Within and Without the Nation: Canadian History as Transnational History 9781442666498

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WITHIN AND WITHOUT THE NATION Canadian History as Transnational History

In some ways, Canadian history has always been international, comparative, and wide ranging. However, in recent years, the importance of the ties between Canadian and transnational history have become increasingly clear. Within and Without the Nation brings scholars from a range of disciplines together to examine Canada’s past in new ways through the lens of transnational scholarship. Moving beyond well-known comparisons with Britain and the United States, the fifteen essays in this collection connect Canada with Latin America, the Caribbean, and the wider Pacific world, as well as with other parts of the British Empire. Examining themes such as the dispossession of indigenous peoples, the influence of nationalism and national identity, and the impact of global migration, Within and Without the Nation is a text which will help readers rethink what constitutes Canadian history. karen dubinsky is a professor in the Department of History and the Department of Global Development Studies at Queen’s University. adele perry is a professor of History and senior fellow at St. John’s College, University of Manitoba. henry yu is a professor in the Department of History and the principal of St. John’s College at the University of British Columbia.

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Within and Without the Nation Canadian History as Transnational History

EDITED BY KAREN DUBINSKY, ADELE PERRY, AND HENRY YU

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

© University of Toronto Press 2015 Toronto Buffalo London www.utppublishing.com Printed in the U.S.A. ISBN 978-1-4426-4677-3 (cloth) ISBN 978-1-4426-1463-5 (paper)

Printed on acid-free, 100% post-consumer recycled paper with vegetablebased inks

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Within and without the nation : Canadian history as transnational history/ edited by Karen Dubinsky, Adele Perry, and Henry Yu. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4426-4677-3 (paperback)   ISBN 978-1-4426-1463-5 (bound) 1. Canada − Historiography.  2. Transnationalism − Historiography.  I. Dubinsky, Karen, editor  II. Perry, Adele, editor  III. Yu, Henry, author, editor FC149.W48 2015   971   C2015-903966-5

This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council, an agency of the Government of Ontario.

Funded by the Financé par le Government gouvernement du Canada of Canada

Contents

Acknowledgments ix Introduction: Canadian History, Transnational History  3 karen dubinsky, adele perry, and henry yu Part One: Indigenous Peoples and Dispossessions 1 The Dog That Didn’t Bark: The Durham Report, Indigenous Dispossession, and Self-Government for Britain’s Settler Colonies 25 ann curthoys 2 The Bannisters and Their Colonial World: Family Networks and Colonialism in the Early Nineteenth Century  49 elizabeth elbourne 3 Comparing to Connect: Indigenous Voice, Regionalism, and the Limits of Transnational History  76 tolly bradford 4 State-Sponsored Photography and Assimilation Policy in Canada and New Zealand  91 angela wanhalla 5 Canada and Australia: On Anglo-Saxon “Oceana,” Transcolonial History, and an Interconnected Pacific World  115 penelope edmonds

vi Contents

Part Two: Migrations 6 “In England a man can do as he likes with his property”: Migration, Family Fortunes, and the Law in Nineteenth-Century Quebec and the Cape Colony  145 bettina bradbury 7 Slave-Owner, Missionary, and Colonization Agent: The Transnational Life of John Taylor, 1813–1884  168 ryan eyford 8 Conceiving a Pacific Canada: Trans-Pacific Migration Networks Within and Without Nations  187 henry yu 9 “How I wish I might be near”: Distance and the Epistolary Family in Late-Nineteenth-Century Condolence Letters  212 laura ishiguro 10 “She cannot be confined to her own region”: Nursing and Nurses in the Caribbean, Canada, and the United Kingdom  228 karen flynn Part Three: Nationalisms, Internationalisms, and Antinationalisms 11 Law and Migration across the Pacific: Narrating the Komagata Maru Outside and Beyond the Nation  253 renisa mawani 12 Canadian Girls, Imperial Girls, Global Girls: Race, Nation, and Transnationalism in the Interwar Girl Guide Movement  276 kristine alexander 13. Health and Nation through a Transnational Lens: Radical Doctors and the History of Medicare in Saskatchewan  293 esyllt w. jones 14 Progressive Catholicism at Home and Abroad: The “Double Solidarité” of Quebec Missionaries in Honduras, 1955–1975  311 fred burrill and catherine c. legrand

Contents vii

15 The End of Empire? Third World Decolonization and Canadian History  341 sean mills Contributors  365 Index  369

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Acknowledgements

This collection of essays has its origin in a workshop organized in Winnipeg in 2008. We thank everyone involved in that workshop, and to the contributing authors here for sticking with what turned out to be a very long process. Adele Perry acknowledges the support of the Canada Research Chairs programme. We also thank Jill McConkey for editorial work on the manuscript and Josh Chan for preparing the index. Thanks also to University of Toronto Press, particularly Len Husband, Frances Mundy, and her team, for their work to get this volume out. Karen Dubinsky and Henry Yu thank Adele for steering this ship capably and for using her Canada Research Chair funds in such a generous and intellectually exciting fashion.

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WITHIN AND WITHOUT THE NATION Canadian History as Transnational History

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Introduction: Canadian History, Transnational History karen dubinsky, adele perry, and henry yu

Marc Lépine is a name well known to Canadians. Perhaps most especially, Canadian women have the name and date – 6 December 1989 – seared into their consciousness: the day Lépine went on his shooting rampage at the École Polytechnique in Montreal, killing fourteen women and leaving behind a note explaining his hatred for “feminists.” For more than twenty years, feminists have argued that this was an extreme but “emblematic,” to use Sharon Rosenberg’s phrase, act of patriarchal violence.1 Lépine died on 6 December too, and though he haunts us, this is the ghost we know. There is, however, another ghost in this story, one who died earlier but haunts us more than we know. Lépine was born Gamil Gharbi, son of Monique Lépine and Rachid Liass Gharbi, an Algerian Muslim immigrant. Monique Lépine gave Marc a legal name change as a fourteenth birthday present. Certainly he wanted distance from his abusive father, who abandoned the family when Lépine was young. But, according to his mother, he also suffered the stigma of “foreignness” in 1970s Montreal. “He was,” she writes, “fed up with being called an Arab by some of the kids at school.”2 The story is further complicated by the bitter history of Rachid Gharbi, who came to Canada after surviving electric shock torture during the Algerian War. The Algerian War, which provided Frantz Fanon with the inspiration for his classic The Wretched of the Earth, seems to be a world away from the Montreal Massacre. But it is just one example of how we might ­reimagine the Montreal Massacre through another lens. Neither the Algerian War nor racism in Quebec “caused” Marc Lépine to shoot women in a Montreal engineering school. Yet a quick Google search will reveal a host of dubious websites linking Lépine’s staggering violence

4  Karen Dubinsky, Adele Perry, and Henry Yu

to his national, religious, and racial heritage, putting into play the virulent anti-Islamism that has circulated so widely in the last few decades. The wider story of both Lépine’s history and the continuing responses to it remind us that even the most iconic of Canadian moments are forged by, and continued to be read through, a global context. By looking outside our customary frame, the story becomes bigger, more complex, and more global than we have imagined. Perhaps it began in the history of colonization, anti-colonial war, and torture and was carried, as surely as skin tone, “funny name,” and accent, by an immigrant to a country – Canada – with its own history of racist intolerance, and which was and remains a contributor to a violent world. The Montreal Massacre is just one powerful example of a Canadian story that ties this country, irrevocably, to a host of nations, events, ideologies, political systems, cultures of meaning, and relationships well beyond Canada’s borders. This collection examines what this means for the practice of history. A Short History of Nations and History in Canada In the past two decades, an increasing chorus of historians has argued that the nation need not be the only or even the most important frame for historical scholarship. This is a more controversial claim than it might appear. Since the discipline of history formed in the last third of the nineteenth century, the nation and the related terrain of empire have provided the critical foundation for much historical enterprise. Modern society is defined by a conviction that, as historian of China Prasenjit Duara puts it, “history belongs to a nation,” but it is also haunted by a nagging doubt about what exactly that nation might be.3 The linking of nations to the discipline of history is itself a transnational story, one that is invariably connected to the professionalization and attendant masculinization of the discipline. The chronology along which this played out in Canada closely follows the pattern of the United States (in comparison, for instance, to that of Australia).4 Donald Wright documents how history became a profession in English Canada between the late-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, while Ronald Rudin suggests a somewhat different and later process in Quebec.5 In both contexts, by the middle years of the twentieth century, scholarly history was something that men (and very rarely women) did for a living, something with established and known codes of authority and recognition, and with the institutional authority of universities to give these meaning and weight.6

Introduction 5

It was in the 1920s that the discipline of history became more clearly articulated as a distinctly national project within English Canada.7 This built on more long-standing arguments for the civic and political import of public archives, recently analysed by Jarett Henderson.8 The particularly national mission of historians was made manifest by the creation of a journal, the Canadian Historical Review (CHR), in 1920, and by an organization, the Canadian Historical Association, founded two years later. In defining history as a professional and national project, historians staked a claim for Canada within hierarchical discourses of civilization. As Catherine Hall’s work on archetypal British historian Charles Babbington Macauley argues, narrative history played a critical role in establishing who could claim the ontological and political privileges of the related claims of citizenship and nation.9 By creating a written history for Canada, historians laid claim to the status of a “civilized” polity in distinction to the non-European world in general and local Indigenous peoples in particular. As Chad Reimer explains in his study of British Columbia’s historiography, “written history was seen as a fundamental component of civilization – that which distinguished European newcomers from non-civilized Native peoples.”10 As certain kinds of work produced by certain kinds of people became validated as capital-H “History,” the writing – let alone talking and performing – of historical knowledge produced by others was excluded or at least deemed less valuable or authentic. As Wright has argued, this process was explicitly rather than coincidentally gendered. It was also raced. The women who were part of the historical societies studied by Cecilia Morgan and the Indigenous authors studied by Robin Jarvis Brownlie and Mary Jane Logan McCallum continued to study and write about the past, but their work was situated outside of the disciplinary framework of history.11 The arguments made in the past three decades for the legitimacy of women’s history as a legitimate sub-field and for the greater recognition of women as historians respond to this history of gendered exclusion. The marginalization of Indigenous peoples and people of colour more generally from historical scholarship has yet to merit the same kind of consideration, though analyses like that offered by McCallum on the place of Indigenous peoples as historical practitioners in Canada begin to do so.12 The extent to which the profession of history was constructed as male, white, and middle class cannot be severed from its connection to the literal and imagined Canadian nation. It is not a coincidence that the only professional writers of Canadian history also imagined themselves as its protagonists, giving themselves first claim on national citizenship.

6  Karen Dubinsky, Adele Perry, and Henry Yu

The unstable ground upon which Canadian nation building occurred was the terrain to be overcome by their national narratives, and they did little to help uncover complications that would have challenged their story. The colonization of north-eastern North America first by France and later by England did not render questions of national or imperial borders straightforward.13 After 1760, Britain’s imperial control was necessarily negotiated around substantial and militarily powerful Indigenous societies and a settler society that was overwhelmingly French speaking and Roman Catholic. For the Indigenous societies that spanned the continent’s northern half, the process of colonization did not end with the founding of Canada but continues today. Canada also remained enmeshed in pan-American trade and the exchanges and networks of both the Pacific and Atlantic worlds from the early modern period through today.14 The geopolitical realignments that accompanied the American War of Independence brought significant numbers of English-speaking and British-identified settlers, as well as enslaved African Americans, into colonized territories. They also tied the colonies of British North America intimately to the schisms and possibilities of an Anglo-American world in the age of the liberal revolution.15 Between the Great Lakes and the coastal mountains, colonization was largely delegated to the private interests of the Hudson’s Bay Company, who asserted their rule only insofar as it served their economic interests and as cordial relations with Indigenous peoples allowed. On the Pacific coast, the British presence was numerically small, and imperial claims of legal sovereignty were unilateral and made with disregard for the Indigenous societies already there. The formation of a nation with the British North America Act of 1867 codified rather than ended these ambivalences. Canada balanced a number of competing claims and interests, including those of settler nationalism, against the presumed political and moral authority of a geographically distant British Empire and the loyalties and practices of French-speaking settlers.16 Indigenous peoples and histories haunted the British North America Act, just as Ann Curthoys’s chapter in this volume argues they did the Durham report. Questions of Indigenous peoples and territories clearly defined the struggles over if, how, and under what terms the Canadian state would expand west in the last third of the nineteenth century. The unevenness by which it did so added a spate of regional histories and claims to the range of identities and loyalties jostling within an aspiring nation state.17 Modern Canadian nation building was always imagined in racial terms, and the exact

Introduction 7

terms of this racial project would be codified in documents like the Indian Act of 1876 and the Chinese Immigration Act of 1885. Disparate locations within the national space of Canada ensured that the connections between geographically diverse historians and the Canadian nation would be clearly differentiated. It is an understatement to say that nations and nationalisms would mean very different things to historians in French Canada than they did to those in Englishspeaking Canada. In Quebec, professionalization occurred along a distinctive historical trajectory, consolidating in the 1940s, and around the crucible of the Quebec nation and its identified antecedents.18 Histori­ ans working in western and Maritime Canada researched and wrote within the complicated terrain of region, working to articulate a vision of Canadian history that navigated between the nation and local experience, history, and insurgencies.19 In this context, it was the nation’s perceived frailty and porosity that was thought to demand the attention and labour of historians. In the 1920s, the enterprise of professional history was given purpose by the special role that historians might play in nurturing a nation state defined by tension and inequality between French and English. At an Ottawa meeting in 1922, what had been the Historic Landmarks Association rebaptized itself the Canadian Historical Association (CHA), which continues to be the main professional body for historians. At its formation, a key aim of the CHA was “to associate itself with other patriotic agencies in bringing into more perfect harmony the two great races that constitute the Canadian people.”20 The goal here was not so much to support the nation as it existed, but to use history to assist into being an idealized one – here figured as one rooted in a harmonious relationship between French and English, imagined in unsubtle terms as distinct races and great ones at that. Emphasis on Canada’s transition from “colony to nation” and its heritage as a self-governing polity within the British Empire took on new importance as Canada played a key role in mapping out a new position for itself and other stable white-settler colonies as “dominions” within a reimagined British Commonwealth.21 The character of Canadian historians’ relationship to the Canadian nation shifted in the years following the Second World War. Buoyed by the expansion of post-secondary education across the country and the resurgence of both English and French Canadian nationalisms,22 the idea that the Canadian nation was an appropriate rubric for organizing historical knowledge and inquiry became more accepted. Doctoral students trained at Canadian institutions with primary research expertise

8  Karen Dubinsky, Adele Perry, and Henry Yu

in Canadian topics began to be hired at Canadian universities, though not without struggle.23 That the connection between the Canadian nation and history became more ubiquitous does not mean that there was a comfortable consensus on what this nation might be. As Marlene Shore has shown, historians writing in the CHR had a range of working definitions of what the nation and historians’ relationship to it was.24 For historians writing in English in the 1980s and 1990s, the nation remained pliant, its uses many and its meanings contested. But it usually remained somehow at the centre. As much as historians of Canada and Quebec might tether themselves to two nations and not agree on what either of those might mean, the nation retained its secure place in organizing historical scholarship. Gerard Bouchard reckons that only 0.8 per cent of articles in the Revue d’histoire de l’Amérique française between 1987 and 1991 were comparative in character. The percentage rose between 1992 and 1996, but remained negligible at 4.5 per cent, and Bouchard rightly calls this a “thin record.”25 In English-speaking Canada in the early 1990s, it was possible to ask what had happened to  even the well-entrenched and well-resourced transnational frameworks like that of the British Empire.26 This remained true even as historians of Canada hotly contested what history should look like and do. Franca Iacovetta points out that even in the charged atmosphere of the “history wars” of the late 1980s and early 1990s, when there was little else to agree on, the primacy of the Canadian nation as the primary subject of historical inquiry was never seriously questioned. Arguments between proponents of a social history attenuated to division and conflict in the Canadian past and those calling for a return to a history ­focused on national governments and high politics shared the presumption that the nation was the appropriate container of historical knowledge and inquiry.27 Within wider international scholarship, however, the last three decades has seen an increasing questioning of the primacy of the nation state as the primary unit of scholarly analysis among both historians and scholars from related disciplines. In the pages of scholarly journals and in collections of essays, historians unpacked the enduring purchase of the nation for different historiographies. Historians proposed a range of alternatives, including comparative history, connective history, global history, oceanic history and its most common subsets, Atlantic and Pacific history, each with its own intellectual touchstones. For all their differences, these scholarships share a common critique of the nation and a common interest in different and generally larger units of

Introduction 9

analysis. The term “transnational” came to most often represent this historiographical shift. The use of the concept was tied at first to the arguments of anthropologist Nina Glick Schiller and other scholars who asserted that a broad shift in research methodology in the social sciences was needed to understand the effects of increased global migration, new communication and transportation technologies, and the long-range intensification of networks, identities, and imaginaries that crossed and transcended national borders.28 Very quickly, however, the rubric of “transnational” began to name within the historical profession a wide range of disparate critiques of national history. Major English-language historical journals devoted entire issues to the question of transnational history, and collections of essays explored the impact of this perspective on particular national or imperial contexts.29 Despite the term’s oft-­ noted lack of historical specificity, its questionable relevance to the colonized world, and its presumption of sovereign nation states with borders to be transgressed and transcended, the rubric of “transnational” named a widespread dissatisfaction with historiography focused upon and contained by national imaginaries. In this context, it became appropriately axiomatic to refer to the trendiness of transnational history, even as the term itself became ever more vague and loose in usage. However it is defined, the term transnational prompts historians to look beyond the nation for levels of analysis. If the bounded nation was an inadequate geographic container for history, then how could other perspectives – local, regional, continental, oceanic, global – work better? One of the most compelling components of social scientific approaches to transnationalism was the use of multi-sited research as a method for investigating how disparate sites were linked by migration or communication networks. The criteria for the selection of these local sites or communities was based upon their connections across both space and time (e.g., long-distance communication networks that tied migrants to home, or circular migration patterns that cycled migrants between sites in different nations). By focusing on the connectedness of sites and the ways in which people imagined their ties to multiple locations, forms of belonging beyond a simple inclusion or exclusion within  a single national imaginary was emphasized. Multi-sited research promised an ability to reveal highly localized forms of knowledge, potentially capturing the perspectives of people left out of national narratives, and yet they could also reveal important connections at a global scale, registering historical processes both more intimate than and beyond the nation.

10  Karen Dubinsky, Adele Perry, and Henry Yu

This wider scholarly shift has produced some concrete and very provocative results within the Canadian context, especially in the past decade or so. Historians of racialized and migrant peoples have often tethered their claims to the nation in bids for institutional and intellectual recognition. That these various subaltern histories were part of a nation’s story became a critical and – judging from the language of inclusion now pervasive in English Canadian public history – successful way of asserting the historicity of peoples long deemed somehow outside of mainstream historical scholarship. But historians of racialized and migrant groups have also been prompted by their subjects and by their political and intellectual frameworks to work beyond the national borders of history. In the American context, historian Robin D.G. Kelley points out that “Black studies, Chicano/a studies, and Asian American studies were diasporic from their inception,” and the parallels are true in Canada as well.30 A special issue of BC Studies edited by Henry Yu argues for Canada’s location within a “Pacific history,” something explored further in Lisa Rose Mar, John Price, and Andrea Geiger’s recent book-length studies.31 Historians Afua Cooper and Harvey Amani Whitfield have situated Black Canadian experience within a wider transnational frame produced first by the slave trade and later by the politics of the anti-slavery movement and abolition.32 Franca Iacovetta and Donna Gabaccia’s work has read Italian migrant women as mobile subjects who moved around an Atlantic world, and Royden Loewen and Marlene Epp have drawn out the transnational dimensions of Mennonite histories.33 But migration is not the only entry point for historians placing Canada within wider frameworks. Historians have built on the rich ­literature comparing American and Canadian histories by examining the rust belt of the Great Lakes region, the history of women, and the Indigenous and agricultural west.34 Transnational analyses have situated Canada in the wider worlds of the Americas, moving beyond the familiar reference of the United States to link Canada to Mexico, Cuba, and Argentina.35 The thick connections and continuities between Canadian and Antipodean histories have attracted recent attention, ­especially from historians themselves located in Australia and New Zealand.36 Historian John Weaver calls it a “modern world,” while Gerard Bouchard names it the “new world,” but both register a connected historical landscape within which Canada is one node.37 Scholars have “returned” to the rubric of the British Empire, exploring Canada’s articulation within the Empire and Commonwealth through a new

Introduction 11

critical lens. As Lisa Chilton explains, these historians took as their point of reference the “new imperial history” and registered the connection between Canada in Britain in critical terms that especially emphasized the categories of gender and race.38 Histories of radicalism, whether of post-war Montreal, British Columbia labour, Italian anarchists, or Indig­ enous protest, have also explored the global networks of radical thought and protest that Canadians drew on and participated in.39 Historians of Canada have produced some remarkable histories that move between, across, and beyond national boundaries. They have also engaged attentively and at length with the possibilities and problems of transborder and comparative Canada–United States history, especially in the regional context of the West.40 Yet the question of the limits of national frameworks and the possibilities of transnationalism for histories of Canada has received only sporadic attention. There have been no special issues of journals, no forums, and few anthologies devoted to the question. Lloyd Wong and Victor Satzewich’s fine collection of interdisciplinary essays points to some of the ways that Canada might speak to and be understood through transnational frames, but only through the frames of immigrant and ethnic communities from the late nineteenth century onward.41 Nancy Christie’s anthology Transatlantic Subjects emphasizes a ­“circum-Atlantic exchange of ideas and social forms” in Canadian colonial history, and suggests that this reading of Canadian history has been largely “eviscerated by the continued dominance of nationalist narratives of the Canadian polity.”42 There are any number of ways to explain historians’ enduring commitment to national frameworks in the face of what is a widespread and influential, if not wholly satis­ fying, critique. One might do so by pointing to the logistical, and by extension financial, barriers to transnational research. History is a discipline where archival research remains a critical benchmark of scholarly gravitas,43 and, despite the remarkable resources increasingly available on the Internet, multi-sited research can be difficult and expensive. It might also be, or reasonably seem, professionally risky. National and continental frames still define the bulk of hirings in history departments in Canada, and graduate students and junior scholars are understandably cautious about defining their expertise in different terms. One might also make the point that Canadian history has always been, to a greater or lesser extent, transnational. Historians trained as “Canadianists” have read books drawn from throughout the English-

12  Karen Dubinsky, Adele Perry, and Henry Yu

and French-speaking worlds, and critical texts and ideas have always circulated widely throughout Canadian scholarship. This scholarship has been mindful of Canada’s colonial origins and attentive to questions  of ongoing informal and formal external influences, especially American ones. The rubric of the transnational has perhaps had the greatest purchase in contexts with long-acknowledged and well-­ resourced national historiographies. Questioning what Antoinette Burton calls Britain’s “island story” or long-held theories of American exceptionalism packs a decisive analytic punch.44 It is one that is registered differently in national contexts with less seamless national historiographies to interrogate. In this particular context, transnationalism can seem at best unnecessary and at worst risky. If we take the granting of doctorates and the offering of a substantial number of undergraduate courses as our benchmarks, Canadian history was established as a legitimate sub-field of scholarship relatively recently. We might reasonably ask a version of what Curthoys queries from Australia: “We’ve just started making ­national histories, and you want us to stop?”45 In the past few years, historians have become concerned about the seeming erosion of the “Canadianization” movement of the last half of the twentieth century and the concomitant increasing influence of American degrees, standards, and institutions.46 Long-standing concerns persist that Canadian histories, institutions, and scholars are of little import outside of our own borders and, even more worrisome, inside them as well. We might also register the pull of what Ian McKay has called the “warrior nation,” a right-wing, nationalist, and bellicosely militaristic vision of Canada promoted by Stephen Harper’s majority Conservative federal government and supported both implicitly and explicitly by some academic historians.47 This current iteration may be unique, but national history has long done serious ideological work in Canada and elsewhere. It has naturalized ideas of race, nation, and gender that are by no means national. It has determined what has been considered a serious and worthy topic and helped to define who was considered able to produce history and, perhaps equally important, contest it. History and Canada Within and Without the Nation This volume shows that historians of Canada have much to learn from and contribute to transnational histories and methodologies. The fifteen chapters, based on essays written in 2008 and 2009, examine the history

Introduction 13

of Canada and the colonial and Indigenous societies that preceded it in terms that query and work beyond those of the nation state. Given the long-standing and relatively rich existing scholarship studying crossborder ties between Canada and the United States or situating central and eastern Canada within an  Atlantic world, this collection stresses other points of comparison, contrast, and commonality in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Elizabeth Elbourne, Bettina Bradbury, and Tolly Bradford put Canada into dialogue with southern Africa. Renisa Mawani and Kristine Alexander raise its connections with India. Henry Yu explores Canada’s location in a Pacific, and more specifically Cantonese-speaking, world. Ann Curthoys, Penelope Edmonds, and Angela Wanhalla analyse Canada alongside New Zealand and Australia. Karen Flynn’s and Ryan Eyford’s chapters read Canadian histories’ imbrications with Caribbean ones, while Catherine LeGrand and Fred Burrill explore those with Guatemala. In different ways, chapters by Laura Ishiguro, Esyllt Jones, and Sean Mills examine wide-­ ranging transnational networks of connections and exchange, whether of kinship and sentiment, radical ideas about health and medicine, or historical thinking. The chapters are grouped in three parts that suggest the particular historical concerns that have most often pushed historians outside of conventional national paradigms. The chapters in the first part, “Indigenous Peoples and Dispossession” connect the histories of the Indigenous peoples of northern North America and their colonization in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with that of Indigenous peoples in  southern Africa, Australia, and New Zealand. Curthoys analyses the presence and absence of Indigenous dispossession in the Durham report, and in doing so recalibrates the meaning of an oft-discussed moment in Canadian historiography. Elbourne traces the movements of the Bannister brothers around the nineteenth-century settler world, r­ eminding us of the wider context and landscape of what can too easily be seen as local phenomena: migration, settlement, and liberal thought. Bradford draws out the differences and similarities between two Indigenous Protestant missionaries, one in South Africa and one in the North American north-west, sketching out the global context within which both colonialism and Christianity need to be understood. Wanhalla analyses where photography fit in New Zealand’s and Canada’s efforts to colonize Indigenous peoples in the late nineteenth century, drawing out shared ground and meaningful differences in these two different but profoundly connected settler projects.

14  Karen Dubinsky, Adele Perry, and Henry Yu

Finally, Edmonds traces the emergence and circulation of a discourse of Anglo-Saxonism in a Pacific world that connected Canada to Australia and hints at some of the ways that it has been resisted and revised. The chapters in the second part approach questions of Canada and transnationalism through the optics of migration. Bettina Bradbury examines how landowning settlers used legal structures that were French and Dutch as well as British, and in doing so demonstrates the need to keep not only multiple national contexts, but multiple imperial ones, ­in  mind. Eyford uses the life history of the prosaically named John Taylor to tie the histories of Iceland, Britain, Canada, and the Caribbean together, and argues that events like the abolition of slavery in the Caribbean and the resettlement of western Canada are more connected than we usually acknowledge. Yu sketches the Cantonese-speaking Pacific and Canada’s place in it, arguing that we need to see it as constituent of rather than peripheral to Canadian history. The letters traded between mourning family members in Britain, Canada, and the United States examined by Laura Ishiguro reveal how the ties of kinship could complicate and surpass those of nation. Labour, and more particularly migrating nurses, is the topic of Karen Flynn’s chapter, which examines the Caribbean nurses who travelled around the twentieth-century British world and challenged ideas of race, gender, and empire as they did so. The third and final part of the book grapples with questions of empires, nationalism, internationalism, and anti-nationalisms and the part they play in shaping historical knowledge. Renisa Mawani revisits the history of the Komagata Maru, examining its complicated history in India as well as Canada. Alexander also makes connections between India and Canada in her examination of the history of the Girl Guides and their particular brand of imperial internationalism. The doctors associated with the twentieth-century Canadian left addressed in Esyllt Jones’s chapter remind us how radical ideas, in this case of health and politics, circulated transnationally. Catherine LeGrand and Fred Burrill’s chapter examines the Québécois missionaries who worked across Latin America, but more particularly in Guatemala, in the years following the Second World War, using their history as a new window into the history of both modern Quebec and Latin America. Finally, Sean Mills shows us the connections between historians of Canada’s reticence to engage meaningfully with the history of the global South and the “parallel dialogue” of historians of Quebec and Canada and the enormous potential of breaking down both of these barriers. This is an

Introduction 15

excellent place to conclude, for it reminds us of the multiple ways that a more genuinely transnational scholarship might help us transform the histories tracked in this collection and the larger stories they are part of. This collection makes no claims to comprehensiveness, nor could it. Within and Without the Nation replicates the bias of transnational history as a genre by emphasizing the nineteenth and twentieth centuries read through the concerns of the present. It is interdisciplinary, drawing on scholars whose training and academic affiliation is in sociology, women’s studies, and African American studies as well as history. Most of the contributors work in Canada, but the presence of scholars based in Australia, New Zealand, and the United States reminds us that it is not simply historians of and within Canada who are interested in the historiographical possibilities of Canada and its multiple histories. The authors do not work under a common historiographical banner on the question of Canadian and transnational histories, let alone anything else. Bradford argues that his work on southern Africa and western Canada in the nineteenth century is comparative rather than transnational. Edmonds challenges the applicability of transnational, but on the grounds that it applies poorly to the Indigenous and colonial contexts that concern her. A number of the authors here address the particular context of the British Empire and Commonwealth, and more especially the settler colonies of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. In different ways, Elbourne, Curthoys, and Mawani build on the new critical historiography of empire. In doing so, they suggest  the particular relationship between transnational and imperial studies and provide another way of approaching what some have dubbed the “British world.” This emphasis on the colonial and imperial provides a productive counterpoint to those analyses that imagine the transnational as a cognate of migration and cosmopolitanism.48 Within and Without the Nation also speaks to the strong imprint of feminist scholarship on transnational histories. Bradbury, Flynn, Ishiguro, and Alexander’s chapters here remind us how the subject of gender and the practice of feminist scholarship can encourage us to approach the question of national boundaries and ties in new ways. This collection analyses and critiques some of the critical national, racial, and ethnic fractures of modern Canada and its historians. It is also marked by them. The book bears the intellectual scars of colonialism, past and present. The particular possibilities of transnational and comparative scholarship for Indigenous histories and historians are

16  Karen Dubinsky, Adele Perry, and Henry Yu

being engaged by scholars in the Americas and the Antipodes, and in particular by the North American Indigenous Studies Association.49 The distinct histories of French Canada and Quebec are a meaningful part of the histories discussed and challenged in this book and are seriously addressed in the chapters by Bradbury and Burrill and LeGrand, taking centre stage in the historiographical analysis provided by Sean Mills. But as an aggregate, the collection reflects the histories and historiographies of English Canada more than those of Quebec and French Canada – a further reminder of the continuing disjunctures between the historiographies of French and English Canada. If the nation is not the only or necessarily the best way to frame historical scholarship, what are the other ways that we might approach our topics, ways that perhaps better capture the multiple subjectivities, fractious politics, and varied points of connection that define our present? These are questions that historians of Canada and the diverse spaces that preceded it are beginning to ask. We are not alone in doing so. Reflecting on the current state of Canadian literary scholarship, Marjorie Fee calls for looking beyond “national boundaries and nationalist theories.” “Then perhaps we won’t be so bored,” she quips.50 More substantially, Fee suggests that it is not that we lack the necessary material to produce scholarship that is engaged and wide-ranging, but that we have too often failed to draw on it. For all the slipperiness and limitations of the term, “transnational” does perhaps provide us with useful ways of speaking more broadly to other audiences, beyond our own countries, and beyond the discipline of history. It prompts us to make connections that we might not otherwise make, between southern Africa and Western Canada, between West Indian slavery and Western Canadian settlement, between health care and migration. It pushes us to read documents like the Durham report or events like the Komagata Maru in a new light. In these ways and more, the chapters gathered here demonstrate the potential of thinking critically about the work of nations in the past and in the histories we write. The nation is with us still. The story of Marc Lépine that we began with is a necessarily Canadian one, and we are no more able to remove that from our analysis than we can take the nation out of the histories we analyse in this book. Outright rejections of the nation can ironically reinscribe its many powers and meanings. Uncomplicated disavowals can work to reinforce the geographic borders of the modern nation state and inadvertently valorize historical scholarship. This may get us

Introduction 17

beyond the notion that only what takes place within the nation’s borders is an interesting subject for national history, but it fails to capture the complexity of historians’ continuing engagement with nations and their political, temporal, and spacial limits. It is for these reasons that we have dubbed this collection Within and Without the Nation. We mean to draw attention to a plurality of non-national registers for history. We  also acknowledge those who are “without” nations or who have been excluded from national narratives – literally those without a history: those whose stories have been considered tangential to, at cross-­ purposes with, or, as with Indigenous peoples in northern North America, by necessity erased from the national project. In doing so, perhaps we can help to find forms of historical narration that reject rather than reinforce the narrative violence of multiple exclusions and erasures upon which national histories have been so often built. NOTES 1 Sharon Rosenberg, “Neither Forgotten nor Fully Remembered: Tracing an Ambivalent Public Memory on the Tenth Anniversary of the Montreal Massacre,” in Killing Women: The Visual Culture of Gender and Violence, ed. Annette Burfoot and Susan Lord (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2006), 21–46. 2 Monique Lépine, Aftermath (Toronto: Viking, 2008). 3 Prasenjit Duara, Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 3. 4 Ann Curthoys, “We’ve Just Started Making National Histories, and You Want Us to Stop Already,” in After the Imperial Turn: Thinking with and through the Nation, ed. Antoinette Burton (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 71. 5 Donald Wright, The Professionalization of History in English Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006); Ronald Rudin, Making History in Twentieth-Century Quebec (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), chap. 1. 6 See Wright, Professionalization of History, chap. 5, and Bonnie Smith, The Gender of History: Men, Women, and Historical Practice (Boston: Harvard University Press, 1998). 7 Carl Berger, The Writing of Canadian History: Aspects of English-Canadian Historical Writing since 1900, 2nd ed. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984), chap. 3.

18  Karen Dubinsky, Adele Perry, and Henry Yu 8 Jarett Henderson, “’I am pleased with the Lambton Loot’: Arthur Doughy and the Making of the Durham Papers,” Archivaria, no. 70 (Fall 2010): 153–76. 9 Catherine Hall, “Macaulay’s Nation,” Victorian Studies 51, no. 3 (Spring 2009): 505–23; Catherine Hall, “At Home with History: Macaulay and the History of England,” in At Home with the Empire: Metropolitan Culture and the Imperial World, ed. Catherine Hall and Sonya O. Rose (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 10 Chad Reimer, Writing British Columbia History, 1784–1958 (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2009), 7. 11 See Cecilia Morgan, “History, Nation, Empire: Gender and the Work of Southern Ontario Historical Societies, 1890–1930,” Canadian Historical Review 82, no. 3 (September 2001): 491–528; Robin Jarvis Brownlie, “First Nations Perspectives and Historical Thinking in Canada,” in First Nation, First Thoughts: The Impact of Indigenous Thought in Canada, ed. Annis May Timpson (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2010); Mary Jane Logan McCallum, “Indigenous Labor and Indigenous History,” American Indian Quarterly 33, no. 4 (Fall 2009): 523–44. 12 McCallum, “Indigenous Labor and Indigenous History,” 13 Allen Greer, “National, Transnational, and Hypernational Historiographies: New France Meets Early American History,” Canadian Historical Review 91, no. 4 (December 2010): 695–724. 14 See Olive Patricia Dickason, Canada’s First Nations: A History of Founding Peoples from Earliest Times (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1992), chap. 3–4. 15 See Jane Errington, The Lion, the Eagle, and Upper Canada: A Developing Colonial Ideology (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1984); Cecilia Morgan, Public Men and Virtuous Women: Gendered Languages of Politics in Upper Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996); Allen Greer, The Patriots and the People: The Rebellion of Lower Canada in 1837 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993); Michel Ducharme, “Canada in the Age of Revolutions: Rethinking Canadian Intellectual History in an Atlantic Perspective,” in Contesting Clio’s Craft: New Directions and Debates in Canadian History, ed. Michael Dawson and Christopher Dummit (London: Institute for the Study of the Americas Press and the Brookings Institution, 2009), 162–86. 16 See the full text at http://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/Const/Const_index​ .html. 17 For a relatively recent reflection on the “limited identities” discussion of the preceding decades, see Ramsay Cook, “Identities Are Not Like Hats,” Canadian Historical Review 81, no. 2 (June 2000): 260–5.

Introduction 19 18 On this, see Rudin, Making History, chap. 1. 19 See, on this, Gerry Friesen, “Critical History in Western Canada, 1900–2000,” in The West and Beyond: New Perspectives on an Imagined Region, ed. Alvin Finkel, Sarah Carter, and Peter Fortna (Edmonton: Athabasca University Press, 2010). 20 Lawrence J. Burpee, “The Annual Meeting of May the Eighteenth at the Victoria Memorial Museum, Ottawa: Presidential Address,” Report of the Annual Meeting of the Canadian Historical Association 1, no. 1 (1922): 8. 21 See Marlene Shore, “Introduction,” in The Contested Past: Reading Canada’s History – Selections from the Canadian Historical Review (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002), 10; Phillip Buckner, “The Long Goodbye: English Canadians and the British Empire,” in Rediscovering the British World, ed. Phillip Buckner and R. Douglas Francis (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2005). 22 See José E. Iguarta, The Other Quiet Revolution: National Identities in English Canada, 1945–1971 (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2005); Rudin, Making History. 23 See Jeffrey Cormier, The Canadianization Movement: Emergence, Survival, and Success (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004). 24 Shore, “Introduction,” in The Contested Past. 25 Gerard Bouchard, The Making of the Nations and Cultures of the New World, trans. Michelle Wienroth and Paul Leduc Browne (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2008), 26, 28. 26 Phillip Buckner, “Whatever Happened to the British Empire?” Journal of the Canadian Historical Association 4, no. 1 (1993), 3–32. 27 Franca Iacovetta, “Gendering Trans/National Historiographies: Feminists Rewriting Canadian History,” Journal of Women’s History 19, no. 1 (Spring 2007): 206–13. 28 See Nina Glick Shiller, Linda Basch, and Christina Szanton Blanc, eds., “Towards a Transnational Perspective on Migration: Race, Class, Ethnicity and Nationalism Reconsidered (New York: New York Academy of Sciences, 1992). 29 See, for instance, these forums and special issues: “The Nation and Beyond: A Special Issue,” Journal of American History 86, no. 3 (December 1999); Alison Games, “Beyond the Atlantic: English Globetrotters and Transoceanic Connections,” William and Mary Quarterly 63, no. 4 (October 2006): 675–93; C.A. Badly et al., “AHR Conversation: On Transnational History,” American Historical Review 11, no. 5 (December 2006): 1440–65. Collections of essays include Thomas Bender, ed., Rethinking American History in a Global Age (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002); Ann Curthoys and Marilyn Lake, eds., Connected Worlds:

20  Karen Dubinsky, Adele Perry, and Henry Yu

30

31

32

33

34

35

36

History in Transnational Perspective (Canberra: ANU E Press, 2006); Antoinette Burton, ed., After the Imperial Turn: Thinking with and through the Nation (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003). Robin D.G. Kelley, “‘But a Local Phase of a World Problem’: Black History’s Global Vision, 1883–1950,” Journal of American History 86, no. 3 (December 1999): 1045. Special issue on “Refracting Pacific Canada,” BC Studies, no. 156 (Winter/ Spring 2007/8); Lisa Rose Mar, Brokering Belonging: Chinese in Canada’s Exclusion Era, 1885–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010); John Price, Orienting Canada: Race, Empire, and the Transpacific (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2011); Andrea Geiger, Transpacific Encounters with Race, Caste, and Borders, 1885–1928 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011). Afua Cooper, The Hanging of Angelique: Canada, Slavery, and the Burning of Montreal, 2nd ed. (Toronto: Harper Perennial, 2006); Harvey Amani Whitfield, Blacks at the Border: Black Refugees in British North America, 1815–1860 (Burlington: University of Vermont Press, 2006). Donna Gabaccia and Franca Iacovetta, eds., Women, Gender, and Transnational Lives: Italian Workers of the World (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002); Royden Loewen, Diaspora in the Countryside: Two Mennonite Communities and Mid-Twentieth-Century Rural Disjuncture (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006); Marlene Epp, Women without Men: Mennonite Refugees of the Second World War (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000). See, for instance, Steven High, Industrial Sunset: The Making of North America’s Rust Belt, 1969–1984 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003); Theodore Binnema, Common and Contested Ground: A Human and Environmental History of the Northwest Plains (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2001); Paige Raibmon, Authentic Indians: Episodes of Encounter from the Late-Nineteenth-Century Northwest Coast (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005). See Karen Dubinsky, Babies without Borders: Adoption and Migration across the Americas (Toronto: University of Toronto Press; New York: New York University Press, 2010); Sterling Evans, Bound in Twine: The History and Ecology of the Henequen-Wheat Complex for Mexico and the American and Canadian Plains, 1880–1950 (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2007). See “Australia and Canada: Labour Compared,” Special Joint Issue of Labour/Le Travail 38 and Labour History 71 (Fall 1996); Angela Wanhalla, “Women ‘living across the line’: Intermarriage on the Canadian Prairies and in Southern New Zealand, 1870–1900,” Ethnohistory 55, no. 1 (2008):

Introduction 21

37

38 39

40

41 42

43

44

29–49; Penelope Edmonds, Urbanizing Frontiers: Indigenous Peoples and Settlers in 19th-Century Pacific Rim Cities (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2010). John Weaver, The Great Land Rush and the Making of the Modern World, 1650–1900 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2002); Bouchard, Making of the Nations. Lisa Chilton, “Canada and the British Empire: A Review Essay,” Canadian Historical Review 89, no. 1 (March 2008): 89–95. See Sean Mills, The Empire Within: Postcolonial Thought and Political Activism in Sixties Montreal (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2010); Benjamin Isitt, “Fellow Traveler: A British Columbia Fisherman Writes Home from the Eastern Bloc, 1952,” Labour/Le Travail 63 (Spring 2009): 105–30; Travis Tomchuk, “Transnational Radicals: Italian Anarchist Networks in Southern Ontario and the Northeastern United States, 1915–1940,” PhD diss., Queen’s University (2010); and Scott Rutherford, “Canada’s Other Red Scare: Rights, Decolonization, and Indigenous Political Protest in the Global Sixties,” PhD diss., Queen’s University (2011). See, for instance, Sheila McManus and Betsy Jameson, eds., One Step over the Line: Toward a History of Women in the North American Wests (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 2008); Sterling Evans, ed., The Borderlands of the American and Canadian Wests: Essays on Regional History of the Fortyninth Parallel (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2006); Sterling Evans, ed., American Indians in American History, 1870–2001: A Companion Reader (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002); Elizabeth Jameson, “Two Wests, One-and-a-Half Paradigms, and, Perhaps, Beyond,” in Finkel et al., eds., West and Beyond; Carol Higham and Robert Thacker, eds., One West, Two Myths: A Comparative Reader (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2004); C.L. Higham and Robert Thacker, eds., One West, Two Myths II: Essays on Comparison (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2006). Vic Satzewich and Lloyd Wong, eds., Transnational Identities and Practices in Canada (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2006). Nancy Christie, ed., Transatlantic Subjects: Ideas, Identities and Institutions in Post-Revolutionary British North America (Montreal and Kingston: McGillQueen’s University Press, 2009), 26. On this, see Antoinette Burton, Dwelling in the Archive: Women Writing House, Home, and History in Late Colonial India (London: Oxford University Press, 2003). Antoinette Burton, “Who Needs the Nation? Interrogating ‘British’ History,” Journal of Historical Sociology 10, no. 3 (September 1997): 227–48; Ian Tyrrell, “American Exceptionalism in an Age of International History,” American Historical Review 96, no. 4 (October 1991): 1031–55.

22  Karen Dubinsky, Adele Perry, and Henry Yu 45 Curthoys, “We’ve Just Started,” 70–89. 46 See Cormier, The Canadianization Movement. 47 Ian McKay, “The Empire Strikes Back: Militarism, Imperial Nostalgia, and the Right-Wing Reconceptualization of Canada,” podcast at http:// activehistory.ca/2011/03/ podcast-ian-mckay-on-the-right-wing-reconceptualization-of-canada/. 48 See, for instance, Wong and Satzewich, eds., Transnational Identities. 49 See, for instance, Aroha Harris and Mary Jane McCallum, “‘Assaulting the Ears of Government’: The Indian Homemakers’ Clubs and The Maori Women’s Welfare League in Their Formative Years,” in Women at Work: A Transnational Study of Aboriginal and Native American Women’s Labor from the Late Nineteenth Century to the Modern Era, Carol Williams, ed. (Urbana, Champagne, and Springfield: University of Illinios Press, 2012); Brendan Hokowhitu et al., Indigenous Identity and Resistance: Researching the Diversity of Knowledge (Dunedin: University of Otago Press, 2010). The work of the North American Indigenous Studies Association is described at http://naisa.org . 50 Marjorie Fee, “Beyond Boomer Nationalism,” Canadian Literature 206 (Autumn 2010), at http://canlit.ca/editorials.php?id=20752.

1  The Dog That Didn’t Bark: The Durham Report, Indigenous Dispossession, and Self-Government for Britain’s Settler Colonies a nn c ur th oys

In Sydney Harbour, at a pleasant spot known as Canada Bay, a nice place for a picnic, there is a monument to fifty-eight French Canadian patriotes who were transported to Sydney in its last years as a convict colony, arriving on the Buffalo on 25 February 1840. The last part of its inscription reads: This plaque was unveiled on May 19, 1970, by The Right Honourable Pierre Elliott Trudeau, Prime Minister of Canada, to mark the 130th anniversary of the landing of the Canadian exiles in Australia and to commemorate the sacrifices made by many Canadians and Australians in the evolution of self-government, equal and free nations within the Common­ wealth of Nations.1

Usually, the convicts transported to the Australian colonies came directly from Britain and Ireland, over 160,000 of them in all. The transportation system was a means of deterring crime, relieving pressure on Britain’s crowded jails, encouraging economic development and expansion, and safeguarding British strategic interests in the southern Pacific. This time, though, the convicts came directly from another British colony, Lower Canada. The men on board the Buffalo had been convicted of treason for their role in the rebellion of 1838. The French Canadian patriotes sent to Sydney were not the only men transported for their role in the rebellion. The Buffalo had just delivered ninety-two men who had taken part in the uprisings in Upper Canada, many of them Americans, to the southern Australian colony of Van Diemen’s Land (now Tasmania).

26  Ann Curthoys

At first, the patriotes were not welcome in Sydney, the capital city of New South Wales, where the convict system was winding down; the last convict ship would arrive from Britain only nine months later. For the British settlers in New South Wales, it was important for convictism to end if they were to be able to extend their political and civil rights and protect the future moral character and reputation of their community.2 Furthermore, the fact that the patriotes were Catholic was a problem. From the point of view of the Protestant majority, the high number of Irish convicts and settlers meant there were quite enough Catholics already. They were put to hard labour and kept under guard in a stockade at Longbottom, near the present suburb of Concord, eleven kilometres from the centre of town. After two years, they were assigned as labourers to various employers and then granted “tickets of leave” that meant they were free to work on their own account. After intensive pressure back in Canada, involving petitions for the pardon and release of the men in Sydney and Van Diemen’s Land, repatriation began in 1844 and lasted for four years. The French Canadian patriotes who spent several hard years in Sydney, so far from home, were nearly all bitterly homesick, something that is evident in the journals some of them left behind, and nearly all went home. Their homesickness was imagined in 1842 by Antoine Gérin-Lajoie, the young author of the still-popular ballad, Un Canadien errant, which concludes with the words “My own beloved land I’ll not forget ’til death / And I will speak of her with my last dying breath.” In Sydney, only one, Joseph Marceau, remained, and about ten of the men in Van Diemen’s Land also stayed. Marceau and the others have many descendants in Australia today. The main historian of this transportation, Beverley Boissery, to whose work my account is indebted, draws our attention to both the sufferings of the Canadian convicts and their eventual warm reception in Sydney. They were, she notes, law-abiding family men with welcome farming and trade skills who took care of their own and formed strong bonds with one another. “Sydney’s citizens,” she says, “remembered them fondly more than forty years after their departure … Surviving residents remembered the Canadiens’ ‘excellent character’ and the high quality of their craftsmanship. Their altruism had become legendary.”3 An episode that for the colonists in Sydney had begun in fear and s­ uspicion had ended by demonstrating the common bonds of settler colonial life. Settlers who spoke the French language and practised Roman Catholicism could be included in the embryonic settler identities emerging in the Australian colonies.

The Dog That Didn’t Bark  27

In popular imagination, as the above-quoted monument inscription makes clear, the history of the patriotes transported from Upper and Lower Canada helps illuminate the subsequent achievement of selfgovernment by the widely separated British colonies that later became the independent nations of Canada and Australia. Like Penelope Edmonds’s chapter in this volume, this one tackles the comparative history of Canada and Australia, and like Henry Yu’s, it deals with the twinned histories of Indigenous dispossession and colonial self-­ governance. In this chapter, I want to explore these connections, especially in relation to the ways questions of imperial versus settler governance affected Indigenous peoples and policies in both places. I want to bring together historiographies that usually make little reference to one another: British imperial history, Canadian Aboriginal ­history, Canadian history of self-government, Australian Aboriginal history, and Australian history of self-government. This will be a conversation of many voices. For those of us working in settler colonial history, the popular move to transnational and comparative approaches provides particular challenges. As Ian Tyrrell has pointed out, “transnational,” though commonly used, is not quite the right term for the study of the British settler colonies of North America, Australasia, and southern Africa before they became independent nations.4 A more precise term, perhaps, would be “transcolonial history,” signifying a form of history that seeks to trace the links and connections between colonies and between them and the imperial government. World historian Arif Dirlik, anxious to deconstruct and historicize notions such as “nation” and “civilization,” suggests the term “translocal” to conceptualize histories of connection across the globe.5 Whichever term we use, how are we to understand these transnational, transcolonial, and translocal histories? How can we retain a grounded sense of particularity through detailed studies, paying close attention to Indigenous–settler interactions while also being sensitive to the broader imperial framework within which these local histories were made? I have been facing these challenges in my own research into Australian colonial history. With my co-researcher, Jessie Mitchell, I am exploring what happened to Indigenous people and policies when Britain granted self-government to five of the six Australian colonies in the midnineteenth century. In the colonial constitutions drawn up to enact these changes in governing arrangements, the colonies remained loyal to the Crown and the British Empire, and Britain retained control over

28  Ann Curthoys

defence and foreign policy. While Britain could veto legislation thought repugnant to Britain’s imperial interests, control over domestic affairs was essentially transferred to the colonies themselves.6 Control and management of Indigenous policy effectively passed from Britain to the settlers. How could this have happened? Why did Britain hand over control to the very settlers British governments had condemned and attempted to constrain in relation to Indigenous people only a decade or so earlier? What did this mean for Indigenous people now at the mercy of the settler governments thus established? How did the ongoing processes of Indigenous dispossession affect the character of settler political discourse and governments? Historians of the gaining of responsible government in the Australian colonies had until recently rarely con­ sidered these questions. One reason is their usual focus on New South Wales, the oldest and most populous colony, where the remaining Indigenous presence was by the 1850s generally ignored, except in the northern districts that later separated to become the colony of Queens­ land. Those debating responsible government for New South Wales, both in the colony and in Britain, rarely considered Aboriginal issues. There is little in the political debates in New South Wales to alert the historian to the questions I am now asking, and the historian’s task of reading the silences becomes especially pertinent. In this archive, it is as if Indigenous people had already disappeared from the face of the earth, as so many believed they would. Until very recently, the study of Aboriginal policies and Aboriginal– European interactions has been quite separate from that of the struggle for and granting of self-government. Historians of Aboriginal–settler relations in Australia have focused either on British imperial policy or on individual colonial government policies; even when a work covers both, it has discussed very lightly if at all the transition from imperial to  settler control.7 For their part, historians of the gaining of self-­ government in the Australian colonies have been preoccupied not with Aboriginal policy questions but with quite different issues, such as the relationship between the cessation of convict transportation and the granting of self-government, or the respective role of Britain and settler demands in prompting the change.8 Two examples from a much larger literature illustrate the point. In his book, Colonial Self-Government: The British Experience, 1759–1856, published in 1976, my former teacher at the University of Sydney, John M. Ward, presented a synthesized, detailed, and very useful account of the moves to responsible government

The Dog That Didn’t Bark  29

in Canada, Australia, and the West Indies.9 He argued strongly that the reasons for the change in each case lay not with local histories and pressures, but rather in British political developments. British settlers in the Australian colonies, he insists, were not interested in responsible  government.10 Peter Cochrane’s prize-winning Colonial Ambition: Foundations of Australian Democracy (2006) offers a very different analysis. As he says right at the beginning, his story is one of “how the eminent landowners of NSW plotted to transfer power from Downing Street to themselves, only to see it usurped by their political enemies – the artisans, shopkeepers, merchants and renegade gentry whose power base was in Sydney.”11 He sees a three-cornered contest between the British imperial government, the landowners, and the middle and working classes, each of them changing rapidly as social conditions and political circumstances shifted. For neither of these historians, publishing thirty years apart, are the ongoing processes of frontier violence and subsequent Indigenous–settler relations in the settled areas perceived as relevant to their argument. Given that I am attempting to understand connections that the po­ litically articulate in New South Wales rarely commented upon at the time, I decided to look to other colonies, both in Australia and elsewhere, to gain a broader understanding of the relationship between the granting of self-government and Indigenous policies more generally. As soon as one’s gaze is widened, it becomes much easier to see the connections between settler self-government and Indigenous governance. Especially important here is Julie Evans, Patricia Grimshaw, David Philips, and Shurlee Swain’s Equal Subjects, Unequal Rights: Indig­ enous Peoples in British Settler Colonies, 1830s–1910. It compares the colonies in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and southern Africa in terms of the granting of political rights to Indigenous people. One chapter deals with the transition to responsible government, briefly tracing the unsuccessful attempts by British humanitarians to protect the rights of Aboriginal peoples in the proposed constitutions.12 This was a pioneering study, but given its wide scope, many questions remain. In the last few years, scholarship on the connections between the gaining of selfgovernment and the nature of settler–indigenous relations has gathered speed, with Jessie Mitchell’s work being especially important.13 Australian historians can especially benefit from looking at the debates in and about the Canadian colonies, as that is where the issue of settler self-government, and more precisely responsible government, first arose. The resolution of conflicts there had huge consequences for

30  Ann Curthoys

British policy towards the Australian colonies. Earlier generations of Australian and Canadian historians understood this well, much more clearly than most Australian historians do today. Their interest arose out of their commitment to the Commonwealth, and before that the British Commonwealth, and of course, before that, the British Empire. Historians wanted to understand how the political institutions of these societies were forged and the processes whereby they changed from settler colonies under direct British control to largely self-governing settler colonies, to dominions, and ultimately to independent nations. Within this larger framework, the question of the granting of responsible government in the mid-nineteenth century loomed large.14 Some time in the 1970s, however, there was a sharp decline of interest in the history of political arrangements within the British Empire. To a large degree, historians in Australia and Canada moved away from constitutional and imperial issues to social and cultural questions, and to studies of local interactions based on class, gender, and race. The empire became unfashionable.15 Indeed, Adele Perry suggests that for Canada this happened a little earlier; Canadian historians, she writes, “soured on empire around mid-century” and looked rather to Canada’s North American character.16­ With the empire receding from view, historians began to make dif­ ferent kinds of connections between Australian, Canadian, and New Zealand history. Indigenous history grew dramatically in importance and extent in all three countries, changing the landscape of each national history. Indigenous people’s claims, especially to land, had a major impact on historical scholarship. The similarities and differences in the processes and outcomes of Aboriginal title claims in Australia, New Zealand, and Canada led to an interest in each other’s jurisprudence, and in each other’s history. In all three cases, especially New Zealand, the work of historians has been integral to the adjudication of Indige­ nous people’s claims. This common experience has led to some valuable comparative research. There is, for example, Arthur Ray’s work on the uses of history in native title claims in all three societies.17 Henry Reynolds, in his series of books on Australian Indigenous history and Indigenous peoples’ legal claims, made considerable use of Canadian examples to argue his case that Australian law ought to recognize native title.18 Canadian scholars like Kent McNeil and Peter Russell have shown considerable interest in Australian Indigenous history.19 Historians began to compare more systematically the history of Indigenous–settler relations in Australia and Canada. Peggy Brock

The Dog That Didn’t Bark  31

studied land policy in both Western Australia and British Columbia, her comparison highlighting that the Australian situation was espe­ cially dire. She concludes: This brief discussion indicates that Aboriginal people in Western Australia were … much worse off than indigenous peoples in other settler societies … While British Columbia is certainly not a best case scenario with which to compare Western Australia, many First Nations peoples in this province did have some land base, however precarious, while Aboriginal people in Western Australia had none.20

The most extensive comparative study to date is Penny Edmonds’s recent book Urbanizing Frontiers: Indigenous Peoples and Settlers in 19thCentury Pacific Rim Cities (2010). It explores and compares the politics of race and the lives of Indigenous peoples in two cities – Victoria in British Columbia and Melbourne in the Australian colony of Victoria.21 Edmonds not only compares and contrasts the Indigenous histories of the two cities, but also notes the ways in which policies and individuals (such as governors and lieutenant governors) flowed from one  city and colony to the other. She emphasizes the importance of cities in the ­settler colonial imagination as representing the successful supplanting of “savage society” with “the highest stage of commerce and civilization.”22 Her analysis resonates with the argument presented in Richard Waswo’s The Founding Legend of Western Civilization (1997) that European colonizers saw themselves as culture bringers, bearing what they regarded as superior knowledge of agriculture, law, religion, and cities.23 For my project, on the three-way relationships among settler selfgovernment, Indigenous peoples, and British imperial policy in Aus­ tralia, however, I found that as well as immersing myself in indigenous histories in Australia and elsewhere I needed to go back to a study of British imperial history. I wanted to understand better the British approaches to questions of settler and Indigenous governance, not only in relation to the Australian colonies but also elsewhere. This search quickly took me back to that staple of an earlier genre of imperial and Commonwealth history, the Durham report. Though so well known to Canadian historians that its mere mention tends to generate groans (I  have found), this crucial report has been almost forgotten by their counterparts in Australia. I had so forgotten it myself that when I realised I needed to pay attention, I actually read it in its entirety.

32  Ann Curthoys

The Durham Report The Durham report was written at the end of the 1830s, the decade to which any exploration of the relationship between Indigenous policy and the granting of self-government in the British settler colonies necessarily leads us. At this time, Aboriginal policy issues across the empire and settler political unrest in the Canadas were both high on the imperial agenda. In 1835, the British House of Commons set up its Committee on Aborigines in the British Settlements, which provided a two-volume report in 1836 and 1837. Led by evangelical abolitionist Sir  Thomas Fowell Buxton, the Christian, liberal, and humanitarian committee had a clear purpose: to protect, civilize, and convert the Indigenous peoples in British colonies. The Report of the Parliamentary Select Committee on the Aboriginal Tribes (British Settlements), the subject of intense interest by historians in recent years, contained voluminous evidence drawn from evangelist networks throughout the em­ pire of the enormous destruction wrought on Indigenous societies by British settlement in North America, southern Africa, New Zealand, and Australia.24 Indigenous peoples, it suggested, were being morally degraded and physically destroyed through settler violence, alcohol, and introduced diseases. The committee did not think that colonization should or could be slowed or stopped; its report concluded, in relation to Van Diemen’s Land, where the destruction of Indigenous lives was particularly extensive, that “whatever may have been the injustice of this encroachment, there is no reason to suppose that either justice or humanity would now be consulted by receding from it.”25 Rather, the solution was Christianization and government protection. Of particular importance is the report’s recommendation that Indig­ enous policy remain with the imperial government through the person  of the governor in each colony, and not with local legislatures.26 Authority for Aboriginal people would rest with the British government rather than with settlers. At the same time, and pointing in the opposite direction, the report also supported continued emigration to the settler colonies, which it saw as providing an outlet for “the superabundant populations of Great Britain and Ireland.” As Cole Harris perceptively suggests, the committee’s attempts to “protect Native rights and also to provide for setters – the moral dilemma at the core of settler colonialism – were sketchy and unconvincing.”27 Even as the second report was delivered in June 1837, events were unfolding in the colonies of Upper and Lower Canada that appeared to

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have little to do with imperial Aboriginal policy, but would eventually threaten British control of Aboriginal policy in settler colonies altogether. Since 1791, the legislature of each province had consisted of both a legislative assembly, an elected lower house, and a legislative council, a nominated upper house. This was consistent with the principle of representative government, which sought to give propertied colonists a limited role in the government of Britain’s settler colonies. The limits, however, were considerable. The assembly did not control the executive government, which was responsible to the governor and beyond him to the British imperial government. Thus, assemblies had limited financial resources and no control over powerful governing officials. As settlement intensified, the arrangement became increasingly unstable. Struggles for political control in both provinces had become so severe that there were unsuccessful armed rebellions in 1837 and 1838. The governor of Upper Canada, Sir George Arthur, recently lieutenant governor of Van Diemen’s Land, successfully oversaw the suppression of the 1838 rebellion in Upper Canada. The leaders were either executed or jailed, and, as mentioned earlier, 150 were transported to New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land. Britain, it seemed, was in danger of losing the rest of her colonies in North America. Early in 1838, the British government commissioned John Lambton, the first Earl of Durham, to take control as the new governor general of the North American colonies and to investigate the reasons for the political crises there. Durham was part of the circle of liberal and radical  thinkers that also included John Stuart Mill and Edward Gibbon Wakefield. Author of the Letter from Sydney in 1829, which urged a more systematic approach to colonization, Wakefield was a significant influence on Durham. A strong supporter of free emigration, which would relieve pressure on land and other resources in Britain and ensure the productive development of the land and other resources in the settler colonies, he emphasized that in colonial situations, the sale of Crown land would make the colonies self-supporting and self-sufficient. Wake­ field was also significant in the 1830s in colonization projects in both South Australia and New Zealand. His influence on Durham and John Stuart Mill and other “colonial reformers” was immense. He travelled with Durham to Canada in a private capacity.28 Durham’s rule as governor general was brief indeed. He arrived on 28 May and resigned only four months later over the British government’s repudiation of his decision to exile Lower Canada’s political prisoners without trial. He left Canada in early November and wrote

34  Ann Curthoys

his Report on the Affairs of British North America on his return to Britain, completing it in late January 1839. The report’s major concern was ensuring British dominance in any future political and social arrangements for her remaining North American colonies, and especially in relations between the French and English colonial communities. Durham advocated a transfer of powers from Britain to the colonists, except in matters of foreign policy and defence; this would keep them loyal to Britain and avoid another American-style revolution against British rule. More specifically, he recommended a system of responsible government whereby the government ministers and their departments were answerable to locally elected legislatures. This was no invention of Lord Durham’s, but was rather something the colonists in the two  provinces had been demanding for some time. He also recommended the unification of Upper and Lower Canada to ensure that the population of British origin numerically and politically dominated the French population. Durham’s report, as Equal Subjects, Unequal Rights points out, does not mention Indigenous people at all.29 Given the intense concern within the Colonial Office over Aboriginal peoples and policy at this time, this is somewhat puzzling. When I read the report, it turned out to be a case of the dog that did not bark. In the Arthur Conan Doyle story “Silver Blaze,” the failure of a dog to bark in the night-time provided Sherlock Holmes with a clue to a murder he was attempting to solve. As historical detectives, perhaps, we can read the absence of any mention of Indigenous people in the Durham report as a clue to understanding why, despite evangelical concerns and campaigns, Britain from midcentury pursued expansionist policies and governing arrangements that meant the continued destruction of Indigenous lives and societies. As so many have commented before me, the Durham report is a fascinating text, a remarkably well written, early sociological account of ethnic, class, and community conflict. It understands the aspirations and ideals of the English settlers in the Canadian colonies very clearly, noting that they said (and this could easily have come from the eastern Australian colonies a decade and a half later), “If the mother country forgets what is due to the loyal and enterprising men of her own race, they must protect themselves.”30 While Indigenous people are nowhere mentioned, it seems to me that a great deal of the report is implicitly about their demise, through the extension of British settlement, the management of wastelands, the taking up of new lands, and British emigration as the foundation of the settlement process. Throughout the

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report, the land is assumed to be empty, awaiting settlement; indeed, the report begins by describing all Britain’s colonies in North America as “ample and fertile,” much of them “still unsettled,” and later refers to “unoccupied land.”31 The resources of the colonies are, according to the report, “the rightful patrimony of the British people, the ample appanage which God and Nature have set aside in the New World for those whose lot has assigned them but insufficient portions in the Old.”32 The report looks forward to the filling of the “ample territories” of the colonies with a “large and flourishing population.” It shares the views of the English settlers as to the possibilities for future expansion and settlement. One of the many differences it sees between the English and the French is that while the former see the North American provinces as “a vast field for settlement and speculation,” the latter regard them “not as a country to be settled, but as one already settled.”33 The problem with Lower Canada’s majority French-speaking population is that they “remain an old and stationary society in a new and progressive world.”34 Curiously, the report here anticipates Edward Said’s analysis of Orientalism, where a common trope in European discourse of the Orient was that it was inert and stationary in history. The report is, in other words, a manifesto for effective settler colonialism, the displacement of Indigenous peoples, and their replacement with British settlers. Within the settler society thus created, the English were to be dominant, economically, demographically, and politically, while the French were to be made a marginal and politically insignificant population. The dispossession and displacement of the never-mentioned Indigenous people is assumed, and is crucial to the settler colonial project. As Harris puts it, migration and Indigenous policies were inevitably related: “Immigrants came to settle in colonies and colonial administrations had to make space for them. To do so they had to dispossess indigenous people of much of their land and, in so doing, to decide where to put and how to treat them.”35 The report’s silence on the fact that “unsettled” and “unoccupied” lands were actually inhabited is telling indeed. The never-mentioned Indigenous people inhabit the report like ghosts; though not included in the analysis, their lands are the basis of and reason for the entire story.36 We can see here, in the complete silence on the fate of Indigenous peoples in a document concerned with the nature and governance of settlement, a startling example of L.M. Findlay’s “haunting of the Canadas by the spectres of their first peoples at every stage of colonial configuration and national sovereignty.”37

36  Ann Curthoys

Self-Government versus Indigenous Rights and Protection While the Durham report did not see Indigenous people and policies as being in any way relevant to the question of colonial governance, some observers in the following decade did. In a series of lectures delivered soon after the report, in 1839, 1840, and 1841, one of the most knowledgeable and thoughtful of British commentators, Herman Merivale, directly tackled the question of settler government and Indigenous policy throughout the empire. Merivale at the time was professor of political economy at Oxford (he was later to be permanent under-­secretary at the Colonial Office from 1847 to 1860), and was influenced by the liberal humanitarianism and Protestant evangelical Christianity of the 1830s. He wanted Indigenous peoples to be protected as far as possible through measures such as the appointment of Protectors, the setting aside of reserves specifically for Indigenous peoples to insulate them from the worst of settler “ferocity and treachery,” and, in the longer term, the pursuit of policies of “amalgamation” and civilization of the Indigenous people into settler society.38 Most important, like the 1837 report before him, Merivale thought it imperative that Britain not transfer control over Indigenous policy to colonial legislatures. The imperial government must in all its colonies retain control through an imperially appointed and controlled department, and do the best it could.39 Merivale’s ideas were put to the test a few years later. The provinces of Upper and Lower Canada were united, as Durham had recommended, in an Act of Union which came into force in September 1841, but ­the report’s recommendation for the institution of a system of responsible government was rejected.40 British authorities resisted the growing demand of reformers in the United Canadas for responsible government a few years longer. Finally, with the arrival in January 1847 of a new governor general, Lord Elgin (Durham’s son-in-law), supported by a new liberal government in Britain with Earl Grey as colonial secretary, the imperial authorities accepted the principle of colonial self-­government as we now understand it.41 It was accepted not only for the Canadas, but also potentially for the other settler colonies in Australia, New Zealand, and southern Africa, should they be considered ready for self-government. There were several reasons for the change in policy. The imperial government wanted to keep the settler colonies within the British Empire as sites for emigration from Britain, and to keep costs down by handing much of the cost of government to the colonies themselves. It was important to keep taxes low to avoid if

The Dog That Didn’t Bark  37

possible agitation on the scale of the 1848 revolutions on the European continent.42 In addition, the growth in free trade policies meant that trade rather than tight governmental controls would connect the settler colonies to the mother country. By the early 1850s, British governments and commentators generally had come to see responsible government as the political framework that would best enable the expansion of Britain’s population around the globe. John Stuart Mill put the new way of thinking about colonial governance well in his book Considerations on Representative Government (1861). Inspired by the Durham report and the influence of Wakefield and his circle, settler self-government had become British policy, he argued, in both theory and practice; it was now agreed policy “that her colonies of European race, equally with the parent country, possess the fullest measure of internal self-government.”43 Under the new system, they could alter their own constitutions, and Britain’s reserved powers were only “on questions which concern the empire and not solely the particular colony.”44 Mill also saw the importance of granting the settler colonies control over land policy. The British have interpreted the colonists’ powers very liberally, he wrote, as can be seen from the fact that “the whole of the unappropriated lands in the regions behind our American and Australian colonies have been given up to the uncontrolled disposal of the colonial communities.” These lands, he thought, might “without injustice, have been kept in the hands of the Imperial Government, to be administered for the greatest advantage of future emigrants from all parts of the empire.”45 In this new situation, would Indigenous governance remain with Britain, as Merivale and the Aborigines committee report had advocated, or would it pass to the new settler-controlled governments? Within Britain, there was some pressure from evangelical humanitarians for Britain to maintain control as the only means of protecting Indigenous peoples from further destruction. The Aborigines Protec­ tion Society (APS) in Britain was fully aware of the dangers the growing pressure for self-government posed for Aboriginal peoples in the empire.46 It opposed a New Zealand bill of 1846 for its insufficient attention to Maori interests, warning the colonial secretary that vesting power in the colonies could easily become an instrument of oppression of “the less civilized and less powerful races of men inhabiting the same colony.”47 The APS said it did not oppose self-government per se, only the exclusion of Maori from a share in it; Maori leaders should sit in parliament, be co-magistrates with Europeans, police superintendents,

38  Ann Curthoys

customs officers, and so forth.48 Three years later, the society opposed moves towards self-government in the Cape for similar reasons. The proposed constitution, it pointed out, made no provision for native participation in colonial government; in response, the British government modified the electoral provisions to allow some Indigenous voters.49 The society was similarly concerned by the growing moves towards self-government for the Australian colonies. Advocates of self-­ government had followed developments in Canada with some interest  ever since the Durham report had been serialized in the Sydney Gazette from June to September 1839, and other colonial newspapers also offered detailed coverage.50 From 1843, New South Wales had had representative government in the form of a one-third-nominated and two-thirds-elected council that had no control over the executive government. By the late 1840s, there were extensive political campaigns involving all classes for greater self-government, and intense divisions over how democratic or otherwise the new form of government should be. It seemed to be only a matter of time before the Australian colonies, too, would follow the Canadian example. The matter was, however, considerably complicated by the continuation of convict transportation to Van Diemen’s Land and British attempts to revive it to New South Wales, both of which stimulated strong anti-transportation campaigns invoking fresh demands for self-government. Early in 1850, the British government introduced into parliament an Australian Colonies Government bill that sought to establish a framework for the development of more representative forms of colonial government, though not, as yet, responsible government. While it was still under consideration, a delegation from the APS in March called on Prime Minister John Russell at Downing Street to express concern that the bill made no provision for the protection, welfare, and civilization of Aboriginal people. The society supported the liberal principles invoked by the settlers, but the problem was that these men who sought liberties for themselves did not do so for the native peoples. They should seek to know, the APS suggested, “the feelings of the most influential and intelligent of the aboriginal tribes” before self-government was granted.51 The bill, the APS suggested, should assert the principle of equality before the law. The influence of the APS, and the evangelical humanitarianism it represented, was, however, already waning fast. Its vision of a common humanity was giving way to a form of thinking that emphasized racial difference, asserted the superiority of the British over all other races,

The Dog That Didn’t Bark  39

and assumed that Aboriginal peoples were doomed to extinction. The Colonial Office was not persuaded by the society’s argument, responding that as Aboriginal people were British subjects they were automatically included in the bill’s provisions. It was then passed without any particular provision for Aboriginal protection or governance.52 There was no suggestion that Britain should keep control of Aboriginal policy when the British authorities in 1852 invited the Australian colonial legislatures to draft new constitutions. Nor were there any suggestions of the kind when new colonial constitutions were passed and enacted in 1855 and 1856, though in the discussion leading up to the decision to insist on the imperial government’s power of veto over internal colonial matters, one of the considerations was the colonies’ possible treatment of Aboriginal people.53 In every case, control over Indigenous policy and people passed to the settlers without qualification. Britain’s Exit from Governing Indigenous Peoples The granting of self-government, celebrated by settlers at the time and by national historiography ever since, was a quintessentially racial policy. It aimed to keep colonies with substantial British populations within Britain’s sphere of influence, and it guaranteed the triumph of expansionist policies of migration and settlement over policies of containment and protection for Indigenous peoples. The transfer of power over Aboriginal people from the metropolitan centre to the far-flung settlers, however, took some time, and the process varied considerably from colony to colony. In some colonies, notably in New Zealand and in the united Canadas, the imperial government did try for a time to ensure that Indigenous relations did not come under popular control, just as the 1837 Aborigines report had recommended. In New Zealand in the 1850s, Maori were still an independent sovereign people whose reaction to government decisions was noticed and sometimes feared. Settlers and British authorities debated responsible government with its effects on future relations with Maori very much in mind. When Britain inaugurated responsible government in New Zealand in 1856, it maintained control of relations with Pakeha and Maori in the hands of the governor.54 Local humanitarians, who feared that colonial responsible government would be harmful for Maori, were influential. Britain, furthermore, wanted to keep control over an issue that could lead to violent conflict and would thus require the deployment of British troops (as eventually happened). The local general

40  Ann Curthoys

assembly, however, strongly opposed this arrangement and in the second half of the 1850s campaigned vigorously to gain control over Maori policy, finally succeeding in 1862. In the most detailed history to date of these political struggles, Brian Dalton concludes that any attempt by the imperial centre to protect Indigenous people from settlers and settlement was pointless once responsible government had been conceded. There was no halfway house, and after the granting of responsible government, any thought of the British government retaining the power to intervene on behalf of Indigenous people was quite illusory.55 Something similar happened in the united Canadas. There, too, the imperial government attempted to maintain formal control over Indig­ enous policy, even after the granting of responsible government. With the Union of 1841, the Indian departments of Upper and Lower Canada were amalgamated and placed directly under the control of the gov­ ernor general, an arrangement that lasted for fifteen years.56 In 1856, ­however, at the same time as the New Zealand general assembly was campaigning for control of Maori policy, the legislative assembly of the united Canadas sought to transfer control of Indian affairs from Britain to itself. The matter was still under debate when the governor, in light of Britain’s desire to reduce the cost of Indian administration, introduced the Gradual Civilization Bill of 1857 that outlined a new assimilationist approach.57 Indians were henceforth to be accorded inferior legal status and denied the franchise; they would be gradually trained, and when deemed to have attained the arts of civilization, granted full citizenship, the right to vote, and forty acres of land.58 Aboriginal people campaigned to repeal the act, but finally lost the battle when control over Aboriginal policy formally passed to the colony in 1860 under the Indian Lands and Properties Act, which centralized control in the hands of the Chief Superintendent of Indian Affairs.59 Only seven years later, with Confederation in 1867, Aboriginal peoples and policy became a federal concern. Settler control of Indigenous policy was complete. Thus, in both North America and in New Zealand, Britain’s attempt to retain control over Indigenous policy once responsible government had been granted failed. Harris points out that when Herman Merivale revised his lectures on colonization for publication in 1861, he regretted that Britain had handed over native policy to settler governments. Despite the problems arising from distance between governments and those governed, he thought control by the home executive would be better than “the arbitrary will of the settlers.” In his view, the “Native Question,” the problem of how to protect native populations once

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self-government had been granted was now insoluble.60 A few years later, John Stuart Mill came to the same conclusion. Though he had long been an enthusiastic supporter of emigration and the expansion of the settler colonies, near the end of his life he came to recognize the usually dire consequences for Indigenous peoples.61 Still firmly believing the British were a superior race, he began to worry over the genocidal aspects of high migration and expansionist policies. In a letter in 1866 to Henry Chapman, a friend who had migrated to New Zealand, he confides a sense of intellectual impasse, anguish, and tragedy.62 After noting the seeming inevitability of conflict between settlers and Maori, such that the country would remain divided between two hostile races “unless or until the progressive decline of the Maori population ends in their extinction,” he writes: “Here then is the burthen on the conscience of legislators at home. Can they give up the Maoris to the mercy of the more powerful and constantly increasing section of the population? Knowing what the English are, when they are left alone with what they think an inferior race, I cannot reconcile myself to this.” Yet Mill acutely realized that keeping control of Maori policy would be extremely difficult: But again, – is it possible for England to maintain an authority there for the purpose of preventing unjust treatment of the Maoris, and at the same time allow self government to the British colonists in every other respect? How is that one subject to be kept separate, and how is the Governor to be in other things a mere ornamental frontispiece to a government of the colony by a colonial Cabinet and Legislature and to assume will and responsibility of his own, overruling his cabinet and legislature wherever the Maoris are concerned?

Then came the crunch line: “If the condition of colonial government is to keep well with the colonial population and its representatives, there is no hindering the colonists from making their cooperation depend on compliance with their wishes as to the Maoris.” Mill concluded, sadly, “I do not see my way through these difficulties.”63 As Duncan Bell writes, the main problem for Mill was that “those best placed to control the colonists – the Crown government in London – no longer had the political power to do so. Rather than leading to progress, colonial autonomy facilitated injustice.”64 By 1870, Andrew Porter suggests, all settler colonies had acquired sufficient financial power to enable them to shape policy towards

42  Ann Curthoys

Indigenous populations more or less as they wished.65 During the 1870s and 1880s, however, especially as the pace of colonization of large parts of Africa quickened, the imperial government reconsidered its position and sometimes sought to regain control of indigenous policy. By this time, as Norman Etherington points out, the dire consequences of unrestrained settler government for Indigenous people had become evident. Settler incursions into Indigenous lands, or mistreatment of already conquered Indigenous peoples, had led to expensive military campaigns (the costs borne by Britain) in New Zealand, Jamaica, and Natal.66 These changes affected Western Australia in the mid-1880s, when it finally achieved sufficient population and political activism to seek responsible government, as the other Australian colonies had done thirty years earlier. At this point, the settlers found their appalling record in matters of Aboriginal treatment (including forced labour and extensive imprisonment) had become a potential obstacle to the increase in their own political self-determination. British concern was so great that the Western Australian constitution, approved in 1890, resurrected the principle of direct imperial control of Indigenous policy through the person of the governor. The Aborigines Protection Board (formed in 1886) would remain under the direct control of the governor and be funded by a fixed percentage of colonial revenue.67 Yet this attempt to support both settler expansion and Aboriginal protection, like its equivalents in Canada, New Zealand, and the other Australian colonies decades earlier, proved, once again, a failure, and after insistent pressure from the colonial legislature, the relevant clause was repealed in 1897. British territorial expansion and migration led, once again, to the dispossession, subjugation, and often ill treatment of ­In­digenous people. When the monument to the patriotes on the shores of Sydney Harbour referred to “the sacrifices made by many Canadians and Australians in the evolution of self-government, equal and free nations within the Commonwealth of Nations,” it was referring to the settlers’ struggles in both places for greater freedom and self-determination. These struggles do indeed deserve to be well remembered. Yet so, too, do the concurrent histories of Indigenous peoples’ continued loss of autonomy and liberty. These losses were not only those flowing from the original seizure of land, often through violent means, but also those that came later – from both imperial and settler-imposed policies of exclusion, marginalization, and institutionalization. In recasting settler political history to ponder the connections in terms of political autonomy between

The Dog That Didn’t Bark  43

settler gains and indigenous losses, a transnational and transcolonial approach which embodies an imperial alongside a local and grounded perspective can yield new questions and complex answers.68 NOTES My thanks to John Docker and Jessie Mitchell for their invaluable assistance. 1 Quoted in “Canada and Australia: A Shared History,” High Commission of Canada in Australia, http://www.canadainternational.gc.ca/australiaaustralie/bilateral_relations_bilaterales/can_australia_shared-australie_ commune.aspx?lang=eng. 2 See Kirsten McKenzie, Scandal in the Colonies (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2004), chap. 6. 3 Beverley Boissery, “The Punishment of Transportation as Suffered by the Patriotes Sent to New South Wales,” in Rebellion and Invasion in the Canadas, ed. F. Murray Greenwood and Barry Wright, vol. 2 of Canadian State Trials (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002), 397. See also Cassandra Pybus, “Patriot Exiles in Van Diemen’s Land,” in the same volume, and Beverley D. Boissery, A Deep Sense of Wrong: The Treason, Trials, and Transportation to New South Wales of Lower Canadian Rebels after the 1838 Rebellion (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1996). 4 Ian Tyrrell, “Reflections on the Transnational Turn in United States History: Theory and Practice,” Journal of Global History 4 (2009): 461. 5 Arif Dirlik, “Performing the World: Reality and Representation in the Making of World Histor(ies),” Journal of World History 16, no. 4 (200): 392. See also Ann Curthoys and John Docker, Is History Fiction? 2nd ed. (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2010): 262–3. 6 See W.J. Hudson and M.P. Sharp, Australian Independence: Colony to Reluctant Kingdom (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1988), 8–14. 7 Henry Reynolds, The Law of the Land, 2nd ed. (Melbourne: Penguin, 1992), esp. chap. 4; R.H.W. Reece, Aborigines and Colonists: Aborigines and Colonial Society in New South Wales in the 1830s and 1840s (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 1974); Lyndall Ryan, The Aboriginal Tasmanians, 2nd ed. (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1996), 203–10; Heather Goodall, Invasion to Embassy: Land in Aboriginal Politics in New South Wales, 1770–1972 (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1996), 44–56; A.G.L. Shaw, “British Policy towards the Australian Aborigines, 1830–1850,” Australian Historical Studies 25, no. 99 (1992): 265–85; Richard Broome, Aboriginal Victorians: A History ­since 1800 (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 2005), 120–65.

44  Ann Curthoys 8 In addition to Ward and Cochrane, discussed below, see A.C.V. Melbourne, Early Constitutional Development in Australia: New South Wales, 1788–1856 (London: Oxford University Press, 1934); A.G.L. Shaw, Great Britain and the Colonies, 1815–1865 (London: Methuen, 1970); John Hirst, The Strange Birth of Colonial Democracy: New South Wales 1848–1884 (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1988); Geoffrey Serle, The Golden Age: A History of the Colony of Victoria 1851–1861 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1963); Mark McKenna, The Captive Republic: A History of Republicanism in Australia, 1788–1996 (Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 9 John M. Ward, Colonial Self-Government: The British Experience, 1759–1856 (London: Macmillan, 1976); Peter Cochrane, Colonial Ambition: Foundations of Australian Democracy (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2006). 10 See also John M. Ward, “The Responsible Government Question in Victoria, South Australia and Tasmania, 1851–1856,” Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society 63 (March 1978): 221–47. 11 Cochrane, Colonial Ambition, xiii. 12 Julie Evans, Patricia Grimshaw, David Philips, and Shurlee Swain, Equal Subjects, Unequal Rights: Indigenous Peoples in British Settler Colonies, 1830s– 1910 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), 64 and 66–8. 13 Recent work includes Jessie Mitchell, “It will enlarge the ideas of natives”: Indigenous Australians and the Tour of Prince Alfred, The Duke of Edinburgh,” Aboriginal History 34 (2010): 197–216; Jessie Mitchell, “‘Are we in danger of a hostile visit from the Aborigines?’ Dispossession and the Rise of Self-Government in New South Wales,” Australian Historical Studies 40, no. 3 (2009): 294–307; Jessie Mitchell, “‘The galling yoke of slavery’: Race and Separation in Colonial Port Phillip,” Journal of Australian Studies 33, no. 2 (June 2009): 125–37; Jessie Mitchell, “‘The Gomorrah of the Southern Seas’: Population, Separation and Race in Early Colonial Queensland,” History Australia 6, no. 3 (December 2009): 69.1–15; Ann Curthoys, “Taking Liberty: Towards a New Political Historiography of Settler Self-government and Indigenous Activism,” in Kate Fullagar, ed., The Atlantic World in a Pacific Field: Effects and Transformations since the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2012), 237–55; Ann Curthoys and Jeremy Martens, “Serious Collisions: Settlers, Indigenous People, and Imperial Policy in Western Australia and Natal,” Journal of Australian Colonial History 20 (2013): 123–46; Ann Curthoys, “The Lying Name of Government: Empire, Mobility, and Political Rights,” in Jane Carey and Jane Lydon, eds., Indigenous Networks: Mobility, Connections and Exchange (London: Routledge, 2013, 75–96; Ann Curthoys and Jessie Mitchell, “The Advent of Self-Government,” in Alison Bashford and Stuart

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21 22 23

24

Macintyre, eds., The New Cambridge History of Australia, volume 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Ann Curthoys and Jessie Mitchell, “‘Bring this paper to the Good Governor’: Aboriginal Petitioning in Britain’s Australian Colonies,” in Saliha Belmessous, ed., Native Claims: Indigenous Law against Empire 1500–1920 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011) , 182–203; “Governing Settlers and Indigenous Peoples in the Australian Colonies,” Special issue, Journal of Australian Colonial History 15 (2013); “Special Issue: Indigenous People and Settler Self Government,” Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 13, no. 1 (Spring 2012). See Adele Perry, “Canada and the Empires of the Past,” History Compass 1 (August 2003). See Phillip Buckner, “The Long Goodbye: English Canadians and the British World,” in Rediscovering the British World, ed. Phillip Buckner and R. Douglas Francis (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2005), 181–208. Adele Perry, “Canada and the Empires of the Past,” 1. A.J. Ray, “Facts, Theories, and Cultural-Historical Expertise in Aboriginal Title Claims Litigation in Australia and North America, 1946–2002,” in Proof and Truth: The Humanist as Expert, ed. Iain McCalman and Ann McGrath (Canberra: Australian Academy of the Humanities, 2003), 97–120; A.J. Ray, “Aboriginal Title and Treaty Rights Research: A Comparative Look at Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United States,” New Zealand Journal of History 34, no. l (April 2003): 5–21. See, for example, the discussion in Reynolds, Law of the Land, 49–50, 167–9. See Kent McNeil, Emerging Justice? Essays on Indigenous Rights in Canada and Australia (Saskatoon: Native Law Centre, University of Saskatchewan, 2001); Peter Russell, Recognizing Aboriginal Title: The Mabo Case and Indigenous Resistance to English-Settler Colonialism (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005).Book Peggy Brock, “The Historical Dispossession of Indigenous Lands in Western Australia and British Columbia,” Studies in Western Australian History 23 (2003): 157–65, quote on 165. Penelope Edmonds, Urbanizing Frontiers: Indigenous Peoples and Settlers in 19th-Century Pacific Rim Cities (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2010). Edmonds, Urbanizing Frontiers, 12. Richard Waswo, The Founding Legend of Western Civilization: From Virgil to Vietnam (London: Wesleyan University Press, 1997). See also John Docker, The Origins of Violence: Religion, History and Genocide (London: Pluto, 2008), 6–7. See, for example, Zoe Laidlaw, “‘Aunt Anna’s Report’: The Buxton Women and the Aborigines Select Committee, 1835–1837,” Journal of Imperial and

46  Ann Curthoys

25

26 27 28 29 30

31 32 33 34 35 36

37 38 39

40 41

Commonwealth History 32, no. 2 (2004): 1–28; Elizabeth Elbourne, “The Sin of the Settler: The 1835–36 Select Committee on Aborigines and Debates over Virtue and Conquest in the Early Nineteenth-Century British White Settler Empire,” Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 4, no. 3 (2003). See House of Commons, “Report of the Select Committee on Aborigines (British Settlements),” British Parliamentary Papers, 1837, vol. 7, 425, pp. 13–14. See also Elbourne, “The Sin of the Settler.” Evans et al., Equal Subjects, Unequal Rights, 31. Cole Harris, Making Native Space: Colonialism, Resistance, and Reserves in British Columbia (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2002), 10. E.M. Wrong, Charles Buller and Responsible Government (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1926), 24. Evans et al., Equal Subjects, Unequal Rights, 34. House of Commons, “Report on the Affairs of British North America from the Earl of Durham with Appendices,” British Parliamentary Papers, 1839, vol. 2, p. 23 (Irish University Press Series, Colonies: Canada, 1968), hereafter Durham Report. Ibid., 7. Ibid. Ibid., 18 and 19. Ibid., 11–12. Harris, Making Native Space, 6 . For a more general discussion of ghosts in Canadian cultural history, see Marlene Goldman and Joanne Saul, “Talking with Ghosts: Haunting in Canadian Cultural Production,” University of Toronto Quarterly 75, no. 2 (Spring 2006): 645–55. L.M. Findlay, “Spectres of Canada: Image, Text, Aura, Nation,” University of Toronto Quarterly 75, no. 2 (Spring 2006): 657. Herman Merivale, Lectures on Colonization and Colonies, delivered before the University of Oxford in 1839, 1840 and 1841 (London: Longman, 1842), 150. Harris, Making Native Space, 6–10. See also David McNab, “Herman Merivale and the Native Question, 1837–1861,” Albion 9, no. 4 (Winter 1977): 350–84. See Ged Martin, The Durham Report and British Policy: A Critical Essay (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972). The system was put to the test in 1849, when Lord Elgin assented to the Rebellion Losses Bill (which indemnified those in Lower Canada whose property had been destroyed during the rebellion in 1837 and 1838). When Tory party deputations urged the British government to disallow the bill, after some lively parliamentary debate in June 1849, it refused. Stephen

The Dog That Didn’t Bark  47

42 43 44 45 46

47 48 49 50

51 52 53 54

55 56

Leacock, “Responsible Government in the British Colonial System,” American Political Science Review 1, no. 3 (May 1907): 384, 391. Miles Taylor, “The 1848 Revolutions and the British Empire,” Past and Present 166, no. 1 (2000): 46–80. John Stuart Mill, Considerations on Representative Government (London: J.M. Dent and Sons Ltd, 1861), 378. Ibid., 379. Ibid., 378. See also Duncan Bell, “John Stuart Mill on Colonies,” Political Theory 38, no. 1 (2010): 46, 50. See Zoe Laidlaw, “Heathens, Slaves and Aborigines: Thomas Hodgkin’s Critique of Missions and Anti-Slavery,” History Workshop Journal 64 (2007): 133–61. Raymond M. Cooke, “British Evangelicals and the Issue of Colonial Selfgovernment,” Pacific Historical Review 34 (May 1965): 131. Ibid., 133. Ibid., 136–7. Anne Beggs Sunter and Paul Williams, “Eureka’s Impact on Victorian Politics: The Fight for Democratic Responsible Government in Victoria, 1854–7,” The History Cooperative Conference Proceedings of the Australian Society for the Study of Labour History (2007), The report was serialized in 34 instalments in The Sydney Gazette from 20 June 1839 to 12 September 1839. There is also discussion in other newspapers, including The Sydney Herald, 28 June 1839, p. 2 and 17 July 1839, p. 4; The Sydney Monitor, 24 June 1839, p. 2, 7 August 1839, p. 4, and 9 September 1839, p. 4; The Colonist, 22 June 1839, p. 4; and The Australian, 22 June 1839, p. 2, 9 July 1839, p. 2, 11 July 1839, p. 2, and 20 July 1839, p. 2. http://www .historycooperative.org/proceedings/asslh2/beggs_sunter.html. Cooke, “British Evangelicals,” 139. See also Jessie Mitchell, In Good Faith? Governing Indigenous Australia through God, Charity and Empire, 1825–1855 (Canberra: ANU E Press, 2011). Serle, The Golden Age, 197–8. Brian Dalton, War and Politics in New Zealand 1855–1870 (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 1967), 1. More recent work in this field includes Damen Ward, “Civil Jurisdiction, Settler Politics, and the Colonial Constitution, circa 1840–58,” Victoria University of Wellington Law Review 39 (2008): 497–532. Dalton, War and Politics in New Zealand, 278–9. Brian Titley, A Narrow Vision: Duncan Campbell Scott and the Administration of Indian Affairs in Canada (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1986), 1. See also David T. McNab, “Herman Merivale and Colonial Office Indian Policy in the

48  Ann Curthoys

57 58 59

60 61

62

63

64 65

66

67 68

Mid-Nineteenth Century,” Canadian Journal of Native Studies 1, no. 2 (1981): 277–302. J.R. Miller, Skyscrapers Hide the Heavens: A History of Indian–White Relations in Canada, 3rd ed. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010), 210. Sidney L. Harring, White Man’s Law: Native People in Nineteenth-Century Canadian Jurisprudence (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998), 32–3. Sarah Carter, “Aboriginal People of Canada and the British Empire,” in Canada and the British Empire, ed. Phillip Buckner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 209. Harris, Making Native Space, 14. See Katherine Smits, “John Stuart Mill on the Antipodes: Settler Violence against Indigenous Peoples and the Legitimacy of Colonial Rule,” Australian Journal of Politics and History 51 (2008): 1–15; Bell, “John Stuart Mill on Colonies.” For a discussion of Henry Chapman, see Angela Woollacott, “Political Manhood, Non-white Labour and White-settler Colonialism on the 1830s– 1840s Australian Frontier,” in Rethinking the Racial Moment: Essays on the Colonial Encounter, ed. Alison Holland and Barbara Brookes (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011), 75–95. John Stuart Mill to Henry Samuel Chapman, 7 January 1866, in Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, vol. 16, The Later Letters 1849–1873 (London: Routledge, 1996 [1972]), 1136. Bell, “John Stuart Mill on Colonies,” 53. Andrew Porter, “Trusteeship, Anti-Slavery, and Humanitarianism,” in The Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. 3, The Nineteenth Century, ed. Andrew Porter (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 212–13. Norman Etherington, “The Western Australian Constitution in Its British Imperial Context,” speech at forum at the Constitutional Centre of Western Australia, 25 October 2003, unpublished manuscript. Neville Green, “From Princes to Paupers: The Struggle for Control of Aborigines in Western Australia 1887–1898,” Early Days 11 (1998): 447–62. This history is discussed much more extensively in Curthoys and Martens, “Serious Collisions.”

