes the duty of all Britons, including the myriad Scots who, like Buchan himself, ventured to the distant corners of the globe to undertake the work of empire. Although Buchan’s developing sense of himself as a Briton speaks to his increasing cosmopolitanism after his student days, he continued to embrace his Scottish side. Like many Scots, for example, he enjoyed a good joke made at England’s expense. For example, on his widely publicized 1937 expedition to the Arctic, when he wondered aloud why so many of the region’s mixed-blood people bore Scottish and Irish surnames instead of English ones, an “old Hudson’s Bay factor” told him that the Indians “had to draw the line somewhere!”20 And yet, despite the obvious pride Buchan took in Scotland’s global diaspora, he was hesitant to boast too loudly. With characteristic self-deprecating humour, he told the Canadian Club that he did “not wish to dwell too much” on Scotland’s

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glorious role in the British Empire, “for I remember the answer of the Australian to the Scotsman who was a little inclined to boastfulness. ‘You have a good many of our folk in Australia,’ said the Scotsman, expecting to be told that they were the best element in the country. The Australian’s reply was, ‘Yes, but they are not our worst plague; it is the rabbits!’”21 Despite such humorous self-cautioning against Scottish national hubris, Buchan very often dwelt on his connections to Scotland during his time in Canada. In fact, as he told his eldest son, John, prior to leaving Britain, he believed he would not feel homesick for  Scotland during his vice regency, “for Canada is only a larger Scotland, with its salmon and firs and rivers” – not to mention its large Scottish settler population. But when he anticipated leaving Elsfield Manor, his English home since 1920, it was a different story. The very thought of leaving “our gentle, kind Oxfordshire” for Canada, he told his son, caused him to suffer “very badly from homesickness.”22 As he would later write, “I think those early years at Elsfield were the happiest in my life, for I acquired a new loyalty and a new heritage, having added the southern Midlands to the Scottish Borders.”23 It was this “new loyalty” that made Buchan as much a Briton as a Scot, helping to facilitate his entry “into the social and political elite that led not only Britain but also a globe-spanning empire.”24 The “territorial name”25 or title he would choose for his peerage – Baron Tweedsmuir of Elsfield – signified Buchan’s sense of his own hybrid identity. He was himself, in other words, an exemplar of the multiculturalism that Henshaw aptly considers one of Buchan’s most important Canadian legacies.26 The role that Canada’s Indigenous people would play in this multicultural vision is examined below. First, however, it is necessary to consider an aspect of Buchan’s early view of Indigenous Canada that seems out of step with a philosophy emphasizing multiple national or cultural allegiances: his desire to encounter, in the Dominion’s remote corners, traditional Indigenous societies not yet subject to the hybridizing and modernizing pressures of contemporary life.

“A F as c in at in g W o r l d o f Old I ndi an Li fe” Tweedsmuir’s fascination for traditional Indigenous life-ways was apparent early in his tenure as Canada’s governor general when he invited Marius Barbeau, Canada’s “chief [academic] authority on the

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Red Indians,” to dine with him at Government House, after which the two men spent at least one afternoon together in the national museum viewing an exhibition of Indigenous artefacts. In a letter written to his son shortly afterward, Tweedsmuir, rather than expressing a sense of nostalgia for Native traditions deemed lost as a result of modernity, declared enthusiastically, “There is a fascinating world of old Indian life still to be explored here, especially in the North-west.”27 It is not surprising that Tweedsmuir hoped to encounter traditional Indians and “real Eskimos”28 on his journey into northwestern Canada, for he considered this region to be “the only physical frontier left in North America”29 and “the least-known corner” of the continent.30 As such, the Northwest promised to be a place where Indigenous people had retained aspects of their traditional cultures as a result of relatively minimal historical contact with Europeans. His meetings with First Nations people in more populous parts of Canada could not satisfy his desire to encounter traditional Indians because they tended to reveal the extent to which Native people had been affected by colonial history. Consider, for example, the governor general’s description of his first formal Indigenous encounter, which took place in Quebec in August 1936. In an exuberant letter to his mother, Helen, he said: “Since I [last] wrote, I have become a Huron Chief! We had a most amusing ceremony on Monday night at Indian Lorette. I was given a great headdress of feathers to put on, and all the family were given gifts, such as moccasins and snow shoes. It was a rather touching business, for it is the end of a very long story. My Huron name as Chief is Hajaton, which means The Scribe.”31 Tweedsmuir’s reference to the ceremony as a “touching business” stemmed from his awareness of the Huron people’s earlyseventeenth-century displacement, by Iroquois armed with European weapons, from their traditional territories in southern Ontario, an event that had marked a dramatic decline in the historical fortunes of a once thriving people. In the autumn of 1937, Tweedsmuir met with a group of Mi’kmaq people in Annapolis Royal, Nova Scotia, in a cultural ritual that mixed Indigenous and colonial traditions. Although the Mi’kmaq honoured the governor general by inviting him to engage with them in a traditional practice of cultural exchange, Tweedsmuir’s comments on the meeting emphasize the cultural mixing that characterized the overall ceremony: “There I was made Grand Master of the

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Order of the Good Time, which was founded three centuries ago by Champlain, and has recently been revived. It was an amusing ceremony, for I smoked the pipe of peace with the Mic-mac Indians, who, physically, seemed to me the finest specimens of Indians I had yet seen. There were also representatives of the old Acadian settlers, and the usual retinue of pipers.”32 Tweedsmuir’s amusement here is telling, for in an undated lecture on Scottish poetry, he claimed that true democracy entailed more than merely a charitable disposition toward others: It means a real sympathy with all sorts and conditions of men, not only – and this is important – not only in their sorrows, but in their joys. Many a man or woman who is only too ready to help in sickness or distress would be very much out of place at a merry-making. But the one is as much a part of the life of the people as the other; indeed, it is a far more vital part. That is what makes Burns for all time the poet of democracy … He could weep with those who weep, but many can do that; he could do a far rarer thing, he could rejoice with all who rejoice.”33 A self-proclaimed democrat who was never “out of place at a merrymaking” in Canada, Tweedsmuir was clearly delighted to be named “Grand Master of the Order of the Good Time,” for it gave him an opportunity to celebrate the “vitality and freedom and … rich humanity”34 of the people assembled. Clearly, he enjoyed the ceremony’s remarkable mixing of cultures, where Mi’kmaq people “in full war-paint”35 mingled with kilt-clad Scottish pipers and French Canadian traditionalists in a celebration of culture and history. And yet at least one of Tweedsmuir’s formal encounters with Indigenous peoples of eastern Canada was anything but amusing. After speaking to members of the Women’s Institute in Fredericton, Nova Scotia, in June 1937, the vice regent was taken to meet a group of local Malacite Indians. In a letter to his wife, Susan, he described the gathering thus: The rain was coming down in torrents, and the Indians stood stolidly looking in front of them with their expressionless eyes. The native Agent, a stout Canadian, held an umbrella over me, while I stood racked with anxiety about the Indians, who were getting wetter and wetter. One aged crone, wrapped in an ancient

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blanket, was known to be over 102 years old! I inspected the silver plaque given to the loyal chiefs by George III, which was reposing on the vast bosom of an elderly Indian. Then the children lifted up their thin little voices and sang the same song over and over again, until they were stopped by their teacher. Then I was given some grass baskets and a bouquet, and left the Indians still standing immovable in the rain!36 Here, Tweedsmuir’s anxiety seems to stem in part from the symbolic inequity of an encounter in which he, the privileged governor general, was sheltered from the elements while the Malacite people, including their elders, were left standing in the rain. Rather than formalizing a renewal of the political bonds symbolized by the silver plaque worn by one of the elders, the ceremony smacked of a colonial system that had stolen the Malacites’ dignity, leaving a once proud people “standing immovable,” looking not at the vice regent but straight ahead with “expressionless eyes” while their children listlessly repeated “the same song over and over again.” For a man who celebrated Scotland’s “old song-making impulse” as a manifestation of democracy and social harmony,37 the Malacite children’s listless singing must have been particularly difficult to hear. During his visits to western Canada in 1936 and 1937, Tweedsmuir’s official encounters with First Nations appear to have been more satisfying and successful than his troubling encounter with Nova Scotia’s Malacites. In 1936, when Tweedsmuir, clad in a “gigantic war bonnet,” was made an honorary chief of the Blood Indians under the title of Chief Eagle Head, he seems to have been struck less by the ceremony itself than by the fact that the deputy manager of the Blood reserve was “a son of Macmillan of Abbotshall, and had been at Kirkcaldy High School” in Scotland, an unforeseen contact “with home” that appeared, as he told his mother, to be “quite ridiculous.” Later that day, after addressing a Mormon congregation at Cardston, the governor general remarked, “It is a curious feat to be made a Chief of the Blood Indians and address a Mormon audience on the same day.”38 Here, in multicultural western Canada, where a displaced Scotsman could encounter Aboriginal people, fellow Scots, and members of the Mormon faith all on the same day, Tweedsmuir entertained some “curious” reflections. Clearly, the traditional “world of old Indian life” that he had once hoped to find in north-western Canada was elusive, and it is likely

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that Tweedsmuir had by this time realized that in searching for it, he was hunting his own preconceptions. Even his experiences in and around Tweedsmuir Park, the vast British Columbian wilderness area that had been named in his honour, were somewhat mixed. In a ceremony presided over by Chief Daniel Leon, the Babine Indians at Francois Lake made him “a full chief of the Lales District Indians,” naming him Chetam Squamish (Chief of the Big Mountain).39 The Babine people impressed Tweedsmuir, for they still handed down “their old tribal legends and folklore, ascribing supernatural powers to many birds and animals in their mountains,” as Lady Tweedsmuir subsequently put it in a National Geographic article her husband helped her to write.40 A short time thereafter, the governor general was delighted to arrive in the territory of the coastal Nuxalk (or Bella Coola) Indians, for it was here that the Scottish explorer Alexander Mackenzie arrived at the Pacific Ocean in July 1793. Performing the Thunderbird Dance at a formal ceremony to which Tweedsmuir was transported by dugout canoe to be “made a chief under the title ‘The Man from Above Who Has Come to Help Us’” (the ancestral name of Chief Samuel King), the Nuxalk people offered what Tweedsmuir described as “an interesting entertainment with their traditional dances.”41 And yet, despite their attention to tradition, the Nuxalk seemed to have lost their connection to the past. Not only did the canoe in which they carried the governor general apparently threaten “to tip over at any moment,” but their ceremony seemed to lack authenticity. To quote Lady Tweedsmuir’s comments, “though the masks were impressive, the spirit had gone out of [the ceremonial dance]. It is not easy,” she added, “in these days for Indians to be traditional.”42

T h e In d ia n D ia m o nd Jubi lee Of all Tweedsmuir’s formal dealings with Indigenous people in Canada, the best-documented and best-publicized encounter occurred at the Indian Diamond Jubilee celebration, which took place at Carlton, Saskatchewan, in August 1936. Present on this occasion were several Cree chiefs, including Chief Joseph Dreaver of Mistawasis, Chief Ahenekew of Sandy Lake, and Chief Sam Swimmer of Battleford. Unlike some of the other ceremonies in which Tweedsmuir was made a chief, this one was notable in part for the explicitness of its political agenda. The event was held to

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celebrate the sixtieth anniversary of the signing of Treaty 6, a treaty that, to quote a publication of the Tribal Chiefs Institute, was originally “designed to create peace and harmony between the First Nations and the European settlers.”43 Unfortunately, the Canadian government had not always respected the treaty’s terms and spirit. Only one year before the celebration, for example, Chief Dreaver successfully sued the government for its failure to honour some of the treaty’s healthcare, or “medicine-chest,” obligations.44 To highlight their own historical understanding of Treaty 6’s implications for the descendants of both its Cree and Canadian signatories, the assembled Cree people re-enacted the original signing of the treaty, with Chief Ahenekew playing the part of Star Blanket, Joseph Dreaver that of Mistawasis, Sam Swimmer that of Poundmaker, and five-year-old Joey Dreaver the role of “Chief Scotchman.” In the prologue to a program published for the event, the Cree organizers explained their intent: We have come together once again to re-enact before your gaze the Treaty No. 6, By which we gave all our lands away – Yes, – willingly, nor would we wish it changed. We pray you to have patience with us as we play our former role, We ask you to excuse us if we lack our former zeal or waver in our step, Or fail to catch the note so long since subdued.45 The closing lines of this passage are particularly interesting in light of Tweedsmuir’s fascination with Indigenous traditions. Perhaps anticipating the sort of critique provided by Lady Tweedsmuir in her reference to the Nuxalk ceremony’s lack of traditional “spirit,” the Cree did not claim to offer their spectators a culturally “authentic” experience. Instead, by referring to the possible loss of their “former zeal” and to their potential failure “to catch the note so long subdued,” they emphasized the temporal distance separating “their former role” from the one they were to play in Lord Tweedsmuir’s presence; and although they claimed not to regret the giving away of their lands under the terms of Treaty 6, this emphasis upon the reality of their cultural transformation highlighted the difficulties they had faced in the sixty years since the treaty’s original ratification.