2 The Bannisters and Their Colonial World: Family Networks and Colonialism in the Early Nineteenth Century eliz abeth elb ourn e

Transnational and family history might seem at first glance to sit at opposite ends of a broad spectrum. Nonetheless, the intimate scale of family history can illuminate transnational networks and ties, just as a transnational approach to the history of particular mobile families readily unearths a wealth of family strategies that are not visible through a purely national focus.1 Here I examine one particular earlynineteenth-century family that was deeply involved in diverse colonial ventures across what was or would become the British Empire. A close reading of this family’s activities illuminates how members thought about very different places as somehow “British” and colonial: they saw themselves as involved in a project that was at once familial and national, as well as being part of a wider effort to render the world as a  whole more civilized and more moral. In this sense their activities were not transnational so much as imperial, but I will still use the term transnational to reflect the perspective of the historian working across different “national” histories; this is, however, a useful reminder that the “national” is not a fixed or obvious term and reflects subsequent histories. In the early nineteenth century, a generation of brothers and sisters, the Bannister family of Steyning, Sussex, well born but fallen on hard times, tried to claw out places for themselves in a changing colonial world. They did this as the British white-settler empire was expanding with an extraordinary rapidity that today is often taken for granted.2 Each one of three brothers, Saxe, Thomas, and John William, tried, with varying degrees of success, not only to find employment in new colonies, but actually to create new settlements. They were colonial entrepreneurs, the wide-ranging nature of whose activity is only visible if one

50  Elizabeth Elbourne

traces their activities across the British colonial world. This family history thus sheds light on the actual mechanisms of colonial expansion. At the same time, the Bannister brothers (we have less information about the sisters) were crucial advocates of what they saw as a more just version of colonialism. They fervently imagined a moral colonialism that would bring civilization rather than conflict to Indigenous peoples, who would be invited into consensual partnership with whites to the mutual benefit of all, under the beneficent eye of virtuous elites. As Saliha Belmessous has recently argued, the eldest brother Saxe was a particularly important and prolific writer on colonial affairs; Bel­ messous sees him as a key theorist of assimilation and colonialism.3 Saxe Bannister wrote many books attacking the immorality of the ill treatment of Indigenous peoples, despite the fact that he was also a lifelong enthusiast for colonial settlement.4 Indeed, his very support for Indigenous rights was predicated on the assumption that colonialism could and should be beneficial for the colonized. He also saw colonialism as inevitable. In an 1846 tract he criticized previous “philanthropists” who “instead of demanding colonial reform as a means of protecting the natives, had long leaned to the opinion, that their only protection was to stop colonization, utterly regardless of the impossibility of doing so.”5 The Bannisters tried to export this model of moral but expansionist colonialism to several Australian colonies, southern Africa, Upper Canada, and Sierra Leone, and sought to influence policy towards Indigenous peoples in general. Beyond what their activities suggest about the consolidation of the British white-settler empire in the early nineteenth century, the Bannisters are also of interest because their ideal of partnership, and of a trade of land for “civilization,” did in fact become a crucial means of self-understanding among at least some white settlers and in that sense a founding myth of the nations of Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. In what follows, I briefly examine the activities of each brother as a colonial agent, asking throughout what light is shed on transnational history by taking an imperial family as a unit of analysis. Far from being an antiquarian pursuit, tracking down families through space as well as time underscores the enormous political importance of the family unit in the so-called long eighteenth century in Britain, at least before the passage of the 1832 Reform Act expanded the franchise and created an at least putatively more democratic Britain. Perhaps more coincidentally, but still importantly, comparative study of the Bannisters’ activities in different colonized spaces reveals a struggle across the British

The Bannisters and Their Colonial World  51

Empire over the legal relationships between settlers and Indigenous peoples. I also think that the activities of Saxe Bannister, in particular, as a would-be broker of transnational colonial knowledge and as a selfdescribed expert on colonialism and Aboriginal affairs illuminate the early days of the business of what would come to be called international humanitarianism. Activists and advisers were also part of the patronage networks that characterized the running of the British Empire until at least the 1840s.6 International humanitarianism was often tightly tied to colonialism, and as a result British activists often ignored or downplayed the critical issue of the sovereignty of Indigenous peoples.7 This is a story that, thanks to the generosity of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Council, I have pieced together from fragments in archives that are themselves far-flung (illustrating a serious practical barrier to transnational research, often a luxury reserved to scholars with funding). The fragmentary nature of this evidence means that the Bannister brothers move in and out of focus at various points, and there are still large gaps in the evidence. Perhaps most significantly, I have no correspondence between family members themselves. Despite serious limits on what the archival evidence can reveal, I still think we can glimpse enough to make some arguments about patterns through time, arguments that have implications for how we think of Canadian history. Family and Empire: The Quest for Patronage There were three Bannister brothers, Saxe, John William, and Thomas, and at least five sisters, Esther, Elizabeth Ruth, Mary Anne, Harriet Catherine, and Susan Francis.8 The family appears to have been of minor gentry stock. John Bannister, the father of these children, owned the manor of Nash in Steyning, West Sussex.9 He appears in a report of commissioners on the “Education of the Poor” in 1819, testifying to his efforts to revitalize the village school that was built on his land in part through a complaint to the Lord Chancellor, in conjunction with his son Saxe, about breaches of trust and poor management by the trustees.10 This hints that John may have bequeathed to his son Saxe a disputatious temperament and a propensity to use the law to resolve quarrels. Less speculatively, John Bannister was clearly on the fringe of British elite circles. Nevertheless, he equally clearly ran into financial problems, as the brothers were in dire financial straits within a few years of their father’s death in 1825, their situation possibly aggravated by the

52  Elizabeth Elbourne

fact that John left all his property to his three unmarried daughters.11 Saxe Bannister was put into debtor’s prison in 1828 and in 1830, while the 1830 probate of John William’s will indicates that all his property went to a creditor.12 Financial desperation helped drive the Bannisters’ colonial activities. Two key institutions, the law and the military, loomed large in the life of each brother. The eldest, Saxe, earned a degree at Queen’s College, Oxford. He volunteered to serve in the army after Napoleon’s escape from Elba, but did not make it to Belgium with the militia contingent he was commanding before the Battle of Waterloo ended the Napoleonic Wars.13 He would nonetheless seek to trade on his militia connections in his later quest for aristocratic patronage, a reflection of the reality that military service was a critical route to advancement in colonial administration in the immediate aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars. John William was, according to an obituary probably written by Saxe, “brought up in the navy,” serving as a midshipman from the age of nine. He left the navy at age twenty-one. Despite later opportunities to learn from shipmasters, John William had limited early formal education, having “quitted school too early to have there made much proficiency, even in common learning.”14 The youngest brother, Thomas, went into the army at about the age of fourteen or fifteen and became an officer in the Fifteenth Foot regiment.15 It was in the aftermath of the Napoleonic wars that Saxe and John William first became involved in colonial activity. John William fought in the navy during the War of 1812 in North America. He was unable to find continued employment in the navy after the peace, and left the service “at twenty-one years of age, with the reputation of being a good seaman and a daring officer.” Like many other demobilized sailors and soldiers in Canada, Bannister settled where he had served. According to his obituary, he “located a tract of land in Upper Canada, and entered earnestly into colonial interests.”16 In 1820, Saxe, John William, and Mary Anne Bannister were part of a group that purchased several thousand acres of land in Upper Canada (now Ontario), at Rice Lake.17 This was originally Anishinabeg territory, and the region would later see a Methodist religious movement, including the emergence of An­ishinabeg Methodist preachers who would themselves be involved in trans-­imperial networks not unlike those discussed elsewhere in this book by Bradford.18 It is not clear if Saxe ever went to Upper Canada, but John William certainly settled at Rice Lake, part of an influx of retired British army and navy officers into the region. According

The Bannisters and Their Colonial World  53

to local historian Catherine Milne, Bannister obtained a ferry licence for Middle Ferry Point and gave the name “Saxe Town,” after a family name from Germany, to a small settlement that was later folded into Gore’s Landing.19 Both Saxe and John William quickly attempted to parlay this initial colonial experience into positions as experts, in revealing ways. In 1821, John William published a pamphlet urging the settlement of Canada by a “portion of the unemployed labourers of England.” In 1822, in a second edition, he expanded the call to cover the unemployed labourers of Great Britain and Ireland, and urged more specifically that labourers be imported in batches of two thousand to work on a projected canal from Rice Lake to the Bay of Quinte, attempting, I would suggest, to leverage his own investment in Rice Lake land.20 In the meantime, Saxe tried to position himself as an expert on Indigenous affairs, drawing on relationships between some Rice Lake settlers and the Kanienkehaka (Mohawk) Brant family, who in turn were interested in land sales and regional development. The Six Nations had been granted lands at Grand River and at Tyendinaga on the Bay of Quinte after the American Revolution, in consideration of the violent expulsion of the loyalist Six Nations from what is now upper New York state by American forces and the subsequent British abandonment of this territory at peace negotiations.21 In 1821, two Six Nations spokesmen, John Brant (Ahyouwaeghs) and Dr Robert Kerr, arrived in London in order to present to the colonial secretary, Lord Bathurst, the strong concerns of the Six Nations about illegitimate settler encroachment on Grand River lands and the refusal to the Six Nations of the right to sell independently of the Crown. John Brant was the son of controversial Mohawk war leader Joseph Brant (Thayen­ danegea), who had himself made two diplomatic visits to London in the late eighteenth century. John Brant’s commitment to the Christianization of his community, his willingness to lease lands to white settlers, and his father’s long-standing military alliance with the British and earlier London contacts had helped earn him the friendship of a few influential settlers, although there was considerable controversy in Six Nations councils over all these issues. Brant and Kerr were assisted in London by Saxe Bannister, as well as by an enterprising Scottish novelist who would later be a director of the Canada Company, John Galt (father of the better-known “father of confederation” Alexander Galt). Space does not permit a full discussion here of the history of the Grand River land disputes, although it is important to observe that

54  Elizabeth Elbourne

Brant and Kerr were amply justified in their complaints that the original grant of 1789 had been infringed upon by state and settlers alike.22 My main concern here is with how Saxe Bannister, a minor player in the original visit of Brant and Kerr to London, subsequently tried to use his involvement to present himself as a colonial expert, and how he saw Brant as the ideal model of a civilized “Indian” who proved the feasibility of a political union between settlers and Indigenous peoples that would enable a moral and progressive colonialism. The relationship between the Brants and the Bannisters was probably seen on both sides as one framed by elite masculine sociability: both Saxe Bannister and John Brant were relatively elite men (despite major disparities of race and privilege) and both hoped to improve the condition of the working class. Shortly thereafter, in 1822, Bannister wrote what appears to be the first of a series of books, pamphlets, and articles criticizing the proponents of what he saw as the immoral treatment of indigenous peoples based on the fallacy that their civilization was impossible. He attacked an anonymous article in the Edinburgh Review on the “Indians of North America,” which claimed that Indigenous peoples of various kinds were so incapable of moving upward in the scale of civilization that they were doomed to extinction. Since Amerindians were totally uninterested in improvement, the article argued, “it now seems certain that the North American Indians, like the bears and wolves, are destined to fly at the approach of civilized man, and to fall before his renovating hand, and disappear from the face of the earth, along with those ancient forests which alone afford them sustenance and shelter.”23 In response to this already relatively well-worn settler argument, Bannister offered what was by then also a stereotypical response from the reformist evangelical camp, albeit one that criticized colonial brutality in surprisingly strong terms: Jacques Cartier’s “fraud and violence” towards the Indigenous peoples of Quebec set the tone for a miserable history of interaction. “It is a cruel sophism, after debasing a people by bad governing and by hard treatment, to argue from their degradation that they are essentially not fit to share the benefits of civil institutions.” Furthermore (reflecting the importance of the idea of the great man), there were indeed examples of “superior genius” among Amerindians: “The sublime language in which the Logans, the Philips, the Brants, and the Tecumthes expressed their noble aspirations to a better fate, will never fail to be listened to with respect.”24 Saxe Bannister was also privately petitioning Sir Robert WilmotHorton, under-secretary of state for war and the colonies from 1821 to

The Bannisters and Their Colonial World  55

1827, to establish a commission to investigate Amerindian affairs in North America. He offered himself as a potential commissioner and sent a list of preliminary recommendations to Wilmot-Horton, including the suggestion that “one or more Indian or White delegates for the Indians” might sit in the legislative assembly, subject to the proviso that “they should not be bound by any Law which a majority of their own Councils should reject in council within six months after it had passed the Legislature.” He also argued that “to repress injustice in our intercourse of every kind with Indians would alone secure [them] from the extinction with which they are threatened.”25 To the end of his life, Saxe would validate his claims to be an expert on colonialism with references to his early experience as an adviser to Brant and Kerr and his advice to the colonial administration on Indian affairs. In 1873, for example, Bannister attested that “in 1822–3, as legal adviser to Indian delegates from Canada in an appeal against local wrong, I contributed materially to the redress of that wrong. Moreover, out of that colonial appeal grew a design in which I took an active part, for the free union of the Red Indians with us as fellow-subjects.”26 Exaggerated as Bannister’s claim was as to his influence, the notion of Aboriginal people as “fellow subjects” (with all the advantages of equal rights and protection and with all the problems of loss of sovereignty that this implied) was fundamental to Saxe Bannister’s thought. In the meantime, John William, who had moved back to Britain to train as a lawyer, submitted a paper to a parliamentary commission on emigration urging that unemployed labourers be offered a fresh start in the Canadas. He singled out the agricultural labourers of Ireland left destitute by enclosures, “without employment sufficient to keep them from discontent, or even to enable them to procure a maintenance.” He offered to lead out his own group of Irish labourers. While English landlords often objected to the loss of potential farm labourers, this would not be a problem in Ireland, “for the people whom I contemplate conducting aboard, are only those, who may be said, to terrify the Land Owner and his Agent, rather than to be desirable competitors for his Farms.”27 In October 1823, Saxe Bannister sought to introduce John William to Wilmot-Horton, who was intensely interested in colonial emigration.28 By November 1823, John William had sent Wilmot-Horton a lengthy letter about the best mechanisms to promote emigration and settlement in Upper Canada (including suggestions of a generous minimum grant of fifty acres and an upper age limit of sixty rather than forty-five given

56  Elizabeth Elbourne

the “healthy, strong and industrious” nature of settlers over sixty at Rice Lake).29 In April 1826, John William was again in contact with Wilmot-Horton to suggest what he described as a humanitarian scheme of settlement under which he would personally bring out boys to Upper Canada from London in exchange for money and land. He now proposed to take 100 Boys (between the ages of 9 and 16 years) who are to be bound apprentices to me as Servants until they attain the age of 21; when I shall give to each apprentice, a deed in Fee, of 50 acres of Land with a House built, and the settlement Duty done upon each 50 acres, at my cost (according to the present Colonial Regulations) and also at the same time, I shall present to each apprentice two axes, two suits of Clothes, a Bed and two Blankets a Cow a Sow and six month provisions of Bread Beef Tea and Sugar. In order to have it in my power, to do this with reasonable advantage to myself; I have further to propose for your consideration, that I be allowed from His Majesty’s Treasury, ten guineas for each Boy, and that 10,000 acres of Wild Land free from Fees be granted to me.30

The Colonial Office does not appear to have taken Bannister up on his offer. In the same year, Bannister was called to the Bar by the Middle Temple.31 In the following year, the Colonial Office offered Bannister a post as Chief Justice of Sierra Leone. Saxe Bannister in New South Wales and the Cape Colony In the meantime, Saxe’s interest had shifted to Australia. In 1823, the Colonial Office appointed him the first attorney general of the young colony of New South Wales as the British government struggled to place the legal administration of its first Australian penal colony upon a firmer footing. It was, as we shall see, important to Bannister’s own sense of honour and manly independence that this be seen as an independent appointment based on merit, despite his apparent lack of pertinent experience. Ironically, however, he owed his appointment, at least in part, to conflict between powerful Australian factions. Saxe Bannister’s appointment had been privately supported in London by John Macarthur Jr, London agent for the powerful but controversial Macarthur family – wool magnates, kingmakers, and staunch proponents of settler virtue, the shares of whose Australian Agricultural Company were being bid up to giddy heights as London investors,

The Bannisters and Their Colonial World  57

including many politicians, flocked to invest in wool. Macarthur Jr pushed Bannister forward in order to counter the claims of the populist newspaper editor, and enemy of the Macarthurs, Charles Went­worth, who had also applied for the position. “I feared renewed application from Mr. W., or some vulgar attorney like Mr. Geillibrand of more than doubtful character.”32 John Macarthur Sr was happy to take Bannister up socially once Bannister arrived in 1824. “I like our new importation exceedingly,” he wrote to John Jr in April of 1824, describing Bannister as “clever – unaffected – and just odd enough to make a pleasing companion.”33 Saxe had travelled in the company of his unmarried sisters Mary Anne and Harriet, and soon all three were taking tea regularly at the Macarthur family home, interacting with John Sr’s clever wife, Elizabeth, and his three daughters and two sons. Bannister came to see himself as part of a small coterie of religious, family-oriented, virtuous people in a colony awash with vice. He also saw the Macarthurs as engaged in righteous commerce and the beneficial development of colonial resources. Unlike most other colonial enterprises at this time, the Macarthurs employed Aboriginal labourers on their wool farms, furnishing for Bannister a model of mutually beneficial coexistence rather than violent massacre at a time of widespread settler killings. The path of virtue, however, was not smooth. Bannister became embroiled in quarrels that have been well documented by Australian historians.34 In general, he plunged into debates between those who saw themselves as elite protectors of morality in the colony, notably the Macarthurs and the Anglican hierarchy, and those, such as the Australian editors Robert Wardell and Charles Wentworth, who portrayed themselves as agents of change promoting a more expansive and democratic notion of colonial citizenship. He was humiliated in the law courts by Wentworth, who was a more successful lawyer and leached away much of the business on which Bannister had counted to supplement his salary,35 which Bannister constantly complained was too meagre. Most seriously, from the point of view of later struggles over Indigenous citizenship, Bannister fought with two successive governors, Sir Thomas Brisbane and Ralph Darling, over the application of martial law to colonial conflict with Indigenous peoples. In attesting to settler violence, Bannister was influenced by his relationship with the maverick London Missionary Society envoy Lancelot Threlkeld, who consistently bore witness to the violent abuse and murder of Aboriginal peoples by settlers and was as consistently marginalized and ignored.36

58  Elizabeth Elbourne

Given the refusal of the British government to negotiate treaties with Indigenous peoples in the Australian colonies and the government’s use of the legal fiction of terra nullius, the constantly mobile frontiers of Australia were probably more consistently violent than those of any other white-settler colony in the nineteenth century. Armed conflict was very frequent between Indigenous peoples and settlers, especially stockmen (often convict labourers) who were out on the fringes of settlement guarding sheep.37 Analyses of court records and of everyday discourse alike suggest that colonists routinely killed Aboriginal people to clear the land and frequently made examples of a few in order to frighten off the others. Revenge killings might be justified in court as following Aboriginal custom or as conforming to natural law.38 In contrast, Bannister insisted that the government ought to declare martial law against Aboriginal groups at a time of warfare, rather than relying on local armed settlers to defend themselves. He also wanted settlers to be disarmed. This was an enormously unpopular call. The typical atmosphere of fear at a time of warfare is reflected in letters such as that from a Bathurst overseer to his master in 1823 reporting that the “natives” had come to a neighbouring station and “committed the most inhuman murder on the Bodies of two men, that I ever saw in my life.” They were “so bent for war” that the men “dare not go out of sight of the Huts.”39 In a later court case to try Bathurst stockmen who had killed Aboriginal women, the local justice of the peace averred that the natives might be said to be at war with the Europeans and that resistance was justifiable.40 In the editorial columns of his controversial newspaper the Australian, Wardell accused Bannister of supporting utopian schemes: “They may accord with the first principles of Christi­anity, but they may at the same time endanger the lives of hundreds of persons.”41 Brisbane agreed to declare martial law in the Bathurst district in response to an uprising by displaced Wiradjuri inhabitants under the leadership of Windradyne and others in the wake of the government’s decision to open Bathurst to settlement.42 (There is considerable debate about how many Aboriginal people were killed after the declaration of martial law, in the context of wider, and very politicized, debate about what evidence is admissible in assessing the Australian past and how that past should be remembered. Whether before, or after, however, it is clear that the Aboriginal death rate during warfare in Bathurst was high.)43 The key issue for Bannister was that Indigenous peoples should be incorporated under the law in the same way as white settlers, with no legal distinction. Essentially, Bannister wanted the state to have the

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monopoly on violence, in part as a defence against the murderous actions of settlers. He also, however, supported the creation of native police. Bannister later argued that martial law was appropriate because the Indigenous people involved were known to the settlers and had lived among them, some working as “black constables.”44 The alternative was to allow settlers to do their own killing, creating a cycle of violence. This specific position about the rule of law (however unlikely in practice to halt violence) was part of Bannister’s much wider philosophical position in support of law as an agent of assimilation and civilization in colonies, as Saliha Belmessous has argued.45 More generally, Bannister argued for the need for shared legal, political, and educational structures that would allow Indigenous peoples and settlers to coexist. Although the ultimate aim was the assimilation of Indigenous peoples, Bannister did see some room for influence that was not solely unidirectional.  For example, he argued consistently that settlers should learn Indigenous languages, as well as vice versa, pointing to the possibility of some mutual exchange of knowledge.46 Bannister left the colony in 1826 after a final falling-out with Governor Darling and a blow-up with the Colonial Office over his salary and benefits. He tendered his resignation unless his salary was doubled. With great relief, Darling called his bluff and accepted his resignation. Just before leaving, Bannister sued Robert Howe, the editor and proprietor of the Sydney Gazette, for claiming (so Bannister alleged) that Bannister was inappropriately influenced by a faction in the colony; it would have been evident to readers that Howe meant the Macarthurs and their followers. Representing himself, Bannister lost humiliatingly despite an impassioned six-hour speech. In the Australian, Wardell proclaimed that the “Gentlemen of the Jury had to listen to his widespreading harangue and wandering, mad invectives, from ten to four o’clock … For six hours he boiled and bubbled, and denounced the press and all its devils.” Bannister subsequently sued Wardell for libel and again lost.47 He then fought a duel with Wardell; fortunately neither man proved a good shot.48 Paradoxically, perhaps, he also made a last effort to ally himself more firmly with the Macarthurs: he proposed marriage to a Macarthur daughter, Emmeline. John Macarthur, Sr firmly refused the offer after consulting his wife. As Elizabeth informed another son, all agreed that refusal was for the best. “Mr. B. and Emmeline had never been thrown into each other’s company nor could we discover the least partiality other than that of a very general nature.” Emmeline was not told of the proposal: “None of us dropped the least

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hint to her, not thinking it necessary as Mr. Bannister was so soon to quit the country.”49 Bannister would spend the rest of his life in a quest for financial compensation and an apology from the Colonial Office, obsessively seeking to restore what he described as shattered finances and damaged honour. In the short term, the Bannister sisters were in a precarious position. “Miss B made an appeal to your father for protection, which distressed him very much,” reported Elizabeth Macarthur. “I cannot understand these very eccentric people.”50 The sisters eventually, however, found husbands in Tasmania: Harriet married colonial architect David Lambe, while Mary Anne married Affleck Moodie, assistant commissary general. Saxe Bannister would later marry Lambe’s sister Mary, expanding their dense colonial network.51 Although I cannot find direct proof, it is very tempting to surmise on the basis of circumstantial evidence that Mary Anne’s marriage to the Scotsman Affleck Moodie linked the Bannisters to two other literary imperial clans, the Scottish Moodies, who settled in southern Africa and Canada (at Rice Lake, near Thomas Bannister), and the abolitionist Stricklands. The work of Canadian writer Susanna Moodie (née Strickland) included not only Roughing It in the Bush, but also a transcription of the life story of the slave woman Mary Prince. Susanna Moodie’s sister, author Catherine Parr Traill, settled at Rice Lake in the early 1830s; Saxe would later promote her work for publication to the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge.52 As we shall see shortly, in South Africa in the late 1820s, it was Donald Moodie, a kinsman of the Canadian Moodie sisters, who investigated legal abuses that Saxe Banister brought to the attention of the colonial government. Whether or not ties among these families were cemented by marriage, it is noteworthy that members of each family wrote extensively about settler colonialism, knitting together an imagined British world through their writings. A final note is that in 1852, after Affleck Moodie’s death in 1838, Mary Anne Bannister sued two of her own sisters over the terms of their father’s will; she sought complete control of certain lands in England in order to pay the £957 she still owed creditors after selling her house and furniture in Hobart’s Town, Tasmania.53 Clearly, this was not a story that ended well, and the lives of the Bannisters continued to be driven by financial distress. Meanwhile, Saxe headed for the Cape Colony, where he tried to set himself up as a barrister and formed links with humanitarians in the colony seeking to overturn legal abuses against the once-nomadic

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Khoekhoe. He proved unsuccessful as a lawyer, but had more success as a thorn in the side of the local administration. Most significantly, Bannister coordinated a petition by male Khoekhoe heads of family in the London Missionary Society mission station of Bethelesdorp. In it, the petitioners asked for all unallocated Crown land to be returned to them, the original occupiers of the land: “They cannot forget that it ­belonged to their fathers.” This petition furnishes an early example of a claim made on the basis of Aboriginal status, one that undercut any British claim to ownership based on supposedly superior uses of the land or the perceived lack of law and civic organization of the Indige­ nous inhabitants. At the same time, the petition did not openly question the right of the Crown to own and distribute “Crown land.” Bannister also complained to the administration that justice had not been done in the suits of Khoekhoe men in the Uitenhage courts against white settlers for assault. Donald Moodie subsequently led an investigation that culminated in the dismissal of the magistrate concerned.54 In addition to his work with Khoekhoe plaintiffs, Bannister accused the acting governor, Richard Bourke, of implicitly condoning slave trading in the interior (part of an important debate to which I do not have space to do justice here). He further claimed that while attempting to locate and attack a Zulu army, a force of British soldiers and their Griqua allies had attacked an innocent group; Bannister’s memorial stated that “instead of fighting with Chaka’s invading army,” these troops had attacked another people by mistake, “and with them women and children about them: and that after a destructive fire of musketry and cannon for several hours they fled, leaving their cattle and families behind – when our allies butchered the wounded, destroyed women and children, knocking infants on the head and actually ripping up pregnant females.”55 Bannister would later write a crusading book urging better policy in South Africa and presenting significant archival materials (still used by historians), Humane Policy, or Justice to the Aborigines of New Settlements (1830). The revealing subtitle was “essential to a due expenditure of British money, and to the best interests of settlers, with suggestions how to civilize the natives by an improved administration of existing means.” Bannister argued that “there is, indeed, little distinction to be made between any of the European governments in their treatment of their colonized subjects.” Laws had been passed but “adequate means have never been provided for executing the laws. The rule, therefore, of Europeans has crushed irretrievably many millions of unoffending men.”56

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Perhaps paradoxically, however, while in Africa Bannister also became involved in early efforts to create a “virtuous colony” devoted to the civilization of the natives, at Port Natal to the south-east of the Cape Colony, in a region controlled by the Zulu under Chaka. He worked in conjunction with Lieutenant Francis Farewell, who had been part of a small group of adventurers operating at Chaka’s court in the 1820s. Farewell claimed that in 1824 Chaka had granted him land that would be appropriate for a new British colony. Bannister and Farewell drew up a proposal in 1829 for the creation of a new colony that they submitted to the Cape administration, only to meet with a decisive snub.57 Farewell died shortly thereafter, but Bannister did not let the idea die. He would later support the application of a group of Cape merchants in  London in 1837 for the colonization of Natal, and, as he put it in 1853, “wrote their papers and published several pamphlets on the advantage of a regular settlement at Natal.”58 He also lobbied the philanthropic Duke of Richmond about the proposed colony and touted its potential benefits. In 1829, as his financial affairs came to a crisis, Bannister sent an abridged version of this proposal to Wilmot-Horton, but in such an odd manner as almost to seem unbalanced. He used the printed proposal as writing paper, scrawling on the bottom an impassioned letter attacking his enemies at New South Wales and pleading for financial compensation. “It is due to my cruelly sullied character; and to my family’s wounded feelings to struggle, as I will do, while life lasts until I succeed.”59 The Colonial Office refused his claims for backdated salary, and  on his return to the United Kingdom to pursue his financial claims, Saxe Bannister was arrested and thrown into the White Cross debtors’ prison.60 The Travails of John William and Thomas Bannister In that same difficult year of 1829, John William sought to make a living in Sierra Leone. To accept a post in Sierra Leone implied a certain desperation: the death rates of colonial officers and ship crews from disease were astronomical. Bannister, however, was undeterred. Unable to start earning a full salary until he reached Sierra Leone, he was furious when the ship taking him there, the Maria, proved so unseaworthy and undermanned that the crew mutinied en route, declaring that “they would never go to sea in the Maria again.”61 Although the ship’s condition remained so poor that it sprung a further leak despite several days

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of repairs in Ireland, and a second crew mutinied in their turn, Bannister remained so passionately focused on reaching the safe haven of his position in West Africa that fellow passengers could attest he was “the only Passenger on Board who was averse to the ships putting back after our extreme sufferings for fifteen days.”62 Perhaps surprisingly, the Maria did eventually reach Sierra Leone. Bannister was sworn in as chief justice on 5 April and almost immediately found himself running the colony on a temporary basis between the “lamented and sudden death” of the governor, Lieutenant-Colonel Denham, and the return from the Gold Coast of the next in command. Having heard that the government was contemplating drawing the next governor from civilian ranks, Bannister unsuccessfully put himself forward, affirming that he had no “serious apprehension for my own safety provided I am careful” and was “determined to remain here so long as I am considered worthy to serve the Crown, & so long as I keep my health.”63 By 3 August, Bannister had to report the “startling and very unexpected” death of the new governor after a seven-day illness, as well as the “dangerous state” of both his brigade major and private secretary. Bannister seized on this opportunity to again propose himself as governor. On Christmas Day, 1828, he wrote to the Colonial Office in handwriting distorted by fever, “from a bed to which I have been confined for 17 days,” enclosing a copy of an act to establish a small-debt court.64 By February of the new year, Bannister was reporting himself in good health despite a severe recent relapse of fever. Shortly thereafter, he insisted that a black liberated African, a former slave brought to the colony in 1817, was as entitled to the protection of British law as the white member of the Liberated African Department who had assaulted him. “The Jury, consisting of eight Europeans and four people of color, brought a verdict for the plaintiff with £20 damages”; Bannister praised the “well disposed, … orderly, industrious, intelligent” “colored population” of the Colony.65 By September, he was dead. Saxe’s other brother, Thomas, also spent much of 1829 on a ship on his way to seek fortune, in his case in Australia. As a young man, Thomas was, Saxe averred in a begging letter to the Duke of Richmond, “a steady energetic military man” who would never have changed these steady early habits were it not for “the most unfortunate cir­cumstances.”66 At the age of thirty, Thomas Bannister arrived at the Swan River colony  in western Australia on 19 October 1829. Thomas had not, how­ ever, slashed expenses completely to the bone. According to the research of  the Perth Dead Persons’ Society, Bannister was one of seventeen

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passengers travelling cabin class, and he brought three servants with him, all from Steyning, Sussex: twenty-four-year-old John Grainger, thirty-one-year-old Jessie Wood, and fourteen-year-old David Baxter.67 In the early 1830s, Bannister helped to explore the region of western Australia with the aim of opening it to white settlement. He was thus intimately involved in the most fundamental of colonial acts: the mapping and claiming of land. Bannister accompanied the expedition of Dr D.B. Wilson to claim land in the Canning River region. In 1830 he was appointed to be government resident in Fremantle. That same year, he led an expedition to the base of the Darling Range. He then went on in 1830–1 to lead an overland expedition from Perth to King George Sound.68 In December 1830, he “discovered” the Bannister River, which, according to the Western Australian Land Information Authority, was named after him in 1832 by Surveyor-General J.S. Roe.69 Thomas Bannister then moved to join his sisters on the troubled island of Van Diemen’s Land, still in the grip of genocidal warfare between settlers and Indigenous peoples.70 Here – as the last Indigenous Tasmanians came out of the bush to be forcibly detained on Flinders’ Island in the wake of horrific warfare – he tried to translate his western Australian experience into a job. He was given a temporary position as sheriff at half-salary (despite his vigorous complaints), was initially refused the permanent position (again despite his complaints) because the Colonial Office did not consider him to be of high enough status, but was somehow reappointed in 1835.71 Throughout, Saxe, who was now back in London and a founding member of the Aborigines Protection Society, looked to his networks for patronage for Thomas. Here we see the operation of family strategies. At a moment at which Saxe was becoming prominent in the Aborigines protection movement, he vigorously importuned the humanitarian Duke of Richmond on Thomas’s behalf. In January 1834, Saxe wrote in horror at the news that the appointment of sheriff would probably go to someone else, revealing in the process much about how patronage networks functioned: “I do intreat that your Grace will tell me the facts and that you will forgive my thus applying to you. I did not presume to come into your grace’s presence without proofs – I had Sir James Stirling’s letter – also one from Mr. Kerr of Lincoln’s Inn and more than all, the unblemished and undaunted conduct of my brother to support the claim I made on your Grace’s kindness. Had the late Duke of Norfolk been living who kindly took my Brother under his protection your Grace had not seen me on this occasion.” Bannister pleaded, “What would I do?” and appealed to

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“your Grace’s connection with our country, my Father’s name being known to you, and the peculiar situation in which my sisters and I are placed.”72 Great men controlled colonial placements, and obtaining their patronage was essential for men such as the Bannisters. By January 1834, however, Bannister was writing more calmly to say he would write no more, as he felt “that your grace will do all for my brother that you think right, even should this appointment of Sheriff of Van Diemen’s Land be impossible,” adding, as a gentle reminder, that to hear of their “beloved brother as a wanderer again would be to us a real woe.”73 Nonetheless, by 1836, Thomas was once again a “wanderer,” despite his position. Perhaps the insecurity of having to rely on others helped motivate Bannister to join the Port Phillip Association, a group of Van Diemen’s Land men spearheaded by John Batman, who set out to found a new and supposedly more virtuous and peaceable colony in Victoria.74 The claim to virtue and the ability not to stir up war was important, in wake of the recent horrors of Van Diemen’s Land and the criticism events had attracted in Britain. The aim of the project was not, Bannister wrote, “possession and expulsion, or what is worse extermination, but possession and civilization.”75 There is considerable controversy over the legitimacy of the treaty that John Batman claimed to have signed with representatives of the Kulin people to give the Port Phillip Association some 240,000 hectares of land.76 Even if the treaty was not a forgery, it is unclear what the Kulin signatories thought they were doing. Nonetheless, the treaty was also a highly unusual recognition by settlers of Indigenous land ownership and was the first such attempt (or at least claimed attempt) in Australian history. It was very much in line with Saxe Bannister’s theories about the need for colonial relationships predicated on Indigenous consent and bound by formal treaties. Thomas clearly shared his older brother’s approach, as both Bain Attwood and Alan Atkinson argue.77 The treaty was disallowed by the governor of New South Wales, Richard Bourke, himself paradoxically acting in response to metropolitan humanitarian concerns over coerced land sales brokered by settlers. At that time, the House of Commons Select Committee on Aborigines (British settlements) was preparing to argue in its final report that the imperial state ought to have a monopoly of land transactions. In the late 1820s and early 1830s, Thomas Bannister was thus also, like his brother Saxe, in the midst of practical debates about Aboriginal sovereignty and land ownership, even as he exhibited the same urgent desire as his brothers to foster new colonies.

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Implications? What does this brief survey of some of the Bannisters’ activities in the 1820s and 1830s suggest about both settler colonialism and the utility of drawing on the family as a unit of analysis for transnational research? First of all, a transnational approach reveals a family economic strategy that relied on the creation of new colonies and took the world as a potential income source. This involved considerable travel and the movement of goods and people across large tracts of space, reflecting nascent globalization. For the most part, the economic strategies of the Bannister brothers depended on the British state and its willingness to claim sovereignty over colonized peoples and territories. The brothers depended on colonial patronage networks and struggled to ingratiate themselves with powerful men such as Wilmot-Horton and the Duke of Richmond. To look at their quest for patronage reminds us how important the state was in the spread of white-settler commercial enterprise, and the establishment of new colonies, despite subsequent rhetoric about unfettered free enterprise. In this process, connections across regional boundaries significantly advantaged white settlers, land speculators, and colonial promoters. The Bannister brothers all sought to present themselves as experts of one kind or another on colonial affairs. They did so for a mix of selfinterested and genuinely altruistic motives. John William published books on settling in Upper Canada while also seeking patronage as a leader of colonial settlement projects. Thomas garnered colonial knowledge in a more concrete sense by exploring and mapping western Australia and writing reports on his exploration, which he then tried to broker for colonial appointments. It was, however, Saxe who tried the most vigorously to position himself as a colonial expert. Back in London in the 1830s, he was a witness before the Select Committee on Aborigines and a founding member of the Aborigines Protection Society. Before the Select Committee he urged the creation of a pan-imperial organization to promote Aboriginal welfare, staffed by Aboriginal people, to act in parallel with the Colonial Office, which Bannister saw as representative of settlers only. He urged that Aboriginal people control their own affairs to a greater extent than hitherto, within the overall framework of a common state and common citizenship. To that quixotic end of common citizenship, he argued that Englishmen must learn Indigenous languages, and vice versa, in a common school system. Despite (or perhaps because of) his zeal, Bannister slipped ever further from the ambit

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of actual colonial decision making over the course of his obsessive lifelong struggle with the Colonial Office for vindication for his actions in New  South Wales. He wrote a torrent of material on colonial affairs, much of it involving colonial history, seeking to create a new form of national memory that would be more appropriate to an imperial people and also to inform and thus improve policy making. He also became an advocate for systematic knowledge as a basis for rule. He paid particular attention to maps and indeed argued for the imperial importance of what he saw as the new science of historical geography. He was a proponent of historical painting, as well, and argued that the House of Commons ought to be decorated with historical frescoes illustrating key moments in the imperial enterprise.78 He also unsuccessfully sought funds to create a museum of Indigenous peoples in the Brighton Pavilion. This museum was also to be linked, however, to a centre that would assist visiting Indigenous people politically, not least by creating a nerve centre through which Aboriginal representatives could communicate with one another. Towards the end of his life, Saxe Bannister turned to the writing of biography, achieving an unexpectedly durable legacy as a historian. Most notably, he collected and published the voluminous writings of William Paterson and wrote his biography.79 Paterson was the progenitor of the infamous Darien scheme, under which Paterson and his coadjutors had attempted to found a Scottish colony on the Darien peninsula in modern Panama, leading many Scots to financial ruin and facilitating the drive to union with England in the wake of the colony’s calamitous collapse. Paterson was, Bannister contended, a profoundly misunderstood man who had been made the victim of the incompetence and moral laxity of colonial officials. It does not take a great leap of the imagination to see in Paterson Bannister’s imagined alter ego, with his vision of successful moral colonialism thwarted by forces beyond his control. From the writings and activities of the brothers, a clear concern with moral colonialism emerges. Taken in conjunction, the trans-imperial activities of the Bannisters reveal a conversation across boundaries about Indigenous sovereignty, Christian morality, and the rule of law. In Sierra Leone, John William Bannister promoted the right to equal protection under the law for both white and black; this reflected the greater ease with which British humanitarians could accommodate deracinated and conquered peoples who no longer had sovereignty to lose. Saxe Bannister supported Six Nations efforts to defend the boundaries of their Grand River lands, but the debate in the United Kingdom

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was fraught with ambiguity about whether or not the Haudenosaunee were sovereign and what that sovereignty meant. In New South Wales, Saxe Bannister’s great enemy, Robert Wardell, could claim in court that Aboriginal peoples had never consented to the British presence and were not subject to British law; settlers could therefore engage in revenge killings in accordance with the law of nature. Saxe Bannister would argue in contrast that martial law needed to be proclaimed against Indigenous peoples and settlers forbidden from killing them precisely because they were in fact members of the same polity. Thomas Bannister advocated a treaty with Kulin leaders to legitimize the takeover of land, while Governor Richard Bourke refused to acknowledge the right of the Kulin to trade away their land, thus implicitly claiming British sovereignty over that land. Bourke had previously served at the Cape before coming to New South Wales (and had tangled with Saxe in South Africa). In ruling as he did on the Batman treaty, Bourke was in part continuing a debate, in which the Bannisters had paradoxically also been involved, about how much power it was safe to give settlers. In South Africa, in the meantime, Saxe fought for the equality of the Khoesan before the law and argued that they should be “granted” their own lands back as if they were settlers; he also argued passionately for the need for an orderly colonialism in Natal based on treaties, more than a decade before the British were actually interested in colonizing Natal. Here one sees the greater interest of “humanitarians” in the 1820s and 1830s in pushing colonialism than was often expressed by more direct agents of the colonial state, such as James Stephen of the Colonial Office. Overall, I would argue that the Bannisters tended to support a paternalistic version of colonialism that built safeguards into the system but still depended on the eventual creation of a common system founded on white-Aboriginal cooperation and the ultimate abrogation of Aboriginal sovereignty. One of the things that this study reveals is thus the extent of interlocked debate about land policy, the citizenship of Indigenous peoples, and the nature of the legal relationship between settlers and Indigenous peoples in multiple locations at a time of surprising uncertainty about the overall morality of colonialism as contemporaries struggled to reconcile versions of liberalism with the fundamentally coercive nature of empire, as did the subjects of Renisa Mawani’s study of the Komagata Maru in this collection. Ironically, and perhaps less obviously, the selfproclaimed humanitarians in this debate in some respects lent force to  assimilation and land reservation policies that ultimately rapidly

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converged with state objectives, despite the putative opposition between state policy and that expounded by the “friends of the aborigine,” and despite the passionate opposition of Saxe himself to the sins of the Colonial Office. The extent of debate over the shape of colonialism and its nature is made a great deal clearer by a networked, trans-­ imperial approach that restores the perspectives of key participants in all their historical messiness. Paradoxically, the very process of debate enshrined the idea of “Aboriginal” people as themselves possessing a  transnational identity that transcended local particularities. British debates would provide a fertile ground for later Aboriginal use of this concept. Finally, the transcolonial nature of these debates at a key moment of transition in the nature of colonialism was presumably clear to at least a handful of Indigenous participants. This raises the issue of whether some members of communities now termed Indigenous were more willing to see themselves in international perspective and to ascribe transnational identity categories to themselves than much historical scholarship has tended to recognize for the 1820s and 1830s. Although this is a subject for subsequent discussion, the transnational activity of white families such as the Bannisters sheds unexpected light on this political possibility. NOTES 1 Work that makes this point with reference to interlocking family and business networks includes S.D. Smith, Slavery, Family and Gentry Capitalism in the British Atlantic: The World of the Lascelles, 1648–1834 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); David Hancock, Citizens of the World: London Merchants and the Integration of the British Atlantic Community, 1735– 1785 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 2 James Belich, Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Angloworld, 1783–1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). 3 Saliha Belmessous, Assimilation and Empire: Uniformity in French and British Colonies, 1541–1954 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 59–116. 4 See, for example, Saxe Bannister, Humane Policy: Or, Justice to the aborigines of new settlements essential to a due expenditure of British money, and to the best interests of the settlers … (London: Thomas and George Underwood, 1830). 5 Saxe Bannister, Colonial Reform: Its prospects, means and principles. A Letter to the Right Hon. William Ewart Gladstone, Her Majesty’s principal secretary of

70  Elizabeth Elbourne state for the Colonies (London: Ward & Co., 1846), 17. See also Saxe Bannister, British Colonization and Coloured Tribes (London: William Ball, 1838), ix. 6 See, for example, Zoë Laidlaw, Colonial Connections, 1815–45: Patronage, the Information Revolution and Colonial Government (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005); C.A. Bayly, Imperial Meridian: The British Empire and the World, 1780–1830 (New York: Longmans, 1989). 7 For a recent argument linking colonialism and “humanitarian governance” in the early nineteenth century, see Alan Lester and Fae Dussart, Colonization and the Origins of Humanitarian Governance: Protecting Aborigines across the Nineteenth-Century British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). 8 The sisters are named in John William’s will. Will of John William Bannister, Sierra Leone, West Africa, 1830, National Archives (UK), PROB 11/1776. See also Belmessous, Assimilation and Empire, 71–2. 9 “Steyning: Manors and Other Estates,” in A History of the County of Sussex, vol. 6, part 1: Bramber Rape (Southern Part), ed. T.P. Hudson et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 226–31. 10 Second Report of the Commissioners Appointed in pursuance of an Act of the 58th Year of His present Majesty, cap. 91, intituled An Act for appointing Commissioners to enquire concerning Charities in England for the Education of the Poor, House of Commons Sessional Papers, 1819 (547): 180–1, 313–14. 11 Will of John Bannister, Steyning, Sussex, 1825, National Archives, UK, PROB 11/1698. 12 “Case of Mr. Bannister” (no date) and Saxe Bannister to Robert WilmotHorton, 24 April 1830, Wilmot-Horton Papers, Derbyshire County Record Office, D3155, WH2744; Will of John William Bannister, Sierra Leone, West Africa, 1830, National Archives (UK), PROB 11/1776. 13 Dean Wilson, “Saxe Bannister,” in Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/1318. 14 Anon., “J.W. Bannister, Esq.,” in “Biographical Particulars of Celebrated Persons, Lately Deceased,” New Monthly Magazine and Literary Journal 27 (December 1829): 544. 15 War Office, A List of the Officers of the Army and Royal Marines, 5 February 1829. 16 Anon., “J.W. Bannister,’ 544–5. 17 “Copy of abstract of Saxe Bannister to lands in Upper Canada, 1820–1838,” Hall, Gillespie Law Firm Fonds, Trent University Archives, 94-001, box 32, case number 135, item 2. 18 Donald Smith, Sacred Feathers: The Reverend Peter Jones (Kahkewaquonaby) and the Mississauga Indians (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1987).

The Bannisters and Their Colonial World  71 19 Catherine Milne, “Pioneers on the South Shore of Rice Lake,” Northumberland Lifestyle 2, no. 3 (August 1990): 14–15.  20 A Settler [John William Bannister], Sketch of a Plan for settling in Upper Canada, a portion of the unemployed labourers of England (London: J. Harding, 1821); John William Bannister, Sketches of Plans for Settling in Upper Canada, a Portion of the Unemployed Labourers of Great Britain and Ireland, 2nd edition, with additions (London: J. Harding, 1822); review of Sketches of Plans (2nd ed.), in The Monthly Review; or Literary Journal, enlarged: from January to April inclusive (London: A. & R. Spottiswoode, 1823), 250–3. 21 “The deputed chiefs of the Indians of the Grand River in Upper Canada to the Earl Bathurst his Majesty’s principal secretary of state for the colonies,” n.d. [1822?]: 222–9, National Archives (UK), CO 42/369. On the wider history, see Alan Taylor, The Divided Ground: Indians, Settlers, and the Northern Borderland of the American Revolution (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006). 22 Susan M. Hill, The Clay We Are Made Of: Haudenosaunee Land Tenure on the Grand River (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, forthcoming); Sidney L. Harring, White Man’s Law: Native People in Nineteenth-Century Canadian Jurisprudence (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998), 35–61. Elizabeth Elbourne, “Broken Alliance: Debating Six Nations’ Land Claims in 1822,” Cultural and Social History 9, no. 4 (December 2012): 497–525. 23 “Indians of North America,” Edinburgh Review 73 (1841): 267–8. 24 Saxe Bannister, Remarks on the Indians of North America, in a letter to an Edinburgh Reviewer (London: Thomas and George Underwood, 1822). See also Belmessous, Assimilation and Empire, 75–6. 25 “Copy of a letter from Mr. Saxe Bannister to Mr. Horton,” 21 August 1823, Wilmot-Horton Papers, Derbyshire County Record Office, D3155, WH2744. Wilmot-Horton commented that Bannister’s proposals were too vague to allow of execution. 26 National Archives (UK), PC 1/1902: “Saxe Bannister, ‘Appendix to a chapter in an octogenarian lawyer’s life’ (1873).” 27 John William Bannister to Spring Rice, 23 June 1823, Wilmot-Horton Papers, Derbyshire County Record Office, D3155, WH2744. 28 Saxe Bannister to Wilmot-Horton, 19 October 1823, Wilmot-Horton Papers, Derbyshire County Record Office, D3155, WH2744. 29 John William Bannister to Wilmot-Horton, 5 November 1823, WilmotHorton Papers, Derbyshire County Record Office, D3155, WH2744. 30 John William Bannister to Wilmot-Horton, 3 April 1826, Wilmot-Horton Papers, Derbyshire County Record Office, D3155, WH2744. 31 “Deaths – September,” Annual Register of World Events: A Review of the Year 71 (1830): 245.

72  Elizabeth Elbourne 32 John Macarthur Jr to Elizabeth Macarthur, 1 May 1825, Macarthur Papers, vol. 15, Mitchell Library, Sydney (hereafter ML), A2911. 33 John Macarthur Sr to John Macarthur Jr, 17 April 1824, Macarthur Papers, vol. 3, ML A2899. 34 Most recently, Alan Atkinson, The Europeans in Australia: A History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). For an older discussion, see C.H. Currey, “Bannister, Saxe (1790–1877), in Australian Dictionary of Biography – On-line edition, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/bannister-saxe-1738; print version: C.H. Currey, “Bannister, Saxe (1790–1877),” Australian Dictionary of Biography, 1 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1966), 55–6. 35 W.C. Wentworth, Letters concerning legal business, 1825–1826, ML A1440, safe 1/350 (microfilm CY 900, frames 699–854). 36 Anna Johnston, “Linguistics, Religion and Law in Colonial New South Wales: Lancelot Threlkeld and Settler-Colonial Humanitarian Debates,” in Diane Kirby, ed., Past Law, Present Histories (Canberra: Australian National University E-Press, 2012), 23–38. On Threlkeld, see also Anna Johnston, The Paper War: Morality, Print Culture and Power in Colonial New South Wales (Perth: UWA Publishing, 2011). 37 See, for example, R.H.W. Reece, Aborigines and Colonists: Aborigines and Colonial Society in New South Wales in the 1830s and 1840s (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 1974). 38 See, for example, R. v. Lowe, 1827, “Decisions of the Supreme Court of New South Wales, 1788–1899,” Division of Law, Macquarie University, www.law.mq.edu.au/scnsw/Cases182728/html/r_v_lowe__1827.htm. This account of the case was originally published in The Australian, 23 May 1827. The case was also reported on in the Sydney Gazette, 21 May 1827. 39 Andrew Dunn to G.J. [Palmer?], 22 November 1823, Archives Office of New South Wales, CO 6065, 4/1798. 40 R. v. Johnston, Clarke, Nicholson, Castles, and Crear, 1824, “Decisions of the Supreme Court of New South Wales, 1788–1899,” Division of Law, Macquarie University, originally published in the Sydney Gazette, 12 August 1824, http://www.law.mq.edu.au/scnsw/html/r_v_johnston_and_ others__1824.html. 41 The Australian, 18 October 1826. 42 John Connor, The Australian Frontier Wars, 1788–1838 (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2002), 55. 43 There was a bitter dispute at the Australian National Museum in the early 2000s around a display that commented on the number of Aboriginal people killed in the wake of the declaration of martial law in Bathurst, in the

The Bannisters and Their Colonial World  73

44 45 46 47

48 49 50 51 52 53

54

55 56 57

context of wider debate about how the museum should present the history of conflict between settlers and Aboriginal peoples. Stephen Foster and Bain Attwood, eds., Frontier Conflict: The Australian Experience (Canberra: National Museum of Australia Press, 2003), notably David Andrew Roberts, “The Bell Falls Massacre and Oral Tradition,” 150–7, and Graeme Davison, “Conflict in the Museum,” 201–14. The wider dispute has, however, calmed in recent years, particularly given convincing refutations of the (in my opinion) flawed uses of historical evidence adduced by Keith Windschuttle, the main advocate of the position that the extent of massacres had been gravely exaggerated. Saxe Bannister, Statements and documents relating to proceedings in New South Wales in 1824, 1825, and 1826 (Cape Town, 1827), 57. Belmessous, Assimilation and Empire, 92–101, on the rule of law. Atkinson, Europeans in Australia, 2: 41; Bannister, Humane Policy, 149, 234–5. R. v. Howe, 20 October 1826, in “Decisions of the Supreme Court of New South Wales, 1788–1899,” Division of Law, Macquarie University, http:// www.law.mq.edu.au/scnsw/html/r_v_howe_1826.htm. This account ­reproduces pertinent articles in the Australian, 21 October 1826, and the Sydney Gazette, 25 October 1826. Currey, “Bannister, Saxe,” Australian Dictionary of Biography – on-line; print: Currey, “Bannister, Saxe,” Australian Dictionary of Biography, 1: 55–6. Mitchell Library, Sydney, Australia, Elizabeth Macarthur to Edward Macarthur, 17 December 1826, Macarthur family papers, vol. 10, A2908. Ibid. On the marriages of the Bannister sisters, see Hobart Town Courier, 20 September 1828 and 28 January 1832. Various letters, University College London, Special Collections, Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge: SDUK. Sir Richard Torin Kindersley, Report of Cases Decided in the High Court of Chancery in 1852 and 1853, vol. 1 (London: V. & R. Stevens and G.S. Norton, 1853), 514–20. V.C. Malherbe, “Testing the ‘Burgher Right’ to the Land: Khoesan, Colonist and the Government in the Eastern Cape after Ordinance 50,” South African Historical Journal 40, no. 1 (May 1999): 1–20. Interviews with the plaintifs by Moodie are reproduced in V.C. Malherbe, “Donald Moodie: South Africa’s Pioneer Oral Historian,” History in Africa 25 (1998): 171–87. 20 September 1828, Western Cape Archives, CO 3936, pp. 292–7. Bannister, Humane Policy, 6. Dan Wylie, Myth of Iron: Shaka in History (Scottsville, SA: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2006).

74  Elizabeth Elbourne 58 Saxe Bannister, “Mr. Bannister’s Claims” (London, 1853), 15. 59 Saxe Bannister to Wilmot-Horton, 2 March 1829, Wilmot-Horton Papers, Derbyshire County Record Office, D3155, WH2744. Letter written at the bottom of pamphlet, “Abridgment of Articles of Agreement entered into between Francis George Farewell, Esquire, a Lieutenant of the Royal Navy; and Saxe Bannister, Esquire, late His Majesty’s Attorney General in New South Wales.” 60 [Saxe Bannister?], “Case of Mr. Bannister,” n.d., Wilmot-Horton papers, Derbyshire County Record Office, D3155, WH2744. 61 John William Bannister to R.W. Hay, 10 February 1828, National Archives (UK), CO 267/97. 62 “Ship officers” to J.W. Bannister, 29 February 1828, enclosed in John William Bannister to R.W. Hay, 29 February 1828, National Archives (UK), CO 267/97. 63 John William Bannister to William Hay, 20 June 1828, National Archives (UK), CO 267/97. 64 John William Bannister to Hay, 25 December 1828, National Archives (UK), CO 267/97. Hay ungratefully pencilled on the back, “I cannot read this Gentleman’s letter.” 65 John William Bannister to W. Hay, 16 April 1829, National Archives (UK), CO 267/101. 66 Saxe Bannister to the Duke of Richmond, 9 January 1834, Duke of Richmond Papers, West Sussex Record Office, 1504, fol. Q61. 67 “Atwick – October 19, 1829,’ Passenger Ships Arriving in Western Australia, http://members.iinet.net.au/~perthdps/shipping/wa-0013.htm. 68 “Report of Captain Bannister’s Journey to King George’s Sound, over Land, Feb 5, 1831,” in Joseph Cross, ed., Journals of Several Expeditions made in Western Australia, during the years 1829, 1830, 1831, and 1832, under the sanction of the Governor Sir James Stirling (London: J. Cross, 1833), 98–109. For further information on Thomas Bannister in western Australia, see J.L. Burton Jackson with Bill Petchell and Malcolm Higham, Frowning Fortunes: The Story of Thomas Bannister and the William River District (Carlisle: Hesperian Press, 1993). Copies of reports sent back by Bannister can be found in Joanne Shoobert, ed., Western Australian Exploration, 1826– 1835 (Carlisle: Hesperian Press, 2005). 69 “History of River Names – B,” Landgate, http://www.landgate.wa.gov.au/ corporate.nsf/web/History+of+river+names. 70 There is debate from several different directions about events in Tasmania and whether or not they should be seen as genocidal (including debate over the meaning of “genocide”). See, inter alia, Benjamin Madley, “From

The Bannisters and Their Colonial World  75

71

72

73 74

75 76

77 78

79

Terror to Genocide: Britain’s Tasmanian Penal Colony and Australia’s History Wars,” Journal of British Studies 47, no. 1 (January 2008): 77–106; and Keith Windschuttle, The Fabrication of Aboriginal History (Sydney: Macleay, 2002). Thomas Bannister to John [Montagu?] Esq., 24 December 1835, State Archives of Tasmania, CSO 1/841, file 17815; Memo, 16 February 1835, CSO 1/786, file 16785. [Saxe Bannister?] to the Duke of Richmond, 7 January 1834, Duke of Richmond Papers, West Sussex Record Office, 1504, fol. Q45. The final ­section of this letter, including the signature, is missing from the archive, but I deduce on the basis of content and handwriting that it was written by Saxe Bannister. Saxe Bannister to the Duke of Richmond, 9 January 1834, Duke of Richmond Papers, West Sussex Record Office, 1504, fol. Q61. Bain Attwood, Possession: Batman’s Treaty and the Matter of History (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2009); Atkinson, Europeans in Australia, vol. 1. My thanks to Bain Attwood for drawing Thomas Bannister to my attention and for convincing me of his importance, as well as to Alan Atkinson for kind assistance. Cited in Alan Atkinson, “Conquest,” in Australia’s Empire, ed. Deryck Schreuder and Stuart Ward (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 44. Belmessous, Assimilation and Empire, 103–4; Alan Atkinson, The Europeans in Australia: A History, vol. 2, Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 159–160; Attwood, Possession. Attwood, Possession, 36–8; Atkinson, Europeans in Australia, 2: 159–60. Saxe Bannister, Large, Uniform Maps of the Land, the Sea and the Heavens (London: John Mitchell, 1849); Saxe Bannister, A brief description of the map of the ancient world preserved in the Cathedral Church of Hereford (Hereford: n.p., 1849); Saxe Bannister, The Cartoon of Sebastian Cabot presenting Indians from Newfoundland to Henry VII in 1502, A.D., exhibited in the collection of 1843 in Westminster Hall by Mr. Banff Tucker (London: Legatt & Neville, 1845); Saxe Bannister, Letter to Right Honourable the Secretary of State for the Home Department, upon the preparation of materials for our national library (Preston: n.p., 1855). Saxe Bannister, William Paterson: His Life and Trials, in Saxe Bannister, ed., The Writings of William Paterson, 3 vols. (London: Judd & Glass, 1859).

3 Comparing to Connect: Indigenous Voice, Regionalism, and the Limits of Transnational History to lly br adford

Although describing western Canadian historiography, Gerald Friesen observes something common to all recent history writing about Canada: during the last twenty years, there has been a move away from histories that emphasize the perspectives of the “less privileged” towards historiographical frameworks that use thematic studies of race, feminism, and borderlands to explore connections between Canada and other areas of the world.1 Friesen is clearly uncomfortable with this new approach. He suggests that for historians partial to this more recent trend, some of whom have work in this volume, “their ideal vantage point was perhaps a satellite looking down on the earth that enabled them to see all human activity and environmental change as one.”2 He worries that these new thematic and transnational histories of western Canada, and indeed Canada, track global connections at the expense of understanding the particularities of the region. For Friesen, the push to transnationalize western Canada “threaten[s] the very ‘regions’ that had been developed in the … previous generations of critical history.”3 Friesen’s critique of transnational and thematic histories is to some extent warranted. The payoffs of transnational approaches – the connections revealed, the shared processes seen – are significant and they enlighten current historical knowledge about how Canada was made by a series of what Christopher Bayly has called local and global “drivers.”4 Yet in the rush to transnationalize Canadian history writing, other perspectives might be lost. This risk is especially acute for historians of Aboriginal Canada. Here, the rise of global and transnational history has precipitated a move away from concerns for Aboriginal voice, agency, and life ways that were foundational to the groundbreaking scholarship in Aboriginal history produced during the 1970s and

Comparing to Connect: Indigenous Voice  77

1980s. While histories of the borderlands have managed to maintain a focus on Aboriginal agency and voice,5 transnational studies that connect Canadian native peoples with the events of other colonial frontiers (such as Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa) tend to downplay Aboriginal voices and perspectives in their narratives.6 This transnational or “transcolonial” scholarship provides insightful comments on how colonial policies and laws in different contexts were connected and how discourses of race and racism flowed between frontiers; however, these histories do not include much about Aboriginal or Maori or African perspectives. These transcolonial studies tend to discuss what the “privileged” did to the “less privileged” peoples.7 In this sense, Friesen is partially correct in worrying that the interest in seeing connections silences the voices and local forces that have been so painstakingly restored by regional historians in the last few decades. This chapter suggests that comparative Indigenous history is one way to recognize Canada’s transnational connections without losing sight of the Indigenous voice and his/her region. The chapter focuses on Henry Budd, the first ordained Indigenous missionary in Rupert’s Land. Born near Norway House in about 1810, Budd attended a Church Missionary Society (CMS) school at Red River in the 1820s before becoming a teacher and, in 1850, an ordained missionary for the CMS.8 While established histories of Henry Budd have revealed what he did as a missionary and how he fit into the fur trade and mission context of  nineteenth-century western Canada, they say little about whether Budd was part of larger processes of colonialism and religious change.9 To explore Budd’s linkages to these larger processes, this chapter compares Budd with an Indigenous missionary in South Africa. Tiyo Soga, a Xhosa/African missionary from the violent and racially divided Cape Colony (South Africa) was educated at schools in Africa and Scotland during the 1840s and 1850s.10 Like Budd, he was ordained in the 1850s. The argument the chapter makes is twofold. First, Budd and Soga both expressed a similar threepart identity as “missionary,” “trans-frontier figure,” and “modern Indigenous man”; and second, because of the very different forms of colonialism around them, they articulated distinct meanings of “Indige­ neity.”11 In particular, Soga saw his “Indigeneity” as akin to a political identity, while for Budd being “Cree” remained an ethnic identity rooted in language and territory rather than a politics of nationalism. Thus, the creation of Indigenous missionaries, although a transnational enterprise, was shaped by regional forces and local forms and levels of

78  Tolly Bradford

colonial power. Indeed, for most Indigenous people in the mid-nineteenth century, their day-to-day lives were informed by local events around them. A comparative history is one way to interrogate the relationship between these local Indigenous lives and the globalizing world around them. Missionary Above all else, Henry Budd and Tiyo Soga shared a sense of identity as a missionary. The meta-narrative of each man’s journal reveals how both felt connected with a mission society in Britain and charged with the task of transforming their “benighted countrymen.”12 Soga’s journal begins in London as he boarded ship to begin his return trip to South Africa after several years of schooling in Glasgow: “Monday – Left London this day for Gravesend where we rejoined ‘the lady of the Lake’ bound for Algoa Bay.”13 The next two months of journal entries detail Soga’s journey to South Africa and his first articulations of a missionary identity. Wrestling with seasickness and boredom, Soga comforts himself, not with thoughts of returning home to South Africa but by explaining that it is “pleasant to know, that our good friends in Scotland, were not forgetting us this day.”14 Soga also finds comfort by comparing his voyage to those of missionaries in the past, suggesting at one point that “properly considered, sea sickness is one of the first trials thro wh[ich] the missionary must pass to his destined field of labour.”15 On arrival in South Africa, the journal strikes another chord: Soga celebrates a new era in his life as a missionary while struggling with insecurities about his worthiness for the job. The entries that follow his return to Africa reproduce the meta-narrative of self-as-missionary. After Soga established his station at Emgwali on the eastern edge of the Cape Colony, two kinds of entries dominate the journal: descriptions of Sunday church services and other church events (like baptisms), and records of visits to outstations within a few days’ horseback ride of Emgwali. While the entries about the station confirm Soga’s role and identity as a missionary, the descriptions of journeys to outstations detail how Soga reconciled his identity as a missionary with his Xhosa background. For example, in July 1860, during a visit from a Kraal under the leadership of a headman named Sakela, Soga argued that his ethnic identity as a “Kaffir”16 gave him common ground with Sakela, while his religious identity set him apart. “I am one of you,” he told Sakela, “a Kaffir as well as you – One of your own tribe & nation – Why

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is it, that I have not a painted blanket like you – or have not my ankles & wrists ornamented with those tinkling chains that ornament your own? Simply because, I have been taught to see the utter uselessness of such things to immortal beings.”17 Referring to his belief in original sin, Soga told Sakela, “I would not for the world exchange positions with you – bec[ause] I know that to live like you are now living, is sure and certain ruin.”18 Budd’s journal is framed by the same meta-narrative of self-as-­ missionary. Written for a specific audience (superiors in Red River and Britain), and following a specific formula, Budd’s journal comprises long narrative entries that often included extensive biblical passages. Training in the CMS, particularly under John Smithurst and James Hunter in the 1840s, had a strong bearing on how Budd wrote his journals and why his journals differ so little from those of European missionaries. Using a flowing narrative style with near-perfect English, Budd makes each entry into a short story about the day, noting important information that might be useful to superiors in London. A typical entry for a Sunday reads as follows: Sept 17th [1854] Lord’s day. At our usual time for the morning prayers I went over to the school and found some women already waiting and the rest of the Indians was [sic] putting their canoes in water to come over to the morning prayers. We had a full congregation in the Morning prayers. I read the prayers and preached from the words of St. John the Baptise, Luke I. 29 “Behold the Lamb of God which taketh away the sins of the world.” In the afternoon we had the same number at the Evening Service. The Indians when they come out of the church, whether after the Morning or after the Evening Service, they assemble in parties in one of their own houses or even outside if it is a warm day, talking about what they have heard, and asking each other questions what [sic] they remember of the sermon, this way many of them are taught and edified.19

As in Soga’s journal, it was during encounters with people away from his home station that Budd engages with other Aboriginal people while emphasizing his role as missionary. In a conversation with a Cree man named Walluck Twatt regarding the differences between “Indian” and “white people,” for example, Budd records how he tried to convince Twatt that he could overcome the differences between himself and “white people” simply by changing his religion: “I endeavored to persuade him,” wrote Budd, “that he [God] has given us [Indians] his Word to teach us the right way. He desires that all men whether

80  Tolly Bradford

whitepeople or Indian to [sic] worship Him in his own way.”20 Like Soga’s encounter with Sekela, the self-as-missionary narrative would continue to frame his encounters with Walluck Twatt even as Budd’s sense of “Nativeness” informed their discussions. Trans-frontier Figure While clearly identifying as missionaries, Budd and Soga recognized they were not the same as their European missionary colleagues. Budd noted this difference in a letter to a superior in London: “I am as you observe placed in very Special circumstances … Possessing as I do the native language and thereby able to address the native with ease [I] can enter into all their feelings, answer all their objections. I say this is a great talent that I have to occupy till my Lord’s coming.”21 Given that he  had spent eight years at school in Scotland Tiyo Soga was even more aware of his “special circumstances” as a native missionary. When Soga arrived in South Africa, he noted how, to Africans, he was “the object of wonder” because of his ability to “bridge over the apparently impassable gulph [sic], fixed between their degraded condition and that of their pre-eminently distinguished white neighbours.”22 Recog­ nizing their “special circumstances” as people able to “bridge” the worlds of their respective frontiers, both Budd and Soga developed an identity as “trans-frontier” figures, as people able to move between the cultural contexts of their frontier zones. Because of their different colonial frontiers, however, Budd and Soga used their trans-frontier position in different ways. Budd relied mainly on his language skills to construct his trans-frontier identity. He realized that, unlike European missionaries, he could use his knowledge of both the Bible and Cree to have intimate conversations with potential converts in Cree camps. As he explained, regardless of whether he was “in the pulpit, or in the fishing tent, or in the sawing tent … A missionary [like himself] acquainted with the Native turn of mind, and knowing the language, can easily turn any subject in conversation to the benefit and instruction of these Indians.”23 While Soga used language to move between cultures, his trans-frontier identity was based more clearly on his ability to act as a bridge between the Xhosa and the co­ lonial political elite. This political use of his trans-frontier status was linked directly to the regional context around him. Unlike the relatively  fluid and peaceful context of the fur-trade frontier around Budd, the space in which Soga found himself was charged with the political

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(and often military) manoeuvrings of Africans and Europeans and the ongoing contest to secure and maintain territory. This regional difference was largely responsible for Soga’s politically informed trans-­ frontier identity. This political edge to Soga’s trans-frontier movements is particularly noticeable in his search to establish land title for himself and his mission. Even before arriving back in South Africa in 1857, Soga used his brother to gain support for his mission from Sandile, the highest ranking Xhosa in the area.24 Once in South Africa, Soga turned to his friends in government for help in establishing the mission. By the late 1850s, the native commissioner near Soga launched a campaign to secure land title for Soga’s station, writing several letters to the colonial government in Cape Town demanding land title for the mission on behalf of Soga.25 The campaign to secure title for Soga’s mission was strengthened in September 1860 when Soga managed to get permission for title from the governor general of the Cape Colony, George Grey. Circum­ stances eventually led to a scenario whereby Soga found himself on a government ship bound for Cape Town. On the ship were Sandile, Grey, and Queen Victoria’s son Prince Alfred (then on a royal tour of the Cape).26 During the voyage Soga mobilized his trans-frontier credentials, moving between Sandile and Grey to secure title for his station and support for his mission. From Sandile he won continued trust as an important adviser in dealings with the government; from Prince Alfred he received a bible and the moral support of the British royal family; and from Grey he secured personal support for his mission and even a donation of £50 for the building of a new church at the  station.27 Soga’s trans-frontier identity was thus rooted in these movements between frontier elites and in the delicate politics of land in the eastern Cape Colony. Because of the lack of settler pressure on Aboriginal land in western Canada before the 1870s, Budd never had to make such political appeals to Cree or British authorities. Different forms of colonialism pushed each missionary towards different uses of their trans-frontier identity. Modern Indigenous Man Although Budd and Soga identified as Indigenous or “Native,” theirs was an Indigeneity altered by their sense of self as a missionary and trans-frontier figure and by their familiarity with Christianity and modernity. To begin with, they both shared a belief that individual sin was

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an inherent part of the human condition that expressed itself in an array of forms (from blasphemy to stealing to practising heathen rituals); they also believed these sins could only be overcome through individual conversion to Christianity. This concept of sin differed from the way most Indigenous cosmologies defined sin as a cause–effect relationship: bad actions, like murder, would create bad results for the murderer, although the murderer himself was not inherently sinful.28 During an itinerating trip in 1852, for example, Budd’s vision of sin is apparent: “What do you call sin?” Budd asked a Cree man named Mahnsuk. “When an Indian murders another do you call that sin?” “Yes,” answered Mahnsuk. Budd then asked, “But when an Indian steals, speaks bad words, and commits fornication, is that not sin?” To this, Mahnsuk replied, “No, we say of such a man, ‘numnu ah ejinnessu [illeg.],’ he is not nice, but we do not call that sinning.” Budd then said to Mahnsuk: “Everything that the Indian does which breaks the holy law of God … is sin” and all humans have “committed more sins than the hair on their heads.”29 Budd reported that Mahnsuk was surprised by this statement: “He did not reply,” noted Budd, “but looked quite astonished wondering how he could be such a sinner.”30 Soga had similar discussions about sin and sinfulness with people like Sakela, who asked Soga several questions about whether infants sin and whether young people sin less than the old.31 All these discussions reveal how Budd and Soga shared a vision of self and sinfulness that differed significantly from the cosmology of other Cree and Xhosa. Budd, like Soga, also identified with a new form of masculinity that emphasized the male’s role – especially the literate, mission-educated male – as a leader in the “public sphere” and protector of females from “heathen” society.32 This gendered vision is reflected in the ways both men educated their own children. Budd, sending one of his youngest daughters, Eliza, to a school at Red River in 1865, explained to the teacher that he hoped the schooling would protect his daughter from the “wild” influences of the Aboriginal children around the mission station: “I fear,” he wrote to the teacher, “you will find her [Eliza] a wild little girl; but when kept under proper restraint, & away from home, I trust, she will soon lose the habit of running about which she acquired from the Indian.”33 Elizabeth Budd, likely Henry’s favourite daughter, exemplified where Budd hoped Eliza would end up: not only did Elizabeth attend school at Red River and work as a schoolteacher at her  father’s mission stations, she also married Henry Cochrane, an Indigenous missionary ordained in the 1860s.34

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Although little is known about Soga’s daughters, both he and Budd had specific hopes for their sons. Soga wanted his three sons to be educated in Scotland and work in Africa as leaders to “their countrymen.” As he wrote to a friend, “they [the boys] go to Scotland to obtain an education to benefit their own countrymen. They are not needed in Scotland, and are much required in Kaffirland.”35 Budd likewise hoped his sons would become leaders to their fellow Cree. While all four of Budd’s sons attended schools at Red River, at either St John’s or St Peter’s parish, only one, Henry Jr, lived long enough to attend the famous Islington College in London and gain ordination (he died two years later in 1865). Lamenting the death of his last son in 1874, Budd remarked, “I had educated them [his sons] all with a view for the church,” but was now left without a son to carry on his work.36 Something else Budd and Soga shared was their perception of history as a linear event wherein the arrival of missionaries and Christianity was a key phase in the progress of Indigenous society. For Budd, identifying with linear history placed him at odds with the Cree vision of history as a place-specific set of events or stories that created a “collective memory in terms of space rather than time.”37 Budd’s vision of history is revealed in his encounter with Walluck Twatt: God “made only one man, and one woman, all the white people and all the Indians have their origins from them”; Cree religion “is the invention of men, men who had lost the right way of worshiping God”; missionaries were brought to the North-West to put the Indians back to the right way of living and worshipping.38 While some people feared “they would soon all die” if they began praying to the Christian God, Budd saw nothing to fear in adopting Christianity, believing instead that all that was modern and Christian needed to be absorbed by the Cree as quickly as possible.39 Although Soga also records how he “met with … instance[s] of kaffir cautiousness”40 wherein people were reluctant to accept a religion that was new, because Xhosa leadership was organized on complex systems of tribal lineage, the concept of linear history was not completely new to Xhosa society. Moreover, the longer history of Christian­ity in Xhosaland made Xhosa society more familiar with the Christian view of history. Despite their strong identification with the ideas and practices passed onto them during their missionary career, Budd and Soga also identified as Indigenous or native. Their challenge was to find a way to articulate this Indigeneity, Creeness or Xhosaness, while remaining loyal to the religion and lifestyle they had come to follow and promote as missionaries.

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For Budd, land and language formed concrete links to his Indigeneity. At the end of a lengthy discussion with some Cree at the Nipowewin mission station about whether missionaries should pay to establish a station in the North-West, Budd reportedly said, “Whatever Indians may expect of a foreigner to pay for the ground belonging to the Indians, it would not be easy to get me to pay for the spot I occupy here, because I am myself a native of the soil, and claim my right and privilege to establish myself in any part of North America without paying the natives for the soil.”41 This brief statement suggests that land, and his sense of Aboriginal title, was a key component to the way Budd constructed his Indigeneity and linked it to other natives across the religious divide created by his conversion. Language was another. Although he saw English as the way towards more rapid modernization and progress, Budd constantly campaigned for the use of Cree in religious services. As he wrote in his journal, while English-language services made him feel “a degree of distrust or diffidence in myself preaching in a foreign tongue,” at Cree services he “felt … on my own ground & in my element.”42 Grounded in language and territory, Budd established a new way of defining Indigeneity in the North-West; instead of locating it in lifestyle or economy or even kinship, Budd constructed a new kind of Indigeneity that combined aspects of Christian modernity with land rights and language. Soga’s journals and letters reveal many of the same uses of territory and language as markers of Xhosaness; however, Soga’s understanding of his Indigeneity went one step further than Budd’s. Most importantly, he used published written texts to articulate a kind of cultural nationalism. In 1862 Soga published a Xhosa-language article in the missionaryrun newspaper Indaba. This article, translated here into English, began as follows: “So we are to have a National Newspaper! The news will come right inside our huts. This is really welcome news. We Xhosa are a race that enjoys conversation. The sense of well-being among us is to hear something new.” Soga goes on to explain how the newspaper would correct the “half-truths” spread by travellers and act as a “beautiful vessel for preserving the stories, fables, legends, customs, anecdotes and history of the tribes.”43 Part tool of national unity, part sermon, and part historical text, Soga’s article in Indaba reveals how he was playing with written texts, borrowing from Christian and Xhosa traditions to make what he would later call a “Native literature.”44 Soga spent much of his free time recording the myths and stories of the Xhosa, compiling a catalogue of information on Xhosa customs and

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history, and creating a new – because written – historiography of the Xhosa.45 Although most of this information remained largely unpublished in Soga’s lifetime, some of it appeared in Indaba, and it seems very likely that Charles Brownlee’s book Reminiscences of Kafir Life and History (1896) drew on Soga’s ethnography and collected Xhosa histories.46 Aside from land, language, and history, Soga also used the ongoing tensions with white settlers to construct his sense of “Xhosaness.” While Budd never comments that he, as a Cree, faced racism or prejudice, Soga often noted how racism was something he faced on a nearly daily basis in the Cape Colony and how he was powerless to stop it: “Knowing the prejudices existing in the Colony against colour, I had resolved never to break forcibly through these prejudices.”47 To land, language, and history, Soga was thus forced to add “Blackness” to his identity as a Xhosa. This sense of Xhosa cultural nationalism mixed with his trans-frontier movement between political elites enabled Soga to construct a proto-nationalism. Later in his life, Soga extended this sense of nationalism when he wrote that “Africa was of God given to the race of Ham [i.e., Black Africans].”48 Following Soga’s footsteps, the African National Congress (ANC) would use a similar understanding of African nationalism to articulate and mobilize support against settler-society violence and interference. Soga’s political understanding of Indigeneity set him apart from Budd. Two reasons, both linked to local or regional context, account for Soga’s different interpretation. First, the hierarchical tribal structure of Xhosa society allowed for the establishment of more stable forms of “community” than Cree band structures. This social structure also made Xhosa society more able than the Cree bands to adopt and appreciate a national, political identity. Second, Soga, unlike Budd, lived through three major wars between Xhosa and British forces in the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s, and in a frontier awash with racial tension and conflict. Budd’s North-West was shaped by the expansion of hybrid settler societies around Red River and by the violent conflict around the fur trade in the first half of the nineteenth century, but these did not produce the same kind of national thinking. Without the violence of a militarized colonialism there was little need for Budd to write about the same kind of “National newspaper” or nationalize his Indigeneity. In fact, Louis Riel’s understanding of the Metis Nation in 1885 is more in line with how Soga conceived of Indigeneity than with Budd’s sense of “Creeness.” Riel, the most important Metis leader of the nineteenth century, led armed resistance movements against the Canadian state in

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1869–70 at the Red River Colony in Manitoba, and again in Saskatchewan in 1885. In both instances, especially during the later campaign, Riel’s influence was partly based on his ability to create a coherent political force that joined together most Metis in a united sense of national selfinterest. Similarly to Soga, Riel’s relationship with Christianity (in his case Catholicism) and his encounter with the military arm of settler colonialism (in 1869–70 and even more violently in 1885) were likely important ingredients in his construction of a noticeably politicized understanding of the Metis as a national category of identity. Conclusion In short, regional factors influenced the way Budd saw himself and the utility of Christianity. A history of mission policy and discourse would capture the empire’s vision of the connections between men like Henry Budd and Tiyo Soga, but only a careful study of each man’s voice gives us a sense of the way each man understood Christianity and why Budd chose a less political path.That Budd used many of the same categories and themes as an African missionary to remake his identity speaks to how he was subjected to this globalizing mission process. Like Soga he identified with the role of “missionary,” recognized he was himself a “trans-frontier figure,” and felt compelled to articulate a novel form of Indigeneity which, similarly to Soga, contained elements of both modernity and Christianity. However, Budd never politicized his vision of Christianity and Indigeneity in the way Soga did. The flexible band structure and relative lack of settler colonialism in western Canada meant Budd had a limited sense of how racial identity – “nativeness” – shaped access to power in a colonial context. While this chapter presents a focused comparison of two individuals, there are others ways to use comparison to investigate the connections between western Canada and other nineteenth-century colonial frontiers. For example, scholars might consider returning to older themes in western Canadian history to explore how the HBC, as part of a global system of trade centred for much of its life in London, brought the region into a transcolonial world. Furthermore, there are a host of questions that can be asked about the connections between colonial policies towards Indigenous peoples in each colonial frontier, as Curthoys and others do in this volume. How physical environments, demographic patterns, and Indigenous social structures shaped regional variations in colonial policies is worth considering further. All of these approaches,

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whether comparative or transnational or transcolonial, offer ways to see western Canada from a “satellite” without losing sight of how local voices and regional forces shaped the past. The social-history, areastudies, and subaltern-studies movements of the 1970s and 1980s gave us many insights into Aboriginal agency and the ability of Aboriginal peoples to adapt European trade systems and institutions. Studies of Canada that use transnational approaches must continue to include these voices and this agency in their own histories. Ultimately, we want to know not only how Canada was connected to a global context, but also how it became disconnected: how Canada became Canadian. NOTES 1 Gerald Friesen, “Critical History in Western Canada 1900–2000,” in The West and Beyond: New Perspectives on an Imagined Region, ed. Alvin Finkel, Sarah Carter, and Peter Fortna (Edmonton: Athabasca University Press, 2010), 7. My thanks to Gerry Friesen for letting me view an earlier version of this paper. 2 Ibid. 3 Ibid. While Friesen does not use the term “transnational,” much of the work he describes falls into the category of transnationalism. 4 C.A. Bayly, Sven Beckert, Matthew Connelly, Isabel Hofmeyr, Wendy Kozol, and Patricia Seed, “AHR Conversation: On Transnational History,” American Historical Review 111, no. 5 (December 2006): 1450. 5 Sterling Evans, ed., The Borderlands of the American and Canadian Wests: Essays on Regional History of the Forty-ninth Parallel (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006). 6 See, for example, Hamar Foster, A.R. Buck, and Benjamin L Berger, eds., The Grand Experiment: Law and Legal Culture in British Settler Societies (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2008); Julie Evans, Patricia Grimshaw, David Philips, and Shurlee Swain, Equal Subjects, Unequal Rights: Indigenous Peoples in British Settler Colonies, 1830–1910 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003); C.L. Higham, Noble, Wretched and Redeemable: Protestant Missionaries to the Indians in Canada and the United States, 1820–1900 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2000); Andrew Armitage, Comparing the Policy of Aboriginal Assimilation: Australia, Canada, and New Zealand (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1995). A notable exception is the work of Peggy Brock. See, for example, Peggy Brock, “Two Indigenous Evangelists: Moses Tjalkabota and Arthur Wellington Clah,” Journal of Religious History

88  Tolly Bradford 27, no. 3 (October 2003): 348–66; and Peggy Brock, “Setting the Record Straight: New Christians and Mission Christianity,” in Indigenous Peoples and Religious Change, ed. Peggy Brock (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 107–28. 7 Several practitioners of transnational history likewise caution against histories that silence the voices of “less privileged” historical actors. See Tony Ballantyne, “Putting the Nation in Its Place? World History and C.A. Bayly’s The Birth of the Modern World,” in Connected Worlds: History in Transnational Perspective, ed. Ann Curthoys and Marilyn Lake (Canberra: ANU E Press); Bayly et al., “AHR Conversation,” 1452. 8 For a biographical sketch of Budd, see Katherine Pettipas, ed., The Diary of the Reverend Henry Budd, 1870–1875 (Winnipeg: Hignell Print, 1974), vii–xliii. 9 Katherine Pettipas, “A History of the Work of the Reverend Henry Budd Conducted under the Auspices of the Church Missionary Society 1840– 1875,” PhD diss., University of Manitoba (1972); Raymond Beaumont, “Origins and Influences: The Family Ties of the Reverend Henry Budd,” Prairie Forum 17, no. 2 (1991): 167–200; and Winona Stevenson, “‘Our Man in the Field’: The Status and Role of a CMS Native Catechist in Rupert’s Land,” Journal of the Canadian Church Historical Society 33, no. 1 (April 1991): 65–78. 10 For background on Soga’s life, see Donovan Williams, Umfundisi: A Biography of Tiyo Soga, 1829–1871 (Lovedale: Lovedale Press, 1978). 11 This interpretation of Budd’s and Soga’s multi-part identity is informed by Homi Bhabha’s description of how nations and communities are formed at the meeting place, the “in-between,” of various narratives. See Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 1–3. 12 See, for example, Tiyo Soga, The Journal and Selected Writings of the Reverend Tiyo Soga, ed. Donovan Williams (Cape Town: A.A. Balkema, 1983). John Peel makes a similar observation about the journals kept by African missionaries in West Africa. See J.D.Y. Peel, Religious Encounter and the Making of the Yoruba (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 15–16. 13 Soga, Journal, 20 April 1857, Journal and Selected Writings, 11–12. 14 Soga, Journal, 26 April 1857, ibid., 12. 15 Soga, Journal, 25 April 1857, ibid. 16 “Kaffir” as used here by Soga refers to “Xhosa,” the largest Nguni language group in the Cape Colony. 17 Soga, Journal, 24 July 1860, Journal and Selected Writings, 27. 18 Ibid. 19 Henry Budd, Journal, 17 September 1854, Church Missionary Society Archives (CMSA), CC1/O/12.

Comparing to Connect: Indigenous Voice  89 20 Budd, Journal, 10 September 1852, CMSA, CC1/O/12. 21 Henry Budd to Major Hector Straith [Lay Secretary, CMS, London], 6 August 1852, CMSA, CC1/O/12. 22 Tiyo Soga to Somerville, 6 October 1857, quoted in Missionary Record of the United Presbyterian Church, 1 March 1858. 23 Budd, Journal, 20 October 1856, CMSA, CC1/O/12. 24 Minutes of Foreign Mission Committee of the United Presbyterian Church, 27 May 1856, Records of the United Presbyterian Church, Dep. 398 (62), National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh. 25 Brownlee to Maclean, 6 November 1860, National Archives of South Africa, Cape Town, BK 72 (Gaika Commissioner). 26 For a full discussion of Soga’s 1860 trip to Cape Town with Sandile, Grey, and others, see J.A. Chalmers, Tiyo Soga: A Page of South African Mission Work (Edinburgh: Andrew Elliot, 1877), 206–19. 27 Chalmers, Soga, 213–14. 28 See Janet Hodgson, God of the Xhosa: A Study of the Origins and Development of the Traditional Concepts of the Supreme Being (Cape Town: Oxford University Press, 1982), 32; Jennifer Brown and Robert Brightman, “The Orders of the Dreamed”: George Nelson on Cree and Northern Ojibwa Religion and Myth, 1823 (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 1988), 132. 29 Budd, Journal, 3 October 1852, CMSA, CC1/O/12. 30 Ibid. 31 Soga, Journal, 24 July 1860, Journal and Selected Writings, 27. 32 Anna Johnston, Missionary Writing and Empire, 1800–1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 8–9. 33 Henry Budd to Miss Davis, 3 July 1865, Matilda Davis Papers, Archives of Manitoba, 1037. 34 Budd, Journal, 11 October 1873, CMSA, CC1/O/12. 35 Tiyo Soga to Mr. Bogue, 10 January 1870, cited in Chalmers, Soga, 413. 36 Budd, Journal, 17 March 1874, CMSA, CC1/O/12. 37 Neal McLeod, Cree Narrative Memory: From Treaties to Contemporary Times (Saskatoon: Purich Publishing Limited, 2007), 6. 38 Budd, Journal, 10 September 1852, CMSA, CC1/O/12. 39 Budd, Journal, 26 September 1851, CMSA, CC1/O/12. 40 Soga, Journal, 9 July 1858, Journal and Selected Writings, 20. 41 Budd, Journal, 15 May 1853, CMSA, CC1/O/12. 42 Budd, Journal, 29 December 1867, CMSA, CC1/O/12. 43 Budd, Journal, 29 December 1867, CMSA, CC1/O/12. 44 Tiyo Soga to John Cumming, 18 September 1862, Cumming Collection, MSB 139, 5 (137), National Library of South Africa, Cape Town.

90  Tolly Bradford 45 For a description of Soga’s work as an ethnographer/historian, see Chalmers, Soga, 344–58. 46 Peel, Religious Encounter, 15–16. 47 Chalmers, Soga, 132. 48 “What Is the Destiny of the Kafir Race?” King William’s Town Gazette, 11 May 1865, cited in Soga, Journal and Selected Writings, 180.

4 State-Sponsored Photography and Assimilation Policy in Canada and New Zealand a nge la wan h al l a

In New Zealand, the United States, and Canada, the agency responsible for Aboriginal affairs employed photography as a striking and innovative way in which to report on the progress of assimilation policy. In Canada, assimilation policy played out on native reserves, where communities were subject to federal legislation that instituted total control and management of reserves and their members.1 Protection and civilization were the goals, the reserve was where they took place, and the Department of Indian Affairs (DIA) and its agents directed this policy, as established under the Indian Act 1876, with assistance from the North-West Mounted Police and missionaries. Under the act, federal officials had extensive powers to monitor all aspects of social and cultural life. A network of Indian agents worked under the auspices of the department. Over the years it expanded to include agency inspectors, school inspectors, farm instructors, and field matrons, demonstrating not only the bureaucratic growth of the DIA but also its increasing power to monitor and regulate lives. Photographers were also an integral part of this network of governance and surveillance, and because of this, assimilation policy has a visual history. Aboriginal peoples in New Zealand and Canada share a history of settler colonialism. Assimilation policy is just one legacy of that past. While shaped by the local conditions, assimilation policy also evolved out of the global transfer and exchange of imperial racial ideas constituting one of the “historical processes and relationships that transcend  nation states and that connect apparently separate worlds.”2 Because it is local in its application and global in its reach, colonial racial policy offers one way of approaching transnational history, which is marked by an interest in the transfer of ideas and the connections

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between people, networks, beliefs, and processes across “politically bounded territories.”3 Unlike colonial racial policy, which has been subject to comparative historical interpretations, histories of photography are often nationbound stories of technological developments and achievements.4 But photographic technology was exported around the world and the practice taken up by a range of peoples, and as photographs were made into postcards from the late nineteenth century, they formed a global network of communication and commerce. In settler societies, photography offers a useful point from which to explore historical processes, policies, or experiences in transnational terms because, after all, photography was harnessed to imperial and colonial ambitions in the nineteenth century for a range of purposes. Because histories of colonization and photographic development coincide in Canada and New Zealand, and because of its international reach, photography has transnational possibilities for interpreting the impact of settler colonialism and racial policy, highlighting connections across diverse sites and histories. There are many photographic collections and archives that have yet to attract scholarly attention. A significant percentage of photographs of Aboriginal peoples produced from the late nineteenth century were state-sponsored and widely published, particularly in the settler colonies of Canada and New Zealand. Both governments deliberately employed photographers and the photographic medium to record and publicize successful assimilation, which encompassed a set of physical, social, economic, and cultural transformations. This chapter addresses the connective histories of race, statecraft, and the visual through an analysis of the state-sponsored photographic archives that arose out of colonial racial policies, as well as their use and deployment. I examine the 156 images published in the annual reports of the Department of Indian Affairs, the federal agency established in 1880 to administer and manage the Aboriginal population resident on native reserves in Canada, and connect them to a similar set of processes in New Zealand, where a hard-line assimilation policy was directed at children through the native schools system from 1867. I focus on only a small selection of the state-sponsored photographic archives from New Zealand and Canada, drawing upon the images reproduced in the annual reports of the agencies responsible for Aboriginal affairs in each country, to examine their shared visual language of assimilation. Rather than tell a simple story of how photographs were used for propaganda purposes, I point to the possibilities of photographs as acts of Aboriginal resistance

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to colonial policy, and draw attention to contemporary uses of these photographs as part of the process of coming to terms with the physical, emotional, and psychological legacies of settler colonialism. Photography and Aboriginal Peoples

By the last decades of the nineteenth century, racial science, technological innovations that enabled the mass production of images, and the development of a commercial market for ethnographic photographs sharpened the focus of the photographic medium upon Aboriginal peoples across a range of settler societies.5 As many scholars have noted, much of the imagery attached to Aboriginal peoples of the western United States, Canada, New Zealand, and the Pacific was highly romanticized, often ethnographically focused, and rarely a truthful or faithful depiction of lives and the spaces people inhabited. Much attention has been paid to the market in “exotic” photographs, but this can be a limiting frame through which to view the visual record of colonial history and the place of Aboriginal peoples in settler societies, for focusing on how Aboriginal peoples have been represented, as post­ colonial scholars have forcefully argued for a number of decades, leaves invisible their acts of resistance to the photographic trade, as well as their interest in the camera.6 While state-sponsored photographs of Aboriginal peoples worked to a specific agenda, a close reading of the content and context of production, and their use, helpfully points to instances of Aboriginal resistance to assimilation, as well as their engagement with the photographic medium. In Canada, the federal government commissioned photographs from the 1860s, but it was not until 1895 that the Department of Indian Affairs began to publish photographs to demonstrate the “successful” transition of Aboriginal peoples to a “settled way of life” on what Cole Harris describes as “native spaces.”7 Of the 156 DIA photographs, 141 focus on western Canada when assimilation policy was extended into that region in the wake of treaties, and as reserves were surveyed and set aside. A vast array of imagery related to the Canadian West was produced from this time, in order to encourage Euro-Canadian settlement there, and the DIA photographs form just one part of how the West was “imagined” and “represented.” Photographs of Aboriginal peoples settled on reserves, engaged in labour, and at school, offered proof the area was safe for settlement when a concerted immigration campaign to fill empty spaces was initiated in 1897.

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Established in 1847, New Zealand’s Department of Native Affairs focused on the purchase of Maori-owned land for settlement and remained concerned with this into the early twentieth century. Opening land up for settlement was crucial to colonization, but the department also directed, from 1865, that Maori-owned land be transferred from communal to individual title as part of the process of assimilating the indigenous population to “civilized” ways of living. Land ownership was essential to assimilation, as was education. Euro-Canadians shared these views, but the New Zealand government differed in their application of them. Reserves were never an important feature of the Maori experience in New Zealand. Instead, the New Zealand government directed its attention to the native schools system, and, from the early twentieth century, took an interest in improving the standards of health, housing, and sanitation in Maori communities, where their key agents of assimilation were schoolteachers, health officers, and local doctors. Apart from policy agendas, technological innovations also enabled state-sponsored photographs of assimilation in action to be published. A total of 150 DIA photographs were published in annual reports between 1895 and 1905, with a further four published in 1912, and the ­final two in 1930. Publication began in 1895 because the recent introduction of half-tone technology meant images could easily be set aside text, fusing the written record with visual data.8 Half-tone technology brought photographs into a broad range of print culture, and integrated them into new institutional contexts. Half-tone technology also meant that photographs could be mass-produced, widely circulated, and reproduced in multiple sites, including annual reports of government departments. Technological innovations shaped the possibilities  of state-sponsored photography in New Zealand too, with the Department of Education producing photographs in its annual reports from the early twentieth century, totalling ninety-five images by 1913. The Department of Native Affairs took up photography sporadically, often in concert with the elaboration of new policy, offering photographs as proof of its successes. In the wake of the devastation of the influenza pandemic of 1918–19, a new focus on health and sanitation gave impetus to new interventions in communities, including, for the first time, government funding to support the building of houses for Maori families across the country. It was a short-lived policy, but it produced a wealth of state-sponsored photographs evidencing Maori uptake of new housing forms in 131 images published between 1937 and 1939.

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That photography was employed to document the reach of colonial policy, particularly its “successes,” is not a startling revelation for anyone interested in the relationship between visual culture and colonialism.9 Canadian historians, in particular, have charted the relationship between colonialism and photography since the 1980s.10 Photographs, as Carol Payne has eloquently argued, were employed by a wide range of government departments to “justify Aboriginal acculturation, promote northern and western settlement, establish borders, serve military efforts, advertise Canadian industry, and provide visual endorsements of numerous other bureaucratic initiatives.”11 Photographers were active participants of numerous nineteenth-century scientific expeditions with federal sponsorship and support that assisted in the opening up of the West for settlement. The photographs produced as a result of the patronage of the Department of Indian Affairs, however, have not received as much attention as those images deployed in aid of colonial development, despite the fact that DIA photographs have been used by historians to make claims about assimilation policy and its impact on Aboriginal peoples. A similar history of neglect exists in New Zealand, where state-sponsored photographs are useful illustrative devices, but the context of their production and their publication have not been the subject of extensive research, nor have historians regarded them as part of the practice of assimilation in that country.12 The Photographs and Their Past State-sponsored photography in Canada emerged out of an alliance of  commercial, scientific, and federal interests. The DIA photographs originate from a number of sources, particularly commercial photographers who were hired by the Indian commissioner of a region, or the Indian agent of a native reserve, to produce a photographic record designed to supplement written reports submitted to the department. The DIA drew on an established process of government patronage of commercial photographers, beginning with British Columbia’s Boundary Commission (1858–62). When British Columbia joined Canada in 1871, federal Indian policy was extended to the region by Dr Israel Wood Powell, who was appointed Indian commissioner in 1872. As commissioner, Powell undertook annual coastal tours of inspection to conduct censuses, to allocate reserves, and for diplomatic reasons.13 Powell ­documented these tours for the minister of Indian affairs in textual and photographic form. Richard Maynard, who with his wife, Hannah,

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established one of the earliest commercial photography studios in Victoria, accompanied Powell on his 1872 and 1873 tours.14 Edward Dossetter, an American photographer based in Victoria, was on Powell’s 1881 tour, and Oregon Columbus Hastings, another American, was on Powell’s 1879 tour. Some of the photographs supplemented Powell’s reports, but the majority became embedded in the commercial market of Victoria, drawing on a popular interest in ethnographic images. Commercial photographers had multiple markets and numerous patrons: they worked for the federal government and in the interests of science and ethnography, and they mediated these closely connected worlds. When Powell visited the Queen Charlotte Islands (now Haida Gwaii) on his 1879 tour, photographs of the Haida were taken, as was their material culture (and bones), with 350 objects collected for museums.15 Museum anthropologists continued the process of collecting from the 1880s, employing photographers to document their scientific expeditions.16 O.C. Hastings, for instance, undertook photographic work for Franz Boas at Fort Rupert, Vancouver Island, in 1894.17 As a result of a “convergence of interests” between science (ethnographers and museums), commerce, and federal desires, certain types of photographs appear in the DIA record: ethnographic portraits (figure 4.1), before-and-­ after conversion images, and panoramic views of reserves and residential schools showing “productive, orderly and disciplined” spaces.18 The key components of assimilation policy – education, Christianity, housing, and agricultural settlement – are popular subjects of the DIA photographs. Of the images, eighty-three relate to education, depicting industrial, boarding, and day schools and pupils and their daily routines. Thirty-two photographs of farms and labour practices on reserves document the transition to individual properties and the success of agricultural policy, often illustrated by the purchase of new implements, improvements to farm buildings, and mechanization. Images of labour practices also document changes in Aboriginal masculinity and femininity, attaching manhood to wage labour and womanhood to the sphere of the home, children, and family. Dwellings, domesticity, and family homes are strongly represented in the photographic record. Christianity also features, in the form of Catholic priests and nuns in school photographs and images of mission villages. A handful of photographs are ethnographic in nature, following the visual genre of photo-­ethnography with its interest in material culture. Although most photographs are not ethnographic in subject matter, they do follow the scientific convention of not identifying individuals, rendering them nameless.

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4.1  “Indian Chief, Skeena River, BC.” Annual Report of the Department of Indian Affairs, Canada Sessional Papers 1901, 17.

DIA photographs record a policy of “total assimilation.” They were designed to provide evidence of the success of that policy, and when considered alongside the textual record, both the annual reports and captions, it is clear photographs were marshalled as “evidence” of assimilation. Captions, text, and photographs preserve a federal view of assimilation policy “within a concrete and bounded report,”19 one meant for display and public consumption beyond the confines of the government agency that produced it. Reports perform a visual narrative;

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some thought has gone into its overall construction, structure, contents, and the placement of photographs with the associated text. The photographs, and the reports in which they are embedded, are public documents demonstrative of federal policy and colonial authority. Reports and captions explicitly highlighted and interpreted transformation for the reader. The most recognizable photographs of “successful assimilation” relate to residential schools, like the before-and-after “conversion” photographs of Thomas Moore, “as he appeared when admitted to the Regina Industrial School” in 1896 and “after tuition at the Regina Industrial School” (figure 4.2 and figure 4.3). These photographs of Moore have been repeatedly published and are claimed as symbolic of the potent changes wrought by assimilation policy within Canadian residential schools, but in many cases the images have been incorrectly dated and sourced.20 Most significantly, no critical analysis of the photographs has been undertaken. These are studio portraits, staged to invite an audience to share in the startling success of residential schooling. No one has asked who Moore was, and who he became. Nor has much thought been given to treating the photographs as material objects, situating them within the context in which they were produced, and exploring the particular purpose for which they were created. Instead, the photographs have been divorced from the context of the DIA record-keeping mechanisms, and Thomas Moore has been rendered invisible, a “captive” of assimilation policy.21 All components of reserve life were open to “visual inspection,” reflecting the pervasiveness of assimilation policy.22 This is most evident in DIA photographs of houses. As a site of intervention into Aboriginal society, housing native families in western-style dwellings, in combination with education and farming policies, played an important role in achieving assimilation. Housing was linked to the total transformation of a traditional way of life and “a better order of things.”23 Living in a western-style home signalled the successful transition to individual holdings, resulting in “superior houses, better fences, larger fields, [and] more carefully and more extensively cultivated areas.”24 Even though the format of DIA reports changed dramatically over the period under study, the house was a constant feature and was consistently linked to health, sanitation, morality, and citizenship because “fixity of residence [is] fundamental to civilization.”25 These ideals were embedded in a narrative of progressive assimi­ lation in which text, caption, and before-and-after photographs were linked. Viewed in sequence, it is clear photographs were designed to

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chart the “process of evolution” outlined by the superintendent general in 1905: [The] first stage in the process of evolution constitutes no great advance upon the teepee or wigwam, and consists of a small low-roofed cabin made of logs, with a floor of mud, a roof of the same material or of thatch, with or without an opening for a window, and another in the roof as an outlet for the smoke from the fire kindled in a hole or within a circle of stones in the centre of a single room … The introduction of light, ventilation, partitioning into separate rooms and finally of adornment is a very gradual process.26

Before-and-after photographs proved claims of progress and transformation. An “Old time house” in the Assiniboine Agency was contrasted in 1900 with the new house of Charles Rider, the headman within that agency (figure 4.4 and figure 4.5). Rider’s home was whitewashed, had a shingle roof, tidy surrounds, and windows. His new home conformed to the superintendent general’s understanding of the first step towards a higher standard of living. His home made visible a successful attainment of progress and modernity in its exterior: the surroundings were tidy, and it possessed the shingle roof so highly valued by the DIA. Architectural transformation was also linked to new spatial routines and uses of interior space. Houses were increasingly “subdivided into apartments.”27 Subdivision “encourages a seemly separation of and decent privacy between the sexes.”28 The “modern Indian house” at Nass River is not just depicted as “modern” in its structure and materials, but the presence of the group on the veranda signals it was an appropriate and respectable home for a nuclear family (figure 4.6). As a “modern” house it was also likely to be “moral,” comprising separate sleeping quarters rather than the communal arrangements of the traditional multi-family dwelling. Annual reports illustrate that the DIA was invested in the home as a transformative agent, which had gendered outcomes. A home that followed Euro-Canadian conventions was equated with the development of individual property rights and improvements to it proved the successful implementation of a cash economy, thus reformulating men as economic subjects.29 This shift was reinforced by images of men at work on the reserve, in agriculture or wage labour, illustrating the desired virtues of masculinity, such as industry and independence. Jim Big

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4.2  “Thomas Moore, as he appeared when admitted to the Regina Industrial School.” Annual Report of the Department of Indian Affairs, Canada Sessional Papers 1897, 1v.

Plume’s home represented the “modern” homes being erected on the Sarcee Reserve in Alberta (figure 4.7). The extent of its modernity was confirmed by not only the physical structure of the home, but also its conveniences and modern furnishings and its “bright and clean” appearance.30 Plume’s home represented the next stage of “evolution” and the corollary of gendered propriety. The residence of Alfred Dudoward (figure 4.8), chief of the Port Simpson Band in British Columbia, is the last house depicted in the DIA reports and represents the final stage of “evolution” by “render[ing] them attractive.”31 The dwellings of the Port Simpson Band in the North­west Coast Indian Agency in British Columbia were “pre-­eminent among the Indians of the agency.” They have “in the vicinity of two hundred modern, substantial, and in numerous cases, handsome

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4.3  “Thomas Moore, after tuition at the Regina Industrial School.” Annual Report of the Department of Indian Affairs, Canada Sessional Papers 1897, 1v.

dwellings.”32 But the addition of an ornate exterior cannot be interpreted simply as an expression of successful assimilation. While such additions were praised by the DIA, they were in fact a common architectural expression of status and prestige among bands in British Columbia.33 Nevertheless, the trail of housing-related images tells a story of “evo­ lution” and conversion, leading to Dudoward, a convert of Thomas Crosby to Methodism, and converted through assimilation to a EuroCanadian way of life. In its early iterations, state-sponsored photography in New Zealand was put to work in support of land settlement and tourism. As in Canada, the state drew upon the output of commercial photographers, some of whom worked hard to gain the government’s patronage.34 As in Canada, photography began as a commercial enterprise, and it

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4.4  “Old time house in Assiniboine Agency near Wolseley.” Department of Indian Affairs Annual Report, Canada Sessional Papers 1901, 64.

4.5  “New house (not quite finished) belonging to headman Charles Rider in Assiniboine Agency, near Wolseley.” Annual Report of the Department of Indian Affairs, Canada Sessional Papers 1901, 80.

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4.6  “Modern Indian House, Ayanash, Nass River, BC.” Annual Report of the Department of Indian Affairs, Canada Sessional Papers 1902, 224.

too was co-opted by the state as an easy, economic and effective way to advertise and promote the country’s progress and development. De­ pictions of bridges, roads, and the railway featured heavily, and, as New Zealand’s thermal regions became an increasingly popular location for international visitors, images of exotic peoples and places were widely reproduced in aid of marketing the country to potential tourists. Photographic work was also easily integrated into the work of the Native and Education Departments, functioning to demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of applied assimilation at school and in the home. As in Canada, Maori housing was also the subject of intervention in New Zealand and was intimately tied to the question of health. In the  nineteenth century, Maori were considered to be a “dying race.” Tuberculosis, smallpox, measles, and other introduced diseases were a common feature in Maori communities in the nineteenth century and continued to be prominent into the early twentieth century. Maori homes were subjected to numerous investigations by a range of health

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4.7  “Jim Big Plume and wife, minor chief, Sarcee Reserve, near Calgary, Alta.” Annual Report of the Department of Indian Affairs, Canada Sessional Papers 1903, 192.

and welfare agents, who positioned houses as the centrepiece of reform. The activities of native health officers, established in 1901, and native sanitary inspectors, for instance, centred on house-to-house inspections, and they had the power to condemn houses and recommend improvements.35 The 1918–19 influenza pandemic, in which the Maori death rate was ten times that of the non-Maori population, was a turning point in the history of health and welfare services to Maori. The epidemic brought many observers and officials into Maori communities, and they often commented on what they considered to be “shocking” living conditions. They described houses as “hovels” and communities as “slums” and as “filthy.” The revelations of the flu epidemic, and the fear that disease would spread into neighbouring towns, brought a new focus on Maori welfare and led to a major effort in the 1920s and 1930s by the Health Department and Native Department officers to improve sanitation. This included the establishment of the Native Hygiene section of the Health Department under the Health Act 1920 and the availability

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4.8  “Residence of A.S. Dudoward, Indian Chief of Port Simpson, BC.” Annual Report of the Department of Indian Affairs, Canada Sessional Papers 1906, 160.

of state assistance for Maori housing in the form of loans for the first time in the 1930s. Transformations rendered to the houses using state funding were recorded in the annual reports of the Native Department, particularly in the years 1937 to 1939, when the state scheme had been extended across much of the country.36 During this three-year period, the Native Depart­ ment published 131 photographs in its annual reports. Like those of the DIA in Canada, these photographs depicting agricultural successes, labour and employment, and domestic life spoke to broader transfor­ mations in Maori masculinity and femininity. Of the 131 photographs, 47  depicted houses, and they followed the visual conventions of the DIA photographs, particularly the before-and-after photograph (figure 4.9). Similarly, architectural transformation signalled an “evolution” to what government officials and the non-Maori public would recognize as an acceptable, modern way of life. Families standing at the entrance of the home, men’s labour on the property, and depictions of gardens were common visual motifs that signalled a shift in the use of space and gestured towards the gendered division of labour in the home.

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The government-sponsored pictorial records in New Zealand and Canada also share a focus on education. Residential schools dominate the pictorial record of the DIA, and native schools are the centrepiece of  the visual archives created by the Education Department in New Zealand. Assimilation policy in New Zealand emerged from a much older colonial policy of “racial amalgamation,” which was designed to draw Maori into the structures and institutions of colonial society, ­notably through capitalism and commerce, as well as biologically by encouraging interracial marriage.37 After several years of interracial conflict between Maori, the Crown, and settlers over land and sovereignty during the 1860s, the settler government introduced a more aggressive policy of cultural transformation with the native school system in 1867. By the last decade of the nineteenth century, native schools followed an English-only language policy and taught a practical curriculum that emphasized agricultural and manual training for boys and domestic instruction for girls. Native schools did not become a common experience for Maori until the turn of the twentieth century, and it was at this time that the Educa­ tion Department began to publish photographs of the native school system and its students in its annual reports. From 1902 until 1913, a total of ninety-five images of schools were published in annual reports, depicting government-run native schools as well as the single-sex Maori boarding schools run by the Anglican, Catholic, and Presbyterian churches.38 Many of these images have been widely reproduced. The most recent scholarly publication on the history of the native schools system, which ended in 1969, employs photographs from the Education Department, such as figure 4.10, but makes no comment on the role of these photographs in annual reports.39 In Canada and the United States residential and boarding schools have a “peculiar iconography.”40 Standard images portray children sporting uniforms and cropped hair lined up in front of the institution, as well the contrasting “before” or conversion photograph. All aspects of school life are represented: drill, sport, engagement in domestic and

4.9  (facing page) Before and after photographs of Maori-occupied homes in 1938, showing­new houses erected under a state-funded housing scheme, Annual Report of the Native Department, Appendices to the Journal of the House of Representatives (AJHR), G-10, 1938, 94.

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4.10  “Practical Dressmaking in the Far North – Hapua.” Annual Report of the Education Department, Appendices to the Journals of the House of Representatives, E-2, 1907, unpaginated.

manual/industrial education, and brass bands. Panoramic, monumental images of buildings and landscapes were also common.41 Very similar images circulate in the New Zealand record. Among the most common are the photographs of children positioned in front of the schoolhouse or actively engaged in the practical curriculum, such as dressmaking or agricultural pursuits. Leisure is also depicted, most notably in the form of school bands. Images of Canadian residential schools have been described as “internment photographs,” evoking the history of pain attached to the residential school experience. Schools suffered financial difficulties, so self-sufficiency was encouraged. Children were put to work maintaining school grounds and gardens, painting, milking cows, planting and harvesting, sewing, laundering, and cooking. Self-sufficiency lent itself to the inculcation of citizenship and provided the practical training needed for living on reserve. As in New Zealand, DIA photographs

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capture the labour of children that assisted to maintain and operate the institution.42 What the photographs do not explicitly show is how common it was to be hungry and cold, and suffering poor health. Tuber­ culosis was endemic. Being frightened was part of the residential school experience. In more recent decades revelations of physical and emotional harm have been overtaken by scandals of sexual abuse, resulting in several court cases in the 1980s and 1990s.43 In an article entitled “Torture and the Ethics of Photography,” Judith Butler, writing specifically about the treatment of Iraqi prisoners by the US military and the subsequent publication of photographs depicting abuse, asks us to “consider the way in which suffering is presented to us, and how that presentation affects our responsiveness.”44 Photographs are emotional objects; they can be confronting, and in some cases, we “react with outrage when lives are degraded or eviscerated without regard for their value.”45 Assimilation is a much less overt kind of torture involving the destruction of language and culture. In discussing torture and its depiction, Butler is exposing the “relationship between the camera and ethical responsiveness.” A similar kind of relationship exists between the historian and photographs that emerge from a context of abuse, bringing with it a duty to be ethically responsible to the subjects.46 Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission is grappling with the history of residential schools, the survivor experience, and how these have been registered and rendered in the archives. Oral testimony has emerged as a key conduit for expressing the history of residential schools, and like photographs, it directs our attention to the emotive legacy of the colonial past.47 In light of this, archival traces and photographs of residential schools found in DIA reports represent more than “a mundane component of modern bureaucratic record keeping.”48 I wish to move beyond the obvious reading of state-sponsored photographs as merely devices to promote and celebrate successful colonial policies. The DIA photographs, for example, do offer examples of resistance to assimilation policy. An 1899 image entitled “A typical Indian home,” in fact depicts not one but three homes: a western structure, a tipi, and a second tipi under construction. There are other images that undermine and challenge the success of “assimilation” in the published photographic record of the DIA, including several images depicting Aboriginal peoples engaged in the colonial economy beyond the boundaries of the reserve, and two photographs of Joseph Meuse “taken by his wife.” In order to gain an understanding of the complex and sophisticated engagement of Aboriginal peoples in western

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Canada with federal policy, and to recover agency and, potentially, an alternative history, visual repatriation of the photographs to their communities of origin must be undertaken. Without visual repatriation, these photographs will remain “captive” to a history of assimilation.49 Interpretation of photographs is dependent on the gaze and the context of viewing. In some hands, DIA photographs are merely representations of assimilation policy, but this is only one reading on offer. For some, DIA photographs are invested with trauma, suffering, and other emotions. For others, they are images of relatives. When photographs are recognized as material objects with a past, multiple histories and cultural legacies can be acknowledged. State-sponsored photographs may have been produced in a context of assimilation, but their material  lives and productive use did not end with their publication. In­ stead, they have been used to assert particular claims. In the wake of the Canadian government’s formal apology to survivors of residential schools in 2008, DIA photographs were used in documentaries and print media as evidence of children’s experiences. These same images were also cited as evidence of a very different history and marshalled to undermine the claims of residential school survivors. We must be attentive to the history of the photographic record and the way it is used so that colonialism, and its impact, is not continually claimed as benign. NOTES 1 Evelyn J. Peters, “Aboriginal People and Canadian Geography: A Review of the Recent Literature,” Canadian Geographer 44, no. 1 (2000): 48. 2 Ann Curthoys and Marilyn Lake, eds., Connected Worlds: History in Transnational Perspective (Canberra: ANU E Press, 2005), 5. 3 C.A. Bayly, Sven Beckert, Matthew Connelly, Isabel Hofmeyr, Wendy Kozol, and Patricia Seed, “AHR Conversation: On Transnational History,” American Historical Review 111, no. 50 (December 2006): 1446. 4 See Alan Lester, “British Settler Discourse and the Circuits of Empire,” History Workshop Journal 54 (2002): 27–50; Daiva Stasiulis and Nira YuvalDavis, eds., Unsettling Settler Societies: Articulations of Gender, Race, Ethnicity and Class (London: Sage, 1995). On assimilation policy, see Andrew Armitage, Comparing the Policy of Aboriginal Assimilation: Australia, Canada and New Zealand (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1995). 5 Elizabeth Edwards, Anthropology and Photography, 1860–1920 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992); Jane Lydon, Eye Contact: Photographing

State-Sponsored Photography and Assimilation Policy  111 Indigenous Australians (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005); Nancy Stepan, Picturing Tropical Nature (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001). 6 Max Quanchi, “Visual Histories and Photographic Evidence,” Journal of Pacific History 41, no. 2 (2006): 172. 7 Cole Harris, Making Native Space: Colonialism, Resistance, and Reserves in British Columbia (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2002). 8 Carol Williams, Framing the West: Race, Gender, and the Photographic Frontier in the Pacific Northwest (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 9. 9 James Ryan, Picturing Empire: Photography and the Visualisation of the British Empire (London: Reaktion Books, 1997); Martha Schwartz and James Ryan, eds., Picturing Place: Photography and the Geographical Imagination (London: I.B. Tauris, 2003); Eleanor M. Hight and Gary D. Sampson, eds., Colonial­ ist Photography: Imag(in)ing Race and Place (London: Routledge, 2002); Christopher Pinney and Nicolas Peterson, eds., Photography’s Other Histories (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003); Martha A. Sandweiss, Print the Legend: Photography and the American West (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002). 10 Margaret B. Blackman, “‘Copying People’: Northwest Coast Native Response to Early Photography,” BC Studies, no. 52 (Winter 1981): 86–112; Daniel Francis, Copying People: Photographing British Columbia First Nations (Saskatoon: Fifth House, 1996); Brock Silversides, The Face Pullers: Photo­ graphing Native Canadians, 1871–1939 (Saskatoon: Fifth House, 1994); Dan Savard, “Changing Images: Photographic Collections of First Peoples of the Pacific Northwest Coast Held in the Royal British Columbia Museum, 1860–1920,” BC Studies, no. 145 (Spring 2005): 55–96; Williams, Framing the West. 11 Carol Payne, “Through a Canadian Lens: Discourses of Nationalism and Aboriginal Representation in Governmental Photographs,” in Canadian Cultural Poesis: Essays on Canadian Culture, ed. Garry Sherbert, Annie Gerin, and Sheila Petty (Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2006), 422–3. 12 Carol Payne and Andrea Kunard, eds., The Cultural Work of Photography in Canada (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2011); Angela Wanhalla and Erika Wolf, eds., Early New Zealand Photography: Images and Essays (Dunedin: Otago University Press, 2011). 13 Williams, Framing the West, 12. 14 Francis, Copying People, 12. 15 Williams, Framing the West, 79. 16 Francis, Copying People, 4. 17 Francis, Framing the West, 12.

112  Angela Wanhalla 18 Jane Lydon, “‘Our Sense of Beauty’: Visuality, Space and Gender on Victoria’s Aboriginal Reserves, South-Eastern Australia,” History and Anthropology 16, no. 2 (June 2005): 220. 19 Martha Langford, Suspended Conversations: The Afterlife of Memory in Photographic Albums (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001), 63. 20 See John Milloy, A National Crime: The Canadian Government and the Residential Schools System, 1879 to 1986 (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 1999), which features Thomas Moore on the cover. See also J.R. Miller, Shingwauk’s Vision: A History of Native Residential Schools (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996). Jim Miller proposes that using photographs, in combination with oral history, is a methodology with much promise, particularly for historians interested in the residential school ­experience. See J.R. Miller, “Reading Photographs, Reading Voices: Documenting the History of Native Residential Schools,” in Reading ­beyond Words: Contexts for Native History, ed. Jennifer S.H. Brown and Elizabeth Vibert (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 1996), 461–81. 21 On children, residential schools, and photography in Canada, see Sherry Farrell Racette, “Haunted: First Nations Children in Residential School Photography,” in Depicting Canada’s Children, ed. Loren Lerner (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2009), 49–84. 22 Lydon, “‘Our Sense of Beauty,’” 220. 23 Adele Perry, “‘From the hot-bed of vice’ to the ‘good and well-ordered Christian home’: First Nations Housing and Reform in British Columbia,” Ethnohistory 50, no. 4 (2003): 587–610; Pamela M. White, “Restructuring the Domestic Sphere – Prairie Indian Women on Reserves: Image, Ideology and State Policy, 1880–1930,” PhD diss., McGill University (1987); MaryEllen Kelm, Colonizing Bodies: Aboriginal Health and Healing in British Columbia 1900–50 (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2001). Also see Paige Raibmon, “Living on Display: Colonial Visions of Aboriginal Domestic Space,” BC Studies, no. 140 (Winter 2003): 69–89. 24 Annual Report 1889, Canada Sessional Papers 1890, 1. 25 Annual Report 1910, Canada Sessional Papers 1911, xxii. 26 Annual Report 1905, Canada Sessional Papers 1906, xxii. 27 Annual Report 1889, Canada Sessional Papers 1890, xiv. 28 Annual Report 1908, Canada Sessional Papers 1909, xxxii. 29 Perry, “‘From the hot-bed,’” 596. 30 Annual Report 1903, Canada Sessional Papers 1904, 219. 31 Annual Report 1905, Canada Sessional Papers 1906, xxiii. 32 Ibid., 241.

State-Sponsored Photography and Assimilation Policy  113 33 David M. Schaepe, Albert (Sonny) McHasie, Keith Thor Carlson, and Patricia Ormerod, “Changing Households, Changing Homes,” in A Sto:lo Coast Salish Historical Atlas, ed. Keith Carlson (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2001), 43. 34 On the relationship between commercial photography and the state in New Zealand see Christine Whybrew, “The Burton Brothers Studio: Commerce in Photography and the Marketing of New Zealand, 1866– 1898,” PhD diss., University of Otago (2010). 35 Raeburn Lange, May the People Live: A History of Maori Health Development, 1900–1918 (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1999), 214. 36 For more detailed discussion of state-sponsored photographs of Maori housing, see Angela Wanhalla, “Housing Un/healthy Bodies: Native Housing Surveys and Maori Health, 1900–35,” Health and History 8, no. 1 (2006): 100–20. 37 See Alan Ward, A Show of Justice: Racial “Amalgamation” in Nineteenthcentury New Zealand (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1973), and Damon I. Salesa, Racial Crossings: Race, Intermarriage and the Victorian British Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 38 Native schools were established under legislation in 1867. Church boarding schools have a much longer history, having developed out of the early Anglican, Methodist, and Catholic missions to New Zealand. Many of the church boarding schools were fully established by the 1840s and 1850s. 39 John Barrington, Separate but Equal? Maori Schools and the Crown, 1867–1969 (Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2008). 40 Eric Margolis, “Looking at Discipline, Looking at Labour: Photographic Representations of Indian Boarding Schools,” Visual Culture 19, no. 1 (2004): 72. 41 Ibid., 81. 42 Ibid., 84. 43 For reflections on how we interpret and register the impact of settler colonialism, see Dian Million, “Telling Secrets: Sex, Power and Narratives in Indian Residential School Histories,” Canadian Woman Studies / Les Cahiers de la Femme 20, no. 2 (2000): 92–104, and Adele Perry, “The Autocracy of Love and Legitimacy of Empire: Intimacy, Power and Scandal in Nineteenth-century Metlakahtlah,” Gender & History 16, no. 2 (2004): 261–88. 44 Judith Butler, “Torture and the Ethics of Photography,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 25, no. 6 (2007): 951. 45 Ibid., 955. 46 Ibid., 963.

114  Angela Wanhalla 47 The scholarship on reconciliation in Canada is large and ranges across a number of disciplines and perspectives. A good entry into the literature can be found in J.R. Miller, “Dealing with Residential School Survivors: Reconciliation in International Perspective,” Australasian Canadian Studies 26, no. 1 (2008). 48 Williams, Framing the West, 140. See also Joanna Sassoon, “The Politics of Pictures: A Cultural History of the Western Australian Government Print Photograph Collection,” Australian Historical Studies 35, no. 123 (2004): 16–36. 49 On visual repatriation see Carol Payne, “Lessons with Leah: Re-Reading the Photographic Archive of Nation in the National Film Board of Canada’s Still Photography Division,” Visual Studies 21, no. 1 (April 2006): 4–22, and Alison K. Brown and Laura Peers, with members of the Kainai Nation, “Pictures Bring Us Messages” / Sinaakssiiksi aohtsimaahpihkookiyaawa: Photographs and Histories from the Kainai Nation (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006).

5 Canada and Australia: On Anglo-Saxon “Oceana,” Transcolonial History, and an Interconnected Pacific World pen elope edmon ds

In 1886, James Froude, one of Victorian England’s most popular historians, wrote passionately on the rapid rise of “Oceana.” Within a “period so brief in the life of nations,” he forecast, “more than fifty million Anglo-Saxons would be spread over the vast continent of North America, carrying with them their religion, their laws, their language, and their manners.” In the southern hemisphere, too, Anglo-Saxons were “in possession of territories larger than Europe, and more fertile than the richest parts of it.” Froude assured his readers that “Wherever they went,” to Canada, Australia, New Zealand, or South Africa, AngloSaxons would “carry with them the genius of English freedom.”1 Froude’s Oceana echoed James Harrington’s 1656 The Commonwealth of Oceana, which Froude described as a “sketch of a perfect commonwealth, half real, half ideal,” that augured the future destiny for the “Scotch, English, and Anglo-Irish nations.” The idea of Oceana had, however, exceeded Harrington’s “wildest dreams,” stated Froude, and now it was reimagined and harnessed by Froude to depict Britain’s imperial, expansionist empire in the Pacific region. At the height of the British Empire, the term “Oceana” now invoked a transcolonial polity of Anglo-Saxon communities, racial “kin” who had colonized lands in the Pacific Ocean. In Froude’s view, common to many, these “unoccupied lands” were “properly the inheritance of the collective British nation.”2 Froude likened “Oceana” to a bountiful tree, and if the United States, its “first great branch” was “broken off” by revolution, nevertheless the “parent stock was still prolific.” Although the American provinces were lost to Britain, “New shoots sprang out again,” he proclaimed.3 Froude’s deep imperialist sentiments led him to view Britain’s failures in Ireland, Africa, and the West Indies as an issue of weakening

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national and moral resolve. He envisioned Oceana as an “organic union of race” mutually strengthening the settler colonies of the Pacific region: “One majestic organism which will defy the storms of fate.”4 Oceana was an imagined polity and a self-defining geographical entity. It was a historian’s term adopted from the English literary past, and it  became central to Froude’s utopian and racialist scheme aimed at the social and moral regeneration of the Anglo-Saxon race. For Froude, the British Empire’s fate “was linked inextricably to that of prized Oceana,” and Canada and Australia were drawn into this imagined utopian scheme.5 Scholarly comparison of Canada and Australia is now a well-­travelled path. These two nations are routinely compared according to economic and social factors, including legal genealogies and public health, labour, and immigration histories; in relation to their respective governments’ roles in Commonwealth affairs; and more recently in regard to Indigenous rights and reconciliation issues. Such comparative studies have generally reinforced the concept of nation-to-nation relations as centrally important and until recently have disregarded earlier his­ torical, political, and regional networks that have shaped Canadian and Australian polities and imperatives today. In the not so distant past, many postcolonial societies built from the British Empire sought to reject as irrelevant the imperial histories that formed them and asserted their nationalism. In seeking to foreground their national distinctiveness, many settler societies turned to social, cultural, and political histories. Yet such social and cultural history can only be understood through examination of the specific and particular dominant forms that were inherited from Britain; in other words, through the constitutive forces of British imperialism and its networks that shaped them.6 Within the academy, transnational and comparative histories have become a renewed and intense area of scholarly interest, particularly in the fields of colonial and postcolonial studies, where Indigenous agency, experience, and sovereignties are foregrounded.7 In this chapter, I turn to the mid- to late nineteenth century, taking a transcolonial and postcolonial approach to the history of Pacific NorthWest coast and south-eastern Australia. While I do not reject the term transnational, and appreciate its capacity to “highlight historical processes and relationships that transcend nation states and that connect ap­parently separate worlds,”8 I largely sidestep this term with its inherent teleology and tendency to presuppose a nationhood that

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the newcomer and Indigenous residents of newly created colonies of British Columbia, on the Pacific coast of North America, and Victoria, in south-eastern Australia, could barely have imagined. Scholars such as Frederick Cooper and Ann Stoler have urged not only that attention be paid to metropole–periphery relations, but also that the hierarchies between related colonies should be explored to show how they have “influenced each other, giving rise to common colonial structures with distinct but related sequences of change.”9 This chapter examines the histories of British Columbia and Victoria both as part of a colony-to-colony or intra-colonial comparative study and as implicitly part of a wider, networked British or anglophone “Pacific world.” I look to the cultural and political sphere of the anglophone Pacific world, or “Oceana,” just as others have used the organizing concept of an “Atlantic world.”10 Attendant to the writings of Froude, Charles Wentworth Dilke, and others, this chapter considers the cultural and discursive making and unmaking of these British colonial spaces as imagined Anglo-Saxon polities. It examines the histories of Indigenous dispossession and land in the mid-nineteenth century and the emergence of a discourse of Asian exclusion around the turn of the century. Both were anchored in ideas of British or Anglo-Saxon exceptionalism. These phenomena were not disparate but highly interrelated and part of the process of settler colonialism. If Froude’s “tree” was a metaphor for British colonization, then the “ship,” surely, has also been an enduring metaphor for immigration.11 These twin facets, colonization and immigration, the tree and the ship, must be considered synonymously, for they represent the key dynamic of settler colonialism; that is, the displacement of Indigenous peoples from their lands and their replacement with others, in this case British or anglophone peoples who identified as Anglo-Saxon. In particular, therefore, this paper considers British settler colonialism’s reorganization of bodies and spaces and the creation of new identities and polities in these Pacific colonial spheres, antecedent forces that have undoubtedly shaped the postcolonial present. Such colonial formations were shaped as much by their relations with local political specificities, places, and peoples, as by British interests and policies and were authorized through powerful racialized discourses of Anglo-Saxon exceptionalism and, later, whiteness, however unstable. As I argue, such discourses were offset by Indigenous peoples and racialized others and by the contingency and instability of AngloSaxonism itself as an imperial and transcolonial identity.

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A National Story of “Parallel Paths” The current Canadian government employs several historical rationales to explain relations between the Canadian and Australian nations. The website for the Canadian government’s diplomatic mission to Australia notes: “Canada and Australia have friendly and longstanding relations. The relationship is based on numerous similarities in the two countries’ historical development and is built on a multifaceted and productive web of political, commercial and cultural connections.”12 This official website borrows at length from Greg Donaghy’s “Parallel Paths: Canada-Australian Relations since the 1890s.”13 In Donaghy’s ­officially endorsed account, the empire in these “post”-colonial soci­ eties is not so much omitted or rejected in service to nationalism as it is rendered benign. While this account acknowledges that “Canada and Australia share a similar colonial past as members of the British Empire,” it emphasizes relations based largely on notions of closer growth due to  late-nineteenth-century technological and infrastructural developments, such as railway and shipping, leading to increased communication and trade and to a series of trade and policy events and manoeuvres. This economistic and external approach reflects a top-down projection of the shared imperial histories of these nations and is expressed by reference to colonial and imperial conferences jointly attended, the story of transition to Commonwealth, as well as a mention of shared convict histories and a scattering of shared colonial personnel. With the story of “parallel paths” beginning in 1895, when “Canada’s first trade commissioner travelled to Sydney,” after Canadian confederation and very close to Australian federation to nationhood in 1901, a  containment occurs whereby the settler-colonial origin of these nations is sealed off, and their crucial and contingent place in a network of British colonial relations – that is, the political and cultural structures upon which these nations were first built – is omitted. The narrative elides the foundational operations of settler colonialism and the forces of displacement and replacement that are its perpetual keystones. Crucially, the official story of Canada and Australia’s “numerous similarities” overlooks culture as a site of both mobilization and oppression. Powerful racial discourses of Anglo-Saxon and white exceptionalism and expansionism, such as Froude’s, shored up notions of empire abroad in these Pacific Rim sites and fed the self-fashioning of these sites as key nodes of Britain’s empire in the Pacific.

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Such presentist and popular government histories tend to dispatch with empire by depicting it as a benign historical legacy preceding nationhood without particular purchase or relevance today. This, of course, is evinced otherwise by the urgent and ongoing land and treaty negotiations between Aboriginal peoples and governments in both places, and by recent apologies from Canadian and Australian prime ministers to   former students of Indian residential schools and to the “Stolen Generations,” respectively.14 Indeed, if empire is an administrative and policy matter only for the past in official versions of nation-based history, other political forums that these nations attend attest otherwise. Discord among signatories of the United Nations’ Declara­tion on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples speaks powerfully to the ongoing relevance of the past in these nominally postcolonial societies. In draft form for over twenty years, the declaration was finally adopted in Septem­ ber  2007 – without the full support of the governments of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United States. These countries were the only four to cast a negative vote in the final adoption, and their objections were largely to do with the status of Indigenous customary law and land. Such refusals tell us much about the continuing imperatives of the former British Pacific Rim settler colonies and their attempts to deny the sovereignty, and land rights, of Indigenous peoples today.15 “New centres of light and civilisation on the Pacific”: Structural and Discursive Comparisons British Columbia, on the Pacific North-West coast, and Victoria, in south-eastern Australia, were each planted on Aboriginal lands, amidst groups of peoples whose cultures were rich and diverse. Europeans, mainly British, first imagined both places at the periphery of Britain’s empire as an “Eden,” land for the taking gifted by providence. On the Pacific North-West coast, newcomer presence began on Vancouver Island with small mercantilist settlements, land-based fur-trade forts that co-joined with Indigenous trade economies in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Along the coastal regions of south-­ eastern Australia, an early sealing and whaling industry operated. By the late 1830s, this was superseded by a fast-growing pastoral industry, which caused a land-grab that rapidly displaced Aboriginal peoples from their traditional lands. Europeans used Indigenous knowledge and labour to establish themselves, mapped the territory, and sought to

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fashion a European cognate space, whether through surveying and fencing the landscape or by building towns and cities.16 After separation from the colony of New South Wales in 1851, the greater Port Phillip region of south-eastern Australia became the colony of Victoria. In 1866, the struggling colony of Vancouver Island amalgamated with the mainland to form the colony of British Columbia. Both places were radically transformed from mercantile settlements by gold rushes, in south-eastern Australia in 1851 and on the Fraser River in British Columbia in 1858, marking a further loss of land and control for Aboriginal peoples. Each colony was largely administered from Britain’s Colonial Office in London, however partial and attenuated this was at times. Demographics are important: while the estimated number of southeastern Aboriginal peoples at the time of European contact was around 15,000, it is estimated that between 200,000 and 400,000 people may have lived on the North-West coast. These figures, however, reflect Indigenous demography after the devastation of smallpox epidemics; far larger populations probably lived in these lands before the European disease. Ultimately, settler-colonial endeavours would be largely destructive for Australian Aboriginal people of the Kulin Nation, the five related linguistic groups of south-eastern Australian Aborigines, and for the diverse First Nations groups in British Columbia.17 With Ab­ original populations severely reduced even before actual contact, peoples of the Kulin Nation and First Nations in British Columbia suffered a loss of land and were pushed into reserves and missions. Later, pernicious assimilative trajectories resulted in transformations and loss of language and culture, the effects of which are still present today.18 The peoples of the Kulin Nation and the First Nations of the NorthWest Coast and British Columbia’s interior, highly diverse cultures ­located on opposite edges of the Pacific Ocean, experienced similar colonial patterns of disease, land expropriation, and missionization through British colonization throughout the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Nevertheless, implicitly distinct Indigenous cultures must be taken into account, and these came to shape colonial patterns. In addition, crucial differences and departures also lie in key economic, legal, and demographic disparities: the fur trade versus pastoralism; treaties or their absence; levels of gradual industrialization, demanding different terms of engagement with colonial labour systems; gold rush transformations; and greatly variable attitudes to intermarriage, miscegenation, and assimilation. Importantly, Indigeneity in both places was

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made and remade over time by these European colonial structures. Shifting constructions of race, or racializations, in these two edges of empire are often far more different than is often acknowledged. In Port Phillip, one treaty, the dubious “Batman treaty” (1835), was brokered between Kulin Aboriginal peoples and the mercantilist Port Phillip Association. It was quickly declared null and void by Governor Richard Bourke because of the threat it posed to the British Crown’s wholesale appropriation of Indigenous lands. As Francis Forbes, chief justice of the colony of New South Wales, put it: “Much trouble may be occasioned if the Crown seems tacitly to assent to the right of the ­Savage to sell.”19 By mid-century, imperial sentiments on the land question  had  shifted. On Vancouver Island fourteen land-based agreements  for reserved areas, known as the Douglas treaties, were made between Governor James Douglas, as representative of the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC), and First Nations peoples in the early 1850s. These treaties were, in general terms, not honoured. Apart, then, from these treaties on Vancouver Island and Treaty 8, British Columbia stands in contrast to the rest of the Canada with its long tradition of treaty ­making. In sum, the colonies of Victoria and British Columbia have something in common – the fiction of terra nullius and its very material consequences of Indigenous dispossession. In his sweeping study of the acquisition of Indigenous lands by anglophone British and American settlers throughout the “Pacific world,” Stuart Banner describes the process of land expropriation in Australia as “terra nullius by design” and in British Columbia as “terra nullius as kindness,” whereby rights in land were at first recognized and then taken away for the “good” of First Nations peoples.20 At the very least, however, the Douglas treaties have placed Indigenous peoples within a discourse of sovereignty, and some gains have been made. The position of Indigenous peoples in relation to European economy and industry has had long-term ramifications for each society. Throughout the mid- to late nineteenth century, Aboriginal peoples of the North-West coast were by turns constructed as “lazy” and redundant or “hardworking,” depending on the colonial requirement of them; that is, based on the imminent requirement for land or labour, although of course settler colonialism required both.21 The terrain now known as British Columbia was initially dominated by the HBC, a mercantilist colonial entity that kept Aboriginal peoples largely on their lands and in control of their own economic systems. The fur trade did not initially “actively interfere with the native subsistence economy.”22

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Later, however, the development of huge fisheries and forestry industries required large pools of capital and wage labour, and, importantly, land. North-West coast Aboriginal peoples were increasingly fashioned as labourers, and British Columbia would later be dubbed the “company province.”23 First Nations workers were crucial to these kinds of industry, and by the late nineteenth century, as John Lutz has noted, they came to form the backbone of the colonial economy.24 In contrast, in south-eastern Australia, the Port Phillip region’s maritime mercantile systems of sealing and whaling had by the late 1830s given over to a boom in pastoralism and an influx of European settler-colonists. This was another, very different form of thoroughgoing industrialization, where markets were created in the metropole. But unlike the fisheries and forestry industries of British Columbia, the pastoral industry of Port Phillip did not require many Aboriginal people as labourers. In theory, the presence of convict and immigrant labour rendered Aborigi­ nal peoples largely unnecessary as labourers, and they were constructed increasingly as an economically redundant “dying race.” Yet, southeastern Aboriginal people were required as labourers by the settler economy.25 Importantly, however, both industrial systems on each side of the Pacific Ocean restructured the environment in such a way as to remove Indigenous people from their lands or reduce and regulate their presence within them. The gold rushes in California (1848–9), south-eastern Australia (1851), along the Fraser River in British Columbia (1858), and in Central Otago, New Zealand (1861–3), were deemed to be proof of the imperial destiny of the Anglo-Saxon races in the Pacific, where “the finger of Providence was manifest.”26 Two towns – Melbourne, in the colony of Victoria, and Victoria, on Vancouver Island – were imagined as hubs of empire, “lights of civilization” and Britishness on the Pacific Ocean.27 On Vancouver Island in 1859, at the height of the Fraser River gold rush, Alexander Morris delivered a lecture to an enthusiastic crowd at Victoria’s Mercantile Library Association: In the rapid planning of the Anglo-Saxon civilisation, the finger of providence was manifest … The discoveries of gold had singularly been the precursors of the mixed races, which for want of a better name were the Anglo-Saxon race. Thus the discovery of gold in California, next Australia … and now the discovery of gold in Columbia had planted a new centre of light and civilisation on the Pacific … Surely a time has come when all of it

Canada and Australia: An Interconnected Pacific World  123 that is fit for settlement should be thrown open for the immigrant … Vancouver’s Island … [is] a sort of England attached to America.28

Such racialized narratives of expropriation, settlement, and manifest destiny linked British white-settler colonies, and gesturing between them became common through trans-imperial networks. In 1862, in a similar mood of gold-rush optimism, R.C. Mayne wrote: “The least experienced eye could see the capabilities of the site of Victoria for a town, and that it was capable, should the occasion ever arise, of springing into importance as Melbourne or San Francisco had done.”29 The colony of Victoria and the colony of Vancouver Island gestured towards each other with reportage of imperial milestones and the growth of each colony in their respective newspapers. A commerce of ideas moved swiftly between the two in the late 1850s and 1860s. At the time of the Pacific North-West gold rush, its potential size and impact was projected to be as great as that of the Californian or south-east Australian gold rushes. Many hoped that the Victoria settlement, a supply centre for the gold rush, would be made prosperous by gold and immigration, like the centres of San Francisco and Melbourne. But it was not to be. The Fraser River gold rush, while drawing many thousands of immigrants and miners to Victoria and the North-West coast, was never to match the many tens of thousands of immigrants that swelled the population of California and the colony of Victoria in Australia.30 Boosted by the fervour of gold rushes, and speaking to the Royal Geographical Society in London on 12 December 1859, W.C. Grant observed that the colony of Vancouver Island, if properly developed, might be made profitable to Australia, and “the two distant extremities of the British Empire might thus be made to join hands, with mutual benefit to each other.”31 Despite such aspirations, any real trade between the Pacific North-West coast and Australia was not to occur until the late nineteenth century with the advent of the CanadianAustralian Steamship Line, which established a regular shipping service. Bilateral trade remained relatively minimal.32 As many scholars have shown, the politics of gender, intimacy, and mixed relations are indeed “vital political sites” that tell us much about the “coordinates of empire.”33 In Port Phillip, unlike the Pacific NorthWest coast, there was no long-standing tradition of publicly accepted unions between Aboriginal women and European men. Australian Aboriginal people were presented in much ugly nineteenth-century

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racial-scientific rhetoric as the lowest order of all the races of humankind. While much systematic sexual abuse on the colonial frontier was taken for granted, marriage between Aboriginal women and European men, although not illegal, was often deemed unacceptable, though grudgingly acknowledged for the “lower orders.”34 On the other side of the Pacific, the traditional, non-legally binding unions, often between Metis peoples or First Nations women of high rank and European fur traders, known as “country marriages” or marriage “à la façon du pays,” set in train very different social dynamics in the early colonial period of British Columbia.35 Such unions profoundly threatened and redefined metropolitan ideas of whiteness and racial homogeneity, particularly in the period before the gold rush. In both places, shoring up a white-settler population became a priority, especially after the 1860s. During the mid- to late nineteenth century, each colony encouraged and engineered immigration schemes to bring white women to its shores to fortify and expand the white-settler population. Prevailing ideas of white women as the civilizing sex, of class and gender mores, and of family and domesticity ensured that white women were crucially required in British colonies. With the consolidation of settlement, government officials increasingly feared “miscegenation” and were concerned about the supposedly degenerative effects of mixed populations, and so mixed unions became more unpopular. Government officials promoted the civilizing and settling effects of white women’s integration into male-dominated frontier communities. Their domestic labour capacity was also highly valued. White women, in Adele Perry’s words, were held to be arbiters of a “respectable heterosexuality,” and thus “powerful imperial agents.”36 In short, diverse Indigenous cultures and demographics, treaty making or its absence, differing industrial economies, and varying levels of migration and attitudes to mixed marriages shaped each edge of empire quite differently. Yet similarities abound between the colonization of the Pacific North-West coast and that of the Port Phillip region. In the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, each would become part of the British colonial system on the Pacific Rim and a vast, interconnected, trans-Pacific world. Rationalized as gifts from divine Providence for the “Anglo-Saxon” races, each region was thus drawn into racialized, trans-imperial narratives of settlement. And despite diverse histories and circumstances, the overriding commonality for Indigenous peoples in both sites of the Pacific was one of dispossession, eventual segregation, and displacement.

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The Dream of an Interconnected Pacific World and Countervailing Currents As a prominent historian, Froude both reinforced the notion of AngloSaxons as a distinct ethnic group with a historicized genealogy and also predicted a global future for them. Accelerating ideas of the uniqueness of the “Anglo-Saxon race” had crystallized for Britons by the mid-nineteenth century. With roots stretching back at least to the 1840s, the circulation of ideas of Anglo-Saxon domination, of a global brotherhood of English-speaking races, and prophesies of a great racial conflict from which “Saxondom will rise triumphant” had developed.37 Allen Frantzen and John Niles have noted that during this period, Anglo-Saxonism became an “identity” that transformed into an “originary myth” of “vigorous emotive power.”38 In their fascinating study Anglo-Saxonism and the Construction of Social Identity, the focus, how­ ever, is firmly located within metropolitan realms, and indeed they note that due to spatial constraints they “eschewed a study of AngloSaxonism in the former British empire such as Egypt, India, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.” As I have argued elsewhere, it was in these very colonies where powerful albeit locally distinctive discourses of Anglo-Saxonism developed, and as much postcolonial analysis has shown, a synoptic view of metropole and colonies helps us to understand the mutually dependent and highly imbricated cultural formation of both places.39 Regarding colonial settlement, by the 1840s there was a popular metropolitan sentiment that the Anglo-Saxon race was providentially entitled to settle unlimited territory, and that this race possessed a specific vocation in human history. “It is obvious,” noted the Manchester Examiner in an article titled “Destiny of the Anglo Saxon Race,” that the “Anglo-Saxon race is called to play an extraordinary part in the civilisation of the world.”40 Such apparently divinely ordained expansionism operated on the politics of denial. Disavowing the presence of many Indigenous peoples who inhabited “new lands,” there was “no human cause,” wrote the Examiner, that would repress Anglo-Saxon expansionism. A range of writers promoted narratives of an imagined transcolonial Anglo-Saxon community or federation at colonial and metropolitan levels. Twenty years before Froude’s “Oceana,” Charles Wentworth Dilke published a travelogue of his tour of North America, India, and Britain’s Pacific colonies titled Greater Britain (1868). This highly influential work was the result of a global tour by which Dilke sought to

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chart the progress of the Anglo-Saxon race around the globe.41 In Dilke’s “sketches of Saxondom” around the globe, he claimed, “The Englishmen founds everywhere a New England – new in thought and soil.” Of his journey through British settler colonies in Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, he declared that he had “followed England round the world … If I remarked that climate, soil, manners of life, that mixture with other peoples had modified the blood, I saw, too, that in essentials the race was always one.”42 Dilke visited the Australian colony of Victoria and was much impressed by its apparent racial vigour and purity. In Dilke’s view, the colony’s economic success was not due to the almost unprecedented rapidity of the removal of Aboriginal people from the land or to the magnitude of the Victorian gold rush.43 Echoing popular notions of racial fitness, Dilke attributed such imperial success to the “unsurpassing vigour of the Victorians,” and the fact that they were “far more thoroughly British” than the citizens of Sydney, the rival capital.44 Inviting a racialized environmentalism even between Australia’s colonies, he argued that Sydney people were mere “cornstalks” reared in semi-­tropical climates, but the Victorians were “full blooded English immigrants, bred in the more rugged climes of Tasmania, Canada, or Great Britain.”45 Victoria, he proclaimed, was a “model colony.” Evoking ideas of contiguous imperial spaces, he observed, “In many senses Melbourne is the London, and Sydney is the Paris of Australia.”46 Metropolitan writers such as Dilke, and later Froude, depicted AngloSaxonism as growing in imaginative and mythic power. This was frequently expressed in highly masculine and embodied terms.47 These white Pacific colonies were men’s colonies, made up of better Britons than the British. Dilke wrote fervently of the “vitality of Melbourne men” and of those bred in “Tasmania, Canada, or Great Britain.”48 Twenty years later, Froude wrote that the United States had “produced men.” And “finer men are to be found nowhere upon the earth”: They feel the dignity of freedom, and the worthiness of moral virtue … Let the Britisher take heart. The race will vary its type according to the home in which it is planted. The Australian, the New Zealander, the Californian will have as much in them, after all, of the ancient “Merry England” as the severely earnest Northern American, who remains a Puritan at the bottom of his heart, though in modern shape.49

Yet, as a range of authors have shown, it was white women that both colonies desperately wanted, and a series of immigration schemes were

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engineered to meet this need.50 These new settler polities were built through the bodies of Indigenous and white women. The settler-­ colonial project was one of deterritorialization and gendered territo­ rialization, as Patrick Wolfe has described.51 Dilke was largely negative about Australian Aboriginal people, as well as the “Red Indians” of America. He described “Red Indians” as “debased” and believed they would soon become extinct. As Duncan Bell has observed, Dilke’s Greater Britain was characterized by a “cruel condescension,” epitomized by Dilke’s comment that “the gradual extinction of the inferior races is not only a law of nature, but a blessing to mankind.”52 Ignoring the very real dislocations and displacements of empire, and the many Indigenous peoples and those of mixed descent who managed to survive colonialism, Dilke was convinced that the Anglo-Saxon race would prevail, predicting that the “dearer race” would “destroy” the “cheaper races” and “Saxondom would rise triumphant from the struggle.”53 Dilke sought a coherent narrative of AngloSaxonism throughout the globe and had faith in its totalizing power. If Victoria, south-eastern Australia, was the most perfect “model colony,” then the Canadas were anomalous and the British Pacific colonies were nothing but stagnant. Commenting on the “intermixing” habits of the French, Dilke wrote, “In Canada and Tahiti the French intermingle with Native races, the Hurons are French in everything but name.”54 This was not so in the United States: in “Kansas, Colorado, New Mexico, miscegenation will never be brought about” due to the English pride of race. The primacy of Anglo-Saxonism would be ensured, he believed, in America and Australia due to an “absolute bar to intermarriage” and even to “lasting connexions to Aborigines.” In such colonial outposts, he considered that the Indigenous population anyway was dying out due to “war” and “whisky.”55 Indeed, evidence of such racial vigour was only further apparent in that even the “very scum and outcasts” of British society had moved out around the globe and “founded empires in every portion of the globe.”56 In Dilke’s mind, British Columbia was an inferior colony of the fur trade. In general, the chief problem with Canada, he wrote, was that “our race is split in twain.” On the Pacific side, it was settled mainly by Americans, and government was reduced to the level of absurdity. He continued, “If we take up the British Columbian we find the citizens of the mainland portion of the province proposing to sell the islands for twenty million dollars to the States.” Lamenting lost wealth and missed opportunities, Dilke continued his disparaging commentary on British North America, noting that trade was hindered by “tolerating the presence of two sets of custom houses

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and two sets of coins between Halifax and Lake Superior.” Dilke did not overtly mention mixed-race relations in British Columbia, but the “fur-buying” companies, he remarked obliquely, had “enough to answer for.”57 Dilke’s views, of course, represented the extreme end of a rampant Anglo-Saxon exceptionalism, but they proffer a sense of the discourse that was growing by the 1850s and 1860s and was taken up and promoted in the colonies. Dilke’s Greater Britain was disparaging and dismissive of Indigenous peoples, privileging a narrative of white racial dominance and coherence (at least in some colonies). Froude, writing twenty years later, acknowledged the many tensions and injustices concerning Indigenous peoples. Early in his book, he wrote on settlers’ treatment of the “native population, whether in Africa, Australia, or New Zealand,” which continually posed “serious differences” between the “mother country and the colonists.” He wrote openly of dispossession of Indigenous lands by settlers who “sometimes by purchase, sometimes by less respectable means … have driven the natives off their old ground and taken possession of it themselves.” This, however, was due to the settlers’ “natural” willingness to cultivate the soil. The tripartite tensions between “people at home in England,” settlers, and “natives” were stark. Metropolitans had “obliged their ministers to step between the colonists and the natives,” the result of which had, in his opinion, led to increased aggression, divergence of policy, and “wars with them [the natives]” due to “acts which they would never have committed if the colonists and they had been left to arrange their mutual relations alone.”58 Nevertheless, as Thompson has observed, Froude’s “messianic racialism” based on Anglo-Saxon superiority led him to believe that the subjugation of other races was a right, and indeed an obligation.59 In Canada, by the late nineteenth century, increased connections to centres of culture and commerce, augmented by the rise of popular steam travel, accelerated tourism and helped to produced the “West Coast” as a distinct Canadian region in both material and imaginative terms, as Bruce Braun has argued.60 Yet it is clear that the imaginative production of colonies also occurred simultaneously through their relation to other colonies and their perceived position in the hierarchical network of such English-speaking domains. As early as the 1850s, Vancouver Island’s British Colonist, for example, looking again to its “model” sister colony in Australia, announced that the “electric telegraph, between Sydney and Melbourne, is nearly complete. It is already in operation thro’ Victoria, between Melbourne and Albany.”61 Later it

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noted, amidst promising announcements of more gold finds in New South Wales, that the “intercolonial line of telegraph between Tasmania and the main land, has been opened.”62 Such notices lauded the infrastructural development of the colonies and the collapse and reordering of space as measures of colonial success. The gesturing of the colonies of Victoria and British Columbia to each other across the Pacific Ocean through such public forums as newspapers, public lectures, intercolonial exhibitions, and travelogues bolstered colonists’ ideas of themselves as global imperial subjects and reinforced popular beliefs of British bourgeois progressivism in its celebration of interconnectedness and closer global ties. In the mid-nineteenth century, Anglo-Saxon polities were imagined triumphantly in the colonies by some, but in reality they were often fragile and uneasy. In colonial outposts such as British Columbia, colonists, outnumbered by many thousands of First Nations peoples, experienced a lack of control. In 1865, Matthew Macfie conducted a survey of the “varieties of race represented in Victoria,” Vancouver Island, applying an intricate system of taxonomy to “calculate upon twenty-three crosses, in different degrees, resulting from the blending of the Cauca­ sian, the aboriginal American, and the Negro,” a result of “illicit commerce between the various races.”63 His prognosis was fearful, one that spelled the demise of the Anglo-Saxon race. In these unstable frontier locales, characterized by Indigenous dispossession and mixed-race relationships, especially on the Pacific North-West coast with its early history of fur-trade relations between French, First Nations, and Metis peoples, Anglo-Saxonism was neither normative nor stable – it was exceptional, fluid, and under threat. In British Columbia, as Adele Perry has shown, bourgeois metropolitan narratives of racial purity were confounded at empire’s unruly edges by mixed-race relations as Indigenous peoples and settlers sought to define themselves and their spaces and refute such moralities.64 In the colony of Victoria, with a vastly larger population of British immigrants and a much smaller Aboriginal population, who had largely been ­sequestered in remote mission stations by the 1860s, commentators such as Dilke saw the face of Britain they wished to see – despite the prevalence of mixed relations and shared spaces that were increasingly glossed over. Yet for some Britons seeking a mirror of their own identity, the colonies caused confusion and anxiety. Rather than being places of Anglo-Saxon triumph, confidence, and sameness, such Brit­ ish imperial realms were “spaces of bewilderment and loss which

130  Penelope Edmonds

continued to trouble and confounded many of England’s subjects.”65 Metro­ politan narratives of Anglo-Saxon exceptionalism often foundered on the shores of these Pacific colonies. Instead, these emerging regions were transactional contact zones. In British Columbia, people of mixed descent, the legacy of the fur trade, continued to hold significant social and political authority. As settlement increased and as racial politics hardened along metropolitan lines, such families Anglicized themselves.66 In early Port Phillip, European men sought to disavow or hide their relations with Aborigi­ nal women and their connection to children of mixed descent. Such relations were mentioned euphemistically, and later, by the 1850s and 1860s, when there were far fewer Aboriginal people living in white settlements (with most placed on missions), satires of miscegenation were nevertheless prevalent, revealing the great anxiety regarding an inverted order that continued to threaten notions of white settled society. Britain’s mid-nineteenth-century Pacific Rim settler colonies, British Columbia on the Pacific North-West coast and Victoria in south-eastern Australia, were rendered as Anglo-Saxon or white spaces, part of an imagined spatial and racial polity spanning oceans, but such notions as shown were contested and refuted by Indigenous peoples and others at the local level. Each Pacific colony was shaped differently by local politics and beset with different tensions. Anglo-Saxonism was fluid and opportunistic, reforming its boundaries and concerns in response to local circumstances, including religious, racial, and cultural tensions. In Australia, broadly speaking, a masculine, Protestant Anglo-Saxonism was promoted, offset against Aboriginality, at times the Irish, and later the Chinese. In Canada, Anglo-Saxonism was also contingent, offset and fashioned as distinct from Indigenous societies and racialized migrants and in tension with French Canada. The popular circulation of such thinking is revealed in publications such as the Anglo-Saxon, a journal whose purpose was to preserve, strengthen, and promote AngloSaxon identity in Canada. Published in Ottawa between 1887 and 1900, it mirrored the writing of those like Froude. As Paula Hastings has described, the Anglo-Saxon was published by Canadian Protestants to promote Anglo-Saxon identity in Canada and advocate the international confederation of the Anglo-Saxon race. It reflected the growing tensions between French and English Canadians.67 In the vision of the AngloSaxon, only “Anglo Saxon man embodied the political and ecclesiastical principles necessary for the survival of Canada.” These principles were necessarily gendered, notes Hastings, but also “implicitly antithetical

Canada and Australia: An Interconnected Pacific World  131

to French culture,” and language in particular became a site of contes­ tation.68 The Anglo-Saxon had local political purchase, but also spoke to a global audience. It was circulated to Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. Yet, over the course of the journal’s life, Anglo-Saxon identity remained fluid and ill defined. Indeed, the Victoria Daily Colonist (British Columbia) in 1899, regarding the question of immigration to North America, asked what were the “characteristics of the AngloSaxon,” noting that this was “a matter upon which there might be a wide diversity of opinion.”69 Contesting Oceana By the late nineteenth century, a comparative transcolonial discourse had long been established at both local and metropolitan levels through the writings of those such as Dilke and Froude, and through journals such as the Anglo-Saxon, and ideas on the international confederation of the Anglo-Saxon race grew in prominence. Yet these ideas would always be controversial. Froude was dismayed that not everyone agreed with his idea of an organic and inevitable Oceana. By 1860, five of the six Australian colonies had achieved responsible government or selfgovernment. In Oceana (1886), Froude attacked the desire for self-rule in Australia, and two years later in The English in the West Indies, he criticized the British West Indian colonies for also seeking self-government. In 1889, John Jacob Thomas published Froudacity, a polemic response critiquing Froude’s misapprehensions and racist rationales that sought to uphold the empire.70 Froude’s invocation of Oceana, and indeed the publication of the Anglo-Saxon, had, in fact come at a time in the late nineteenth century when the empire was most under threat.71 Nonetheless, Froude’s views were of great interest in the colonies and food for thought in their political self-fashioning, even posthumously. Just one month after Froude’s death in 1894, an editorial in the Victoria Daily Colonist noted that “he was one of the few who advocated a closer union between Great Britain and her colonies than existed in his day.” Despite his enthusiasms, however, the exact means by which a fed­ eration would occur did not appear to greatly concern him. “Never­ theless,” the editorial continued, some of this “Imperial Federationist’s” propositions had become reality and were “suggestive of the remarkable development which the Imperial Idea has undergone since he wrote Oceana.” Froude had suggested, for instance, that “our public honours should be bestowed on all who deserve them without respect

132  Penelope Edmonds

of birth place” and that “colonial statesmen be admitted to the Privy Council, as they are now.”72 By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, an overt and vigorous transnational discourse of whiteness, of “whiteman’s land” and “white labour,” had formed throughout the British settler colonies, in Australia, Canada, and New Zealand.73 Immigration policy was crafted to keep out those deemed unsuitable for the maintenance of white-settler populations. British Columbia, New Zealand, and the United States borrowed Australia’s colonial immigration laws, which were racially encoded to enforce notions of white labour and “whiteman’s lands.” The reorganization and regulation of bodies and spaces in the desired formation of white settler–colonial polities was increasingly thoroughgoing. In the 1850s, British Columbia gold rush boosters had looked enthusiastically towards San Francisco and Melbourne as models for success and wealth. In the 1870s and 1880s, they looked again to their colonial counterparts on the Pacific Rim for other reasons: How would they manage Chinese immigrants? As racial tensions grew, British Columbia expressed its severe antipathy towards Chinese people. Such feelings were shared by other white British settlers, particularly in Australia but also in the western United States, especially California.74 Legal models were shared among the “white” colonies of the British Empire, within a political climate where white supremacist thinking would only grow by the close of the nineteenth century. Australia, Canada, and New Zealand had by 1885 adopted a dual immigration policy consisting of the Immigration Act, with “a low fees and tonnage ratio designed to encourage immigration from European countries,” and its counterpart, the Chinese Immigration Act, “with a differential and high tonnage ration calculated to reduce Chinese immigration.”75 Yet, the technologies for restricting immigration were not always overtly based on race as explicit race-based legislation was later opposed by Britain and frowned upon by Britain’s ally, Japan. Another method was based on literacy, through the application of a dictation test. Dictation tests, partly based on legislation used in Natal in South Africa, were introduced in Western Australia, New South Wales, and Tasmania in the late 1890s. As historian Marilyn Lake points out, however, the ­infamous dictation test originated not in Natal in 1897, but in the United States, often to limit the franchise as well as to restrict immigration. Lake has shown that the use of a literacy test for racial purposes began in Mississippi in 1890.76 Lake argues that, reflecting the shift in

Canada and Australia: An Interconnected Pacific World  133

imperial power to the United States, policymakers in South Africa and Australia were by this time looking to the United States for their in­ spiration rather than solely within the British Empire. By the end of the nineteenth century, powerful sentiments regarding the perpetuation of white labour and increased trade, travel, and communications between white dominions, especially in the Pacific, fostered increased feelings of white exclusivity and ideas of a common cause against “Asian intruders.”77 At transcolonial levels, white spaces were organized and shored up outwardly with a borrowing of restrictive immigration policies between these (former) British colonies, whilst internally “at home,” Aboriginality was increasingly regulated and litigated both discursively and physically, and reserve policies on both sides of the Pacific became more restrictive and diminishing of Aboriginal entitlements. Simultaneously, various immigration schemes brought white settlers to these Pacific shores. At Australian federation in 1901, several pieces of legislation, such as the Immigration Restriction Act and another act to effect the forced removal of Pacific Islander workers, served to further consolidate the idea of a white-settler polity. Such consolidation also banished or closed off other polities, other thriving worlds. As Henry Reynolds and Paul Battersby have shown, the northern parts of Australia had a long his­ tory of interconnected ties with Melanesia and South-East Asia. Known as “The islands,” “Australasia,” or the “Malay Archipelago,” this Aus­ tralasian world of the western Pacific was increasingly disparaged as a mixed, “mongrelized,” and racially inferior backwater.78 The ideal of an anglophone Pacific world of racial purity was privileged by the southern states, and federal legislation followed to reinforce this model. British Columbia came to be known as the “whiteman’s province” in the early twentieth century, and the catchphrase “White Canada For­ ever” was central to settler sentiment there and elsewhere in Canada.79 By 1908, Australia’s Bulletin magazine had on its masthead the now infamous declaration: “Australia for the White Man.”80 Froude’s utopian dream of social and moral regeneration through a Pacific Oceana may have been, as Thompson notes, “an incredible jump in to the realm of fantasy and myth,” yet nonetheless, such ideas of an imagined, superior racial polity were made real through the mid- to late nineteenth century and were equally violent in their material and legal effects. By the turn of the century, changed geopolitical circumstances caused Europeans to believe that colonies of the south Pacific were under

134  Penelope Edmonds

threat. By 1907, the Pacific was becoming a “storm centre,” Sydney’s Daily Telegraph noted, and the “true Armageddon of the world, in which the tawny and yellow, or both combined, will engage in a life and death struggle with the white for final supremacy, may be fought in the Pacific south of the equator.” The Pacific had to be secured for the white man.81 By this time, Canada and Australia may have joined in their common identification as white men’s countries, but they did not agree on the terms of the empire’s organization.82 Australia disliked Canada’s domestic nationalism and its refusal to concede to aspects of imperial foreign policy. Under threat, Australia looked not to Canada but to its alliance with the United States, “kinsman” in “our Oceanic neighbourhood.” As the Daily Telegraph put it, “With an invincible Australian sentinel at the South West and an American one at the East … the Pacific and its innumerable islands of amazing fertility and beauty will be secured to the Caucasian for all succeeding time.”83 As Lake and Reynolds note, Australia’s prime minister, Alfred Deakin, spoke of the two countries’ common interests, and predicted that that Australia and the United States might greet each other as “sister republics” across the Pacific. In December 1907 Deakin would invite the United States Navy, known as the “Great White Fleet,” to visit Australia while on tour, as a strategic political gesture to respond to the “racial disputes” in the Pacific and to demonstrate the Anglo-Saxon kinship ties.84 British Columbia and Victoria were not always friends, they did not always trade; only sometimes did they look to each other, and the gaze was not always equal. However, they were each implicated in the idea of a Pacific racial community joined by the bonds of race and empire. Internally and externally, both inside and outside the nation, these former British Pacific Rim colonies had reordered bodies and spaces, systematically making new spaces of modernity in their search for an imagined transcolonial polity of Anglo-Saxon colonies. Froude’s mythic and imagined Oceana, which exclusively embodied the anglophone settler colonies around the Pacific Rim, is precisely the vision of “Oceana” that the late Tongan academic Epeli Hau’ofa sought to critique in his highly influential A New Oceania: Rediscovering Our Sea of Islands (1993).85 Hau’ofa’s vision was a much needed corrective to the pervasive understanding of the Pacific as a vast, watery desert or void, where the only sites of importance, vitality, or meaning were along the rim, that is, the settler colonies of Britain and America. He also sought to overturn the idea of many scattered, dislocated islands, or failed microstates. Rather, he endeavoured to reclaim Oceana,

Canada and Australia: An Interconnected Pacific World  135

emphasizing the rich, connected network of shared genealogies and deep histories of connection, travel, and meaning for indigenous Pacific peoples – the “real Pacific world.” In this sense, Hau’ofa’s work was formative and also presciently transnational. As Margaret Jolly states, Hau’ofa’s “extended vision of Oceana not only blurs the boundaries of nation states but also emphasizes the connection between Islanders beyond and within nation states.”86 Hau’ofa’s vision should inspire historians of Canadian and Australian transnationalism to look seriously at Pacific interconnections: not only to transpacific migrations (such as those u ­ ndertaken by the Chinese), but also to the rich, intertwined, and challenging labour, maritime, migration, missionary, and settlement histories of Pacific peoples in western Canada and eastern Australia and to corresponding Pacific diaspora in these regions today. NOTES 1 James Anthony Froude, Oceana: Or, England and Her Colonies (New York: C.Scribner’s Sons, 1886), 2. See also Thomas W. Thompson, James Anthony Froude on Nation and Empire: A Study in Victorian Racialism (London and New York: Garland Publishing, 1987). 2 James Harrington, The Commonwealth of Oceana (1656; Edinburgh: Ballantyne Press, 1887); Froude, Oceana, 1, 2, 5. 3 Froude, Oceana, 4. 4 Thompson, James Anthony Froude, 181, 182; Froude, Oceana, 16. 5 Thompson, James Anthony Froude, 210. 6 David Goodman, Gold Seeking: Victoria and California in the 1850s (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), xiii. 7 See, for example, Julie Evans, Patricia Grimshaw, David Philips, and Shurlee Swain, Equal Subjects, Unequal Rights: Indigenous Peoples and Political Rights in British Settlements, 1830–1910 (Manchester: Manchester University Press: 2003); Penelope Edmonds, Urbanizing Frontiers: Indigenous Peoples and Settlers in 19th-Century Pacific Rim Cities (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2010); Lisa Ford, Settler Sovereignties: Jurisdiction and Indigenous Peoples in America and Australia 1788–1836 (Boston: Harvard University Press, 2010). 8 See, for example, Ann Curthoys and Marilyn Lake, eds., Connected Worlds: History in Transnational Perspective (Canberra: ANU E Press, 2006), 5. 9 Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler, eds., Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (Los Angeles: University of California Press,

136  Penelope Edmonds 1997), vii–x. See also Alan Lester, “British Settler Discourse and the Circuits of Empire,” History Workshop Journal 54, no. 1 (2002): 25–48. 10 Michael A. McDonell, “Paths Not Taken, Voices Not Yet Heard: Rethinking Atlantic History,” in Curthoys and Lake, Connected Worlds, 46. 11 See Renisa Mawani, “Law and Migration across the Pacific: Narrating the Komagata Maru Outside and Beyond the Nation,” chap. 11 in this volume, on the ship as metaphor for immigration. 12 Canada, “History of Canada-Australia Relations,” http://www.canada international.gc.ca/australia-australie/bilateral_relations_bilaterales/ history-histoire.aspx?lang=eng&view=d. 13 Greg Donaghy, Parallel Paths: Canada-Australian Relations since the 1890s (Ottawa: Historical Section, Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade, 1995). 14 Australia’s prime minister, Kevin Rudd, made an official apology to Aborigi­ nal and Torres Strait Islander people who had been removed or stolen from their parents and placed in care or domestic service, often r­ eferred to as the “Stolen Generations,” in February 2008. In June 2008, Canada’s prime minister, Stephen Harper, made an official apology for the abuse suffered by Aboriginal peoples who had been placed in the residential school system. 15 The Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples was adopted by the UN General Assembly on Thursday, 13 September 2007, by a majority of 144 states in favour, and 4 votes against by Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United States. All four governments expressed partic­ular, but not exclusive, concern over Article 26, which in the draft form read: “Indigenous peoples have the right to own, develop, control and use the lands and territories, including the total environment of the lands, air, waters, coastal seas, sea-ice, flora and fauna and other resources which they have traditionally owned or otherwise occupied or used. This includes the right to the full recognition of their laws, traditions and customs, land-tenure systems and institutions for the development and management of resources, and the right to effective measures by States to prevent any interference with, alienation of or encroachment upon these rights.” Since its adoption, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the United States have all reversed their positions and now endorse the Declaration. See United Nations’ Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, adopted by the General Assembly, 13 September 2007. See http://undesadspd.org/ IndigenousPeoples/DeclarationontheRightsofIndigenousPeoples.aspx. 16 For a more extensive comparison, see Edmonds, Urbanizing Frontiers. 17 The “Kulin Nation” refers to the five related cultural-linguistic groups of south-eastern Australian Aboriginal people who are the traditional

Canada and Australia: An Interconnected Pacific World  137

18

19 20

21 22 23 24

25

owners of the area now referred to as the Port Phillip region. These are the Wurundjeri (speaking Woiwurrung), Wathawurrong, Boonwurrung, Daungwurrung, and Djadjawarrung peoples. See also Richard Broome, Aboriginal Victorians: A History since 1800 (Crows Nest, NSW: Allen and Unwin, 2005), xxi. On epidemic disease, see Cole Harris, “Voices of Smallpox around the Strait of Georgia,” in The Resettlement of British Columbia: Essays on Colonialism and Geographical Change (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1997), 3–30; N. Butlin, Our Original Aggression: Aboriginal Populations of Southeastern Australia 1788–1850 (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1983). On assimilation programs in Canada, see Susanne Fournier, Stolen from Our Embrace: The Abduction of First Nations Children and the Restoration of Aboriginal Communities (Vancouver: Douglas and McIntyre, 1997). First Nations children taken into care in Canada are also referred to as the “lost generation,” 9. On Australia, see 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). For a comparison of missionary endeavours between British Columbia and Australia, see Peggy Brock, “Mission Encounters in the Colonial World: British Columbia and South-West Australia,” Journal of Religious History 24, no. 2 (June 2000). Francis Forbes (1784–1841) to Governor Sir Richard Bourke, 26 July 1835, National Library of Australia, MS 1293. Stuart Banner, Possessing the Pacific: Land, Settlers and Indigenous Peoples from Alaska to Australia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 2, 3, 13–46, 195. John Lutz, Makuk: New History of Aboriginal-White Relations (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2008). Cole Harris, “Social Power and Cultural Change in Pre-Colonial British Columbia,’ BC Studies, no. 115/116 (Autumn/Winter 1997): 78. Robert A.J. McDonald, Making Vancouver: Class, Status and Social Boundaries, 1863–1913 (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1996), xiv. John Lutz, “After the Fur Trade: The Aboriginal Labouring Class of British Columbia, 1849–1890,” Journal of the Canadian Historical Association 2 (1992): 70. For example, in Victoria itinerant harvesting and pastoral work was vital to maintain the settler economy, and in the nearby colony of New South Wales in the late nineteenth century, over 80 per cent of Aboriginal people lived self-sufficiently from wages, ration labour, or traditional subsistence, enjoying some autonomy. Later, in northern Australia, the cattle industry had a great requirement for Aboriginal labour, and Aboriginal people

138  Penelope Edmonds

26 27 28 29

30

31

32

33

34

35 36

i­ ntegrated pastoral industries into Indigenous economies. As pastoralists sought to run stations cheaply and efficiently, a delicately balanced interdependence emerged. Tracey Banivanua Mar and Penelope Edmonds, “Indigenous and Settler Relations,” in The Cambridge History of Australia, vol. 1, ed. Alison Bashford and Stuart Macintyre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 354, 359. British Colonist, 13 July 1859. Alexander Morris, ibid. Alexander Morris, Lecture, reported in the British Colonist, 13 July 1859 (emphasis added). R.C. Mayne, Four Years in British Columbia and Vancouver Island: An Account of their Forests, Rivers, Coasts, Gold fields, and Resources for Colonisation (London: John Murray, 1862), 31. On the gold rush, see Jean Barman, The West beyond the West (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990), 65; Robin Fisher, Contact and Conflict: Indian-European Relations in British Columbia, 1774–1890s, 2nd ed. (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1992), 58. See also Peter McDonald, “Demography,” in Encyclopedia of Melbourne, ed. Andrew Brown-May and Shurlee Swain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); J.W. McCarty and C.B. Schedvin, eds., Australian Capital Cities: Historical Essays (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 1978). W.C. Grant, “Remarks on Vancouver Island. Principally Concerning Town Sites and Native Population,” read 12 December 1859, Journal of the Royal Geographical Society 31 (1861). See Donaghy, Parallel Paths; see also P. Slyfield, “Trade and Communications with Australian and New Zealand, 1892–1911,” Library and Archives Canada (LAC), RG 20, vol. 1417, file 424. Ann Laura Stoler, “Tense and Tender Ties: The Politics of Comparison in North American History and (Post) Colonial Studies,” Journal of American History 88, no. 3 (2001): 838. There are very few studies in this area of Australian history, leaving a ­major gap in scholarship. See Katherine Ellinghaus, “Margins of Acceptability: Class, Education and Interracial Marriage in Australia and America,” Frontiers 23 (2002). Nancy E. Wright, ‘Comparative Study of the Status of Women in Canada and Australia,’ Australian Canadian Studies 22, no.1 (2004). Lisa Chilton, Agents of Empire: British Female Migration to Canada and Australia, 1860s–1930 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007). Adele Perry, On the Edge of Empire: Gender, Race, and the Making of British Columbia, 1849–1871 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), 145, 150, 158.