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But the Indian Diamond Jubilee celebration had another important purpose, as the epilogue from the event’s published program makes plain: [I]f by dwelling on the memories of the past from time to time it helps our children to better play their part, If such lessons from by-gone days serve even to spur them on a little, So that they are strengthened to become more efficient in our great Manitou’s plan and scheme of things, Than we had ever hoped to be in former times, – Then we are content.46 Just as Tweedsmuir wished in his posthumously published children’s book Lake of Gold (1941) “to help children of North America to realize … the history of their country,” the Cree people at Carlton aimed to raise their own children’s awareness of their nation’s historical heritage. But unlike Tweedsmuir, whose mainstream pedagogy highlighted the “intensely romantic background” of a Eurocentric history involving “tales of Indians and magic and mystery,”47 the Cree celebrants emphasized an Indigenous pedagogical agenda focusing on “lessons from by-gone days” that their ancestors had learned in their dealings with the Canadian government. And if the tone of their remarks seems somewhat nostalgic, their focus on a future in which their children might be “strengthened to become more efficient in our great Manitou’s plan and scheme of things” demonstrates an optimistic, forward-looking agenda that is nevertheless strongly connected to tradition. As an important part of this agenda, the Cree welcomed Tweedsmuir in a formal ceremony in which he was given the name Okemow Otataowkew, or Otataowkewimow (Teller of Tales). Tweedsmuir’s presence at the celebration fulfilled a strategic political function for the Cree, which was to bring as much publicity as possible to an event centred on their own role in and interpretation of treaty-making history. After making Tweedsmuir an honorary chief, the celebrants presented him with a “present for his Majesty Chief Morning Star (King Edward VIII) on the occasion of his coronation,” thereby ensuring a direct link to the British Crown, after which they made Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King, in absentia, an honorary member of the Cree nation under the title Oteenesew

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Weeusowew (Wise Counsellor).48 If the Cree wished to attract the attention of the Canadian government in Ottawa, they certainly had some success in doing so, for Tweedsmuir and Mackenzie King exchanged correspondence concerning their roles in the event. Thanking the prime minister for a telegram he received “while I was dressed in Indian plumes and made a Chief,” Tweedsmuir wrote, “I was in good company, for you endured the same honour, receiving the honourable name of Wise Counsellor, whereas I was only The Teller of Tales.”49 In light of these light-hearted, self-depreciating remarks, one wonders whether Tweedsmuir considered the possibility that “Teller of Tales” might encode a clever pun referring not only to his literary writings but also to his former British propaganda activities (where “telling tales” might be construed as a euphemism for “telling lies”). Whatever Tweedsmuir thought about his Cree name, he was ultimately content, however, for it carried the same meaning as the “name the Samoans gave to Robert Louis Stevenson”50 – a fellow Scot who was one of the vice regent’s favourite authors – when they “called him Tusitala.”51 In response to Tweedsmuir’s correspondence, the prime minister wrote, “I am glad the Indian Ceremony at Carlton was so picturesque and interesting. I had never expected to see the day when I should be sharing the honour of being an Indian Chief in company with the Governor General of Canada, but ours is a country of romance, and wherever the North American Indian is, something of romance is pretty certain to survive.”52 Although Mackenzie King acknowledges the “honour” of his formal chieftainship, his references to “romance” and the “picturesque” suggest a stereotypical aestheticizing process at odds with the more serious, political side of the Indian Diamond Jubilee celebration. Sometime afterward, however, a group of Cree living in The Pas, Manitoba, showed the governor general that membership in their nation carried certain obligations when they asked him “to secure them a copy of their ancient treaty with Queen Victoria,” something he promised to do. Having a bit of fun at Tweedsmuir’s expense, however, the same people were highly amused when he was unable “to pronounce his own name in Cree.”53 Although this incident was a reminder of the cultural distance separating Tweedsmuir and his adoptive Cree from each other, the humour that marked the transaction suggests a process of levelling, a sharing between equals, for it was not every day that a governor

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general – even one with Buchan’s pronounced sense of humour – was an object of laughter in Canada. Although participation in Indigenous ceremonies, like attendance at military reviews and historic occasions, was very much “the stuff of Governor-Generals’ tours at the time,”54 Tweedsmuir seems to have enjoyed this part of his duty. Through such experiences, he gained important insights not only into the relationship between the Crown and its Aboriginal subjects but also into the realities of life for contemporary Indigenous people. Arguably, however, it was Tweedsmuir’s less formal encounters with Indigenous people during his 1937 journey to North America’s only remaining “physical frontier,”55 the western Canadian Arctic, that inspired his most pragmatic reflections on Aboriginal issues.

“ D ow n N o rth” In the summer of 1937, Tweedsmuir set out on “the most significant official journey of his term in Canada”56 – his expedition down the Mackenzie River to the Arctic Ocean. It was an experience he had long anticipated. As he told King George VI before setting out, “It will be pleasant to get rid of top hats and black coats and speechifying for a couple of months” and head into the back country.57 While en route to the Arctic, not only did Tweedsmuir visit the region’s “Hudson’s Bay posts and police posts,” but he also “had conference[s] with the local Indian tribes” “at every stopping place.” His view of the North was a complex one, for although, as noted below, he recognized the importance here of maintaining a socio-economic environment that would sustain traditional modes of subsistence, he also envisioned the North as a promising location for significant industrial activity, including “big developments” in “the tar-sands around Fort McMurray” and the exploitation of natural resources by “a large number of small industrial centres in close touch with civilization by radio and the air.”58 Indeed, according to Arthur Turner, the “fundamental object” of the governor general’s journey to the Arctic was to draw Canadians’ attention to “the size and wealth of its undeveloped areas.”59 Nevertheless, Tweedsmuir paid close attention to the Aboriginal people he met during his north-western travels. As he told King George VI in his subsequent reflections on the journey, “The Indians are the special concern of Your Majesty’s representative, since the

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original treaties were made directly in the name of the Crown.”60 In the contemporary industrializing North, however, the white man remained the primary beneficiary of economic development. Tony Onraet, a French Canadian entrepreneur who met Tweedsmuir at the Radium Café on Great Bear Lake, described the region’s economic system thus: “Ever since the Indians of long ago ceased struggling against the inevitable, and smoked the pipe of peace with the big paleface chiefs from over the sea, they have been given five dollars a head; man, woman and child. This is regarded as good business all round, for the Indian gets the dollars and the white man gets the country and its wealth, such as the minerals and furs. So everybody is happy. Another white man gets the Indians’ dollars back in trade.”61 During his Arctic journey, Tweedsmuir realized firsthand the need for policy changes to address such an inequitable economic system. However, due to the largely symbolic nature of his vice regency, he could not engage in overt policy activism. Limited to speaking in what he called “Governor-Generalities,”62 Tweedsmuir lacked a proper formal platform upon which to recommend policy on any Canadian issue, but this did not stop him from attempting to intervene in Indigenous governance through the strategic distribution of two reports he wrote about his experiences in the Northwest. In order to learn about the condition of Indigenous people in this vast region, the governor general consulted widely. In a report entitled “Down North,” he mentions numerous “conferences” he held “with the local chiefs,” “beginning with the Chipewyans and going through the Dog Ribs, the Yellow Knives, the Slaves, the Hares or Rabbit-skins to the Loucheux.”63 While claiming that the Indians’ grievances were in general “very small,” Tweedsmuir noted “one perpetual demand – for better medical attendance.” “I feel very strongly,” he wrote, “that efforts should be made to put the whole medical services on a different basis. The Indian agent is usually a doctor, and I wonder if it is wise to mix up administrative and medical duties. The latter often get obscured by the former. What is needed, I think, is a greater number of small hospital units situated in the proper places, so that a district can really be served.”64 One of the major medical problems facing the North was the high incidence of tuberculosis among Aboriginal people. Rather than seeing the Indians as racially or constitutionally prone to contracting this disease, Tweedsmuir expressed a sophisticated understanding of its intertwined environmental, economic, and socio-political causes:

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Tuberculosis is rife among the different Indian tribes and this is largely due to under-nourishment. Under-nourishment in turn comes from the failure of their hunting and trapping. This failure is partly seasonal and inevitable; but we must be very careful to see that it is not due to the intrusion of the white trapper. I am strongly in favour of a policy of increasing the area of the Indian trapping reserves and making them wholly exclusive. This is just as important in the interests of the great natural asset of the land, the furs, as of the Indian people, for the Indian is a natural conserver and will never over-trap, whereas a white man, especially with the assistance of the aeroplane, will trap a long line without regard to the future, since he can always shift his venue. This point was strongly impressed upon me by everyone I met in the North who had given any thought to the question.65 Relating the region’s high incidence of tuberculosis in part to a colonial political and economic legacy that had deprived Indigenous people of control over their traditional hunting and trapping territories, Tweedsmuir probes crucial questions of Native rights, questions he subsequently raised in Ottawa with Thomas Crerar, minister of  the interior and superintendent general of Indian affairs, and Dr  Charles Camsell, deputy minister of mines.66 Although some modern-day scholars might take issue with Tweedsmuir’s claim that Indigenous people are “natural conservers,” seeing this as part of a European romantic fantasy of the “ecologically noble savage,”67 he deserves some credit for proposing a holistic northern health policy that would enable First Nations to control more of their traditional territory by “enlarging” Indigenous trapping reserves and making them “wholly exclusive” to Indigenous people. The governor general would address the problem of Indigenous people’s access to healthcare once again in his final novel, Sick Heart River, wherein he depicts the Hare Indians as highly vulnerable to tuberculosis, among other serious maladies. It is interesting to note that on the very day of his death in 1940, he had been scheduled to give an educational radio address in Quebec on the need for Canada to take concerted action against the “scourge” of tuberculosis.68 Tweedsmuir’s focus on such practical, modern-day concerns in the Far North suggests how far his thinking about Canada’s Indigenous people had come since his arrival in Ottawa in 1935, when, as noted above, he had