Canada and Australia: An Interconnected Pacific World  139 37 Catherine Hall, Civilising Subjects (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002), 368; Robert A. Huttenback, Racism and Empire: White Settlers and Coloured Immigrants in the British Self-Governing Colonies (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1976), 15. 38 Allen J. Frantzen and John D. Niles, eds., Anglo-Saxonism and the Construction of Social Identity (Miami: University of Florida Press, 1997), 5. 39 Penelope Edmonds, “‘I followed England round the world’: The Rise of Trans-imperial Anglo-Saxon Exceptionalism and the Spatial Narratives of Nineteenth-century British Settler Colonies of the Pacific Rim,’ in ReOrienting Whiteness: Transnational Perspectives on the History of an Identity, ed. Leigh Boucher, Jane Carey, and Katherine Ellinghaus (New York: Palgrave, 2009), 99–115. 40 “Destiny of the Anglo Saxon Race,” Manchester Examiner, 11 April 1846. 41 Charles Wentworth Dilke, Greater Britain: A Record of Travel in English-Speaking Countries during 1866 and 1867, 2 vols. (London: Macmillan and Co., 1868). 42 Dilke, Greater Britain, 1: 68; and Preface (emphasis added). 43 Ibid., 2: 106, 2: 21, 2: 23. 44 Ibid., 2: 106, 2: 21, 2: 23. 45 Ibid., 2: 23. 46 Ibid., 2: 25, 2: 23. 47 See Adele Perry, “Whose World Was British: Rethinking the British World from the Edge of Empire,” in Britishness Abroad: Transnational Movements and Imperial Cultures, ed. Kate Darian-Smith, Patricia Grimshaw, and Stuart Macintyre (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2007), 140; James Belich, Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Anglo-World (London: Oxford University Press, 2009). 48 Dilke, Greater Britain, 2: 23 (emphasis added). 49 Froude, Oceana, 374. 50 A.J. Hammerton, Emigrant Gentlewomen: Genteel Poverty and Female Emigration 1830–1914 (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1979); Perry, On the Edge of Empire; Chilton, Agents of Empire. 51 “Gendered territorialism” is the phrase used by Patrick Wolfe in “Nation and Miscegenation: Discursive Continuity in the Post-Mabo Era,” Social Analysis 34 (1994): 95. See also Perry, On the Edge of Empire, 19. 52 Duncan Bell, The Idea of Greater Britain (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 115; Bell cites Dilke, Greater Britain, 1: 130, 123, and 2: 225. 53 Bell, The Idea of Greater Britain, preface. 54 Dilke, Greater Britain, 125. 55 Ibid., 125 (emphasis added). 56 Ibid., 406.

140  Penelope Edmonds 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65

66 67

68 69 70

71 72 73

74

75 76

Ibid., 71. Froude, Oceana, 5. Thompson, James Anthony Froude, 210. Bruce Braun, “Colonialism’s Afterlife: Vision and Visuality on the Northwest Coast.” Cultural Geographies 9 (2002): 202–47, 219. “Colonial,” British Colonist, 11 December 1858, 4. “Later from Australia,” British Colonist, 12 January 1860, 3. Matthew Macfie, Vancouver Island and British Columbia: Their History, Resources and Prospects (London: Longman, Green et al., 1865), 379. Perry, On the Edge of Empire. Ian Baucom, Out of Place: Englishness, Empire, and the Locations of Identity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 3–4; Baucom cites Franz Fanon. Sylvia Van Kirk, “Tracing the Fortunes of Five Founding Families of Victoria,” BC Studies, no. 115/116 (Autumn/Winter 1997): 148–80. Paula Hastings, “‘Our Glorious Anglo-Saxon Race Shall Ever Fill Earth’s Highest Place’: The Anglo-Saxon and the Construction of Identity in LateNineteenth-Century Canada,” in Canada and the British World: Culture, Migration and Identity, ed. Phillip Buckner and R. Douglas (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2006), 92–3. Ibid., 98. “Population of the United States,” Victoria Daily Colonist, 11 February 1899, 4. James Anthony Froude, The English in the West Indies (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1888); John Jacob Thomas, Froudacity (Philadelphia: Gebbie and Company, 1889). See Edmonds, “‘I followed England round the world,’” 105, 111. “An Imperial Federationist,” Victoria Daily Colonist, 22 November 1894, 4. Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men’s Countries and the International Challenge of Racial Equality (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 2008); Marilyn Lake, “Whiteman’s Country: The Transnational History of a National Project,” Australian Historical Studies 122 (October 2003): 346–81. John P.S. McLaren, “The Burdens of Empire and the Legalisation of White Supremacy in Canada, 1860–1910,’ in Legal History in the Making: Proceedings of the Ninth British Legal History Conference, Glasgow, ed. W.M Gordon and T.D Fergus (London: Hambledon Press, 1989), 187. Ibid., 191. As Lake points out, the Cape Colony in South Africa followed the Mississippi precedent in its Franchise and Ballot Act of 1892, which for

Canada and Australia: An Interconnected Pacific World  141

77

78

79

80 81 82 83 84 85

86

the first time applied an education test as well as a property test to further restrict the number of non-whites who could vote there. Marilyn Lake, “From Mississippi to Melbourne via Natal: The Invention of the Literacy Test as a Technology of Racial Exclusion,” in Connected Worlds, ed. Curthoys and Lake, 213, 216. McLaren, “Burdens of Empire,” 197. Charles A. Price, The Great White Walls Are Built: Restrictive Immigration to North America and Australia, 1836–1888 (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1974). Henry Reynolds, North of Capricorn: The Untold Story of Australia’s North (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 2003); Paul Battersby, To the Islands: White Australians and the Malay Archipeligo since 1788 (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007). See W. Peter Ward, White Canada Forever: Popular Attitudes and Public Policy toward Orientals in British Columbia (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2002). This was not removed from the masthead until 1961. Lake and Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line, 196. Philip G. Wigley, Canada and the Transition to Commonwealth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 185, 191. Daily Telegraph, 30 October 1907, quoted in Lake and Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line, 196. Lake and Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line, 196–9. Epeli Hau’ofa, “Our Sea of Islands,” in A New Oceania: Rediscovering Our Sea of Islands, ed. Eric Waddell, Vijay Naidu, and Epeli Hau’ofa (Suva, Fiji: School of Social and Economic Development, University of the South Pacific, 1993). Margaret Jolly, “Imagining Oceania: Indigenous and Foreign Representa­ tions of a Sea of Islands,” Contemporary Pacific 19, no. 2 (Fall 2007): 530. Thank you also to Tracey Banivanua Mar for our discussions.

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6 “In England a man can do as he likes with his property”: Migration, Family Fortunes, and the Law in NineteenthCentury Quebec and the Cape Colony bettina br adb ury

In 1842, Mrs Kerr, a Montreal widow, wrote to a prominent law firm in the city asking what portion of her husband’s estate the laws of “this country” would give to her and to her children, as her husband had left  no will. The couple had married in Scotland before migrating to Quebec, where they had acquired a reasonable fortune. She was planning on continuing his business. Twenty years later in the Cape, the recently widowed Mary Ann Blatchford went to court to contest the validity of her husband’s will. She had known nothing of its contents, she told the court, until after his death in March that year. She then discovered that George Blatchford had promised her an annuity of £100 a year and the right to make a will covering a sum of £1500. But he had made his illegitimate son, who had come to live with them at their Cape farm just three years before his father’s death, his universal heir. Claiming that she felt “aggrieved” by the inadequate provisions of the will, Mary Ann sought justice.1 The Blatchfords had migrated from Bristol, England, in 1847. They settled first in Cape Town, where George found work as a journeyman miller and Mary Ann ran a small shop on Plein Street in the city. George then leased a mill in the Stellenbosch area, some fifty kilometres to the east. This had long been an area of Cape Dutch settlement and of wine production based, until abolition, on slave labour. The population of ex-slaves in the area was still double that of Europeans, and farmers were struggling to maintain their control over the labour of the freed men and women. Mary Ann and George’s joint labours enabled them to purchase a farm, “Knorhoek,” not far from Stellenbosch on the slopes of Sir Lowry’s Pass, on the main route between Cape Town and the Eastern Cape. Here, George tried his hand at running what appears to

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have been a mixed farm with some vines, sheep, wheat production, and a mill, and hired labourers who were likely ex-slaves. Mary Ann continued to contribute, possibly running another shop and taking over much of the work when George engaged in bouts of drinking. Such engagement in business might not ensure her respectability among the middle classes, but it did contribute to their comfortable standard of living. At the time of her husband’s death, the movable and immovable property of the estate was estimated to be worth around £6000. After nearly twenty years in the colony, Mary Ann had a clear idea of the rights of widows under local law. She argued that all their property had been held in common and that she therefore had the right to half of it.2 The widow Kerr’s letter to her lawyer and Mary Ann Blatchford’s challenge to her husband’s will posed a question that was unsettled in nineteenth-century international jurisprudence: when a couple married in one jurisdiction, then moved permanently to another, which law governed property relations and rights within families – that of the place in which they married or that of the colony to which they had moved and taken up residence? Widows’ claims, wills, property regimes, and inheritance might at first glance seem “not even remotely global” issues,3 and therefore best explored within the histories of individual families, nations, and specific legal jurisdictions. Yet the actions of these two white, immigrant widows serve as powerful reminders of the wide range of intimate issues that the movement of men and women from European states to colonies of diverse kinds raised. They highlight the importance of questions of inheritance, property, and marriage – threads in the “intersecting plots” of the history of colonialism and in  the “movement, flows and circulation” that interest transnational his­torians – that have received less attention recently than have issues of sexuality, gender, and race.4 They invite us to explore the ways “past lives and events have been shaped by processes and relationships that have transcended the borders of nation states,” and hence become a part of transnational histories. Furthermore, they suggest a way to reinsert questions of property and gender into the histories of colonialism, empire, and transnational networks and into understandings of local productions of difference and identity.5 Studying inheritance as a transnational phenomenon opens up a “world of comparative possibility” in conceptualizing how inheritance practices and laws precipitated particular movements of commonsense understandings, information, goods, people, papers, and property. It also raises the possibility of exploring the “tense and tender” ties

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of family, gender, class, and race that frequently spanned oceans and continents in some of the new ways also mapped in Laura Ishiguro’s chapter in this volume.6 Migration to colonies of settlement raised larger issues. What place did inheritance law and practices play discursively and materially in the dispossession of indigenous peoples? Did the property laws of particular colonies have an impact on their attractiveness and reputations as destinations for migrants? Did migration to colonies of settlement modify the expectations of migrants regarding the property rights and claims of wives, husbands, and children like Mary Ann and George Blatchford and his son, Walter? To explore some of these issues, I narrow my transnational frame here to that of two colonies – Cape Colony and Quebec – within the British Empire. Both were occupied first by one European power and then taken over by the English, and in each questions of marriage, property, and inheritance were particularly fraught. Under the Roman-Dutch law retained for civil issues in the Cape and the Custom of Paris, and later the Civil Code, in Quebec, wives, widows, and children had much greater claims to accumulated family property than under the English common law. In both colonies, debates and discussions about proper practices and legislation pitted English understandings against those deriving from European legal codes and evoked competing representations of bourgeois masculinity and of appropriate authority relationships, both within families and between the domestic realm and the state. The focus here is on public debates and cultural skirmishes enacted within the colony’s courts, legislative assemblies, and councils.7 The key players are mostly colonial politicians, all of European origin and all male. In these debates, the Indigenous Xhosa, Khoesan, or First Nations inhabitants whose lands the rules of inheritance or marriage would better enable settlers to occupy, are largely invisible. Issues regarding Indigenous customs, rights, and claims were mostly segregated in different discussions, pushed discursively out of sight, just as so many Indigenous peoples themselves were.8 This chapter first explores the question of which marriage or inheritance law determined the rights of husbands and wives when couples or single people migrated. The second section compares the very different early responses to British settlers’ claims to the right to British laws. The third and fourth sections explore the ways some politicians asserted a particular version of very British bourgeois masculinity rooted in the common-law rules of husband and wife against the greater rights these particular colonial laws offered wives, widows, and children.

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Marriage Law and Migration: Did Marriage Law Follow “the spouses like their clothes, or their skins?”9 The migration of peoples between European metropoles and colonies raised a series of questions that were unsettling at the scales of bodies, families, communities, colonies, and empire. Historians of the settler colonies of the empire have shown how anchoring European migrants in legal marriages and imposing Christian marriage on Indigenous peoples were understood to be critical to a colony’s reputation, stability, and long-term success.10 The migration of married couples raised the questions posed by the widows Kerr and Blatchford: which marriage or inheritance law governed the claims of widowers, widows, and children – that of the place where they were married or of their new place of residence? Migrants from Britain to colonies in which the English common law was the basis of rules of marriage and inheritance encountered little that was unfamiliar. Unless a marriage settlement or prenuptial contract provided otherwise, property accumulated during a marriage belonged to the husband, and he could transfer and bequeath it pretty well as he wished. If a man made no will, intestacy provisions, which in most white-settler colonies initially included primogeniture, kicked in. Wheth­er a husband wrote a will or not, widows had a claim to dower – the use of a third of his real property. It would pass eventually to any children, though historians have shown the ways that right was severely constrained in England even before the 1831 Dower Act that curtailed it further.11 Under both Roman-Dutch law and the Custom of Paris as practised under British rule in the Cape and Quebec, in contrast, marriage created shared community property out of some assets brought into the marriage and all accumulated during it. Community property was understood to belong equally to the husband and wife unless some other legal arrangement was made before the wedding. Under this version of legal patriarchy, a husband controlled that property during his lifetime and could do what he wished with it. However, his will could deal only with his half. If he died first, the other half of their joint property became the widow’s at his death. This was what Mary Ann Blatchford sought for herself as she faced her new life as a widow. This was what Mrs Kerr, who as a Scot would have understood community property, wished to know about. Roman-Dutch Law also required that a set percentage of each spouse’s property go to the children, while the Custom

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of Paris provided a generous dower to the widow of the use of half the husband’s own property that did not fall into the community property. This passed to any children on her death.12 Propertied migrants from jurisdictions of the English common law and their offspring who married in these two colonies quickly learned to make contracts before their marriages, usually reproducing a gendered property order much closer to the logic of men’s common-law privilege, or opting for separate property for wives and husbands.13 Others, like George Blatchford and John Douglas, a Montreal cooper, sought to use their wills to counteract the effects of community property, dower, or children’s claims. In addition to requesting that his clothing be sent to his brother in Scotland, John had offered his wife, Mary Wilson, the use of all the rest of his property on the condition that she renounce all claims that the Custom of Paris gave her to the community property created by their marriage in Montreal. Thus, men marrying in these colonies could use legal instruments to counter some of the effects of European law privately within their own family, though if they offered less in their will than the law provided, widows and children could and did reject the wills in favour of the law’s provisions. Change for the colony as a whole, however, required legislation.14 For couples like the Kerrs or the Blatchfords, who married before they migrated, the law was less clear. Did marriage law follow “the spouses like their clothes, or their skins … incapable of being altered?” This is what the attorney general in the Cape suggested would be argued against Mary Ann’s claim. Was it imaginable, asked the Quebec judge Samuel Cornwallis Monk in the prominent Quebec case about the customary marriage of a fur trader with a Cree woman, that William Connolly had carried “with him this common law of England to Rat River in his knapsack?” Or did the laws of the Cree and the territory in which the marriage was lived take primacy? As late as 1893, a Scottish jurist described this as one of the most vexing questions “of modern times.”15 In Montreal, the Torrance law firm informed the widow Kerr in 1842 that it seemed to be “recognized doctrine” in Quebec “that upon the married parties settling permanently in the Province,” community property would be recognized. Less than a decade later, the courts of Quebec were consistently arguing the opposite. In 1848, the Montreal Court of Queen’s Bench concluded that the marriage and initial domicile in England of a Mr and Mrs Rogers meant that there was no community of goods. The judge underlined the “immense importance” of

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setting a principle, particularly in a country “peopled to a great extent, by immigration.” He concluded that transferring their “domicile to Lower Canada … could not have the effect of establishing such a community of property contrary to their presumed intention at the time of marriage.” The case was published in the newly formed Revue Légale de Jurisprudence and reported on again twelve years later elsewhere – suggesting that ongoing migration, and the lack of international agreements, meant the question was a recurring and contested one. From 1848, the decisions published in Quebec reiterated the principle that domicile at the time of marriage determined matrimonial rights and hence widows’ claims.16 In the Cape, judges and lawyers were equally adamant about the importance of this question deemed to “affect the rights of all the many married persons who have already emigrated from England and Ireland into the colony, and of the still greater numbers who are still likely to do so in time to come.” Yet well into the 1860s, the issue remained contested. The attorney general argued Mary Ann Blatchford’s case in 1861 and insisted that “probably no question had ever come before the court that was of greater importance for the colony at large.” In her support, he maintained that because the property had all been acquired in the colony, it should be considered community property, or a joint estate. The lawyer for Walter, her husband’s illegitimate son, drew on Dutch jurisprudence to argue that the “great body of civil lawyers” upheld the “ubiquity of the law of the matrimonial domicile, notwithstanding any change of personal domicile.” A dedicated proponent of community property and European law more generally, he stressed the dangers of a marriage contract that could change if couples moved. Judge Bell evoked the argument of legal embodiment and a wife’s individual extinction under coverture to support his judgment that domicile at the time of marriage must prevail. “When two persons of opposite sexes join in marriage,” they formed “one body in a sense.” Laws so thoroughly linked to the person or body rather than to territory must, he argued, migrate with them.17 Judge Bell concluded his decision on Mary Ann Blatchford’s case by pointing out that though in this case “the change of domicile, would have operated beneficially for the wife, had local law been deemed to determine her rights,” this was accidental. He invited his listeners to imagine a situation in which a husband removed to a country “where the opposite resulted, where the law was much more prejudicial to the rights of the wife, than even the law of England.”18 Yet one of the

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lessons from the cartography of marriage law that this case mapped out was that there was no such place. Under the law of England, marriage precipitated a unique and “absolute gift to the husband.” This was certainly clear to admirers of the alternative versions of patriarchy and marriage embodied in Roman Dutch law, the Custom of Paris, and European civil law more generally.19 Early Solutions Lauren Benton argues in her impressive study of law and colonial cultures that “colonialism shaped a framework for the politics of legal pluralism” in which “jurisdictional jockeying by competing legal authorities” was a universal feature with diverse outcomes that precipitated a range of responses from the colonized.20 In Quebec and the Cape, that jockeying was complicated by the history of double European occupation. The English did not impose English civil laws on the Cape Dutch or the Canadiens, though this was tried for a short time in Quebec. The support, or at minimum the neutrality, of the conquered Europeans was critical in each colony both for military reasons and to maintain and further settlement on Indigenous lands. In each colony, the English long remained a minority surrounded by potential enemies. In the early years after the Conquest of New France, the English needed to maintain the support of Indigenous nations; after the American War of Independence they could not risk French Canadians siding with Ameri­ cans. In the Cape and other South African colonies, the “old subjects” were critical in the endless border skirmishes and wars with the Xhosa and Zulu. Immigration to both colonies was slow, and initially there was little hope of English settlers outnumbering earlier colonizers.21 In each colony, a vocal group of male British colonizers, often merchants, complained about the loss of what they represented as the fundamental right of Englishmen to their own laws throughout the empire. And in both colonies some politicians explicitly supported them. In neither colony did the main players in these debates divide completely along ethnic lines. Supporters of existing colonial civil law countered colonists’ version of British colonial masculinity in a range of ways, arguing for the greater chivalry of their law and its greater fairness to women and children. These debates can fruitfully be read as part of the production of divergent colonial ethnicities in colonies where the differences between two European groups complicated those between colonizers and Indigenous peoples and were harnessed in different

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ways and at different times to political imaginings of nation. As Benton suggests, such “struggles over cultural and religious boundaries and their representations in law became struggles over the nature and structure of political authority.”22 When the Custom of Paris was accepted as the law governing civil matters in the colony of Quebec in 1774, the Quebec Act also provided that property owners could bequeath real and movable property as they wished. Some confusions about the extent of this right were eliminated in 1801 legislation that made it very clear that both men and women, including wives, were allowed to write wills. Neither men nor women could bequeath more than their half of the community property created in all marriages except when a marriage contract specified otherwise or when doing so would “prejudice the rights of the survivor or the customary dower of the children.”23 In the Cape, a very different resolution was attempted in 1822 when Governor Somerset decreed that laws regarding marriage and property attached to the bodies of Englishmen. In a proclamation issued that year, he apparently gave migrants who were “natural-born subjects of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland” the right to dispose of their own property as if they were resident in England. In this way, Somerset left local Dutch marriage law intact. But, in contrast to Quebec’s law that applied to all subjects residing in the territory, he limited the freedom of willing to this particular group of migrants.24 The context in 1822 was specific. Just two years earlier the first major British migration had brought some five thousand lower-middle-class English colonizers, most of them attracted by promises of free transportation and land.25 The “1820 Settlers” moved into the Eastern Cape area, where they served “as a rural buffer against the amaXhosa.”26 Though they were outnumbered in the colony and especially the Eastern Cape by both Cape Dutch and Africans, Somerset’s ordinance seemed to compensate the settlers with the promise of familiar laws regarding inheritance.27 Thus, in contrast to Quebec, in the Cape, inheritance laws were attached to the ethnic or national origins of some of its subjects. Over subsequent decades, as new generations of colonists of British origin were born and as other immigrants began to arrive in the Cape Colony, cases like that of Mary Ann Blatchford raised the question of whether Somerset’s proclamation had been meant to apply only to the 1820 settlers, only to those born or married in England, or to all those of British descent. This placed the whole question of English versus Dutch laws of marriage and especially inheritance on the legislative agenda.

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Widows’ Dower Rights and Children’s Legitimate Portions Roman-Dutch law and the Custom of Paris were similar in their provision of community property in the absence of a contract and in the ease with which ante-nuptial marriage contracts could be used to allow women to keep their property separate and even manage it. And though fundamental questions were routinely raised in each colony throughout the nineteenth century, in neither was the regime of community property changed. They differed in that Cape law gave children a fairly significant claim on both parents’ property – the legitimate portion – and little to a widow, beyond her half of the community property,28 while Quebec law created a generous and tenacious dower for widows before their deaths, and changes since the Conquest had virtually eliminated children’s special claims to anything but the dower. As a result, when politicians and settlers claimed their rights to British law, they focused on different issues. Once British Quebeckers secured freedom of willing, dower became a significant subject of discontent and debate. In the Cape it was the inheritance law that required that children receive a legitimate portion that engendered a similar lengthy series of attempts at legislation. Debates in Quebec were at their most heated in the two decades leading up to the rebellions of 1837 and 1838. In the Cape, there were calls for the introduction of English inheritance laws in the 1820s and 1840s following highly publicized court cases, but it was not until after the establishment of representative government in 1854, and at the time of Mary Ann Blatchford’s court case of 1861, that politicians seriously addressed the issue. Bills were introduced sporadically throughout the 1860s and 1870s. In the 1820s and 1830s, widows’ dower rights became a focus of discontent in Lower Canada. Marriage in the colony created a customary dower that encumbered a man’s own immovable property with a general hypothec to ensure his wife’s dower should she outlive him. This customary dower produced no written documents. It took precedence over all other claims on a man’s property. To men imbued with the common-law conception of marriage this was outrageous. From the late eighteenth century on, English merchants denounced dower as a feudal right, a brake on economic development, and evidence of the secrecy and backwardness of the Custom of Paris. In language that evoked British supremacy and anti-Catholicism, dower took on the shape of a feudal devil casting widow’s mourning weeds over the land and freezing up the possibilities of honest and open buying and selling

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of land. Until the mid-1830s, French Canadian and Patriot politicians countered such claims by representing their law as enlightened and protective of widows and minors.29 In the assembly and legislative council, dower constituted a danger zone, a word that could not be uttered without conjuring up different visions of gender and family that divided the mostly Canadien supporters of civil law from those seeking to move it closer to English legal traditions. Bills were introduced repeatedly from 1817 seeking to modify dower. No bill that touched on dower became law.30 By the mid-1830s, cooperation between the Patriot-dominated assembly and the mostly pro-British legislative council was breaking down. The Patriots were becoming more and more vocal in their critiques of autocratic British rule, increasingly republican in their rhetoric and liberal in their ideas about property. They began to link dower with the seigniorial system as inimical to the modern capitalist economy they sought.31 The armed rebellions of 1837 and 1838 were suppressed, and for three years the colony was ruled by a small, shifting group of mostly English-speaking elite men hand-picked by successive governors general. Among the very last of the many hundreds of ordinances passed by this Special Council was one ensuring that dowers stipulated in marriage contracts had to be officially registered if they were to take precedence over other claims on husbands’ property. It allowed wives to agree to renounce their dower rights when their husbands sold land, and limited the customary dower, created without a marriage contract, to the land a husband or father owned at the time of his death. Thus, in Quebec, the first major change to widows’ rights was made without the direct involvement of elected representatives. The next major change occurred in the early 1860s, when the civil laws of the colony were codified and dower rights were further constrained with only minimal political debate.32 In the Cape, political interest in inheritance revived after 1859 following the publication by two prominent jurists, Egidius Benedictus Watermeyer and William Porter, of a book on community property and colonial inheritance law and Mary Ann Blatchford’s unsuccessful litigation in 1861.33 Bills were introduced in 1862 by Egidius’s brother, Frederick S. Watermeyer, and in 1864 by George Wood, a pugnacious promoter of British rights from the Eastern Cape. After heated debates, the question was placed in the hands of two commissions in 1864. One heard evidence in the towns of the Eastern Cape, where the Eastern Cape conservatives, who included many of the 1820 settlers and their

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offspring, resided. The other sought opinions in the Western Cape, which included Cape Town, Stellenbosch, and areas long occupied by the Cape Dutch. Neither commission sought the opinions of the nonEuropeans who outnumbered them. Peopling the former commission were vocal supporters of British law, including the Hon. Robert God­ lonton, the “intellectual, and eventually political, leader of the Eastern Cape conservatives,” and George Wood, both politicians seeking to introduce English laws regarding inheritance. The commissioners for the western district were mostly admirers of Cape law, led by the able attorney general, William Porter, who had argued Mary Ann Blatchford’s case.34 Declaring that the governor had made a serious mistake in these appointments, the Graaff-Reinet Herald, located in the most western electoral division of the Eastern Cape predicted problems and reaffirmed faith in local law: We are utterly opposed to the abolition of Roman-Dutch law. The former has some serious defects, which can be and ought to be remedied. But in its general principles it is humane and equitable, appealing to the highest principles of our nature. The latter is the relic of a barbarous age, – loving the oft-repeated dictum that a man should be allowed to do as he likes with his own; and striving, we might add, to do as he likes with a good deal that is not and ought not to be his own.35

Two years later, the two commissions produced irreconcilable sets of recommendations which provided fodder for bills and debates in the assembly and council. A bill proposing minor changes to inheritance law in 1866 did not pass; a more extensive bill was introduced a year later, then again in 1874. Debates were heated. As in Lower Canada, they evoked different visions of family and gender linked to the two bodies of law. Two divergent goals recurred in these bills. The first was to curtail or eliminate children’s claims on family property. The second was to reconcile militant British claims for British laws with the existing RomanDutch law. Existing law gave a couple’s children the right to an equal share of one-third of their dead parent’s estate if there were four children or less, one-half if there were more. Adult children could claim this on the death of the first parent as well as after the death of the survivor. While children were still minors, the surviving parent had to provide security on this portion. In 1862 the liberal Frederick S. Watermeyer, a Cape Dutch lawyer who could trace his family’s residence in the

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colony back to the eighteenth century, proposed changes that sought adjustments within the logic of Roman-Dutch law. His bill delayed the distribution of children’s legitimate portion until after the second spouse died. (Later bills would go much further.) It also allowed spouses to bequeath all their part of shared community property to their surviving spouse. This would have duplicated what was possible in Quebec. It also seems very similar to the practices that Susan NewtonKing has described as prevalent in the late eighteenth century on the Cape frontier.36 Cape politicians and men giving evidence to the inheritance commission attributed similar problems to the children’s portion as those in Quebec expressed about dower. It was claimed to hinder progress because it took so much from the “surviving husband.” Widows were not mentioned. Worse, the legitimate portion was represented as stunting enterprise in children by doing “away with self reliance which should be found developing … all over the colony,” upsetting normal age and authority relations in families and producing children who were either too independent or “idle and lacking in reverence for parents.” Cape Town lawyer and politician Charles Aken Fairbridge argued that he had personal knowledge of at least fifty cases of children who had treated parents disrespectfully, but of none where men had sought to leave children destitute or give all to their mistress. He shared the tale of “a young man who demanded his legitimate portion from his widowed mother, an old woman upwards of eighty-one years old, and shook his fist in her face,” and another of a rich man who claimed his portion “from his poor old father.” Against these melodramatic stories of bad children spoiled by an inheritance that the law guaranteed them, supporters countered with tales of Englishmen giving everything to their mistresses and argued that “a man had no right to bring children into the world and to leave them on the streets after his death.”37 Yet, just as Quebec Patriot politicians had moved towards agreement on changing dower while retaining the logic of their law, many supporters of Dutch law came gradually to agree that the payment of the legitimate portion should either be delayed until the death of the second partner or eliminated completely.38 Until 1874, each attempt to legislate led to major modifications of the original bill and repeated attempts to delay second readings, but then failed to go to vote before the end of a session. The first major modifications to inheritance law were passed in 1873, abolishing provisions that restricted what parents who remarried could give to the children of the second marriage.

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Legislation in 1874 completely eliminated the provision for children’s legitimate portion.39 The second main thrust of several of the bills introduced in the 1860s and 1870s was to extend Somerset’s 1822 proclamation to those of British origin born in the colony. Debate about George Wood’s proposed 1864 bill raised issues that would recur again and again over the next decade. To cries of “Hear! Hear!” he argued in the legislative council that “every white family” in the colony had been involved in some way with questions of inheritance and that recent legal decisions supporting local law were driving capitalists from the colony.40 His proposal was that British rights of property disposal be allowed to all those of British or Irish origin born anywhere in the British Empire.41 Supporters of Roman-Dutch law warned that such a bill “threatened to over-run the entire Law of Inheritance in the colony.” The Zuid Afrikaan underlined the futility of any law based on ethnic origins, repeating predictions that the passage of such a bill would keep lawyers fully occupied at the Supreme Court making decisions about whether testators were “in the paternal or maternal line, the lawful, legitimate issue of persons born in Great Britain or Ireland.”42 Three years later, when Wood again tried to link inheritance law to national identity, the editor of the South African Advertiser and Mail acknowledged the fluidity of ethnicity as a category, remarking that such a law would require compiling a “stud book” to distinguish British-born subjects. This attempt to link law to particular bodies or to the “bonds of blood which made a race,” hints, perhaps, at the hardening processes of racialization in the Cape in the wake of abolition and as humanitarian influences waned in the second half of the century.43 As Ryan Eyford’s chapter here suggests, this occurred elsewhere in the colonial world as well. Competing Colonial Masculinities In debates about laws of marriage and inheritance, Canadiens and Cape Dutch loudly proclaiming the superiority of their law were joined by some men of English and other origins. These tended to be men who had come to know the law in a professional capacity or liberal politicians, sympathetic to their fellow French or Cape Dutch colonists. In the Cape, they dismissed their opponents as a “thoroughgoing specimen of John Bull, who goes headlong in for primogeniture and all the rest of it, and advocates the introduction of English law both of marriage and inheritance in its entirety … avowedly because it is English

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law.”44 Such debates produced competing versions of colonial masculinities and divergent claims about gender order and disorder. Male settlers and politicians seeking to change existing provisions for widows and children articulated arguments that reflected the common law’s presumption that husbands should own or control all family  property accumulated during a marriage. In 1828, Samuel Gale, a Montreal justice, conveyed his sense of the injustice of denying men full property rights. He described Quebec marriage law as giving the wife entitlement to “one half the communauté, that is, one half of the entire personal property of the husband, and one half of the real community which he has acquired during his marriage.” Worse, if the wife died first, “the children will be entitled to her share.” This “interfered with the right of the husband in the disposal of his property.”45 Similarly, in the debates in the legislative assembly and council in the Cape, men in favour of changing colonial law called on their audiences to picture the sad cases where “a man had accumulated much property” and endured “the terrible hardship of having to leave one half of it to the disposal of the wife!” The argument usually followed the claim that having been “promised British laws,” men found instead “a law antagonistic to English feelings.”46 “In England,” asserted Charles Fairbridge in 1866, “a man can do as he likes with his property.” George Wood claimed that right for men in the Cape: “Englishman did not come to this colony to be bound by any foreign law; they wanted the law that they bound to their hearts, under which they emigrated to the colony, that they inherited when they were born, and which they never chose to give up,” he insisted in October 1866. The colony would never prosper, he claimed, until the current inheritance law was abolished.47 In such rhetoric, any claims of wives, widows, their relatives, or children upon a man’s estate were represented as constraints on Englis­ hmen’s freedom and insults to their paternal wisdom. Early in the century, Hugh Gray, an Englishman visiting Lower Canada, suggested that “the law making marriage a co-partnership, and creating a communauté de biens is … perhaps the remote cause that the fair sex have such influence in France and in Canada … and even an air of superiority to the husband. In general,” he concluded, “(if you will excuse a vulgar metaphor), the grey mare is the better horse.”48 An editorial in the South African Advertiser and Mail about the widow Blatchford’s inheritance struggle drew on the same metaphor to signal the gender disorder produced by expectations resulting from inappropriate marriage law. “Mrs. B. is not satisfied, and her counsel urges that as the grey

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mare was quite as good a horse as the other, if not better, and did a great deal towards getting the money together … she is entitled to half the amount left. I dare say every Cape lady will exclaim at once, ‘Of course,’ but the lawyers have so much to argue.”49 Supporters of Roman-Dutch Law and the Custom of Paris countered such claims with the argument that local law was superior because it acknowledged and rewarded the contributions of wives, widows, and children. “By the laws of our country,” Patriot politician Denis Benjamin Viger explained in 1828, “husbands and wives are partners and joint proprietors of every species of personal property.50 In the Cape in 1864, a legislative councillor lauded Roman-Dutch law for providing that “no matter who brings their property … into the community – whether the wife or the husband,” they shall share that property. Those averse to changing the law invariably evoked the dangers of unfettered freedom of willing in the hands of men who might fail to act as good husbands, fathers, and providers. Under English law, a man might “cut his wife off without a shilling,” was one variant.51 In a bitingly sarcastic letter to the editor written under a pseudonym just as the Special Council was considering changes to widows’ rights in 1840, one of the colony’s leading French Canadian jurists, Charles-Elzéar Mondelet, painted a striking contrast between the future of widows under the two legal systems. He criticized British claims to superiority by representing the common law as pushing widows and their children onto the street in contrast to the Custom of Paris, which left them well provided for, especially when husbands arranged a dower.52 Newspaper accounts of inheritance struggles in prominent families taught wider lessons both about the law and about men who abused dominant understandings of men’s “moral obligation” to provide for widows and children. The possibility of rewarding illicit sexuality was repeatedly deployed as a reason to retain existing colonial law. The liberty that English law gave husbands to bequeath so much of their estate to their mistress or to bastard offspring was invoked again and again. These were powerful discursive weapons in colonies where, as Kirsten McKenzie has convincingly argued, scandal tinged both personal and colonial reputations. The pro–Dutch law commissioners for the western district reminded settlers in their 1866 report that “a man in England may, by law, leave all his fortune to his kept mistress, and let his minor children and their mother go to the workhouse.” A year later, Saul Solomon, a liberal and tireless supporter of Roman-Dutch laws of marriage and

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inheritance, accused the government of seeking to abolish a law that was “superior,” since the very “principle of the English law” was that a man could give all he owned to his mistress.53 Those in favour of English law argued in a language of liberal freedom and male individualism that stressed the wisdom of most married men: “Let husbands, not legislatures decide what is best.”54 When moving the second reading of his Law of Inheritance Amendment Bill in June 1874, Ross-Johnson “confidently” appealed to his fellow members as “a father myself from early manhood,” and argued that “the interest of the little ones” could “safely be left to the natural affection of the parents.” He then turned the gendered character of the mistress story on its head, claiming he had heard opponents of his bill argue that it was dangerous because should it “become law a woman might entirely pass by her children to make provision for a favourite companion; or a father permit minors to starve while he enriches a mistress.”55 Fairbridge supported the bill because it would allow Englishmen the “right of free disposition of property” that was so very dear to them while allowing those preferring Roman-Dutch law to follow its rules. He drew on his own authority as a lawyer with thirty years of experience to assert that he had never met a case in which a mistress inherited. To laughter from his fellow male politicians, he stressed that “he should not like to live in a country which interfered with his freedom of action in domestic matters, or even obliged him to kiss his wife and children if he did not choose to.” Warming to this theme, another member asserted that “in domestic duties people should be entirely free and untrammelled.” Domestic intimacy could be harnessed in public debate, but bourgeois domesticity and male authority over property were best not meddled with by law or the state.56 Supporters of Cape law disagreed. As women in England and the United States succeeded in placing questions of women’s rights on the public agenda, they could increasingly point to the backwardness and barbarian roots of the common law to underline their point. Critics of the common law in both colonies played effectively with the contradiction between British claims to be the most civilized European race in part because of their superior treatment of women and the realities of common law coverture. They pointed to the civilized roots of their law in Roman jurisprudence and to the dominance of such law throughout Europe. English law, in contrast, “degrades the wife into a nonentity, or at least deems her no better than a serf or chattel of the husband,” asserted the editor of the South African Advertiser and Mail in September 1866.57

“In England a man can do as he likes with his property”  161

Conclusion Mary Ann Blatchford, her husband, and Mr and Mrs Kerr were successful colonists. Migration to the Cape and Quebec had allowed these couples to profit from the dispossession of Indigenous peoples and the possibilities that the empire offered. Both had accumulated significant assets. The husbands had performed colonial masculinity successfully, and both women entered widowhood relatively well provided for by the promises of their wills. Their wealth also contributed to the prosperity of their respective colonies and more broadly to the success of colonies of settlement. The experiences of these two middle-class widows remind us of the centrality of property to family fortunes and to colonial projects. Each moved to a colony where the English common law did not determine rules of marriage and inheritance. Their dilemmas as widows, seeking to determine their rights, led each to grapple with the different logic of rules based on European civil law. In both colonies, canny widows, like Blatchford, were quite clear about which law served them best. They jettisoned the promises men made in wills, seeking instead to take their half of the family assets, or promises made in marriage contracts, unless the will was more generous. Immigrant widows’ attempts to determine their rights raised the question in each colony about whether domicile at the time of marriage or place of residence and property accumulation during the marriage determined a survivor’s rights. This was both a local issue and a transnational question in a century of major migrations. Debates about inheritance and marriage law in colonial legislative councils and assemblies and their reporting, along with the transcripts of prominent court cases in colonial newspapers, placed domestic issues in the public sphere. They taught citizens the details of the law and of the differences between bodies of law. And they reiterated the lesson that good men provided for their wives and children. Roman-Dutch law, or the Custom of Paris, in contrast to Aboriginal rules of marriage, presented an alternative, European way to imagine marriage. In colonies in which friction and cooperation between two groups of Euro­ pean colonizers were grafted in diverse ways into the ongoing brutal colonization of Indigenous peoples and their lands, such debates served at times to reiterate and remake differences between the British and the  “other” conquered Europeans of each colony, and at others to deny them. Public debates concurrently sustained their collective assertions of superiority as Europeans and affirmed the centrality of legal,

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heterosexual marriage between Europeans to the success of white-­ settler colonial projects. Debates about marriage or inheritance law were never only about the intimate and economic rights of men and women within families. As colonies competed with each other for settlers and sought to forge vibrant economies, laws about marriage, inheritance, and property were critical components in fostering, or hindering, colonial progress and civilization. NOTES The quote in the title comes from the South African Advertiser and Mail (SAAM), 3 September 1866. My thanks to graduate students funded through an SSHRC grant for their assistance and to the SSHRC for funding. 1 “Case for Opinion from Kerr’s Estate,” 2 May 1842, Torrance papers, McGill University Archives, Mss 200; “Mary Ann Blatchford, Plaintiff, and Walter Lerwill – alias – Walter Lerwill Blatchford and Thomas Philip and Joseph lawton Senior … as Executors Testamentary of the Estate of the late George Blatchford,” Cape Supreme Court (CSC), 2/1/1/101 no. 51, 1861, Cape Town Repository, National Archives of South Africa (hereafter CTR). 2 “Blatchford, Liquidation & Distribution Account, 1862,” MOOC, 13/1/196, 51, CTR; Blatchford v. Blatchford, and others, reported SAAM, 26 November 1861, 3 November 1861; Blatchford v. Blatchford in Cases Decided in the Supreme Court of the Cape of Good Hope, vol. 1, 1861–1867, ed. E.S. Roscoe (Capetown: J.C. Juta, 1885), 3–11; Pamela Sculley, “The Bouquet of Freedom: Social and Economic Relations in Stellensbosch District, 1870–1900,’ MA thesis, University of Cape Town, 1987, 11–12; Cape of Good Hope, Census of the Colony, 1865 (Cape Town: Saul Solomon and Co., 1866), which categorized and counted the population of Hottentot’s Holland, where their farm was located, as European 428, Hottentot (Khoesan) 28, Kafir male 56, and “Other” (whom I assume were largely ex-slaves), 1093; “Request for grant of Norhoek Estate,” 1846, CO 4031, CTR; Kirsten McKenzie, Scandal in the Colonies: Sydney and Cape Town, 1820–1850 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2004), 92–3; Katherine M.J. McKenna, A Life of Propriety: Anne Murray Powell and Her Family, 1755–1849 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1994), 33–6; Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780–1850 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). 3 Antoinette Burton, “Not Even Remotely Global? Method and Scale in World History,” History Workshop Journal 64 (Autumn 2007): 323–7.

“In England a man can do as he likes with his property”  163 4 Ann Laura Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002), 12; Adele Perry, On the Edge of Empire: Gender, Race, and the Making of British Columbia, 1849–1871 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001); Tony Ballantyne and Antoinette Burton, eds., Moving Subjects: Gender, Mobility and Intimacy in an Age of Global Empire (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009); Tony Ballantyne and Antoinette Burton, eds., Bodies in Contact: Rethinking Colonial Encounters in World History (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005); Isabel Hofmeyr, “AHR Conversation: On Transnational History,” American Historical Review 111, no. 5 (2006): 1444. 5 Catherine Hall, Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination 1830–1867 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); Lauren Benton, Law and Colonial Cultures: Legal Regimes in World History, 1400–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); John Weaver, The Great Land Rush and the Making of the Modern World, 1650–1900 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2003); John McLaren, A.R. Buck, and Nancy E. Wright, eds., Despotic Dominion: Property Rights in British Settler Societies (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2005); Jean Allman and Antoinette Burton, “Destination Globalization? Women, Gender and Comparative Colonial Histories in the New Millenium,” Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 4, no. 1 (2003); Helen Bradford, “Women, Gender and Colonialism: Rethinking the History of the British Cape Colony and Its Frontier Zones, c. 1806–1870,” Journal of African History 37 (1996): 351–70. 6 Hofmeyr, “AHR Conversation,” 1444. 7 The material on the Cape is based largely on editorials, articles, and the reporting of court cases and debates in the South African Advertiser and Mail and the Cape Times, as well as on digests of court cases and the legislation of the period. The Quebec material used here draws on nineteenth-century political debates, legal case reports, and colonial investigations, many of which I have used in earlier publications. Here I reflect as a Quebec ­historian on the parallels and differences between the issues raised in the two colonies. 8 Elizabeth Elbourne, Blood Ground: Colonialism, Missions, and the Contest for Christianity in the Cape Colony and Britain, 1799–1853 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2002). Indigenous marriage precipitated its own debates, as Sarah Carter shows so well in The Importance of Being Monogamous: Marriage and Nation Building in Western Canada to 1915 (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press and Athabasca University Press, 2008). I have followed the spelling and naming used in

164  Bettina Bradbury Carolyn Hamilton, Bernard K. Mbenga, and Robert Ross, The Cambridge History of South Africa, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). 9 SAAM, 2 November 1861, 26 November 1861. 10 Carter, The Importance of Being Monogamous; Perry, On the Edge of Empire; McKenzie, Scandal; Bettina Bradbury, “Colonial Comparisons: Rethinking Marriage, Civilization and Nation in the Nineteenth-Century White Settler Societies,” in Phillip Buckner and R. Douglas Francis, eds., Rediscovering the British World (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2005); Jennifer Henderson, Settler Feminism and Race Making in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003); Charlotte Macdonald, A Woman of Good Character: Single Women as Immigrant Settlers in Nineteenth-Century New Zealand (Wellington: Bridget Williams Books, 1990); Alan Lester, Imperial Networks: Creating Identities in Nineteenth-Century South Africa and Britain (New York: Routledge, 2001); Anne Summers, Damned Whores and God’s Police (Victoria: Penguin, 1975), 296–9; Cecilie Swaisland, Servants and Gentlewomen to the Golden Land: The Emigration of Single Women from Britain to Southern Africa, 1820–1939 (Providence, RI: Berg, 1993). 11 A.R. Buck, “‘A Blot on the Certificate’: Dower and Women’s Property Rights in Colonial New South Wales,” Australian Journal for Law and Society 4, no. 87 (1987); Lee Holcombe, Wives and Property: Reform of the Married Women’s Property Law in Nineteenth-Century England (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1983); Mary Poovey, Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988); Susan Staves, Married Women’s Separate Property in England, 1660–1833 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990); Charlotte Macdonald, “Land, Death and Dower in the Settler Empire: The Lost Cause of ‘The Widow’s Third’ in Nineteenth-Century New Zealand,” Victoria University of Wellington Law Review 41 (2010): 493–518. 12 Robert Ross, Status and Respectability in the Cape Colony, 1770–1860: A Tragedy of Manners (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 51–5; Bettina Bradbury, Wife to Widow: Lives, Laws, and Politics in NineteenthCentury Montreal (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2011); Bettina Bradbury, Alan Stewart, Evelyn Kolish, and Peter Gossage, “Property and Marriage: The Law and Practice in Early Nineteenth-Century Montreal,” Histoire sociale / Social History 26 (May 1993): 9–39; Susan Newton-King, Masters and Servants on the Cape Frontier, 1760–1803 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 13 Bradbury et al., “Property and Marriage”; SAAM, 3 September 1866.

“In England a man can do as he likes with his property”  165 14 Will, John Douglas, Notary Griffin, 6 August 1836, Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec à Montréal; Bradbury, Wife to Widow, 86, 159, 243–53. 15 SAAM, 26 November 1861; Connolly v. Woolrich and Johnson et al. (1867), in Lower Canada Jurist (LCJ) 11: 207, 215, 247; Sidney L. Harring, White Man’s Law: Native People in Nineteenth-Century Canadian Jurisprudence (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998), 169–72: Carter, The Importance of Being Monogamous, 134–5; Constance Backhouse, Petticoats and Prejudice: Women and Law in Nineteenth Century Canada (Toronto: Osgoode Society and Women’s Press, 1991), 9–20; Frederick Parker Walton, A Handbook of Husband and Wife According to the Law of Scotland (Edinburgh: W. Green, 1893), 341. 16 “Case for Opinion from Kerr’s Estate,” 2 May 1842; LCJ 3 (1860): 64; Revue de législation et de jurisprudence et collection de décisions des divers tribunaux du Bas Canada 3 (1848): 255; LCJ 3 (1853): 101; McTavish v. Pyke et al., in Lower Canada Review 3 (1853): 101. 17 Blatchford v. Blatchford, cited in SAAM, 11 December 1861; The Cape Argus, 28 November 1861, cutting included in Blatchford v. Blatchford and others, Cape Supreme Court (CSC), 2/1/1/101 no. 51, 1861, CR. 18 SAAM, 11 December 1861. 19 Blatchford v. Blatchford, cited in SAAM, 1 September 1866, 11 December 1866. 20 Benton, Law and Colonial Cultures, 2. 21 Leonard Thompson, A History of South Africa (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 64. Thompson suggests that “British settlers soon outnumbered French Canadians” in Canada, but they never did in Quebec. 22 Benton, Law and Colonial Cultures, 2. 23 41 Geo. III, Cap. 4, “An Act to explain and amend the Law respecting Last Wills and Testaments,” Provincial Statutes of Lower Canada, 1801; Evelyn Kolish, Nationalismes et conflits de droits: Le débat du droit privé au Québec, 1760–1840 (Montreal: Éditions Hurtubise, 1994), 208–12. 24 “Testamentary Dispositions of Natural-born Subjects of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland resident within this Settlement,” 1822, Statutes of the Cape of Good Hope (SCGH), vol. 1, 2795–6. 25 Thompson, A History of South Africa, 55–6; Ross, Status and Respectability, 7–8, 52–3. 26 Hamilton et al., Cambridge History, vol. 1, 269. 27 “Testamentary Dispositions,” 2795–6. 28 Wayne Ph. Te Brake, Rudolf M. Dekker, and Lotte C. van de Pol, “Women and Political Culture in the Dutch Revolutions,” in Harriet B. Applewhite

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29 30

31

32

33

34 35 36

and Darline G. Levy, eds., Women and Politics in the Age of the Democratic Revolution (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990), 125–6. On the death of a parent with four or fewer children, each child had the right to claim an equal share of one third of the clear residue of the parents’ estate, unless something else had been provided for in an ante-nuptial agreement: “Report of the Law of Inheritance Commission for the Western Districts,” in Cape of Good Hope, Reports of the Committee of the Legislative Council and of Government Commissions (Cape Town: Saul Solomon and Co., 1866), xiii. Kolish, Nationalismes et conflits de droits; Bradbury, Wife to Widow, 122–5. “Report of the Special Committee to whom was referred the Petition of certain Inhabitants of the City and District of Montreal, respecting the state of the law regarding the creation of incumbrances upon Real Estate in this Province, and praying for the establishment of Register Offices therein,” in Journals of the Legislative Council of the Province of Lower Canada (JLCLC), 1835–6, appendix F; Linda Colley, Britons Forging the Nation 1707– 1837 (London: Pimlico, 1992); Linda Colley, “Britishness and Otherness: An Argument,” Journal of British Studies 31, no. 4 (October 1992): 309–29. Allan Greer, “La république des hommes: Les Patriotes de 1837 face aux femmes,” Revue d’histoire de l’Amérique français 44, no. 4 (Spring 1991): 507–28. Bradbury, Wife to Widow, 127–39; Brian Young, The Politics of Codification: The Lower Canadian Civil Code of 1866 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1994); Civil Code of Lower Canada: First, Second and Third Reports (Quebec: E. Desbarats, 1865). Egidius Benedictus Watermeyer and William W. Porter, Community of Property and the Law of Inheritance at the Cape of Good Hope (Cape Town: Saul Solomon, 1859); Ross, Status and Respectability, 52. “Report of the Law of Inheritance Commission for the Western Districts,” xiii; Hamilton et al., Cambridge History, vol. 1, 18. Reprinted in SAAM, 21 December 1864; J.L. McCracken, The Cape Parliament, 1854–1910 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), 19. F.S. Watermeyer, a Cape Dutch, Cape Towner who was given an English education was elected MLA for Graaff-Reinet in 1858 and 1861. His wife Jane Agnes Fairbairn was of English origin and daughter of the publisher and prominent liberal John Fairburn. “Frederik Stephanus Watermeyer,” in W.J. De Kock, Dictionary of South African Biography (DSAB), vol. 3 (Cape Town: South African Library, 1968), 833–4; Egidius Benedictus Watermeyer, Selections from the Writings of the late E.B. Watermeyer, with a brief sketch of his

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37

38 39

40 41 42 43

44 45 46 47 48

49 50 51 52 53

54 55 56 57

life (Cape Town: Juta, 1877),174; SAAM, 11 November 1865, 1 September 1866, 25 June 1874; Newton-King, Masters and Servants, 155–56. “Extracts from Law of Inheritance Commission Report for the Western District,” SAAM, 1 September 1866; Mr. Vincent, House of Assembly, in SAAM, 30 June 1874; De Korte, Legislative Council, in SAAM, 27 July 1874. Pote, Legislative Council, Debate on Law of Inheritance, SAAM, 22 June 1864. “Act to Amend the Law of Inheritance of this Colony, 1874”; “Act to Amend the Law of Inheritance in this Colony, and Repeal the ‘lex Hac Edictali,’” SCGH, vol. 2, 1249. Wood, Legislative Council, reported in SAAM, 22 June 1864. SAAM, 28 May 1864. Zuid Afrikaan, cited in SAAM, 20 July 1864. SAAM, 22 May 1867. Catherine Hall, “Of Gender and Empire: Reflections on the Nineteenth Century,’ in Gender and Empire, ed. Philippa Levine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 46. Editorial, SAAM, 1 September 1866. Select Committee, 1828, Evidence of Samuel Gale, 23, 266 (emphasis added). Editorial, SAAM, 4 June 1864; Legislative Council, reported in SAAM, 22 June 1864. SAAM, 11 October 1866, 3 September 1866, 1 July 1871, 17 October 1866. See “George Wood,” DSAB, vol. 4, 793. Hugh Gray, Letters from Canada Written during a Residence There in the Years 1806, 1807 and 1808 (London: Longman et al., 1809), 141–3, cited in Pioneer and Gentlewomen of British North America, 1713–1867, ed. Beth Light and Alison Prentice (Toronto: New Hogtown Press, 1980), 103–4. SAAM, 30 November 1861. Select Committee, 1828, Evidence of Denis-Benjamin Viger, 145. Legislative Council, Hon. Pote, reported in SAAM, 22 June 1864. L’Aurore des Canadas, 18 December 1840. McKenzie, Scandal; “Report of the Law of Inheritance Commission for the Western Districts,” xix; SAAM, 1 September 1866; Legislative Council, 2 May 1867, reported in SAAM, 22 May 1867. Legislative Council, reported in SAAM, 22 June 1864. Standard and Mail, 25 June 1874; House of Assembly, reported in Standard and Mail, 30 June 1874. Legislative Assembly, Standard and Mail, 30 June 1874. Editorial, SAAM, 1 September 1866.

7 Slave-Owner, Missionary, and Colonization Agent: The Transnational Life of John Taylor, 1813–1884 rya n eyfor d

Many historians whose work is sometimes grouped under the capacious heading of “the new imperial history” have used a biographical approach to illustrate networks of migration, trade, and intellectual exchange that linked various colonial contexts to each other and to the imperial metropole.1 Following the lives of individuals who moved within and beyond the formal boundaries of the British Empire, these authors have demonstrated how imperial identities were produced in reference to the categories of gender, race, and class.2 Most studies of “imperial careering” have focused on individuals whose lives are relatively well documented in various colonial archives – governors, missionaries, military officers, and elite travellers. Others have uncovered criminals, fraudsters, and other rogues who exploited the anonymity sometimes afforded by empire to reinvent themselves and hatch fresh schemes in multiple contexts.3 The career of John Taylor bridges these two categories of colonial travellers. In doing so, Taylor’s story engages with the questions about the wider relationship between Canadian, trans-imperial, and transnational histories that underlie this book, especially the connections between Canada and the Caribbean that frame the chapters by Karen Flynn and Laura Ishiguro. Born into privilege in Barbados in 1813, Taylor was educated on the island and overseas. In 1835 he moved to Texas along with a group of former slaves he had signed to indenture contracts. Once there, he sold these contracts to other white settlers in exchange for cash. This transaction eventually resulted in Taylor’s 1840 trial and conviction for violating the law for the abolition of the slave trade. Although he was originally sentenced to fourteen years’ transportation to Australia, Taylor was ultimately imprisoned in Barbados

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for only three years; his connections to the planter and mercantile elite first helped have his sentence commuted, and later worked to secure his early release. Taylor then ventured to England, where he petitioned the Colonial Office in an unsuccessful quest to clear his name. During the same period, he underwent a profound religious transformation that altered the course of his life. In the latter 1840s he moved to Canada West and joined a Baptist congregation in Kingston. By 1874, he was a missionary working among the lumbermen in Ontario’s Haliburton district, where he met some recently arrived Icelandic immigrants. In the spring of 1875, Taylor advocated on behalf of the largely destitute Icelanders to the Canadian government, and that summer he led an Icelandic delegation to Manitoba to select a site for an Icelandic colony. Taylor moved with the immigrants to the “Icelandic reserve,” or “New Iceland” colony, on Lake Winnipeg that autumn. From that point until his death in 1884, Taylor was employed by the federal Department of Agriculture as the “Icelandic agent” responsible for the resettlement of immigrant Icelanders in Manitoba and the North-West Territories. Taylor did not advertise his Barbados connection – or any other part of his past – to his superiors in Ottawa; his West Indian origins are never mentioned in the more than 100 official and private letters that passed between Taylor and Department of Agriculture secretary John Lowe between 1875 and 1884. At the same time, it is unclear whether  Taylor tried to conceal his past from his friends and associates in Canada. The people Taylor was closest to among the Icelanders knew that he had been born in Barbados, and he listed the island as his place of birth on census returns. It is possible that he simply chose not to elaborate on the details of his earlier life; the ubiquity of his name certainly helped ensure that Taylor could hide in plain sight. He was but one of more than 500 John Taylors recorded in the 1881 Canadian census, and there were roughly 5000 more in each of the US and British censuses of the same period. The odds of him being connected with slave trading in Texas forty years earlier, or the resulting court case on a faraway island, were slim at best. The division of Taylor’s life into two distinct phases is reflected in its documentation in the historical record. He receives minor mention in histories of Barbados and Manitoba and in local histories in Texas and Ontario, and he is an important figure in the story of Icelandic migration to North America.4 However, the full scope of his life and career has previously been segmented into these distinct national and regional boxes. Since he was not a major figure in any one of the places he

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lived, the fact that John Taylor the Texas settler and convicted Barbadian slave trader was also John Taylor the Baptist missionary in Ontario and Icelandic agent in Manitoba was hitherto unknown. This chapter brings several pieces of that puzzle together, although the picture is far from complete. In part, this reflects the typical research challenges of attempting to follow one individual through fragmentary archival records scattered in several different jurisdictions. But in Taylor’s case, it also involved the special challenge of realizing that puzzle pieces placed in different archival or historical boxes were part of the same picture. Reconstituting a full outline of Taylor’s life has opened up the possibility of revisiting some familiar historical topics from a fresh perspective. The end of slavery in the British West Indies and the Canadian colonization of north-western North America are two processes that are rarely linked to one another.5 What is the significance of the fact that a man who was a product of West Indian slave society helped build whitesettler society in the Canadian North-West? How did Taylor succeed in remaking himself in response to the broader social and cultural changes that occurred around him over the course of the nineteenth century? Department of Agriculture secretary John Lowe once called Taylor “the principal projector” of the Icelandic colony.6 This reflected the fact that in his position as Icelandic agent, Taylor concerned himself with all aspects of the colony’s development, from basic provisioning to institution building to regulating marriage among the colonists. Taylor believed that his overall purpose was to assimilate the Icelanders into Anglo-Canadian society. He considered their time in the reserve to be a period of tutelage during which they would be trained to become British subjects exercising all the attendant rights, privileges, and obliga­ tions while becoming culturally indistinguishable from white, Englishspeaking Canadians. He undertook this mission with a sense of religious zeal derived from his own deeply held convictions of faith; he aspired to be the Icelanders’ spiritual leader as well as their link to the Canadian state. With its religious underpinnings and assimilative emphasis, the Icelandic reserve was in essence a type of mission community in which the paternalistic missionary/agent oversaw a wide-ranging civilizing project. It was in this respect not entirely dissimilar from the village settlements that missionaries established for Indigenous peoples and former African slaves throughout the imperial world during the nineteenth century. On one hand, Taylor’s plan for the Icelanders echoed the dreams of early-nineteenth-century abolitionists and humanitarians who

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believed in the fundamental equality of mankind and that cultural differences could be overcome with tutelage. He considered himself to be taking the “hardy and able bodied people of Iceland,” who, he claimed, were “rather deficient on their first arrival,” and demonstrating “their fitness for becoming good settlers and peaceable citizens.”7 But on the other hand, his work in the Icelandic reserve reflected the racial ideologies of the latter half of the nineteenth century, when the earlier faith in racial equality had been replaced with a greater emphasis on biology in determining cultural difference. Taylor’s Icelandic reserve was surrounded by Indian reserves where missionaries and Indian agents employed the kind of discourses about civilization and assimilation discussed in different ways in both Tolly Bradford’s and Angela Wanhalla’s chapters in this collection. However, the legal and administrative constraints that immigrant Icelanders and their Aboriginal neighbours laboured under were fundamentally different. In his role as Icelandic agent, John Taylor helped produce and enforce those differences. John Taylor was the fourth of at least fifteen children born to Richard Taylor and Elizabeth Mehetabel Jones. Taylor’s father was an official in the British commissariat, which was responsible for the provisioning of the armed forces. His mother came from a prominent Barbados family who owned several plantations in the parish of St John’s.8 The Taylors lived on a sixteen-acre property called Enmore Cottage on the outskirts of Bridgetown, Barbados’s capital. Slave registers from 1817 to 1833 show that Richard Taylor was slowly increasing the family’s slave holdings. On the eve of Emancipation in 1833, Richard Taylor had twentyeight slaves, most of whom were involved in domestic service and household provisioning.9 In March 1836, as part of the imperial government’s scheme for compensating former slave-owners for the loss of their property, Richard Taylor was awarded £604. John Taylor also received compensation; he was awarded £7 15s 4d for one male slave.10 Little is known for certain about John Taylor’s early life. According to his friend Sigtryggur Jónasson, Taylor was educated in Barbados and Halifax, Nova Scotia, and family tradition claims that he attended Oxford. He appears to have studied theology, and for a time considered ordination into the Anglican priesthood. In his late teens Taylor may have spent some time in the United States, and worked with his father in the commissariat office.11 What is certain is that as Taylor grew to adulthood, the slave society that he had been born into was slowly withering away. The Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade was passed in 1807, six years before Taylor

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was born. In 1816, a month after his third birthday, a major slave rebellion convulsed the island and terrified the white population. By his tenth birthday, Barbadian whites had found a scapegoat for AfroBarbadian resistance in the Methodist church; the chapel of William Shrewsbury was torched by an angry mob in 1823.12 However, by the latter 1820s the anti-slavery forces in England had gained a decisive advantage, and the imperial government formally adopted a policy mandating the gradual amelioration of slavery. The end of formal slavery in 1834 came on the heels of Taylor’s twenty-first birthday. Full emancipation for the formerly enslaved Barbadians had to wait until 1  August 1838, when the quasi-slavery apprenticeship system was ended. Following full emancipation, freed people and the planter and mercantile elite contested the limits of the civil and labour rights of Afro-Barbadians and the extent to which the old order would be overturned.13 In the same period, the island underwent a profound economic crisis brought on by the imperial government’s removal of preferential duties on West Indian sugar. Many white Barbadian families, including the Taylors, looked for a way out. Canada, specifically the area around Kingston, became their new home in 1848. In that year, Robert Schomburgk published his monumental His­ tory of Barbados. It contains a passing reference to the “very remarkable and important” 1840 trial of John Taylor for violating the Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade.14 Comparison of the accounts of the trial in the contemporary newspaper the Barbadian and in British Colonial Office records with the biographical information about Taylor from the Manitoba context confirms that the man on trial in 1840 was the same John Taylor who later became Icelandic agent in the Canadian North-West. Taylor explained his move to Texas in 1835 as a strategic one, “for the purpose of engaging there in mercantile as well as other pursuits.”15 He claimed to have learned of the region’s advantages during a trip to the United States. In the mid-1830s, Texas, then a province of Mexico, was attracting considerable numbers of American settlers. Many of these migrants were slave-owners from the southern states who brought their slaves with them, even though chattel slavery had been abolished by Mexico in 1829.16 Americans were able to perpetuate the slave system by manipulating Mexican laws around indentured servitude and debt peonage. Owners drew up indenture contracts that virtually guaranteed slavery for life. Contemporary settlers’ guides contain advice on  how to “evade the general law of abolition” through indenture

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contracts.17 It is suggestive of their intent that before leaving Barbados, Taylor and his business partner, Thomas Ames, signed a number of their servants to indenture contracts. Taylor arrived in Texas during the revolutionary war between the Mexican government and American settlers, which resulted in the creation of the Republic of Texas in March 1836. The revolution had important consequences for the legal status of the Afro-Barbadian servants that Taylor brought with him. The revolutionary council made it illegal “for any free negro or mulatto to come within the limits of Texas” and later formally reintroduced slavery.18 During this chaotic period, Taylor transferred the indenture contracts of his nine servants to several persons in return for cash. He later contended that he had done this out of necessity because he did not have the means to provide for and protect them in the middle of a war zone. He even claimed to have transferred the contracts at his servants’ request; such requests could have occurred, but were probably made under duress. One of the servants, Edward Whittaker, later testified that he had asked Taylor to transfer his contract to a man named William Moore out of fear that Moore would “blow his brains out” and after receiving fifty lashes from his new master.19 The question of whether Taylor moved to Texas as part of a plan to sell freed Afro-Barbadians back into slavery is complicated by his actions after his return to Barbados in 1837. It was Taylor who first brought his case to the attention of the British government. In April 1837, Taylor sent a petition to Lord Glenelg, secretary of state for the colonies, asking that the eight black and coloured persons be restored to liberty and that the government reimburse him for his financial losses.20 The Colonial Office referred the case to the foreign secretary Lord Palmerston, who took a dim view of Taylor’s intentions.21 Over a year passed without any action from London, and Taylor became increasingly anxious. In November 1838, he approached the prominent coloured Barbadian abolitionist Samuel Jackman Prescod to help him with his case.22 Gossip about the affair was apparently already circulating on the island; in January 1839, Taylor wrote that he was “scandalized in the community & injured in the opinion of many of my friends” as a result of the Texas affair becoming widely known. By this time, the imperial government was considering the possibility of prosecuting Taylor for slave trading. In October 1839, Taylor’s former slave April Lashley arrived back in Barbados after a harrowing escape from Texas. According to Lashley’s mother, her son confronted Taylor in Bridgetown, asking, “Mass John,

174  Ryan Eyford

what did you sell me for?” Taylor answered, “Couldn’t do better, April; I had the schooner expenses to pay.”23 On the strength of Lashley’s deposition, Taylor was arrested and committed to jail. Early in 1840, the British government sent a naval officer to Texas to recover the other people and gather evidence for the case against Taylor. Only five of the eight missing people were recovered; the others were presumed dead.24 The trial at the end of June 1840 was a sensational event in Barbados and was noted in the anti-slavery press in England.25 The editor of the Barbadian, a conservative organ of the planter class, opined that he was reluctant to report on the trial of the “unfortunate young man” because it would be “eagerly seized upon by the Anti-Colonial faction in England who take advantage of any isolated case to fulminate their cruel and sweeping charges against West Indians who are not so fortunate to be of African descent.”26 At trial, Taylor’s defence focused on the fact that he had voluntarily approached the government to secure the release of the people. His attorney attempted to portray him as a respectable young man and even “a perfect martyr in the cause of lib­ erty.” The white community of Barbados was virtually united in its support of Taylor. Even Samuel Jackman Prescod, a champion of the rights of the Black and coloured population, defended him; “although Mr. Taylor acted imprudently, was ill advised, and exposed himself to a good deal of suspicion … it was impossible for him to have acted the part he did if he had believed his conduct to have been criminal – or had he been conscious of a guilty intention.”27 In spite of this broad-based support for Taylor, the jury had little choice but to convict him. The imperial government was watching, and based on the evidence there was little doubt that Taylor had broken the law. Taylor was convicted and sentenced to transportation to Australia for a term of fourteen years. Shortly thereafter, as a result of petitions sent by many prominent Barbadians, the sentence was commuted to imprisonment on the island. In March 1843, Governor Sir Charles Grey released Taylor after he had served three years and three months.28 Taylor left Barbados for England early in 1844, and while there repeatedly lobbied the imperial government to “interfere on behalf” of the remaining Afro-Barbadians he had taken to Texas “with the view of recovering them from their present miserable condition.” Taylor readily acknowledged that in doing this he was motivated in part by a selfinterested desire to clear his name, but he stressed that even if that was not the case, his sense of duty and responsibility for the people would

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have prompted him to advocate for them.29 The Colonial Office and the Foreign Office brushed aside his petitions as unimportant and ultimately did nothing to help free the rest of Taylor’s party. During his Texas sojourn, his imprisonment in Barbados, and his time in England, Taylor was engaged in a personal struggle to understand and redefine his relationship with God. After almost dying in a terrible storm at sea on the voyage to England, Taylor made a commitment to spend the remainder of his days as God’s servant. His religious transformation is described in detail in a “covenant of faith” signed in the Chapel-of-Ease in Seymour Street, London, in June 1844. In this deeply personal document, Taylor describes how The Rise and Progress of Religion in the Soul, a highly influential 1745 book by the English nonconformist Philip Doddridge, had inspired him to become “one of God’s people” and to finally overcome the cycle of sin and repentance that had characterized his life. He believed that his misfortunes had provided an opening to escape his old ways and be reborn, stronger and fortified by God’s love.30 In the midst of all my troubles … the Almighty kept me from falling into the utmost extremity of despair, although he would not remove his heavy hand from off me for several long years, during which I received very gradually small portions of that strength which I had formerly besought him to give me, until at length I found myself enabled by a power not mine own, to resist and to overcome those sins which I had been accustomed to fall almost as often as spoiled by their temptation.31

Some time after moving to Canada in the latter 1840s, Taylor’s spiritual searching resulted in conversion to the Baptist faith – a denomi­ nation that had been particularly active in the fight for the abolition of slavery. His conversion probably coincided with his 1850 marriage to Elizabeth Mary Haines, member of a prominent Baptist family in Kingston. He worked for a time as a schoolmaster and merchant in Ernestown and later at Peterborough, but after 1870 devoted most of his time to missionary work for the British and Foreign Bible Society. He relocated his family to Dysart Township in the Haliburton district. His mission field was the region’s lumber camps and he aimed to earn converts from among the rough-and-tumble “shantymen” working in the forests. In 1874, the Ontario government settled a group of Icelandic immigrants at the nearby village of Kinmount. During the winter of

176  Ryan Eyford

1874–5, these people suffered from considerable hardships owing to poor housing and lack of employment. Taylor learned about them from his niece Caroline and resolved to help them.32 Taylor approached the Dominion government with a proposal for an “industrial farm” for Icelanders in Ontario. He believed that the main barrier to the Icelanders becoming “independent and self-supporting” citizens was their ignorance of the language and culture of the host society. His remedy was to place them in an agrarian institution where they would be under the supervision of “some knowledgeable person” who would transform them from backward foreigners into prosperous Canadians.33 This particular plan got a cool reception in Ottawa, but government officials were nonetheless interested in promoting Icelandic immigration. The ministers of agriculture and the interior directed Taylor to form a delegation of Icelanders to search out a site for an Icelandic colony in Manitoba or the North-West Territories. In July 1875, Taylor led what he called the “Icelandic Deputation” to Manitoba. They selected a tract on the south-west shore of Lake Winnipeg in what was then part of the North-West Territories. Taylor received an eight-month appointment as “Icelandic Agent” that ultimately stretched into nine years. Typical for government appointments of the period, Taylor’s main qualification was that he was politically well connected.34 Taylor, then in his mid-sixties, was given broad responsibility for a colony that at its peak contained upwards of 1500 people. Although the land was reserved exclusively for Icelanders, an exception was made for Taylor and his family. Three branches of his extended family eventually settled in the Icelandic reserve. The Icelandic settler Símon Símonarson perceived that distinctions were made between the “better-class” of people – Taylor’s family and the few Icelanders who could speak English – and the majority of the settlers. Símon alleged that those who were “on the most intimate terms with Taylor” received preferential treatment, particularly when it came to selecting land.35 Taylor clearly intended to place himself at the centre of life in the colony. Shortly after arriving, he hired the Icelanders to build him a two-storey house in the centre of Gimli, the colony’s main village, from which he conducted the business of his agency. Although he was a political appointee, John Taylor’s position was no sinecure. Officials in the Department of Agriculture considered his role to be akin to the hard-working “inland” agents who provided logistical and material support to new immigrants and reported to the government on the conditions in newly settled districts.36 Taylor was

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instructed to “assist the Icelanders in their first settlement,” primarily by distributing various forms of government aid.37 In the context of a new and relatively isolated colony, that basic directive came to encompass an extensive list of duties. Taylor arranged for the purchase, transport, and distribution of food, seed, implements, livestock, and other necessities. Since most of this was paid from a government loan, he was required to keep detailed accounts of what each Icelandic family owed. The arrival of new groups of immigrants meant he had to arrange for their transport from Winnipeg and ensure that their basic needs were met after arrival in the colony. In the absence of a Dominion Lands Office in the region, he was instructed to register the settlers’ homesteads. When the government agreed to construct a road to connect the Icelandic reserve with Manitoba in 1876, Taylor was given the additional tasks of overseeing the project and paying the workers. He also looked out for the health of the settlers by arranging for medical assistance during disease outbreaks. Carrying out all these duties required a voluminous correspondence with government officials in both Ottawa and Winnipeg that was often frustratingly slow due to poor commu­ nications. Taylor delegated work to his assistant agent, Sigtryggur Jónasson, and relied heavily on Icelandic storekeeper Friðjón Friðriksson as his interpreter, since he did not understand the Icelandic language. Taylor saw his role as agent in more expansive terms than did his superiors in Ottawa. He aspired to wide-ranging religious, moral, and legal authority over the settlers’ lives. Although he had formally exchanged the role of Baptist missionary for that of civil servant, his deeply held religious views led him to interpret events as having been guided by divine providence. In July 1875, he wrote in his exploration journal, “If the Lord shall plant the colony of Icelanders here, may there never be wanting among them true and devoted hearts to serve the living God.”38 Some Icelanders perceived that Taylor believed himself to be Moses leading them to the Promised Land. Colonist Jón Jónsson from Munkaþverá recalled that on the journey to the North-West in the fall of 1875, Taylor preached a sermon drawn from the Book of Exodus.39 One of the leading settlers, Ólafur Ólafsson from Espihóll, wrote to his friend Rev. Jón Bjarnason that although Taylor fervently wanted to become the Icelanders’ pastor, the people largely rejected him because of differences between Taylor’s Baptist beliefs and their Icelandic Luther­ anism.40 Of particular importance to the settlers was infant baptism, a rite that Taylor refused to perform. Still, Taylor long retained the dream of being a spiritual leader to the Icelanders. In 1883 he told his niece’s

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husband, the Icelandic pastor Halldór Briem, “How greatly I long to preach the Gospel of Christ to them without any interpreter! Perhaps the Lord may yet permit me to see this before I die.”41 Taylor also worked to establish the basic structures of governance and civil society that he considered necessary. His first step was to engineer his appointment as justice of the peace, all the while working to establish a school, a post office, a rudimentary police force, a militia unit, a system of municipal government, and a newspaper. Only nine days after their arrival in the colony, Taylor wrote to Alexander Morris, lieutenant governor of Manitoba and the North-West Territories, asking for the creation of a “national school … connected with the regular educational system of Canada.”42 He argued that these structures were vitally necessary in “bringing the Icelanders to a practical knowledge and possession of our civil and political privileges, so that they may acquire and make use of the position of naturalized British subjects at as early a period as possible.”43 Taylor considered assimilation and material progress to be inextricably linked. In his view, the ultimate success of the colony hinged on building a community that adhered to the proper class, gender, and racial order. Over time, he saw this goal coming into view: “A perfect identification in all respects with our people will eventually take place, so that whether by birth or assimilation, a Canadian population is being rapidly developed here.”44 In this way, he believed that the experiment would meet both the larger goals of the Canadian government’s colonial project in the North-West and the Icelanders’ desire to form a prosperous community. Taylor sought to bring the Icelanders into as close contact as possible with Anglo-Canadians while creating a rigid separation between them and the region’s Aboriginal population. In reporting the choice of reserve site to Lieutenant Governor Morris, Taylor stated that some Norway House Indians were planning to settle in the same place and asked that something be done to prevent it. “This is the very spot which we have selected as the nucleus of our settlement, and therefore it would be of the very greatest advantage both to these Indians and to ourselves, if some very distinct and clearly defined line of division could be adopted and enforced.”45 However, there was already a native settlement in the Icelandic reserve. Elizabeth Fidler, an Indige­ nous woman who had settled along the south-west shore of Lake Winnipeg before the arrival of the Icelanders, claimed that Taylor had ordered her out of her house on the White Mud / Icelanders’ River.46 For his part, Taylor claimed that he had received assurances from both

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Lieutenant-Governor Morris and Indian Commissioner J.A.N. Proven­ cher that the Indians “had no claim whatever to the lands at Sandy Bar, and White-mud River on the West Shores of Lake Winnipeg, and that they were about signing a Treaty under the terms of which they would remove to a Reserve at Doghead, further north.”47 While Taylor sought to exclude Aboriginal people from the Icelandic reserve, he frequently proposed opening it to Anglo-Canadians who would teach the new immigrants about farming. He asserted that those Icelanders who had worked and lived with Anglo-Canadians demonstrated such a rapid change in appearance, dress, and speech that it was difficult to differentiate them from people of British ancestry.48 Literal integration was also important. Over time, the Taylor family itself became intertwined with the Icelanders. John and Elizabeth adopted an Icelandic girl, and two of their nieces and John’s brother William all married Icelanders. But in spite of his enthusiasm for the job, Taylor’s tenure as Icelandic agent was a difficult one. During the first five years of its existence, the Icelandic reserve was almost perpetually in crisis. Malnutrition and near-starvation in the first winter were followed by a devastating smallpox epidemic in the second.49 Chronic wet weather and flooding over several summers ruined crops and dashed hopes of agricultural  progress. A divisive religious controversy between two competing Lutheran pastors – which was as much about the colony’s future as it was about articles of faith – caused a profound split among the colonists.50 Officials in Ottawa became deeply concerned that the colony would collapse, despite large amounts of government support. In 1877, John Lowe, secretary of the Department of Agriculture, threatened that if Taylor did not succeed in making the colony self-supporting, relations with the government would be cut off, “throwing to the ground your Castle in Spain.”51 Taylor’s listing and draughty house in the muddy village of Gimli was hardly a castle, and the climate of Manitoba’s Interlake region bears little resemblance to the Iberian Peninsula. Nonetheless, Lowe’s comment accurately reflected Taylor’s ambiguous position as an intermediary between the government and the immigrant Icelanders. The Icelandic reserve was in large measure his private fiefdom; he was afforded considerable latitude in his decision making and was provided with unusually generous resources to carry out his various grandiose plans. But Taylor was also a mere functionary whose position was wholly dependent on maintaining the good graces of his superiors in

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Ottawa. To the Icelanders, however, Taylor was the everyday face of government power. He was the conduit through which vital aid to the colony flowed, and he exercised considerable authority over their lives. This was something that not all of them appreciated. Even for those who were on good terms with Taylor, there was a general frustration at their seemingly endless series of reverses. Some began to move to Dakota and called for a break-up of the colony, even bypassing Taylor to directly petition the government for forgiveness of their debts. Taylor was enraged by this affront to his authority. In a bitter public announcement in the pages of the colony’s newspaper, Framfari, Taylor chastised those who dared to leave the colony without repaying their debts to the government: “Such treacherous conduct is both wanting in gratitude and dishonourable, and likely to abase the reputation and honour of the entire Icelandic people.”52 As he struggled to salvage the colony and his own reputation, Taylor aggressively sought to assert his authority. He asked the Dominion government to appoint him stipendiary magistrate so that he could seize individuals’ property if they did choose to leave. Taylor’s opponents were keenly aware of the implications of linking indebtedness to labour and freedom of movement. The former Icelandic parliamentarian Björn Pétursson astutely observed, “It never occurred to the government, I dare say, to establish the Icelanders … as a kind of serfs on the land here.”53 Taylor’s assistant, Sigtryggur Jónasson, had to reassure his countrymen that the Canadian government had no intention of making them slaves: “It was never intended to institute a form of slavery in this colony; it was intended only as a colony of free and honourable men.”54 Taylor’s wide-ranging civilizing mission also had obvious parallels with another paternalistic functionary of the Canadian state – the Indian agent. Like agents working on Indian reserves around Lake Winnipeg, Taylor was an outsider promoting the values of thrift, industry, and self-sufficiency to a group of people constructed as backward and dependent; both types of agents relied on similar assimilative rhetoric to describe the future relationship of the people to Anglo-Canadians. But while Taylor’s activities paralleled those of Indian agents to some degree and drew on the same discourses of progress, civilization, and ­citizenship, neither in practice nor in expected outcomes were they equivalent. Taylor was not a believer in racial equality, and race-based exclusionary practices trumped the inclusionary pretensions of his civilizing mission. He unified the abolitionist’s civilizing mission with a

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planter’s understanding of a hierarchical racial order. Whatever “deficiencies” Taylor considered the Icelanders to have on first arrival, he ultimately believed that these difficulties could eventually be overcome and that the Icelanders would fully assimilate with Anglo-Canadians and lay claim to the full privileges of whiteness. By 1881, chronic flooding had convinced even Taylor that it was time to leave New Iceland. He moved first to St Andrews on the Red River and then to Carberry in south-western Manitoba, where he continued to work as Icelandic agent by assisting a new settlement of former Icelandic reserve colonists in the Argyle district. He also continued, as his friend and frequent translator Friðjón Friðriksson put it, “to build castles in the air.”55 In 1882, he wrote to Governor General Lord Lorne in hopes of extending his humanitarian efforts to Jewish refugees fleeing pogroms in Russia. “I would take the liberty of suggesting that under your lordship’s kind influence and patronage a suitable block of land might be obtained for this purpose from the Dominion government and placed in the hands of trustees to carry out the benevolent design of providing new homes far removed from the cruelties and atrocities so shamefully perpetrated on this people in the name of religion.”56 He also proposed the formation of new Icelandic colonies in Alberta on the Bow River and in British Columbia.57 By this time, however, the septuagenarian had grown tired of the climate in the Canadian North-West, and he schemed a final, deeply revealing dream that, if successful, would have brought his life full circle. In December 1883, Taylor explained to Halldór Briem that he had “been considering for several months past whether some other part of the world might not be better for the poor emigrants from Iceland. To my mind there is no place more desirable than in the mountainous parts of the large islands in the tropics, such as Trinidad and Jamaica in the West Indies.”58 Taylor went so far as to propose the scheme to the governor of Jamaica, who replied that while he thought Icelanders to be a fine people, he doubted whether they could survive the tropical heat.59 With his Jamaica plan soundly rejected, Taylor instead decided to move to Florida along with several members of his extended family.60 He was granted a leave of absence from his position as Icelandic agent, but in July 1884 was ordered back to Manitoba to assist in settling an unexpected influx of new Icelandic immigrants.61 On the return journey, he took ill and died in Milwaukee at the age of seventy-one.62 The Icelandic reaction to Taylor’s term as agent was decidedly mixed. Many of the Icelanders respected him for his religiosity, but were also

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painfully aware of his shortcomings and many mistakes. Icelandic settler Símon Símonarson wrote that Taylor was a good and God-fearing man, but somewhat lacking in forethought.63 Taylor’s eventual successor as Icelandic agent, Baldwin L. Baldwinson, was less generous: “Mr. Taylor never brought an Immigrant to this country and was in short of no earthly use to our people. This is not said as a reflection on his memory for he meant well but his great age and inability to converse or associate with the people for whose interest his position was rightly created made him of much less use than he should have been had he been one of them.”64 Later Icelandic-Canadian historians tended to forgive him and focus on the positive. In 1975, on the occasion of New Iceland’s centenary, Wilhelm Kristjanson wrote: “John Taylor was Godfearing and devout. His family ties were close. He was kind-hearted and generous and there was love in his heart. He was a strong humanitarian whose active concern was for the distressed individual as well as humanity in general.”65 This quote illustrates that Taylor was, despite the disappointments and failures of his term as Icelandic agent, to some degree able to leave his past in Barbados and Texas behind and reinvent himself as God’s servant in the Canadian North-West. Still, his new guise was not fashioned entirely out of whole cloth; it was instead a patchwork quilt of old elements recombined or turned inside out. A paternalistic relationship to those placed under his authority was a common thread that ran throughout. As he made the transition from slave-owner to missionary and colonization agent, he came to sound more like the evangelical humanitarians who had campaigned to abolish slavery, protect natives from settlers, and forge a new Christian community based on virtue and personal salvation. In the intervening years, the faith of those humanitarians in the inherent perfectibility of mankind had waned and was replaced by a more rigid vision of hierarchical racial order that bore more of a resemblance to the world that Taylor had been born into. He was thus ideally suited to help fashion a new settler order in the Canadian North-West in which white settlers predominated and Indigenous people were pushed to the margins. NOTES 1 See David Lambert and Alan Lester, eds., Colonial Lives across the British Empire: Imperial Careering in the Long Nineteenth Century (Cambridge:

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2

3 4

5

6 7 8

9

Cambridge University Press, 2006); Angela Woollacott, Desley Deacon, and Penny Russell, eds., Transnational Lives: Biographies of Global Modernity, 1700–Present (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). See especially “Prologue: The Making of an Imperial Man,” in Catherine Hall, Civilizing Subjects: Colony and Metropole in the English Imagination, 1830–1867 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 23–65. See Kirsten McKenzie, Scandal in the Colonies: Sydney & Cape Town, 1820– 1850 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2004). Robert H. Schomburgk, The History of Barbados; Comprising a Geographical and Statistical Description of the Island, a Sketch of the Historical Events since the Settlement, and an Account of Its Geology and Natural Productions, Cass Library of West Indian Studies ([London]: F. Cass, 1971), 489; W.L. Morton, Manitoba: A History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1957), 165; W.T. Block, A History of Jefferson County Texas from Wilderness to Reconstruction (Nederland, TX: the author, 1976); Leopolda z Lobkowicz Dobrzensky, Fragments of a Dream: Pioneering in Dysart Township and Haliburton Village (Haliburton, ON: Municipality of Dysart, 1985), 229; Wilhelm Kristjanson, “John Taylor and the Pioneer Icelandic Settlement in Manitoba and His Plea on Behalf of the Persecuted Jewish People,” Papers Read before the Historical and Scientific Society of Manitoba Transactions, 3d ser., no. 32 ­(1975–6): 33–41. An important exception is Adele Perry, Colonial Relations: The DouglasConnolly Family in the Nineteenth Century Imperial World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). Lowe to Taylor, 2 October 1876, Library and Archives Canada (hereafter LAC), MG 29, E 18, vol. 4. Taylor to the Minister of Agriculture, 1 January 1883, LAC, RG 17, A-I-1, vol. 358, docket 38365. The basic outline of Taylor’s biography was laid out by his friend and assistant Icelandic agent Sigtryggur Jónasson in a 1920 article. See Sigtryggur Jónasson, “John Taylor og Elizabeth Taylor,” Syrpa: Mánaðarrit með myndum 8, no. 4 (1920): 97–102. Additional details about the family’s origins in Barbados are contained in a genealogy done by descendants of one of Taylor’s sisters. Mary Hearn, “The Hearn Family Story” (Clinton, ON: the author, n.d.). My thanks to Ernest Wiltshire of Ottawa for helping to sketch out more of Elizabeth Mehetabel Jones’s family background from his database of Barbadian planter families. Office of Registry of Colonial Slaves and Slave Compensation Commission: Records, Barbados, St Michael Parish, 1817, 1820, 1829, 1832, 1834, National Archives of the United Kingdom (hereafter TNA), T71.

184  Ryan Eyford 10 “Accounts of slave compensation claims; for the colonies of Jamaica, Antigua, Honduras, St Christopher’s, Grenada, Dominica, Nevis, Virgin Islands, St Lucia, British Guiana, Montserrat, Bermuda, Bahamas, Tobago, St Vincent’s, Trinidad, Barbadoes, Mauritius, Cape of Good Hope,’ British Parliamentary Papers, 1837–8 (215), 171. 11 TNA, CO 28/134/37, no. 61, fols. 392–410. 12 On the effect of the rebellion on Barbadian whites and the burning of William Shrewsbury’s chapel, see chaps. 4 and 5 in David Lambert, White Creole Culture: Politics and Identity during the Age of Abolition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 13 See Melanie J. Newton, The Children of Africa in the Colonies: Free People of Color in Barbados in the Age of Emancipation (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2008). 14 Schomburgk, History of Barbados, 489. 15 “The Humble Petition of John Taylor, of the Island of Barbados, to the Secretary of State for these Colonies,” 15 April 1837, TNA, CO 28/119, fols.258–63. Also see Barbadian, 8 July 1840. 16 Randolph B. Campbell, An Empire for Slavery: The Peculiar Institution in Texas, 1821–1865 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989), 17. 17 Anon., A Visit to Texas: Being the Journal of a Traveller through Those Parts Most Interesting to American Settlers, with a Description of Scenery, Habits, Etc. (New York: Goodrich & Wiley, 1834), 10–11. 18 Campbell, An Empire for Slavery, 45. 19 Barbadian, 1 July 1840. 20 “The Humble Petition of John Taylor.” Also see Barbadian, 8 July 1840. 21 West Indian, 6 July 1840. 22 The Liberal, 26 October 1839. 23 Barbadian, 1 July 1840. 24 Ibid. 25 British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Reporter, 26 August 1840. 26 Barbadian, 1 July 1840. 27 The Liberal, 15 July 1840 (emphasis added). 28 TNA, CO 28/156/13, fols. 126–37. See also The Liberal, 21 January 1843. 29 TNA, CO 28/160, fol. 352. 30 Documented in two personal religious texts preserved in a collection of John Taylor manuscripts owned by the Skardal family of Baldur, Manitoba. 31 John Taylor, “Affirmation of Faith,” London, 3 June 1844, Skardal ms. 32 Extracts from the lost diary of Caroline (née Taylor) Christopherson in the possession of Bob Christopherson of Edmonton, Alberta. Bob’s mother, Laura (née Anderson) Christopherson, made notes from the original diary,

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33

34

35 36 37 38 39 40

41 42

43

which was then owned by Caroline’s daughter Sigurveig Dawe. See also Daily Witness [Montreal], 8 April 1875. Taylor to Lord Dufferin, 12 April 1875; included in Harry Moody, Governor-General’s Office, to the Minister of Agriculture, 16 April 1875, LAC, RG 17, A-I-1, vol. 131, docket 13750. John Taylor’s principal contacts in Ottawa were probably John Bertram and James Hall, the Liberal MPs for Peterborough East and West. In September 1875, both men wrote to the minister of agriculture enthusiastically supporting Taylor’s appointment as Icelandic agent (see LAC, RG 17, vol. 140, dockets 14686 and 14688). Taylor may have had other contacts in cabinet or the upper echelons of the civil service; IcelandicCanadian historian Wilhelm Kristjanson claimed that Taylor’s contact was the “Minister of Immigration,” who had been “a fellow student of John Taylor’s at Oxford” (see Kristjanson, “John Taylor and the Pioneer Icelandic Settlement,” 35). However, there was no minister of immigration during this period; responsibility for immigration fell under the agriculture portfolio. In 1875, the minister was Luc Letellier de St Just and the deputy minister was J.C. Taché, both francophones educated in Quebec. It is more likely that Taylor’s upper-level contact was John Lowe, secretary of the Department of Agriculture, who supervised the dayto-day operations of the immigration branch. However, the two men ­probably never attended school together, since Lowe was eleven years Taylor’sjunior. University of Manitoba Archives and Special Collections (hereafter UMASC), Símon Símonarson fonds, ms. 34 (A.80-04). Norman P. Macdonald, Canada: Immigration and Colonization, 1841–1903 (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1966), 40. Lowe to Taylor, 15 September 1875, LAC, RG 17, A-I-2, vol. 1513, p. 3. Manitoba Daily Free Press, 3 August 1875. Thorleifur Jóakimsson Jackson, Framhald á Landnámssögu Nýja Íslands (Winnipeg: Columbia Press, 1923), 35. Ólafur Ólafsson frá Espihóli to Séra Jón Bjarnason, 13 January 1876, Friðjón Friðriksson Letter Collection, University of Manitoba Icelandic Collection (hereafter UMIC). John Taylor to Halldór Briem, 3 September 1883, Landsbókasafn Íslands (National Library of Iceland, hereafter Lbs), 34 NF. Taylor to Morris, 30 October 1875, Alexander Morris fonds, LieutenantGovernor Collection, no. 1147, Archives of Manitoba (hereafter AM), MG 12, B1. Taylor to Lowe, 28 November 1876, LAC, RG 17, A-I-1, vol. 173, docket 17911.

186  Ryan Eyford 44 Taylor to the Minister of Agriculture, 31 December 1878, LAC, RG 17, A-I-1, vol. 232, docket 23807. 45 Taylor to Morris, 3 August 1875, Alexander Morris fonds, LieutenantGovernor Collection, no. 1066, AM, MG 12, B1. 46 “Elizabeth Fidler, Claim for loss of houses and improvements occasioned by occupation of Icelandic settlers,” LAC, RG 15, D-II-1, vol. 409, file 105883, reel T-13113. 47 Taylor to James F. Graham, 15 March 1880; included in “Clandeboye Agency – Claim to Land along the White Mud River by John Ramsay of St. Peter’s band,” LAC, RG 10, vol. 3649, file 8200, reel C-10113. 48 Taylor to the Minister of Agriculture, 31 December 1878, LAC, RG 17, A-I1, vol. 232, docket 23807. 49 Ryan C. Eyford, “Quarantined within a New Colonial Order: The 1876– 1877 Lake Winnipeg Smallpox Epidemic,” Journal of the Canadian Historical Association 17 (2006): 55–78. 50 Jónas Þór, “A Religious Controversy among Icelandic Immigrants in North America, 1874–1880,” MA thesis, University of Manitoba, 1980. 51 Lowe to Taylor, 2 May 1877, LAC, RG 17, A-I-6, reel T-132, vol. 1633, p. 217. 52 Framfari, 14 May 1879, 565–6. 53 Framfari, 26 March 1879, 526–8. 54 Framfari, 17 July 1879, 620–8. 55 Friðjón Friðriksson to Rev. Jón Bjarnason, 19 December 1880, UMIC. 56 Taylor to Lord Lorne, 13 February 1882, LAC, MG 26 A, reel C-1515, vol. 82/X2, pp. 3198–9. 57 Taylor to Lowe, 5 September 1883, LAC, RG 17, A-I-1, vol. 381, docket 41056. 58 John Taylor to Halldór Briem, 30 December 1883, Lbs, 34 NF. 59 John Taylor to Susie Briem, 17 February 1884, Lbs, 34 NF. 60 John Taylor to Halldór Briem, 21 April 1884, Lbs, 34 NF. 61 Lowe to Taylor, 18 July 1884, LAC, RG 17, A-I-6, vol. 1642, reel T-139, p. 733. 62 Elizabeth Taylor to Lowe, 20 August 1884, LAC, RG 17, A-I-1, vol. 414, docket 45095. 63 Símon Símonarson fonds, UMASC, Mss 34, A.80-04. 64 B.L. Baldwinson to A.M. Burgess, 12 December 1893, LAC, RG 76, reel C-4680, vol. 22, file 389, part 2. These remarks were made in the context of a request to have his salary as Icelandic agent increased to $1000 per year. Baldwinson pointed out that Taylor had been paid $1200 per year as agent almost twenty years earlier. 65 Kristjanson, “John Taylor and the Pioneer Icelandic Settlement,” 41.

8 Conceiving a Pacific Canada: Trans-Pacific Migration Networks Within and Without Nations h en r y yu

In 1858 British Columbia became a Crown colony. That same year, three Chinese merchants arrived from San Francisco, marking the first permanent settlement of Chinese in the new British Columbia. That these two moments are coincident, and indeed connected, should not come as a surprise. From the earliest days of European migration to the north Pacific coast, Chinese migrants arrived alongside Scots, English, Québécois, and other transatlantic migrants, as well as native Hawaiians and other migrants from the Pacific region, and all engaged with First Nations peoples.1 For most Canadians today, the fact that Chinese settlement is as long-standing as British settlement in British Columbia might be a curiosity at best. However, there are historical consequences to this coincidence that we have yet to fully work out. Canada is as much a Pacific-oriented as an Atlantic-oriented nation. Not just British Columbia and western Canada, but Canada on the whole was a nation built out of a colonial past. I have used the phrase “Pacific Canada” to name this oceanic orientation and history.2 Pacific Canada is not a geographic designation to replace “western Canada,” but a perspective on our past, a way to refract our history not solely through the prism of transatlantic migration and settlement. Confedera­ tion brought together many colonies into a new nation, yet thus far, our national history has given primacy to a colonial past that centres on Atlantic Canada, in particular the colonies that became Ontario and Quebec. This particular approach to the past favours certain genealogies, displacing Indigenous peoples and also erasing our particular Pacific past.3 Placing British Columbia in the context of a transpacific world illustrates how the privileging of European migration and colonialism and

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an exclusive focus on the legacies of anti-Asian politics have left out so much of the history of British Columbia and of Canada. Transpacific migrants were more than just victims of racism. As much as white supremacy might have constrained their activities, they lived rich lives that cannot be understood if all we know is what was done to them. We know that Japanese Canadians were interned in 1942. And that Chinese Canadians paid the head tax between 1885 and 1923. And Punjabi Sikhs and other South Asian migrants on the Komagata Maru were not allowed to land in British Columbia in 1914. But what were all the transpacific migrants who followed those first three Chinese merchants in 1858 doing the rest of the time? The rhythms of Asian migrants journeying across the Pacific are inseparable from the drumbeats of a migrating set of ideas about white supremacy that systematically cut off these newly established networks one after another in ways mapped by Penelope Edmonds in this collection. However, the story of Pacific Canada is to be found by hearing the voices of migrants and by listening for the enforced silences of journeys eclipsed and ended. This complex composition of voices and silences can only be heard if we take the Pacific as a whole into account across the last 150 years. Only then can the starts and stops of migratory networks be understood as interlocked beats, with the cutting off of migrations along one route leading to the rise of migrants along another route to another place. This chapter will sketch how Pacific crossings were marked by intermittent rhythms, using the example of Cantonesespeaking migrants to illustrate how one set of Pacific migrations after the 1850s grew out of the interaction between the aspirations of migrants and the timing of laws designed to curtail transpacific migrants from Asia. I trace a growing Pacific world of which the settler colonial nation of Canada became an outgrowth, providing an alternative history that provides a corrective to an Atlantic-centred narrative of Canadian history, and highlighting a world in transformation that was eclipsed by white supremacy, but also a world that returned in force at the end of the twentieth century to reshape global history. The basic point of this chapter is that by considering the larger patterns and networks of transpacific migrants, we can escape conceptions of history that only consider them meaningful when they are being excluded from the developing Canadian nation. In thinking about these transpacific migrants with­ in  the framework of transnational migrations, for example, we could

Conceiving a Pacific Canada: Migration Networks  189

analyse them with a comparative eye to the imperial migrants who travelled from places like Scotland out into the larger British Empire. At the level of individuals whose desires for mobility can be un­ derstood within a life cycle of aspirations, as well as at the level of family networks within which these individuals moved, we can see how both transatlantic and transpacific migrants often travelled the same imperial routes. Rather than beginning with the assumption that the migrations of “white settlers” were fundamentally different in character than those of “non-white” Asian labourers, we can begin to see both interesting parallels and contrasts between migration networks. Cantonese migrants around the Pacific between the 1850s and 1920s, for in­stance, shared many of the peripatetic practices of the Scottish imperial migrants with whom they constantly crossed paths in multiple sites around the empire. Beginning with mostly young males with aspirations for social mobility through geographic mobility, and tied into dispersed family networks that often split both males and females across geographic space, both networks were internally animated by similar mechanisms. However, national narratives of inclusion in postcolonial settler nations such as Canada, Australia, and New Zealand have seamlessly ­incorporated British imperial migrants into narratives of national settlement and belonging. In contrast, the Cantonese who migrated to British Columbia in large numbers in the 1850–1920s were used as the exemplar for national exclusion and the political foil against which European migrants could organize and cohere around white supremacy.4 Coming from coastal regions of Guangdong province that were roughly the same area in size as Scotland, Cantonese migrants were demonized for being “sojourners” and incapable of belonging, with newspaper editors and anti-Chinese agitators pointing negatively to social practices of migration that in fact often paralleled those of the networks of young male imperial migrants from Scotland. Transpacific Migration in the Nineteenth Century We must pay close attention to the various levels at which migrations register as historical processes – from the aspirations of individuals that aggregate into migration patterns, to the changes in state policies that abruptly shift the lives of thousands – but also to how our scholarly understandings of the past have been shaped and reshaped by the

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changing analytical perspectives of academic research. Approaches in Asian American studies in the United States and the burgeoning field of migration studies, for instance, allow us to see in concrete ways the complexity of the transpacific migrations that flowed in large numbers for the first time during the nineteenth century. Both fields allow us to see historical actors as having intentions and effects that have not been captured by national historiographies. Asian American studies in particular arose as a challenge to existing scholarship that either ignored or marginalized transpacific migrants. As a scholarly intervention, it emphasized listening to the historical voices of Asian migrants not only excluded from the body politic of white-settler nations, but also retroactively excised from the national imaginaries propagated by these new nation states. Careful attention to the world of interactions created by early transpacific Chinese migrants and First Nations peoples also highlights the interwoven histories of racial exclusion and the displacement of Indigenous people from their lands. The nineteenth century saw the first great period of mass migrations across the Pacific, but these new migration patterns were virtually eliminated by 1930.5 The century before 1930 might be characterized as marking both the beginning of mass migrations of labourers across and within the Pacific and the creation and spread around the Pacific region of states who enacted policies designed to curtail or end such migrations. Rather than a steady increase in numbers of migrants over time, the century is marked by the intermittent rhythm of migrants following routes that were suddenly cut off, leading to the creation of other routes to new destinations that re-charted the pathways of migration networks.6 In syncopated rhythms, the enforced silences and the sounds of human travel across the Pacific start and stop. If it is difficult to hear within historical records the stories of migrants who crossed the Pacific in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it is partially because they are often the narratives of the excluded, the utterances of migrants who ultimately were not included within the state-sanctioned myths of belonging created by settler nations such as Australia, Canada, Mexico, and the United States. Listening to the stories of those who crossed the Pacific Ocean involves following them across multiple journeys from one place to another, and then on to yet another. We strain to hear the sounds created by migrants in motion: arguments over the terms of a labour contract, tips and intelligence gathered and passed along gossip chains by family relatives and village mates, the footsteps of peripatetic

Conceiving a Pacific Canada: Migration Networks  191

wanderings in search of a higher wage or a better opportunity. Hearing their stories requires listening to them in the languages they used, often village or regional dialects that were tied to the regions from whence they came and to which they often returned. Some restarts were forced – exile by violence or decree as incipient political states adopted legislation designed to ethnically cleanse regions of non-whites. Indigenous inhabitants in Australasia, in the Pacific Islands, and on the Pacific coast of the Americas were systematically cleared from their lands, and transpacific migrants originating from Asia became the targets of new forms of governmental surveillance and control, marking the rise of legal regimes whose purpose was to re-engineer populations by controlling the movement of migrants. Elsewhere in this book, Curthoys’s analysis of the connections between self-government and dispossession and Wanhalla’s discussion of surveillance and control show how these histories played out in different locations in the Pacific. Scholarly studies of transpacific migration that move beyond the constraints of nationalist history need to pay particular attention to how white supremacy operated in its manifest political forms across the Pacific region and to how discourses of anti-Chinese agitation and anti-Asian legislation migrated along with labourers and political organizers of European origin. There are two dichotomous and yet interlocked migrations that marked the pulse of transpacific flows – that of migrants originating from specific regions of Asia (in particular southern China and Japan, along with smaller numbers from South Asia, Korea, and the Philippines), and that of migrants coming into the Pacific region from the Atlantic world. Any periodization of migration patterns must take into account the pattern of their interacting networks, and how each played out on the lands of indigenous peoples and Pacific Islanders whom they encountered in their migrations. The Sounds of the Cantonese Pacific Between 1850 and 1930, migrants speaking various dialects of Chinese and originating in a small number of regions in Guangdong province dominated transpacific labour migrations. Before 1850, the majority of seafaring migrants crossing the vast expanse of the Pacific were Pacific Islanders, who had explored the open ocean in large enough numbers to settle islands all the way across to the Hawaiian islands (and very likely had reached other sites close to and along the Pacific coast of the Americas), and the various sailors, traders, craftsmen, and labourers

192  Henry Yu

who had travelled the Spanish galleon route between Acapulco and Manila since the sixteenth century. When significant numbers of migrants began to cross the Pacific in the 1850s, however, it was initially on routes that extended the existing trade and migration networks that linked ports on the southern Chinese coast with the “Nanyang” (the “South Seas” or South-East Asia). The ports of Hong Kong and Singapore became the major nodes of migration from Guangdong and Fujian provinces into the Nanyang, following the routes of the junk trade across the South China Sea. How did the Pacific become so dominated by migrants speaking various dialects of Cantonese? The simple answer is that the nineteenthcentury transpacific began as a British project, centred on their newly acquired port of Hong Kong (granted to the British in 1842 as part of the settlement of conflicts with the Qing Empire over the opium trade). By anchoring transpacific routes on Hong Kong and linking it with Canton (Guangzhou) and Macao, the main ports for Cantonese out-migration, the British effectively cut the transpacific off for coastal ports such as Amoy (Xiamen) that were the main out-migration ports for Hokkienand Teochiu-speaking migrants from Fujian province. The Guangzhoubased British consul observed this incipient Cantonese Pacific in 1852: Emigration has within the last few years taken place from the port to a considerable extent; but although the emigrants are shipped at Whampoa, Cumsing, Macao and Hong Kong, I shall consider them as belonging to Canton and the surrounding districts. In 1848 about 10 Chinese emigrated to California; in 1849 about 900; in 1850 about 3,118; in 1851 about 3,508; and during the first six months of 1852, 15,000 left Whampoa, Cumsing, Macao and Hong Kong for California. In addition to these, about 2,025 coolies have emigrated to South America, where, on arrival, they are generally hired out to the Peruvian government, and employed on various government works.7

By the 1880s, the Cantonese Pacific was firmly established, and Hong Kong was its main port of origination.8 Japanese, Canadian, and Amer­ ican shipping lines crossed the Pacific along with those established by British ships earlier, connecting ports such as Yokohama, Hong Kong, Sydney, Honolulu, Victoria, Vancouver, and San Francisco. But if the trade routes were navigated by sail, and then steam in the 1860s, on ships built with British, Japanese, Canadian, and American capital, the transpacific migrants were motivated by ambitions for

Conceiving a Pacific Canada: Migration Networks  193

monetary returns of a different order. The aspirations of individual ­migrants were inspired by the intelligence that passed back along the familial networks that were built along the shipping and mail routes. As Madeline Hsu so poignantly illustrated in her study of migrants who circulated back and forth between Hoisan (Taishan) county in Guangdong and the United States, these migration networks relied on good intelligence about wages, available jobs, local economies, and the value of goods that could be moved.9 The networks were based upon kinship and shared origins in the clusters of villages from which the migrants came, and they stretched all around the Pacific and into the Caribbean and along the Atlantic coast of the Americas.10 One illustrative story shows how global the networks could be: John Lee Lum was born in 1842 in Sun Wei (Xinhui in Mandarin) County in Guangdong province and travelled to California in the 1870s to work in the gold mines. He then accompanied the 15,000 or so Chinese men hired to build the Canadian Pacific railway in British Columbia, Canada, before moving on to Brazil, then British Guiana, and then Trinidad in the 1880s, where he worked in a trading firm run by fellow Sun Wei migrants. In 1885, with savings from his years of work and with loans from relatives and the extended network of fellow villagers and others who spoke the same dialect, he established his own general store, which sold liquor, hardware, food, and imported items that passed along the global networks set up by the Chinese to move goods. In the 1890s he returned to China to marry and fathered a boy and a girl, leaving them with his village wife before travelling back to marry a Trinidad-born Chinese woman, with whom he had three sons and two daughters. After extending his chain of Trinidad general stores to twenty branches, he retired in 1908 to Hong Kong with his youngest son, living out his days in comfort before passing away in 1921. A story such as Lum’s would have passed along gossip chains as a heroic success, fuelling the aspirations of others, just as Lum himself must have heard similar stories about those who had gone before him to California and Canada. Lum started out with nothing as a labourer, but he watched and learned as he worked his way up within a network of compatriots, finally striking out on his own with the financial support of those from whom he could gain trust.11 Relentlessly upwardly mobile, individual migrants might have their aspirations dashed by circumstance and by their own failings, but hard work and ambition fuelled long-distance travels. Lum’s story might not have been typical for its success, but it was the kind of example that

194  Henry Yu

travelled the same pathways as the migrants, emboldening others to follow. A British observer of the Chinese overseas remarked in 1852 on  this incredible ambition when comparing them to others: The absorbing aim of the Chinese emigrant is to better his condition. Of this object he never loses sight; and … it frequently follows that he finally adopts as his permanent home the locality in which he reaped his profits … The labour of the Chinese knows no cessation, and his savings are formed into a stock, which he is always endeavouring to increase, but never to exhaust … It is curious, that whilst in their own land they seldom quit the particular calling they adopt in early life … the Chinese evince, when abroad, a remarkable talent … of adapting themselves to any circumstances, readily quitting one trade or occupation, if they find it does not yield the remuneration they had expected, for another of a wholly different nature. A strong commercial spirit rules all their proceedings … From husbandmen they become planters, and often change this vocation for that of the merchant, or perhaps combine the two.12

A British official who was similarly familiar with Chinese labour saw the same burning ambitions in 1844, stating, “My notion of the Chinese is, that they are industrious and diligent only when they are working for themselves, and see profit in the face at every hour of their labour.”13 One of the most common strategies for upward mobility for the overwhelmingly male migrants was to establish multiple households, one in the home village with a wife selected from a nearby village, and another somewhere else along his journeys where he saw an opportunity to establish a small business. Bringing to Australia and the Hawaiian Islands a set of practices developed earlier in South-East Asia, ambitious Cantonese migrants aspired to enter local “native” community networks by marrying into local families. The British consul in Canton in 1852 observed of the skewed gender ratios of Cantonese migration practices that “Chinese women never emigrate … There is not a China woman in the Straits Settlements, nor an honest one in Hong Kong.” Predicting what the Cantonese would do if they were brought to British colonies in the Americas and followed the patterns in South-East Asia, he wrote, “The emigrants, would, I presume, cohabit with or marry the native females … as they do in the Straits, and educate their children according to Chinese usages.”14 Another British official observed, “The Chinese setters form matrimonial connexions wherever they go, and whenever they can, and in those countries to which they have been

Conceiving a Pacific Canada: Migration Networks  195

long accustomed to resort. In Java, Siam, and Cochin China, a very considerable mixed population has been the result.”15 In Hawai‘i, the Chinese-Hawaiian mixed family running a grocery store became a staple by the 1880s, and Chinese-Aboriginal marriages were commonplace in Darwin on the north-west coast of Australia and in rural areas of New South Wales and other colonies on the south coast, in practice an extension of Chinese migrations into the Malay Peninsula and the East Indies.16 Marrying into a local Indigenous family offered the ambitious male migrant an entry point into local society and made it possible for him to acquire the status and privileges of the wife’s family. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, such unions were also common up and down the Fraser River in British Columbia, and, as in other parts of the Cantonese Pacific, they signalled a transition for the migrant from being a peripatetic labourer to a man with some savings and an ambition to run a small business.17 It is harder for us to recover in their own voices what motivated the Indigenous women to marry Chinese men, but certainly the global network of goods for which such men served as the contact point must have been part of the reason. These Cantonese men also brought with them healing techniques and technological practices, and thus marriage alliances with Cantonese men expanded local horizons into a larger world of possibilities. It should not be discounted, as well, that migrant males offered a widened set of potential mates beyond the limited set of local families already well known. On Canada’s north-west coast, the practice of marriage alliances with neighbouring or even distant clans was common among the Coast Salish peoples, who encountered the Chinese in the late nineteenth century; strategically considering the value of a Cantonese husband with connections to a very different set of resources would not likely have been too novel a consideration for a daughter’s future. If the Cantonese-speaking migrants who crossed the Pacific in the 1850s used a single name for North America and Australia – Gum San (Gold Mountain, jinshan in Mandarin) – they were referring ultimately not to the gold they could wash out of the gravel in stream beds, but to a life cycle of upward mobility built out of labour and mutual investments in each other’s aspirations of wealth. Successful migrants at the end of their lives loaned money to the young seekers of fortune in  whom they saw their own ambitions echoed. “Gold Mountain” named a geographic imaginary, a field of aspirations over time and space that named the New World for their own purposes, different

196  Henry Yu

from those of Europeans. They might have cared less for the political disputes and boundary maintenance of European migrants and settlers, except when they impeded their own mobility, both geographically and economically. “Gum San” collapsed the geography of North America and Australasia into a single term defined by the migrants’ own aspirations. That these regions were amazingly profitable for them reinforced the continuing power of that name. According to Madeline Hsu’s estimates, based on the account books of companies that specialized in remittances from overseas Chinese through Hong Kong, in the late 1920s, over 50 per cent of the nearly 272 million (HK$) coming from overseas remittances were from Canada and the United States, even though the Chinese population in Canada and the United States accounted for only 1.7 per cent of the overseas Chinese who had left southern China.18 Some recent research on Cantonese migrants who entered Canada between 1885 and 1923 is illustrative.19 The nearly 100,000 Chinese who entered Canada during this period were almost all from just a handful of counties in Guangdong (table 8.1), and although the dominant image of Chinese in North America is of “Chinatown” enclaves, in fact they spread quickly into almost every small town across the continent (figure 8.1). This geographical pattern of urban commercial node combined with wide rural dispersion (often with just one or two Chinese migrants running a restaurant or general store in a small town) replicated earlier practices all around the Pacific. In aggregate, the life cycles of these tens of thousands of individual male migrants created a vast rhythm of transpacific movement. Indeed, the transpacific shipping that travelled back and forth between Hong Kong and Vancouver and San Francisco relied upon their fees for a profitable bottom line in the late nineteenth century.20 Created out of the migrants’ aspirations for wealth, a network of circular movements tied small villages to port cities and urban enclaves on both sides of the ocean. By the end of the nineteenth century, however, a new set of migrants to the Pacific coast of North America began to interrupt the steady rhythm of these migrants’ ambitions. The dominance of a limited number of county origins for the overwhelming majority of the Chinese migrating to Canada and the United States in this period is remarkable. In particular, migrants from one single county Hoisan, a.k.a. Toysan (originally named “Sunning” county – Xinning), accounted for 45.5 per cent of all migrants to Canada.

Conceiving a Pacific Canada: Migration Networks  197 Table 8.1  County origins of Chinese registrants, 1885–1949. County origins, 1858–1949 (Total registrants = 97,124)

Number of migrants

% of total

5,922

6.1

Hoisan (Taishan) a.k.a. Sunning (Xinning)

44,217

45.5

Sunwei (Xinhui)

13,857

14.3

Hoiping (Kaiping)

13,352

13.7

Onping (Enping)

3,753

3.9

Hoksan (town) Heshan

2,579

2.7

Poon Yue (Panyu)

6,413

6.6

Nam Hoi (Nanhai)

479

0.5

Shun Tuck (Shunde)

419

0.4

Chang Sing (Zengcheng)

623

0.6

Tong Kwan (Dongguan)

202

0.2

Samsui (Sansui)

54

> 0.01

Chungsan (Zhongshan) a.k.a. Heungsan (Xiangshan) “Four Counties” Sze Yup (Si Yi)

“Three Counties” Sam Yup (San Yi)

Other origin places in Guangdong

Notes: Place names have English transliterations of Cantonese dialect pronunciations as well as pinyin. Data compiled from the Chinese Head Tax Database created at UBC from the Canadian General Register of Chinese Immigration, 1885–1949, by Jason Chan, Mary Chan, Judy Maxwell, Alyssa Pultz, Denise Wong, and head researcher Feng Zhang, under the supervision of Professors Peter Ward and Henry Yu, with funding from the Social Science Humanities Research Council of Canada.

The Rising Discord of the White Pacific It is a great historical irony of the nineteenth-century Pacific that on the west coast of North America the Cantonese built the very means of transportation that produced the demise of the world they had created. Beginning in California in the 1860s, and following like a drumbeat up the coast through Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia through the 1880s, the Cantonese built the western ends of the transcontinental rail network that allowed mass migration of labourers from the Atlantic

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8.1  Destinations in Canada of Chinese head tax registrants, 1910–1923 Notes: Geographic Informations Systems map created by Edith Tam for Prof. Sally Hermansen, Dept. of Geography, UBC, and Prof. Henry Yu, using data from the Chinese Head Tax database produced at UBC from the General Register of Chinese Immigration. See also http://chinesecanadian.ubc.ca.

world. They were able to build these railways because they were already there in large numbers, having travelled transpacific shipping routes that could bring them to the west coast of the Americas much more efficiently and cheaply than overland travel across the continent – at least until there were transcontinental railways. Capital investments from the same people who had built transpacific shipping lines fuelled the railroad boom. British capital, for instance, built both the Canadian Pacific Railway steamships and the transcontinental railway that took goods straight off the ships in Vancouver and raced them on “Silk Express” trains to Halifax, where they would be taken to Liverpool, Glasgow, and other ports across the Atlantic. Goods could be moved more efficiently across the Pacific and Atlantic using

Conceiving a Pacific Canada: Migration Networks  199

this new means of bypassing the Americas. Before railways bisected North America, the two main paths for goods from the “Orient” to Europe involved long journeys by ship, either around the Cape of Good Hope at the southern tip of Africa or around Cape Horn at the southern tip of South America.21 Railways provided a revolutionary means of eliminating the barriers of land, shifting the dynamic of global traffic from almost purely seaborne to one now supplemented by overland rail networks. But if the railways could move goods, they also moved human bodies. As the map in figure 8.1 shows, the Cantonese used the new railways to spread across the continent; passing them on trains going the other way, however, were large numbers of labourers eager to take the jobs of Chinese in the mines, forests, and factories of the Pacific coast. The newly arrived Atlantic migrants stepping off the railways that the Cantonese built saw Chinese working everywhere. In California in  the 1870s, Chinese were a tenth of the population but made up a quarter of the total available workforce. Similar proportions marked all of the societies of the Cantonese Pacific on the west coast before the railways changed the demography.22 Even as late as 1901 in British Columbia, Chinese were one-tenth of the non-Aboriginal population, and as in California, the mostly young male Cantonese population was the backbone of the labour force. However, as increasing numbers of new migrants from the Atlantic entered into the territories on the west coast of North America claimed by the United States and Canada, a transformation occurred. Areas that had virtually no presence of state officials turned into colonies and then provinces and states of faraway governments.23 These new migrants organized to control the incipient new political states, inventing new forms of white supremacy built around anti-Chinese and then broader anti-Asian agitation. This was part of a wider shift that included the strengthening of a range of different racial hierarchies including those discussed by Curthoys, Edmonds, and Eyford elsewhere in this book. In disparate locations that were being incorporated into the new dominions of Australia and Canada, colonial regimes that were part of a broader British Empire shifted from doing the business of empire, with appointed governors protecting the interests of merchants and colonial officials, to new modes of democratic politics that answered to the growing numbers of new Atlantic migrants. Three essential political strategies developed: (1) distributing white supremacist rhetoric and imagery to demonize Chinese and “Asiatics” and to organize new migrants under the banner of being “white,” (2) expanding the right to

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vote to “white working men” and disenfranchising Chinese workers, and (3) using vigilante violence to achieve political ends. If the geographic imaginaries of Cantonese migrants encompassed a transpacific world beyond any individual nation state, so too did the imaginaries of many of the transplants from the transatlantic world who came to displace them from the west coasts of North America. At the level of individuals and families, the aspirations of these migrants were not so different from those of their Cantonese counterparts, but if the Cantonese learned to imagine the field of possibilities around the Pacific as Gum San, the transatlantic migrants learned that they were part of a greater movement of white civilization ordained to displace the “coloured” peoples of the world. In British imperial colonies such as British Columbia, New South Wales, and Queensland, the Chinese had been welcome as essential labourers, farmers, and merchants. But as colonies turned into states or provinces of new white-settler nations at the end of the nineteenth century, a new imaginary arose that narrated Chinese as outsiders to the new nations. “White Australia” and “White Canada” became banners for the exclusion of Asians as well as Indigenous peoples from the new body politic. Although the timing varied, depending on when transportation routes created enough new migrants who could be organized into an exclusionary polity, the pattern was repeated throughout the new settler nations of Australia, Canada, and New Zealand. In the territories of Oregon and California, political organizers used the same tactics to create newly formed states that could be incorporated into the existing United States. White supremacy as a set of political tools and rhetorical strategies travelled along the same routes as the migrants did, accompanying them as they wandered from one site to the next. If the Cantonese moved from one location to another in search of wealth, so too did the new migrants from Great Britain, Europe, and the Atlantic coasts of the Americas; however, the rhetoric of white-settler supremacy differed in one distinctive regard – the migrants from the Atlantic world, like those analysed by Elbourne, Bradbury, or Ishiguro in this book, claimed ownership and belonging to the land in ways that the Cantonese almost never did. Even if a migrant from a small village outside Aberdeen, Scotland, might go through Glasgow to Halifax or New York, and perhaps on to Vancouver or Sydney or San Francisco or Auckland, he or she carried with them and participated in a settlement scheme that claimed belonging and ownership wherever he or she happened to be at that moment.

Conceiving a Pacific Canada: Migration Networks  201

The justifications and political strategies for achieving white dominance travelled far and wide, and the effects on the existing world of the Cantonese Pacific were corrosive and widespread. As Indigenous peoples were cleared from their lands onto reserves to make room for white settlement, the social status and community privileges into which young male Cantonese migrants sought to marry were steadily eroded. In Australia and Canada, Indigenous children were removed from families and sent to residential schools, where a systematic cultural genocide was enacted in the name of civilization. The rhythms of life and migration that made the Cantonese Pacific an extension of the Chinese in South-East Asia were broken. Facing an onslaught of anti-Chinese legislation that curbed their ability to enter and leave the new settler nations, eliminated their right to own land, and drove them from the best-paying jobs, Cantonese migrants adapted to a pattern of mobility that featured either the ultimate return to home villages or futile attempts to be included as equals in the new white supremacist states. The world in which Cantonese men saw opportunities in marrying into Aboriginal families was eliminated by the rise of white-settler state policies. As the status of Indigenous peoples dropped, so too did the opportunities for upward mobility through marriage and for creating local communities where Cantonese men could incorporate into Aboriginal societies. This extinction of economic mobility through marriage alliances with Indigenous women had profound effects. Existing families were broken; children learned neither Chinese language and practices nor those of their native societies; and the pos­ sibilities for complex mixed Chinese/Indigenous societies such as the Peranakan of the Malay peninsula never developed, even though many local Indigenous communities in Australia, New Zealand, Hawai‘i, and Canada contained significant numbers who claimed partial Chinese ancestry.24 The rhythms of white supremacy tracked the movement of European workers from the Atlantic world. Where only soldiers, clerks, missionaries, and colonial officials migrated, an imperial order that gave a prominent place to Cantonese workers and merchants remained. But the politics of settler nationalism relied on an expanding democracy of white workers. To this day, the national historiographies of all four of the white-settler nations in the Pacific have difficulty reconciling their triumphant national narratives of the spread of democracy and freedom with the reliance of nation building on exclusionary policies that denied, and deprived others of, the same political privileges. Exclusion

202  Henry Yu

and demonization of the Chinese, and eventually other Asian migrants, were essential strategies of nation building.25 A quick survey of two waves of anti-Chinese and then broader antiAsian legislation in the four white-settler nations bordering the Pacific Ocean reveals the rhythms of white supremacy: Anti-Chinese legislation, 1880–1900 1881

Chinese Immigrants Act (restriction of numbers and poll tax), New Zealand

1882

Chinese Exclusion Act (no new labourers), United States

1885

Chinese head tax (on new migrants), Canada

1880–1900

Various Australian colonies enact anti-Chinese legislation

Broad extension of Anti-Chinese to Anti-Asian legislation, 1900–1930 1899

Immigration Act (requiring immigrant application in English), New Zealand

1901

Immigration Restriction Act (requiring dictation test), Australia

1907

Chinese Immigrants Amendment (English language reading test and poll tax), New Zealand

1908

Gentlemen’s Agreement curbs Japanese migration, United States

1908

Hayashi-Lemieux Gentlemen’s Agreement curbs Japanese migration, Canada

1908

Continuous Passage regulation curbs South Asian migration, Canada

1924

National Origins Act blocks all new Asian migration except from the Philippines, United States

The first downbeat of anti-Chinese legislation coincided with the a­ rrivals of large numbers of European migrants to each of the four ­colonies in the 1870s and 1880s. Chinese migration to the United States, for instance, virtually stalled after the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act. How­ever, because the Canadian head tax of 1885 merely put a price on entry ($50 – equivalent to a year’s salary), Cantonese migration to Canada continued, and with it the rise of smuggling into the United States through its northern borders. The head tax slowed down Can­ tonese migration to Canada, and perhaps without it many more than 100,000 chi­nese would have entered between 1885 and 1923. But even after the head tax was raised to $500 in 1904, more than a third of those

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100,000 Cantonese migrants entered Canada after 1910. The rhythms of Cantonese migration could be dulled by anti-Chinese legislation, but the beat went on – at least until 1923, when the euphemistically named Chinese Immigration Act legally ended Chinese migration to Canada except for a small handful of merchants. The clearest example of how anti-Chinese legislation altered the pulse of migration can only be seen when we look at different Asian transpacific migrations in relation to each other. As Cantonese migration to the United States was curtailed in 1882, for instance, other Asian migrants crossed the Pacific to fulfil the continuing demands for labour. Japanese, Koreans, South Asians, and Filipinos began taking some of the same jobs in agriculture, mining, logging, and fishing that the Chinese had performed before them, although sometimes with very different aspirations than the Cantonese. From the 1890s through to the first decades of the twentieth century, Japanese migration to North America in particular grew in numbers, although with different characteristics from that of the Chinese before them. Although initially young males dominated, the Gentleman’s Agreements signed between Japan and Canada and the United States voluntarily restricted the passage of male labourers from Japan to North America, but not of women, allowing Japanese migrants to bring over brides to join them and create families.26 By the 1920s, rising anti-Japanese agitation on the Pacific coast of Canada and the United States helped undergird the spread of white supremacy among the ever-growing numbers of migrants from the eastern coast of North America, leading to exclusionary policies and discriminatory legislation that virtually ended transpacific migration to the continent. A pair of riots on the Pacific coast of North America during the fall of 1907, which directly precipitated the creation of the 1908 Gentlemen’s Agreements between Japan and the United States and Canada, illustrate the ways in which transpacific Asian migrations intersected with those of Atlantic migrants arriving at the same time. An anti-Punjabi Sikh riot in Bellingham, Washington, preceded violence that targeted Chinese and Japanese businesses in Vancouver, British Columbia, several days later.27 The proximity of these two incidents reveals how far and wide tactics and strategies for organizing politically around antiAsian white supremacy travelled. Just as with the Cantonese, global migration networks passed intelligence across vast distances and created far-flung journeys with multiple stops. The leader of the Asiatic Exclusion League in Seattle, Arthur E. Fowler, had thorough knowledge

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of how anti-Chinese organizing had worked in California before he arrived in Washington state, and he had advised the Bellingham rioters before speaking in Vancouver at a rally that preceded the riot there. Another speaker at the rally, J.E. Wilson, had travelled from New Zealand and spoke about the effectiveness of anti-Chinese agitation there. Other speakers were local labour leaders who had themselves migrated from other parts of the British Empire. Vancouver in 1907 was just two decades old, and like most of the new transportation nodes on the Pacific, almost everyone in the city was a migrant from somewhere else. However, the rhetoric of the anti-Asian organizers was one of belonging – ascribing outsider status to the Chinese, Japanese, and South Asians in the city. The “Oriental Invasion” threatened the “Anglo-Saxon blood” that had built the expanding British and American empires, and if white labour leaders and workers were themselves recent migrants along imperial routes, their rhetorical device of accusing Asian workers of coming to take away white jobs worked perfectly well with the ideal of a “White Canada Forever” that belonged to white workers, no matter when they had arrived. As a number of the chapters in this volume show, nationalism and imperial belonging could coexist in harmony – local racial practices and global imaginaries striking different notes in the same melody.28 A posting in Chinese on the day after the riot by the Chinese be­ nevolent Association revealed a very different perspective on the violence. It asked Cantonese workers to report any incidents of harassment or violence in their workplaces and to let the association know if they were forced from their jobs by white workers: “If any of you go back to your original work places and your employers are not willing to hire you and hire others instead, please report to the CBA and we will negotiate for you.”29 The voices of those speaking and writing in Asian languages is still largely missing from many accounts of anti-Asian political organizing, oddly reiterating the erasure of their voices that the initial anti-Asian movements accomplished. The Silencing of the Transpacific Voice One of the most subtle and effective distortions effected by anti-Asian rhetoric was the change in the status of Asian workers. They were no longer akin to those they worked alongside in canneries, mines, and logging camps. Moon-ho Jung describes how anti-Asian activists in the

Conceiving a Pacific Canada: Migration Networks  205

United States borrowed much of the rhetoric used in the Caribbean and Latin America to demonize Chinese as “coolie” labour, describing them as a form of indentured labour that was a new form of slavery. This categorization of both Chinese and South Asian labour as essentially “unfree” was shaped by debates in the aftermath of the end of the transatlantic slave trade and the emancipation of enslaved Africans in the Caribbean and Latin America. In the United States and Canada, however, this depiction of the “coolie” as a threat to the “free” white workers they supposedly displaced did more than just the rhetorical work of white supremacy.30 National histories in Canada and the United States generally continued to portray Asian migrants using the rhetorical lens through which anti-Asian agitation represented them as “cheap,” “coolie” labour that undercut “whites” and threatened through their late arrival to take away “white” jobs. A misleading distinction between “free” and “unfree” labour continued to distort understandings of how and why Cantonese migrants crossed the Pacific. The exclusion of Chinese and other Asians from mythic national histories created a common response in the latter half of the twentieth century: a retroactive inclusion of them into the national imaginaries that had originally been built out of their exclusion. But this reincorporation of the missing voices of Chinese and other Asian migrants ironically accepted one of the fundamental tenets of the white-settler nationalisms that excluded them in the half-century before 1930: that the Chinese were the “late arrivers.” In fact, the Chinese had arrived on transpacific ships to the west coast of North America long before the vast majority of white labourers arrived on the railways that the Chinese built. In the reincorporation of the long excluded voices of Chinese and other Asian migrants into ­existing national historiographies, a common mistake has been to un­ reflectively accept “Americans” or “Canadians” or “Australians” as belonging to every part of the abstract space claimed to be part of these recently founded nations, and for all time. In 1907, recent European migrants proclaimed, in a popular bar song, “White Canada Forever,” but they meant it not only in reference to an unbounded future ahead without Chinese, Japanese, and South Asians. When they sang “forever,” they also meant historical time, as if they had always belonged; the Aboriginal peoples they were displacing and the Chinese who were already there when they arrived could simply be erased from historical memory and forgotten. National mythologies of white-settler colonialism remain rooted in the convenient forgetting that the “Canadians”

206  Henry Yu

and “Australians” who could count themselves as “white” were themselves recent migrants to the Pacific. It is an irony of colonial archives that even as the stories of Chinese and other Asians were largely omitted from the national archives of the United States, Canada, and Australia, the state surveillance of those who were systematically discriminated against created detailed records. The table and map in this chapter detailing the origins and destinations of Chinese head-tax payers would not have been possible without the careful attention of clerks whose purpose was to record the details of a racially discriminatory policy. Migrants who were welcome in Canada left much less of a trace in national archives – a young man taking a ship from Glasgow or Liverpool stepped on shore leaving none of the same detail in government records.31 If there is a final point to be made in this chapter, it is the necessity of reimagining the migration history of the Pacific as a unitary process. In the 1970s, Chinese-American histories that invoked the silenced stories  of early Cantonese pioneers pointed out that the United States was  known by the old-timers as “Gum San.” Chinese-Canadian histories that invoked the early Cantonese pioneers to Canada pointed out that Canada was known as “Gum San.” The same point was made in Chinese-Australian histories. Each of these national historiographies was partially correct, but the fact that both Canada and the United States had the same name in Cantonese was a curious contradiction at best. The larger point missed was that in the imaginaries of the migrants, the crossing of the Pacific was a unitary process, and if we recover the lost voices of the nineteenth-century Cantonese Pacific, we will understand the rhythms of their lives as a result not merely of inclusion and exclusion, but also of their marching to the beat of their own drums. The beat of those drums has also become the new rhythm of Pacific Canada. In the 2006 census, there were more than half a million ethnic Chinese Canadians in Vancouver, and an even larger number in Toronto. Ethnic Chinese make up a third of metropolitan Vancouver, with other migrants from Asia another 15 per cent, and the “visible minority” in Vancouver are not Asians, but whites. The vast majority of new migrants to Canada now come from the Pacific world, with the most coming from the People’s Republic of China in 2006. At the university where I teach, ethnic Chinese students form 37 per cent of the undergraduate population – self-identified white students make up only 34 per cent. The origins of these ethnic Chinese are varied and no

Conceiving a Pacific Canada: Migration Networks  207

single community exists, and yet they are the result of a Pacific world of migrations that has a specific set of rhythms.32 The present and the future, ironically, is a return to a past that was curtailed. One major research project, “Chinese Canadian Stories” (chinesecanadian.ubc.ca), aims to recover the stories of Chinese Canadians as a crucial element within a broader common past, including the complex global and transnational connections present both historically and in the present. How much sooner might the world of Pacific Canada have developed if we  had not gone the way of white supremacy? The half-century of apartheid and racial exclusion in Canada was the aberration, and so we must re-examine our national myths and make them relevant not to that world from which they grew, but to the old and the new world in which we live. NOTES 1 BC’s colonial past of admixture has been well documented by scholars such as Jean Barman, Sylvia Van Kirk, and Robin Fisher. For more on native Hawaiians in fur trade forts on the Pacific coast, see Jean Barman and Bruce Watson, Leaving Paradise: Indigenous Hawaiians in the Pacific Northwest, 1787–1898 (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2006). 2 Henry Yu, “Global Migrants and the New Pacific Canada,” International Journal, Autumn 2009: 147–62. 3 Henry Yu, ed., “Refracting Pacific Canada,” BC Studies, no. 156 (Winter/ Spring 2007/8). 4 See, for instance, Tony Ballantyne, Orientalism and Race: Aryanism in the British Empire (New York: Palgrave, 2002). 5 Variations of some of the arguments made here were presented to the “Inside and Outside the Nation” workshop at the University of Manitoba in April 2009; to the “Pacific Worlds in Motion II” conference at the National University of Singapore in March 2009; at the Center for the Study of the Pacific Northwest at the University of Washington in February 2009; to the “Deconstructing Empire II” conference at the University of Victoria in June 2007; to the “Visualizing the Ethnic Chinese in Indonesia and North America” conference at the University of British Columbia in March 2007; and to the Institute for Pacific Northwest Studies at the University of Idaho in November 2006. My thanks to the attendees of these presentations for their helpful questions and comments, in particular for the useful suggestions from Eiichiro Azuma, Greg Blue, Gordon Chang, Ann Curthoys,

208  Henry Yu Moon-Ho Jung, Abidin Kusno, Renisa Mawani, Adele Perry, John Price, Vicente Rafael, Adam Sowards, Anand Yang, and my late mentor, Edgar Wickberg, to whom this essay is dedicated. See also Elizabeth Jameson and Jeremy Mouat, “Telling Differences: The 49th Parallel and Historiographies of the West and Nation,” Pacific Historical Review 75, no. 2 (May 2006): 183–230. 6 See Guohong Zhu, Zhongguo de haiwai yimin: Yi xiang guoji qianyi de lishi yanjiu [Overseas Emigration from China: A Historical Study of International Migration] (Shanghai: Fudan Daxue Chubanshe, 1994) and The Encyclopedia of the Chinese Overseas, ed. Lynn Pann (Singapore: Chinese Heritage Centre, 2006), 62 (table 2). 7 Walton Look Lai, The Chinese in the West Indies, 1806–1995 (Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 1998), 71, excerpted from a series of answers made by the Canton-based consul A. Elmslie, 25 August 1852, to inquiries about the desirability of increasing the recruitment of Cantonese labour in British colonies in the West Indies. Earl of Malmesbury to Dr Bowring, 12 June 1852, “Questions for Circulation among the Consuls in China,” in British Parliamentary Papers 1852–53, vol. 68 (1686). 8 Henry Yu, “The Rhythms of the Trans-Pacific” and “The Intermittent Rhythms of the Cantonese Pacific,” in Connecting Seas and Connecting Ocean Rims: Indian, Atlantic, and Pacific Oceans and China Seas Migrations from the 1830s, ed. Donna Gabaccia and Dirk Hoerder (Leiden: Brill, 2011). 9 Madeline Hsu, Dreaming of Gold, Dreaming of Home: Transnationalism and Migration between the United States and South China, 1882–1943 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000). Also Michael Williams, “Destination Qiaoxiang: Pearl River Delta Villages and Pacific Ports 1849–1949,” PhD diss., University of Hong Kong (2002). 10 For examples of studies of family lineage organization in outmigration villages, see Yuen-fong Woon, Social Organization in South China, 1911–1949: The Case of the Kuan Lineage in K’ai-p’ing County (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1984); James L. Watson, Emigration and the Chinese Lineage: The Mans in Hong Kong and London (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1975). For a study of how such regional migration networks could be reflected in a Hong Kong institution, see Elizabeth Sinn, Power and Charity: The Early History of the Tung Wah Hospital (Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1989). 11 Story of John Lee Lum from Lai, The Chinese in the West Indies, 299. 12 Quoted in Lai, The Chinese in the West Indies, 81, excerpted from a parliamentary discussion about the possibility of using more Chinese labour in British colonies. “General Remarks on Chinese Emigration: Report by

Conceiving a Pacific Canada: Migration Networks  209

13

14

15

16

17

18 19 20

21

Harry Parkes, British Interpreter, September 1852,” in British Parliamentary Papers 1852–53, vol. 68 (1686), 23–8. Lai, The Chinese in the West Indies, 54, excerpted from Colonial Land and Emigration Commissioners to G.W. Hope, 8 September 1843, enclosure no. 2, “Papers re Emigration of Chinese Labourers to the West Indies,” in British Parliamentary Papers 1844, vol. 35 (530). Lai, The Chinese in the West Indies, 72, excerpted from Dr Bowring to Earl of Malmesbury, Despatch no. 8, 25 September 1852, enclosures no. 1, 3, in British Parliamentary Papers 1852–53, vol. 68 (1686). Lai, The Chinese in the West Indies, 52, excerpted from Colonial Land and Emigration Commissioners to G.W. Hope, 8 September 1843, enclosure no. 2, “Papers re Emigration of Chinese Labourers to the West Indies,” in British Parliamentary Papers 1844, vol. 35 (530). Henry Chan, Ann Curthoys, and Nora Chiang, eds., The Overseas Chinese in Australasia: History, Settlement and Interactions (Taipei: Interdisciplinary Group for Australasian Studies and Centre for the Study of the Chinese Southern Diaspora, 2001); Shirley Fitzgerald, Red Tape Gold Scissors: The Story of Sydney’s Chinese (Sydney: State Library of New South Wales Press, 1996); Julia Martinez, “Ethnic Policy and Practice in Darwin,” in Mixed Relations: Asian/Aboriginal Contact in North Ausstralia, ed. Regina Gantner (Claremont: University of Western Australia Press, 2006); Jan Ryan, Ancestors: Chinese in Colonial Australia (Fremantle: Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1995); Jan Ryan, ed., Chinese in Australia and New Zealand: A Multi­ disciplinary Approach (New Delhi: New Age International Press, 1995); Manying Ip, Being Maori Chinese: Mixed Identities (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2008). See the stories of Musqueam elder Larry Grant and Senator Lillian Dyck from Saskatechewan, for examples of Chinese-Aboriginal marriages and families. . Hsu, Dreaming of Gold, 195. See the maps at “Chinese Canadian Stories” . Elizabeth Sinn, Pacific Crossing: California Gold, Chinese Migration, and the Making of Hong Kong (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2012); also Dirk Hoerder and Donna Gabaccia, eds., Connecting Seas and Connected Ocean Rims: Indian, Atlantic, and Pacific Oceans and China Seas Migrations from the 1830s to the 1930s (Leiden: Brill, 2011). It is interesting to note that when British officials first began contemplating importing Chinese labourers into its Caribbean colonies in the early nineteenth century, they assumed that they would be shipped across the Pacific

210  Henry Yu

22

23

24

25

26

27

and around Cape Horn. But it proved to be more efficient to ship them through the Indian Ocean, around the Cape of Good Hope, and across the Atlantic. The journey took around the same amount of time, but larger ships and therefore more cargo capacity existed on the transatlantic shipping routes. See Lai, The Chinese in the West Indies, 77. Alexander Saxton, “The Army of Canton in the High Sierra,” Pacific Historical Review 35 (1966): 114–52; Alexander Saxton, The Indispensable Enemy: Labor and the Anti-Chinese Movement in California (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1975). Jeremy Adelman and Stephen Aron, “From Borderlands to Borders: Empires, Nation-States, and the Peoples In Between in North American History,” American Historical Review 104, no. 3 (June 1999). See Lily Chow, Sojourners in the North (Vancouver: Caitlin, 1996), and Chasing Their Dreams: Chinese Settlement in Northwest British Columbia (Vancouver: Caitlin, 2001) for numerous examples of Chinese-Aboriginal families and relationships. Also, Jean Barman, The West beyond the West: A History of British Columbia, 3rd ed. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007); “Chinese Canadians and First Nations: 150 Years of Shared Experiences,” a project of the Chinese Canadian Historical Society of British Columbia, http://www.chinese-firstnations-relations.ca/cchsbc​ .html. See also the film Cedar and Bamboo, directed by Kamala Todd and Diana Leung, produced by Jennifer Lau and Karin Lee, CCHSBC (2010). See Henry Yu, “Then and Now: Trans-Pacific Ethnic Chinese Migrants in Historical Context,” in The World of Transnational Asian Americans, ed. Daizaburo Yui (Tokyo: Center for Pacific and American Studies, University of Tokyo, 2006), for an argument about the links between South-East Asian postcolonial nationalism and white-settler nationalisms from the late ­nineteenth through the end of the twentieth centuries. As Eiichiro Azuma explains, the second round of anti-Asian legislation that culminated in the Gentlemen’s Agreements of 1908 also helped push new Japanese migrants to Latin America – another example of how the rhythms of transpacific migration were altered by the white supremacy of workers coming to the Pacific coast from the Atlantic seaboard. Eiichiro Azuma, Between Two Empires: Race, History, and Transnationalism in Japanese America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). Patricia Roy, A White Man’s Province: British Columbia Politicians and Chinese and Japanese Immigrants, 1858–1914 (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1989); Peter Ward, White Canada Forever: Popular Attitudes and Public Policy towards Orientals in British Columbia (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1990); Yu, “Refracting Pacific Canada”; Gerald Horne,

Conceiving a Pacific Canada: Migration Networks  211

28 29

30

31 32

White Pacific; Adele Perry, On the Edge of Empire: Gender, Race, and the Making of British Columbia, 1849–1871 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001); Erika Lee, “Hemispheric Orientalism and the 1907 Pacific Coast Race Riots,” Amerasia Journal 33, no. 2 (2007); Erika Lee, “Orientalisms in the Americas: A Hemispheric Approach to Asian American History,” Journal of Asian American Studies (October 2005): 235–56. See Perry, On the Edge of Empire. Translation by Woan-Jen Wang. From work on Chinese-language newspaper perspectives on the 1907 riot by Woan-Jen Wang, http://www.instrcc​ .ubc.ca/1907_riot. Walton Look Lai, Indentured Labor, Caribbean Sugar: Chinese and Indian Migrants to the British West Indies, 1838–1918 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993); Moon-Ho Jung, Coolies and Cane: Race, Labor, and Sugar in the Age of Emancipation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006); Adam McKeown, Chinese Migrant Networks and Cultural Change: Peru, Chicago, Hawaii, 1900–1936 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001); and an older study that accepted the distinction between “coolie” and “free” labour, Watt Stewart, Chinese Bondage in Peru: A History of the Chinese Coolie in Peru, 1849–1874 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1951); Henry Yu, “Writing the Past in the Present,” Amerasia Journal, Winter 2002: xli–lii. Henry Yu, “Then and Now.”

9 “How I wish I might be near”: Distance and the Epistolary Family in LateNineteenth-Century Condolence Letters lau r a ishi g u ro

Shortly before seven o’clock on the evening of 16 July 1895, Lady Julia Elizabeth (née Hyde) Trutch, sixty-eight years old, died of intestinal cancer at her family home in Victoria, British Columbia.1 While the official death registration records this standard information, other ­ sources reveal more intimate details of her death and its impact on her family and social networks in Victoria. A journal kept by her brother-­ in-law, Peter O’Reilly, gives one such perspective. Although at times it  suggests more concern for his lumbago than for Julia’s deathbed, his  journal describes her growing weakness, the doctor’s diagnoses, and the inability of her husband, Joseph, to function after her death. He  also  notes that he hired Charles Hayward, Victoria’s first – and by 1895, most prominent – undertaker to arrange her funeral.2 Details in Hayward’s letter-books paint a picture of this funeral: a typical Victorian-era affair complete with seven pairs of black kid gloves, nine carriages, and choirboys hired for $1.55. In total, Joseph paid $213.10, making the funeral expensive but not overly extravagant for this period.3 Local newspapers provide further details about Julia’s funeral and her burial in the Trutch family plot in Ross Bay Cemetery, including the names of her pallbearers, who were some of the most distinguished residents of late-nineteenth-century Victoria.4 From these sources, Julia Trutch’s death can be narrated as part of the story of the social and political elite of British Columbia’s settler society. Her husband, Joseph, had been an influential surveyor, engineer, and politician during British Columbia’s colonial period. Through this work, he played a significant role in the colony’s settlement, its “Indian” policy, and its 1871 union with the young Dominion of Canada, which resulted in his appointment as the new province’s first lieutenant

“How I wish I might be near”  213

governor. The family’s political power was further entrenched by the marriage between Joseph’s brother John, another engineer and surveyor, and Zoë Musgrave, the sister of British Columbia’s last colonial governor. A third Trutch sibling, Caroline, married Peter O’Reilly, a  prominent politician who held a number of positions in British Columbia, including gold commissioner and Indian reserve commissioner. By the time of Julia’s death in 1895, then, the family was firmly established at the centre of Victoria’s elite. The loss of a well-liked matriarch was an emotional event for this network, and it led directly to another – Joseph’s decision to leave forever the province that he had helped to build.5 While Julia’s death marked a rupture for family and friends in British Columbia, this narrative cannot be seen as strictly bounded by local, provincial, or national borders, or as having significance only to Victoria’s social and political elite. Like hundreds of thousands of families, the Hydes and Trutches had a long history of migration and separation across the British Empire and the United States by the end of the nineteenth century.6 Born in Illinois, Julia had met Joseph through her brother-in-law, John Preston, when both men were working as surveyors in California. A year Julia’s senior, Joseph had moved to California in 1849 after spending his childhood in Jamaica and England. The two married in Oregon in 1855 and moved to Illinois. Four years later they moved again, this time to Victoria, but were occasionally able to visit relatives in England and the United States due to Joseph’s financial success. At the time of Julia’s death in 1895, the extended Hyde-Trutch family network stretched across at least five countries and colonies. Many of her cousins, nieces, and nephews were based in the eastern United States, mostly New York, Massachusetts, and Illinois, though a few lived on the American west coast. The Trutch family was centred in England. This included Joseph’s siblings – John in Perey Lodge and Emily in Folkestone – as well as nieces in south-east England (Folkestone, Perey Lodge, Woodbridge, and Datchet). Other relatives were living in India and the Sudan in 1895. Although individual expectations differed, in the late nineteenth century the ability to be at home and with family at times of death was generally considered to be very important, both to achieving a “good death” for the dying individual, and for providing some level of comfort, structure, and support for the bereaved.7 For families like the Hydes and Trutches, however, migration and mobility meant that such proximity was impossible when Julia died; correspondence thus provided the

214  Laura Ishiguro

only means for relatives to communicate expressions of grief, sympathy, and emotional togetherness, with Joseph Trutch receiving dozens of condolence letters from four continents following his wife’s death. An examination of this correspondence suggests that Julia’s death should not be understood only as a local event, but also as a significant moment of crisis for a transnational family network – one that produced emotional and material connections, however tenuous or fleeting, across the world as separated relatives grappled with familial fragmentation in the face of both death and distance. Taking this approach, this chapter uses the Hyde-Trutch condolence letters as a case study for exploring how family strategies for dealing with death, assumed to be based on physical proximity, came to incorporate distance into mourning. While the letters do not necessarily tell us about individual grief, they do reveal a community of mourning produced through and concerned with the distances between family members as writers articulated the emotional impacts of mobility and distance in response to family mortality. Because death was a highly charged moment when the typically unsaid was expressed, emotions crystallized, and separations felt sharper than ever, condolence letters  can expand our understanding of the ways that families like the Hydes and Trutches developed epistolary networks of emotion in order to renegotiate family relationships across spaces. Separated relatives used condolence letters in part to navigate the challenges and possibilities of distance for family life. By considering these points, this chapter suggests that, for the Hydes and Trutches, the meanings of family relationships at a distance were produced in and through the very communication of grief between relatives. At the same time, the Hyde-Trutch condolence letters call for a more complicated narrative of family that considers communication crossing local and national boundaries. Influenced by recent transnational approaches,8 this chapter emphasizes a history of border-crossing families, letters, and emotional expressions that would be obscured by a narrative confined to national boundaries. Although studies of death and the family in the nineteenth century remain primarily framed by national borders, these letters remind us that the parameters of such family histories cannot be assumed to follow political boundaries.9 During the nineteenth century, increasing physical mobility and the development of more reliable and affordable postal systems meant that the lived experiences and emotional lives of families often resisted, disregarded, or crossed borders. Constricting a study of responses to Julia

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Trutch’s death to the boundaries of British Columbia or Canada would thus limit attention to the rich exchange of condolence letters produced outside the country, and to the important work that these letters performed for the separated family. Instead, this chapter seeks to situate historical processes in movement, connection, and, most important, the expression of kinship, emotion, and intimacy across geographic and political spaces. The Hyde-Trutch condolence correspondence, I argue, reveals a historical map of family that cannot be reduced to region, province, nation, continent, or empire. Letter Writing and Familial Networks of Communication This set of condolence letters formed part of a wider epistolary practice maintained by the Hyde-Trutch family. As with similar families, correspondence acted as the primary means for these separated relatives to maintain a sense of familial connection, however tenuous, across physical distances; although some relatives chose not to write or lost touch over time, several (especially Joseph’s siblings) maintained a regular and detailed correspondence, while others (e.g., his nieces) wrote to him more sporadically. In general, their letters – again, typically for transnational family correspondence – contained a mix of news, advice, and memories that appealed both to new circumstances and to a shared past.10 In recent years, historians of migration have turned increasingly to similar collections of letters. Studied initially as sources revealing other phenomena, “immigrant letters” are now often taken as subjects of analysis themselves, examined for the ways in which identities and relationships were performed in epistolary forms across continents and oceans.11 These studies have suggested a range of ways in which letters acted as “material and emotional links” to distant relatives, “charged with maintaining the fractured family group” and reworking senses of self through continued claims to affection, obligation, and relationship.12 However, while such studies acknowledge that death could act as a key moment in transnational family correspondence, there has been comparatively little attention paid to the specific work performed by condolence letters in this context.13 An exploration of the Hyde-Trutch collection offers some insight into the relationship between condolence letters and transnational family correspondence more generally. While family correspondence could deal with a wide range of issues, letters were typically more frequent – and written by a larger number of people – in times of significant change, especially death. The

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Hyde-Trutch collection is no different, with condolence letters sent by both regular correspondents and by people who had written to Joseph and Julia less often, if at all; his siblings, for example, wrote several longer letters each, while many other relatives sent shorter notes of condolence. The overall forms of these letters were notably similar, even formulaic in style. They included some conventions of everyday correspondence such as the language in salutations, as well as other characteristics that were specific to condolence letters. For example, most were written on mourning paper – black-edged stationery that signalled death and grief even before the words were read – and contained many similar sentiments or phrases. These features might be seen as producing, and being produced from, a specific form of what Eve Tavor Bannet terms “letteracy”: the “collection of different skills, values, and kinds of knowledge beyond mere literacy that were involved in achieving competency in the writing, reading, and interpreting of letters.”14 In  this sense, members of the Hyde-Trutch family called upon a broadly shared understanding of what a condolence letter should be, seeking to offer support, or to find it, through conventions that connected individual loss with a wider cultural system of dealing with death. The shape of such conventions also sheds some light onto the workings of the transnational family network in this moment of crisis. The opening statements of most letters, for example, record how and when the writers heard the news of the deceased’s death. These lists of names and dates – one of the most commonly shared features of the HydeTrutch condolence letters – are, in some ways, similar to the “ritualized openings” of other letters, which often involved accounting for previous correspondence within the family.15 While some scholars have considered such statements as “dross” to be ignored, Jane Errington rightly argues that such conventions “were not empty rote,” but rather acted as “a crucial affirmation of the intimacy that the writer assumed existed with the recipient.”16 This was perhaps particularly true in times of death, when family unity and connection was both threatened and urgently called upon. At the same time, listing names enabled relatives to ground their condolences in a wider family context. In this sense, adherence to the form could represent a kind of “familial solidarity” in the face of death and distance.17 For the historian, too, this common and seemingly innocuous opening performs some useful work, illustrating the ways in which Julia Trutch’s death called upon, or even called into being, a transnational family network of communication. According to the letters, the Hyde

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family network first received warnings of Julia’s impending death in early July from a Seattle cousin, May Preston, who was visiting Victoria. These were followed by notices of Julia’s death, mostly sent by Caroline O’Reilly, Joseph’s sister and his only blood relative in Victoria at the time. Letters to the Trutch family were primarily from O’Reilly, while more distant relatives and friends read newspaper announcements. A few close relatives heard first via telegraph from Joseph. Those who received telegraphs or the earliest letters forwarded the information to others, spreading the news to extended family in the Sudan, India, the United States, and throughout Europe. Responses to Julia’s death moved in much the same way. Those closest to the Trutches wired their immediate sympathy, followed by letters. Other family members and friends simply wrote letters, while more distant acquaintances sent their sympathies by word-of-mouth until someone included them in a letter. This process could take months; Joseph received condolence letters well into the autumn. Tracing the movement of information in this way reveals the workings of the communication networks of this mobile, upper-middle-class family in the United States and the British Empire, and suggests ways in which they were shaped by postal technology, physical distance, and family dynamics. In the process, these details also illustrate the sometimes tense and uneven nature of such family networks. For example, Joseph’s niece Grace Davey wrote to him in mid-July from Folkestone. In her letter, Davey complained that she only came to hear of Julia’s impending death “by chance” when she contacted a relative about another matter. She then continued, “I did feel very hurt that they should have known it all this time, Emily … having heard from you about a fortnight ago, and it is not half the interest to her it is to me.”18 This letter serves as a reminder that news of family deaths, and responses to them, did not move in simple concentric circles relational to the place of death. Rather, they were shaped by the complexities of family epistolary networks, directed in uneven ways and fraught with tensions and a complex array of emotions. Shared Epistolary Spaces for Description and Memory The Hyde-Trutch condolence letters do not just tell us about the movement of letters along family networks in times of death; they also reveal much about the symbolic role of correspondence itself for the family. In lieu of a common physical space where information could be shared,

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affections offered, and duties enacted, letters opened up the possibility  for a different kind of space for separated families like the Hydes and  Trutches. In what James How terms “epistolary space,” relatives could advise, help, and comfort one another from afar, thereby seeking – if not always successfully – to “maintain the essential fabric of their family’s lives.”19 In so doing, letters offered the possibility of a “transnationalized rootedness” in a family that could not be located in a “homeland” or in a “land of resettlement,” but in a “third place” that simultaneously occupied both and neither.20 This kind of epistolary space became particularly important in times of death, when societal norms and practices were typically associated with physical proximity. Unable to view the body, attend the funeral, witness the interment, or visit the grave, members of the Hyde-Trutch family instead sought acceptance, comfort, and closure through the acts of writing and reading. If shared mourning relied on a sense of shared experience, knowledge, and emotion, letters could help to produce or suggest this sense, offering a “third place” where distant relatives could imagine themselves as grieving together. In this way, condolence letters were critical for producing a community of mourning and a sense of cohesion – however temporary or tenuous – for a fragmented family at a time of further fragmentation. As part of this process, letter-writers directly acknowledged the complicated relationship between emotion, information, space, and distance. Some indicated that distance and epistolarity necessarily changed the possibilities of emotional expression, particularly commenting on the inadequacy of words, written from afar, to convey feelings or to comfort one another. For example, Julia’s niece Kate Hyde Ewing wrote to Joseph: “There are no words in which to express to you the sympathy we feel. When one can be with a friend in sorrow it is always possible to do something which is an assurance of love and sympathy.”21 In this sense, epistolary space was found wanting, but still valued and useful, as a strategy for supporting one another in grief. Seeking to make up for such “cold and inadequate”22 writing from a distance, correspondents emphasized the importance of sharing particular kinds of knowledge in order to create a communal under­ standing about Julia’s life and death. For example, many foregrounded memories of Julia in their letters, in this way allowing the family to shape shared epistolary spaces of remembrance that did not depend on proximity to her grave or to one another. These included both general and specific memories ranging from Julia’s “thoughtfulness & care for

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us all,”23 to reminiscences about “that night … at Bailey’s Hotel last November.”24 Some writers regretted that their only memories were very old, in part because of the physical separations wrought by mobility.25 Helen Webster, for instance, could only write, “My memory of her sweet & lovely character as she appeared to me in childhood, her voice, amicable gentle murmur was a revelation to me then never to be forgotten.”26 Correspondents did not only discuss personal memories of Julia’s life, however, but were also concerned with details of her death. In nineteenth-century Britain, sharing detailed descriptions of the deathbed was a common and expected part of mourning.27 For the extended Hyde-Trutch family, an absence from and lack of knowledge about Julia’s death precluded a full experience of mourning. Receiving details by post, they suggested, would help them come to terms with her death and foster connections with Joseph’s grief.28 However, Joseph found it too emotionally difficult to provide his family with the requested information. Nearly a month after Julia’s death, he wrote to his brother John, explaining: “I ought to have written to you before but … the fact is that my experience in witnessing the sufferings of my dear wife … so upset me that I have not been fit for anything since … I may not have the courage to [write their sister Emily] – for I fear I am very weak and foolish.”29 In this light, epistolary spaces for grief were always in process and under negotiation, relying on the continued participation of all correspondents for their meaning, content, and very existence. How­ ever incomplete or unsatisfactory they could be, though, condolence letters offered the Hyde-Trutch family the possibility of a mobile and shared grief through the exchange of words, memories, information, and emotional expression. Writing for “Togetherness” in Family Grief For families like the Hydes and Trutches, death could provide disconcerting reminders of disconnection and distance of all kinds – between the living and the dead, and between the living separated across the world. While the exchange of information and memories was a key feature of condolence letters, correspondents seemed to feel that a sense of closeness was the only way to truly comfort Joseph or to participate in his bereavement. As a result, they explicitly discussed the impact of separation on their grief, making distance not something that hindered or caused mourning but a fundamental part of it. Seeking to transcend

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distance through the acts of writing and reading, in other words, relatives simultaneously resisted and incorporated distance into family mourning. In both their content and their symbolic place in the family, then, these letters came to serve as particular “emblem[s] both of separation and connection.”30 Letter-writers particularly appealed to a sense of togetherness fostered by emotion or familial relationship, which were framed as overcoming the barriers of physical distance. As Joseph’s sister, Emily White, wrote quite simply, “So far distant I am with you in spirit,”31 while for his niece Grace Davey, both reading and writing letters about Julia brought the bad news and her emotional response “so much closer.”32 Julia’s family also stressed that they considered Joseph a part of their family, a layer of familial connection that had to be reconfirmed after her death. Notably, though, they appealed to this sense of togetherness not because he had “married in,” but rather because he had stood by Julia in life and death and now shared their grief and memories.33 Friends and family also tried to comfort Joseph and themselves by writing about their experiences with similar losses, which offered another possibility for closing an emotional gap and producing a shared epistolary space in which they could relate to one another. Positioning themselves as “fully entering” Joseph’s grief through the explanation of similar experiences, these letter-writers claimed entwined bonds of grief and affection that made separations – both in life and in death – seem more bearable.34 To this end, Robert Day wrote: “Tis most trying at all times to see those we love in bodily anguish, without the means of alleviating it, or removing it. I had to watch my dear son in mortal agony until the morphia which only eased the pain, hastened the End. You have passed thru’ an ordeal of the same kind.”35 Similarly, niece Julia Hyde Evans wove together the deaths of her aunt and her father, both of whom she framed as having died typical Victorian “good deaths.” She then went on to describe her son’s death, using Julia’s death as a lens through which to view the others in her life and to bring them within the same frame of understanding.36 In a particularly expressive letter to this end, Fred Wilcox, also paralleled his and Joseph’s grief, writing: “Alas, the last of my Mother’s household except unworthy me has gone to their eternal home, and the thoughts make me sad and lonely … I participate so sincerely in your affliction that I scarcely know how to express the deep sense I have of the heavy stroke under which you are prostrated.”37 While this letter presented an image of

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Wilcox as isolated in the world, in the act of writing he connected this isolation with – and participated in – Joseph’s grief. However, despite such efforts, letter-writers also found that they could not reweave the fabric of family connection as neatly as they had perhaps hoped. As David Fitzpatrick suggests, “The pursuit of family unity should be interpreted as evidence of intention rather than ac­ complishment.”38 In the same letter, for example, Wilcox also discussed the  impact of distance and the expectations that it shattered for him, with Julia’s place of burial representing an insistently permanent separation: “I immediately on the receipt of the sudden and unexpected news wired my sympathy, and asked for particulars, anticipating that you might possibly choose to lay dear Julia at rest here in the east beside her Brother and Sister. But I have just learned through a letter from May Preston to Julia Hyde Evans of her burial at Victoria.”39 Here he does not contest Joseph’s decision to bury Julia in Victoria, but it is clear that he had expected her burial with his family rather than in her adopted home. The grief articulated in the rest of this letter is refracted through this struggle with the physical distance between Julia and her family, both in life and in death. Although the cemetery has been identified as the site of family memory and mourning in nineteenth-century British Columbia,40 transnational families – as Fred Wilcox’s letter suggests – were unable to locate their grief and work out their responses to a death at a physical grave­ site in the same way. The Trutch-O’Reilly plot in Ross Bay Cemetery, Victoria, suggests one strategy employed by the mobile family to deal with this very concern in the coming years, at least for the smaller “nuclear” unit. Already buried there by the time of Julia’s death were Charlotte (née Barnes) Trutch, Joseph Trutch and Caroline O’Reilly’s mother, and Mary Augusta O’Reilly, the daughter of Caroline and Peter O’Reilly. On the Trutch side of the headstone, Julia’s name is carved first, followed by Joseph’s; it notes that he is buried in Lydeard St Lawrence, Somerset (1904). The next side marks Peter O’Reilly’s 1905 burial in Ross Bay and Caroline’s 1899 death and burial in Cheriton, Kent. Of the first two generations of Trutches in British Columbia, then, the Victoria plot contains the bodies of Charlotte Trutch (born in Jamaica), her granddaughter Mary, her daughter-in-law Julia (born in the United States), and her son-in-law Peter (born in England and raised in Ireland). Their spouses are buried in England, separated in death but marked together in name.

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While the Trutch family would choose this epitaphic evocation of family togetherness in the years to come, those writing condolence letters in 1895 sought ways to reduce distances between them and Joseph in life as well, suggesting that it was difficult or impossible to truly comfort him across such spaces. As his niece Caroline Hare exclaimed in her letter, “How I wish I might be near.”41 When they could not be near, family members found special comfort in the fact there were relatives, especially his sister, close to him.42 However, many still saw Julia’s death as a reason for Joseph to move to England,43 implying that he would find comfort there with extended family rather than in what Mary Holbrooke called his “desolated home.”44 Joseph does appear to have sought comfort with close family. In the short term, the O’Reillys moved into his house, and one was with him at all times to support him in his immediate grief.45 Within a year, Joseph left British Columbia forever, moving back to England to take up residence in Somerset, where he died less than a decade later.46 While family members regretted the distances between themselves and Julia in life and death and urged Joseph to move closer to them, they found Julia’s place of death – Fairfield House in Victoria – an important source of comfort since she had felt at home there. In one such letter, Gertrude Fletcher wrote, “I am sure it must have been a satisfaction to you that [she died in her] … such loved house instead of in a strange place. She was so attached to it.”47 The importance and comfort attached to Julia’s place of death suggests a profound discomfort with the idea and experience of dying somewhere not “at home,” even for a mobile family with roots in many places. Julia Trutch’s death disrupted relationships in the extended HydeTrutch family network. Physically separated family members sought to remake and redefine bonds with each other in a world without her by using letters to communicate grief, comfort, and a sense of connection. When Caroline Hare exclaimed to Joseph Trutch, “How I wish I might be near,” she framed the condolence letter as both insufficient and indispensable for expressing grief and consolation at a distance. In negotiating this position, the Hyde-Trutch condolence letters reveal some ways in which epistolary families could carve out shared spaces for intimacy and grief across physical distances. These were not simply generic descriptions of emotion that travelled across space; rather, writers actually engaged with the idea of distance as part of their mourning, seeking to produce a shared body of knowledge and emotion about Julia’s death and reconfiguring the emotional and physical distances

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between relatives. Correspondents also looked to foster links that did not rely on physical proximity, emphasizing emotional and spiritual bonds, discussing similar losses, and stressing the importance of family and home in times of death. While everyday family correspondence sometimes grappled with these themes, they took on a particular urgency and directness at a time of fragmentation, with condolence letters working both as signs of separation and as modes of connection for the Hyde-Trutch family. In doing so, they both resisted and incorporated the idea of distance into mourning, producing forms of grief that were profoundly shaped by the separated nature of the family. Seen in this light, the Hyde-Trutch letters suggest the need for a more  complicated history of family and mourning in the late nineteenth century. While the literature on death and dying in the nineteenth century is primarily bounded by national or local borders, hundreds of thousands of families found themselves separated around the world during this period. This meant a change in how deaths were experienced and mourned within the family circle, as that “circle” could not depend on physical proximity to define its emotional bonds and boundaries. Grief, put simply, was not necessarily defined by or expressed within local, provincial, national, or imperial borders. In­ stead, the Hyde-Trutch family letters speak to a social world that spanned the United States, Canada, metropolitan Britain, and the empire. These connections could be called up with particular urgency in a moment of rupture, as epistolary networks carried news of death and letters of grief to far-flung places, with sometimes vast time lags, and compelled families to negotiate how to mourn at a distance without ever seeing a body or a grave. As a result of this process, family death and mourning – experiences that often entailed the formulation or articulation of feelings otherwise unexpressed – helped to create, maintain, strengthen, and challenge epistolary networks of emotion and intimacy articulated by families across physical distances and political boundaries. NOTES 1 Registration of death, Julia Elizabeth Trutch, British Columbia Archives (hereafter BCA), reel B13078, 1895-09-009846. 2 Diaries, 1895, O’Reilly family fonds, BCA, MS-2894, box 3, file 5, reel A01911; and loose papers from diaries, 1895, box 3, file 20, reel A01912.

224  Laura Ishiguro 3 Bill #390 to Joseph Trutch, 22 July 1895, Letter-book (January 1894– September 1896), Charles Hayward papers, City of Victoria Archives, box 1, vol. 3. 4 British Colonist, 17 July 1895, 5 and 8; 18 July 1895, 5 and 8; and 19 July 1895, 5. 5 Joseph Trutch to John Trutch, 11 August 1895, Trutch family fonds, University of British Columbia Special Collections (hereafter UBCSC), box 1, file 58; and List of Articles at Fairfield to be Packed and Sent to England if Required, 1896, Trutch family fonds, BCA, MS-2897, box 9, file 10, reel A01952. 6 In the face of repeated economic depressions, for example, approximately 22 million emigrants left the British Isles between 1815 and 1914, a significant percentage of whom moved to the United States or Canada. Improved transportation, new forms of work, and the promise of land or fortune spurred these and others migrations both within and beyond national ­borders. Marjory Harper, Adventurers and Exiles: The Great Scottish Exodus (London: Profile, 2003), 2. For a general view of British emigration, see Eric Richards, Britannia’s Children: Emigration from England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland since 1600 (London: Hambledon, 2004); for more on English migrants to the United States, see Charlotte Erickson, Leaving England: Essays on British Emigration in the Nineteenth Century (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994); and for an overview of imperial migration, see Marjory Harper and Stephen Constantine, Migration and Empire, Oxford History of the British Empire Companion Series (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), especially chap. 2 for the Canadian context. 7 Pat Jalland, Death in the Victorian Family (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 3–4. 8 Although C.A. Bayly argues that the term “transnational” is inappropriate for subjects prior to 1914, the theoretical underpinning of this literature ­offers valuable ways of thinking about border-crossing families like the Hydes and Trutches. C.A. Bayly et al., “AHR Conversation: On Transna­ tional History,” American Historical Review 111, no. 5 (2006): 1442. See, for example, Ann Curthoys and Marilyn Lake, “Introduction,” in Connected Worlds: History in Transnational Perspective (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 2006); and Isabel Hofmeyr in Bayly et al., “AHR Conversation.” 9 For example, James J. Farrell, Inventing the American Way of Death, 1830– 1920 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980); Julian Litten, The English Way of Death: The Common Funeral since 1450 (London: Robert Hale, 1991); and Esther Schor, Bearing the Dead: The British Culture of Mourning from the Enlightenment to Victoria (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994).

“How I wish I might be near”  225 10 For other correspondence, see, for example, Trutch family fonds, BCA, MS-2897 and O’Reilly family fonds, BCA, MS-2894. 11 For example, Bruce S. Elliott, David A. Gerber, and Suzanne M. Sinke, eds., Letters across Borders: The Epistolary Practices of International Migrants (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006); Elizabeth Jane Errington, “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; David Fitzpatrick, Oceans of Consolation: Personal Accounts of Irish Migration to Australia (Cork: Cork University Press, 1994); David A. Gerber, Authors of Their Lives: The Personal Correspondence of British Immigrants to North America in the Nineteenth Century (New York: New York University Press, 2006); Sarah Katherine Gibson, “Self-Reflection in the Consolidation of Scottish Identity: A Case Study in Family Correspon­ dence,” in Canada and the British World: Culture, Migration and Identity, ed. Phillip Buckner and R. Douglas Francis (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2006), 29– 44; Bill Jones, “Writing Back: Welsh Emigrants and Their Correspondence in the Nineteenth Century,” North American Journal of Welsh Studies 5, no. 1 (Winter 2005): 23–46; Charlotte J. Macdonald, “Introduction,” in Women Writing Home, 1700–1920: Female Correspondence across the British Empire, vol. 5: New Zealand, ed. Charlotte J. Macdonald (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2006), xi–xxvi; and Sarah M.S. Pearsall, Atlantic Families: Lives and Letters in the Later Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). 12 David Fitzpatrick, “Irish Emigration and the Art of Letter-writing,” in Elliott, Gerber, and Sinke, Letters across Borders, 97. 13 One of the more detailed considerations of death in family letters can be found in Jane Errington’s work, which includes a useful case study of transatlantic correspondence from one man regarding the death of his ­sister-in-law. Errington, “Webs of Affection and Obligation,” 17–23. 14 Eve Tavor Bannet, Empire of Letters: Letter Manuals and Transatlantic Correspondence, 1688–1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), xvii. 15 Errington, “Webs of Affection and Obligation,” 8. 16 Ibid. On older approaches to letter-writing conventions, see Fitzpatrick, Oceans of Consolation, 20; and Jones, “Writing Back,” 44–5. 17 Fitzpatrick, Oceans of Consolation, 22. 18 Grace Davey to Joseph Trutch, 17 July 1895, Trutch family fonds, BCA, MS-2897, box 2, file 23, reel A01948. 19 James S. How, Epistolary Spaces: English Letter-Writing from the Foundation of the Post Office to Richardson’s Clarissa (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003); and Errington, “Webs of Affection and Obligation,” 4. 20 Elliott, Gerber, and Sinke, “Introduction,” in Letters across Borders, 2 and 12.

226  Laura Ishiguro 21 Kate Hyde Ewing to Joseph Trutch, 25 July 1895, Trutch family fonds, BCA, MS-2897, box 3, file 2, reel A01948. See also Emily (Trutch) Pinder White to Joseph Trutch, 15 July 1895, box 3, file 54, reel A01949; Grace R. Davey to Joseph Trutch, 7 August 1895, box 2, file 23, reel A01948; Julia (Hyde) Evans to Joseph Trutch, 21 July 1895, box 3, file 1, reel A01948. 22 Earl of Aberdeen to Joseph Trutch, 16 August 1895, Trutch family fonds, BCA, MS-2897, box 2, file 6, reel A01948. 23 Sarah Emily (Davey) Ashley to Joseph Trutch, 1895, Trutch family fonds, BCA, MS-2897, box 2, file 9, reel A01948. 24 Charlotte E. (Ashley) Brown to Joseph Trutch, 1 August 1895, Trutch family fonds, BCA, MS-2897, box 2, file 15, reel A01948. 25 Fannie E. Harwood to Joseph Trutch, 10 August 1895, Trutch family fonds, BCA, MS-2897, box 3, file 10, reel A01948; Gertrude Hammond to Joseph Trutch, [undated] 1895, box 3, file 7, reel A01948. 26 Helen C. Webster to Joseph Trutch, 20 July 1895, Trutch family fonds, BCA, MS-2897, box 3, file 52, reel A01949. 27 Jalland, Death in the Victorian Family, 30. 28 Florence Maria (Stapleton) Seymour to Joseph Trutch, 24 August 1895, Trutch family fonds, BCA, MS-2897, box 3, file 43, reel A01948; Margaret Miller to Joseph Trutch, undated 1895, box 3, file 25, reel A01948; Clara W. Frink to Joseph Trutch, 17 July 1895, box 3, file 5, reel A01948; Grace R. Davey to Joseph Trutch, 18 July 1895, box 2, file 23, reel A01948; Gertrude Fletcher to Joseph Trutch, 14 August 1895, box 3, file 4, A01948. 29 Joseph Trutch to John Trutch, 11 August 1895, Trutch family fonds, UBCSC, box 1, file 58. 30 Kate Teltscher, “The Sentimental Ambassador: The Letters of George Bogle from Bengal, Bhutan and Tibet, 1770–1781,” in Epistolary Selves: Letters and Letter-Writers, 1600–1945, ed. Rebecca Earle (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999), 86. 31 Emily (Trutch) Pinder White to Joseph Trutch, 20 July 1895, Trutch family fonds, BCA, MS-2897, box 3, file 54, reel A01949. 32 Grace R. Davey to Joseph Trutch, 7 August 1895, Trutch family fonds, BCA, MS-2897, box 2, file 23, reel A01948. 33 Helen C. Webster to May Preston, 19 July 1895, Trutch family fonds, BCA, MS-2897, box 3, file 52, reel A01949. 34 Earl of Aberdeen to Joseph Trutch, 16 August 1895, Trutch family fonds, BCA, MS-2897, box 2, file 6, reel A01948. 35 Robert Day to Joseph Trutch, 27 July 1895, Trutch family fonds, BCA, ­MS-2897, box 2, file 25, reel A01948. 36 Julia (Hyde) Evans to Joseph Trutch, 21 July 1895, Trutch family fonds, BCA, MS-2897, box 3, file 1, reel A01948. Meanings of a “good death” were

“How I wish I might be near”  227

37 38 39 40

41 42 43

44 45 46

47

always reworked in individual contexts, but according to Pat Jalland’s ­research, upper- and middle-class families in Britain repeatedly expressed a broadly shared, general set of characteristics. Jalland, Death in the Victorian Family, 2–3. Fred J. Wilcox to Joseph Trutch, 25 July 1895, Trutch family fonds, BCA, MS-2897, box 3, file 56, reel A01949. Fitzpatrick, Oceans of Consolation, 513. Fred J. Wilcox to Joseph Trutch, 25 July 1895, Trutch family fonds, BCA, MS-2897, box 3, file 56, reel A01949. Colin M. Coates, “Monuments and Memories: The Evolution of British Columbian Cemeteries, 1850–1950,” Material History Bulletin 25 (Spring 1987): 11–19. Caroline (Pinder) Hare to Joseph Trutch, 18 July 1895, Trutch family fonds, BCA, MS-2897, box 3, file 8, reel A01948. John Trutch to Joseph Trutch, 5 August 1895, Trutch family fonds, BCA, MS-2897, box 3, file 47, reel A01948. For example, Grace R. Davey to Joseph Trutch, 7 August 1895, Trutch family fonds, BCA, MS-2897, box 2, file 23, reel A01948; Beryl Ashley to Joseph Trutch, 2 August 1895, box 2, file 8, reel A01948. Mary H. Holbrook to Joseph Trutch, 6 August 1895, Trutch family fonds, BCA, MS-2897, box 3, file 13, reel A01948. Joseph Trutch to John Trutch, 11 August 1895, Trutch family fonds, UBCSC, box 1, file 58. Joseph Trutch to John Trutch, 11 August 1895, Trutch family fonds, UBCSC, box 1, file 58; and List of Articles at Fairfield to be Packed and Sent to England if Required, 1896, Trutch family fonds, BCA, MS-2897, box 9, file 10, reel A01952. Gertrude Fletcher to Joseph Trutch, 14 August 1895, Trutch family fonds, BCA, MS-1897, box 3, file 4, reel A01948. See also H.C. Trutch to Joseph, 22 July 1895, box 3, file 46, reel A01948; Julia (Hyde) Evans to Joseph Trutch, 21 July 1895, box 3, file 1, reel A01948; Emily (Trutch) Pinder White to Joseph Trutch, 10 August 1895, box 3, file 54, reel A01949; Sarah Emily (Davey) Ashley to Joseph Trutch, [undated] 1895, box 2, file 9, reel A01948; Fred J. Wilcox to Joseph Trutch, 25 July 1895, box 3, file 56, reel A01949.