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imagined the Northwest less as a modern place facing modern problems than as the locus of “a fascinating world of old Indian life.” Aside from using his northern journey as an occasion to make policy recommendations based on his newly gained understanding of the crucial links between Indigenous land control, sustainable economies, and healthcare, Tweedsmuir also made recommendations to the Hudson’s Bay Company (H BC ) that had potential implications for the livelihood of Indigenous people. In a private and confidential report on prospects for northern commercial development, he outlined the benefits that might be gained if the H BC marketed Indigenous artworks and artefacts. The American tourist, he observed, is a passionate curio-hunter and collector of memorials. Wherever he goes he wants to bring away a trophy. Now Canada is not well provided with trophies, beyond a little Indian work and French-Canadian embroideries. I do not see why the H.B.C. should not lay itself out to provide them. Every American knows its name and a little of its history. Whatever the H.B.C. provides is for him authentic Canada. I suggest that this side might well be organised – all varieties of Indian work, some of which is very good; Eskimo work, some of it excellent; special articles like H.B.C blankets, parkas, snow shoes, hunting knives – anything which suggests the genius loci.69 Although Tweedsmuir undoubtedly had the H BC’s economic interests at heart in this proposal, his emphasis upon the need to develop a trade in Indigenous art and artefacts – key aspects of what he calls “authentic Canada” – showed his desire to help Indigenous people diversify beyond a primarily fur-based, subsistence economy and develop new, sustainable markets. Tweedsmuir saw to it that his report was communicated to members of the H BC ’s board, and subsequent correspondence suggests that his ideas carried at least some influence there. Indeed, in a letter that clearly delighted him, the HB C’s governor called Tweedsmuir’s report “so constructive and helpful that it will form the base not only for many interesting discussions amongst ourselves, but, I hope, a definite line of action in several directions.”70 Although this “line of action” was not ultimately implemented during Tweedsmuir’s lifetime, the governor

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general’s proposal arguably showed a remarkable prescience concerning the aesthetic and economic value of Indigenous artwork, for which there has since developed a substantial domestic and international market. Tweedsmuir took pains to ensure that his larger policy recommendations regarding improved Indigenous access to healthcare and the need to make traditional hunting and trapping grounds “wholly exclusive” to northern Native peoples would carry some influence with Canadians and their government. Speaking of the conferences he held during his north-western tour “with all the different Indian tribes and also with the Eskimos,” Tweedsmuir told his son, John, “there are a good many things I want to discuss at Ottawa.”71 Prime Minister Mackenzie King facilitated these discussions by circulating copies of “Down North” – which was also “leaked” to the British press and “formed the basis of Buchan’s Canadian broadcasts about his tour”72 – among his Cabinet ministers.73 In his self-proclaimed capacity as Canada’s “only trait d’union between the Atlantic and the Pacific, the St. Lawrence and the North Pole,”74 the governor general seems to have taken his obligations to First Nations seriously; and despite the largely symbolic nature of his office, he did his best to encourage a broad and essentially political dialogue about the lives of Indigenous people and the policies affecting them. Far from romanticizing Indians or waxing nostalgic in the face of cultural changes wrought by modernity, Tweedsmuir had by this time developed a well-informed and pragmatic view of contemporary Indigenous life in the Northwest.

T h e H a r e In d ia n s and the Méti s o f sick heart river I do not mean to suggest that Tweedsmuir was immune to the prejudicial views and practices prevalent during the 1930s. The paternalism informing his idea that First Nations people were special wards of the Crown is undeniable; and it informs his novel Sick Heart River (1941), parts of which were directly inspired by the author’s Arctic journey.75 Like all Buchan’s fiction, the novel is “laced with propaganda,” as James Buchan has recently noted.76 Like many Buchan scholars, Lady Tweedsmuir called the novel’s Scottish protagonist, Sir Edward Leithen, “perhaps the most autobiographical” of her husband’s characters.77 Although one must nevertheless be

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careful to distinguish between Buchan’s own views and those he articulated in his fiction, an analysis of Leithen’s attitudes toward the novel’s Aboriginal characters can help us to see how Buchan’s understanding of race and empire had changed since he wrote such earlier novels as Prester John. In Sick Heart River Leithen enacts a fantasy of benevolent imperialism by sacrificing his life to save a band of Hare Indians from virtual extinction. Represented as “dabblers in the old magic” (167), the Hare of Sick Heart River are slowly dying from a degenerative “blight” that is as much the result of “madness” (170) – what Buchan’s narrator calls “a pestilence of the soul” (189) – as of disease and starvation brought on by the kinds of adverse environmental and economic conditions the governor general had addressed in “Down North.” On a microcosmic level, the predicament in which Buchan’s Hare Indians find themselves recalls the “vanishing American” trope so common in nineteenth-century British and American literary texts; but rather than accepting their annihilation as inevitable, the dying Leithen devotes the last remnant of his health to their restoration. Despite his self-sacrifice, Leithen’s ideas of the Hare at times betray an overt imperialist arrogance, as for example when we are told that “He had more urgent things to think about than the future of a few hundred degenerate Indians who mattered not at all in his scheme of things” (167). Combining the well-worn rhetoric of racial degeneration with that of theriomorphism (the attribution of nonhuman characteristics to human beings), he envisions “the Indians as tenuous growths, fungi which had no hold on the soil. They existed in sufferance; the North had only to tighten its grip and they would disappear” (178). Leithen, in contrast, is an ostensibly nobler plant: “Compared to his companions Leithen suddenly saw himself founded solidly like an oak. He was drawing life from deep sources” (179). There is, of course, some interesting irony informing these contrasting descriptions, for although Leithen’s deeply rooted oak – long a symbol of England – is clearly meant to signify a life form superior to that of the tenuously rooted Indigenous fungi, the fact remains that whereas a transplanted oak cannot survive in the Canadian North, numerous species of fungi flourish there. Although the racist and imperialist dimensions of Buchan’s depictions of the Hare Indians in Sick Heart River are difficult to deny, it is important to note that the novel subjects Leithen to a great deal of

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critique in its closing chapters. Meditating on his personal history as one of the most accomplished men of his generation, Leithen comes to realize that he has possessed not the qualities of a good man but a “barren creed,” one devoid of “true humility” and incapable of appreciating “plain human affection” (197). Drawing a deliberate parallel between the condition of his British protagonist and that of the Hare Indians, whom he describes as suffering from “an animal sickness” (190), Buchan’s narrator depicts Leithen himself as an “inhuman” creature owning not true courage but “the dreary fortitude of a sick animal” (197). Leithen’s pathology in turn finds its external correlative in the supposedly civilized world of Old Europe, which, due to the outbreak of the Second World War, had once again become “a carnage pit,” a site of “waste, futile waste, and death, illimitable, futile death” (191). Ultimately, for Leithen, the danger that the Hare will succumb to extinction is not separate from, but is metaphysically linked to, “the dissolution” that seems to be “overtaking the world” (191) as a result of the war. It is nothing new, of course, for a British author to invoke the lives of Indigenous people as a means to criticize so-called European civilization. Scottish writers who did so long before Buchan included such luminaries as the economist Adam Smith, the novelist Henry Mackenzie, and the poet Thomas Campbell.78 Critical of modern society, Buchan had begun to doubt the “high-flying Victorian conception of progress” that informed much contemporary imperialist philosophy, seeing it as “facile” and “apt to give arrogance.” Like many members of his generation, he believed the war offered decisive proof that Western society was not becoming “in any real sense more humane,” and he pointed to the cause of war – “Futile and jealous nationalism” – as proof that the “civilized” world had failed to realize its ideals concerning “the brotherhood of man.”79 During his travels in north-western Canada, however, he experienced a form of society that seemed to offer an antidote to these shortcomings. “There is,” he wrote, “an immense friendliness in the North. It is a true democracy, for there are no distinctions of classes. The trapper is on the same social level as the Hudson’s Bay post-master, or the police sergeant. Everybody is known by his Christian name, and they are all ready to help each other … In the face of a harsh Nature human beings seem to have acquired a keener sense of responsibility towards each other. I cannot imagine a more pleasant or wholesome society.”80

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A similar social dynamic informs Buchan’s depiction of northern societies in Sick Heart River. While pondering the ultimate inability of white philanthropy to assist First Nations, Leithen comes to realize that northern communities have a remarkable capacity for selfhelp due to the development of social bonds transcending “race loyalty” and even “the duty of kinship.” Here, in stark contrast to the warring nations of Europe, Leithen discovers a hardy society based on “the brotherhood of all men, white and red and brown, who have to fight the savagery of the North” (167). Compared to David Crawfurd’s racial discourse in Prester John, discussed above, Leithen’s view of race relations arguably demonstrates how far Buchan had come in his thinking about race since his days in South Africa, a transformation that might be partly attributed to lessons learned during his encounters with Canada’s Indigenous peoples. And yet not all of Sick Heart River’s Aboriginal characters are shown to be equal. In contrast to the novel’s Hare people, who remain “a mass of mostly nameless individuals,”81 the novel’s two Métis characters – the Scots-Cree Frizel brothers Lew and Johnny – are fully developed in terms of psychology and personality, and they play a crucial role in helping Leithen to rescue the Hare from their deadly dilemma. Significantly, these mixed-blood characters – whose surname is a variant of Fraser – are infinitely more savvy about wilderness life than are the Indigenous Hare. Speaking of Lew, “one of the most famous guides in the North,” Buchan’s narrator notes that the “country fitted him as a bearskin fitted the bear. Never, surely, was man better adapted to his environment” (132). To some extent, the novel acknowledges that Lew’s exemplary environmental adaptation is partly the product of the Indigenous side of his ancestry, such as when the narrator declares that only “Heaven knows what aboriginal wildness was mingled with his Highland blood” (162) – a remark that is all the more interesting in part because of the distinction it implies between Aboriginal North American and Scottish Highland cultures, cultures that have often been simplistically correlated as analogous exemplars of “savagery,” noble or otherwise. But Lew and Johnny, despite benefiting from the traditional environmental knowledge of Cree forebears who had bequeathed to them “the secret lore of the woods” (82), tend to think of themselves as white men: “The brothers had never shown any pride in their Indian ancestry; their pride was reserved for the Scots side. They had treated

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the Hares with friendliness, but had been as aloof from them and their like as Leithen” (166). Although in Sick Heart River Buchan provides a largely sympathetic portrait of Lew and Johnny, these Scots-Cree characters, like the Hare, are arguably more important for the plot functions they fulfil vis-à-vis the novel’s white characters than they are important in and of themselves. Perhaps the most serious social problem in Sick Heart River is the degeneration of the Western world’s capitalist social order. Peter Henshaw notes that such degeneration was a major concern for Buchan throughout his career and that the antidote to it was “an ongoing and energetic engagement with the countryside and wilderness,” without which “Britain would slip into irretrievable moral and material decline.”82 According to the narrative of Sick Heart River, the same held true for the United States. As Mrs Ravelston, wife of the wealthy American industrialist Simon Ravelston, remarks early in the novel, “Before the depression we [Americans] were getting rather gross. The old Uncle Sam that we took as our national figure was lean like a Red Indian, but in late years our ordinary type had become round-faced, and puffy, and pallid, like a Latin John Bull” (19). For several white characters in Sick Heart River, the best way to remedy such social “dissolution” (34) is to recruit an Aboriginal wilderness guide, a “strong child of Nature” like Lew or Johnny (130), capable of leading them toward a place of “worship at the altars of the northern wilds” (49), a place where they could go to shed a debilitating “docil[ity]” (39) and access the vigour of lost “instinct” (180). Outside the imaginative world of the novel, the North was key to Buchan’s vision of multicultural Canada. It was for him a potentially “binding force,” for it was “common to practically all Provinces and to all of our different race stocks.”83 As “one of the great unifying factors in the future of the Dominion,”84 the North was an ideal symbol of social renewal. In Leithen’s vision of a multicultural “brotherhood of all men, white and red and brown” (167), the mixed-blood Métis, combining what Buchan called “all the merits of the white man added to the traditional lore of the Indian,”85 provide both a role model for, and a vehicle toward, the revitalization of the social mainstream.

C o da : A n In d ig e n o us Tri bute Buchan’s vision of an inclusive “brotherhood” of all Canadian “race stocks” was a progressive one for its time, despite its subtle relegation

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of Aboriginal people to instrumental roles, with the suffering Hare providing opportunities for an imagined renewal of the social mainstream through paternalist self-sacrifice and with the Métis characters helping various degenerate white men to regain a vivifying connection to nature. And yet, notwithstanding such problems, this vision was much more inclusive than the “world-wide brotherhood,” with its “background of a common race and creed,” that Buchan’s character David Crawfurd imagined in Prester John three decades earlier.86 Indeed, evidence suggests that at least some of Canada’s First Nations people felt a sort of fraternal bond with the author of Sick Heart River. Upon his passing in February 1940, members of the Tyendinaga, Huron, Blood, Six Nations, Assiniboine, Bella Coola, and Cree nations expressed their sympathy by sending messages of condolence to Lady Tweedsmuir, some of which recounted the governor general’s formal visits and the traditional ceremonies in which he was made an honorary chief.87 Most touching was the message conveyed by Chief Sam Swimmer of the Crees – who played a key role at the Indian Diamond Jubilee celebration – upon the occasion of the governor general’s death: “We shall pray to the Great Spirit to put it into the hearts of his Indian children, never to forget the noble example of Lord Tweedsmuir, Chief Otataokewimow to his people here.”88 Chief Swimmer’s message is even more poignant when one considers the circumstances in which it was sent, as presented in a newspaper story posted from North Battleford, Saskatchewan: In failing health, and braving the rigours of snowbound roads, Chief Swimmer of Sweet Grass, Head Chief of the Battle River Crees, rose at dawn Monday, journeying many miles to the home of an honourary member of their band here, to tell of the grief of his people at the passing of Lord Tweedsmuir … whom they knew and loved as a friend … Weary from his distant journeying, his heart heavy with a sense of personal loss, Chief Swimmer recalled haltingly that glorious summer day at Carlton in 1936 when the Cree nation accepted the hand of friendship so freely extended by Lord Tweedsmuir, in ceremonies that reaffirmed not only their pledge of fealty to their Sovereign, but continued adherence to the provision of a treaty entered into by his forbears. Head “dancemaker” on that occasion, and one whose neverto-be-forgotten privilege it was to welcome Lord Tweedsmuir

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into that rare honour – Chieftainship of the Crees – Chief Swimmer linked with his tribute that of the Dreavers, recalling the part played by the late George Dreaver, whose band perpetuates the memory of Mistawasis, Head Chief of the plains Crees. True to native tradition that places supreme value on home ties, and those of kinship, Chief Swimmer was solicitous for Lady Tweedsmuir, her sons and daughters.89 As a son of Sweet Grass, a chief who had participated in the original making of Treaty 6, Chief Swimmer undoubtedly had political reasons for braving the winter elements to deliver his message of condolence, for Tweedsmuir’s death provided him with an opportunity to remind Canadians and members of the international community that his nation existed and that it remained loyal to the Crown. But Chief Swimmer’s message, as communicated by an “honourary member” of his band, also enacted a process of levelling, for although it called his meeting with Tweedsmuir a “neverto-be-forgotten privilege,” it also pointed out that the Cree people had bestowed upon the governor general a “rare honour” in making him a chief. In its reference to the Cree’s “continued adherence” to Treaty 6, moreover, the message subtly reminded Canadians and the Crown that Chief Swimmer expected them to honour the treaty’s terms as well. And yet, in its claim that the Cree people loved the governor general “as a friend” and in its reference to Chief Swimmer’s “heavy” heart and “sense of personal loss” (emphasis added), this sympathetic message surely exceeded the polite conventions of political condolence. In short, Chief Swimmer seems truly to have lamented the loss of a man who loved (in Tweedsmuir’s own words) to “get right down among the people,”90 a man for whom “the people” meant not only those of European extraction but Aboriginal people too. More research still needs to be undertaken in order to illuminate the full legacy of John Buchan, First Baron Tweedsmuir, among Canada’s Aboriginal people. But as I ponder this legacy, and especially as I consider the more troublesome aspects of Buchan’s long and distinguished career in service of the British Empire, I cannot help but notice that, of the numerous messages of sympathy sent from all over the world upon the governor general’s sudden passing, there was none more touching than Chief Swimmer’s tribute.

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No t e s I am grateful to the Canada Research Chair Program, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and the University of Northern British Columbia for funding research for this chapter. I would also like to thank the National Library of Scotland and Queen’s University Archives for giving me access to their John Buchan archival materials; and I would like to thank Blake Bouchard, Shay Shortt, and Matthew Slykhuis for helpful research assistance. 1 John Buchan (hereafter JB) to John Norman Buchan (hereafter J NB ), undated letter written in 1935 (likely 12–26 March), John Buchan Papers, National Library of Scotland (hereafter NLS), acc. 11627/10. 2 Rattigan, “John Buchan,” 33. 3 Brockington, “John Buchan in Canada,” 267. 4 J B to J NB, 23 December 1935, N LS , acc. 11627/10. 5 Henshaw, “John Buchan from the ‘Borders,’” 15–16. 6 Buchan, Memory-Hold-the-Door, 42–3. 7 Buchan attributes this phrase to Pearsall Smith in ibid., 50. 8 Ibid., 82–3. 9 See Dippie, Vanishing American. 10 “The popular idea that the Indians are a disappearing race is not supported by fact, as they increase slightly in numbers every year.” See Tweedsmuir, Canada, 43. 11 Quoted in Henshaw, “John Buchan from the ‘Borders,’” 17. 12 Henshaw, “John Buchan and the British,” 203. 13 Buchan, Memory-Hold-the-Door, 273, 276. 14 Buchan, John Macnab, 63, 154. 15 Buchan, Mr Standfast, 389. 16 Buchan, Huntingtower, 49, 50. 17 Buchan, Prester John, 123, 293–4, emphasis added. 18 Buchan, Memory-Hold-the-Door, 130. 19 J B , Speech to the Canadian Club, 27 May 1935, NLS, acc. 12329/15. 20 J B , Draft Report on Tour to the Arctic, August 1937, Queen’s University Archives (hereafter QU A), loc. 2110, box 12, folder 4. 21 J B , Speech to the Canadian Club, 27 May 1935, NLS, acc. 12329/15. 22 J B to J N B, 25 June 1935, N LS , acc. 1167/10. 23 Buchan, Memory-Hold-the-Door, 201. 24 Henshaw, “John Buchan from the ‘Borders,’” 18. 25 J B to J N B, 2 April 1935, N LS , acc. 11627/10.

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26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40

41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58

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See Henshaw, “John Buchan and the British.” J B to J NB , 23 December 1935, N LS, acc. 11627/10. Buchan, “Down North,” typescript, 7. J B to J NB , 6 September 1937, N LS , acc. 11627/12. Buchan, Sick Heart River, 80. Subsequent references to this novel are cited parenthetically. J B to Helen Buchan, 5 August 1936, N LS, acc. 11627/9. J B to King George VI, 14 October 1937, NLS, acc. 11738. John Buchan, fragment typescript of a lecture on Scottish poetry, n.d., NLS, acc. 11627/24(iv). Ibid. J B to J NB , 9 October 1937, N LS , acc. 11627/12. J B to Susan Buchan, 17 June 1937, N LS, acc. 6975/15, folder 3. John Buchan, fragment typescript of a lecture on Scottish poetry, n.d., NLS, acc. 11627/24(iv). J B to Helen Buchan, 10 September 1936, NLS, acc. 11627/9. Lebourdais, “Governor General,” 1. Tweedsmuir, “Tweedsmuir Park,” 453. In a letter of 9 September 1937 to his mother, Helen Buchan, Tweedsmuir noted that he was “busy helping Susie” with this article. See N LS , acc. 11627/9. J B to King George VI, 9 September 1937, NLS, acc. 11738. Tweedsmuir, “Tweedsmuir Park,” 476. Tribal Chiefs Institute of Treaty 6, In Their Footsteps, vii. On Dreaver et al. v. The King (1935), see Haslip, “Treaty Right to Sport?” paras 48–55. Indian Diamond Jubilee Association, Indian Diamond Jubilee, 6. Ibid. Tweedsmuir, “Foreword.” Indian Diamond Jubilee Association, Indian Diamond Jubilee, 5. J B to Mackenzie King, 17 August 1936, Q UA, loc. 2110, box 7, folder 11. Ibid. Smith, John Buchan, 390. Mackenzie King to JB, 24 August 1936, Q UA, loc. 2110, box 7, folder 11. “Served Empire Faithfully.” Buchan, “Introduction,” v. J B to J NB , 6 September 1937, N LS , acc. 11627/12. Galbraith, “His Excellency’s Excellent Adventure,” 34. J B to King George VI, 19 June 1937, N LS, acc. 11738. J B to King George VI, 9 September 1937, NLS, acc. 11738.

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59 Turner, Mr. Buchan, 97. 60 J B to King George VI, 9 September 1937, NLS, acc. 11738. Elsewhere, Tweedsmuir noted that he felt a “special responsibility” to First Nations since “the original treaties were made in the name of Queen Victoria, and the Indians are in a special degree the wards of the Crown.” See Buchan, “Down North,” typescript, 14. 61 Onraet, Down North, 51. 62 J B to King Edward VIII, 17 November 1936, NLS , acc. 11738. 63 Buchan, “Down North,” typescript, 13. 64 Ibid. 65 Ibid., 14–15. 66 J B to J N B, 25 September 1937, N LS , acc. 11627/12. 67 See, for example, Krech, Ecological Indian. 68 “His Excellency’s Last Address,” 13. 69 I refer to Tweedsmuir’s “Private and Confidential” report to the HB C , 1 September 1937, typescript copy, 5–6, which Tweedsmuir attached to a letter written to his son, John, on 6 September 1937, NLS, acc. 11627/12. 70 Quoted in JB to JN B, 12 October 1937, NLS, acc. 11627/12. 71 J B to J N B, 14 August 1937, N LS , acc. 11627/12. 72 Editorial headnote to Buchan, “Down North,” reprint (1985), 3. 73 J B to J N B, 15 September 1937, N LS , acc. 11627/12. 74 J B to Walter Buchan, 1 July 1937, N LS , acc. 11627/80. 75 Lownie, John Buchan, 285–6. Sick Heart River was published in the United States as Mountain Meadow. 76 Buchan, “Introduction,” ix. 77 Tweedsmuir, ed., John Buchan, 287. 78 See, for example, Lise Sorensen, “Savages and Men.” On Thomas Campbell, see Hutchings, Romantic Ecologies, 134–53. 79 Buchan, “Revision of Dogmas,” 2–3. 80 Buchan, “Down North,” typescript, 16. 81 Macdonald, John Buchan, 115. 82 Henshaw, “John Buchan from the ‘Borders,’” 15. 83 J B to Walter Buchan, 1 July 1937, N LS , acc. 11627/80. 84 J B, “Notes for Mackenzie King,” 7 April 1937, NLS, acc. 6542/12. 85 Buchan, “Down North,” typescript, 15. 86 Buchan, Prester John, 130, emphasis added. 87 See “List of Messages Received on His [Tweedsmuir’s] Death,” QUA, loc. 2110, box 23, folder 9. For the message of sympathy posted to Lady Tweedsmuir from Bella Coola, see “Indians Mourn Tweedsmuir.”

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88 Quoted in “Chief Swimmer Expresses Sorrows of Cree Nation,” posted at North Battleford, Saskatchewan, 13 February 1940. Cut from an unidentified newspaper, the clipping can be found in NLS, acc. 11628/282. 89 Ibid. 90 J B to Walter Buchan, 27 December 1935, NLS, acc. 11627/79.