10 “She cannot be confined to her own region”: Nursing and Nurses in the Caribbean, Canada, and the United Kingdom ka ren flyn n

A nurse confined to her own region will eventually mis-interpret her own importance in the vast body of nursing personnel all over the globe. Travel and scholarships will help her to see and appreciate the contributions of other graduates in the other regions, the tremendous amount of research being done on diseases which in her own region are common, and which there is no visible sign of curative endeavor.1

As a relatively new concept, transnationalism is often used to explain how globalization and its attendant reconfigurations of international social, political, and economic relations have resulted in the deterritorialization of borders and, by extension, nation states. With respect to the Caribbean, scholars tend to use transnationalism as a conceptual and analytical framework to understand Caribbean people’s experiences as mobile workers who migrated in search of improved economic and social options within a massive international system. In this context, transnationalism refers primarily to diasporic communities’ formation and reformation, and the myriad ways they constructed and inscribed their identities and relationships across national borders. The scant scholarship on Caribbean women in the Canadian context, frequently (though not entirely) emphasizes their maternal roles within the family and the construction and maintenance of social relationships that crossed national boundaries.2 These cross-border relationships mostly involved women, children, and other family members left behind in the home countries, and the mothers who supported them by working overseas. In this vein, transnational practices included remittances in the form of capital, telephone calls, and return visits.3 In my own research, on Black Canadian-born and Caribbean nurses, dual

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citizenship, ties with, and support of institutions such as schools and churches are additional examples.4 Allisa Trotz, however, critiques the focus on “the relations sustained between ‘origin’/‘home’/‘departure’ and ‘destination’/‘away’/‘settlement’ ‘societies,’”5 as the primary way to map cross-border linkages. For Trotz, the aforementioned binaries ignore other journeys between multiple diasporas such as those that occur among African-Caribbean women living in Toronto who make frequent trips to New York. As a result of labour demands in industrialized economies after the Second World War and the more recent unprecedented movement of practitioners across national borders, nursing has emerged as a global occupation.6 In the case of Canada, nurses from the Caribbean and the Philippines,7 as well as physicians have been recruited to fill a much needed labour shortage. In the case of foreign-trained physicians, Sasha Mullally and David Wright posit that they played a critical role in the development of Medicare.8 Yet scholarly interest in these migratory patterns has remained sparse. Drawing on historian Prasenjit Duara’s analysis,9 Catherine Cenzia Choy maintains that this lacuna in the nursing scholarship is based on the “centrality of the ‘nation’ in nursing history.”10 She further contends that “like other historical fields of study, the presumption that the nation defines what counts as history may have had the effect of trivializing foreign trained nurses.”11 In this chapter, I intend to help fill the gap Choy, Mullally, and Wright identify by exploring nursing through a transnational framework. I move beyond the family-centred dimension of the current scholarship to focus on Caribbean nurses as transnational subjects and agents between the Second World War and the 1980s. I focus on the ties, affiliations, and sustained activities among the English-speaking Caribbean (especially Jamaica), Britain, and Canada – and, to a lesser extent, the United States. I demonstrate how transnational migration practices ­remain intricately linked to the asymmetrical colonial relationships among the Caribbean and Britain and Canada as part of the British Commonwealth. Whether crossing borders to work intermittently, to pursue additional training, or to attend conferences, workshops, or seminars, Caribbean, Canadian, and British nurses forged connections and linkages across national boundaries. For post-war nurses of Caribbean origin, Canada was one node in a layered transnational network. I begin by discussing Caribbean nurses’ engagement in transnational practices to illustrate how “ideas, things, people, and practices which have crossed national boundaries”12 moved

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among Britain, the English-speaking Caribbean region, and Canada. I then turn to an analysis of transnational nursing organizations and conclude with a textual analysis of the Jamaican Nurse. In doing so, this chapter suggests how we can see Canada as one site of the transnational world that Caribbean nurses built. Caribbean Nurses, Transnational Practices, and the Empire/Commonwealth As Ryan Eyford’s paper in this collection demonstrates, Caribbean people have long migrated, either within their own region or in smaller numbers, to “first world” countries in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The transformation these economies underwent after the Second World War, however, culminated in an acute labour shortage that led to a mass migration of Caribbean people. Britain and Canada so desperately needed nurses that immigration officials and hospital representatives went abroad to recruit nurses to work in their respective countries. In 1949, the British Ministry of Health and Labour, together with the Colonial Office, the General Nursing Council, and the Royal College of Nursing, began a deliberate policy of recruiting from the Caribbean.13 Conversely, in Canada, it was individual hospitals, such as Catherine Booth Mother Hospital in Montreal and Northern General Hospital in Simcoe, Ontario, that issued letters of acceptance for already trained nurses and potential trainees.14 In addition, the Canadian School of Practical Nursing “arranged for eight fifty-second spot announcements to be broadcast on radio in Trinidad inviting anyone who was planning on coming to Canada for nursing training to contact the Canadian School of Practical Nursing.”15 These schools’ and hospitals’ desperate need for nurses led them to contravene federal policies controlling immigration by issuing letters of acceptance regarding employment. Despite the intense need for nurses, not to mention the Canadian Nursing Association’s (CNA) 1944 resolution that “reaffirmed its policy to support the principle that there be no discrimination in the selection of enrollment into the schools of nursing,”16 Caribbean nurses faced discrimination when they migrated to Canada. Immigration officials, individual directors of nursing, and nursing schools discriminated against Caribbean Registered Nurses (RNs) and potential students. According to Agnes Calliste, Caribbean-trained nurses who first immigrated to Canada required parliamentary approval as “cases

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of exceptional merit.”17 To be considered for landed-immigrant status, Caribbean nurses were expected to have qualifications that exceeded those of their white counterparts. Consequently, only 286 nursing assistants and 982 graduate nurses from the Caribbean gained landedimmigrant status between 1954 and 1965, compared to 15,359 nurses,18 primarily from Britain (which would include some Caribbean nurses). Until 1962, Caribbean migrants enjoyed unrestricted entry to Britain. While we must view the available figures with caution, they do provide some insight into the value of Caribbean health-care practitioners to the newly developed National Health Service (NHS). By 1954, more than 3000 Caribbean nurses were training in British hospitals; by 1959, official statistics showed 6365 colonial students in Britain.19 With respect to trained nurses, the Nursing Times reported that between the years 1964 and 1967, “300–600 fully trained Commonwealth nurses ­arrived in Britain.”20 The imperial relationship among the Caribbean, Britain, and Canada revealed itself in the structure and organization of Caribbean nursing schools. Caribbean nursing leaders in the colonial period expended enormous energy to legitimize nursing locally and internationally. Besides marshalling a plan to improve nursing standards in the Caribbean, Caribbean nurses felt they were more than capable of assuming those leadership and supervisory positions – as tutors, sisters, and matrons – that had been reserved for British and a few Canadian nurses. The uneven power relationship between the empire and its colonies complicated measures to improve nursing education in the Caribbean due to “British dominance in the nursing profession,”21 and racist ideas about Caribbean people’s capability to effectively manage their own institutions. Nursing leaders such as Nita Barrow, Gertrude Swaby, Berenice Dolly, Mary Jane Seivwright, and Julie Symes, the majority Caribbean born, felt otherwise.22 These women in their different capacities engaged in a relentless struggle to radically improve the state of Caribbean nursing education. Given that the Caribbean islands were still colonies and very much tied to Britain, colonization sowed the seeds for transnational ties to germinate. Caribbean nursing schools were organized and structured in ways similar to those in Britain. In 1945, for example, sister tutors appointed by the Colonial Office revised the nursing curriculum in Trinidad.23 Subsequently, “all schools of Nursing in the British Caribbean follow[ed] the pattern of Nurse Education of Great Britain” and followed the syllabus of the General Nursing Council of Great Britain (GNC) “as far as

232  Karen Flynn

is practicable.”24 Even when Caribbean nursing leaders were appointed, most were either graduates of, or had participated in, postgraduate training in Britain, and they in turn privileged the British nursing model. As nursing leaders strove to transform the structure of nurse training in the Caribbean, they kept the GNC in mind. It was imperative that Caribbean nursing standards were recognized in Britain and internationally, particularly regarding reciprocity, which enabled qualified Caribbean nurses to practise in Britain. For example, when the General Nursing Council for Jamaica was established in 1951, it immediately applied to the GNC (Britain) for reciprocity for “nurses registered by  the examination,”25 which was granted in 1952. In addition, “the Association was admitted as a member of the International Council of Nurses [ICN] at its quadrennial congress in Brazil 1953.”26 Trinidad and Tobago was also admitted to the ICN and granted reciprocity with the United Kingdom that same year.27 The granting of reciprocity by the GNC (Britain) is especially significant. Nursing historian Jocelyn Hezekiah points out that eventually “only training recognized by a body external to the region, namely the General Council for England and Wales, was accepted by all the islands’ authorities as equipping a nurse to practice her profession outside her home territory.”28 This particular gesture solidified an interdependent relationship between the empire and its colonies beyond legitimizing the direction of Caribbean nursing education. As long as the Caribbean training system followed the British pattern, the latter was able to depend on the former to help solve the nursing shortage. Reciprocity with the GNC contributed to the transnational character of nursing. It also had its rewards beyond the GNC. Caribbean nurses who were members of the ICN were permitted “to go to any member country of the ICN for purposes of observation, work or study.”29 As an indication of the occupation’s improved status, it was also crucial that Caribbean nurses be admitted into and recognized by international organizations. These visits solidified the relationship between Caribbean nurses and their counterparts elsewhere. Nursing scholars have recently decried the ongoing preoccupation with professionalization – strategies such as education and registration – that an occupation adopts to maintain control over its work. Yet in the case of the Caribbean, this emphasis reflected the relationship between the region and Britain. To assist Britain’s colonies, various British nursing personnel visited the Caribbean, some on behalf of the Colonial Office, others as a result of relationships between individual nurses. In 1953,

“She cannot be confined to her own region”  233

after a request from the Colonial Office, Marjorie Houghton, the education officer for the GNC, visited a number of Caribbean islands to assess the facilities available for nurse training, with the larger goal of improving nursing education and service. The information Houghton brought back to the GNC no doubt contributed to the organization’s 1958 decision to grant “full recognition of the purposes of registration by the GNC”30 to nurses trained at the Colonial and San Fernando Hospitals. Visits by British and Canadian nursing personnel continued even as Caribbean nations became formally independent of the British Empire in the early 1960s to the early 1980s. In 1959, Mary Henry, former registrar of the GNC, visited Trinidad. According to Henry, it was a “neverto-be forgotten six and a half days paced with discussions, visits to hospitals, sanatoria, health centres, to the Ministry of Health and to the Federal Building.”31 In addition, Henry attended a dinner party hosted by the Nursing Council of Trinidad and Tobago and met nurses who were members of the council. Henry’s recollection of the trip was as follows: “I well recall my feeling of admiration for the professional attitude of the nurses whom I met and their determined efforts to advance the status of the profession.”32 In 1970, Henry returned to Trinidad as a resource person for the ICN. She also participated in the Caribbe­ an  Seminar on Nursing in Barbados. Other visitors included Sheila M. Quinn, director of the Social and Economic Welfare Division of the ICN, who travelled to Jamaica for the sixth biennial conference of the Caribbean Nurses Organization (CNO) in July 1968. Likewise, in April of the same year, Helen K. Mussallem, executive director of the CNA, attended the fourth nursing education seminar held in Guyana. Guyana is geographically situated in South America but shares a cultural connection to the English-speaking Caribbean. These nurses became embedded in transnational networks, which were also a by-product of an occupation that often required travelling and the exchange of information across destination sites. They significantly contributed to nursing education in the colonies before and after independence. For example, Lois Smith, a Canadian consultant, spent 1967 in Jamaica working with the administration at Bellevue Hospital “towards achieving better patient care.”33 During the same time, Barbara Sexton, another Canadian, joined the Kingston Public Hospital (KPH) as a visiting professor for a year before returning to Canada. Along with the ideas she brought with her to Kingston, Jamaican nurses also hoped that “she too will have some ideas to take home with her,”34 reflecting their expectations for a multilateral exchange of ideas.

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Caribbean nurses acutely recognized their unequal position within the larger global sphere of nursing. At the same time that they required the expertise of foreign white nurses and administrators who travelled to the Caribbean, they were mindful of transplanting their ideas without considering the Jamaican or Caribbean context. This concern came to the fore in an article on Dr Rae Chittick, a Canadian who travelled to Jamaica during the late 1960s as a World Health Organization (WHO) consultant to assist KPH in reorganizing its nursing program. Among her other responsibilities, Chittick developed the country’s first advanced courses in nursing education and teaching. The article saw Chittick’s work as an example of a successful transnational exchange rooted in mutual respect: “Those nurses who work closely with [Chittick] … have been impressed by her extraordinary patience and humility and her capacity for concentrated work. She has never sought to impose her ideas on us, but always waited to learn from us the details of the Jamaican situation and allowed us to decide what would be appropriate for our use.”35 Jamaican nurses consciously selected from the coffer of knowledge that Chittick offered, and in so doing they actively participated in constructing and generating their own vision of the nursing program. Despite the historical asymmetric colonial relationships – between the Caribbean and Britain and between the Caribbean and Canada as a white-settler colony – that structured these visits, linkages and ties transformed the island nursing systems. At the same time, these associations went beyond the colonial/Commonwealth relationship to reflect a shared nursing identity, however contrived. The flows and exchanges of ideas and activities pertaining to nursing remained far from one-dimensional. White nurses were not the only individuals with agendas travelling to and from the Caribbean; Caribbean nurses reciprocated with visits of their own to Britain. For example, Mrs Dolly, president of the Nursing Council of Trinidad and Tobago, visited the United Kingdom in 1961, as did Mrs Waterman, then president of the council, during the colonial period.36 These travels decentre the empire/colony paradigm that characterizes early migration scholarship. Equally significantly, Caribbean nurses actively participated in myriad cross-border activities, even if some of them remained anchored in a specific geographic locale. The diverse representation from various countries that attended the sixth CNO biennial conference held in Jamaica in 1968 renders these connections visible. In addition to delegates from the Caribbean and elsewhere, international speakers included Dorothy Cornelius, president of

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the American Nurses Association (ANA); Sheila Quinn, executive director of the ICN; and Margaret Lamb, chair of the General Nursing Council for Scotland. Indeed, within the transnational social network developed at such conferences, nurses engaged in numerous cross-border activities and forged relationships that did not require migration, whether for training or employment. As members of the ICN, Caribbean nurses and students also attended international conferences. For example, approximately twenty-three Caribbean nurses attended the fourteenth quadrennial ICN congress in Montreal, 22–9 June 1969. Caribbean nursing leaders also participated as members of panels. Grace March, a nursing education officer, and Miss L. Honey, director of Nursing Education, both at KPH, “took part in special sessions on Nurses and the Practice of Nursing and the Community Psychiatric Nursing.” In addition, Julie Symes joined a session on nursing legislation, and Gertrude Swaby participated in “Writing for the Professional Press.”37 The reaction of Doreen Wilson (student representative for the Student Nurses Association of KPH) to the meeting is instructive: I was greatly moved by the large attendance of nurses from all over the world. They gathered to exchange ideas and share common interests, and this demonstrated to me that there is strength in unity, and that through the ICN every registered nurse who is a member of her national Nurses Association has the privilege of helping to improve our profession’s standards, and so improving nursing care … The Congress has stimulated me greatly and I hope to spread this feeling through the channel of our Student Nurses Association.38

These cross-border interactions allowed diverse groups of women and students to forge ties and articulate a collective – though often contested – notion of professional identity, despite the political economy of health care in the Caribbean. However, we can also map transnational exchanges through those who attended nursing schools outside the region. Scholars have criticized transnational history’s potential to remain just another buzzword, a descriptive label rather than an agentic practice.39 How, then, does practice illuminate transnationalism? Can we measure tangible results? In the case of the Caribbean, I argue that we can. The marginalization of the colonies vis-à-vis the empire, and the resulting dearth of resources, rendered border crossings for educational purposes inevitable. Indeed, Ruby Grannum King and other nursing

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leaders, many of whom travelled and trained overseas, knew that such crossings would benefit not only individual nurses, but also the occupation as a whole. Consequently, King and the CNO emphasized the specific contributions that nurses could make to the field of nursing by leaving the region. They would return home inspired and reinvigorated with new skills, ideas, and research agendas. Subsequently, the CNO recommended that nursing councils and associations persuade local governments to “help nurses to obtain more scholarships for necessary study abroad, not only in Great Britain, but in Canada and the United States.”40 In addition to crossing borders to pursue professional endeavours, some graduate students received scholarships to pursue additional training abroad. Such was the case of four ward sisters from Trinidad who received scholarships to complete a one-year program in ward administration at the Royal College of Nursing in Britain. While these four women could not challenge existing inequalities within the medical field as a whole, upon their return they were able to “improve their standard of supervision” on their own wards. Similarly, Edna E. Tulloch trained in Britain, but before she returned to Jamaica she worked in Scotland, the United States, and then Nigeria. Eventually, Tulloch returned to Jamaica in the mid-1960s, where she worked as the night sister at the University College Hospital of the West Indies (UCHWI) before being promoted to administrative sister. Tulloch has received recognition as a dynamic leader in her various positions. Certainly, she gleaned some of her “imaginative and original ideas” from her experience working overseas, which she reconfigured for the Jamaican context. Despite exclusionary policies that prohibited the migration of Caribbean migrants to Canada up until the late 1960s, a few migrants managed to gain entry, such as those families who could afford the cost to send their children to Canada for educational purposes. Among this group were nurses who sought postgraduate training. At least in the case of Barbados, a few students already had some connection with Canadian nursing personnel. According to Hezekiah, the nursing leadership shifted from British to Canadian in Barbados, and no doubt other Caribbean islands as well, as a direct result of the Second World War.41 The war created a shortage of supervisors in Britain, and as a member of the Commonwealth, Canada became the next source from which Barbados could recruit supervisors. Some of these supervisors encouraged Caribbean graduate nurses to seek training at the University of Toronto School of Nursing (UTSN).

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The UTSN was attractive for several reasons: it accepted certificates from outside its jurisdiction for entry into the school; it was one of the few schools in North America “that was both innovative and flexible in regards to nursing education”;42 and it maintained an excellent international reputation. Student records from the UTSN during the war years boast nurses from across the globe who enrolled in the one-year Certificate in Public Health Nursing program. As one observer noted in 1949, “the school is a cosmopolitan beehive. In the crowded corridors of the school, now awaiting new and larger quarters, many languages discuss the nursing problems, and the Indian sari and high throated oriental tunic are also as familiar as the skirt and sweater.”43 This idealized, cosmopolitan image of nursing often ignores the economic, political, and social conditions that contributed to the movement of nurses of colour across international borders for nurse training. Nevertheless, during the war a few Caribbean registered nurses (RNs) did enrol in the UTSN. Student records remain a rich documentary source, as they provide insight, however subjective, into an individual student’s aptitude from the perspective of the nursing instructor. One Caribbean student, for example, was described as an “Excellent student; Ability very good; Interest keen, personality forceful with charm; an experienced student of good educational background. She should prove capable of leadership in her own country. No. in class: 79 rank: 3rd Average: A.”44 Caribbean graduate nurses who sought supplementary training overseas arrived already equipped with certain knowledge and skills. Such is the case of Jamaican-born Eva Lowe, who received a Rockefeller Foundation Scholarship to the UTSN during 1944–5 and earned a certificate in public health nursing. Before her studies in Toronto, Lowe had trained in Britain, and upon her return to Jamaica she was appointed in 1941 as a public health nursing supervisor. Lowe later joined the Government Service where she initiated an island-wide health service.45 She was also the first Jamaican nurse in the government service to hold a master’s degree. Nurses on these intermittent sojourns overseas were not meant to uncritically adopt “foreign” ideas and models and impose them on the Caribbean. This was particularly important, given the lower- to middle-class penchant to imitate everything British, reflected in Stuart Hall’s recollections about growing up in Jamaica. He recalls: “If you live, as I’ve lived, in Jamaica, in a lower-middle-class family that was trying to be a middle-class Jamaican family trying to be an upper-middle-class Jamaican family

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trying to be an English Victorian family,” your identity was grounded in the notion of displacement.”46 Caribbean nurses appear to have embodied a distinct sensibility, as evidenced by Nita Barrow, a UTSN graduate who remains one of the most well-known Caribbean nurse leaders. Barrow graduated from the Barbados General Hospital (BGH), now the Queen Elizabeth Hospital, in 1938. During nurse training, Barrow met Nora Cotton Stoute, also a graduate of the UTSN and the first Canadian supervisor at BGH. When Barrow told Stoute that she wanted to seek additional nurse training overseas, Stoute recommended the UTSN and suggested that Barrow apply for the Rockefeller Foundation scholarship, which she did. In 1943, Barrow entered the UTSN to pursue a one-year “post-basic” course in public health nursing. She graduated in 1944 as the valedictorian, ­giving an impressive speech on the training of nurses in Barbados and the state of public health on the island.47 Barrow’s choice of topic was far from incidental. In this venue, comprising health-care practitioners, administrators, and representatives from the Rockefeller Foundation, the speech held far-reaching implications that led to additional connections with health-care representatives and additional educational benefits. After Barrow’s speech, a Rockefeller representative asked her to stay for another year at the UTSN to pursue a concentration on nursing education, with teaching as her primary focus. The representative knew of teaching positions at the Jamaica School of Public Health, but there were no “qualified” Caribbean applicants. Barrow did her field work in Jamaica, and several months later she became an assistant teacher with the School of Public Health in Jamaica, the first Caribbean nurse to hold the position.48 Barrow established a one-year public health post-diploma program, with an emphasis on theory and practice, no doubt using the UTSN program as a guide while remodelling it to fit the Jamaican context. Barrow’s other educational pursuits also reveal how colonialism could and did facilitate transnational exchange. In 1950, Barrow received a Commonwealth and Welfare Development Fellowship at Edinburgh University, where she completed a sister tutor diploma.49 She also went to England and enrolled in the one-year graduate course in nursing administration under the Colonial Development and Welfare Scheme, through the Royal College of Nursing. In 1963, she completed a bachelor’s degree in nursing at Teachers College, Columbia College, New York. While at Teachers College, Barrow met Canadian scholar Helen Mussallem, who was completing a PhD. Mussallem’s study of

“She cannot be confined to her own region”  239

twenty-three basic schools of nursing in Canada intrigued Barrow, who wondered if a similar project could be undertaken throughout the Caribbean, which coincidentally had the same number of nursing schools. With the assistance of Mussallem, who joined the research team, Barrow conducted such a study of Caribbean nursing schools in 1965.50 Mussallem’s study was filtered and modified to address the local conditions and culture of Caribbean nursing. Eventually, Barrow became matron at the newly created UCHWI, in Jamaica, and subsequently principal nursing officer (PNO) at the Jamaican Ministry of Health, both firsts for a Black Caribbean woman. The intellectual exchanges and the professional, social, and emotional relationships forged across borders by Caribbean nurses had a major impact on nursing within the region. The nurses who travelled overseas for professional purposes advanced Caribbean nursing education and training. Conscious of the deficiencies facing the profession and the entire Caribbean, nurses who returned home worked hard to improve the image and status of Caribbean practitioners. These nurses implemented programs and ideas that they acquired from their training in forms that fit the local setting. These are some of the ways that Caribbean nursing and the lives of individual nurses “have been shaped by processes and relationships that have transcended the borders of nation states.”51 Nurses and Transnational Organizations While the colonial relationship between Britain and its territories contributed to the transnational movement of British subjects in search of economic opportunities, and led to British health personnel visiting Caribbean territories in multiple capacities, these are not the only patterns of transnationalism in nursing practice. The international nature of the nursing profession itself facilitated transnational linkages. Nowhere is this more evident than in the institution building and crossborder efforts of the ICN and the CNO. These nursing organizations played a critical role in promoting and sustaining cross-border interactions and relationships irrespective of the geographical distance between their members. Founded in 1899, the ICN is “a federation of national nurses asso­ ciations and was formed in the belief that nursing practice throughout the world can be developed and improved by sharing the contributions of each member association.”52 The ICN motivated Jamaican nurses

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towards autonomy and inspired them to improve nursing education in their home country.53 When nursing bodies in Jamaica debated the registration of practical nurses, Frances Beck, director of ICN’s Nursing Service division, argued that a separate statutory body controlling practical nurses was unwise and unhelpful.54 Beck astutely pointed out that there already existed the General Nursing Council for the island and this regulatory body should be responsible for controlling the practice and training of all categories of nurses. Even though the final decision would be determined by Jamaican nurses, they sought Beck’s expertise. While it was not a possibility for decades, the sentiment expressed by ICN president Dorothy Cornelius at the organization’s 1977 meeting was always implicit in the ICN’s mandate: “Nursing is determined to make a difference in the health care of the world. It should be inspiring to all of us to observe the ability of nurses throughout the world to reach a consensus in nursing, irrespective of the differences in culture, political or religious orientation, language, or race.”55 The CNO was formed in 1957. Its primary objective was “to work towards improving the health of the people of the Caribbean, promoting the best possible care, and improving educational, economic and professional welfare of nurses in the Caribbean.”56 Members hailed from all regions of the Caribbean, including the French, Dutch, British, and American territories. The organization also had members in the United Kingdom, the United States, and Canada. The CNO’s mandate was itself transnational: “As nurses concerned with giving care to people’s primary needs, as they relate to the fundamentals of life needs, which are universally the same … we have a common cause. It can thus be said that nursing transcends political and geographical boundaries.”57 I have discussed the CNO here to highlight trans-Caribbean connection as a way to avoid reifying and privileging certain border crossings, places, relations, and linkages, such as those between “third” and “first” world countries. Members of the ICN and CNO did not have to cross national boundaries to share ideas and practices pertaining to nursing globally. Nurses who travelled overseas to participate in conferences and professional endeavours were not the only actors involved in transnational exchanges. Caribbean nurses, migrant nurses in Canada and elsewhere, and Canadian nurses and supervisors, circulated information and ideas in the publication Jamaican Nurse. The editorial letters and articles in the publication suggest that international connections could be maintained in multiple ways and did not always require moving from one place to another. Non-migrants, too, could participate in nursing’s transnational dialogue.

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Jamaican Nurse: Facilitating Transnational Conversations The Jamaican Nurse is the official journal of the Nurses Association of Jamaica (NAJ). Established in 1961 by Gertrude H. Swaby, then president of the organization, the journal enjoyed both a local and an international readership. According to Hewitt, Swaby “circulated the journal around the world with her own funds.”58 This meant that, like some of the British subjects whose letters were featured in the journal, the journal itself was “anchored in and transcend[ed] one or more nation states.”59 Swaby also implemented an exchange program with other nursing organizations that had similar periodicals, and the journal featured excerpts from other nursing publications, including The Nurse in Israel, the Philippine Journal of Nursing, and the Nursing Journal of India. These exchanges reflected nursing’s international scope and the belief that regardless of culture and geographic location, the occupation allowed for affiliations that transcended national borders. It would be a mistake, however, amidst glowing examples of nurses’ cooperation and solidarity across borders, to ignore the power relations and the marginal status of Caribbean nurses before and after emancipation. There is no evidence that British nurses were involved in anti-­ colonial struggles on behalf of Caribbean nurses. Some benefited from their status of being British. One glaring example is the difference in salaries between British nurses sent by the Colonial Office and local matrons. However, despite the paucity of resources available in the Caribbean, nurse leaders remained determined to develop successful professional programs. Hence, Swaby was determined to hold Jamaican Nurse to the same standards as other international nursing journals. For example, at the ICN meeting held in Montreal in 1969, she noted: “We are honoured that, at the exhibition of nursing journals, which was an interesting feature of the last congress in Montreal, the Jamaican Nurse took its place among nursing journals of the world, and drew favourable comments from several who visited the exhibition.”60 Praise for the journal featured in selected issues stands as a concrete manifestation of transnational ties between Caribbean nurses and their counterparts elsewhere. Sheila Quinn, director of ICN’s Social and Economic Welfare division, wrote that it was a “great pleasure to find a copy of The ‘Jamaican Nurse’ on my desk this morning and especially so because of the news and pictures contained within it of so many of my friends.”61 Similarly, Helen Mussallem, executive director of the Canadian Nurses Association, wrote of the association’s move to another office and thanked Swaby for copies of the Jamaican Nurse. In

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other letters, both Quinn and Mussallem offered support and assistance to Jamaican nurses “if [they] ever required it.” Clearly, professionalization opportunities also motivated the pursuit of cross-border relationships. Regardless of geographic location, nursing as an occupation faced similar issues. Subsequently, nursing engendered the “creation and forms of solidarity and identity” that were not always predicated on “face to face contact.”62 Letters and feature articles in the Jamaican Nurse attest to the fact that the issues bearing on nursing extended beyond Canada and other “developed” countries. Shared struggles with the state, the medical profession, and the overall political economy – albeit with varied levels of intensity and ramifications – further connected nurses across borders. While I have emphasized nursing leaders here, the voices of rankand-file practitioners remain equally important. The Jamaican Nurse served a critical function in this regard, as it allowed ordinary nurses to participate in a polyvocal dialogue across different localities. Jamaicans and non-Jamaicans alike used the editorial space as a forum to discuss a variety of nursing and non-nursing issues. As with those in supervisory roles, ordinary practitioners also focused on professional concerns. Differences in emphasis, efforts, and consequences of professionalization – strategies adapted by nursing to maintain control of its works – did not preclude identification with some of their manifestations, especially around patient care. For example, Gertrude Ferguson, former nursing instructor of Ottawa Civic Hospital, wrote: “I especially liked the article, ‘What Nursing Means to Me.’ The writer echoes many of my own thoughts and feelings. I too, hope that nurses do not allow themselves to be lured away from the patients’ bedside; it is there that satisfaction is to be found.” In another letter, Ferguson supports the struggle of Jamaican nurses to improve their status “so that [they] may give better care to [their patients].”63 These letters further capture an aspect of professional identity – nurses’ shared emphasis on patient care – that extended beyond spatial boundaries. By admitting that she “had no idea that Kingston was as large a city as it is,” Ferguson made it obvious that she had never been to Jamaica. Nevertheless, she expressed familiarity with the issues raised in the article. Such letters not only constitute a tangible example of transnational activity, they also underscore the commonalities that conjoin nurses despite being globally dispersed. A letter from Lady Blackburne, wife of a former governor general of Jamaica, reveals the extent to which professionalization as a phenomenon transcends borders. She wrote: “I do

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hope that most of the nurses’ troubles have been ironed out by now … Of course there are plenty of nurses’ troubles in this country [England] too.”64 Blackburne was probably referring to ongoing struggles nurses face to legitimize the occupation or to the nursing shortage. The nursing shortage that followed the Second World War also preoccupied nurse leaders across national boundaries and related directly to professionalization endeavours. Depending on the country, the reasons behind the labour problem varied as much as the solutions. Avril Davy, writing from Quebec in response to “suggestions on how to ease the present day shortage of nurses in Jamaica,” offered strategies ranging from allowing married nurses to practise full or part-time, implementing a forty-hour work week, and “yearly visits to high schools by a senior nurse with one or more student nurses to give vocational talks.”65 To deal with the shortage in Canada, some of these recommendations were implemented in various provinces,66 and Davy felt these strategies could easily be transferred to Jamaica. An article written by Caribbean nurse Edna Tulloch on the migration of Jamaican nurses or the “brain drain” prompted numerous responses. Jamaican nurses in particular explicitly expressed their views, which they might not have been able to do if they still resided in their homeland, especially if they trained abroad and returned home. In response to the issue of the brain drain, Marilyn Parker, writing on behalf of the Jamaican Professional Nurses Group in New York, noted that remuneration and the lack of available facilities for further advancement left the feeling that “the Nursing Service in Jamaica is unwilling to take full advantage of the qualifications of nurses who gained their training and degrees abroad.”67 One nurse writing from Montreal explained that “there are a quite a number of nurses who would like to return to Jamaica but because of the general conditions they are forced to remain abroad where the conditions are a lot more suitable.”68 Parker further outlined three reasons why “Jamaica loses so many of her young, able and ambitious nurses, by migration to other lands”: the lack of facilities for advanced nursing studies, an inadequate system of promotion, and low salaries.69 She concluded by saying that if “the above consistencies are rectified … there are many in our organization only too willing to return and give their services to Jamaica.” Through these letters, Caribbean nurses contributed to an international conversation that went beyond formal networks like the CNO and ICN. The Jamaican Nurse, then, served multiple purposes. It provided Jamaican nurses abroad with a sense of familiarity, a connection to “home,” and a venue

244  Karen Flynn

for them to respond to the issues facing their homeland. Of the issues randomly selected for this chapter, the majority of letters to the editors featured were from nurses overseas. Interestingly enough, none of the letters made the connection between the island’s underdeveloped health and education systems and the island’s colonial and postcolonial relationship with Britain. In addition to serving as a medium where affiliations were sustained and created across geographic locations, the Jamaican Nurse also facilitated transnational practices that were “private, affective and/or symbolic.”70 These forms of transnational practices are “still open for exploration” by scholars, as they are often overlooked in favour of practices that are tangible and frequent.71 Correspondence submitted to the Jamaican Nurse extends beyond the profession. Jamaican practitioners participated in what Yen Le Espiritu and Thom Tran refer to as “symbolic transnationalism,” which is described as “imagined returns to the homeland (through selective memory, cultural rediscovery and sentimental longings).”72 For example, writing from London, Mrs Bethinia Bennett wrote that the journal provided “Jamaican nurses away from home with an opportunity to search for a familiar face or to recognize some familiar scene, bringing back nostalgic memories.”73 Bennett also used the journal as a way to let readers know how vital Jamaican nurses remained to the NHS: “Most people in Britain have come to regard nurses from Jamaica as integral to part of the hospital scene.” We can further interpret Bennett’s emphasis on Jamaican nurses’ indispensable role in British hospitals as an identification with multiple homes: Britain and Jamaica. Absent from her letter is a nostalgic longing to return to her original homeland, which other letters expressed. Newton Bennett, for example, wrote from Toronto: “Thanks a lot for the Jamaican Nurse. I read it thoroughly each time and pass it on. I just have a yearning to come home especially when I read of all the strides that are being made in the nursing field, but one of these days I’ll be coming home to work among my people.”74 Bennett continued: “I have met a few girls who would give their right arm to return [to Jamaica] but when they realize that for their many years experience they would be starting at the bottom of the salary scale, that is a bit hard to take.” Bennett used the Jamaican Nurse as a medium not only to express her reasons for not returning to Jamaica and to connect with her counterparts in Jamaica and beyond, but also to describe a typical day as a public health nurse in Canada. “I go to a school three times a week from 9:00 a.m. to 12 noon and see the children with minor cuts and bruises

“She cannot be confined to her own region”  245

and treat those with defective vision, hearing, gait, etc.” She then highlighted certain programs that linked the schools she visited with the hospital where she was employed. She emphasized programs geared towards teaching girls about their bodies, concluding her letter by stating that she would be “so happy if this type of service could be incorporated into the hospitals in Jamaica.” Clearly, Jamaican nurses abroad felt connected to and remained concerned about their original homeland. They felt responsible for proposing solutions to the multiple issues facing Jamaica and Jamaican nurses. In so doing, they participated, after a fashion, in the affairs of their respective islands. Conclusion Scholars continue to focus on the transnational practices of immigrants as they assess, define, analyse, and explain the cross-border relationships and networks of transmigrants. In contrast, this chapter has explored the transnational practices resulting from the intermittent movements of a group of professional workers, as well as those anchored in a particular geographic space. For Caribbean nurses in the post-war period, Canada was one node in a layered transnational network that was both rich with possibilities and rife with structural disadvantages. The Caribbean’s colonial and Commonwealth relationships with Britain and Canada made these places the loci of transnational activities and exchanges. Caribbean, Canadian, and British nurses created networks and affiliations by actively travelling to multiple destinations for educational and professional purposes. Not unlike the radical doctors examined in Esyllt Jones’s chapter in this collection (chapter 13), these nurses borrowed from multiple sites and used a range of media to communicate. The evolution of nursing as a global occupation also led nurses to draw on their commonalities in forging relationships and networks. On the whole, whether they returned home or remained in their host countries, Caribbean nurses were enmeshed in transnational social fields. NOTES Special thanks to Angela Glaros for her editing suggestions. 1 Ruby V. Grannum King, “The Importance of Post Graduate Education for Graduate Nurses,” Caribbean Nurses Organization (CNO) Conference, Barbados, 1959, 24.

246  Karen Flynn 2 See, for example, Christine G.T. Ho, “Caribbean Transnationalism as a Gendered Process,” Latin American and Caribbean Perspectives 26, no. 5 (1999): 39–54; Charmaine Crawford, “African-Caribbean Women, Diaspora and Transnationality,” Canadian Woman Studies 23, no. 2 (Winter 2004): ­97–104; Charmaine Crawford, “Sending Love in a Barrel: The Making of Transnational Caribbean Families in Canada,” Canadian Woman Studies 22, no. 3/4 (Spring/Summer 2003): 104–10. 3 Alan B. Simmons and Dwaine Plaza, “The Caribbean Community in Canada: Transnational Connections and Transformations,” in Transnational Identities and Practices in Canada, ed. Lloyd Wong and Vic Satzewich (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2006), 130–49. 4 Karen Flynn, Moving beyond Borders: A History of Black Canadian and Caribbean Women in the Diaspora (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011). 5 D. Alissa Trotz, “Bustling across the Canada-US Border: Gender and the Remapping of the Caribbean across Place,” Small Axe 15, no. 2 (2011): 59. 6 See, for example, Catherine Cenzia Choy, Empire of Care: Nursing and Migration in Filipino American History (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003). 7 Daiva K. Stasiulis and Abigail B. Bakan, Negotiating Citizenship: Migrant Women in Canada and the Global System (Toronto: University of Toronto, 2005). 8 Sasha Mullally and David Wright, “La Grande Seduction: The Immigration of Foreign-Trained Physicians to Canada, c. 1954–76,’ Journal of Canadian Studies 41, no. 3 (2007): 67–89. 9 Prasenjit Duara, “Transnationalism and the Challenge to National Histories,” in Rethinking American History in the Global Age, ed. Thomas Bender (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002), 25–46. 10 Catherine Cenzia Choy, “Nurses across Borders: Foregrounding International Migration in Nursing History,” Nursing History Review 18 (2010): 14. 11 Ibid., 14. I discuss the role of the state in “Race, the State and Caribbean Immigrant Nurses, 1950–1965,” in Women, Health and Nation: Canada and the United States since 1945, ed. Georgina Feldberg et al. (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2003), 247–63. 12 Ann Curthoys and Marilyn Lake, “Introduction,” in Connected Worlds: History in Transnational Perspective (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 2006). 13 Ann Kramer, Many Rivers to Cross: The History of the Caribbean Contribution to the NHS (London: Sugar Media, 2006), 15.

“She cannot be confined to her own region”  247 14 Director, CGIS UK, Northern General Hospital, Simcoe, ON, to P.T. Baldwin, Chief, Admissions Division, Ottawa, Library and Archives Canada (hereafter LAC), RG 76, 553-110, pt 1, 2 August 1957. 15 LAC, RG 76, 553-110, pt 1, 30 October 1959. 16 Kathryn McPherson, Beside Matters: The Transformation of Canadian Nursing, 1900–1990 (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1996), 211. 17 Agnes Calliste, “Women of ‘Exceptional Merit’: Immigration of Caribbean Nurses to Canada,” Canadian Journal of Women and the Law 6 (1993): 85– 102. See also Karen Flynn, “Experience and Identity: Black Immigrant Nurses to Canada, 1950–1980,” in Sisters or Strangers: Immigrant, Ethnic, and Racialized Women in Canadian History, ed. Marlene Epp, Franca Iacovetta, and Frances Swyripa (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), 381–98. 18 Calliste, “Women of ‘Exceptional Merit,’” 96. 19 Kramer, Many Rivers to Cross, 20. 20 Ibid. 21 Hermi Hyacinth Hewitt, Trailblazers in Nursing: A Caribbean Perspective, 1946–1986 (Barbados: Canoe Press, 2002), 10. 22 For a discussion of these nursing leaders, see Hewitt, Trailblazers in Nursing; and Jocelyn Hezekiah, Breaking the Glass Ceiling: The Stories of Three Caribbean Nurses (Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 2001). 23 M. Bryce-Boodoo, “A Fresh Look at Nursing Education in Trinidad and Tobago,” Nursing Council of Trinidad and Tobago, 25th anniversary (Port of Spain, 1976), 33. 24 “What Basic Nursing Is Available in the Caribbean,” CNO Conference, Barbados, 1959, 11. 25 Miss Julie Symes and Miss Cynthia Vernon, “Ten Green Years: Nursing Organisation in Jamaica, 1946 to 1956,” 1957, University of Toronto Archives (hereafter UTA), A73-011 (15). 26 Hewitt, Trailblazers in Nursing, 25. 27 Boodoo, “Fresh Look at Nursing Education,” 33. 28 Hezekiah, Breaking the Glass Ceiling, 42. 29 “Address of NAJ’s Outgoing President given at the Annual General Meeting,” Jamaican Nurse 7, no. 3 (December 1967): 6 30 Mary Henry, former GNC registrar, “Trinidad Nurses Have Shown Great Determination,” Nursing Council of Trinidad and Tobago, 25th anniversary (Port of Spain, 1976), 5. 31 Ibid. 32 Ibid. 33 “Personal Mention,” Jamaican Nurse 7, no. 1 (April/May 1967): 15.

248  Karen Flynn 34 Ibid., 18. 35 Ibid. 36 “Close Similarities in Our Birthdays, says GNC,” Nursing Council of Trinidad and Tobago, 25th anniversary (Port of Spain, 1976), 6. 37 ‘ICN Congress News,’ Jamaican Nurse 9, no. 1 (April/May 1969): 32. 38 “Pot-Pourri of NAJ Participants’ Impressions of the ICN Congress,” Jamaican Nurse 9, no. 2 (September 1969): 32. 39 C.A. Bayly, Sven Beckert, Matthew Connelly, Isabel Hofmeyr, Wendy Kozol, and Patricia Seed, “AHR Conversation: On Transnational History,” American Historical Review 111, no. 50 (2006): 1141. 40 “What Basic Nursing Education Is Available in the Caribbean,” CNO Conference, Barbados, 1959. 41 Hezekiah, Breaking the Glass Ceiling, 16. 42 Ibid. 43 Edith Kathleen Russell (nursing director) is credited for the school’s international focus. UTA, A73-91/1 (02). On Russell’s initiative, see Rondalyn Kirkwood, “Blending Vigorous Leadership and Womanly Virtues: Edith Kathleen Russell at the University of Toronto, 1920–52,” Canadian Bulletin of Medical History 11 (1994): 175–205. 44 “Certificate in Public Health Nursing,” UTA, A79-001/001 45 “Personal Mention,” Jamaican Nurse 9, no. 1 (April/May [1969]): 9. 46 Stuart Hall, “Minimal Selves,” in Black British Cultural Reader, ed. Houston A. Baker, Manthia Diawara, and Ruth H. Lindeborg (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), as quoted in Ula Yvette Taylor, The Veiled Garvey: The Life and Times of Amy Jacques Garvey (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 13. 47 Hezekiah, Breaking the Glass Ceiling, 20. 48 Hewitt, Trailblazers in Nursing Education 10. 49 Hezekiah, Breaking the Glass Ceiling, 31. 50 Hewitt, Trailblazers in Nursing, 76. 51 Curthoys and Lake, “Introduction,” in Connected Worlds. 52 “ICN Statement on Nursing Education, Nursing Practice, Service and the Social Economic Welfare of Nurses,” American Journal of Nursing 69, no. 10 (October 1969): 2177. 53 See, for example, Joan E. Lynaugh, “From Chaos to Transformation,” in Barbara L. Brush et al., Nurses of All Nations: A History of the International Council of Nurses, 1899–1999 (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1999), 111–27. 54 “Progress Report from the Practical Nurses Committee,” Jamaican Nurse 3, no. 2 (December 1963): 33. 55 “ICN 77,” American Journal of Nursing 77, no. 8 (August 1977): 1303–10.

“She cannot be confined to her own region”  249 56 Hewitt, Trailblazers in Nursing, 30. 57 ‘News of the Caribbean Nurses’ Organisation,’ Jamaican Nurse 7, no. 1 (April/May1967): 16 (emphasis added). 58 Hewitt, Trailblazers in Nursing, 113. 59 M. Kearney, “The Local and the Global: The Anthropology of Globalization and Transnationalism,” Annual Review of Anthropology 24 (1995): 548. 60 Hewitt, Trailblazers in Nursing, 113. 61 ‘What Our Readers Think,’ Jamaican Nurse 3, no. 2 (December 1963): 1. 62 Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson, “Beyond ‘Culture’: Space, Identity and the Politics of Difference,” Cultural Anthropology 7, no. 1 (1992): 9. 63 “What Our Readers Think,” Jamaican Nurse 7, no. 1 (April 1967): 3. 64 Ibid. 65 “What Our Readers Think,” Jamaican Nurse 5, no. 3 (December 1965): 3. 66 See, for example, Helen K. Mussallem, “Manpower Problem in Nursing,” Canadian Nurse (August 1967): 25–8. 67 “What Our Readers Think,” Jamaican Nurse 5, no. 2 (August 1965): 3. 68 “What Our Readers Think,” Jamaican Nurse 7, no. 3 (December 1967): 3. 69 “What Our Readers Think,” Jamaican Nurse 5, no. 2 (August 1965): 3. 70 Edna A. Viruell-Fuentes, “‘My Heart Is Always There’: The Transnational Practices of First-Generation Mexican Immigrant and Second-Generation Mexican American Women,” Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power 13 (2006): 337. 71 Ibid. 72 Yen Le Espiritu and Thom Tran, “Viêt Nam, Nu’ó’c Tôi’ (Vietnam My Country): Vietnamese Americans and Transnationalism,” in The Changing Face of Home: The Transnational Lives of the Second Generation, ed. Peggy Levitt and Mary Waters (New York: Russell Sage, 2002), 369. 73 “What Our Readers Think,” Jamaican Nurse 3, no. 4 (December 1964): 3. 74 “What Our Readers Think,” Jamaican Nurse 5, no. 1 (April 1965): 3.

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11 Law and Migration across the Pacific: Narrating the Komagata Maru Outside and Beyond the Nation reni sa mawan i

The Komagata Maru’s journey is now well known as “one of the most infamous ‘incidents’ in Canadian history.”1 After sailing a circuitous route from Hong Kong to Shanghai, Moji to Yokohama, and across the Pacific, the ship reached Vancouver on 23 May 1914. Upon arrival, the 376 passengers, mostly adult men from Punjab, were denied entry under three newly passed orders-in-council, each significantly amending the Dominion’s Immigration Act and each severely curtailing future possibilities for British Indian migration. The most contentious of these required all prospective immigrants to make a “continuous journey” from “the country of which he is a native or naturalized citizen and upon a through ticket purchased in that country or prepaid in Canada.”2 Although this particular amendment was carefully penned in racially neutral language, suggesting that it did not single out British Indians, but rather applied universally to all prospective immigrants seeking entry into the Dominion, the underlying objective was explicitly aimed at restricting and eventually prohibiting migration from India. As the ship’s itinerary suggests, passengers did not make a direct journey from their country of origin to their final destination.3 In response, Canadian authorities claimed that the ship’s arrival breached existing legislation, its passengers entered Canada unlawfully, and the ship thus warranted immediate deportation. While anchored in Vancouver – and as Canadian and British authorities deliberated when and where the Komagata Maru should be returned – the passengers remained forcibly detained aboard the ship for two months, during which time they endured deplorable living conditions, including a shortage of food and water. Upon their return to Calcutta, British authorities alleged that those arriving from their failed journey

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had been involved in seditious activities while abroad and were “undesirables” and “criminals” who would now incite anticolonial sentiments in India. The ship’s arrival in Calcutta precipitated a violent conflict, known as the Budge Budge Massacre, which left at least twentysix people dead, many more injured, and over two hundred imprisoned.4 As this brief account suggests, the Komagata Maru’s journey was not exclusively a Canadian event. Rather, its journey connected Canada, Britain, and India to other British jurisdictions and within a transcontinental movement of peoples, legalities, and violence. The Komagata Maru’s voyage, as I have narrated it here, clearly illuminates the force of imperial circuits and the persistence of transnational and transcontinental connections. Yet within existing historiography, the ship’s journey is largely understood as a national event and narrated through the themes of Canadian exclusion.5 Many scholars have rightfully argued that the Dominion government’s efforts to deny entry to British Indians were directly tied to a “White Canada Forever”6 politics which are addressed by Yu and Edmonds in this collection. In most accounts, the ship’s voyage is explicated through the nation and through the actions of a dominion that was assiduously protecting its racial visions of white settlement by imposing legal restrictions against Indian migration.7 While there is little doubt that the Komagata Maru was a pivotal moment in Canada’s long history of racial exclusion, this prevailing focus has obscured other equally important imperial histories and global connections. By evoking a nationalist lens to make sense of what was clearly a transcontinental journey, historians, sociologists, and others have highlighted Canada’s repressive immigration regime at the expense of other larger questions and themes that highlight the expansive, coercive, and yet unstable and productive dimensions of ­colonial and imperial power. Although several scholars have usefully placed the Komagata Maru within a broader context of transnational anticolonial struggles, particularly in North America,8 my own objective here is to begin exploring the ship’s significance in India. The Komagata Maru has received considerable scholarly attention in Canadian and to a lesser extent in American historiography. Interest­ ingly, however, it has not yet been a significant subject of study within Indian social or legal history.9 Yet, the ship’s journey and detention in Canadian waters and its return to India was viewed by British Indians to be a critical moment in a much longer and wider set of colonial ­histories marked by violence, exclusion, and subjugation. The ship’s journey prompted lively discussion and debate in English-language

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newspapers published and circulated in major Indian cities, including Amritsar, Allahabad, Lahore, and Calcutta.10 Importantly, the Komagata Maru’s journey and the events surrounding it were also regularly reported upon and drew comment from other imperial jurisdictions, including South Africa, Kenya, Ceylon, Mozambique, Malawi, and Nigeria. Well into the 1920s, it became a flashpoint of deliberation on the inconsistencies and asymmetries of empire, marking an especially important event in the condemnation of immigration restrictions imposed on Indians travelling to the dominions and also figuring prominently in discussions on the urgent need for India to gain independence from Britain. Placing the Komagata Maru within this wider imperial context, examining its journey from the vantage point of Indian newspapers, and reading it contrapuntally against Canadian responses, I suggest, foregrounds a number of dynamics obscured through national histories: the shifting bounds of imperial governance, the transcontinental movements of British law, the many valences of racial power, and the transnational networks of anticolonial resistance.11 The reactions of British Indians in Indian papers points to the responses that ensued among colonial subjects while also illuminating the conjunctive points of connection between India, Canada, and other imperial locales. The critical contiguities between these jurisdictions, I argue, are  not fully captured in nationally bounded histories or in colonial and  postcolonial studies, where metropole–colony relations, despite ongoing critiques, have remained the primary scale of analysis.12 By contrast, a wider global vista that allows for a deeper examination of circulations and movements between colonial jurisdictions highlights the transnational field of empire as one that was uneven, generative, and constantly in motion. The ship, I contend, provides a useful analytic frame to think outside and beyond the nation.13 Nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century travel via steamships forged new connections between disparate geographies, promoting the circulation of peoples, commerce, commodities, and ideas, themes discussed in the chapters by Bradbury, Ishiguro, and Curthoys in this collection. As a moving target, travelling across oceans, between continents, and traversing jurisdictional divides, the ship foregrounds mobility and opens a compelling trajectory of multiple circulations. Crucially, these movements were materialized not only through shipping routes and passenger itineraries, but in the legal regimes these travels produced in India, Canada, and beyond, and in the anticolonial  resistance the ship’s journey generated. The Komagata Maru’s

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movements unbounded the peregrinations of law and the production and proliferation of legal concepts and forms of governance while also facilitating protracted debates over dominion and imperial sovereignty and the making of racial-political subjectivities.14 To be sure, the gift of law was central to colonial and imperial expansion, often inspiring and subsequently legitimizing territorial conquest.15 However, Britain’s emphasis on law and legality, as evidence of cultural supremacy and as a justification for colonial rule, shored up numerous contradictions and opened generative possibilities for anticolonial critique. Law was central to Britain’s dominance over India. However, the English common law was not simply imposed on native inhabitants; it became a key site of conflict and debate over questions of modernity, civility, and the successes, failures, and futures of empire.16 In their efforts to protest the Komagata Maru’s detention, British Indians in India, London, and elsewhere mobilized legal vocabularies to contest the “unfair” and “un-English” treatment of the ship and its passengers. The paradox of the civilizing mission, as many critics have noted, was that it was forced to confront and reconcile the precarious binaries upon which it was founded (colonizer/colonized, citizen/subject, lawful/lawless).17 Struggles over the ship and its passengers raised pressing questions concerning the interpretation and application of law and its implications for justice, thereby challenging the racial distinctions between colonizer and colonized, a logic that underwrote and also animated claims to dominion and imperial sovereignty. This chapter explores the Komagata Maru’s significance beyond Canada and in so doing (re)conceptualizes the event as a historical ­moment that generated considerable interest in India and the Indian diaspora. The ship’s failed journey stimulated vibrant discussions in English-language Indian newspapers, facilitating and strengthening anticolonial solidarities in India as well as between British Indians in India and in other jurisdictions. The Komagata Maru’s supporters and advocates in Amritsar, Allahabad, Lahore, Calcutta, and London, for example, regularly drew on legal lexicons and racial grammars of justice to challenge both the coercive actions of the Dominion of Canada as well as what they saw to be the inaction of the imperial government. Importantly, their deployment of legality was strategic, not merely to demonstrate their support for the ship’s passengers, but to invent themselves as modern subjects and as fully matured political equals who were now ready to join the imperial polity.18 Anticolonial assertions of legality, I suggest below, highlighted the exclusionary impulses

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inherent within British liberal legality and augmented existing tensions between the imperial and dominion governments. Mobility, Diaspora, and Empire From the mid-nineteenth century onwards, British Indians had been travelling to South Africa and South-East Asia, on both sides of the Indian Ocean region. However, large-scale migration from India to Canada began much later. The first record of British Indian migrants landing in Canada dates as late as 1904. Until then, immigration from India was sparse and largely inconsequential, drawing little interest from government authorities. From a legal viewpoint, government disinterest resulted in a visible absence. Since 1885, the provincial and dominion governments had taxed, targeted, and excluded Chinese and later Japanese migrants, but had not yet developed appropriate legal categories through which to classify and exclude British Indian subjects. Yet after 1904, as migration from India markedly increased, Canadian authorities began expressing deep concern. During this period, Canada’s west coast witnessed an accelerated rate of Indian immigration, and by 1908, over 5000 Indians were newly resident in British Columbia.19 This changing pace of migration in such a compressed time period provoked an impassioned set of discussions among politicians and others. What was Canada’s future as Britain’s most northern and prized settlement colony, and what would be the place of British Indian subjects within it? Growing fears over Indian migration along Canada’s west coast were underpinned by global processes and thus unfolded in ways that paralleled anxieties and responses in other parts of the empire. The British government tacitly promised its Indian subjects that they, like other British subjects, could travel freely across the imperial landscape. But when large-scale “free” migration ensued outside the indenture system, Britain’s administrative and settler colonies – including Natal, Mauritius, Australia, and Canada – began enacting legislation aimed at restricting and eventually prohibiting Indian migration.20 In 1897, a Colonial Office memo described the dilemma of British Indian migration and its effects on metropole–dominion relations as follows: “The whole subject is perhaps the most difficult we have to deal with. The colonies wish to exclude the Indians from spreading themselves all over the empire. If we agree, we are liable to forfeit the loyalty of the Indians. If we do not agree we will forfeit the loyalty of the Colonists.”21

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Caught in a difficult position, and well aware of the consequences in India and the dominions, the imperial government’s response was to try and avoid conflict. Sympathetic to their dominions, yet fearing possible resistance, officials in London did not fully endorse the outright exclusion of British Indians. With anticolonial sentiments fermenting in India, South Africa, and elsewhere across the empire, imperial authorities aimed to resolve this exigency by encouraging colonial administrators to craft and impose restrictions that appeared universal in reach, even if they were explicitly aimed at restricting the movements of British Indian migrants. Any visible references to race needed to be avoided, many agreed, as allegations of racial exclusion would only exacerbate the growing discontent among Indian communities at home and abroad.22 By the early twentieth century, questions of colonial loyalty and imperial sovereignty that were brought to bear on the colonies became especially palpable along Canada’s west coast. Although Britain had not initially been interested in establishing territorial control over British Columbia, by the 1850s these sentiments changed quite dramatically. As Penny Edmonds’s chapter in this volume explores, the Pacific North-West came to be viewed by the imperial government as a strategic locale and a lucrative geography for the exploitation and commodification of natural resources, including gold.23 By the turn of the century, imperial authorities feared that the young province of British Columbia might renounce its allegiance to the Crown if its demands for sovereignty, including restrictive immigration policies, were not met.24 Like their counterparts in Natal and other colonies, authorities in British Columbia debated a number of exclusionary strategies, including a proposed literacy test. The Dominion government continually refused these suggestions, claiming that immigration restrictions interfered with national and imperial interests and ultimately contravened international agreements.25 By 1908, as migration from India continued to increase, Ottawa’s position on non-intervention changed. Agitation surrounding the arrival of British Indian subjects intensified along the west coast, and the federal government acquiesced to the demands from British Columbia, finally agreeing to restrict Indian immigration. In efforts to address the problem on the terms set by the imperial government, Canada passed three orders-in-council: one required all members of the “Asiatic race” to have a minimum of $200 upon landing; the second prohibited the landing of unskilled labourers; and the third denied entry to any

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migrants who did not travel by way of a “continuous journey” from their country of origin.26 Imperial authorities were reasonably satisfied that the monetary requirements, employment restrictions, and continuous-journey provisions enacted by the Dominion were not prima facie discriminatory and thus would not provide British Indian subjects with any legitimate grounds for complaint if they were denied entry. The orders-in-council, they claimed, seemed universal and reasonable and could not be vulnerable to allegations of racial discrimination. Despite the Dominion’s best efforts to appear racially neutral, the arrival of the Komagata Maru in Vancouver harbour incited an extraordinary response clearly undergirded by racial concerns. Contestations over the ship and its passengers not only revealed the racial anxieties that motivated Canada’s immigration restrictions, but, more broadly, materialized the exclusionary impulses inherent within British liberalism itself.27 Although the orders-in-council had been carefully penned and made no explicit reference to India or to British Indians, the discussions that followed the ship’s arrival visibly demonstrated the racial logics that inspired Dominion claims to territorial sovereignty. Shortly after the Komagata Maru arrived and anchored in Vancouver, H.H. Stevens, a Member of Parliament and an outspoken critic of Asian migration, summarized the Dominion government’s dilemma as follows: “I think the events of recent years, especially those of the last month or so, have amply demonstrated that this is a case where we have to choose between two evils. One is the possibility of causing some slight offence to those people from across the seas, and the other is unrestricted Asiatic immigration into this country.”28 In crafting his arguments, Stevens was claiming that Canada enjoyed some degree of political autonomy and sovereignty from Britain and thus was legally entitled and morally justified in governing its borders as it saw fit. It “is our right to con­ trol immigration into this country,” he opined. “We are not bound to extend the privileges of our country to everyone who cares to come … It is not a right on the part of immigrants to enter this country, but it is our right to restrict whatever immigration we desire.” Perhaps ironically, Stevens justified his arguments by drawing on the words of India’s former and highly controversial governor general and viceroy, George Curzon: “For this position,” he explained, “we have a very high authority Lord Curzon [who] in discussing the Hindu immigration problem, has declared that: The common rights of British citizenship cannot be held to over-ride the rights of self-protection conferred on a self-governing colony.”29

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Whereas some officials, including Stevens, were making strong declarative statements on the Dominion government’s authority and jurisdiction over immigration, there were many voices in Canada and elsewhere warning of the serious consequences that would follow the Komagata Maru’s detention and deportation. The province and the Dominion’s actions, many cautioned, would surely incite and aggravate existing anticolonial sentiments in India and possibly in other parts of the empire. Writing for the Westminster Hall Magazine and Farthest West Review, Principal John Mackay highlighted the growing tensions between the dominion and imperial governments and their overlapping territorial claims. The Komagata Maru affair, he alleged, was the deliberate work of seditionists who were trying to “embarrass the British Authorities in India.” The result, Mackay claimed, was a very unfortunate predicament: The issue is admittedly a most difficult one and especially so for a Canadian government. Every act of a self-governing Dominion has a bearing upon the whole fabric of Empire. And yet it will ultimately be found that anything which makes impossible the highest type of Christian democracy in any one of the selfgoverning Dominions cannot be in the best interests of Empire as a whole. This Hindoo question touches the continuance of British rule in India, but it also touches the very life of Canada, and there must be no weak yielding to the demands of those who wish to come here.30

Despite speculations that the ship’s deportation might hold disastrous consequences for imperial politics, Mackay conceded that the deleterious effects of open immigration far outweighed any antipathy brewing in India. “A firm stand on this question,” he insisted, “may cause resentment for a time in India but it will save Canada from a condition of affairs which will put her back centuries.”31 Echoing the views of Stevens, Mackay agreed that Indian immigration was a threat that would surely unsettle the Dominion’s racial and political aspirations to fulfil its visions as a white-settler colony. Like colonial rule in India, immigration to Canada was informed by a deferred temporality: British Indian subjects might at some point be ready to live as equals among whites but not yet. Restricting Indian migration, Mackay insisted, was for the good of all British subjects and would ultimately “work for the best interests of India and Empire.”32 The Komagata Maru’s arrival in Canada intensified an ongoing struggle between British Columbia and the dominion and imperial gov­ ernments regarding political and territorial sovereignty. Although the

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Dominion was formally under British imperial rule, Canadian authorities insisted on their territorial autonomy and demanded some legal control and determination over questions of immigration. As these juridical questions over political sovereignty were broached and debated between dominion and imperial officials, British Indians also mobilized idioms of law and legality, first, to contest the ship’s detention in Vancouver and, second, to criticize the imperial government’s complicity in these acts of coercion and violence. Indian English newspapers published in major Indian cities and in the overseas Indian diaspora created a vibrant public forum for debate on the rule of law, British justice, and the unfulfilled promises of imperial equality. These discussions raised critical questions regarding the putative distinctions between colonizer and colonized, law’s role in sustaining gradations of political membership in the imperial polity, and its spatio-temporal regimes of inclusion and exclusion.33 Law, Legality, and British (In)Justice As many authorities predicted, Canada’s refusal to allow entry to the Komagata Maru generated a series of global responses that only intensified tensions and amplified contestations between the dominion and imperial governments. The Dominion of Canada’s detainment and eventual deportation of the ship and its passengers became a key flashpoint that stimulated ongoing anticolonial sentiments in London, India, and South Africa. Law, as a language of justice and liberty, figured centrally in these discussions. British Indian objections to Canadian exclusion, voiced in India and elsewhere in the diaspora, were grounded in the principles of the liberal imperial state and in the vocabularies of law that were its product. It is now well known that by the early twentieth century, Indian migrants challenged exclusionary laws all across the British Empire, including Canada.34 But these struggles, as I suggest here, transcended the formal sites of law conceived in terms of statutes and courtrooms. Although Indigenous and subaltern groups often turned to law to fight their exclusion and to make rights claims before the courts, colonial subjects also mobilized languages of legality in public debates in order to contest the coerciveness of colonial rule and its (il) liberal logic of racial inequality. These lexical strategies proved to be crucial on two counts: first, by allowing colonial subjects to translate their concerns and to engage colonial administrators on their own terms and in a language they understood, and second, by enabling British Indians to emphasize their readiness to enter the wider imperial polity. Law

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became a tactic for effacing colonial-racial difference and for emphasizing the sameness of Indian subjects and their British counterparts, all the while reinscribing its authority and its constitutive exclusions. After the Komagata Maru reached Vancouver harbour, Englishlanguage newspapers published in Amritsar, Allahabad, Calcutta, Lahore, and elsewhere provided detailed information to their readership regarding the ship’s status and the legal and political reactions incited by its arrival. Importantly, these newspapers did not see the Komagata Maru as an isolated instance of racial restriction or prohibition. Viewing it as part of a much broader and longer global process of colonial violence, the ship’s supporters drew important connections between Canadian exclusion as it was materializing in Vancouver and legal developments unfolding in Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. Each of these countries had already enacted restrictive immigration legislation explicitly targeting British Indian subjects, many noted. But as the Khalsa Advocate, a weekly paper published in Amritsar explained, these expulsions had reached their apogee with the Komagata Maru. The “question [of exclusion] has reached its climax … in Canada,” the paper wrote.35 Drawing explicitly on notions of British justice and fairness, the Khalsa Advocate advised that the “Dominion of Canada should act in a wise manner and see that the British Empire does not get a bad name for the doings of their officers. Fairplay [sic] and justice ­always enhance the prestige of the Empire.” Here, the Komagata Maru was no longer an exigency for Canada alone, but raised larger questions concerning the authority and legitimacy of imperial rule. Through their allegiance to the crown, British Indians saw themselves as rightsbearing subjects who could travel freely across the empire. This loyalty, the Khalsa Advocate insisted in another account, was especially significant in Canada. British Indian subjects, the paper explained, had been instrumental in building the infrastructure of Britain’s most northern settlement colony: “Indian migrants have turned the vast jungles of Canada into smiling fields, and for all this service they should not be treated as others who are not British subjects.”36 Charges of unfairness, injustice, and the “un-Britishness” of colonial rule have a much longer history that predates the Komagata Maru. In the early twentieth century, this rhetoric had been powerfully mobilized by the Indian National Congress, who outwardly questioned the principles of British justice and their seeming absence from the economic and administrative policies of the imperial government.37 Languages of law were generated, mobilized, and shaped by ongoing struggles against

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British rule in India. But legal struggles also transcended geographical boundaries while bringing localities closer together. Writing of a different historical period and context, legal historian Lauren Benton contends that law came to be a globalizing force. It “worked both to tie disparate parts of empires and to lay the basis for exchanges of all sorts between politically and culturally separate imperial or colonial powers.”38 The British common law forged ties between its distant and disparate colonial jurisdictions. As Indians began travelling across the empire, vocabularies of legality that proved central in India were unmoored, augmented, and circulated by British Indian migrants who contested their treatment abroad. As Bradbury discusses in a different context, law connected India not only to London, the heart of empire, but also to the seemingly distinct and disparate dominions.39 Like those British Indian subjects who journeyed to South Africa, Natal, and Australia, passengers aboard the Komagata Maru came with very specific understandings of British law and legality. Gurdit Singh – the railway contractor and anticolonial critic who chartered the Komagata Maru and planned its journey – was well aware of Canada’s restrictive immigration policies. But he, like his counterparts in India and elsewhere, was convinced that passengers aboard the ship had a right to “migrate anywhere in the Empire as British Subjects.”40 In Singh’s view, the Komagata Maru was to be a challenge to Canada’s claims to territorial control, exemplifying the political and legal limits of its putative autonomy. But as the conflict escalated and as events unfolded, the ship became evidence of Canada’s prohibitive immigration policies and much more. Upon the ship’s arrival, Gurdit Singh, speaking through an interpreter, declared: “We are British citizens and we consider we have a right to visit any part of the Empire … We are determined to make this a test case and if we are refused entrance into your country, the matter will not end here.” A defiant Singh warned the immigration inspector that restrictions on the ship and its passengers would carry global implications: “What is done with this shipload of my people will determine whether we shall have peace in all parts of the Empire.”41 Vocabularies of law gained traction vertically and horizontally. The ship and its passengers became a point of vigorous debate across im­ perial locales, fomenting transcontinental networks of political solidarity and anticolonial critique. An absolute surrender “by Indians to the selfish and arrogant pretensions of the self-governing dominions is unthinkable and will never be,” wrote the Leader, an English daily in

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Allahabad. “India is cheerfully content to be part of the British Empire but not as the footstool of Canada and Australia and South Africa and New Zealand.” Rather, a “nobler destiny was promised her by the Sovereign and the Parliament of the United Kingdom,” the Leader continued, and “she is preparing herself assiduously for the realization of the ideal of equality and internal self-government with the generous aid and under the wise tutelage of England herself.”42 The colonial governments “are making naught of the promise Queen Victoria gave to India,” accused the Civil and Military Gazette, an English daily in Lahore, “and as the King of England is King also of each colony, his promise ought to hold good in every unit of the Empire.” Making brief reference to the Komagata Maru, the Gazette asked its readers: “How can the King both affirm and deny. How can he as Emperor of India grant rights which he confirms as King of England, while as King of South Africa or King of Canada he denies those rights[?]”43 The answers to these questions, the Gazette implied, were contingent on the temporality of British liberalism: were British Indian subjects, like other “coloured” races across the empire, in continued need of England’s tutelage, or had they reached a higher stage of development that had by now prepared them for self-government?44 In the Indian diaspora, these conceptions and evocations of legality and justice had multiple effects. Law was mobilized to question the legitimacy of colonial rule and to ground the abstract assertions of equality. However, the pressing urgency of these matters also worked to unite Indian communities across religious and regional divides.45 The Komagata Maru inspired and incited anger and resistance from a number of British Indian constituencies and in ways that transcended and even fused religious differences. Although British colonial rule in India had long reified religious distinctions by enumerating populations as “Hindus,” “Muslims,” and “Sikhs,” outside of India and elsewhere in the empire these differentiations were overshadowed by the racial divisions that were assumed to distinguish the British from their Indian subjects.46 Indian subjects, irrespective of their religious affiliations, were equally angered by Canada’s detention of the ship and its passengers. On 18 June 1914, C.A. Latif, a member of the All-India Muslim League, wrote to the Colonial Office in London condemning the actions of authorities in British Columbia: I am directed by the committee of the London All-India Moslem League to respectfully invite the attention of the Right Honorable Secretary of State

Law and Migration across the Pacific  265 for the Colonies to the deplorable effect the attitude of the British Colombian [sic] authorities towards the Indian emigrants is creating in India. The committee feel sure that the illiberal treatment of the British Indians who have proceeded to British Columbia will give rise to an intense feeling of indignation against the Colony, in which, we fear, the Imperial government may also be involved on the ground that it does not exercise its authority for the protection of the interests of His Majesty’s Asiatic subjects, who by right of Imperial citizenship, consider themselves as much entitled to travel and settle in different parts of the Empire as the King’s British or colonial subjects. The hostile and illiberal attitude of the Colonies, which is hardly consistent with the advance of civilization and the progress of ideas in the modern world, will probably lead to an insistence on the part of the Indians for the adoption of retaliatory measures.47

The All-India Muslim League had intervened in imperial matters before, but often in cases concerning British Indian Muslims.48 Here, Latif’s letter advised the Colonial Office that the treatment of the Komagata Maru’s passengers, notwithstanding that most were Sikhs from Punjab, would surely create feelings of animosity in India.49 But Latif’s letter is important for other reasons. Notwithstanding Britain’s efforts to maintain the supremacy and significance of law, liberty, and equality under British colonial rule, his letter made pointed references to the exclusions inherent within liberalism itself.50 Although British Indian subjects were theoretically and abstractly bestowed the same rights as other British subjects across the empire, Latif claimed that the passengers’ demands for freedom of movement were explicitly denied and curtailed through racial logics. The orders-in-council may have been penned in a universal language of liberalism – as equally applicable to British subjects; however, it was “the rule of colonial difference” as racial difference that justified the exclusion of the Komagata Maru.51 Canada’s prohibitive legislation, Latif pointed out, pushed up against and contravened the dominant ideals of civility and progress that were deemed to be so central to British legality and its putative superiority. The sentiments expressed in Latif’s letter were by no means unique or exceptional. On 26 June 1914, the Civil and Military Gazette reported on a meeting of Indian students at Caseton Hall, London. The Lahore paper informed its readership that Indian students in the metropole had expressed their solidarity with the Komagata Maru’s passengers and offered “profound indignation at the un-English attitude of

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Canada.” In so doing, they urged the Indian government to “adopt ­retaliatory measures.”52 One month later, at a Sikh protest in Lahore, a resolution was passed also conveying “deep indignation at the harsh and illegal treatment which is being accorded to the Indian passengers on board the Komagata Maru.” Attendees humbly prayed to “His merciful Excellency Lord Hardinge, the viceroy and governor-general of India, to intervene on behalf of His Majesty’s loyal and faithful Indian subjects who are being subjected to such illegal and inequitable hardships in a country which owes allegiance to their own sovereign.”53 In South Africa, Hardinge had criticized the anti-Indian exclusions and outwardly supported Britain’s Indian subjects.54 Many hoped he might do so again. By refusing the passengers entry into Canada, the Civil and Military Gazette charged, the dominion government was acting in a manner that explicitly contravened the fundamental principles of British liberal legality that was lauded as being vital to Britain’s rule over India. “Imperial Citizens” and Sovereign Subjects Throughout these escalating conflicts over the Komagata Maru, the British imperial government repeatedly expressed its concerns, over both increased anticolonial agitation across the empire and possible retaliation against Britons living in India. The All-India Muslim League’s intervention shored up these fears in palpable ways. The letter alluded to an Indian populace potentially united across geography and religion who might, at any moment, rise up against British rule. Yet, in a response to Latif, the Colonial Office sanctioned the Dominion’s decision and supported its claims to territorial sovereignty. At the Imperial Conference of 1911, the Colonial Office explained, the Marquess of Crewe had “explicitly declared” that every subject of the King, whoever he may be or where ever he may live, has a national right of travel, or still more to settle, in any part of the Empire, is one which cannot be maintained, and further recognized as beyond dispute the right of the self governing Dominions to decide for themselves in each case who are to be admitted as citizens of the respective Dominions.55

In previous and subsequent correspondence, Britain continuously asserted its political and legal jurisdiction over the Dominion of Canada,

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making strong recommendations regarding the legislative responses that were most acceptable in dealings with Indian migration, for example. But here, the message was unequivocally clear. British Indian claims to mobility and settlement were eclipsed and undermined by the Dominion’s racial preferences surrounding matters of citizenship and inclusion. Despite these reactions from the Dominion and the Colonial Office, the passengers, supporters, and advocates of the Komagata Maru held a territorially expansive view of mobility and political subjectivity. British Indians, as the letter from Latif makes clear, identified themselves not merely as colonial subjects but as “imperial citizens” who had legal rights to travel freely across the empire.56 Although the notion of imperial citizenship emerged in the metropole and may have held little political or legal purchase, it is worthwhile to consider how conceptualizations of an expansive imperial polity informed the imaginaries of British Indian subjects. How did legal and political idioms of “imperial citizenship” enable British Indians to challenge existing territorial and political geographies and to critique modalities of inclusion and exclusion?57 Prevailing conceptions of citizenship, anthropologist Aihwa Ong argues, “have been based on a binary opposition between the rights of citizenship rooted in a national territory and a stateless condition outside the nation-state.” Current “flows of capital and of migrants,” she continues, “have interacted in complex ways to disentangle citizenship claims once knotted together in a single, territorialized mass.”58 The disjuncture between citizenship and the nation state that Ong identifies in the contemporary moment is not specific to late ­modernity. Claiming to be “imperial citizens” passengers aboard the Komagata Maru and their supporters in India and London asserted their own demands for sovereignty that transcended geographical boundaries and offered other possibilities for political membership. Ultimately, however, their geographical visions were overshadowed by the time of political inclusion/exclusion. Colonial rule was both premised on and justified through historicist and developmental narratives of progress. By the nineteenth century, as Uday Mehta so eloquently argues, “virtually every liberal justification of the empire [was] anchored in the patience needed to serve and realize a future.”59 Indeed, the future was crucial for resolving the tensions that punctured nineteenth-century liberal thought. John Stuart Mill, for instance, described India as positioned in a “time line of civilizational and individual development.” This temporality justified

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despotism, coercion, and violence against an established British mindset that was deeply committed to liberty and freedom.60 Colonialism as the coercive expression of civilizing and governing “those backward states of society” was thus justified by its end product. “Despotism is a legitimate system of government in dealing with barbarians,” wrote Mill, “provided that the end betters their improvement.”61 For Mill, acquiring a historical consciousness was a necessary condition for the art of self-government. Discussions of the Komagata Maru in the Khalsa Advocate, the Leader, the Civil and Military Gazette, and elsewhere suggest that contrary to the temporal rhetoric of coloniality, British Indians viewed themselves as modern subjects whose historical consciousness and maturity were evident in their lexical demands for law, equality, and justice. The Tribune, a Lahore newspaper, emphasized the “readiness” of British Indian subjects to join the imperial polity through their demands for mobility across the empire. “There is nothing remarkable in the people of India appreciating the rights and privileges of British citizenship in various ways,” the paper charged: Instead of this appreciation being a matter for irritation to a class of Englishmen, it should be [a] matter for congratulation. India is being more and more absorbed into the British Empire and the people are realizing that as British subjects their future offers great possibilities of happiness. Such a feeling ought to be encouraged and the people are not to be made to suffer inconvenience or pain in claiming the fullest rights of British citizenship.62

Rather than punish Gurdit Singh and his passengers for attempting to gain entry into Canada, the Tribune urged, their journey should be regarded as a moment of historical progress and even triumph, one that illuminated the successes of Britain’s colonial rule in India while also pointing to the paradoxes of the civilizing mission. “The British Empire,” the Tribune continued, “surely stands on an infinitely more advantageous position that the old Roman Empire with its slave populations and barbarian hordes … Empire today stands on more solid foundations than the perpetuation of unequal and unjust barriers of advancement and growth of subject rationalities.” By evoking cultural and legal differences between the British and Romans and their resulting empires, the Tribune conveyed that justice and equality were central to the British ethos. Allowing British Indian subjects to

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enter Canada “is not a favour,” the paper insisted, “but a bare act of justice to India, and justice to the British people – and its effect in cementing the bond of love and attachment of the Indian people to the Empire will be very great.”63 Through their mobilization of law, British Indian subjects used Britain’s own “grand narratives of emancipation and enlightenment,” to borrow from Edward Said, to “rise up and throw off imperial subjection.”64 In the process, they highlighted the discrepancies between the universality of British liberal legality and its particular racial exceptions. Coda: Beyond the Nation Modern imperialism, Said argues, initiated a set of globalizing processes. “One of imperialism’s achievements,” he explains, “was to bring the world closer together.”65 Specifically, it was the “pattern of dominions or possessions,” Said contends, that “laid the groundwork for what is a fully globalized world.”66 Focused on the Komagata Maru’s journey, this chapter tracks the circuitous movements of people and legalities between colony and dominion, in order to show how these mobilities brought India, Canada, and other imperial jurisdictions closer together. Modern imperialism was indeed a global process, but perhaps not solely in the ways that Said intimates. To be sure, imperialism unmoored the transpacific and transatlantic movements of people, ideas, and commodities, but it also facilitated the migration of law, creating an imperial system of rule that linked the metropole to its dominions and colonies while simultaneously cultivating a global vernacular of British liberal legality that generated sites of contestation and solidarity among British Indians. Importantly, imperial authorities were not the only ones who trafficked in law. Colonial subjects also strategically deployed languages of legality in their efforts both to assert their political maturity and to gain entry as equals into the wider imperial community. Gurdit Singh and his supporters in India and London, as I have argued throughout, had very specific understandings of legality and justice that emerged from Britain’s own liberal ethos of equality and freedom that were presumed to inform imperial rule in India. Combining these understandings with arguments against colonial-racial difference, the Komagata Maru’s supporters and advocates in India and London crafted innovative claims against their exclusion. Unmooring the ship from Canada and from national histories, my objective has been to illustrate not only how the

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migration and the mobility of colonial subjects integrated the world, as Said suggests, but also how their struggles revealed fissures and tensions in imperial power through the overlapping political claims of the dominion and imperial governments. Authorities in Canada and India perceived British Indian subjects as not yet ready for self-government or self-determination. By deploying languages of legality that were so central to Britain’s own self-characterization as a civilized nation, the ship’s supporters envisioned themselves to be “imperial citizens” who were members of a broader political polity, one that carried its own ethical commitments and obligations of inclusion, equality, and liberty.67 Although their insistence on geographic mobility was eclipsed through the historicity of linear time – that British Indian subjects were not yet ready to live as equals among whites – and was thus ultimately unsuccessful, their struggles raised pressing questions regarding the putative racial distinctions between colonizer and colonized and their temporal and spatial meanings. Rethinking the Komagata Maru and the struggles of British Indian migrants beyond Canada holds significant analytic and political stakes. First, tracing the ship’s transpacific journey and its connectivity to metropole, colony, and dominion might stimulate new modes of analysing the fragile and yet violent articulations of colonial power, illuminating the event’s broader significance and its relation to other global imperial processes. Second, the ship’s journey is not merely evidence of a repressive dominion government, as scholars have thus far emphasized. Rather, responses and reactions to the Komagata Maru reveal the generativity of coloniality, its production of anticolonial discourse and transoceanic claims to legality, points that remain obscured through a narrow focus on national history. Narrating the ship outside and beyond the nation highlights the global circuits of empire. It may also inspire political imaginaries and ways of being that are unmoored from the nation and from nationally bound histories, visions and possibilities that are captured, albeit fleetingly, in the demands made by British Indians. NOTES 1 This is a common argument. See, for example, Ali Kazimi’s film Continuous Journey (2004) and Kazimi, Undesirables: White Canada and the Komagata Maru (Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 2012).

Law and Migration across the Pacific  271 2 The original order-in-council was passed on 8 January 1908, but was ­challenged in 1913 and struck down. The new order-in-council was PC 23, passed at Government House, Ottawa, 7 January 1914. See Re. Thirty-Nine Hindus (1913), Dominion Law Reports, 189, 192. 3 By 1908, all direct shipping lines from Calcutta to Vancouver had been discontinued. 4 Report of the Komagata Maru Committee of Inquiry, vol. 1 (Calcutta, Superintendent Government Printing, 1914). 5 In Canada, there is now a growing literature on the Komagata Maru. See Enakshi Dua, “Towards Theorizing the Connections between Governmentality, Imperialism, Race, and Citizenship: Indian Migrants and Racialization of Canadian Citizenship,” in Making Normal: Social Regulation in Canada, ed. Deborah Brock (Scarborough: Thomson Nelson, 2003), 40–62; Hugh Johnston, The Voyage of the Komagata Maru (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1989); Radhika Mongia, “Race, Nationality, Mobility: A History of the Passport,” in After the Imperial Turn: Thinking with and through the Nation, ed. Antoinette Burton (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), ­196–216; James W. St G. Walker, “Race,” Rights and the Law in the Supreme Court of Canada (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1997), 253–7; Peter Ward, White Canada Forever: Popular Attitudes and Public Policy towards Orientals in British Columbia (Montreal and Kingston: McGillQueen’s University Press, 2002). For an account that breaks with these see Renisa Mawani, “Specters of Indigeneity in British Indian Migration, 1914,” Law and Society Review 46, no. 2 (2012): 369–403. 6 White Canada Forever, the title of Peter Ward’s book, was a popular song during this period and is a dominant theme in accounts of the ship. Even in Ali Kazimi’s award-winning film Continuous Journey (2004), the question of empire, which is much more prevalent than it is in other accounts, is overshadowed by his focus on a “White Canada Forever.” See also Kazimi’s more recent book, Undesirables. 7 Some scholars have pointed out that the continuous-journey provisions were part of a much larger repertoire of restrictions directed at the Chinese and Japanese. See Dua, “Towards Theorizing the Connections,” 40–62. 8 See, for example, Joan M. Jensen, Passage from India: Asian Indian Immigrants in North America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988); Nayan Shah, Stranger Intimacy: Contesting Race, Sexuality, and the Law in North America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012); Seema Sohi, “Race, Surveillance, and Indian Anticolonialism in the Transnational Western U.S.-Canada Borderlands,” Journal of American History 98, no. 2

272  Renisa Mawani (2011): 420–36. See also Mongia, “Race, Nationality, Mobility,” which contextualizes the ship within struggles over documentation and surveillance. 9 For a notable exception see Radhika Singha, “Settle, Mobilise and Verify: Identification Practices in Colonial India,” Studies in History 16, no. 2 (2000): 151–98. 10 The Komagata Maru’s return to Calcutta, Radhika Singha has argued, also prompted authorities to pass a criminal ordinance aimed at segregating those who returned. Singha, ibid. 11 Edward Said developed the idea of contrapuntal reading in Culture and Imperialism (1993) to highlight the complementarity and interdependency of metropole and colony. Here, I suggest its relevance can be extended for thinking more carefully about the conjunctive histories of colonies and ­dominions. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage Books, 1993), 51. 12 There is now a vibrant literature on empire as transnational process. See, for example, Antoinette Burton, ed., After the Imperial Turn: Thinking with and through the Nation (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003); Tony Ballantyne and Antoinette Burton, eds., Bodies in Contact: Rethinking Colonial Encounters in World History (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005); Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men’s Countries and the Challenge of Racial Equality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). On connections between administrative and s­ ettler colonies, see Tony Ballantyne, Orientalism and Race: Aryanism ­in the British Empire (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2002), especially the introduction. 13 For a very useful discussion of the ship, see Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001). 14 On the transnational movements of law, see Lauren Benton, Law and Colonial Cultures: Legal Regimes in World History, 1400–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 3. The Komagata Maru’s journey produced a series of legal responses including the Foreigner’s Act (1914) and the Ingress into India Ordinance (1914). 15 Peter Fitzpatrick, The Mythology of Modern Law (London: Routledge, 1992), 107. 16 For recent discussions of law and colonialism in India, see Ritu Birla, Stages of Capital: Law, Culture, and Market Governance in Colonial India (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009); Nasser Hussain, The Jurisprudence of Emergency: Colonialism and the Rule of Law (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003); Elizabeth Kolsky, “Codification and the Rule of Colonial Difference: Criminal Procedure in British India,” Law and History Review 23, no. 3 (Fall 2005): 631–84.

Law and Migration across the Pacific  273 17 This sentence paraphrases a claim that Gyan Prakash makes with respect to the place of science. The “paradox of the ‘civilizing mission’ was that it was forced to undo the very opposition upon which it was founded.” Gyan Prakash, Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 47. Elizabeth Kolsky has argued that debates over codification and the rule of law in India threatened to obscure the differences between colonizer/colonized. Kolsky, “Codification and the Rule of Colonial Difference,” 632. 18 Many influential British authorities argued that India did have law, but believed it to be despotic and different from European law. On this point, see Bernard Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 63; Hussain, The Jurisprudence of Emergency, esp. chap. 2. For a useful contemporary account of law in India and the saliency of languages of human rights, see Arjun Appadurai, “Deep Democracy: Urban Governmentality and the Horizon of Politics,” Public Culture 14, no. 1 (2002): 21–47. 19 Jensen, Passage from India, 59–60; Walker, “Race,” Rights and the Law, 253–4. 20 Jensen, Passage from India, 10–12. 21 Cited in Walker, “Race,” Rights, and the Law, 253. 22 Mongia, “Race, Nationality, Mobility,” 201. 23 On the reluctance of Britain to assert sovereignty over Canada’s Pacific North-West, see Jean Barman, The West beyond the West: A History of British Columbia, 3rd ed. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), esp. 52–5. 24 Jensen, Passage from India, 57. 25 Ibid., 65. 26 The dominion government initially passed similar provisions in 1913, which were then struck down. See note 2. I discuss these developments more fully in Mawani, “Specters of Indigeneity”; see note 3. 27 For a wonderful account of British liberalism and its constitutive exclusions, see Uday Mehta, Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-Century British Liberal Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). 28 Canada, House of Commons Debates, 8 June 1914, p. 5185 (emphasis added). 29 Ibid. 30 Principal John Mackay, “Problems of Immigration VII: Komagata Maru,” July 1914, no. 6: 6–7 (emphasis added). University of British Columbia Special Collections, Vancouver, BC. 31 Ibid., 7 (emphasis added). 32 Ibid. 33 My evocation of spatio-temporal regimes of inclusion is intended to highlight the ways in which modes of inclusion and exclusion have both spatial and temporal logics. For a very productive discussion of time and

274  Renisa Mawani sovereignty in India, see Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), especially the introduction. 34 See Jensen, Passage from India, 121. 35 “Komagata Maru,” Khalsa Advocate 12, no. 27 (11 July 1914): 3. 36 Khalsa Advocate 12, no. 24 (20 June 1914): 4–5 (emphasis added). 37 For a discussion of this point, see Mithi Mukherjee, “Justice, War, and the Imperium: India and Britain in Edmund Burke’s Prosecutorial Speeches in the Impeachment Trial of Warren Hastings,” Law and History Review 23, no. 3 (2005): 590. 38 Benton points out that law has too often been restricted to “boundaries of national political histories.” Her insights on law as a globalizing force are useful for thinking through the transnational circuits not only of imperial and colonial authorities but also of colonial subjects. See Benton, Law and Colonial Cultures, 3 n. 4. 39 Thomas Metcalf makes the provocative claim that India was the centre of empire. Although he does not discuss the dominions, he makes interesting arguments regarding the relationships between India and Britain’s colonies in the Indian Ocean region. Thomas Metcalf, Imperial Connections: India in the Indian Ocean Arena, 1860–1920 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2008). 40 Civil and Military Gazette 38, no. 14, 306 (Lahore, 26 May 1914): 3. 41 Cited in Johnston, Voyage of the Komagata Maru, 37–8. 42 Leader (Allahabad, 7 July 1914): 3. 43 Civil and Military Gazette 38 (Lahore, 17 June 1914): 10. 44 See Mehta, Liberalism and Empire. 45 Jensen makes this point regarding Teja Singh, who, she argues, successfully united Punjabi Muslims, Hindus, and Sikhs with Bengali Brahmins in British Columbia in ways that had never been possible in India. Jensen, Passage from India, 124–5. 46 On the reification of religious differences in colonial India, see Dipesh Chakrabarty, Habitations of Modernity: Essays in the Wake of Subaltern Studies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 85. Some scholars have ­argued that caste and religious distinctions were created through British rule. See Tayyab Mahmud, “Colonialism and Modern Constructions of Race: A Preliminary Inquiry,” University of Miami Law Review 53 (1998/9): 1219–46. 47 London All-India Moslem League, 18 June 1914. Cited in Malwinderjit Singh Waraich and Gurdev Singh Sidhu, eds., Komagata Maru: A Challenge to colo­ nialism – Key Documents (Chandigar: Unistar Books), 46 (emphasis added).