B i b l i ogr ap h y Brockington, Leonard. “John Buchan in Canada.” In Susan Tweedsmuir, ed., John Buchan by His Wife and Friends, 267–77. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1947. Buchan, James. “Introduction.” In John Buchan, Sick Heart River, v–x. Edinburgh: Polygon, 2007. Buchan, John. “Down North.” Typescript. N.d. National Library of Scotland, acc. 11627/12. – “Down North.” Reprinted in two installments in John Buchan Journal 5 (1985): 3–6; and John Buchan Journal 6 (1986): 4–8. – Huntingtower. 1922. Reprint, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. – John Macnab. 1925. Reprint, Edinburgh: Polygon, 2007. – Memory-Hold-the-Door. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1940. – Mr Standfast. 1919. In The Complete Richard Hannay, 349–655. London: Penguin, 1992. – Prester John. 1910. Reprint, London: Thomas Nelson, 1922. – “The Revision of Dogmas.” Typescript. N.d. National Library of Scotland, acc. 11627/34. – Sick Heart River. 1941. Reprint, Edinburgh: Polygon, 2007. Dippie, Brian W. The Vanishing American: White Attitudes and U.S. Indian Policy. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1982. Galbraith, William. “His Excellency’s Excellent Adventure.” Up Here (May-June 1996): 34–7. Haslip, Susan. “A Treaty Right to Sport?” E LA W: Murdoch University Electronic Journal of Law 8, no. 2 (June 2001). http://www.murdoch. edu.au/elaw/issues/v8n2/haslip82nf.html#t178 (accessed 2 October 2012). Henshaw, Peter. “John Buchan and the British Imperial Origins of Canadian Multiculturalism.” In Norman Hillmer and Adam Chapnick, eds, Canadas of the Mind: The Making and Unmaking of Canadian Nationalisms in the Twentieth Century, 191–213. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2007.

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– “John Buchan from the ‘Borders’ to the ‘Berg’: Nature, Empire and White South African Identity.” African Studies 62, no. 1 (2003): 3–32. “His Excellency’s Last Address Plea for War on Tuberculosis: Broadcast Written by Governor General Goes ahead as Planned, at Request of the Lady Tweedsmuir.” Ottawa Journal, 15 February 1940, 13. National Library of Scotland, acc. 11628/281. Hutchings, Kevin. Romantic Ecologies and Colonial Cultures in the British Atlantic World, 1770–1850. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2009. Indian Diamond Jubilee Association. Indian Diamond Jubilee Celebration Programme. Carlton, S K: Indian Diamond Jubilee Association, 1936. Queen’s University Archives, loc. 2110, box 22, folder 7. “Indians Mourn Tweedsmuir.” Toronto Evening Telegraph, 16 February 1940. National Library of Scotland, acc. 11627/78. Krech, Shepard, III. The Ecological Indian. New York: Norton, 1999. Lebourdais, Louis. “Governor General Becomes Chief of the Big Mountain.” Province, 16 August 1937, 1–2. Lownie, Andrew. John Buchan, the Presbyterian Cavalier. Toronto: McArthur, 1995. Macdonald, Kate. John Buchan: A Companion to the Mystery Fiction. Jefferson, N C, and London: McFarland, 2009. Onraet, Tony. Down North. London: Jonathan Cape, 1944. Rattigan, Clive. “John Buchan: Governor-General.” Great Thoughts (April 1939): 33–6. “Served Empire Faithfully in Both War and Peace: Was Indian Chief.” Toronto Daily Star, 12 February 1940. National Library of Scotland, acc. 11627/78. Smith, Janet Adam. John Buchan. London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1965. Sorensen, Lise. “Savages and Men of Feeling: North American Indians in Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments and Henry Mackenzie’s The Man of the World.” In Tim Fulford and Kevin Hutchings, eds, Native Americans and Anglo-American Culture, 1750–1850: The Indian Atlantic, 74–93. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Tribal Chiefs Institute of Treaty 6. In Their Footsteps: Contributions of First Nations People in Alberta. Edmonton, A B : Duval House, 2001. Turner, Arthur C. Mr. Buchan, Writer: A Life of the First Lord Tweedsmuir. Toronto: Macmillan, 1949. Tweedsmuir, Susan. Canada. London: Penns in the Rocks Press and William Collins, 1941.

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– “Foreword.” In John Buchan, Lake of Gold, n.p. Toronto: Musson, 1941. – “Tweedsmuir Park: The Diary of a Pilgrimage.” National Geographic 73, no. 4 (April 1938): 451–76. – ed. John Buchan by His Wife and Friends. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1947.

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Contributors

DON A LD HA R MA N A K E NSO N is Douglas Professor of Canadian and Colonial History, Queen’s University, Kingston. From 1997 to 2004 he was also Beamish Research Professor of Migration Studies in the Institute of Irish Studies at the University of Liverpool. JOHN EASTLAKE is currently based in Roinn an Bhéaloidis, University College Cork (Department of Folklore and Ethnology), where he recently held an IRCHSS (Government of Ireland) Post-Doctoral Fellowship and is now manager of the L D L project Béaloideas na mBan / Irish Women’s Folklore. He is co-editor of Anáil an Bhéil Bheo: Orality and Modern Irish Culture  (with Nessa Cronin and Seán Crosson) and co-editor of Béascna: Journal of Folklore and Ethnology.  He has written extensively about the development of Native autobiography in Ireland and America, and his work on Jeremiah and Alma Curtin has been selected to be part of the Mellon Foundation Folklore Studies in a Multicultural World series in partnership with the University of Wisconsin Press. MA R JORY H A R P E R is a professor of history at the University of Aberdeen. Her research interests and publications are in the area of disapora studies, particularly – but not exclusively – emigration from Scotland. Her prize-winning book on nineteenth-century Scottish emigration, Adventurers and Exiles, has recently been followed by a twentieth-century sequel, Scotland No More?, which incorporates several interviews from her recent work on oral testimony. She co-wrote (with Stephen Constantine) Migration and Empire, in the Oxford History of the British Empire Companion series, and

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she makes regular visits to Canada to lecture and collect archival material for new projects. ANDREW HINSON is a SSHRC postdoctoral fellow with St Michael’s College at the University of Toronto. He co-edited Ties of Bluid, Kin and Countrie: Scottish Associational Culture in the Diaspora with Graeme Morton and is co-authoring The Scottish Diaspora with Tanja Bueltmann and Graeme Morton. He has authored several articles on the Scots in Canada, focusing on their clubs and societies and on the role of the Presbyterian Church. Andrew received his doctorate from the University of Guelph and holds a master’s degree in history from the University of Glasgow. MIC HELE HOL MGR E N is an associate professor of English at Mount Royal University. She teaches early Canadian literature, has published articles on Canadian and Irish literary nationalism in nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature, and has contributed to the Library Archives Canada website The Shamrock and Maple Leaf. Michele is the president of the Canadian Association for Irish Studies. K EV IN H UT C HI NGS is a professor of English and the Canada Research Chair in Literature, Culture and Environmental Studies at the University of Northern British Columbia. His recent books include the monograph Romantic Ecologies and Colonial Cultures in the British Atlantic World and the co-edited collections Native Americans and Anglo-American Culture, 1750–1850: The Indian Atlantic and Transatlantic Literary Exchanges, 1790–1870. He is currently working on a monograph entitled British Romanticism and North American Indigenous Governance, 1800–1940. A N N E LE DE R MA N holds a master’s degree in ethomusicology from York University for her work “Old Native and Métis Fiddling in Two Manitoba Communities, Camperville and Ebb and Flow.” She has written for many scholarly publications, including “Fiddling” for the Encyclopedia of Music in Canada (revised 2010, complete version available at www.annelederman.com) and several articles for the Garland Encyclopedia of World Music. Formerly an adjunct professor of music at York University and founding artistic director of Worlds of Music Toronto, Anne is an active performer (fiddle,

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voice, piano, accordion, mandola, and tenor guitar) and composer (theatre and concert performance). She currently teaches Canadian fiddling at the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto. PA TR IC I A A . M c C O R MA C K has taught in the Faculty of Native Studies at the University of Alberta since 1994 and is now Professor Emerita. Previously, she served as the ethnologist at the Provincial Museum of Alberta. Her research is broadly ethnohistorical, focusing on Aboriginal peoples in northern Canada, southern Alberta, and Scotland in the contexts of the fur trade and the expansion of the state. In recent years, she has assisted lawyers in numerous cases and has served as an expert witness in legal proceedings. MA R K G . M c GOWA N served as principal of St Michael’s College at the University of Toronto from 2002 to 2011. He is a professor of history specializing in religion, ethnicity, education, and media. He has written many award-winning books and articles and has been the recipient of four university teaching awards. He is currently working on a book on Irish Catholics in Canada and the Great War and another on religion and broadcasting in Canada. A N N M c GR A T H is the director of the Australian Centre for Indigenous History at the Australian National University. She has published prize-winning books and articles on gender and colonialism, including comparative work on North America and Australia. She is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Social Sciences and received the Medal of the Order of Australia for her contribution to  the field. Her most recent project adopts a landscape-based historical approach, and she is also conducting interdisciplinary work probing into Australia’s deep past. She has worked on Aboriginal land claims, on royal commissions, and on film and television projects. C IA N T . M c MA HON is a postdoctoral scholar in history at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and the 2012–13 I ACI / N U I G Visiting Fellow in Irish Studies. He has published articles in Irish Historical Studies, American Periodicals, History Ireland, and the Journal of American Ethnic History. McMahon is currently revising his doctoral dissertation for publication as a book manuscript entitled The Irish World: Global Migration, National Identity, and the

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Popular Press, 1840–1880. For more information, please visit his website: www.ctmcmahon.com. G R A E M E M O R T O N is a professor of history and the Scottish Studies Foundation Chair at the University of Guelph. His research interests coalesce around Scottish national identity, associational culture, and diaspora studies. Recent publications include Ourselves and Others: Scotland, 1832–1914; A History of Everyday Life in Scotland, 1800 to 1900; and as co-editor, Ties of Bluid, Kin and Countrie: Scottish Associational Culture in the Diaspora. He has edited the International Review of Scottish Studies since 2004 and is currently co-authoring a study on The Scottish Diaspora for Edinburgh University Press. MIC HA EL NE WT O N is an assistant professor of Celtic studies at St Francis Xavier University. He was awarded a doctorate in Celtic studies from the University of Edinburgh in 1998. He has written several books and numerous articles on many aspects of Gaelic tradition and history in Scotland and North America. He  was the editor of Dùthchas nan Gaidheal: Selected Essays of John MacInnes, which won the Saltire Society’s Research Book Award of 2006, and the author of Warriors of the Word: The World of the Scottish Highlanders, which was nominated for the 2009 Katharine Briggs Award for folklore research.  PÁ DR A IG Ó SI A DHA I L is an associate professor of Irish studies and  holder of the D’Arcy McGee Chair of Irish Studies at Saint Mary’s University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, where he teaches Irish language, literature, and culture courses. His publications include Stair Dhrámaíocht na Gaeilge, 1900–1970, a history of Irishlanguage theatre; An Béaslaíoch, a full-length biography of Piaras Béaslaí, the Irish Revolution political activist and writer; and recent articles in Béaloideas, New Hibernia Review, and the Canadian Journal of Irish Studies. B R A D PA T T E R SO N is an honorary research associate at the Stout Research Centre for New Zealand Studies, Victoria University of Wellington. He was formerly founding director of the University’s Irish-Scottish Studies Programme and, in 2010, held the W.F. Massey Fellowship at Massey University. The author or editor of nine books

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and numerous articles, he is co-author of a major study of New Zealand’s Scots, to be published by McGill-Queen’s University Press. His research interests, beyond New Zealand history, include Irish and Scottish migration and the political economy of nineteenthcentury settler capitalism. B EV ER L Y SO L OWA Y is a sessional lecturer in history at Lakehead University, Thunder Bay, as well as a doctoral candidate in history at York University, Toronto. Her research interests include Canadian history with a particular focus on the interaction of culture and environment. Her current project investigates the impact of introducing horticulture to the Canadian Subarctic in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. DA V ID A . WI L SO N is coordinator of the Celtic Studies Program at St Michael’s College, University of Toronto. His most recent work is a two-volume biography of Thomas D’Arcy McGee.

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Index

Abbey Theatre (Dublin), 53 Aberdeenshire, 15, 271, 307 abolitionism, 45n41. See also slavery Aboriginal Irish, 130 Aboriginal populations; lack of census data, 28 Aboriginal women, 114, 119, 121, 124, 268; and white men, 112, 114, 121 Aborigines; land rights of, 8. See also Australia Act of Union (1801), 94 Addis Ababa, 92 Afghanistan, 95–6 Africa, 4, 25– 6, 35, 37– 40, 45– 6n48, 93, 102, 104, 341, 344, 345, 361; scramble for, 25; slave trade, 4, 37–9, 40, 44n34, 174 Ahenekew (Chief, Sandy Lake), 350–1 Ailean the Ridge. See Domhnallach, Ailean mac Alasdair Ruaidh Akenson, Donald H., 4–6, 17 Alaska, 32, 43n18, 43n19 Algonquins, 18, 183, 197, 200, 229 Ambrose, Harry, 307

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American Civil War, 58 American Land League, 52 American Philosophical Society, 53 American Revolution, 26, 32, 45n46, 176, 184, 200, 239, 265 Amerindians, 30, 33, 38 Alain, André, 336n17 Anderson, Thomas, 208 anti-imperialism; international, 104; Irish, 18, 26, 92–107 Antipodes, 9, 99–101, 103–4 Army Medical Museum (Washington, DC ), 58 Asia, 94, 95, 97, 104, 116, 118, 123 Atkinson, Wayne, 126 Attawapiskat (Ontario), 316 Auld, William, 257, 259, 276n19 Australia, 7, 8, 9, 18, 22, 33, 35, 37, 94, 99–104, 108–43, 307, 310–11, 346; Catholic Church in, 122; Freeman’s Journal, 103; Labor Party, 116–17; “stolen children” of, 118 Back, George, 258 Ballendine, Betsy (wife of William Rowland, daughter of John

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378

Index

Ballendine and Jane Cree), 280n59 Ballendine, John, 280n59 Bandler, Faith, 111, 132n19 Barbeau, Marius, 346–7 Battle of Culloden (1746), 236, 242, 244–5, 248, 262 Béaloideas, 53, 64n21 Beattie, Kathleen Linda, 124 Belgian Congo, 5, 26 Bell, Andrew, 229 Bell, Mary, 223 Bell, William, 11–12, 18, 220–33, 235; dislike of French Canadians and Americans, 224; Hints to Emigrants, 230; on the Irish, 225; on Perth’s moral shortcomings, 224; racist attitudes of, 18; on Sabbath breaking, 222 Big Trout Lake (Ontario), 16, 314– 15, 317 Black, Mary, 222 “blackbirding,” 45n41 Blarney Stone, 124–5 Boer War, 86n6 Bolt, Andrew, 108 Booth, James, 153 Boulanger, Clément, 210 Bourget, Ignace, 197, 202, 203, 209 Bourke, Edward, 59 Bourke, John Gregory, 57, 59, 61, 67n57; attraction to Native American culture, 61 Brant, Joseph, 10, 174–5, 176–7, 180, 184, 187 Brass, Peter, 271 Brazil, 27, 31, 39, 43n17, 45n41 Brenan, Joseph, 102 Brockington, Leonard, 342 Brooking, Tom, 163

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brosnachadh, 238 Brosnan, Timothy, 87n28 Brough, Charles Crosbie, 207, 209 Brown, Alison K., 270–1 Brown, George, 221 Brown, Gordon, 308–9 Brown, Jennifer S.H., 259, 268–9, 276n12 Buchan, James, 358 Buchan, John, 17, 341–64, 367n60, 369–70; Canadian Aboriginal policy of, 342; childhood, 343; death of, 367, 369; as governor general of Canada, 17; honoured by Mi’kmaq, 347; imperialism of, 345; John Macnab, 344; journal of, 368; Lake of Gold, 353; Memory-Hold-the-Door, 343–4; as Okemow Otataowkew or Otataowkewimow (Teller of Tales), 342; policy recommendations, 358; Prester John, 341, 344–5, 359, 361, 363, 365, 367– 8; recipient of Huron name, 347; Sick Heart River, 342, 356, 359– 63; The Thirty-Nine Steps, 341 Buchan, Susan, 350, 351, 358, 363–4 Buchanan, Cheryl, 127 Bulls, Township of (New Zealand), 144, 152, 157, 159, 160, 161 Bumsted, J.M., 275n6 Bureau of American Ethnology (B A E), 5, 49, 50, 53, 55, 57, 60, 61, 72, 76–7, 83 Bureau of Indian Affairs, 51, 62, 78–9 Burke, Edmund, 197 California, 6, 51, 78–9 Callegari-Jacques, Sidia, 30

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Index

Calloway, Colin, 227, 230, 265, 266 Campbell, Patrick, 174 Campbell, Thomas, 175, 360 Campey, Lucille, 263 Canada, 7, 10, 27, 32, 42–3, 45, 255, 256, 265–74; in-migration, 43; Irish nationalists in, 7; outmigration, 43; population estimates of, 32 Canadian Pacific Railway, 305, 320 Canadian Regiment of Fencible Infantry, 265 Cape Colony, 26 capitalism, 35, 37–8, 41 Cardell, Alma. See Curtin, Alma Carey, John, 205 Carmody, Kev, 108, 125 Carron, Hugh, 258 Casement, Roger, 5 Casey, Dawn, 126 Cathcart, the Earl of (Governor General), 206 Cathcart, Emily Gordon, 320 Catholic Church. See Roman Catholic Church Caucasus, 37, 76 Cavanaugh, James M., 67 Charles II, 278, 287 Chazelle, Pierre, 202–3, 204 Cheechoo, James, 329, 337 Cherokee, 60 Chico (California), 78 Childers, Erskine, 93 China, 96, 104 Choné, Jean-Pierre, 203–4, 209–10 Church of England, 155 Clay, Cassius M., 75 Clench, J.B., 207 Clouston, J. Storer, 256

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379

Cody, “Wild Bill,” 35 Colbourne, John, 207 Colby, William, 51, 59, 61, 64 colonialism, 5 colonization; benign, 8 Congo Free State, 26 Connecticut, 35 Connolly, Billy, 317 Connolly, James, 8, 105 Constitution of 1787, 27 Corrigal, John, 258, 277 County Cavan (Ireland), 62 County Dublin (Ireland), 58 County Meath (Ireland), 49 Craighead, William, 308 Crawford, Alexander, 113–15 Cree, 16, 266, 272, 314, 316, 325, 342, 352–3, 364 Cree, Jane (wife of John Ballendine), 280 Cuba, 39 Cullingford, Elizabeth Butler, 73 Curthoys, Ann, 116 Curtin, Alma, 56, 71–91; attitude toward Native Americans, 78; memoirs of Jeremiah Curtin, 86 Curtin, David, 72 Curtin, Jeremiah, 5–7, 19, 44–5, 56–7, 59, 61, 65–7, 71–85, 87–8; approach to Irish folk culture, 7; attempt to start timber business, 76; connection between Irish experience and Native American fieldwork, 7; Creation Myths of Primitive America in Relation to the Religious History and Mental Development of Mankind, 56; as Hiwesas (Seeker of Knowledge), 77; interest in Russian language, 75; Irish Catholic origins, 6; Irish

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380

Index

folk culture, 56; Jeremiah and Alma (Cardell) Curtin Papers, 65–8; myth-narratives, 80–2; Myths and Folk-Lore of Ireland, 56, 65–6; story collected from “an Orleans Bar Indian,” 83; visits to Ireland, 80 Cushing, Frank Hamilton, 51 Czechs, 37 Dana, Charles A., 85 Davis, David Brion, 37 Davis, Richard, 101 Davis, Thomas, 7, 95–6, 98, 100, 104–5 Davitt, Michael, 52, 93 Delaware, 18 Democratic Labor Party (Australia), 134 Denevan, William, 30–3, 43 de Nie, Michael, 93 Dennison, Walter Traill, 260 Department of Indian Affairs (Canada), 318 de Valera, Eamon, 8, 92, 105, 107 Devlin, Ellen, 49. See also Mooney, Ellen Dickason, Olive P., 195 Dilke, Charles Wentworth, 151 Dillon, John Blake, 98 Dixon, Roland B., 89 Dixson, Miriam, 120 Dobyns, Henry F., 42 Dodson, Mick, 108, 126 Dodson, Pat, 126 Dodson, Patrick, 130 Dolan, Jay, 52 Dolman, Kevin, 125 Domhnallach, Ailean mac Alasdair Ruaidh, 13, 240–3

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Domhnall Donn BhothFhionntainn, 241–2, 250 Dreaver, Joseph (Chief), 350–1 Drops of Brandy (dance), 327, 331 “Drops of Brandy” (song), 328, 330, 331, 332, 338n43 Dublin Corporation, 96–7; antiimperialism at, 97; pro-imperialist proposal, 96 Dublin Nation (newspaper), 94–5, 98–9, 104 “Duck Dance” (song), 330, 338 Duffy, Charles Gavan, 7, 95, 98–100 Duilearga, Séamus Ó, 73 Du Ranquet, Dominique, 204–6 Earlham College, 52, 63–4 Eastlake, John, 6, 57 Ellison, George, 61 Eltis, David, 37–8, 44–5 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 75 Emslie, George, 307 England, 101 Fagnan, Grandy, 16, 324–5, 335 Famine, Ireland, 5, 49, 56, 58, 94, 96, 98, 99, 123, 212 Faulkner, D., 307 Ferenczi, Imre, 41 Ferguson, Christina, 244 fiddle music, 317, 321, 323–4; Aboriginal influence on, 332; Indigenous and Métis, 16; influence of the Shetland Islands, 330; The Fiddlers of James Bay, 317 Field, Spencer, 281 First Nations, 11, 13, 35, 207, 254, 274, 324–5, 335n10, 342, 347, 349, 351, 356, 358, 361, 363,

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Index

367n60; child removal, 119; Gaelic perceptions of, 13, 237; and Irish Catholics, 195–212; and Jesuits, 203–4, 205, 210; population estimates for, 32; missions of, 11, 203–7, 208; trade, 210, 309 Fitzgerald, Edward, 10–11, 18, 170–8, 179–87, 188n3, 190n64, 191n69; adoption as Mohawk, 176; aristocratic background, 10; United Irish revolutionary republicanism, 10 Fletcher, H.J., 161 Fogarty, Lionel, 127 forced labour, 38, 40, 44n35 Ford, Les, 310, 314, 316 Ford, Patrick, 87–8n28 Fort Albany, 290, 291 Fort Chipewyan, 253–4, 258, 268, 280n55 Fort Nelson, 269 Fort William, 149, 204, 210, 277n22 Fowlie, George, 307 Fox, Charles, 174 Francis, Daniel, 228; Imaginary Indian, 228, 234–5 Franklin, John, 258 Fraser, Shirley Graham, 316 Fraser’s Highlanders, 263 Freeman’s Journal (Dublin), 8, 87, 96–7, 100–1, 103, 104 Freeman’s Journal (Sydney), 100, 103 French Canadian Patriotes, 197 Frogg, Henry, 315 Furlong, Eileen, 72 fur trade, 14–16, 19, 253–74, 275n6, 275n7, 276n12, 281n74, 287–98, 299n7, 304–19