Law and Migration across the Pacific  275 48 For a discussion of the All-India League’s intervention into questions concerning Muslim marriages in South Africa, see Radhika Mongia, “Gender and the Historiography of Gandhian Satyagraha,” Gender and History 18, no. 1 (2006): 135. 49 Although the ship’s passengers are often assumed to have been Sikh, they were not exclusively so. Rather, 340 were Sikhs, 12 were Hindus, and 24 were Muslims. 50 See Mehta, Liberalism and Empire. 51 The “rule of colonial difference” in India has been formulated by Partha Chatterjee, but not always with explicit reference to race. See Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993). See also Kolsky, “Codification and the Rule of Colonial Difference.” 52 “Indians and Empire,” Civil and Military Gazette 38 (26 June 1914): 3 ­(emphasis added). 53 “Sikhs and Vancouver,” Civil and Military Gazette 38 (14 July 1914): 9. 54 Jensen, Passage From India. 55 Colonial Office to the Vice-President, All-India Moslem League (draft ­reply), June 1914. Cited in Waraich and Sidhu, Komagata Maru, 47. 56 Thomas Metcalf argues that through the process of migration, British Indian subjects saw themselves as “Imperial citizens.” See Metcalf, Imperial Connections, 2. See also Sukanya Banerjee’s Becoming Imperial Citizens: Indians in the Late-Victorian Empire (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010). I develop this point more fully in Mawani, “Specters of Indigeneity.” 57 See Banerjee, Becoming Imperial Citizens. 58 Aihwa Ong, Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 15. 59 Mehta, Liberalism and Empire, 30. 60 Ibid., 71. 61 Cited in Leela Gandhi, Affective Communities: Anti-Colonial Thought, Finde-Siècle Radicalism, and the Politics of Friendship (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 95. 62 Lahore Tribune 35 (18 June 1914): 2. 63 Ibid. 64 Said, Culture and Imperialism, xiii. 65 Ibid., xxi. 66 Ibid., 6. 67 For a fuller discussion of this point see Mawani, “Specters of Indigeneity.”

12 Canadian Girls, Imperial Girls, Global Girls: Race, Nation, and Transnationalism in the Interwar Girl Guide Movement kristine alex an de r

In the September 1930 issue of the Canadian Girl Guide magazine, Toronto teenager Margaret Warren encouraged the Guide movement’s young female members to imagine their lives in national, imperial, and global terms. Modern Canadian girls, she insisted, were “citizens not only of Canada but of the British Empire and the World.” As Guiding spread across the globe during the interwar years, the movement’s leaders used uniforms, badges, and activities to prepare girls and young women for their assumed future roles as domestic managers, mothers, and paid workers. Boasting more than a million members in over forty countries by the early 1930s, the movement also sought to teach girls to “look wide” and think of themselves as members of a tolerant and friendly global sisterhood. Concepts of “nation” and “race,” used in vague and often interchangeable ways by Guide leaders during this period, were also central to interwar Guiding’s imperial and internationalist vision. As Margaret Warren reminded her readers, the Girl Guides had a responsibility to “follow the events of the world, [and] learn about the people of other countries and races, and their history, their customs and their thoughts.”1 Unlike some of the other chapters in this volume, which use transnational frames of reference to analyse historical actors who might not have thought of themselves as participants in global processes and exchanges, this chapter examines how the interwar Guide movement actively sought to create a transnational imagined community of girls. Leila Rupp, Angela Woollacott, and Fiona Paisley have shown that the 1920s and 1930s years were a fruitful time for women’s internationalist organizing, marked by dozens of international conferences and shifts in power dynamics, as white dominion women assumed more leadership



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roles and some women of colour demanded to be included or established their own groups.2 The history of the Girl Guides, an all-female voluntary organization that has been the subject of several nationally focused studies, must be understood in this broader context: as a British-based exercise in cultural internationalism whose leaders promoted an ideal of cross-border friendliness and cooperation that posed few if any challenges to Anglo-American hegemony.3 Touted in official publications as a “junior League of Nations” and a “happy empire family,” the Guide movement was effectively an early non-governmental organization – one which, unlike many twenty-first-century NGOs, defined itself as “apolitical” while buttressing British imperial power in often quite conservative ways.4 My understanding of the Guide movement’s global and interracial pretensions owes much to recent scholarship on the British Empire and transnational questions. The Girl Guides, like its brother organization the Boy Scouts, was initially the product of early-twentieth-century British fears about gender roles, the white or Anglo-Saxon “race,” and the future of the British Empire,5 the kind examined by Penelope Edmonds in her chapter here. Guiding spread quickly across the British sphere of influence after its establishment in England in 1909, and its exponential global membership growth during the 1920s and 1930s both reflected and contributed to efforts to rearticulate the British Empire as a friendly and peaceable family.6 The Guides’ vision of a familial and egalitarian global empire was also clearly a consequence of the First World War, as the traumas of that conflict caused many in Britain and the dominions to critique the nation state and, as Frank Trentmann has noted, “turn to the British Empire as a historic building block in the creation of a new transnational framework of governance and cultural solidarity.”7 Inspired by the work of Alan Lester and Tony Ballantyne, I have come to understand the Guide movement as a series of trans-imperial and transnational networks that connected different parts of the empire and the globe; facilitated the circulation of ideas, texts, and goods in multiple directions; gave some women and girls the chance to travel internationally; and offered similar experiences and ideals to members around the world.8 Karen Flynn’s chapter on nursing in this collection maps similar kinds of travel, circulation, and exchange. Crucially, these networks also connected parts of the British Empire that are usually studied separately, a fact that poses a direct challenge to historians’ continuing tendency to pursue discrete studies of settler colonies and the

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dependent empire. My analysis of the Guide movement in the metropole and several different imperial “peripheries” shows that a transnational approach does make sense, as it reveals a number of what Ann Laura Stoler has called “unexpected points of congruence and similarities of discourse in seemingly disparate sites.”9 However, looking only for imperial networks and similarities can obscure the fact that the Guides, like many other imperial products, were also influenced by and established in a number of locations that were officially outside the British sphere of influence. My understanding of this aspect of Guiding’s global nature has benefited from the vital and growing body of scholarship on transnational questions.10 I see my work as transnational history in that it analyses how, through the Guides, more than a million girls and young women participated in and were represented in a range of activities and discourses that transcended national and imperial boundaries.11 Like several recently published global histories, I hope to emphasize the “interconnectedness and interdependence of political and social changes across the world well before the supposed onset of the contemporary phase of ‘globalization’ after 1945.”12 I also appreciate the idea expressed by C.A. Bayly – a self-proclaimed “occasional conformist” to the idea of transnational history – that such scholarship “raise[s] critical issues about transnational flows, but do[es] not claim to embrace the whole world.”13 Yet to stress the imperial and transnational is not to argue that questions of national identity and nationhood are unimportant. As Bayly has written, it is worth remembering that “the ‘nations’ embedded in the term ‘transnational’ were not originary elements to be ‘transcended’” by a range of social and cultural forces.14 This point is especially applicable to the interwar years, as the League of Nations and a rearticulated British imperialism were paralleled by the growth of European fascism and by anticolonial and constitutional nationalisms in Britain’s dependent empire and dominions. The complex and interdependent relationship between nationalism and internationalism is shown especially clearly in the second biennial report of the World Association of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts (1932), which described an “international current” in global society that had emerged “during the last century through mixing up nationalities and races; a mix-up due to migration, to the war and its consequences, to scientific inventions such as the radio, the cinema, wireless telegraphy, etc., to economic interdependence and to other forces working towards international cooperation of all kinds.” That the drive towards internationalism was paralleled and



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sometimes challenged by “national” concerns was explained as the result of “the self-consciousness of small nations and … the question of minorities – namely people now living under foreign sovereignty – and a national renaissance after the war, entailing a natural reaction against communism and against internationalism.”15 While many early-­ twentieth-century nationalist movements were products of the international “Wilsonian moment” that followed the end of the First World War, only some articulations of national identity were seen as complementary to Guiding’s imperial global vision.16 Efforts by French Canadian and Hindu nationalists to create their own Guide groups, for example, were derided by the movement’s British leaders as “disobedient” and “political.”17 Organizational Changes Guiding’s attempts to prevent the formation of rival “political” girls’ organizations, which paralleled their promotion of interracial and international friendship, may be traced through a number of organizational changes that were instituted by the movement’s British headquarters in the wake of the First World War. In 1918, Olave Baden-Powell (wife of Boy Scout founder Robert Baden-Powell and head of the Girl Guides) created an Imperial Guide Council with the aim of promoting “mutual interest and sympathetic understanding throughout the empire.”18 The Imperial Council and its sister Guide organization, the International Council (a body representing nations that had never been colonized by the British), were essentially corresponding societies in which elite women living in London wrote to and advised Guide leaders in their “special part[s] of the Empire” and the world.19 But as Guiding took off around the world during the 1920s, some women began to question the International and Imperial Councils’ limited and Anglocentric system of governance. From 1920 on, Guide leaders from Britain and around the world began to organize and attend international meetings in order to compare their experiences and pedagogical techniques. The First International Conference for Guiders was held in 1920 at St Hugh’s College, Oxford, and was attended by delegates and visitors from Belgium, China, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, Holland, Italy, Liberia, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Serbia, Sweden, and the United States. A combined Imperial and International Conference followed two years later in 1922 at Newnham College, Cambridge. The third international conference,

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which was combined with the first World Camp for Girl Guides, was attended in July 1924 by 1200 representatives from thirty countries. A fourth international conference – the first to be held outside the United Kingdom – was held two years later in the United States at Camp Edith Macy in New York State. This conference partially reflected the desire, expressed by Baden-Powell and several British and Canadian Guide leaders during the interwar years, for the construction of a global AngloSaxon alliance that, as Tammy Proctor has argued, “could bring peace to  the world on British terms.”20 The Fourth International Conference also highlighted the problems that could be caused by the Guide movement’s official practice of dividing the world into the discrete categories of “imperial” and “foreign/international.” Canada was both and neither, defined by Guide headquarters as an “imperial” nation but only allowed to attend as a non-voting visitor. Partly because of the confusion caused by the distinction between “imperial” and “international” in 1926, Guide representatives from twenty-eight countries approved the dissolution of the International and Imperial Councils at the 1928 world conference in Hungary. In place of these two corresponding societies-cum-governing bodies, the women approved the creation of a more unified, formal, and bureaucratic governing body: the World Association of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts (WAGGGS). This decision was explained in official WAGGGS publications as the result of these women’s desire for “closer organization, in which each country should take part, on an equal footing, and should have a share of determining the policy on the whole.”21 At first glance, this attempt to facilitate communication and encourage equality in policymaking sounds very different from the jingoistic expansionism that characterized much Victorian thinking on imperial and international questions. But WAGGGS’s desire to promote “unity of purpose and common understanding in the fundamental principles of Guiding and Girl Scouting throughout the world” may also be seen as an attempt by the movement’s metropolitan leaders to regulate Guide activities in different countries while preventing the formation of unofficial and potentially subversive groups of girls.22 International and Imperial Gatherings International and imperial camps and conferences were at the heart of the global Guide movement’s attempts to create friendly connections between young women and girls from different places and different



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“races.” The most highly publicized of these events were the movement’s Imperial and World Camps, semi-annual gatherings during which girls from different countries lived together under canvas with the aim of promoting tolerance and sisterly friendship. Many of these camps were held on the grounds of Foxlease, the British Guide training ground in the New Forest; rooms in the main house there were furnished and decorated by Guide groups from around the world, with rugs from India, a desk from New Zealand, cottage furniture from Canada, and a four-bedroom cabin from the wealthy and increasingly powerful Girl Scouts of the United States.23 The more than 1200 attendees at the 1924 world camp at Foxlease included twentyfive Canadian representatives, whose travel expenses had been paid by the Overseas Education League, a Canadian organization that promoted student and teacher exchanges between Canada, Britain, and other parts of the British Empire.24 One Canadian Guider who attended the camp wrote in the Girl Guides’ Gazette that she was “proud to think that each room [in the house at Foxlease] has been furnished by a different country.” The entire experience, she claimed, made her feel thrilled to belong to “an organization that has spread itself over the face of the whole globe, every individual member of which has the same laws and codes, each furthering the great cause and promoting an advance in all spheres, bringing a higher sense of honour and integrity into every condition of life.”25 Inclusion, Exclusion, the “Power of the Pen,” and the Mass Media But while more accessible than ever before, long-distance travel remained a costly luxury during the interwar years and was an unimaginable expense for thousands of families who had trouble even finding the funds to buy Guide uniforms. Experiences like the world camps, so central to the Guide movement’s vision of a familial imperial internationalism, were in reality only available to a minority of girls and women during this period of global economic uncertainty. The tension between the movement’s ideal of inclusiveness and the exclusive nature of these special events was seldom mentioned in official Guide publications and organizational records, likely because the women who produced these texts were often the ones who had the means and time to attend the movement’s various international meetings.26 How­ ever, the October 1930 issue of the Council Fire (the quarterly periodical published by WAGGGS) includes a rare but telling reflection on the

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fact that most girls would never have the opportunity to travel to different countries or befriend distant “Guide sisters” at international camps. The author of the article, Miss S.J. Warner, a staff member at the Guide Association’s newly opened world bureau in central London, lamented the fact that despite the formation of WAGGGS and the institution of regular international meetings for women and girls, “unfortunately much of our international unity rests on theory.” Noting the centrality of international gatherings to Guiding’s ideological emphasis on cooperation and friendly sisterhood, Warner expressed concern that “comparatively few of our members will ever be able to take part” in these types of activities. Urging readers to think of “troops of Girl Scouts in the Middle-West of the United States, miles away from the sea-board … of the companies in the provinces of France … [and] of the numbers of children in little England who will never be able to go abroad,” she insisted that Guiding must try harder to bring its international message to these children, since they too will be “voting, thinking citizens, and will have influence over the destinies of their countries.” Warner, having taken the unusual step of acknowledging the fact that most members of the global “Guide sisterhood” were being left out of the movement’s most significant imperial and transnational initiatives, suggested one possible solution to this problem of exclusivity: that more of the movement’s “international work must rest on the power of the pen, and on the broadcast word.”27 The “power of the pen,” as exercised through publishing and personal correspondence, was central to the Guide movement’s attempt to spread its message of imperial and international sisterhood throughout the interwar years. The various Guide periodicals to which members of different ages were urged to subscribe frequently featured articles describing life and Guiding in different places. Stories in the Girl Guides’ Gazette, for instance, discussed “The First All-Island Rally in Ceylon,” the Baden-Powells’ visits to Canada, and Guide camps in Rhodesia.28 The Canadian Guider magazine, a monthly periodical produced by the Toronto-based Canadian Girl Guides Association, regularly published similar stories, including a May 1934 article on the All-India Guide Training Camp that had been held in Lahore the previous summer.29 Subjects discussed in the Council Fire, the movement’s most explicitly internationalist periodical (featuring articles in English, French, and German), included “Guiding Among the Aborigines of Australia,” the  1st Purulia Leper Company in India, and the Inuit Guides and Brownies at the Anglican Mission School in the Canadian North-West



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Territories.30 In December 1924, the editors of the Girl Guides’ Gazette announced the production of a series of lantern slides (available by mail order for a small fee) depicting Guide life in sixteen different countries. The advertisement for the slides described several of them using nation- and race-based stereotypes: “The sturdy Czechs boldly sent thirty plates through the post, and not one of them was broken. The Swiss sent small negatives carefully labeled and named, and so did the French. From India and Burma came large square photos of very active Guides in white uniform, cooking, carrying stretchers, tying their tenderfoot knots, etc. The United States thoughtfully sent lantern slides, and coloured ones at that.”31 Lantern slides and magazine articles, like the activities of the middle-class American women’s armchair travel clubs studied by Kristin Hoganson, provided readers with a popular geography that let them feel included in the movement’s culture of ­international travel.32 Yet opportunities for fictive travel provided by Guiding were also often exercises in ethnographic classification that emphasized difference as they generalized about non-white Guide groups from “exotic” locales. Guide periodicals also encouraged girls and women to experience world travel vicariously by reading. The May 1935 issue of the Canadian Guider, for example, recommended a number of books for girls “who are interested in learning more about the life in other countries, or who are corresponding through the Canadian Post Box with Guides in other lands.”33 This list consisted of novels and autobiographical accounts by men and women whose lives exemplified the border-crossing and multiple identities of the “international current” in early-twentieth-century life. Charlotte Lowensköld, a novel by the Swedish Nobel Prize–winning writer Selma Lagerlof, was the only European book on the list, and the rest of the recommended texts may be seen as proof of the continuing importance of orientalism to twentieth-century internationalism. They included two books by white American women based on their experiences in China – East Wind, West Wind by Pearl Buck and Nora Waln’s The House of Exile – as well as texts by writers from India, Japan, and China: Dhan Gopal Mukerji’s Caste and Outcast, Etsu Sugimoto’s A Daughter of the Samurai, and Kow-Tow by Princess Der Ling. As Fiona Paisley has written of the Pan-Pacific Women’s Association, “If the Orient was a place of both oppression and possibility in the Western feminist imagination, it was also an actual realm in which elite women from Eastern countries used Western feminist principles to advance their own feminist traditions. Orientalism was a transnational feminist

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language shared between elite Western and Eastern women, in which Eastern women were to become agents in their own progress.”34 Guide leaders from the East and especially the West also used the “power of the pen” to spread their transnational message in more personal ways during the interwar years. Beginning in the early 1920s, Brownies, Guides, and Rangers were urged to make contact with their “sister Guides” around the British Empire and the world through a headquarters-sponsored letter exchange program called the Post Box. Through the Post Box, girls were encouraged to write to Guide headquarters requesting a pen friend from a distant part of the globe; the program then provided them with the address of a girl from another country in the hopes of encouraging the development of imperial or international friendships. This attempt to strengthen the sisterly ties of Guiding in imperial and global terms was lauded in the 1924 Canadian Girl Guide Association council’s annual report as a “means by which Canadian Guides may correspond with other Guides in distant parts of the world and more especially in parts of the Empire and by this means realize more fully the large sisterhood to which they belong.”35 According to this report, Canadian Guides corresponded with girls in Australia, New Zealand, India, the United States, South Africa, Jamaica, and especially the United Kingdom. Stories celebrating the Post Box appeared often in Guide periodicals as proof of the movement’s international success and as incentives for other girls to join. Like other early-twentieth-century cultural internationalists, Guide leaders also made extensive use of “the broadcast word.” The official films and radio programs that were released during the 1920s and 1930s often dealt with imperial and global themes, and frequently featured big international events that most girls would have missed. The Britishmade film Girl Guides to the Fore was brought to Canada for two months in 1922 and was shown from Nova Scotia to British Columbia.36 A ­two-reel film of the 1924 world camp was “shown extensively” throughout Britain and in Brussels and Cologne, and copies were also sold to Guide groups in Canada and the United States.37 In November and December of 1927, the film of an international Guide camp in Geneva was shown at the Metropolitan Theatre on Donald Street in downtown Winnipeg.38 Guides around the world listened to radio broadcasts about the Guide and Scout festivities held in London to celebrate the coronation of King George VI in 1937, and British Guide leaders also addressed Guides in India on the BBC.



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The Persistence of Racial Hierarchies The movement’s attempts to use letter writing, publishing, radio, and films to include the thousands of girls and women who for reasons of class, culture, and geography were left out of Guiding’s international gatherings were significant, as they reached tens and even hundreds of thousands of girls who would otherwise have had little or no sense of belonging to a global sisterhood of girls and women. But many official Guide publications produced during this time, like much of the coverage the movement received in the popular press, still bore traces of older, more conservative, and hierarchical ways of thinking. Most significantly, a number of contemporary newspapers, as well as Guide fiction and prescriptive literature, continued to discuss the Guides in ways that reinforced and perpetuated Anglocentric forms of racial and cultural categorization. The uneasy tension between this older kind of hierarchical thinking and interwar Guiding’s emphasis on sisterly affection and tolerance is characterized by the content of Guide Links, a 1936 collection of essays originally written for the Guide magazine by Chief Guide Olave Baden-Powell about her and her husband’s visits to Scout and Guide companies around the world. The chapter about their travels in Canada, for example, features several positive (though still decidedly paternalistic) descriptions of their encounters with Aborigi­ nal people, including the dances done by “a group of real live Red Indians” at a 1923 Guide and Scout rally in Calgary and the ceremony in which the Chief Guide was named an honorary member of the Alberta-based Sarcee nation.39 Yet the Chief Guide also sought to explain Canada to Guides from other countries by referring to early European settlers’ “considerable trouble with the Red Indians” and the legacy of “many unhappy conflicts between the native Redskin and the conquering white race.”40 The Chief Guide’s assumptions about “native Redskins” and the “conquering white race” complicated her youth movement’s official support of interracial cooperation in obvious ways. Her claims, which were based on an understanding of Canada as a “white” nation whose Aboriginal inhabitants were weak and likely to die out, bore some significant similarities to the ideas that underpinned Canadian Aboriginal policy during the 1920s and 1930s.41 Education was central to the Cana­ dian state’s efforts to eliminate Aboriginal languages and cultures, and participation in Guides and Scouts was mandatory at many Aboriginal

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residential and industrial schools.42 These institutions, in which hunger and violence often coexisted with lessons and “extracurricular” activities like the Guides, separated Aboriginal children from their families with the hope of transforming them into docile, English-speaking citizens and workers. Guide and Scout companies at Canadian Aborigi­ nal residential schools like the Mohawk Institute in Brantford, Ontario, and the McKay Boarding School in Winnipeg, Manitoba, were seen by government and religious authorities as useful ways to further the schools’ assimilatory project while teaching boys and girls “appropriate” gender roles. The Canadian Scouts and Guides did not provide their programs and literature in Aboriginal languages to these children (a striking contrast to India, where efforts were made to translate Guide texts into a number of vernaculars) because it would have undermined the dominion government’s attempt to assimilate them into Euro-Canadian society.43 Efforts to use Guiding to assimilate “other” populations was another transnational aspect of the movement, as it was supported by educators and politicians in a range of national and colonial contexts across the globe. In a speech at the 1923 Imperial Education Conference in Toronto, Chief Scout Robert Baden-Powell, whose Victorian colonial military career had been based on the violent oppression of native groups in India, Afghanistan, and Africa, boasted about the success of Scouts and Guides in colonizing institutions around the world. The Guides and Scouts had been “found particularly useful,” he claimed, “in the schools for Red Indian children, just as [they] had also proved useful in a like manner on the West Coast of Africa and in Baghdad.”44 Paisley has shown that similar motivations supported the introduction of Guide and Scout companies in Aboriginal settlements and missions in Australia, noting that government officials like A.O. Neville, Chief Protector of the Aborigines of Western Australia in the 1930s, believed that “the ‘serious game’ of Scouting and Guiding complemented assimilation and provided an ‘excellent disciplinary effect.’”45 The assimilatory and disciplinary side of Guiding, which shadowed and sometimes undermined its emphasis on studying “racial problems” and learning respectfully about other cultures, also played out in settler societies like Canada in efforts to assimilate non-British immigrants. Like the Imperial Order Daughters of the Empire, an organization to which many of them also belonged, Anglo-Canadian Guide leaders often explained their mission as one of “Canadianization.”46 Joyce Wolton, an English Guider who visited Winnipeg in 1928 to



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conduct training sessions for leaders, also embraced this idea. As a local newspaper pointed out, her speeches emphasized “the part played by the Girl Guide movement in instilling in the younger generation the ideals of British citizenship,” and claimed that, “owing to the constant flux of foreign civilizations into this country … the Girl Guides were needed even more in Canada than in England.”47 In 1928, for example, the captain of a company from the southern Manitoba town of Morden was commended by the Manitoba Council for “trying to turn fourteen  little German girls into good Canadians.”48 Monica Storrs, a British ­missionary who started Guide and Scout groups in northern British Columbia in the late 1920s, used her diary to try to make sense of the multiple and overlapping meanings of “nation” and “race” she encountered in the children of the town of Fort St John. In one entry, she attempted to categorize her Scouts and Guides according to “their nationalities or rather their original races; because of course their nationality is Canadian; but their races make rather a good sample of the population of North West Canada.” Her list of “races” is tellingly ambiguous with its inclusion of Danish, Italian (Roman Catholic), American, French-Canadian, “halfbreed,” English, German-Italian, “three-quarters Indian,” and “real Scotch” boys and girls.49 Similar ambiguous examples of “racial” and “national” categorization appeared alongside calls for sisterhood and international tolerance in Guide publications throughout the 1920s and 1930s. In August 1937, for example, the Girl Guide column in the Toronto Daily Star described an “interesting correspondence” between Florence Joyce of the 37th Toronto Guide Company and Merlyn Cross, an “English girl who was born in India” and belonged to the 1st Calcutta Guides. Sum­ marizing several of Merlyn’s letters to her Canadian “Guide sister,” the article discussed the Baden-Powells’ recent visit to India and described the Guide rallies that were frequently held at “the compound of Belvedere House, Calcutta, India, the home of the Viceroy.” This exchange of letters was, on the one hand, exactly the type of international success story that the organizers of the Post Box had hoped for. On the other hand, however, it was also an exclusive exchange between two British-born girls that did nothing to challenge the belief expressed by Merlyn that “the Hindoos have many queer customs.”50 The prevalence of such assumptions about “Hindoos” and other “exotic” peoples in publications and at Guide gatherings was noted and critiqued in a 1936 Council Fire article on “Guiding and Mutual Under­ standing” by Sherene Rustomjee, a Parsi Guide leader from Bombay

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who had attended Guide training sessions in England and travelled throughout India encouraging other women to start companies. “It has been amazing to me,” she wrote, “to find in the course of my visits to Europe how little people know of India, its peoples and its distances. This must be true of other countries too. Perhaps this lack of know­ ledge is the result of our present systems of education; let us, anyhow, get to know each other better through Guiding.” Guides and Rangers, Rustomjee suggested, “might be able to form study groups, and to investigate racial problems; they could widen their knowledge by reading books and newspapers of other countries, not only Guide literature.”51 The publication of Rustomjee’s piece some twenty years after the movement’s first international conference and six years after Margaret Warren encouraged Canadian Guides to learn about “the people of other countries and races” indicates the flawed and incomplete nature of interwar Guiding’s attempts to promote interracial and international sisterhood. Yet it also reveals the growing involvement of elite Eastern women and girls, and a limited degree of institutional openness to criticism. Would the members of Guide groups in colonizing institutions across the empire and the world have agreed with Rustomjee’s assessment of the movement’s successes and failures? The lack of official interest in their stories is telling, and still worth considering in our increasingly “transnational” twenty-first-century world. NOTES Portions of this essay were originally published in Kristine Alexander, “The Girl Guide Movement and Imperial Internationalism in the 1920s and 1930s,” Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 2, no. 1 (Winter 2009): 37–63. 1 Canadian Girl Guide, September 1930: 13. 2 Leila J. Rupp, Worlds of Women: The Making of an International Women’s Movement (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998); Angela Woollacott, “Inventing Commonwealth and Pan-Pacific Feminisms: Australian Women’s Internationalist Activism in the 1920s–30s,” in Feminisms and Internationalism, ed. Mrinalini Sinha, Donna J. Guy, and Angela Woollacott (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), 81–104; Fiona Paisley, “Performing ‘New Zealand’: Maori and Pakeha Delegates at the Pan-Pacific Women’s Conference, Hawai‘i, 1934,’ New Zealand Journal of History 38, no. 1 (2004): 22–38; Fiona Paisley, Loving Protection? Australian Feminism and Aboriginal Women’s Rights 1919–1939 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2000).



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3 On cultural internationalism, see Fiona Paisley, Glamour in the Pacific: Cultural Internationalism and Race Politics in the Women’s Pan-Pacific (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2009); Akira Iriye, Cultural Internationalism and World Order (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997). Nation-based studies of Guiding include Timothy Parsons, “The Limits of Sisterhood: The Evolution of the Girl Guide Movement in Colonial Kenya,” in Scouting Frontiers: Youth and the Scout Movement’s First Century, ed. Nelson R. Block and Tammy M. Proctor (Newcastle-uponTyne: Cambridge Scholars’ Press, 2009); Tammy Proctor, On My Honour: Scouts and Guides in Interwar Britain (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 2002); Allen Warren, “‘Mothers of the Empire?’ The Girl Guides Association in Britain, 1909–1939,” in Making Imperial Mentalities: sociali­ sation and British Imperialism, ed. J.A. Mangan (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990), 96–109; Bonne MacQueen, “Domesticity and Discipline: The Girl Guides in British Columbia 1910–1943,” in Not Just Pin Money: Selected Essays on the History of Women’s Work in British Columbia, ed. Barbara K. Latham and Roberta J. Pazdro (Victoria: Camosun College, 1984), 221–36. For a broader survey, see Tammy M. Proctor, Scouting for Girls: A Century of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts (Santa Barbara, CA: ABCClio, 2009). 4 Harald Fischer-Tiné, “Global Civil Society and the Forces of Empire: The Salvation Army, British Imperialism and the ‘Pre-History’ of NGOs (c. 1880–1920),’ in Competing Visions of World Order: Global Moments and Movements, 1880s–1930s, ed. Sebastian Conrad and Dominic Sachsenmaier (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 53. Fischer-Tiné makes a similar point in his work on the Salvation Army in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-­ century India: “Being aware of this ambiguous relationship between British imperialism and a predecessor of today’s NGOs, one would pro­ bably have to be cautious vis-à-vis the fashionable uncritical view that postulates an ‘epic struggle’ between global civil society and the ‘forces of empire,’ extending back ‘to the earliest human experience.’” 5 See Tim Jeal, Baden-Powell: Founder of the Boy Scouts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989). 6 Barbara Bush, “Gender and Empire: The Twentieth Century,” in Gender and Empire, ed. Philippa Levine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 78. 7 Frank Trentmann, “After the Nation-State: Citizenship, Empire and Global Coordination in the New Internationalism, 1914–1930,” in Beyond Sovereignty: Britain, Empire and Transnationalism, c. 1880–1950, ed. Kevin Grant, Philippa Levine, and Frank Trentmann (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 46.

290  Kristine Alexander 8 Alan Lester, Imperial Networks: Creating Identities in Nineteenth-Century South Africa and Britain (London: Routledge, 2001); Tony Ballantyne, Between Colonialism and Diaspora: Sikh Cultural Formations in an Imperial World (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006). 9 Ann Laura Stoler, “Tense and Tender Ties: The Politics of Comparison in North American History and (Post) Colonial Studies,” Journal of American History 88, no. 3 (2001): 829–65. 10 David W. Gutzke, ed., Britain and Transnational Progressivism (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008); Adele Perry, “Reading Haunted by Empire in Winnipeg: The Politics of Transnational Histories,” Left History 13, no. 2 (Fall/Winter 2008): 163–70; Ian Tyrrell, Transnational Nation: The United States in Global Perspective since 1789 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); Lloyd Wong and Vic Satzewich, “Introduction: The Meaning and Significance of Transnationalism: Conceptual, Theoretical, and Research Issues,” in Transnational Identities and Practices in Canada, ed. Vic Satzewich and Lloyd Wong (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2006); Rumi Yasutake, Transna­ tional Women’s Activism: The United States, Japan, and Japanese Immigrant Communities in California, 1859–1920 (New York: New York University Press, 2004); Vera Mackie, “The Language of Globalization, Transnation­ ality and Feminism,” International Feminist Journal of Politics 3, no. 2 (2001): 180–206. 11 Ann Curthoys and Marilyn Lake, “Introduction,” in Connected Worlds: History in Transnational Perspective, ed. Ann Curthoys and Marilyn Lake (Canberra: ANU E Press, 2005), 5. 12 C.A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World 1780–1914: Global Comparisons and Connections (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), 1. 13 C.A. Bayly, Sven Beckert, Matthew Connelly, Isabel Hofmeyr, Wendy Kozol, and Patricia Seed, “AHR Conversation: On Transnational History,” American Historical Review 111, no. 5 (December 2006), 1441–64. 14 Bayly et al., “AHR Conversation,” 1449. See also Antoinette Burton, “Who Needs the Nation? Interrogating ‘British’ History,” in Cultures of Empire: A Reader, ed. Catherine Hall (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 137–53. 15 Archives of the World Association of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts (London), The World Association of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts Second Biennial Report: July 1st 1930 to June 30th 1932, 19–20. 16 Erez Manela, The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). 17 I expand on this point in chap. 3 of Kristine Alexander, “The Girl Guide Movement and Imperial Internationalism in Interwar England, Canada and India,” PhD diss., York University (2010).



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18 Archives of the World Association of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts (London), World Association of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts First Biennial Report: July 1st 1928 to June 30th 1930 and General Historical Sketch, 2. 19 Girl Guiding UK Archives (London), The Girl Guides’ Annual Report, 1921, 54. 20 Proctor, On My Honour, 131. 21 Archives of the Ontario Council of the Girl Guides of Canada – Guides du Canada (Toronto), The World Association of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts, 4th ed. (London: WAGGGS, 1951), 2. 22 For more on this, see Kristine Alexander, “The Girl Guide Movement and Imperial Internationalism in the 1920s and 1930s,” Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 2, no. 1 (Winter 2009): 37–63. 23 For an explanation of the use of the term “Girl Scout” in the United States, see Mary Aickin Rothschild, “To Scout or to Guide? The Girl Scout–Boy Scout Controversy, 1912–1941,’ Frontiers 6, no. 3 (1981): 115–21. 24 Archives of the National Council of the Girl Guides of Canada – Guides du Canada (Toronto), Headquarters Annual Report, April 1924–1925, 3. For more on the OEL, see James Sturgis and Margaret Bird, Canada’s Imperial Past: The Life of F.J. Ney, 1884–1973 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press / Centre for Canadian Studies, 2000). 25 Girl Guides’ Gazette 11, no. 129 (September 1924): 249. 26 Leila J. Rupp comments on a similar tension in her Worlds of Women: The Making of an International Women’s Movement (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 52. 27 Council Fire 5, no. 4 (October 1930): 99. 28 Girl Guides’ Gazette 10, no. 113 (May 1923): 99; no. 115 (July 1923): 156; no. 117 (September 1923): 203. 29 Canadian Guider 2, no. 3 (May 1934): 2. 30 Council Fire 11, no. 1 (January 1936): 2; 11, no. 2 (April 1936): 13; 13, no. 2 (April 1938): 21. 31 Girl Guides’ Gazette 11, no. 132 (December 1924): 327. 32 Kristin L. Hoganson, Consumers’ Imperium: The Global Production of American Domesticity, 1865–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007). 33 Canadian Guider 3, no. 3 (May 1935): 2. 34 Paisley, Glamour in the Pacific, 23. 35 Archives of the National Council of the Girl Guides of Canada – Guides du Canada (Toronto), The Canadian Council of the Girl Guides Association (Incorporated) Annual Report 1924, 12. 36 Archives of the National Council of the Girl Guides of Canada – Guides du Canada, “Canadian Council, Girl Guides Association Annual Meeting, April 1923: Report of Organizing Secretary.”

292  Kristine Alexander 37 Girl Guiding UK Archives, The Girl Guides Annual Report, 1924, 46. 38 Minute book, 2 November 1927, Girl Guides of Canada – Manitoba Council fonds, Archives of Manitoba, P3467/5. 39 Olave Baden-Powell, Guide Links (London: C. Arthur Pearson Ltd, 1936), 151–3. 40 Ibid., 171. 41 E. Brian Titley, A Narrow Vision: Duncan Campbell Scott and the Administration of Indian Affairs in Canada (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1986). 42 Mary Jane McCallum, “To Make Good Canadians: Girl Guiding in Indian Residential Schools,” MA thesis, Trent University (2001). McCallum’s work focuses mainly on the decades after the Second World War, but also notes the presence of Scouts and Guides in some industrial and residential schools during the 1920s and 1930s. For more on residential schools, see J.R. Miller, Shingwauk’s Vision: A History of Native Residential Schools (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997); John Milloy, A National Crime: The Canadian Government and the Residential School System, 1879–1986 (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 1999). 43 Titley, A Narrow Vision, 75. 44 Girl Guides’ Gazette 10, no. 118 (October 1923): 232. 45 Fiona Paisley, “Childhood and Race: Growing Up in the Empire,” in Gender and Empire, ed. Philippa Levine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 254. 46 Katie Pickles, Female Imperialism and National Identity: Imperial Order Daughters of the Empire (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), 40; Nancy M. Sheehan, “Women and Imperialism: The I.O.D.E., Propa­ ganda and Patriotism in Canadian Schools, 1900–1940,” in Education and Imperialism: Four Case Studies, ed. J.A. Mangan (Hull, UK: University of Hull Press, 1989), 11–34. See also Rosa Bruno-Jofré, “Citizenship and Schooling in Manitoba, 1918–1945,” Manitoba History 36 (Autumn/Winter 1998–9). 47 “Progress of Guides Highly Recommended,” Marjorie Hoskins folder, Archives of the Manitoba Council of the Girl Guides of Canada, Scrapbook – Clippings – 1920s. 48 Minute book, 14 May 1928, Girl Guides of Canada – Manitoba Council fonds, Archives of Manitoba, P3467/5. 49 Monica Storrs, God’s Galloping Girl: The Peace River Diaries of Monica Storrs, 1929–1931, ed. W.L. Morton (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1979), 61–2. 50 Ibid. 51 Council Fire 11, no. 1 (January 1936): 10.

13 Health and Nation through a Transnational Lens: Radical Doctors and the History of Medicare in Saskatchewan es yllt w. jone s

It would be difficult to find a more emblematic symbol of the Cana­dian nation state than state health insurance, generally referred to in Canada as “medicare.” Its putative founder, the democratic socialist (Cooperative Commonwealth Federation [CCF] / New Democratic Party [NDP]) premier of Saskatchewan, Tommy Douglas, is surrounded by what Ian McKay calls a “charismatic aura” within a “nationalist mythsymbol complex.”1 It was the Saskatchewan CCF, first elected in 1944, that enacted Canada’s first universal government medical-care insurance in 1962, after a bitter physicians’ strike. Although policy debates around state health care in Canada are often cursorily set in an international (read comparative) context, the basic premise remains that the history of medicare is written into and bounded by the history of the Canadian nation state and national identity. In the slim and under-researched literature on the subject, the provincial state is understood as the nation’s constituent part (however troublesome), and federalist constitutional arrangements the most important factor shaping the particular evolution of health care in Canada.2 Developments in Canada, however, cannot be fully understood using a paradigm with the nation state at its centre. The shallowness of the prevailing paradigm, concerned as it is with a small number of male players in elite politics, the views of organized medicine, and the particularities of Canadian welfare-state federalism, might explain why so few historians have shown any interest in the history of medicare. Alternatively, approached as a historic intellectual, social, and political movement, “medicare” – or what this paper will more accurately refer to as socialized medicine – can be seen as embedded in a transnational network of ideas and people who advocated an expanded role for the

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state in public health and medical care as necessary to greater health equality among citizens. I explore the intersection between local and US, British, European, and Soviet knowledge and ideas, viewing events in Saskatchewan in 1944–5, under the CCF’s first electoral mandate, as a junction where broader currents of what might be called socialist health activism originating in diverse spaces met in place and time. The patterns of interconnectedness linking a socialist movement for health are traced through the biographies and intellectual histories of individuals who played a key role in Saskatchewan’s first CCF government health initiative. Outward from this small group expanded a complex web of personal, political, and intellectual relationships, which served to transfer passions and ideals about the state’s responsibility for greater health equality and as a forum for detailed debates about the principles and the pragmatics of socialized medicine. As this network emerges from the haze of the past, the distinctions between a socialist or communist vision of state medicine and the liberal “health insurance” model become evident. Part of the purpose of this project, then, is to uncover the buried history of socialist aspirations for health equality that is missing from existing analyses of policy and programing. Certainly this is, like much history of the workingclass and socialist movements, a story of what was not achieved, a story of failure and of loss. A transnational frame, nonetheless, helps us to get beyond the self-congratulatory, liberal, nationalist narrative of Canadian health-care history. The focus here is on interwar and wartime conversations taking place between advocates during a time when the model of Soviet medicine, in particular, shone a strong light on the failures of health policy in Western liberal democratic states, and when Canadians formed key social movements aimed at transforming health. Examining the views and political engagement of socialist physicians and public health experts, this chapter further complicates our understanding of “medical opinion” about socialized medicine in Canada. Terminology: Or, a Lesson in Suggestive Borrowing Can the transnational help us to understand the history of state policy? This chapter contributes to a literature that seeks to take the nation state into account while employing the transnational as a mode of critique, debunking the myths of nation building. As Marilyn Lake has noted, “Groups subordinated by national political processes have ­often felt empowered through engagement in transnational political

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movements.”3 Socialists, communists, and fellow travellers, marginalized on the national political stage, drew inspiration from leftist politics  beyond Canada’s borders. The interwar years were a moment of significant transnational engagement, as the Canadian left monitored events in the Soviet Union and aligned itself with the struggles of Spanish republicans and Chinese communists. The interwar and war years were also, profoundly, an era when Canadian Jewry was horrified and moved to action by the persecution of Jews in Germany and Europe. Political and social movements sought to transform Canadian domestic and foreign policy by looking beyond Canada. It is also possible to use the transnational, or perhaps more accurately, the translocal, to illuminate the dialectic at work between broader aspirations and discourses of change and the contingencies shaping a locally based political or social movement. Certainly those involved in early debates about socialized medicine in Canada possessed a fairly diverse “politics,” difficult to assess without a rich contextualization; their life experiences as women or men were not uniform. Their connections with one another, which formed the heart of the transnational network, varied in degree if not kind: sometimes close if not intimate, but other times as diffuse as a shared intellectual heritage or reading of key texts. Two interpretive poles suggest themselves here. On the one hand is the argument made by Harold Cook in his Matters of Exchange: Commerce, Medicine and Science in the Dutch Golden Age: “Both the content and the framework of knowledge could be reshaped in the encounters with strangers.”4 Yet, the affective is also at work in what Leela Gandhi terms “the politics of friendship” in radical movements.5 In the case of health politics, ideas circulated through forums that become quite obvious when we look for them: radical newspapers and publications; trade unions, political parties, women’s groups, and other social organizations; universities, medical journals, and professional groupings. Medical workers, as Karen Flynn’s chapter in this collection shows, were as mobile as their ideas. But the passion brought to bear in the debate over health policy was born not only of this intellectual exchange, but also of the bonds between people, in place and in time. Local Context: Health Politics in Saskatchewan A.W. Johnson, in his “biography” of the Douglas government, has argued that the CCF viewed the availability of medical care, alongside economic security, as necessary for individual self-development and

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self-expression.6 The Health Services Survey Commission was struck by Douglas almost immediately after the CCF was elected in June 1944, leading to the creation of the Health Services Planning Commission and the CCF’s first health legislation. Henry Sigerist of Johns Hopkins University, a well-known physician, academic, and political advocate for state medicine in the United States during this era, and Mindel Cherniack Sheps, a CCF activist and Winnipeg physician, were respectively the chair and secretary of the 1944 Health Services Survey Commission, known as the Sigerist commission. As he moved to establish new state-run health services, Douglas recruited to Saskatchewan “the best advisors he could find … from among people with very broad experience.”7 To a significant extent, Douglas turned to the talents and in some cases international reputations of “outsiders,” in health as much as in economic planning. Mindel’s husband, Cecil Sheps, was seconded from the Canadian army and became the first chair of the Health Services Commission in 1945. His tenure there was followed by the arrival of Frederick Dodge Mott, former head of medical programs for Roosevelt’s New Deal Farm Security Administration, in which significant expansion and innovation in state health provision had taken place. With Mott came Leonard Rosenfeld, a former student of Sigerist who had also worked in New Deal health care. Later came J. Wendell Macleod, the first, “red” dean of the University of Saskatchewan medical school. Macleod had trained and worked in Montreal and was involved with Norman Bethune in health politics through the Group for the Security of the People’s Health. Much has been made of Saskatchewan’s export, in the 1960s, of talented public administrators and policy experts – the “Saskatchewan mafia.”8 But Douglas also drew in a diverse cadre of policy advisers, many of whom were not immured in the place and space that was Saskatchewan at the end of the Second World War. Their presence helps us to understand how Saskatchewan, as a place in time, fits into a much larger leftist conversation about equality of the body and the goals of socialized medicine.9 Sigerist and Sheps were the key authors of Saskatchewan’s first health blueprint for socialized medicine. Sigerist’s role has been described in two important articles by Jacalyn Duffin and Leslie Falk.10 When Douglas recruited him to chair the Health Services Survey Commission, Sigerist was a well-known public intellectual in North America and Europe. Born to Swiss parents, he was educated in France, Switzerland, and Germany and came to Johns Hopkins University in

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1932. He remained in the United States until driven out by cold war politics in 1947. He was a historian of medicine, heading up the Johns Hopkins medical history program, but Sigerist was better known in political circles and to the broader public for his advocacy of socialized medicine in the United States, his opposition to a private medical marketplace, and his 1937 book Socialized Medicine in the Soviet Union, which praised Soviet achievements in health.11 It was this reputation that landed Sigerist on the cover of Time magazine in 1939.12 According to Duffin and Falk, Sigerist’s role in Saskatchewan “was that of a distinguished outsider, a well-chosen catalyst who lent authoritative credibility and political detachment to a course of action.”13 While he was an expert with the credibility and clout of a Johns Hopkins academic, he was not politically neutral, but an outspoken public advocate of state medicine, group medical practice, and locally run health centres. He publicly supported and lobbied for the passage of the Wagner-MurrayDingell bill, proposing a national system of health insurance, introduced in the US Congress in 1943. Increasingly associated with communism, by the mid-1940s he was under investigation by the FBI and denied eligibility for government service in the United States.14 Sigerist’s record has tended to overshadow that of Mindel Sheps, whose efforts have also been subsumed by her position as wife, despite the fact that Mindel’s work in Saskatchewan began months before Cecil’s. In the limited material on the couple’s role in Saskatchewan’s early health programs, Mindel and Cecil Sheps are generally described as a “husband and wife team,” as “experienced physicians, as well as socialists of outstanding ability and great energy,” and as “strong personalities.”15 Mindel’s presence as a woman in the political inner circle of government was exceptional, as were her medical achievements as a Jewish woman in interwar Canada. Dr Mindel Sheps had come from Winnipeg to Regina to act as secretary of the Health Services Survey Commission. She was born in Winnipeg in 1913, the daughter of Joseph Alter and Fania (Goldin) Cherniack, immigrants to Winnipeg from southern Russia. She was an academically gifted child, completing grades 10 and 11 in one year.16 She  received her medical degree from the University of Manitoba in 1936, one of a very small number of Jews and women to do so. She did her internship at the Saskatoon City Hospital in 1935 and was a resident at the Winnipeg Children’s Hospital in 1937, which at that time was the only hospital in Winnipeg’s working-class, immigrant north end, where she had grown up. She and her by-then husband, Cecil Sheps,

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went to London in 1937, and Mindel worked in Whitechapel, in east-end London. Her Winnipeg and London experiences both brought home to her the impact of poverty on health. By 1939, Mindel was back in Winnipeg, working in general practice. She worked with Mary Speechly in the Winnipeg Birth Control League, joined the CCF, and was elected a school trustee in 1942, a position from which she resigned in order to serve as the secretary of the Saskatchewan com­mission. Mindel chaired the Manitoba CCF’s research committee on health in 1944, and also served on the party’s national health research committee.17 Mindel and Cecil left Canada for the United States in late 1945. Cecil studied for a master’s degree in public health at Yale. Mindel received her graduate degree in public health in 1950 from the University of North Carolina, and held positions at North Carolina, Columbia, the University of Pittsburgh, and Harvard, where she taught in both the medical school and the school of public health – one of a very few scholars to bridge this gap. After 1963, she published almost exclusively in the field of demographics, in which she was self-taught, researching patterns of female fertility. Sheps also consulted for the Ford Foundation and the World Health Organization, linking her research on fertility patterns and birth control to help solve what was then known as the “population problem” in developing countries. She received an honorary doctorate from the University of Manitoba in 1971, and died in 1973, aged fifty-nine, at the peak of her career. According to her entry in Jewish Women of America, “a critical element of her work was her recognition of the links among poverty, fundamental social inequality, and population growth.” “For Sheps,” the entry continues, “demography became a science that could achieve social justice and clarify issues of women’s rights and equality.”18 Although claimed as a Jewish woman of America, where she died, Mindel Cherniack Sheps came out of what Leo Panitch has called the “radical yiddishist milieu” of Winnipeg’s north end.19 The Jewish left was dominant in the social and cultural life of the district, and its politics were complicated and rich, ranging from the embrace of anarchism, committed communism, and democratic socialism, to the pragmatic politics of Jewish mutual aid organizations. Particularly in the early twentieth century, but lingering well past the Second World War, this leftist Jewish world was intellectually, culturally, and politically connected to other diasporic locales of Jewish life in North America and Europe, both before and after migration. The context of Jewish life in the Russian Pale of Settlement was critical, but so too was an ongoing

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sense of connection to Jewish immigrant centres such as New York. Canadian identity, the Canadian nation state, the nature of a Canadian political life on the North American continent – these were not central questions in the Jewish context of Mindel Cherniack’s early life. As Panitch points out in his personal recollections of his childhood home of  north-end Winnipeg, “insofar as the question of nationalism concerned these radical Jews, it had much more to do, of course, with the question of Jewish national identity and Zionism.”20 The hard questions for Jewish leftists, the national ones over which they struggled, had to do with whether to support Palestine, the integration of Jews into European state socialism, or Soviet communism. The sense of connection the Sheps came to feel with Sigerist and others who shared their health politics and internationalist orientation made sense in this context. Mindel grew up in a left-leaning, socialist but not communist, Jewish extended family. Her father, Alter Cherniack, helped to found the I.L. Peretz Schul, a Jewish radical school, and was called to the bar in 1918. He formed a law practice with British Jewish immigrant Max Hyman, who also lectured at the law school. Hyman was elected to the Manitoba legislature in 1927 for the Independent Labour Party. Although Alter Cherniack was a member of the CCF, during the last years of the Second World War he worked with communists in the League Against Fas­ cism and Anti-Semitism, despite the opposition of the Canadian Jewish Congress to common-front politics.21 Mindel’s mother Fania, too, was active in the Peretz school’s founding and, more broadly, in Jewish communal life; she was a member of the school’s Muter Farein (mother’s club) and helped to establish North America’s first Jewish Kin­ dergarten in 1919. As Ros Usiskin argues, Fania Cherniack and other Jewish women valued modern early childhood education and be­ lieved that “Jewish education should begin with the pre-school child.”22 Fania’s political activity did not begin in Canada, but in Odessa, where she was born during Russia’s late imperial era. Before immigrating to Winnipeg in 1908, she was jailed for her activism in Socialist Territorial­ ist (not Zionist) causes. She was an influential woman in Winnipeg’s radical Jewish community and appears to have encouraged her daughter to push the gendered boundaries of professional and public life. Mindel grew up in a family steeped in leftist electoral politics. Her paternal aunt Rose (Cherniack) Alcin was elected to city council for the Independent Labour Party after the Winnipeg General Strike, the first Jewish woman elected to public office in Canada. Her younger brother

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Saul, a lawyer, also ran for elected office and ultimately served as finance minister in the first NDP government elected in Manitoba in 1969, led by Ed Schreyer. Mindel’s cousin David Orlikow was also a CCF/NDP politician, eventually replacing Stanley Knowles as the NDP member of Parliament for Winnipeg’s north end. Neither Mindel’s mother (a seamstress) nor her father (a watchmaker) had grown up in privileged circumstances in Odessa. After they married in Canada, Fania supported the family while Alter went to law school. Their first two children, a boy and a girl, died as infants. Saul Cherniack describes his mother as a “strong person” and both of his parents as “gender conscious” and feminist.23 As a physician and health-care advocate, what is the significance of Mindel’s Jewishness, her socialism, and her gender? Feminist scholarship would suggest that Jewish women were every bit as excluded from medicine as Christian women were before the nineteenth century. As European Jewry experienced the advantages of emancipation and citizenship, historians such as Harriet Pass Friedenreich have argued, Jews incorporated values of middle-class domesticity that provided opportunities for economic and social mobility for men but not women. Jewish women, like Gentile women, were largely confined to the domestic sphere in nineteenth-century western Europe.24 The importance of Jewish women’s contribution to marshalling Jewishness within family life and religious domestic practice was particularly potent after migration to North America, when Jewish immigrant identity was at stake. While all women were initially barred from medical education, Jewish women eventually moved into the profession in significant numbers, constituting one-third of all women doctors in Germany, for example, by the Nazi era, and were particularly active in providing care to women and children in urban areas. Many Jewish women doctors in Germa­ny were on the political left. Atina Grossmann’s work has demonstrated the commitment of Jewish female and male physicians to work in public clinics and municipal hospitals in interwar Germany. Jewish women doctors were active in movements for access to legalized abortion and birth control.25 The situation of Jews in the Russian Pale, whence most other Winnipeg Jews migrated, was economically different from that of German Jews. Oppression and poverty meant there was little social mobility. East­ ern European Jewish identity, in the context of the vast multiethnic Rus­ sian empire, tended to be both religious and ethnic, with the maintenance of separate language, for example, being more important than it

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was for central European Jews. Class, too, was essential to shaping the lives of Russian Jewish women; poverty often meant that Jewish women and girls played an essential economic role in family life. Paula Hyman has argued that “the strong, capable working woman … [was a] dominant cultural ideal.”26 Jewish women, as in Germany, took advantage of opportunities for medical education when the Russian state made them available. In 1889, after a brief period during which women had been encouraged to enter medicine, Jewish women represented 24 per cent of all female physicians, though Jews made up only 4 per cent of the total population of the Russian empire.27 They often saw their role as women in medicine as a calling and, like Jewish women in Germany, were likely to work in urban clinics or in some variety of community health supported by the state, such as the rural regional (zemstvo) clinics and hospitals. In the words of one such physician, Mariya Rashkovich, their commitment was “to be useful to the people through specialized knowledge.”28 Many Jewish women studying medicine, like Rashkovich, came from the “New Russia,” particularly from Odessa, the home city of Mindel Cherniack’s parents.29 The European tradition of Jewish women in medicine laid a backdrop for Mindel’s experience. The gender norms that so often undermined the possibilities for young Jewish women in post-migration North America did not seem to have significantly confined her life. As a woman and a Jew in Depression-era Winnipeg, a city in which antiSemitism functioned openly, Mindel crossed boundaries when she graduated from medical school, was elected to public office, and took up a senior position in the Douglas administration. Connection: Friendship and Health Politics When Mindel met him, Henry Sigerist was an influential figure for a young group of self-identified physician radicals in the United States and beyond (who later called themselves the “careniks”)30 that included Cecil and Mindel Sheps. The relationship between Mindel Cherni­ ack Sheps and Henry Sigerist, and the brief but seemingly intense time they spent together in Saskatchewan, illustrates the strands of the transnational story of health politics and suggests the passion felt about both the project of socialized medicine and the details of its structure and organization. As individuals, Sigerist and Cherniack Sheps are interesting, but in relation to one another they reveal the broader network of a movement.

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When Douglas won the June 1944 election in Saskatchewan, the war was not yet over. By 20 July, he had cabled Sigerist, requesting him to lead a survey of provincial health services and recommend a framework for the future. Sigerist accepted almost immediately. A key factor in the interest in Saskatchewan expressed by Sigerist and other Ameri­ can physician radicals was the political climate in the United States itself. Roosevelt had failed to include health care in his New Deal Social Security Act, and the Wagner-Murray-Dingell bill was ultimately defeated, largely as a result of a powerful anti-state-medicine lobby from private health insurers, the American Hospital Association, the United States Chamber of Commerce, and the American Medical Association.31 As a result of these historic defeats in their own nation state, US progressives viewed Saskatchewan in a positive light, and the province was able to recruit key individuals who would shape and implement ideas expressed by advocates of state medicine. Mindel Cherniack Sheps first wrote to Sigerist on 12 August 1944 – the beginning of a lengthy correspondence with Sigerist that would not end until the late 1940s, after he had returned to Europe. She was familiar with Sigerist’s published work, beginning with Socialized Medicine in the Soviet Union. In 1941, and again in 1943, her husband Cecil had been in communication with Sigerist, requesting information about his courses in social medicine at Johns Hopkins and about the American Journal of Soviet Medicine, which Sigerist founded and edited.32 Mindel wrote to Sigerist after he left Regina, confessing her frustration at the slow pace of progress, her exhaustion, and her desire for him to return. These were affectionate and caring letters on both their parts, showing how deeply the two had connected during the few weeks they spent together in Saskatchewan in the fall of 1944. When Sigerist arrived in Regina in early September, the commission began a demanding agenda, touring the province and hearing eightyeight briefs from members of the public.33 When he left in October, Mindel was both euphoric and exhausted. She wrote emotionally to him shortly after he left, “I didn’t find it possible to tell you orally how much this last month has meant to me. The opportunity of working with you and learning from you has been the greatest I’ve ever had, and one that I shall always remember with gratitude. The privilege of knowing you and being in such close contact with you is something to appreciate all my life.”34 A few days later she wrote, “I feel physically and mentally exhausted. I didn’t start feeling really tired till last night and today I’m in a daze.”35 She was to experience bouts of ill health

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throughout the next year. Sigerist expressed his concern for Mindel: “What you need is ‘a nice home, plenty of wholesome food, warm clothing and fuel’ rather than medical care (to quote from one of my speeches).”36 Mindel’s time in Saskatchewan was filled with the joys of political commitment, friendship, and family. She and Cecil bought a home in Regina and adopted their son, Sam. While in Saskatchewan, Mindel became good friends with George and Barbara Cadbury. George Cadbury, grandson of the nineteenth-century British Quaker and chocolate manufacturer, was another adviser recruited from outside the province. A British socialist, he had studied with John Maynard Keynes and was hired by Douglas to head the Economic Advisory and Planning Board, a planning secretariat.37 Barbara Cadbury, George’s wife, describes Mindel’s time in Saskatchewan as being richly busy beyond her work in the health department; building not just policy, but a network of close friendships in a specifically gendered way. She recalled, upon Mindel’s death: That prairie town was never lonely for me, a Londoner, with Mindel a block away … We helped with each other’s children, worked together at consumer co-operatives, [for] the equitable treatment of women schoolteachers, and the care and feeding of a baby suddenly bereft of its mother – the child of one of our staff – all projects which were absorbing of my mental energies … The inspiration of those days diminished, of course. In youth you do not realize that the dawn cannot last all day. But it was when the Sheps left Saskatchewan … that we realized how much those two were both the zest and the solid foundation of the whole experiment in the public good. For me at least it never recovered without them.38

Modelling Socialized Medicine The Sigerist commission’s records indicate that the Saskatchewan public had well-defined ideas about what socialized medicine would look like in the province, and that local organizations, including unions and municipalities, expected Douglas to introduce policy that built upon earlier achievements in municipal medicine. The Sigerist commission recommended the creation of health districts as administrative units for both preventative and curative health services. This holistic model, which attempted to break down the boundaries between public health

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and medicine, would see public health nurses and sanitation officers working with regional medical officers of health to provide child health clinics, for example. Health districts would establish small rural health centres with eight to ten hospital beds and simple laboratory and supportive services, as well as district centres with more specialized care and higher bed capacity. “Base hospitals” in Saskatoon and Regina would provide the most complex and specialized care. This organizational model, at the heart of which was the idea of a health centre providing an array of coordinated public health and primary care services, was one with a remarkable cogency in the interwar North Atlantic world. Some version of this system of organizing and delivering health care was advocated or (less often) implemented throughout the North Atlantic world before the Second World War. It was one of those ideas of the moment, the origins of which are difficult to locate precisely. The model was most likely first realized in the Soviet Union, where the “polyclinic” formed a key plank in post-revolutionary health services.39 Ultimately, the Sheps left Saskatchewan frustrated with the lack of immediate progress towards the commission report’s stated goals. When Sigerist returned to Baltimore, Mindel Sheps was left to draft the Douglas government’s new legislation to create a Health Services Plan­ ning Commission, which would implement the health districts framework and decide on crucial questions of how to organize and finance services. When the planning commission was established, she was, again, made secretary, and her husband, Cecil, was made acting chair. In its 1945 report, the commission stressed the importance of local autonomy, in balance with central “supervision and co-ordination.”40 For a variety of reasons, including medical opposition and Douglas’s fiscally cautious approach, implementation of the Sigerist commission recommendations proceeded either at a snail’s pace or not at all, in the short and medium term.41 To Mindel’s dismay, medical opposition to a decentralized system with health centres at its core was immediately evident.42 Cecil did not find it easy to strike a compromise with the medical profession, particularly over the question of fee-for-service versus salaried payment, and apparently disagreed with Douglas’s attempts to pacify physicians who were opposed to his health-care agenda. Although this dis­ agreement may have contributed to the couple’s departure from Saskatchewan, it is also apparent that the Sheps had ambitions elsewhere. Cecil resigned as chair of the Health Services Planning Commission, and he and Mindel left for the United States, where Cecil

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attended Yale, studying with prominent progressive public-health experts with the financial support of a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship.  The Sheps worked to secure Fred Mott as Cecil’s replacement. Mott had been acting chief medical officer of the medical-care program of Roosevelt’s New Deal Farm Security Administration from 1942–6. Mott had close ties to Canada. His wife was from Winnipeg, and he had been educated at the McGill medical school. His career, like the Sheps’, spanned the Canada-US border.43 Conclusion In a recent article about the “promise and problems” of transnational history, Marilyn Lake begins with the statement “History … made its career as a handmaiden to the nation-state … History was, as often as not, the record of men’s public work of nation-building.”44 This is an accurate statement, too, for the history of medicare in Canada, such as it is currently written. Thus, to answer Ian McKay’s question “Why did the nation loom so large?”45 in this era in Canadian socialism, it is in part because historians have made it so, marginalizing counter-currents in the process. Some aspects of the left in Canada are relatively well researched, but the history of electoral socialism is not one of them; nor is the history  of women, immigrants, or Indigenous peoples within the broader left. As Franca Iacovetta has pointed out, greater attention to such lives and experiences inevitably serves to “transnationalize,” if by that we mean it moves the nation state more properly into perspective.46 Any discussion of health care in Saskatchewan under the CCF cannot avoid the problem of the state; democratic socialism was predicated on the belief, however problematic, that the state could be made to serve the needs of “the people.” The exact shape of the nation state in health provision in the 1940s was not yet determined, however, but remained a subject of debate and experimentation, much of which took place in the context of a transnational conversation. In this conversation, which paid a great deal of attention to questions about how best to organize health services around a multidisciplinary local health centre that integrated primary and preventive care, and which remained cognizant of the health effects of capitalist inequality, a rough consensus emerged about the social and political means of addressing health inequality. This model was rarely realized in the North Atlantic world. In  Canada, state medicine became state health insurance more narrowly defined, and the social and economic underpinnings of health

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inequality remained almost unchallenged. Radical advocates of socialized medicine tended to see the state structures they built as bearers of the people’s desires. The seeds of this embrace of the socialist (nation) state are everywhere evident in the idealism of the interwar period, which was, at the same time, heavily tinged by leftist internationalism. Perry Anderson has argued that nationalism and internationalism are inseparable, two sides of the same coin.47 Applied to interwar health politics, such an interpretation would suggest that, while transnational in orientation, the dreams of these passionate advocates remained in tension with and embedded in the nation state. NOTES 1 Ian McKay, “For a New Kind of History: A Reconnaissance of 100 Years of Canadian Socialism,” Labour/Le Travail 46 (Fall 2000): 96. 2 The classic histories of state health care in Canada include C. David Naylor, Private Practice, Public Payment: Canadian Medicine and the Politics of Health Insurance, 1911–1966 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1986) and Malcolm G. Taylor, Health Insurance and Canadian Public Policy: The Seven Decisions That Created the Canadian Health Insurance System (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1978). Neither author is a professionally trained historian. The focus on nation state remains in newer literature on health care, such as Carolyn Hughes Tuohy, Accidental Logics: The Dynamics of Change in the Health Care Arena in the United States, Britain, and Canada (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). Tuohy contributes nothing new to Naylor or Taylor’s version of the historical development of state-supported health care in Canada, but cites extensively from both. Recent research, though not transnational in approach, includes Gregory P. Marchildon, ed., Making Medicare: New Perspectives on the History of Medicare in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012). 3 Marilyn Lake, “Nationalist Historiography, Feminist Scholarship, and the Promise and Problems of New Transnational Histories: The Australian Case,” Journal of Women’s History 19, no. 1 (2007): 183. 4 Harold J. Cook, Matters of Exchange: Commerce, Medicine and Science in the Dutch Golden Age (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 48. 5 Leela Gandhi, Affective Communities: Anticolonial Thought, Fin-de-Siècle Radicalism, and the Politics of Friendship (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006).

Health and Nation through a Transnational Lens  307 6 A.W. Johnson, Dream No Little Dreams: A Biography of the Douglas Government in Saskatchewan, 1944–1961 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004). 7 Ibid., 77. 8 See, for example, Gregory P. Marchildon, “Public Administration and Policy Innovation in a Federal State: The Saskatchewan Tradition,” speaking notes, public lecture, Faculty of Administration, University of Regina, 8 January 2001, http://www.uregina.ca/sipp/documents/pdf/gmjan.pdf. 9 J. Wendell Macleod was significantly influenced, as were the Sheps, by the internationalism of Norman Bethune, a fellow physician and radical health advocate. See Louis Horlick, J. Wendell Macleod: Saskatchewan’s Red Dean (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2007), ­20–4; Wendell MacLeod, Libbie Park, and Stanley B. Ryerson, Bethune: The Montreal Years (Toronto: James Lorimer & Co., 1978); Libbie Park, “The Bethune Health Group,” in Norman Bethune: His Times and His Legacy, ed. David A.E. Shepard and Andrée Lévesque (Ottawa: Canadian Public Health Association, 1982), 138–44. 10 J.M. Duffin, “The Guru and the Godfather: Henry Sigerist, Hugh MacLean, and the Politics of Health Care Reform in 1940s Canada,” Canadian Bulletin of Medical History 9 (1992): 191–218; J. Duffin and L.A. Falk, “Sigerist in Saskatchewan: The Quest for Balance in Social and Technical Medicine,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 70, no. 4 (1996): 658–83. 11 Although there is no space here to discuss the attention in Europe and North America to Soviet experiments in health, the Soviet Union was the object of considerable interest in the post-revolutionary period, and many Westerners, including physicians and public health advocates, visited the country and wrote about it. See Park, “The Bethune Health Group,” 138. 12 See Elizabeth Fee and Theodore M. Brown, eds., Making Medical History: The Life and Times of Henry E. Sigerist (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997). 13 Duffin and Falk, “Sigerist in Saskatchewan,” 660. 14 Elizabeth Fee, “The Pleasures and Perils of Prophetic Advocacy: Socialized Medicine and the Politics of American Medical Reform,” in Fee and Brown, eds., Making Medical History, 216. 15 These quotes are from, respectively, Johnson, Dream No Little Dreams, 79; Thomas H. McLeod and Ian McLeod, Tommy Douglas: The Road to Jerusalem, 2nd ed. (Calgary: Fifth House, 2004), 185; and Johnson, ibid. 16 Personal interview with Saul Cherniack, 25 April 2005. 17 Mindel Sheps to Henry Sigerist, 12 August 1944, Sigerist Collection, Alan Mason Chesney Medical Archives (hereafter AMCMA), box 153, folder 12.

308  Esyllt W. Jones 18 Paula E. Hyman and Deborah Dash Moore, eds., Jewish Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia (New York: Routledge, 1997): 1242–3. 19 Leo Panitch, “Back to the Future: Contextualizing the Legacy,’ in Jewish Radicalism in Winnipeg, 1905–1960, ed. Daniel Stone, vol. 8 of Jewish Life and Times (Winnipeg: Jewish Heritage Centre of Western Canada, 2002), 10. 20 Ibid., 22. 21 Henry Srebrnik, “Birobidzhan on the Prairies: Two Decades of Pro-Soviet Jewish Movements in Winnipeg,” in Stone, ed., Jewish Radicalism in Winnipeg, 179. 22 Roz Usiskin, “Winnipeg’s Jewish Women of the Left: Traditional and Radical,” in Stone, Jewish Radicalism in Winnipeg, 112. 23 Personal interview with Saul Cherniack, 25 April 2005. 24 Harriet Pass Friedenreich, Female, Jewish and Educated: The Lives of Central European University Women (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 2002), 2–4. 25 Atina Grossmann, Reforming Sex: The German Movement for Birth Control and Abortion Reform, 1920–1950 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). 26 Paula Hyman, Gender and Assimilation in Modern Jewish History: The Roles and Representation of Women (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1995), 68. 27 Carole B. Balin, “The Call to Serve: Jewish Women Medical Students in Russia, 1872–1887,” in Jewish Women in Eastern Europe, ed. Chaeran Freeze, Paula Hyman, and Antony Polonsky (Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2005), 134. 28 Quoted ibid., 151. 29 Ibid., 142. 30 Donald L. Madison, “Remembering Cecil,” in Cecil G. Sheps Memorial Volume (Chapel Hill: Cecil G. Sheps Center for Health Services Research, University of North Carolina, 2005), 11. 31 Alan Derickson, Health Security for All: Dreams of Universal Health Care in America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005); Jill Quadagno, One Nation, Uninsured: Why the U.S. Has No National Health Insurance (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); Daniel M. Fox, Health Policies, Health Politics: The British and American Experience, 1911–1965 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986). 32 Personal correspondence between Henry Sigerist and Cecil Sheps, 18 September 1941 and ca. October 1943, Sigerist Collection, AMCMA, box 53, folder 8; box 138, folder 8. 33 Saskatchewan Archives Board, “A Checklist of the Records of the Saskatchewan Health Services Survey Commission (Sigerist Commission), 1944.”

Health and Nation through a Transnational Lens  309 34 Mindel Sheps to Henry Sigerist, 4 October 1944, Sigerist Collection, AMCMA, box 153, folder 12. 35 Mindel Sheps to Henry Sigerist, 6 October 1944, ibid. 36 Henry Sigerist to Mindel Sheps, 9 October 1944, ibid. 37 Johnson, Dream No Little Dreams, 120. 38 Barbara Cadbury, remarks at the memorial service for Mindel Cherniack Sheps, 18 January 1973, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Personal papers of Saul Cherniack. 39 On health centres in Britain, see Abigail Beach, “Potential for Participation: Health Centres and the Idea of Citizenship 1920–1940,” in Regenerating England: Science, Medicine and Culture in Inter-War Britain, ed. Christopher Lawrence and Anna-K. Mayer (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000); J. Lewis and B. Brookes, “The Peckham Health Centre, ‘PEP,’ and the Concept of General Practice during the 1930s and 1940s,” ­Medical History 27 (1983); Pyrs Gruffudd, “Science and the Stuff of Life: Modernist Health Centres in 1930s London,” Journal of Historical Geography 27, no. 3 (2001); John Stewart, “Socialist Proposals for Health Reform in Inter-War Britain: The Case of Somerville Hastings,” Medical History 39 (1995). For Soviet medicine after the Bolshevik Revolution, see Susan Gross Solomon and John Hutchinson, Health and Society in Revolutionary Russia (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990); Mark G. Field, Soviet Socialized Medicine: An Introduction (New York: The Free Press, 1967). 40 Quoted in Johnson, Dream No Little Dreams, 79. 41 For medical opposition, see Gordon S. Lawson, “The Road Not Taken: The 1945 Health Services Planning Commission Proposals and Physician Remuneration in Saskatchewan,” Canadian Bulletin of Medical History 26, no. 2 (December 2009): 395–427. 42 Mindel wrote with evident sarcasm to Sigerist in March 1945, “The doctors on the Advisory Committee found that [the regions] did not agree with their perfectionist standards, and that what we needed were large hospitals and centres where the people could travel from sixty to a hundred miles, and have all their health needs looked after by city practitioners.” Mindel Sheps to Henry Sigerist, 5 March 1945, Sigerist Collection, AMCMA, box 153, folder 12. 43 Michael R. Grey, New Deal Medicine: The Rural Health Programs of the Farm Security Administration (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999). See also Jayne Elliot’s review of this title in the Canadian Bulletin of Medical History 18, no. 1 (2001): 160–2. 44 Lake, ‘Nationalist Historiography,’ 180.

310  Esyllt W. Jones 45 McKay, “For a New Kind of History,” 95–109. This is what he refers to as the “third socialism: national state management,” a phase lasting from the early 1930s until the 1960s and the arrival of the New Left. 46 See, for example, Donna Gabbaccia and Franca Iacovetta, eds., Women, Gender and Transnational Lives: Italian Workers of the World (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002). 47 Perry Anderson, “Internationalism: A Breviary,” New Left Review 14 (March 2002): 5–26.

14 Progressive Catholicism at Home and Abroad: The “Double Solidarité” of Quebec Missionaries in Honduras, 1955–1975 f red bur r ill an d cat h e rin e c. l e g r a n d

Historians writing on Quebec have long grappled with questions of nation, nationalisms, and the creation of historical narratives. As an analytical tool, an idea motivating historical actors, and a persistent reality manifested in the daily challenges posed by linguistic difference, the concept of nation has cast long shadows over the work of historians and rooted deeply in the soil of popular memory and collective self-understanding in Quebec.1 Thinking transnationally – that is, analytically and methodologically decentring the nation by attending to the complex circulation of people and ideas between Quebec and other parts of the world, especially the global South – may help generate novel insights about past and present configurations of power in the province. Like elsewhere in Canada and the world, work along these lines is taking off in Quebec. Though their work does not always fall under the rubric of “transnational history,” historians and other researchers in Quebec are beginning to focus on the wider context of shifts and ­divisions within Quebec society. They are moving from an emphasis on national narratives to underlining the histoires connectées of social groups in Quebec with their counterparts abroad, stressing themes of interaction and solidarity.2 Scholars thinking and writing about the turbulent decades of the 1960s and 1970s in the province have looked to the ways in which these years, often framed within the neo-nationalist narrative of the Quiet Revolution, were deeply implicated in and informed by globalized forms of political struggle.3 At the same time, there has been a push to reformulate analyses of the role of the Catho­ lic church in twentieth-century Quebec, highlighting the importance of  transnational debates within Catholic thought and practice to the

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political and social modernization of the province.4 Our study builds on these efforts through a consideration of Catholic missionary connections between Quebec and Latin America during the dawn of liberation theology in Latin America and the Quiet Revolution in Quebec. Foreign mission work has been central to the religious life of Canada, and particularly Quebec, since the early twentieth century. By the end of the 1950s, 3300 Canadian Catholics (mostly francophone Quebecers) were overseas in sixty-eight countries around the world.5 Situat­ ed  within the often contentious confluence of competing European projects of “civilization,” and in an ongoing colonial relationship with Indigenous communities within its own geo-political boundaries, Quebec proved to be an ideal recruiting ground for young men and women who participated in the imperial projects of other countries. Quebecers became important religious and authority figures in the British and French “scramble for Africa” and enthusiastic participants in the early-twentieth-century rush to convert the peoples of Asia.6 This mission work, in turn, structured the basic categories through which people in Quebec came to learn and think about the wider world and their place in it, in schools, parishes, and newspapers.7 These transnational networks, however, were not solely a means for acting out Quebec’s internal colonial dynamics on the rest of the world. The missionary-forged connection between the North and the global South, particularly since the 1960s and especially with regard to Que­ becers’ mission work in Latin America, could also be an important space for cross-border solidarities and progressive change in both hemispheres. Experiencing from a Latin American position the rise of liberation theology and new practices of socially oriented Catholicism, Quebecers were deeply shaped by their time spent living with marginal peasant and working-class communities throughout Central and South America. In turn, the shifting political currents of their home province also affected the ways in which Quebec missionaries viewed social problems and struggles abroad, a dual orientation that played itself out both in their missionary endeavours and in their efforts to raise consciousness in Quebec society about the struggle for social justice around the world.8 One of the major obstacles to the realization of transnational research is the challenge of bridging the gap between different historiographies. Historians of Latin America, too, are turning towards analyses of interactions and connections, addressing questions of empire, tensions between regional and national identity, and migration.9 What

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follows is our collaborative effort, as a student of Quebec history and a Latin Americanist, to examine the case of Quebec Catholic missionaries in Honduras in the second half of the twentieth century. This effort focuses on the work of the Laval, Quebec–based Société des MissionsÉtrangères (Society of Foreign Missions). Through this particular story, we advance some reflections on the contradictory and complex nature of the connection between Quebec and the global South. Called to accept responsibility for religious life in the southern Honduran department of Choluteca in the summer of 1955, these Quebec priests and the links they forged with peasants in the countryside over succeeding decades have much to tell us about the mutually constitutive relationship between Quebec society and social movements in other parts of the world. Recovering the ideational and physical networks established in this missionary project is a centrally important strategy for thinking more clearly about the tangled webs of power and resistance built into the political and social space of both Quebec progressive politics and Honduran rural social movements. We begin by describing the economic, political, and religious context into which the Quebec priests moved in Honduras in the late 1950s and 1960s. Deeply influenced by the worsening life conditions of their rural parishioners, the Quebecers responded by spearheading the creation of radio schools, a peasant leadership training centre, and Chris­ tian base communities that contributed in significant ways to the emergence of Central America’s most important peasant land-reclamation social movement. We then shift back to what was happening in Quebec in the same decades. We argue that to understand the role played by these Quebec priests in Honduras in the 1960s and 1970s, it is essential to take into account certain formative experiences that young priests-in-­training underwent in Montreal that related to the Quiet Revolution and also Vatican II.10 In the last section, we explore the meanings of the “double solidarity” that some Quebec priests who served in Honduras articulated to express their commitments that encompassed both Quebec and Central America, and we suggest how their transnational involvements radiated out to affect civil society. Honduras Wedged between Guatemala and El Salvador to the west and Nicaragua to the south-east, Honduras has been called the quintessential “banana  republic” because, for most of the twentieth century, its export

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economy centred on the United Fruit Company–controlled banana enclave along the Caribbean coast. The rest of the small country was mainly populated by mestizo, Spanish-speaking peasants (campesinos) producing subsistence crops and running a few cattle on communal or public lands. In the late 1950s, pressure on peasant land intensified due to ongoing population growth, an influx of squatters from El Salvador, and the United Fruit Company’s decision to drastically cut its workforce. Then, in the 1960s, many Honduran peasants were pushed off their farms by the expansion of large rural estates when new export products – cotton and beef, to supply North America’s burgeoning fast food industry – took off.11 This agrarian transformation most affected the major cattle-producing area of the country along the southern Pacific coast, the region of Choluteca assigned to the Quebec priests (see figure 14.1). The Catholic church as an institution was particularly weak in Honduras: liberal reforms of the nineteenth century had stripped it of property and its control of education, and then military dictator General Tiburcio Carías Andino made sure, in the 1930s and 1940s, that the archbishopric was left empty. By the 1950s, there was less than one priest for every 10,000 Hondurans. At mid-century, a new archbishop welcomed foreign orders from Spain, the United States, Italy, and Canada to become parish priests in rural parts of Honduras and to ­assume spiritual and administrative responsibility for whole departments.12 The Quebec Prêtres des Missions-Étrangères (p.m.é.) received not only the department of Choluteca, more than 2600 square kilometres in area, but also two parishes in Tegucigalpa, the capital of Honduras. In contrast to its neighbours (Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua), where military dictators refused to consider land redistribution, the Honduran military demonstrated a reformist impulse, passing agrarian reform laws in 1962 and 1972 that gave peasants some hope that they might resist the onslaught of the cattle ranchers.13 Meanwhile, in the wake of the Cuban revolution, the perception of communist menace spurred Catholic leaders to become more active among the country’s rural poor. In the 1960s, the Honduran church hierarchy was open to community development initiatives and to engagement with progressive Christian doctrines associated with the nascent Christian Demo­ cratic party, the teachings of the Second Vatican Council in Rome, and the Latin American Bishops’ Conference of 1968.14 From intensified capitalist export growth, the curtailing of the al­ ternative of wage employment on the banana plantations, and the

Progressive Catholicism at Home and Abroad  315

14.1  Honduras, 1955–1975: Departments under the Religious Supervision of North American Missionaries

hope of state support proffered by the rather ineffective agrarian reform laws, there emerged in Honduras an important campesino movement centred on land reclamation that came out of the Catholic social movement of these years. The Société des Missions-Étrangères played a crucial role in the flowering of these efforts, and the priests themselves were transformed by what they lived in Honduras. The popular rural religious movement that the Quebec priests helped initiate created new forms of organization and critical social consciousness, new institutional spaces, and new representations of legitimacy that informed the incipient Honduran social movements of the 1960s and 1970s.15 Our analysis draws on intersecting sources – interviews with and documents of ­missionaries and those who observed and supported their work, the Society of Foreign Missions magazine distributed in Quebec, and the writings of Honduran historians and sociologists. The silences in this archive are palpable: particularly within the missionary sources, there is a paucity of campesino voices and reflections. We struggle with these gaps but recognize them as the perhaps

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inevitable limitation of the initial and tentative first steps in building new historiographical connections.16 Radio Schools, Housewives’ Clubs, and Delegates of the Word: Forming Lay Leaders in Rural Communities Early in the Cold War, there was a significant push from the Vatican for the Canadian and American churches to assume responsibility for the fight against communism and Protestantism in Latin America.17 In the March 1955 edition of its magazine Missions Étrangères, the Societé des Missions-Étrangères published a rather imposing table of numbers on the “Vocational Crisis in Latin America,” noting particularly the dire lack of priests in Honduras, Guatemala, and the Dominican Republic.18 In June of that year, at the behest of the archbishop of Tegucigalpa,19 two p.m.é. priests, Henri J. Coursol Jr and Guillaume Aubuchon, were sent to Choluteca. Their reasons for being there were typical of the times: Choluteca had 120,000 Catholics but only two priests, and the people’s “insufficient knowledge of Christian apologetics” left them “defenceless in the face of Communist and Protestant propaganda.”20 Jefferson Boyer, a Peace Corps volunteer who lived and worked with the Quebec priests on community development projects in Nacome, Choluteca, in the early 1960s, provides an outsider’s perspective on how the priests from Quebec adapted to Honduras. In May 2008 he remembered that “many of them came from big Catholic families and from small towns and rural settings” and that they adapted well to rural Honduras. “Once they picked up the local Spanish and got their feet on the ground, they were at ease with campesinos and rural elites. They laughed, joked, worked hard and played hard too.”21 In the articles they sent home, the Quebecers often remarked on the poverty of rural communities in Honduras and the dignity with which people struggled through it. By the end of the decade, fifteen priests from the Society were working in Honduras, and they were writing urgent requests for funding for projects under way.22 If, moving into the 1960s, the Quebec Foreign Missions priests were still primarily concerned with proper observance of the sacraments, the practical challenges they faced were moving them slowly in new directions. Eighty per cent of the population of Choluteca in those years was rural, scattered over coastal lowlands and highland terrain further inland.23 In their letters home, the talk of the missionaries revolved around the practical challenges of their work, dealing with the geographical

Progressive Catholicism at Home and Abroad  317

exigencies of the territory they were supposed to cover, the climate, and the hazards of travel.24 In 1961 the Society accepted responsibility for the neighbouring department of El Valle, increasing the total area assigned to the Quebec priests to 3500 square kilometres and the population of which they had charge to 225,000 souls.25 To supplement the paucity of trained church people, the p.m.é. began to put increasing emphasis on traditional lay organizations, focusing primarily on pastoral care, family, and youth.26 But in the early 1960s, as the Honduran church turned to an emphasis on community economic development as an integral part of its pastoral work in response to Pope John XXIII’s social encyclicals, the Cuban revolution, and the US Alliance for Progress, the relations between these parish priests and their rural constituency began to take new forms. A seminally important project of these early years was the radio school movement. The Honduran hierarchy saw radio as an exciting new way to reach rural populations vulnerable to communist influence.27 In 1959 the Honduran church founded a new radio station called “The Voice of Suyapa (La Voz de Suyapa),” and Father Jean-Paul Guillet, p.m.é., who had experimented previously with broadcasting, was brought in as director of programming.28 In September 1961, Father Guillet was named director of a new system of radio schools. The schools were intended to spread literacy to adults in a country where more than 60 per cent of the rural population could neither read nor write. At the same time, the radio schools were an important source of community involvement and leadership generation, as groups of adults in the villages who received classes by radio were led by a local coordinator (monitor or professeur auxiliaire) expected to “recruit students, receive the teaching materials, help students to carry out the broadcast class exercises, give reports on attendance, and give simple exams at the end of the year’s classes.”29 To train the coordinators – many of whom were middling peasants with slightly more resources and education than their peers – the p.m.é. brought them together for discussions that emphasized that becoming literate was not just a technical skill but a process of growing personal awareness: literacy meant awakening their communities to the reality of their problems and acting to solve them. Honduran historian Marcos Carías says that the radio schools gave birth to a social movement.30 The important changes of Vatican II, which called for greater lay participation and reoriented Catholic church activity towards active engagement with concrete socio-economic and political problems, were

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filtering into the consciousness of the Society in these early years of the  1960s and being fed by the on-the-ground experience of the missionaries.31 In March of 1964, Father Yvan Labelle, in a letter to Missions Étrangères, spoke of Vatican II’s missive “The Tasks of the Church in Latin America”: “In reading this document and in writing to you, I think of all the priests who are working so hard,” he stated, especially “Father Pablo Guillet … who gives body and soul to organizing and administering the Radio Schools throughout the Honduran countryside.”32 In these early years, Guillet operated within the “development” framework33 that, in confronting structural obstacles to improving the lives of the poor, was morphing into the more radical Catholic concept and practice of “liberation.”34 Jefferson Boyer writes that: The Vatican II 1960s was a special time for priests and nuns in Honduras who wanted to become active in rural community development ... in order for campesinos to overcome backwardness, illiteracy, etc. and become selfstarting farmers, active citizens and “modern,” perhaps paralleling what their own families had endeavoured to do back in Quebec.35

In the late 1950s, the first National Federation of Honduran Campesi­ nos (FENACH) was formed. Heavily influenced by Communist party organizers, it was forced to disband in the early 1960s, and was replaced by the American-influenced peasant union ANACH. In these same years, the more activist, less government-controlled National Campesi­ no Union (UNC) began to coalesce out of local community organizing promoted by missionary priests in three parts of the country that were foci of peasant dispossession and struggles over land.36 These included Choluteca, the site of the Canadian priests, Olancho, under the ministry of American Franciscans, and parts of the north coast, administered by Jesuits from the United States.37 In the early 1960s, Father Guillet and other p.m.é. missionaries encouraged the formation of local campesino organizations and cooperatives, asking representatives from the new peasant leagues (ligas campesinas) to attend monthly meetings of radio school monitors and working with Christian Democratic organizations and several priests from Antigonish, Nova Scotia, to train local leaders in cooperative techniques. As one contemporary observer noted, “The experience of the radio school movement is now forming the basis for a  large system of consumer cooperatives in southern Honduras.”38 The Church, however, was reluctant to see the project devolve too far from its control: Guillet ran into heavy opposition when he suggested

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passing the administrative responsibilities for the program to a committee of lay people, such that he felt it necessary to return to Quebec to let the controversy die down.39 In September 1964, Pope Paul VI declared the creation of a new prelature in Honduras (functionally equivalent to a diocese), withdrawing the departments of Choluteca and El Valle from the archdiocese of Tegucigalpa and making Quebecer Monsignor Marcel Gérin, p.m.é., the new prelate. In 1967 Gérin was instituted as full-fledged bishop of the region, a position that he took up “fully in the spirit of Vatican II.”40 Mgr. Gérin saw the radio schools as a major element of rural development in the southern departments, and he pushed for the establishment of the first peasant regional training centre in the city of Choluteca.41 On Saturday, 24 September 1966, more than 4000 campesinos descended on Choluteca to celebrate the opening of the Centre for Peas­ ant Formation (Centro de Capacitación para Campesinos), otherwise known as The Beehive (La Colmena), a new headquarters for educating and training peasant leaders. Most of the crowd was made up of students from the radio school program, and Father Guillet, returned from Quebec to become director of the centre, was in the front row of the procession. In communicating to its Quebec readership the importance of this initiative, Missions Étrangères articulated how the development ideology of the early 1960s was becoming a new liberatory position: The foundation of the Centre marks a new stage in the progressive liberation of poor people. It will permit the humble to emerge from isolation, to learn new work techniques, to improve their social condition. It will teach them to unite against the forces of exploitation … and to realize how forming cooperatives is a good response to their income and production problems.42

The Beehive became a centre for peasant consciousness-raising (the word in Spanish is conscientización) and radicalization. According to historian Marcos Carías, La Colmena was the generative focus out of which spread the new social-activist position of the Honduran Catholic church, and similar centres soon sprang up in other regions. Peasant study groups analysed the socio-economic situation of the country, problems of marginality, agrarian sociology and economics, the history of salvation, and how to be a leader in one’s community.43 Father Guillet established contacts with and hired teachers trained in the Christian social movements of Venezuela, Chile, and Brazil.44 At La Colmena, he