25314_Morton-Wilson.indb 381

381

Gaelic League, 5, 50, 71 Gaelic Society (Washington, DC ), 53 Gauld, Charles, 307 Gauld, Frank, 307 Genthon, Frederick, 332 George VI, 354 Gibb, Jock, 306, 308–9, 311, 313, 315, 319 Gibbons, Luke, 5, 73–4, 172, 178, 187 Goldie, Terry, 180, 191n69 Goldring, Philip, 256 Gordon, George, 208 Gould, Bob, 121 Graham, Andrew, 291 Graham, Christina, 316 Graham, James, 316 Graham, Shirley, 316 Grant, Alison, 271 Great Bear Lake, 355 Great European Migration, 4, 22–31, 33–41, 43n18, 43n23, 43n26, 45–6n48 Greenfield (Wisconsin), 72 Greenland, 32, 43n18, 43n19 Gregory, Lady Augusta, 53, 57 Grey, Charles, 206 Griffith, Arthur, 8, 105 Gurindji, 127–9, 135n83 Halpern, Katherine, 58, 66n46 Hampton, Ernest, 307, 315 Hardy, Frank, 129 Harney, Bill, 124–5 Harney, Bill, Sr, 124–5 Harper, Marjory, 15–16, 256, 262, 279n40 Harrison, Benjamin, 6, 79 Hawke, Bob, 116–17

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382

Index

Hay, J.J., 208 Head, Francis Bond, 207 Healy, Chris, 116 Henige, David, 29–30 Henry, Alexander, 269 Henry, Will, 324 Henshaw, Peter, 343, 346, 362 High Counters, 29–30, 42n13 Highlanders, 12, 13–14, 18, 19, 149–54, 226–7, 237, 239, 247– 8, 257–8, 259, 260, 262–6, 280n59 Hill, David (Chief), 174–7, 180, 185, 187 Hinsley, Curtis M., Jr, 52, 57–8, 60–1, 65–6n40 Hitchcock, Alfred, 341 Hiwesas. See Curtin, Jeremiah Holy Cross (St-Croix) Mission, 210, 212 Houle, Laurence “Teddy Boy,” 16, 329, 335n10, 336n17 Howard, John, 121, 126, 134n65 Howe, Stephen, 92–3 Howison, John, 220, 222, 232 Hudon, Hyacinthe, 206 Hudson Bay, 262, 278, 291–3, 299–302 Hudson Bay Lowlands, 297–8 Hudson Bay Railway, 315 Hudson Plains, 292, 295 Hudson’s Bay Company, 14–15, 210, 253, 255–60, 262, 265–6, 268, 271, 273, 274n1, 275n7, 276n12, 277n28, 278n35, 280n59, 287–98, 299n3, 304– 19, 330, 336n15, 345, 357; recruitment, 266, 305, 309 Hunia, Kawana, 152, 160 Hunter, James, 265 Hyde, Douglas, 50, 58, 85n2

25314_Morton-Wilson.indb 382

imperialism, 7, 8, 25–6, 28, 34, 35, 37, 73, 92–3, 94; in Australia, 18; British, 7, 8, 13, 17, 18, 73, 93, 94, 95, 101, 102, 103, 117; effect on Indigenous populations, 37; horticultural, 287–98; Italian, 92; Scottish, 273 indentured labour, 44n34, 111 Indiana, 49, 52, 64n17 Indian Department, 11, 204, 205, 207, 208, 212 Indian Diamond Jubilee celebration, 350–4, 363 Indian Health Services, 313 Indian Territory, 5, 49–63, 77 Innes, Robert Alexander, 275n5 intermarriage, 8, 19, 109, 111–12, 117, 119, 123–4, 163; between settlers and Maori, 157 Inuit, 16, 313–18 Iowa, 58, 65–6n40 Ireland, 5, 7–8, 10–11, 49, 52, 54, 56, 58, 61, 72, 80, 89, 94, 97, 101–2, 104, 121, 135, 139, 176, 179, 181, 207; anti-imperialism in, 18, 92, 96; folk culture, 54; Irish Australian ethnic identity, 109 Irish Folklore Commission, 73 Irish Land League, 52 Irish nationalism, 5, 7, 18, 92–5, 98, 100, 101, 103, 104, 187; internationalization, 95, 100, 104 Iroquois, 172–6, 179, 183, 187, 195, 200, 347 Isham, James, 293 Jabbour, Alan, 337n41 Jaenen, Cornelius, 195 James Bay, 15–16, 288, 290–4, 307, 315, 319, 324, 325, 335n4, 336n15

13-04-08 9:05 AM

Index

Jarvis, Samuel, 204, 206 Jesuits, 11, 202–12; Our Lady of the Assumption Parish at Sandwich (Windsor), 203; reception by First Nation peoples, 204 jigging, 328, 336n20 Johnson, Patrick, 109, 125 Kaiwarra, 149–50, 153 Keating, John, 204–5 Keating, Paul, 132n16 Keenainak, Simeonie, 317 Kelly, Ned, 108, 121, 128–9; legend of, 129 Kenny, Kevin, 3, 18–19, 93 Kidd, Adam, 10, 11, 18, 55, 170–1, 179–87, 190n64, 191n69, 191n73; Huron Chief, 55, 170, 179, 181–2, 184; quarrel with the Anglican clergy in Montreal, 182; support for Catholic Emancipation in Ireland, 10 Killibuck, Jim, 312 Killin, Robert, 315 Killiney, 58 King, Samuel (Chief), 350 King, William Lyon Mackenzie, 352–3, 358 Kipling, Rudyard, 345 Kirkintilloch, 122 Klamath River, 83 Knight, James, 297 Ko-a-lak’-ak-a, 77, 87n21, 88n29 Koch, Christopher, 110 Kuhnlein, Harriet, 292–3 Labor Party (Australia), 116–17, 134n70 Land League (American), 52 Land League (Irish), 5, 52

25314_Morton-Wilson.indb 383

383

Land League (Scottish), 13 Land Ordinance of 1785, 27 Langhorn, Richard, 275 Larminie, William, 85n2 Lawber, Jennie, 87 Lawson, Bill, 274 League of Nations, 92 Lecky, James, 85n2 Lederman, Anne, 16–17, 334 LeMoine, J.M., 265, 277n23 Lennon, Joseph, 93 Lennox, Georgiana, 172 Leon, Daniel (Chief), 350 Leopold II of Belgium, 26 Lethbridge, George Yates, 159 Lewis (Isle of), 14, 19, 253–4, 259, 260, 263–4, 266, 268, 270–4, 278n36, 280n59 Lewismen, 14, 259, 262–6 Liebersohn, Harry, 174–5 Linklater, Charlie, 314 Lippman, Walter, 24, 42n6 London Missionary Society, 113 Longmoor, Robert, 259 Louisiana Purchase of 1803, 27 Lynch, Niamh, 93 Lyon, William H., 58 Mabo judgment (1992), 123 MacDonagh, Oliver, 110 MacDonald, Alexander, 153–4, 165n53 MacDonald, Donald, 149, 153 Macdonald, Ranald, 311, 315, 320n21 Macdonell, Aeneas, 257, 258 Macdougall, Brenda, 275, 279 MacDougall, Robert, 18, 220, 226 MacGilleathain, Eachann N., 245 MacGilleathain, Iain, 246

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384

Index

MacGilleBhàin, Alasdair, 243–4 MacInnes, John, 236 Maciver, Mary Ann, 271 Mackenzie, Alexander, 253–4, 263, 265, 273, 350 Mackenzie, Henry, 360 MacLagan, James, 237, 238 MacLeod, Margaret Arnett, 332, 337n38 MacNicol, Donald, 239 Macpherson, James, 183 Mac-Talla, 245 Malley, William, 258 Manawatu-Rangitikei purchase, 154 Manitoba, 13, 16, 245–6, 271, 283–6, 310–11, 315, 318, 324–5, 327, 329, 332 Manitoulin Island, 11, 201–4, 207– 10, 212. See also Wikwemikong Manitowaning, 207–8; Anglican mission at, 208; failure of, 210 Maori, 24, 35, 146–7, 150–1, 153– 8, 160, 162, 164 Marshall, John, 306 Martin, John, 99–100, 103 Martiniello, Jennifer, 125 Marton, Township of, 152, 156, 160–2 Massan, Christina, 271 Mathews, Lillie, 114–15 Matthews, Matthew C., 65–6n40 Matthews, Washington, 57–61, 65–6n40, 66–7n55, 67n56, 67n57; Navaho Legends, 66n55; obituary of, 60 Mazoff, C.D., 182 McCabe, Lida Rose, 50, 58 McClean, Rosalind, 163 McCormack, Patricia A., 14–15, 19, 253–4, 256, 258, 260, 262,

25314_Morton-Wilson.indb 384

264, 266, 268, 270, 272, 274, 276, 278, 280–2, 284, 286 McEncroe, John, 103 McGee, Thomas D’Arcy, 98 McGibbon, James, 311–12 McGinness, Jack, 128 McGinness, Vai, 127 McGinness, Val, 127 McGinnis, Jack, 126 McGinnis, Joe, 126 McGowan, Mark, 11 McGrath, Ann, 8, 114 McGreevy, Susan, 58 McGregor, Alistair, 308, 310–11, 313, 316 McIntosh, Fraser, 310 McKay, James, 258 McKenzie, Charles, 258 McKenzie, Roderic, 253 McLean, Donald, 9, 147–8 McLeod, Norman, 306 McMahon, Cian, 7, 8 McManus, Terence Bellew, 99 McPherson, Alexander, 307 McTavish, John, 265 McTavish, Simon, 265 Meagher, Thomas Francis, 99–100 Metcalfe, Charles (Governor General), 206, 209 Methodist Credit River, 229 Métis, 8, 14, 253–4, 269, 274n2, 274n3, 275n5, 280n55, 335n10, 342, 361–2; ancestry, 253; fiddle players, 16–17, 324; identities, 268 Mexico, 27–8, 30, 32 Mi’kmaw, 13, 244 Mills, Kathy, 120 Mission of Immaculate Conception, 204

13-04-08 9:05 AM

Index

Mississauga, 18, 229 Mississippi River, 27 Missouri, 77 Mitchel, John, 7, 98–100, 103 Mitchell, Stanley, 306 Mitchell, William R., 307 Mohammedanism, 55 Mohawks, 24, 174, 176 Moir, Henry, 271–2, 281 Montgomerie’s Highlanders, 263 Moodie, Susanna, 220 Mooney, Alicia, 62 Mooney, Ellen, 49, 54. See also Devlin, Ellen Mooney, James, 5–7, 49–67; ban on visiting reservations, 62; Calendar History of the Kiowa Indians, 49; Ghost-Dance Religion and the Sioux Outbreak of 1890, 6, 49–50, 54–5, 66n55; interest in Irish identity, 52–3; Irish essays, 53; Irish ethnicity, 6; as journalist, 49; Myths of the Cherokee, 49; relationship with the Catholic Church, 52; Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees, 49; Siouan Tribes of the East, 49 Mooney, James, Sr, 49 Moore, Thomas, 10, 54–5, 65, 134, 170–2, 175, 178–9, 181, 187–91, 193 Moravians, 37 Morgan, Lewis Henry, 64 Moriarty, John, 126 Morning Star (Chief) (King Edward VIII), 352 Morris, Nana, 122 Morrison, Iain, 271, 281 Morton, Graeme, 12, 226, 234

25314_Morton-Wilson.indb 385

385

Moses, L.G., 50–3, 55, 61, 64, 67 Mountain, George Jehoshaphat, 182 Mowat, John, 258, 277n22 Müller, Max, 76 Muskekowuck, 15, 293, 295, 298 Mussolini, Benito, 8, 92 Native Land Acts of 1862 and 1865 (New Zealand), 160 Native School, Turakina, 155–6 Navajos, 58 Nelson, Bruce, 93 Nenadic, Stana, 289, 296 New Mexico, 51 New South Wales, 126 Newton, Michael, 12, 13, 238 New Zealand, 19, 22, 33, 144–5, 149, 153, 156–7, 163, 167 New Zealand Company, 145–7, 149 New Zealand Labour Party, 161 New Zealand Spectator, 156 Ngati Apa, 9, 19, 146–7, 149–53, 160, 162 Ngati Raukawa, 147–8, 151 Ngati Toa, 147, 151 Nicaragua, 38 Nicks, John, 256 Nixon, John, 290 Norel-Putis, 77 North Africa, 26 North West Company, 14, 253, 257–8, 265–6, 275, 277–8, 304, 306 North-West Rebellion (1885), 245 Northwest Territories, 16, 308, 324, 336n15 Nova Scotia, 11, 13, 171, 197, 240, 243, 278

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386

Index

Oberholtzer, Cath, 299 O’Brien, Anne, 120 O’Brien, William Smith, 8, 18, 99–103 O’Connell, Daniel, 56, 93–4, 97–8, 104, 180 O’Connor, Shannon, 276 Odawa, 209 O’Doherty, Kevin Izod, 99, 103 O’Donohoe, Patrick, 8, 18, 99, 102 Ó Duilearga, Séamus, 73, 85 O’Farrell, Patrick, 8, 109, 111–17, 124, 126, 131 O’Gorman, Richard, 98 O’Grady, Standish, 10 Ohio Territory, 27 Ojibwa, 205 O’Meara, Frederick Augustus (Rev.), 207–10 Onraet, Tony, 355 Orcadians, 14–15, 257, 273; music of, 16 Orkney Islands, 15, 19, 253–4, 259–61, 263, 270, 272, 278, 280, 288, 295, 308, 314; fur traders, 294 O’Rourke, Kevin, 24 Ó Siadhail, Pádraig, 5, 6, 49–50, 52, 54, 56, 58, 60, 62, 64, 66, 68, 70, 85, 374 Ossian, 183 O’Toole, Fintan, 3 Pangnirtung (Nunavit), 315 Parewanui (New Zealand), 149, 151 Parnell, Charles Stewart, 8, 52, 93, 105 Patterson, Brad, 9, 19, 163–4, 166, 168

25314_Morton-Wilson.indb 386

Pelham Burn, Angus, 16, 304, 308, 314–15, 317, 319 Penetanguishene (Upper Canada), 201, 208 Pennsylvania, 18–19 Percival, James Gates, 54 Perth (Upper Canada), 11–12, 18, 200, 220–2, 223–5, 227–8, 235 Petyarre, Kathleen, 111 Petyarre, Temerre, 111 Philadelphia, 59 Phillips, Mr, 310 Point, Nicholas, 210 Point, Pierre, 203–4 Poland, 72–3 Pond, Peter, 274 Portugal, 31, 39 Powell, John Wesley, 76, 175 Power, Michael (Bishop), 11, 19, 195–212 Power, William, 197 Prairies; settlement of, 13, 35–6, 237, 245–8 Presbyterian Church of New Zealand, 155 Prince Edward Island, 278 Prince of Wales Fort, 289 Proulx, Jean-Baptiste, 202, 208–9 Provencher, Norbert, 210 Puerto Rico, 39 Quakers, 64 Quebec, 338 “Rabbit Dance,” 338 racism, 115–16, 126; toward the Catholic Irish in Australia, 115 Raddison, Pierre, 315 Radell, David, 44 Rae, John, 273

13-04-08 9:05 AM

Index

Rangitikei (New Zealand), 164– 66 Rangitikei Advocate, 145 Rangitikei Cavalry, 150 Rangitikei-Manawatu block, 151 Rangitikei Maori, 151 Rangitikei-Turakina, 9, 146–7, 149, 151, 158 Ratana, Tahupotiki Wiremu, 161 Rattigan, Clive, 342 Ray, Arthur, 276 Rebellion of 1848, 7, 94, 98, 101 Redding (California), 78–79 Red River, 269 “Red River Jig, The” (song), 328, 330, 332, 334, 336, 338 Red River Rebellion, 245 Reece, Bob, 111, 116 Regiment de Meuron, 265 residential schools, 15–16, 78 Revillon Frères, 316 Rhodes, W.B. (Barney), 159 Richmond (Indiana), 49, 52–4, 64 Rigg, Suzanne, 256, 267, 281 Rio Grande, 27 Ritchie, William, 156 Roach, Archie, 123 Robinson, Ronald, 35 Robson, Joseph, 291 Roche, Mary, 197 Rockel, Eliza, 149–50 Roman Catholic Church, 6, 11, 59, 65–6n40, 116, 122–3, 130–1, 134n70, 195–212, 212–13n5, 225, 272; and Irish Catholics, 8–11, 52–3, 56, 57, 59–63, 67n67, 72, 100, 103, 110, 111– 12, 115, 119, 122, 130–1, 180–1, 212; missions of, 201–12, 272; presence in Upper Canada, 197;

25314_Morton-Wilson.indb 387

387

support for “stolen children” campaign, 123 Roosevelt, Theodore, 71 Roothaan, Jan, 202–3 Roque, Ferdinand, 209 Ross (Rev.), 155–6, 161, 258 Rowland, William, 280 Rudd, Kevin, 108 Rupert’s Land, 256, 262, 278, 287– 91, 293–6, 298 Russia, 37, 71, 75–6 Rutherford, James, 156 Sackville-West, Lionel (Ambassador Lord), 87n28 Salzano, Francisco, 30 Sapir, Edward, 89 Savage, Matt, 117 scordatura, 328 Scotland, 154, 220, 222, 226–7, 236, 241, 248, 250n9, 254–74, 276n19, 277n23, 288, 293, 296, 304, 306–7, 309, 316, 318–19, 329–31, 333, 336n21, 343, 345– 6, 349; Land Agitation, 13, 245. See also Lewis (Isle of); Lewismen; Orcadians; Orkney Islands; Shetland Islands Scottish Gaels, 13 Seddon, Richard, 161 Seneca, 77 Serbo-Croats, 37 Seven Years’ War, 13, 237, 239, 263, 279, 285 Shahan, Thomas, 53 Shamrock Aborigines, 108, 112, 126, 127, 131 Sharkey, Mick, 117 Shepherd, C., 315 Sheridan, Philip Henry, 62, 67

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388

Index

Shetland Islands, 330 Sienkiewicz, Henryk, 71 Simpson, George, 258, 268, 277 Sinclair, George, 166, 169, 250, 252, 258 Siouan Tribes of the East (1894), 49 Six Nations Reserve, 200 Six Nations territory, 201 Skelton, Isabel, 222, 235 Skenandoa (Chief), 184 slavery; of Africans, 4–5, 37–40, 44n34, 44–5n38, 45n41, 45n46; of Amerindians, 38, 44n35 Slovenes, 37 Smith, Adam, 360 Smith, Donald, 305 Smith, John, 271 Smith, Margaret (née Brass), 271 Smithsonian Institution, 50, 55 Snow, Sebastian, 312 Society for the Propagation of the Faith, 201, 203 Soloway, Beverly, 15 South America, 28, 30 Spain, 39 Spanish America, 43 Spanish Empire, 31, 37–8, 44 Spence, James, 258 Stanton, Richard, 294 Stout-Ngata Commission, 158 Stroh, Silke, 12–13, 236 Stromness, 223, 273, 288, 305, 321 Swanton, John R., 61, 67 Swimmer, Sam (Chief), 17, 350, 351, 363–4 Szasz, Margaret, 226 Taranaki, Province of, 150 Tartars, 37

25314_Morton-Wilson.indb 388

Tate, James, 257, 277 Taylor, James, 258 Taylor, Margaret, 268 Taylor, Peter, 258 Te Atiawa, 147 Tecumseh, 179, 186–7 Temperance Movement, 155 Texas, 27 Third, Taylor, 307 Thistlethwaite, Frank, 24, 32, 41–2 Thomas, L.G., 270 Thomson, James, 268 Thomson, William P.L., 256, 272 Thornton, Russell, 30, 42 Threlkeld, Lancelot, 113 Tillyard, Stella, 11, 20–1, 177, 188– 9, 194 Tini Waitara, 162 Tipae, Aperahama, 9, 147–8, 150– 1, 160, 163–4n19 Tiree, 9, 147, 246–7 Titokowaru’s Outbreak, 152 Treaty of Nanking (1842), 95 Treaty of Paris (1763), 263 Treaty of Waitangi (1840), 145–7, 153, 162 Tuberculosis, 356 Turakina, 9, 18–19, 144, 149–50, 152–4, 157–8, 160, 165; base for Presbyterianism, 156; Common School, 155; Highland Games, 144; host of Caledonian Games, 156; immigration of Scottish Highlanders, 19; Ladies Classical School, 161; Maori Girls College, 161; Maori Girls School, 161; theological college, 156 Turgeon, Pierre-Flavien (Bishop), 202

13-04-08 9:05 AM

Index

Turkey, 76 Turner, Nancy, 292–3 Tweedsmuir, Baron. See Buchan, John Tweedsmuir, Lady. See Buchan, Susan Ubelaker, Douglas H., 43, 48 United Irish, 5, 176, 183, 191 United Irishman, 99 United Irish Rebellion, 179, 187 United Kingdom, 26–7, 39; migration from, 26 United States, 5, 26–7, 32–3, 39–40, 45, 54; attack on Spanish Cuba (1898), 28; imperial expansion, 2; population estimation, 32 Urquhart, J., 306 van der Kuyp, Kyle, 125 Van Diemen’s Land, 99, 101–4 Van Kirk, Sylvia, 3, 20–1, 280, 286 Vermont, 78 Véroneau, Jean, 210 Versailles Treaty negotiations (1919), 26 Vestey, Lord, 129 Voyage of Máel Dúin, The, 20 Wallace, John, 310–11, 312–18 Walpole Island (Upper Canada), 11, 196, 203–6, 210, 211; case, 205–6 Wanganui (New Zealand), 144, 146, 147, 149–50, 152, 153, 155–6, 157, 158 Ward, Robert, 153 Ward, Russel, 120 War of 1812, 27, 265 Washington, DC , 49, 51, 53, 62, 67n67, 77

25314_Morton-Wilson.indb 389

389

Washington, George, 58 Watson, Don, 115 Watson, G., 306, 308 Wave Hill Walk-Off, 127, 128, 135n83 Wayne County (Indiana), 64n17 Weld, Isaac, 170, 173 Wellington (New Zealand), 146, 149, 158, 159 Wellington Education Board, 155 Wellington Independent, 151–2 West, John, 102 West Indies, 22, 24 White, Richard, 110, 176 Wikwemikong, 196, 204, 207–9, 210–12; mission at, 210–12. See also Manitoulin Island Willcox, Walter F., 34 Williamson, Jeffrey, 24 Wilson, Bryce, 275n7 Wilson, James Glenny, 158–60 Winnipeg, 311, 312, 315, 332 Wintu, 77; 1864 massacres of, 79 Wisconsin, 6, 71–3, 76 Women for Wik, 123 Yana (California), 79, 87; 1864 massacre at, 6, 79, 87n28 Yibuluyma, Ludi, 124 York Factory (Manitoba), 291, 297, 307, 311, 323 Young Irelanders, 7–8, 94–6, 98–9, 101–4; arrest, 99; contribution to Irish foreign policy, 104; exile to Australia, 7, 8, 94, 99, 101, 102, 103; internationalization, 8, 95; rebellion, 98 Yukon, 16, 313, 324, 330, 336n15 Zolbrod, Paul, 58–9

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25314_Morton-Wilson.indb 390

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