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also used social-animation techniques he had learned at the Institut Desjardins in Quebec. Inspired in part by socialist and emancipatory Christian practices from Latin America and the consciousness-raising work of literacy advocate Paulo Freire of Brazil, animation sociale in Quebec in the 1960s was an approach to community organizing that emphasized citizen participation and forming self-help groups with local leaders to address the root causes of poverty and pressure municipal governments for change.45 In 1969 Father Guillet helped to found Radio Paz, a regional broadcasting station for Choluteca and El Valle that helped forge networks among isolated rural communities and organizations.46 When this initiative was shut down by the military government in 1975 during a period of repression of popular movements, another project called Radio Valle was born from its ashes.47 Over this period, The Beehive and the radio schools were foundational in the growth of “community development, rural housewives’ activities, the promotion of credit union cooperatives, the formation of peasant organizations and even the reform of rural municipal government.”48 Although they may not yet have been practising a specific “theology of liberation,” the activities of the Society in the final years before the 1968 Latin American Bishops’ Conference in Medellín were certainly within the framework of a “liberationist” discourse.49 Beyond the radio schools and The Beehive, a second kind of lay organization that the p.m.é. promoted, though they did not originate it, were Housewives’ Clubs (Clubes de amas de casa), which, by 1970, numbered more than four hundred in Choluteca. These clubs, intended to encourage women to take an active role in the public life of their villages, brought peasant women together to discuss the problems of their families and communities. Out of the clubs some women emerged as important leaders at the local and regional levels of the peasant movement.50 In 1966, the Society of Foreign Missions made what would come to be perhaps its biggest contribution to both Honduras and Central America as a whole. The annual celebration of Holy Week raised the perennial problem of the lack of priests. Bishop Marcel Gérin and his priests thus trained seventeen men to lead the Holy Week celebrations in their communities, calling them “Delegates of the Word.”51 This was the beginning of what came to be known as the “Celebration of the Word of God” program, referred to as “one of the most generative initiatives of the Latin American Catholic Church.”52 The logical extension of earlier lay development programs and local leadership training through the radio schools, the Delegates movement soon came to take on much more than

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a simple liturgical role. Qualified to lead their neighbours in worship, including communion, delegates also brought their communities together to think collectively and take action.53 The Foreign Missions priests from Quebec produced a manual called “Man and the Land” (“Hombre y Tierra”) to guide the lay religious teacher-leaders. The third edition, in 1975, was dedicated “To all of our peasant brothers who suffer and slave in inhuman work and who ask why, waiting for God’s reply. To all workers who are victims of exploitation. To all who fight to transform the world to make it a community of brothers.” It emphasized the dignity of work as a path to liberation, both personal and social.54 The popularity and effectiveness of the program soon caused it to expand to the other dioceses of Honduras and then to Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, and into Mexico, prefiguring the Christian base communities that came to be so prominent after 1968.55 By the end of the decade, forty-one p.m.é. missionaries were working in Honduras, along with an assortment of affiliated priests and nuns.56 The 1968 Medellín Bishops’ Conference, which Quebec Bishop Marcel Gérin attended as one of two Honduran church representatives, really only intensified the organizing.57 The Celebration of the Word program grew, along with other lay movements; more emphasis began to be put on Christian base communities; cooperatives and credit unions flourished; and The Beehive trained thousands of peasant leaders.58 In 1975, ten years after Marcel Gérin’s installation as bishop, it was possible for the p.m.é. to look back and describe the nature of the mission as “a faith incarnated in social development through multiple projects touching all aspects of people’s economic, social and political life.”59 The Peasant Land Reclamation Movement In a context marked by the enclosure of peasant farms, the radio school movement and the Celebration of the Word program resulted in the consolidation of campesino unions and a widespread social movement in Honduras to reclaim land being lost to cattle ranchers, especially between 1972 and 1975. The campesino movement emerged in the early 1970s out of newly activist peasant communities encouraged by the support of Church teachings and the Catholic base organizations that had taken form in the 1960s. In 1972, the young p.m.é. priest Guy Charbonneau, a native of Montreal,60 wrote home about “The Violence of the Rich.” Churchsupported educational centres like The Beehive had been working steadily to inform campesinos about their human rights and their right

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to land, he said, while the agrarian reform law was being neglected. When a reformist military government took power in a coup later that year, many peasants in Choluteca and some other areas organized land “recuperations” of the unused parts of large estates to force the government and its National Agrarian Institute (INA) to apply the agrarian reform laws in conflictual zones. This was the first major peasant movement Central America had seen for forty years and the first ever in Honduras.61 Clashes between landlords and peasants intensified, while the INA did its best to settle the disputes by allocating land to peasants. In 1973–4, 182,000 acres of land in Choluteca were distributed to more than 23,500 peasant families.62 The peasant land invasions that began in the late 1960s and escalated  after 1972 led to confrontations and sometimes violence between campesino occupiers and local police: security forces, acting at the bidding of large landowners, frequently burned peasant homes and cornfields and arrested community leaders.63 Cattle ranchers, alarmed and angry, blamed the Church and denounced the actions of foreign priests and nuns in the nation’s rural parishes as subversive, communist, and inimical to the interests of the nation. Many of the Quebec priests were favourable to the land occupation movement. It was clear which side Father Charbonneau was on: “For a young missionary, it’s a great joy to work within a Church that isn’t afraid to get its hands dirty, to engage itself in the service of justice through fidelity to the Gospel.”64 In 1970, Bishop Gérin defied the landowners by publishing a declaration supporting the moral right of peasant communities to occupy land. Later that year, the political representatives of the landowning elite tried to pass a motion in the Honduran legislature expelling all Quebec missionaries from the country, and for the rest of the decade the Society was the target of criticism.65 It is important to note, though, that land recuperations were largely the initiative of the campesinos themselves. The clergy provided a decade of leadership development and conscientización work, but they were blamed largely because the landowners refused to believe the rural poor had such organizational capacity.66 In 1975 the peasant movement (and the government’s reformism) came to an abrupt halt when, as a massive hunger march wound its way across the country to the capital, two foreign priests, a university student, and a foreign observer were kidnapped, tortured, and brutally  murdered in the region of Olancho.67 The backlash won out; the Honduran church, in shock, folded back on itself, the hierarchy questioning whether it had become too involved in politics and so was in

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some sense responsible for the violence. According to Jefferson Boyer, “When peasant land occupations led to threats by the Honduran Congress to expel foreign clergy who sided with the peasant unions, the French Canadians, and I think the Archbishop, began to back away from liberation theology … After setting up the Delegados de la Palabra de Dios, a vast network of rural leaders becoming deacons to spread the word of liberation, the priests were told to tell their parish delegados to look for the meanings of liberation in their individual reading of the Bible, but not to expect the priests to lead the charge.”68 The p.m.é. and other groups of foreign priests based in Honduras were divided over how to react to increasing repression: some withdrew from overt social involvement, while others tried to continue some sort of social engagement quietly. Debate over the continuation of radio programming was particularly acrimonious.69 Boyer says that “a few of the Canadians radicalized, some remained cautiously liberal, and [my perception is that] the rest became or lapsed into some kind of conservatism.”70 After 1975, Boyer writes, many Cholutecan peasants in the villages felt “abandoned” by the priests, even bitter, although his own study reveals that the language and practice of liberationist-­ inspired Catholic discourse continued to be central for years to come.71 The mission of the Foreign Missions priests embodied a central contradiction: its development-oriented work, in a context of increasing desperation among campesinos, generated autonomous social movements ready and willing to pursue the struggle beyond the comfort limits of most North Americans. Even so, these missionaries were deeply affected by their contact with campesino organizers. Father Coursol, one of the founders of the mission in 1955, on his way to become a parish priest in Nicaragua soon after the Sandinista guerrilla movement took power in 1979, explained that “the only possible option is to live the Gospel in a radical way.”72 Guy Charbonneau said simply, “When one returns from a country like that [Honduras], one can’t live in the same way.”73 The priests who had been in Honduras and elsewhere in Latin America brought a new viewpoint to the direction of the Society as a whole. “Une double solidarité” The progressive response of the Société des Missions-Étrangères in Honduras to the realities they encountered there raises the question of how this connection of solidarity was shaped by Quebec. The Foreign

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Missions Society’s innovative use of lay organizations and emphasis on training lay leaders, which emerged out of the Honduran Catholic church’s desire to revitalize the church, also reflected certain aspects of Quebec Catholic thought and practice before the Quiet Revolution. Some Quebec historians have recently begun to reconsider the role of Catholicism in the fundamental changes that shook the province over the course of the second half of the twentieth century. As does Bradford in this book, these historians argue against the tide of studies underlining the seeming incongruencies between religion and modernization and show how progressive Catholic lay movements, in­ fluenced by “personalist” philosophies and centred on the socially engaged Catholic Action model, shaped a generation of young activists and laid the groundwork for the transformations of the 1960s.74 Several of the priests with whom we spoke cited their experience in Catholic Action organizations, particularly Jeunesse Étudiante Catholique (JEC), as the basis for their radical transformations and desire to do socially engaged missionary work. Father Jean-Paul Guillet, a man whose progressive activity incited Honduran elites to put a price on his head, indicates that his time spent in the JEC was an important part of his decision to go into the priesthood and realize his “true vocation” through social engagement.75 A younger generation of missionaries was similarly affected by the experience of social change in Quebec. Dominant narratives about the Church’s role in Quebec that paint a picture of precipitous decline occasioned by the rapid growth of the state apparatus do not do justice to the ways in which the Church sought to adapt itself to new social realities during the turbulent years of the 1960s and 1970s. Despite widespread secularization, the Church did not disappear after 1960 but rather responded to the dual challenge of Vatican II and the social-­ democratic nationalism of the Quiet Revolution by attempting to remodel itself as a moral conscience for the nation.76 Many Catholics in these years, much inspired by trends in Latin America, became deeply involved in the changes sweeping the province: Catholic Action groups were increasingly radicalized; an important network known as the “Politisés chrétiens,” looking to similar developments in Salvador Allende’s Chile, came to identify explicitly as socialists; and progressive institutions such as the Centre de Pastoral en Milieu Ouvrier were founded, becoming important voices for social justice in the province.77 Catholic publications like the Jesuit-produced Relations, the Oblates’ Prêtres et laïcs, and the Dominicans’ Maintenant articulated a kind of

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kairos at a time when the particularisms of a tide of progressive nationalist mobilizations seemed congruent with the universalism of liberatory Christian social doctrines.78 The Société des Missions-Étrangères also considered its international work in the light of social unrest in Quebec. Throughout the 1960s, social movements in Quebec were connected with and took reference from a common discourse of decolonization.79 Historian Paul Jackson has studied at the effects of this language on the Montreal-based missionaries of the Congrégation de Sainte-Croix (CSC), and the debates it caused over the continuation of mission work.80 Similar questions plagued the p.m.é. priests, as they asked themselves: “If we recognize the values of liberty of conscience and of religion, should we still go on mission?”81 P.m.é. priests took pains to demonstrate that “through his departure, the missionary radicalizes the urgency of this new way of being for his compatriots and makes visible in an extreme fashion … the kind of solidarity that should be the concern of every Canadian citizen [tout citoyen d’ici].”82 The documents produced at the 1973 General Assembly of the SMÉ referred to this simultaneous connection as a “double solidarité,” since within the structure of their secular mission society they were both diocesan priests from Quebec and committed to their international work.83 For these Catholics, “experiences of evangelization undertaken here help us to find new paths to evangelization for the present day.”84 Whereas until the latter half of the 1960s initiates of the Society received  all their training at the Grand Séminaire in Pont-Viau, Laval, after 1965 young missionaries-to-be were sent to study at the Université de Montréal. The new faculty of theology, created in 1967, featured a relatively heterodox curriculum and a roster of progressive professors. The year the faculty was founded, Peruvian liberation theologian Gustavo Gutiérrez taught a summer course there, “The Church and the Problems of Poverty.”85 Mixed in with other seminarists and lay people in the broader university setting and engaged with the social movements of the time, Kamouraska native Father André Dionne, p.m.é., remembered that “the education of future priests was no longer done in a closed space – an ivory tower. We were preparing ourselves to live open to human realities.” Seminarists were encouraged in their third year to live collectively, teaching them important skills of autonomy and teamwork. During their vacations they were provided the opportunity to do mission work in the city: Dionne rented a bedbug-infested house with

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other students in the working-class Montreal neighbourhood of SaintHenri, learning what it was like to live and work “among the poor.” “It’s in this way,” he said, “that we acquired apostolic training with a preferential option for the poor … The events of the 1960s favoured an opening up to global reality. The problems of poverty and injustice were at the centre of our concerns.”86 Father Guy Charbonneau had a similar experience, coming to Honduras as a young priest fresh from the global student uprising of 1968. Following the famous contestations of “May ’68” in France, in the fall of that year Quebec experienced its first-ever general student strike. Although the student movement originated in the Collèges d’ensei­ gnement général et professionnel (CEGEPs), the professional schools created as part of the educational reforms of the Quiet Revolution, it had a major impact on students at the Université de Montréal.87 Stu­ dents in the faculty of theology were on the forefront of the struggle: swept up in the currents of student syndicalism in 1967 and remaining  out of class for weeks in the fall of 1968, they demanded greater control and autonomy in matters of curriculum.88 Father Charbon­ neau recalled the hours of debate and discussion in the faculty of theology, their eventual decision to join the strike, and the impact this had on his development as a missionary, both in affirming the belief that the Church needed to be engaged in social struggles and on a personal level: “It helped to affirm once again for me a missionary commitment in the world [au milieu du monde],” he said. “Throwing ourselves into the movement for us was about not accepting reality … When we arrived in Honduras, there was more of a mentality of conformity. But, with this experience behind me, I said to myself, ‘Yes, we have to change some things.’”89 National liberation struggles and political agitation in Quebec, deepening poverty and peasant movements in Honduras, and a new, radical orientation in Christian values made for a potent combination. But how did this Church-mediated connection translate into the political space of the broader Quebec society? In the post-1960 period, Quebec had come to identify itself as a hothouse of different forms of international solidarity, at the governmental level, within the cooperative movement, in the growth of North-South-focused non-­governmental organizations (NGOs), and in more grass-roots projects.90 As Pierre Beaudet, sociologist and former director of the international-cooperation NGO Alternatives, has recently reminded us, in many ways missionary ties were at the heart of that process. For youth of his generation,

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coming of age in the midst of the sea changes of the 1960s, inspiration came from the increasing knowledge that African countries were decolonizing, Vietnamese resistance to French and European imperialism was ongoing, the Cuban revolution was making waves throughout Latin America, and from “the missionaries in the colleges telling [us] that in the slums of the Third World, there was oppression, yes, but also revolt.”91 During the first half of the twentieth century, as the ranks of the clergy swelled and Quebec’s missionary presence extended around the globe, the Church became the primary means through which many Quebecers learned about the wider world.92 As the numbers entering the priesthood and religious orders diminished from the 1960s on and as theologies of liberation and progressive identification with global South causes echoed throughout the Canadian church, the Church’s focus began to shift towards educating lay people about, and connecting them with, community struggle in the Third World.93 The Société des Missions-Étrangères worked hard to provide op­ portunities for students and other young people to take short con­ sciousness-raising trips to Latin America. In 1980, three groups of Que­ becers were sent to visit the Latin American missions of the Society, part of a series of such excursions organized throughout the decade.94 The groups visiting Honduras and Nicaragua, made up of students and adults from a variety of walks of life, were deeply affected by the ex­ perience, noting the remarkable participation of Central American Christians in social struggle and leaving with a renewed commitment to active engagement in Quebec. Pierre Shehyn, a student in agronomy at Université de Laval in Quebec City, asserted, “When I see a situation of injustice taking place here in Quebec, I am a lot more attentive to it and, instead of saying ‘It’s not that serious,’ I myself feel this injustice; I want to shout, to struggle.”95 The Society also did important animation missionnaire work in CEGEPs, universities, and parishes throughout the province, bringing the reality of communities in other parts of the world into the classrooms of young people across the province, and a p.m.é. priest was a founder of the Quebec-based NGO Mer et Monde that organizes development-focused internships in Honduras and Senegal.96 Meanwhile, in the early 1980s, Father Jean-Paul Guillet, who had returned to Quebec, made a series of films about the new, engaged mission work inspired by liberation theology for Quebec television. From 1987 to 2001, he lived in Rome to collaborate with the Organisation Catholique Internationale

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du cinema et de l’audiovisuel (OCIC) on projects involving radio, film, television, and, later, satellite telecommunications and the Internet related to evangelization and development in Africa, always with a commitment to, in his words, “les plus défavorisés, les plus démunis.”97 Much like the efforts of the Quebecers in Honduras, the missionaryfostered humanitarian connection between Quebec, Latin America, and other parts of the world was not without its contradictions. Writing about the engagement of Quebec missionaries in decolonizing African countries in the 1950s and 1960s, Pierre Beaudet points to what he sees as an agenda “simultaneously – and contradictorily – emancipating and  conservative.”98 While Quebecers swept up in the Catholic Latin American social movements of these years often took on a more radical analysis than their counterparts in non-Christian African or Asian countries, it remained true that these reorientations still occurred within a fundamentally unequal North-South power axis. From an emancipatory perspective, educational and exchange programs such as the ones set up by the p.m.é. in Honduras served to link Central American social struggles with interested and supportive parties in Quebec, raising awareness about their struggles and in turn influencing women and men in Quebec to reflect on and engage with social justice issues in their own communities. Furthermore, a number of recent studies suggest that in Quebec – to use Ruth Compton Brouwer’s evocative phrase – “missions became development” in the 1960s and 1970s as the international Church’s novel engagement with socio-economic realities stimulated new transnational exchanges and cooperation not only among churches but also among lay people in Canada and Latin America.99 And yet, the new connections also contained problematic and conservative elements: these efforts need to be placed in context among a rash of humanitarian and NGO-driven initiatives that are being increasingly held up to scrutiny. Many of these initiatives rely on established institutions and funding sources like USAID and the Canadian International Development Agency and perpetuate tropes of “experience abroad” tied up with travel culture and capitalist consumption. The ability to facilitate these sorts of exchanges in and of itself points to an ongoing unequal power relationship. As Kate Simpson puts it, “The processes that allow young westerners to access the financial resources, and moral imperatives, necessary to travel and volunteer in a ‘third world country,’ are the same as the ones that make the reverse pro­ cess  almost impossible.”100 Despite the radicalizing solidarity formed

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between Quebec priests and rural Honduran people in the 1960s and early 1970s, there is still a sense in which their exchanges, missionary journals, and educational programs were caught up in a broader epistemological project of knowing and cataloguing the “other” – echoing, despite itself, the colonial lessons taught to Quebecers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This case study is a preliminary step in a larger transnational research agenda that stands to significantly alter our understanding of Quebec’s past. The Catholic missionaries we have explored in this chapter are “people for whom transcending national boundaries has been the norm rather than the exception, [people] whose experiences of mobility have been particularly acute.”101 Entering Honduras in 1955, and thus experiencing from a Latin American position the changes of Vatican II and the rise of popular Catholicism, these priests were deeply shaped by their time spent organizing and living with marginal campesino communities. In turn, the political turbulence of their home province in these years affected the ways in which Quebec missionaries viewed social problems and struggles abroad, a dual orientation that played itself out in the efforts of some Society of Foreign Missions priests to raise consciousness among Quebecers of all stripes about the struggle for social justice around the world. Many basic questions remain for further reflection. How does considering the role of the Church reconfigure our understanding of the province’s social transformation and its role in broader, transnational processes? What has been the impact of Quebecers in promoting social change on a global scale? The premise might seem elementary – how did things happening elsewhere affect what was going in on postwar  Quebec? How did changes in Quebec itself ripple out into the world? – but even preliminary answers seem to hold great promise for thinking in different ways about Quebec’s past. In a time characterized by growing inequalities between rich and poor countries, and on the eve of the dawning of a new and brutal neoliberal age, this Churchmediated mixture of spirituality, local struggles, and international solidarity acted as an important pocket of alternative patterns of globalization in Quebec society. Historical analyses of networks such as these serve to actively undermine the hegemonic discourses of self-interest and consumption that structure our daily lives; they represent an important first step in imagining some other ways in which we might move into the future.

330  Fred Burrill and Catherine C. LeGrand NOTES Acknowledgments: It is with profound gratitude, and with apologies to those whose testimony we could not include here, that we wish to acknowledge ­Fathers Guy Charbonneau, Jean-Paul Guillet, Roland Laneuville, Jean Ménard, and Eloy Roy of the Société des Missions-Étrangères du Québec for sharing their experiences with us. Thank you also to Father Jean Gaboury for helping us arrange these interviews, and to Jefferson Boyer, Rolando Sierra Fonseca, Sean Mills, Adele Perry, Edward T. Brett, Susan Fitzpatrick-Behrens, and Catherine Foisy for much-appreciated comments. Claire Ouellet Dallaire of McGill University’s Geography Department produced the map of Honduras. 1 Two works that have done much to stimulate debate on the role of the nation in historical writing are Ronald Rudin, Making History in TwentiethCentury Quebec (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997) and Jocelyn Letourneau, Passer à l’avenir: Histoire, mémoire, identité dans le Québec d’aujourd’hui (Montreal: Boréal, 2000). 2 The term “histoires connectées,” taken from the sensitive reflection of two French scholars on the state of transnational history in their national context, is useful here inasmuch as francophone historical work in Quebec often reflects this European intellectual tradition more than that of its English Canadian or American neighbours. See Caroline Douki and Philippe Minard, “Histoire globale, histoires connectées: Un changement d’échelle historiographique?” Revue d’Histoire Moderne et Contemporaine 5, no. 54–5 (2007): 7–21. 3 On political movements of the 1960s and 1970s, see Sean Mills, The Empire Within: Postcolonial Thought and Political Activism in Sixties Montreal (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2010); JeanPhilippe Warren, Une douce anarchie: Les années 68 au Québec (Montreal: Boréal, 2008); Jean-Philippe Warren, Ils voulaient changer le monde: Le militantisme marxiste-léniniste au Québec (Montreal: VLB éditeur, 2007). See also special issues of the Bulletin d’histoire politique: “Expo 67: Quarante ans plus tard” (vol. 17, no. 1, Fall 2008) and “Les mouvements étudiants des années 1960” (vol. 16, no. 2, Winter 2008). 4 For an exciting collection of articles looking at Quebec Catholicism from a transnational perspective, see “Coopération et missionariat,” Globe: Revue Internationale d’Études Québécoises 12, no. 1 (2009); also Maurice Demers, Connected Struggles: Catholics, Nationalists, and Transnational Relations between Mexico and Quebec, 1917–1945 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2014). New approaches to the Catholic church in Quebec

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5 6 7

8

9

include E.-Martin Meunier and Jean-Philippe Warren, Sortir de la “Grande Noirceur”: L’horizon “personnaliste” de la Révolution tranquille (Quebec: Septentrion, 2002); Louise Bienvenue, Quand la jeunesse entre en scène: L’Action catholique avant la Révolution tranquille (Montreal: Boréal, 2003); and Michael Gauvreau, The Catholic Origins of Quebec’s Quiet Revolution (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2005). For recent contributions considering Quebec’s place in international relations, see Stéphane Paquin, ed., with Louise Beaudoin, Histoire des relations internationales du Québec (Montreal: VLB éditeur, 2006); David Meren, With Friends Like These: Entangled Nationalisms and the Canada-Quebec-France Triangle, 1944–1970 (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2012). Henri Goudreault, “Les missionnaires canadiens à l’étranger au XXe siècle,” Canadian Catholic Historical Association (Study Sessions) 50, no. 1 (1983): 368. Lionel Groulx, Le Canada français missionnaire: Une autre grande aventure (Montreal and Paris: FIDES, 1962). Pierre Beaudet, Qui aide qui? Une brève histoire de la solidarité international au Québec (Montreal: Boréal, 2009), 15–27; Paul Jackson, “Convertir et civili­ ser: L’impérialisme canadien français,” 61e Congrès de l’Institut d’histoire de l’Amérique française, Université Laval, Quebec, 25 October 2008; and Paul Jackson, “Web Exclusive: On Shaky Ground,” Canadian Dimension 44, no. 2 (March/April 2010), http://canadiandimension.com/articles/2766/. See Catherine LeGrand, “L’axe missionnaire catholique entre le Québec et l’Amérique latine: Une exploration préliminaire,” Globe: Revue Internationale d’Études Québécoises 12, no. 1 (2009): 43–66; LeGrand, “Réseaux missionnaires québécois et action sociale en Amérique latine, 1945–1980,” Études d’histoire religieuse 79, no. 1 (2013): 93–116. For an articulate framing of these questions and a helpful guide to transnational thinking on the “Americas,” see Sandhya Shukla and Heidi Tinsman, eds., Imagining Our Americas: Toward a Transnational Frame (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007). Also see Gilbert M. Joseph, Catherine C. LeGrand, and Ricardo D. Salvatore, eds., Close Encounters of Empire: Writing the Cultural History of US–Latin American Relations (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998); Berndt Ostendorf, ed., Transnational America: The Fading of Borders in the Western Hemisphere (Heidelberg: Universitat­ sverlag C. Winter, 2002); John Soluri, Banana Cultures: Agriculture, Consump­ tion and Environmental Change in Honduras and the United States (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005); Deborah Cohen, Braceros: Migrant Citizens and Transnational Subjects in Postwar United States and Mexico (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011); Jessica Stites Mor, ed., Human Rights and Transnational Solidarity in Cold War Latin America (Madison:

332  Fred Burrill and Catherine C. LeGrand University of Wisconsin Press, 2013). On transnational approaches to religion, see Susanne Hoeber Rudolph and James Piscatori, eds., Transna­tional Religion and Fading States (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997) and Susan Fitzpatrick-Behrens, The Maryknoll Catholic Mission in Peru, 1943–1989: Transnational Faith and Transformation (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2012). 10 The Second Vatican Council (1962–5, often called Vatican II) in Rome and the Conference of Latin American Bishops in Medellín (Colombia) in 1968 gave rise to what is often called “liberation theology,” which ­espoused a “preferential option for the poor.” In Latin America, the ­practice of liberation theology involved the creation of Christian base communities whereby poor people came together to apply the Bible to problems in their lives. 11 Robert G. Williams, Export Agriculture and the Crisis in Central America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986); William H. Durham, Scarcity and Survival in Central America: Ecological Origins of the Soccer War (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1979); Jefferson C. Boyer, “Agrarian Capitalism and Peasant Praxis in Southern Honduras,” PhD diss., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (1982). 12 Edward T. Brett and Donna W. Brett, “Facing the Challenge: The Catholic Church and Social Change in Honduras,” in Central America: Historical Perspectives on the Contemporary Crisis, ed. Ralph Lee Woodward, Jr (New York: Greenwood Press, 1988), 107–8. 13 See Marcos Carías, De la patria del criollo a la patria compartida: Una historia de Honduras (Choluteca: Ediciones Subirana, 2005), 278–9; Victor BulmerThomas, “Honduras since 1930,” in Central America since Independence, ed. Leslie Bethell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 191–226. 14 See Frederick M. Shepherd, “Church and State in Honduras and Nicaragua prior to 1979,” Sociology of Religion 54, no. 3 (1993): 277–93. 15 See Daniel Camacho and Rafael Menjívar, “El movimiento popular en Centroamérica (1970–1983): Síntesis y perspectivas,” and Andrés Opazo, “El movimiento religioso en Centroamérica: 1970–1983,” in Movimientos populares en Centroamérica, ed. Daniel Camacho and Rafael Menjivar (San José, CR: EDUCA, 1985), 16–19, 27–30, 143–99. In Honduras, the priests from Quebec were known as the Padres Javerianos. 16 Based on extensive fieldwork in Choluteca, Robert A. White, “Structural Factors in Rural Development: The Church and the Peasant in Honduras,” 2 vols., PhD diss., Cornell University (1977), does shed light on peasant responses to p.m.é.-initiated radio and community development projects in the late 1960s and 1970s. White was a Jesuit priest. 17 James F. Garneau, “The First Inter-American Episcopal Conference, November 2–4, 1959: Canada and the United States Called to the Rescue

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18

19 20 21 22 23

24 25 26

27

of Latin America,” Canadian Catholic Historical Review 87, no. 4 (October 2001): 662–87. “Sur la crise sacerdotale en Amérique latine,” Missions Étrangères, March 1955: 78. Founded in 1941 to publicize the work of the missionaries and generate new vocations, Missions Étrangères, published monthly after 1954, had a circulation of 53,000 in 1957, 70,000 in 1970, and 45,000 in 1980. André Beaulieu et al., eds., La presse québécoise des origines à nos jours, vol. 7 (Quebec: Presses de l’Université Laval, 1985), 207–8. See also Jean-Philippe Warren and Eric Desautels, “Urbi et Orbi: Les revues missionnaires catholiques québécoises au XXe siècle,” in Les missions au Québec et du Québec dans le monde, ed. Gilles Routhier and Frédéric Laugrand, Collection Atlas historique du Québec (Centre de recherche en études québécoises) (Quebec: Presses de l’Université Laval, forthcoming). Groulx, Canada français missionnaire, 414–15. See Missions Étrangères, October 1955: 263–71; April 2003: 4. Email message from Jefferson C. Boyer, Department of Anthropology, Appalachian State University, to Catherine LeGrand, 21 May 2008. See Missions Étrangères, January 1959: 10–12, 29, 31; February 1959: 63–4. Richard N. Adams, Cultural Surveys of Panama, Nicaragua, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras (Washington: Pan American Sanitary Bureau, Regional Office of the World Health Organization, 1957), 532, 536. Missions Étrangères, February 1956, 393–406; January 1958, 380; February 1958, 393–96; February 1959, 60–61; July/August 1960, 551–55. Missions Étrangères, February 1961: 44–5. This territory was 85 per cent rural. See Missions Étrangères, February 1961: 45; May 1961: 138, 144–51; September 1961: 228–32. These were the Legion of Mary, Catholic Action, and the Christian Family Movement. For a full list of lay groups, see Pierre Drouin, p.m.é., “Honduras: Pastorale de Promotion,” in Societé des Missions-Étrangères, Annuaire 1970 (Laval, QC: Le Centre d’Animation Missionnaire, 1969), 35. The Honduran radio project took its inspiration from the Colombian church’s popular education project Radio Sutatenza. See Camilo Torres Restrepo and Berta Corredor Rodríguez, Las escuelas radiofónicas de Sutatenza-Colombia: Evaluación sociológica de los resultados (Friburgo, Suiza: Oficina Internacional de Investigaciones Sociales de FERES, 1961). Sutatenza also provided the model for radio school projects in Ecuador, the Dominican Republic, India, and Tanzania. Mary Roldán, “Acción Cultural Popular, Responsible Procreation, and the Roots of Social Activism in Rural Colombia,” in “Lived Religion and Lived Citizenship in Latin America’s Zones of Crisis,” Special issue of Latin American Research Review 49, no. 4 (2014): 27-44.

334  Fred Burrill and Catherine C. LeGrand 28 Jean-Paul Guillet, p.m.é., “À Votre Service! Mes mémoires,” unpublished manuscript in possession of the author, Société des Missions-Étrangères, Laval, QC, 2005, 16–24. The Virgin of Suyapa is the patron saint of Honduras. In Bolivia, the Oblates of Mary Immaculate (also from Quebec) founded an important miners’ radio station around the same time: see Alan O’Connor, ed., Community Radio in Bolivia: The Miners’ Radio Stations (Queenston, ON: Edwin Mellen Press, 2004). 29 Robert A. White, “The Adult Education Program of Acción Cultural Popular Hondureña: An Evaluation of the Rural Development Potential of the Radio School Movement in Honduras,” Report, Department of Anthropology and Sociology, St Louis University, St Louis, Missouri, and Centro Loyola, Tegucigalpa, Honduras (1972), 120–4. 30 Marcos Carías, La iglesia católica en Honduras, 1492–1975 (Tegucigalpa: Editorial Guaymuras, 1991), 110. On the radio schools, see also Missions Étrangères, March 1960: 442–3; January 1963: 38–50; March 1965: 85–8; May 1965: 139–42; June 1965: 164–6; November/December 1979: 18–25. 31 See Henri Beaudoin, p.m.é., “Le Concile et les missions,” Missions Étrangères, February 1960: 35–6. Two p.m.é. members participated in Vatican II, including Gustave Prévost, a former missionary in China who became vicar apostolic of Pucallpa, Peru. His article “Le Concile et ses fruits” appeared in Missions Étrangères, March 1963: 68–73. 32 Missions Étrangères, November 1964: 663–6. 33 White, “Adult Education Program,” 124. 34 The pioneering statement on liberation theology is Gustavo Gutiérrez, A Theology of Liberation: History, Politics, and Salvation, trans. Caridad Inda and John Eagleson (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Press, 1973; 1st Spanish ed. 1971). 35 Jefferson Boyer, email message to Catherine LeGrand, 21 May 2008. 36 Rafael Menjívar, Sui Moy Li Kam, and Virginia Portuguez, “El movimiento campesino en Honduras,” in Movimientos populares en Centroamerica, ed. Camacho and Menjivar, 373–408. 37 An informative account by an American Jesuit priest indicating how his order in the department of Yoro drew on Quebeckers’ methods of peasant organizing is J. Guadalupe Carney, To Be a Revolutionary: An Autobiography (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1985). On the Franciscans in Olancho and their relations to Choluteca, see Sister Mary Garcia, The Sufferings, Assassi­ nations and Martyrdom of the Missionary Church in Olancho, Honduras ­(1963–1982): The History of a Church That Lived Its Commitment to the Poor (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2011); Edward T. Brett, “The Transformation of a U.S. Missionary: The Recollections of Bishop Nicholas

Progressive Catholicism at Home and Abroad  335

38

39 40 41 42 43 44

45

D’Antonio on his Ministry in Honduras,” American Catholic Studies 118, no. 1 (2007): 1–20. White, “Adult Education Program,” 143–6. Other Canadian priests also contributed to the cooperative movement in Central America, particularly Harvey Steele of Ontario’s Scarboro Foreign Mission Society, who had worked with Moses Coady and the Catholic Antigonish cooperative movement in the 1930s. In 1964, in Panama City, Father Steele founded the Inter-American Co-operative Institute (Instituto Cooperativo Interameri­ cano, ICI) – the Latin American equivalent of the Coady International Institute at St Francis-Xavier University in Nova Scotia – to train community leaders from Latin America on how to set up and run cooperatives. By 1985, 19 Hondurans had trained at the Coady International Institute, and 101 Hondurans had taken classes on cooperatives at the ICI in Panama. See Harvey Pablo Steele, s.f.m., Winds of Change: Social Justice through Co-operatives: Evaluation of Co-operatives in Latin America and the Caribbean (Truro, NS: Co-operative Resources, Ltd., 1986), 115, 122. Also see Rev. John H. MacEachen, A Chosen Few: Voluntarios (Sydney, NS: City Printers Ltd., 1967) on secular priests from the diocesis of Antigonish who formed cooperatives in Honduras; and Catherine C. LeGrand, “The Antigonish Movement of Canada and Latin America: Catholic ­Co-operatives, Christian Communities and Development in the Great Depression and the Cold War,” in Local Church, Global Church: Catholic Activism in the Americas before Vatican II, ed. Stephen J.C. Andes and Julia G. Young (Washington: The Catholic University Press, 2016). White, “Adult Education Program,” 150. See Missions Étrangères, January 1965: 4–8; August 1967: 204–11. White, “Adult Education Program,” 151–2, 155–7. Normand Landreville, p.m.é., “Révolution en marche,” Missions Étrangères, February 1967: 45–52. Carías, La iglesia católica, 112. White, “Adult Education Program,” 136; Father Jean-Paul Guillet, interview with F. Burrill and C. LeGrand, Laval, QC, 9 September 2009. The main links were with the Jesuit Centre for Economic and Social Development of Latin America (DESAL) in Santiago, Chile, and Brazil’s Basic Education Movement (MEB). See Clément Mercier, “Bref historique de l’organisation communautaire au Québec: Les années 1960–1980. De l’animation sociale urbaine et rurale au développement du mouvement communautaire autonome,” in Introduction au travail social, ed. Jean-Pierre Deslauriers et Yves Hurtubise (Quebec:

336  Fred Burrill and Catherine C. LeGrand

46 47

48 49

50 51 52 53 54 55

56

Presses de l’Université Laval, 2000), 178–81; Louis Favreau, “Le développement local de type communautaire,” and Yves Hurtubise, “L’action conscientisante,” in Théorie et pratiques en organisation communautaire, ed. Laval Doucet and Louis Favreau (Sillery, QC: Presses de l’Université du Québec, 1991), 73–96, 147–60. White, “Adult Education Program,” 161–2, 165–76. Radio Valle received funding and equipment from Development and Peace, the official international development organization of the Catholic church in Canada, and Société Radio-Canada. Missions Étrangères, November/December 1979: 18–25. See also Jean-Paul Guillet, p.m.é., “Une station radiophonique d’Église, qui s’intéresse même à la politique,” Missions Étrangères, May/June 1982: 29–31; and Peter Ernest Baltutis, “Forging the Link between Faith and Development: The History of the Canadian Catholic Organization for Development and Peace, 1967–1982,” PhD diss., St Michael’s College Faculty of Theology and the University of Toronto (2012). White, “Adult Education Program,” 5. Not long after this, the Society published an issue on development: Missions Étrangères, numéro spéciale sur la 3e conférence des Nations Unis pour le commerce et le développement (September/October 1972). A fascinating study of how the editorial writers of four influential Quebec publications employed the term “liberation” is Daniel Gay, Les élites québécoises et l’Amérique latine (Montreal: Éditions Nouvelle Optique, 1983). See Elvia Alvarado, Don’t Be Afraid, Gringo: A Honduran Woman Speaks from the Heart, trans. and ed. Medea Benjamin (New York: Harper & Row, 1989). Jean-Louis Giasson, p.m.é., “Délégué de la parole: Une réponse au besoin de célébrer,” Missions Étrangères, April 2003: 10. Missions Étrangères, February 1996: 22. Missions Étrangères, April 2003: 10–11; see also July/August 1973: 3–4, 11–13. Carías, La iglesia católica, 144–5. See Missions Étrangères, April 2003: 10; July/August 1973: 13. Also Mgr. Bernardino Mazzarella, “The Experience of Honduras,” in Basic Christian Communities, LADOC Keyhole Series, no. 14 (Washington: US Catholic Conference, 1976), 22–4; and Penny Lernoux, Cry of the People: The Struggle for Human Rights in Latin America – The Catholic Church in Conflict with US Policy (New York: Penguin Books, 1980), 391–2. Panama and Honduras were the two main foci from which the practices of liberation theology emanated in Central America. On Panama, see Leo T. Mahon, Fire under My Feet: A Memoir of God’s Power in Panama (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2007). Société des Missions-Étrangères, Annuaire 1970, 34.

Progressive Catholicism at Home and Abroad  337 57 Ibid., 28. On Gérin at Medellín, see José Maria Tojeira, Panorama histórica de la Iglesia en Honduras (Tegucigalpa: CEDOH, 1986), 215. A remarkable indication of some of the new orientations can be seen in “Révolution en Amérique Latine,” Missions Étrangères, January/February 1969. 58 Missions Étrangères, April 1968: 457–63; November/December 1969; July/ August 1972: 24–5; March/April 1981: 20–1; February 1987 (special issue on Honduras). 59 Missions Étrangères, March/April 1975: 4. 60 Bottin 2006 (Pont Viau, Laval, QC: Société des Missions-Étrangères, 2006), 36. 61 On the military government of the 1970s, see Rachel Sieder, “Honduras: The Politics of Exception and Military Reformism (1972–1978),” Journal of Latin American Studies 27, no. 1 (February 1995): 99–127. 62 Williams, Export Agriculture and the Crisis in Central America, 125–6. 63 Ibid., 124–8. 64 Guy Charbonneau, p.m.é., “La violence des riches,” Missions Étrangères, July/August 1972: 24–5. 65 White, “Adult Education Program,” 857–8; Missions Étrangères, January/ February 1978: 12; Father Guy Charbonneau, interview, 12 March 2008. The Soccer War of 1969 intensified nationalist sentiment among Honduran elites; a scant three years after the war, they used nationalist rhetoric to target foreign priests, especially the Quebecers, whose activities in the peasant movement hurt their economic interests. 66 White, “Adult Education Program,” 856. 67 Donna Whitson Brett and Edward T. Brett, Murdered in Central America: The Stories of Eleven U.S. Missionaries (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1988); Garcia, Sufferings, Assassinations and Martyrdom. 68 Jefferson Boyer, email to Catherine LeGrand, 21 May 2008. 69 Guillet, “À Votre Service!” 51–5. 70 Jefferson Boyer, email to Catherine LeGrand, 21 May 2008. However, the three retired p.m.é. priests with experience in Honduras and elsewhere in Central America whom we interviewed in 2008–9 all articulated a structural analysis of the urgent need for social change in Central America. They are politically radical men in their seventies and eighties. 71 Jefferson C. Boyer, “Charisma, Martyrdom and Liberation in Southern Honduras,” Comparative Social Research, supp. 1, 1990: 115–59. 72 Henri Coursol, p.m.é., “Lettres d’Henri,” Missions Étrangères, May/June 1981: 6. 73 Father Guy Charbonneau, interview, 12 March 2008. 74 See Gauvreau, Catholic Origins; Meunier and Warren, Sortir de la “Grande Noirceur”; Bienvenue, Quand la jeunesse entre en scène. 75 Guillet, “À Votre Service!” 6–7.

338  Fred Burrill and Catherine C. LeGrand 76 Terrence Fay, A History of Canadian Catholics: Gallicanism, Romanism, and Canadianism (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2002), 283–4. On the impact of Vatican II on Quebec, see David Seljak, “Why the Quiet Revolution was ‘Quiet’: The Catholic Church’s Reaction to the Secularization of Nationalism in Quebec after 1960,” CCHA Historical Studies 62 (1996): 109–24; Gilles Routhier, ed., L’Église canadienne et Vatican II (Saint-Laurent, QC: FIDES, 1997); Gilles Routhier, “La reception de Vatican II au Canada: Un processus complexe et sinueux encore inachevé,” Mission 10, no. 2 (2003): 149–96. On dominant popular narratives, see Jocelyn Letourneau, “The Unthinkable History of Quebec,” Oral History Review 17, no. 1 (Spring 1989): 89–115. Also see Gregory Baum, The Church in Quebec (Montreal: Novalis, 1991), and Jean Hamelin and Nicole Gagnon, Histoire du catholicisme québécois, vol. 2 (Montreal: Boréal Express, 1984). 77 Gregory Baum, “Catholicisme, secularisation et gauchisme au Québec,” in Religion, secularisation, modernité: Les expériences francophones en Amérique du Nord, ed. Brigitte Caulier (Quebec: Presses de l’Université Laval, 1996), 109; Father Jean Ménard, p.m.é., interview, 7 March 2008. Founded by the Oblates in the 1960s, the Centre Pastoral en Milieu Ouvrier offered adult education in working-class communities; in the 1980s, it was at the forefront of the effort to establish the “popular church” in Quebec. 78 See Gregory Baum, “Catholicisme,” 105–21; Baum, “‘Politisés chrétiens’: A Christian-Marxist Network in Quebec, 1974–1982,” in The Church in Quebec (Ottawa: Novalis, 1991), 67–89. Also Jean-Guy Vaillancourt, “Les groupes socio-politiques progressistes dans le catholicisme québécois ­contemporain,” in Les mouvements religieux aujourd’hui: Théories et pratiques, ed. Jean-Paul Rouleau and Jacques Zylberberg (Montreal: Les Éditions Bellarmin, 1984), 261–82. We poach this idea of a “kairos” from Gregory Baum, Nationalism, Religion, and Ethics (Montreal and Kingston: McGillQueen’s University Press, 2001), 84–107. 79 See Mills, The Empire Within; David Luis-Brown, Waves of Decolonization: Discourses of Race and Hemispheric Citizenship in Cuba, Mexico, and the United States (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008). 80 Paul Jackson, “The Dé-missionaires,” unpublished paper, November 2007. 81 “Prêtres des Missions-Étrangères, répondez-nous,’ Missions Étrangères, October 1966. 82 Charlemagne Ouellet, p.m.é., “Partir n’est pas fuir,” Missions Étrangères, September/October 1973: xi. Emphasis in original. 83 “Une double solidarité,” Missions Étrangères, January/February 1974: xxiv. 84 Ibid. 85 Madeleine Sauvé, La Faculté de théologie de l’Université de Montréal: Mémoire et histoire (1967–1997) (Quebec: FIDES, 2001), 613. Gutiérrez cites this

Progressive Catholicism at Home and Abroad  339

86 87

88 89 90

91 92

93

94 95

sojourn in Quebec as the birthplace of liberation theology. See Stéphane Baillargeon’s interview with him in “Gustavo Gutiérrez: Le théologien engagé. Un autre regard sur la foi à la lumière de positions socio-politiques,” Le Devoir, 29 November 1993, B1. André Dionne, p.m.é. “La mission dans les années 1960: Fini les soutanes!” Missions Étrangères, February 2007: 12–13. See Pierre Bélanger, Le mouvement étudiant québécois: Son passé, ses revendications et ses luttes (1960–1983) (Montreal: L’Association nationale des étu­ diants et étudiantes du Québec, 1984), 40–6. Sauvé, Faculté de théologie, 117–52. Father Guy Charbonneau, interview, 12 March 2008. Michel Lacroix and Stépanie Rousseau, “Introduction. ‘La Terre promise de la coopération.’ Les relations internationales du Québec à la lumière du missionariat, de l’économie sociale et de l’éducation,” Globe: Revue Internationale d’Études Québécoises 12, no. 1 (2009): 11–16. Beaudet, Qui aide qui? 8. Catherine Foisy, “Des Québécois aux frontières: dialogues et affrontements culturels aux dimensions du monde. Récits missionnaires d’Asie, d’Afrique et d’Amérique latine (1945–1980),” PhD diss., Concordia University (2012). Alvyn J. Austin and James S. Scott, “Introduction,” in Canadian Missionaries, Indigenous Peoples: Representing Religion at Home and Abroad (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1986), 4; Marjorie Ross, “Setting the Table for All God’s People: Canadian Churches and Development,” in Canadian Churches and Foreign Policy, ed. Bonnie Greene (Toronto: James Lorimer & Co., 1990), 70–1. For example, see Florian Vachon, p.m.é., “Une formation missionnaire pour notre temps: Vision globale de la formation offerte aux laïques ­missionnaires par la Société des Missions-Étrangères,” Missions Étrangères, February 1996: 26–7. Marcos Carías tells us that the hemorrhage of priests in the 1960s and 1970s also affected the mission fields: Carías, La iglesia católica, 121. On ideological developments within the Canadian church, see Gregory Baum, “The Shift in Catholic Social Teaching,” in Gregory Baum and Duncan Cameron, Ethics and Economics: Canada’s Catholic Bishops on the Economic Crisis (Toronto: James Lorimer & Co., 1985), 19–93; Gregory Baum, Truth and Relevance: Catholic Theology in French Quebec since the Quiet Revolution (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2014). Father Guy Charbonneau, interview, 12 March 2008; Missions Étrangères, July/August 1973: 21. Missions Étrangères, November/December 1980, 11; see also February 1986, 17–19.

340  Fred Burrill and Catherine C. LeGrand 96 Father Guy Charbonneau, interview, 12 March 2008; “Qui nous sommes,” Mer et Monde: Organisation d’initiation à la coopération internationale, www​ .monde.ca/meretmonde/. 97 Guillet, “À Votre Service!” 61–86. 98 Beaudet, Qui aide qui? 41. 99 See Beaudet, Qui aide qui?; LeGrand, “L’axe missionnaire,”; Gilles Routhier, “L’Amérique du Sud: Un nouvel ­horizon missionnaire des Églises diocesaines du Québec au cours de la deuxième moitié du XXe siècle,” paper presented to the 62nd Congrès de l’Institut d’histoire de l’Amérique française, Montreal, 17 October 2009 ; Catherine Foisy, “Culture publique en mutation dans le Québec des années 1960: L’apport du discours missionnaire à l’émergence des ONG de coopération internationale,” paper presented at the Congrès annuel de l’Association francophone pour le savoir, Ottawa, 12 May 2009. Historian Ruth Compton Brouwer’s apt phrase comes from “When Missions Became Development: Ironies of ‘NGOization’ in Mainstream Canadian Churches in the 1960s,” Canadian Historical Review 91, no. 4 (December 2010): 661–93. 100 Kate Simpson, “‘Doing Development’: The Gap Year, Volunteer-Tourists and a Popular Practice of Development,” Journal of International Development 16, no. 5 (July 2004): 690. Yet it should be noted that, in 1960–1, the Canadian hierarchy funded fifty-eight students from fourteen Latin American countries to study at seminaries in Quebec and Ontario, and, ­in the early 1970s, the p.m.é. brought a group of Honduran community leaders to the Université du Québec en Outaouais to dialogue, teach, and learn with Canadian organizers. Routhier, “L’Amérique du Sud,” 19, 26; Jean-Paul Guillet, interview, 9 September 2009. 101 Latin American historian Micol Siegel in “Beyond Compare: Comparative Method after the Transnational Turn,” Radical History Review 91 (Winter 2005): 65.

15 The End of Empire? Third World Decolonization and Canadian History s ea n mi lls

Historical narratives, according to Michel Rolph-Trouillot, are about power, and their production “involves the uneven contribution of competing groups and individuals who have unequal access to the means for such production.”1 Over the past forty years, many historians have worked to challenge conservative nationalist histories written through the eyes of elites, and they have written compelling studies exploring the past from the perspectives of women, workers, Aboriginals, and racial and ethnic minorities. The wave of critical historical writing of the past forty years has revealed the incredible depth and complexity of the past, the many social struggles that have shaped its development, and the multifaceted workings of systems of power. Yet, in Canada, with the rarest of exceptions, this critical historiography has focused on the internal developments of Canadian and Quebec societies, with the international dimensions of the past left to scholars of foreign relations and international politics. For critical historians, the nation remained, in Prasenjit Duara’s words, “the skin that contains the experience of the past,”2 but it did so implicitly, rarely becoming an object in and of itself of historiographical scrutiny and debate. In recent years this has changed dramatically. Browsing through the latest issues of scholarly journals in French and English Canada, or looking over the programs of scholarly conferences, it is becoming increasingly clear that an important shift is taking place. Debates about “transnationalism” abound, studies adopting broad global frameworks are continually appearing, historians of foreign relations are looking in new directions towards the Global South, and graduate students are lining up to study topics that stretch beyond the confines of nationally defined fields. The studies of immigration history, diplomacy, post-war

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social movements, and many other sub-fields, are undergoing an important moment of renewal. In this chapter I will review some of these recent developments, exploring how an emerging body of historiographical literature is exploring Canada’s complex engagements with the Global South, engagements which until recently have been overshadowed by or filtered through studies of Canada’s connections to Britain, France, and the United States. In particular, while making no claim to completeness, I want to look at how scholars have portrayed Canada and Quebec’s involvement in the processes of Third World decolonization in the post-war period. This new body of literature is still very much in formation, and employs a wide range of methodologies and approaches, from traditional diplomatic history to postcolonial analyses and transnational feminism, and while not all of this literature is explicitly transnational in approach, it does provide critical tools in helping us to think through the boundaries of Canadian history. Taken together, this new literature problematizes many established historical narratives, forcing us to recognize that “domestic” and “international” history need to be understood together, rather than being cordoned off in their own separate spheres. Yet despite the desire to explore new topics, read across national boundaries, and imaginatively chart alternative social connections, much of this new scholarship has inherited one historiographical shortcoming of the past: even when discussing similar topics, historians of Quebec and English Canada continue to speak in what Denyse Baillargeon has termed, in a slightly different context, “parallel voices.”3 Unlike many countries, historical writing in Canada is shaped by the basic fact of having two separate historiographical spheres, each operating in its own language, with its own journals, and its own professional associations. While this division is fostered both by these separate institutions and by the very real linguistic obstacles of learning and reading a second language, the problem, in my opinion, is not only of an institutional or linguistic nature, as many historians on both sides of the divide see little value in crossing the symbolic boundary. Although making similar claims about similar topics, and although having a great deal to learn from each other, these literatures generally operate with little reference to or acknowledgment of the existence of the other. I will therefore conclude this chapter by exploring some of the consequences of this historiographical separation, as well as of the possibilities of transnational history for reading across the fractured historiographies that continue to exist within the Canadian academy.

Third World Decolonization and Canadian History  343

Decolonization and English-Canadian Historiography In recent years, historians have been debating the boundaries – geographic, cultural, and linguistic – within which Canadian history should be understood.4 For many previous generations of scholars in Canada, the country’s relationship with “empire,” variously defined, had been a  central preoccupation. From Canada’s particular role in the British Empire to the economic and cultural influences of the United States to Canada’s own process of expansion and dispossession of Aboriginal peoples, it is clear that imperialism has played a central role in shaping Canadian history. It should perhaps be no surprise, then, that as historians have again begun looking beyond the nation, the question of the country’s relationship to “empire” has returned again. Drawing on feminist, critical race, and postcolonial theory, scholars in English Canada have worked to situate Canada within the broader context of the British world, and have sought to overcome the implicit teleologies of earlier imperial histories.5 Scholars have also centred Aboriginal ­perspectives in their analyses, and have attempted to overcome the anachronistic tendency to write the present boundaries of the “nation” back into the past.6 For scholars of the post-1945 period, engaging with empire means engaging, in one way or another, with the politics of global decolonization.7 The decolonization of British and French Africa, the independence of India, the Chinese Revolution, the Cuban Revolution, the Algerian and Vietnam Wars, and the many other challenges to empire of the post-war era dramatically transformed global politics. Canada was both deeply implicated in and was shaped by this changing global order. Canadian diplomats, corporations, missionaries, tourists, and activists travelled to the Global South to take part on both sides of the decolonization divide, and the examples and theory generated by struggles of global decolonization cast new light on Canada’s long history of empire.8 Although Canada’s relationship with the Global South has periodically surfaced as a heated topic of debate,9 it is only recently that it has emerged as a central area of historical research, inspiring scholars to look beyond Canada’s relationship with Britain and the United States towards its many interactions with the non-Western world. In so doing, they have put into question many of the narratives that have long sustained understandings of Canada’s global presence. One of the most enduring narratives structuring understandings of Canada’s role in the international arena, as Sherene Razack has pointed

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out, is the representation of Canada as a country of peacekeepers, one which maintains benevolent and enlightened policies towards the decolonizing world.10 While this myth – and the binary of civilization and savage that sustains it – has come under sustained challenge by many scholars,11 peacekeeping has also become the subject of an increasing body of critical historical scholarship. Kevin Spooner, in his detailed history of Canadian peacekeeping in the Congo, provides an important case study that demonstrates that it was self-interest, rather than abstract humanitarianism, that led Canada to intervene in Africa.12 Ian McKay and Jamie Swift have recently offered one of the most critical assessments of Canada’s past and current foreign policy by exploring the creation and subsequent undoing of the Canadian peacekeeping mythology. “Canadians were not the passive recipients of an imperialism nurtured outside Canada’s borders,” they argue, but rather “were active creators of and participants in an Anglosphere that they hoped would civilize the world.”13 McKay and Swift demonstrate how Canadian peacekeeping emerged out of Canada’s legacy of empire and the realities of the Cold War. But they also argue that peacekeeping emerged in part as a response to a non-militaristic Quebec and a sizeable peace movement. For all of its flaws, the authors therefore maintain, peacekeeping as an ideal is far preferable to the current narrative promoted by the federal government of Canada as a “Warrior Nation.” In a similar vein to the new scholarship on peacekeeping, a new body of work on Canadian foreign policy has placed the question of decolonization at the centre of its analysis, demonstrating that familiar nar­ ratives of Canada’s role in the world look quite differently if we take the non-Western world seriously. Ryan Touhey has demonstrated the importance of race and religion in shaping the Diefenbaker government’s attitudes towards India and Pakistan. He shows how it was through these racialized understandings that policymakers came to make sense of India’s insistence on non-alignment, as well as Pakistan’s pro-Western orientation.14 Looking towards Cuba, Robert Wright explores the personal and professional relationship between Fidel Castro and Pierre Trudeau, showing how both leaders worked to continually challenge “the limits imposed on their nations by history and circumstances, without destroying the delicate strategic balance that was absolutely essential to their self-preservation.”15 In a recent study, David Webster has explored Canada’s multifaceted relationship with Indonesia, and in so doing challenged the idea that Canada has acted as a benevolent and disinterested partner to the

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emerging Third World. Ultimately, Webster argues, “Canadian policy toward Indonesia, as with Canadian policy toward the decolonizing world in general, was an afterthought in post-war Canadian foreign policy. Here, alliances mattered most of all. The national interest seemed to require a focus on the North Atlantic arena. Canadian government policies on decolonization flowed from alliance-driven thinking.”16 Webster highlights the “mental maps” that shaped the attitudes and actions of Canadian officials, and he emphasizes the role of development aid, Western technical advisers, and non-governmental contacts through development economists as well as the McGill Institute of Islamic Studies. Ultimately, he argues, Canada played an active role in shaping and supporting the pro-Western Indonesia dictatorship under Suharto, and would raise little protest when Indonesia invaded East Timor in 1975. Through careful and detailed research, Webster demonstrates the ­necessity of rethinking our understanding of Canada’s involvement with the decolonizing world. In this, he has been joined by John Price. In Orienting Canada: Race, Empire, and the Transpacific, Price demonstrates the centrality of race and empire to Canadian history. Price sees it as his fundamental goal to challenge the Eurocentric bias of canadian history, and to upset traditional narratives of multiculturalism and the evolution of a non-imperial Canadian foreign policy. Too great a focus on Canada’s connections to Europe, he argues, “marginalizes Asia, not to mention Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean.”17 To redress this balance, Price offers a sustained examination of the two-way relationship between Canada and Asia, demonstrating the importance of race to the construction of Atlanticism, and the importance of cultural imperialism to immigration policies, war, and diplomacy. From Vancouver’s race riots of 1907, to Canada’s role in the building of the nuclear bomb, to its disenfranchisement, evacuation, and deportation of Japanese Canadians, to its involvement in Korea, Price connects “internal” and “external” histories, demonstrating them to be fundamentally connected. By looking at “the past from the margins,”18 Price argues, Canada’s involvement in the world looks rather different than is generally understood, and its supporting role in the imperial projects of Great Britain and, later, the United States, becomes evident, as does the importance of “colonial knowledge” in shaping Canada’s past and present. While many scholars have been exploring Canada’s official policies towards the decolonizing world, others have been looking at how culture, people, and ideas also flow across porous boundaries, although in

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conditions shaped by differing hierarchies of power.19 In a collection of  articles edited by Phillip Buckner, Canada and the End of Empire, a wide array of authors explore the political and cultural dimensions of the declining role of Britain on Canadian cultural, political, and economic life. Essays probe how severing the ties of empire affected trading relationships and formal politics. Others explore the Suez Crisis of 1956 and the royal tour of 1959, the persistence of Britain in conceptions of high culture, and the heated 1964 flag debates. Taken together, the book’s various chapters portray a retreating empire and its lingering influence over cultural and political affairs, and they make the salient point that Canadian history cannot be thought of on its own, that its past is integrally bound up in broader political, economic, and cultural projects of imperialism from which it was originally founded.20 While the essays offer many details about the slowly declining role of the British Empire in Canada, however, the collection relies, with the notable exception of J.R. Miller’s contribution on First Nations petitions to London,21 on traditional methodologies of political and diplomatic history, making little use of the insights drawn from revisionist accounts of  British imperialism; the divergent histories of Aboriginals, immigrants, French Canada, and women remain largely absent.22 Canada and the End of Empire does, however, force historians to consider the continuing significance of empire in Canadian life, an endeavour that could stimulate others to study the meaning of the end of empire for shedding light on Canada’s own internal process of colonization. In the post-war period, Aboriginal groups began drawing upon a global language of decolonization and human rights to contest the colonization to which they had long been subjected, as both Scott Rutherford and Ken Coates have ably shown.23 And thinking about Canada in broad imperial terms could also lead to the study of transimperial connections between Canada and other parts of the British Empire, such as the Caribbean, India, or South Africa.24 In Base Colonies in the Western Hemisphere, 1940–1967, Steven High – a historian who has offered a sustained a reflection on the possibilities and limits of the nation in the writing of history25 – highlights the decline of the British empire and the rise of American hegemony in the Americas, demonstrating what is to be gained by bringing previously separate histori­ ographies into a common framework. Base Colonies explores the AngloAmerican “destroyers-for-bases” deal of 1940, which saw the United States gain the right to build bases in Newfoundland and many Caribbean islands in exchange for fifty aging British warships.26 By

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exploring the transaction not from the perspective of the United States or Britain, but rather through the use of multi-archive research in the countries on the “peripheries,” High demonstrates not only the shared history of imperialism across various fragments of the British Empire, but also the differences separating Newfoundland, a white colony, from the Caribbean, where local populations faced discrimination on the basis of the combined effects of race and class. While High emphasizes the transnational circulation of racial knowledge by way of American imperialism, Karen Dubinsky has worked to transcend national boundaries and rethink established understandings of self-contained national history by exploring the symbolic politics of transnational adoption. In Babies without Borders: Adoption and Migration across the Americas, Dubinsky situates the history of transnational adoption in the context of unequal global power relations, highlighting the differing ways that children have acted as symbols for financial and racial inequality. In a gripping history that takes us from Aboriginal adoptions in Western Canada to interracial adoption in Montreal, to the story of the evacuation of babies from revolutionary Cuba to narratives of missing children in Guatemala in the 1990s, Dubinsky critically deconstructs the prevailing narratives surrounding international and interracial adoption. Portraying international adoption as either kidnap or rescue, Dubinsky argues, has reduced the complicated realities of the  world’s children to simplistic clichés. The power of Dubinsky’s book is derived from her discussion of the ways in which global power relations are represented and reproduced through the symbolism of adoption, especially in a context in which “children move from south to north, east to west, poor to rich, brown to white.”27 Understanding Canada as part of this transnational story means coming to terms with the country’s internal racial dynamics, as well as the complex ties that bind wealthy nations like Canada to the poverty and exploitation of the Third World. It should be no surprise that Dubinsky’s story of the symbolic politics of global inequality should take her to Cuba, a country that has played a unique role in representing the hopes of the Third World. Perhaps because of the symbolism of Cuba, as well as the common challenge faced by both Cuba and Canada of living next to the American superpower, the relationship between the two countries continues to draw historical research and critical attention. In Our Place in the Sun: Canada and Cuba in the Castro Era, Robert Wright and Lana Wylie have edited a collection of essays that challenges the view that Canada has charted a

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completely independent course on Cuba. Many essays demonstrate that Canada’s policy was and remains far more indebted to its alliance with the United States than is generally conceded.28 In addition to chapters on formal politics, essays by Cynthia Wight and David Sheinin reveal the power of Cuba in spurring social movements in Canada. Sheinin explains how the Progressive Church Movement in Canada drew on Cuba “as a starting point for the shaping of domestic and foreign policy analysis in a way that … invoked Marxist analysis on praxis, imperialism, and the role of corporations in capitalist society.”29 And Cynthia Wright examines the Canadian Fair Play for Cuba Committees that, she argues, had a more enduring life in Canada than in the United States. In addition to providing a richly detailed account of the group, she argues for an international perspective that would transcend “a persistent left nationalism which has often grounded a deeply limited understanding of left narratives and imaginaries in Canada.”30 The above-mentioned works are striking in their scope and originality, and for the extent to which, by looking at Canadian history through a lens that transcends national boundaries, or by looking beyond traditional connections with Britain and the United States, they challenge existing historical narratives, forcing a debate about mythologies that portray Canada unproblematically as a force of good in the world. Quebec and Decolonization Like their counterparts in English Canada, historians in Quebec have also been exploring the entangled relationship between Canada and the Global South, although with a focus on the connections forged between French-speaking Quebec and the wider world. While it is im­ possible to ignore the influence of Britain in Canadian life, the end of “empire” meant something quite different in Quebec, where in addition to the declining role of the British Empire, the prolonged and violent end of French colonialism captivated public opinion, even before the Quiet Revolution of the 1960s renewed an engagement with the broader world.31 In L’une et l’autre indépendance 1954–1964: Les médias au Québec et la guerre d’Algérie, Magali Deleuze demonstrates how the Algerian War marked Quebec culture, showing, through an extensive analysis of media coverage of the war, that both the Right and the Left drew links between themselves and the struggle for Third World decolonization. In the late 1950s, she writes, there was nearly unanimous support for

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Algerian independence among Quebec intellectuals, and this had a lasting impact on political debates in the province throughout the decade to come.32 Like Deleuze, Robin Gendron has also explored the impact of French decolonization, demonstrating the reciprocal relationship between developments in French Africa and domestic constitutional wrangling. In his Towards a Francophone Community: Canada’s Relations with France and French Africa, 1945–1968 Gendron shows how, while giving lip service to decolonization, the Canadian government continued to support France and many of the crimes of the French Empire, becoming itself an active agent perpetuating Western hegemony in North Africa. When in the 1960s Quebec began to develop its own diplomatic relations with the francophone world, both it and the federal government struggled to gain influence in French Africa and representation in La Francophonie.33 Gendron has recently extended his work in a perceptive article which uses the efforts of the well-known Quebec academic Father Georges-Henri Lévesque to highlight how political actors succeeded in exploiting constitutional struggles between Quebec and Ottawa to secure funding for projects, in Lévesque’s case a uni­ versity in Rwanda. Lévesque’s project of building a university serves as one example of a more generalized phenomenon taking place in the 1960s, as connections between Quebec and French Africa proliferated. Idealistic Quebeckers headed to Africa to pursue development, engineering, and missionary work, while at the same time building a cultural infrastructure connecting disparate elements of the Frenchspeaking world.34 The strength of Deleuze’s and Gendron’s work lies in their demonstration that Quebec’s relationship to the francophone world is much more complicated and multifaceted than standard studies of France– Canada relations suggest, and that when thinking about the various ways that Canada forms part of global relations of power, the Frenchspeaking world must be taken into account.35 In a recent article, David Meren demonstrates the importance of the discourse and context of decolonization in shaping attitudes of French and Quebec diplomatic officials towards both France’s role in the world and the perceived looming end to the Canadian federation. By drawing on metaphors of decolonization, French and Quebec political leaders forged an increasingly strong relationship, one that threatened Canadian federalism and caused a major diplomatic incident with the visit of French president Charles de Gaulle to Montreal in the summer of 1967.36 Similarly, Gérard Fabre has recently written about the transatlantic connections

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between anti-colonial activists in the 1960s, and especially the connections between Les Éditions Parti Pris in Montreal and Les Éditions Maspero in Paris. Such connections, Fabre demonstrates, were crucial hubs in a global network of intellectuals and activists challenging the  power of European imperialism.37 Although none of the above-­ mentioned authors incorporates the perspectives of those living in the formerly colonized world into their respective studies, all demonstrate the centrality of the francophone world – including the French-speaking postcolonial world – to Canadian history. Together they demonstrate that the breakup of European empire in general, and not merely the end of the British Empire, shaped the global environment in which his­ torical developments in Canada unfolded. Like historians in English Canada, scholars in Quebec have been involved in a parallel discussion about the extent to which relationships with the Global South were shaped not only by states and diplomats, but also by cultural flows and everyday people, and they have also been exploring how Quebec’s “internal” history has been shaped by “external” developments. In a special 2009 issue of Globe: Revue internationale d’études québécoises, guest editors Michel Lacroix and Stéphanie Rousseau outline their goal of looking at non-state actors in forging transnational links between Quebec and the rest of the world, and the journal’s essays concentrate on missionary work and various forms of international cooperation.38 Catherine LeGrand demonstrates the importance of the relationship between French-Canadian missionaries and Latin America, both for Latin America and for the culture that the missionaries brought back with them when they returned (a theme also explored in her chapter in this book, co-authored with Fred Burrill). By looking at progressive elements within the Catholic church – and to the influences of liberation theology – LeGrand’s work also contributes to a larger rethinking of pre–Quiet Revolution Quebec, challenging the increasingly outdated dichotomy between a pre-1960 reactionary Catholicism and a post-1960 modern secularism.39 Like LeGrand, Louis Favreau demonstrates some of the present-day legacies of Quebec’s long history of transnational political activity, highlighting the international networks of cooperatives and various other organizations,40 while Samy Mesli explores how the Quebec Ministry of Education has been central to Quebec’s diplomatic efforts.41 In a number of important works, Maurice Demers has suggested that exploring the connections made by French-Canadian elites with

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Latin America, and the attempt by many in Quebec to claim a “Latin” identity to re-imagine their place in the Americas – an effort which was especially strong during the Second World War – allows us to reconsider the long-standing debate over Quebec’s américanité. Promoting an “American” identity, Demers argues, could be used to promote ideas of cultural survival. The transnational exchanges of this period, Demers maintains, would presage the importance of Latin American thought that would increasingly shape Quebec in the post-1960 period, although at this time the impetus would come from the Left rather than the Right.42 Catherine Foisy has also worked to demonstrate the role of French-Canadian Catholic missionaries in forging new forms of international awareness of the Global South, especially in the post-1960 period, when they began to think about solidarity with the Third World in new ways. Other scholars, such as Serge Granger and Éric Desautels, have also looked at the reception in Quebec of representations of the Third World and movements of decolonization. Taken together, the above-mentioned articles demonstrate an increased desire of historians to explore transnational connections, and especially a new openness to thinking about Quebec’s relationship with the Global South. This desire can also be seen in José del Pozo’s recently published oral history of Chilean migration to Quebec, a work which demonstrates the connections between Quebec’s religious and labour leaders who travelled to Chile in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and which probes the wave of political immigrants and refugees who came to Montreal in the wake of Augusto Pinochet’s brutal CIA-backed coup of 1973.43 What the work of LeGrand, Demers, and del Pozo demonstrate is the extent to which the circulation of both ideas and people between Quebec and the Global South not only affected societies of the South, but also helped transform Quebec from the inside. As I have attempted to demonstrate in my own work, throughout the 1960s and early 1970s Quebec social movements drew on the examples and theoretical works of Third World decolonization to reimagine their place in the world, and the movements that they created collectively transformed Quebec society and culture.44 In addition to this nascent historiographical literature, a number of recently published memoirs portraying the transnational dimension of political activism during the period have emerged. Pierre Beaudet, in On a raison de se révolter, describes in detail his own engagement with national liberation, Marxism, and youth activism in Montreal in the 1960s and 1970s. He demonstrates how one-dimensional­

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portraits of the period that see only nationalism or the rise of the se­ paratist movement miss the deep complexities of social movements shaped by the anti-colonial and anti-imperialist struggles of Algeria, Cuba, and Vietnam.45 As Beaudet demonstrates so vividly, ideas drawn from global movements of decolonization were reinterpreted in Quebec, transposed through what Odd Arne Westad has termed “creative misunderstandings” of Third World examples,46 fuelling the conviction of many young people that they formed one part of a broader global movement demanding an end to unjust forms of power. By focusing on his personal autobiography, Beaudet succeeds in bringing back to life the suppressed memory of youth radicals’ global imagination. In a similar vein, Marjolaine Péloquin’s autobiography of the women’s liberation movement in Quebec collects not only her reflections, but also the reflections of other feminists of the era, who recall the importance of travels to Cuba as well as ideas of Third World decolonization in the development of their own political awareness.47 And in the autobiography of radical doctor, activist, and writer Serge Mongeau, one reads of the transformations of Catholicism during Vatican II and the explosion of discussions of sexuality during the Quiet Revolution, as well as the importance of the shifting global climate. Mongeau himself was deeply involved in family planning in Quebec, and explains how his work on birth control and sexual health happened alongside his preoccupation with global poverty. Mongeau travelled from Colombia to Tunisia to Haiti (and elsewhere), and lived extensively in Chile during the Allende years, witnessing first-hand in 1973 Augusto Pinochet’s coup d’état. Through his travels and writings, Mongeau came to understand the deeply interconnected nature of political struggles at home and abroad, as he was also constantly confronted with the wealth and privilege of Quebec in relation to the Global South.48 These autobiographies show how it was precisely at the time of the retreat of empire from Canadian life that new awakenings of the deeper structures of empire began to emerge. Individuals and groups began to think not only about Canada’s and Quebec’s own positions within larger structures of imperial power, but also about the role that these societies played in the world. Contextualized in a broader setting, the rise of Quebec (and English-Canadian) nationalism form one part of a larger post-war global history shaped by drives for national sovereignty, modernist development, and anti-imperialism.

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Entangled Histories As I have attempted to outline in the above review, the emerging literature on Canada and decolonization has the potential to resituate many of the debates and narratives that have long structured the study of Quebec and Canadian history. Yet, after surveying much of this literature it seems reasonable to conclude that transnational history has tended to reinforce rather than diminish the divide between historians of Quebec and English Canada, as scholars have sought to explore the differing transnational connections that are rooted, at least in part, in differing global linguistic communities. And one could legitimately ask why a study of French-Canadian missionaries and a study of Canada and the British world should feel compelled to talk to each other in any meaningful way. Does it really matter if Quebec and English-Canadian historians continue ignoring each other? Maybe not. And yet I cannot help but feel that keeping these two historical communities and bodies of scholarship separate closes us off from exploring some of the crucial dynamics of how empire, power, and resistance has operated in Canada. Or, to put it another way, perhaps the continued historiographical separation between French and English Canada strips us of critical tools to make sense of the origins of our complicated and multifaceted present, and it denies us the opportunity to follow fascinating, rich, and ethically pressing intellectual avenues. In the EnglishCanadian literature on decolonization, while the absence of Quebec may make sense for studies pertaining to particular regions or questions, even the two collections of essays that purport to be about “Canada” do not offer a single essay on the region. Our Place in the Sun and Canada and the End of Empire provide important insights into Canada’s complicated relationship with empire, yet, in their almost total omission of Quebec, both books also reveal something about the current divisions in the Canadian academy. To be sure, discussion of Quebec is not important for inclusivity’s sake, but because it is impossible to fully understand the multiple dimensions of the retreat of empire or the impact of the Cuban Revolu­ tion in Canada without Quebec. In no part of Canada, for example, did the Cuban Revolution have such a profound resonance, and nowhere was Canada’s legacy of empire as vigorously debated, as in Quebec in the 1960s. The social movements that grew out of this intellectual and political ferment continue to resonate to this day, having significantly contributed to Canada’s development in the past forty to fifty years.49

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Like the new literature on English Canada and decolonization, the new wave of writing on Quebec and the Global South, emphasizing the movement of people and ideas across the permeable boundaries separating the “First” and “Third” Worlds, points to new directions in Quebec history. But just as Quebec history cannot be thought of outside its global context, neither can it fully be understood without some acknowledgment of the Canadian political space in which it still exists. Quebec, and especially Montreal, is a complicated multicultural society, one composed not only of its majority francophone population, but also of successive waves of English-speaking racial and ethnic minorities, and understanding their realities requires opening ourselves up to the multiple histories that have shaped the Quebec landscape. To fully grasp the impact of decolonization on Quebec, therefore, it is not only necessary to look at French Canada’s engagement with the Global South, or the many ways in which the ideas and examples drawn from the Third World transformed Quebec culture from the inside. It is also necessary to engage with the ways that racial minorities in Quebec, such as Montreal’s Caribbean population, built on larger transnational conversations about race, the Caribbean, and postcolonialism, a theme explored extensively in the many path-breaking works by David Austin.50 And it is important to grasp how Aboriginal groups in Quebec engaged with, challenged, and stretched the many narratives of decolonization and sovereignty circulating in the province and beyond.51 It is therefore crucial to acknowledge the many overlapping spaces, imaginaries, and political jurisdictions that make up Quebec society. To better understand the complex effects of the global climate of decolonization on Canadian life, and to better grasp how Canada has shaped these very processes, we have much to gain from understanding how Quebec and Canadian history are entangled not only with the histories of other societies and cultures, but also with each other. Can we really understand the shifts in Canadian foreign policy beginning in the 1960s that accorded a far greater importance to the francophone world, or the retreat of the British Empire from Canadian life, without a deep engagement with the rich scholarly literature on Quebec’s Quiet Revolution? Can we really fully understand immigration from countries like Haiti to Quebec, with all the debates that it created and political and intellectual energies it released, without taking into account the federal government and its shifting immigration policies, and the corresponding historiographical literature? And, perhaps most importantly for our present discussion, is it possible to understand the large-scale

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questioning of Canada’s relationship to empire, unleashed by a wave of social movements beginning in the 1960s but with consequences which can still be felt to this day, without recognizing that, at least to some degree, political movements in English Canada, among Aboriginal peoples in Canada, and in Quebec, learned from each other’s examples and drew on similar sources of inspiration (even while at times being in conflict with one another)? How, then, can we rethink the relationship between Canada’s fractured historiographies? In an important essay, Magda Fahrni has raised the critical question of what the relationship between English- and French-Canadian historical writing should be, especially at a moment when historians are increasingly attempting go beyond the nation. To “argue that we ought to be writing books that include both Canada and Quebec,” she maintains, “is to imply adherence to an older, celebratory, pan-Canadian nation-building philosophy,” which is of little interest for the critically minded historian. Drawing on Jürgen Kocka, Fahrni suggests that Quebec can be integrated into Canadian history through methods of histoire croisée, or “entangled history,” and that historians can draw upon methods of transnational history and “new imperial” history to bring the histories of different parts of the country into dialogue with one another.52 “Taking Quebec into account,” she writes, “renders a comparative or ‘entangled’ approach unavoidable – suggesting to historians a range of questions and interpretive possibilities that might not otherwise have occurred to them.”53 If the new wave of transnational writing has taught us anything, it is that the inherent biases of writing history in national frameworks have closed us off from other ways of seeing the past, blinding us to the overlapping and interdependent histories of different societies. In Canada, this insight can be used to put Canada’s own fractured historiographies into dialogue with each other, allowing us to better understand the shared cultural and political space and asymmetrical relations between English and French Canada, as well as their entanglements with other societies around the world. Doing so could open new possibilities for understanding the complicated legacies of empire that continue to shape both the local and global world in which we live. Now that historians are beginning to resituate the post-1945 period in its larger global context, and beginning to think outside the confines of national historiographies, it becomes possible to think about the relationship between Quebec and English-Canadian history in new ways. Bringing these historiographies into dialogue with one another could

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be one step towards a larger questioning of established national frameworks, a questioning that would include studying the perspectives of those affected by Canada’s and Quebec’s activities abroad, as well as the perspectives of those – such as Aboriginal peoples and racialized migrants – who continue to be marginalized by mainstream historical writing at home.54 It could include moving beyond elite-driven histories and looking to the transnational circulation of ideologies of gender and race, probing the impact of transnational capital at home and abroad, and exploring the global context of migration and border controls. And it could help us to understand the interconnected nature of political movements that have sought to challenge Canada’s long history of empire, imagining instead a democratic and decolonized world. NOTES I would like to acknowledge financial support from the SSHRC postdoctoral fellowship program and the University of Toronto. This paper benefitted greatly from my conversations with David Meren, Steve Penfold, Adele Perry, and Scott Rutherford. This essay was originally written in 2009–10. 1 Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), xix. 2 Prasenjit Duara, “Transnationalism and the Challenge to National Histories,” in Rethinking American History in a Global Age, ed. Thomas Bender (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002), 25. 3 Denyse Baillargeon, “Des voies/x parallèles: L’histoire des femmes au Québec et au Canada anglais, 1970–1995,” Sextant, no. 4 (1995). Also see Carl Berger, The Writing of Canadian History: Aspects of English-Canadian Historical Writing since 1900, 2nd ed. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1986), 10; and Ronald Rudin, Making History in Twentieth-Century Quebec (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), 10. Insights can also be found in Joanne Burgess, “Exploring the Limited Identities of Canadian Labour: Recent Trends in English-Canada and in Quebec,” International Journal of Canadian Studies / Revue internationale d’études canadiennes, no. 1–2 (1990). I have also learned greatly from the article by Magda Fahrni referenced in the final section of this chapter (see note 52 below). 4 “Inside and outside the Nation: Canadian History as Transnational History,” workshop at University of Manitoba, 23–25 April 2009. Also see, for example, Allan Greer, “National, Transnational, and Hypernational

Third World Decolonization and Canadian History  357

5

6

7

8

9

Historiographies: New France Meets Early American History,” Canadian Historical Review 91, no. 4 (2010); Aline Charles and Thomas Wien, “Le Québec entre histoire connectée et histoire transnationale,” Globe: Revue ­internationale d’études québécoises 14, no. 2 (2011); Adele Perry, “Nation, Empire and the Writing of History in Canada in English,” in Contesting Clio’s Craft: New Directions and Debates in Canadian History, ed. Christopher Dummitt and Michael Dawson (London: Institute for the Study of the Americas, 2009). For important works, see Adele Perry, On the Edge of Empire: Gender, Race, and the Making of British Columbia (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001); Cecilia Morgan, “A Happy Holiday”: English Canadians and Transatlantic Tourism, 1870–1930 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008); Lisa Chilton, Agents of Empire: British Female Migration to Canada and Australia, 1869–1930 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007); Philip Buckner and R. Douglas Francis, eds., Rediscovering the British World (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2005); Philip Buckner and R. Douglas Francis, eds., Canada and the British World: Culture, Migration, and Identity (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2006). For some of the challenges of this approach, see Greer, “National, Transnational, and Hypernational Historiographies,” and Perry, “Reading Haunted by Empire in Winnipeg,” Left History 13, no. 2 (2008): 7. It should be noted that this has been happening at the same time as historians have been producing a number of important studies on Cold War Canada. For important new looks at the construction of the national security state during the Cold War, see Franca Iacovetta, Gatekeepers: Reshaping Immigrant Lives in Cold War Canada (Toronto: Between the Lines, 2006); Gary Kinsman and Patrizia Gentile, The Canadian War on Queers: National Security as Sexual Regulation (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2009); Reg Whitaker, Double Standard: The Secret History of Canadian Immigration (Toronto: Lester & Orpen Dennys Ltd., 1987). Also see Robert Teigrob, Warming up to the Cold War: Canada and the United States’ Coalition of the Willing, from Hiroshima to Korea (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009). For a provocative analysis of rethinking how Canada can fit within a ­global history of decolonization, see A.G. Hopkins, “Rethinking Decolonization,” Past and Present, no. 200 (2008). For insights into some of these debates, see Richard Swift and Robert Clarke, eds., Ties That Bind: Canada and the Third World (Toronto: Between the Lines, 1982); Robert Chodos, The Caribbean Connection (Toronto: James Lorimer & Co., 1977); Laura Macdonald, “Unequal Partnerships: The Politics of Canada’s Relations with the Third World,” Studies in Political

358  Sean Mills Economy 47(1995). For a highly provocative and generally overlooked study of Quebec’s relationship with Latin America, see Daniel Gay, Les élites québécoises et l’Amérique latine (Montreal: Éditions Nouvelle Optique, 1983). For recent contributions to the debate about Canada’s role in the world, see Nikolas Barry-Shaw and Dru Oja Jay, Paved with Good Intentions: Canada’s Development NGOs from Idealism to Imperialism (Halifax and Winnipeg: Fernwood Publishing, 2012); Todd Gordon, Imperialist Canada (Winnipeg: Arbeiter Ring Publishing, 2010). 10 Sherene Razack, Dark Threats and White Knights: the Somalia Affair, Peace­ keeping and the New Imperialism (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004). 11 In addition to Razack, also see the Spring 2009 edition of the University of Toronto Quarterly. 12 Kevin A. Spooner, Canada, the Congo Crisis, and UN Peacekeeping, 1960–64 (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2009). For a discussion of representations of the Congo mission in the Canadian media, see Colin McCullough, “‘No Axe to Grind in Africa’: Violence, Racial Prejudice, and Media Depictions of the Canadian Peacekeeping Mission to the Congo, 1960–64,” in New World Coming: The Sixties and the Shaping of Global Consciousness, ed. Karen Dubinsky et al. (Toronto: Between the Lines, 2009). 13 Ian McKay and Jamie Swift, Warrior Nation: Rebranding Canada in an Age of Anxiety (Toronto: Between the Lines Press, 2012), 62. 14 Ryan M. Touhey, “Dealing in Black and White: The Diefenbaker Government and the Cold War in South Asia 1957–1963,” Canadian Historical Review 92, no. 3 (2011). 15 Robert Wright, Three Nights in Havana: Pierre Trudeau, Fidel Castro and the Cold War (Toronto: HarperCollins, 2007), 200. 16 David Webster, Fire and the Full Moon: Canada and Indonesia in a Decolonizing World (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2009), 4. 17 John Price, Orienting Canada: Race, Empire, and the Transpacific (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2011), 2. 18 Ibid., 302. 19 See, for example, Ruth Compton Brouwer, “Ironic Interventions: CUSO Volunteers in India’s Family Planning Campaign, 1960s–1970s,” Histoire sociale / Social History 43, no. 86 (2010); “When Missions Became Development: Ironies of ‘NGOization’ in Mainstream Canadian Churches in the 1960s,” Canadian Historical Review 91, no. 4 (2010). 20 Phillip Buckner, ed., Canada and the End of Empire (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2005). For works that also discuss the decline of notions of “British Canada,” see Bryan Palmer, Canada’s 1960s: The Ironies of Identity in a Rebellious Era (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009); Jose Igartua, The Other Quiet

Third World Decolonization and Canadian History  359

21

22

23

24

25

26 27 28

Revolution: National Identities in English Canada, 1945–71 (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2006). J.R. Miller, “Petitioning the Great White Mother: First Nations’ Organizations and Lobbying in London,” in Canada and the End of Empire, ed. Phillip Buckner (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2005). Lisa Chilton makes this point in her essay “Canada and the British Empire: A Review Essay,” Canadian Historical Review 89, no. 1 (2008), 93. In the introduction to Canada and the End of Empire Phillip Buckner does, however, write: “We tried but failed to find someone to write a chapter on French-Canadian attitudes towards the end of empire.” Buckner, ed., Canada and the End of Empire, 13. See Ken Coates, Global History of Indigenous People: Struggle and Survival (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), and Scott Rutherford, “Canada’s Other Red Scare: Rights, Decolonization, and Indigenous Political Protest in the Global Sixties,” PhD thesis, Queen’s University (2011). For a firstperson account of the importance of global decolonization on Aboriginal activism, see Lee Maracle, “The Context for Red Power Activism in the 1960’s and Its Enduring Importance,” in New World Coming: The Sixties and the Shaping of Global Consciousness, ed. Karen Dubinsky et al. (Toronto: Between the Lines, 2009). For important insights, also see Emma LaRocque, When the Other Is Me: Native Resistance Discourse, 1850–1990 (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2010). For insights into Canada’s relationship to the “new imperial history,” see Chilton, “Canada and the British Empire.” For a recent account celebrating the continuation of the British imperial tradition in Canada, see C.P. Champion, The Strange Demise of British Canada: The Liberals and Canadian Nationalism, 1964–68 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2010). For earlier works by High, see Steven High and David Lewis, Corporate Wasteland: The Landscape and Memory of Deindustrialization (Toronto: Between the Lines, 2007), Steven High, Industrial Sunset: The Making of North America’s Rust Belt, 1969–1984 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003). Steven High, Base Colonies in the Western Hemisphere, 1940–1967 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 1. Karen Dubinsky, Babies without Borders: Adoption and Migration across the Americas (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010), 20. Robert Wright, “‘Northern Ice’: Jean Chrétien and the Failure of Construc­ tive Engagement in Cuba,” in Our Place in the Sun: Canada and Cuba in the Castro Era, ed. Robert Wright and Lana Wylie (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009), 196; Don Munton and David Vogt, “Inside Castro’s

360  Sean Mills

29 30

31

32

33

34

35

36

Cuba: The Revolution and Canada’s Embassy in Havana,” ibid.; Dennis Molinaro, “‘Calculated Diplomacy’: John Diefenbaker and the Origins of Canada’s Cuba Policy,” ibid. David Sheinin, “Cuba’s Long Shadow: The Progressive Church Movement and Canadian-Latin American Relations, 1970–87,” ibid., 122. Cynthia Wright, “Between Nation and Empire: The Fair Play for Cuba Committees and the Making of Canada-Cuba Solidarity in the Early 1960s,” ibid., 98. For new works that have begun tracing relations between Quebec and France before the 1960s, see Stéphanie Angers and Gérard Fabre, Échanges intellectuels entre la France et le Québec 1930–2000: Les réseaux de la revue Esprit avec La Relève, Cité libre, Parti pris et Possibles (Paris: Harmattan, 2004); Serge Joyal and Paul André-Linteau, eds., France-Canada-Québec: 400 ans de relations d’exception (Montreal: Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 2008). Magali Deleuze, L’une et l’autre indépendance 1954–1964: Les médias au Québec et la guerre d’Algérie (Outremont: Les Éditions Point de Fuite, 2001), 81. Robin S. Gendron, Towards a Francophone Community: Canada’s Relations with France and French Africa, 1945–1968 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2006). Robin S. Gendron, “‘Le prestige du Canada est en jeu.’ Le Père Lévesque et l’Université nationale du Rwanda dans les années 1960: Entre le Canada et le Québec,” Globe: Revue internationale d’études québécoises 12, no. 1 (2009): 97. This new focus is taking place, it should be said, at the same time as a ­renewal of research into Quebec’s relationship with France, as well as of its américanité. In addition to the above-mentioned work, see Yvan Lamonde and Gérard Bouchard, eds., Québécois et Américains: La culture québécoise aux XIXe et XXe siècles (Montreal: Éditions Fides, 1995); Gérard Bouchard, Genèse des nations et cultures du nouveau monde: Essai d’histoire comparée (Montreal: Boréal, 2001). For an excellent new work that looks at the mutual entanglements between Quebec and English-Canadian history, demonstrating the necessity of using multi-archive research that examines many different perspectives simultaneously, see David Meren, With Friends Like These: Entangled Nationalisms in the Canada-Quebec-France Triangle (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2012). David Meren, “An Atmosphere of Libération: The Role of Decolonization in the France-Quebec Rapprochement of the 1960s,” Canadian Historical Review 92, no. 2 (2011).

Third World Decolonization and Canadian History  361 37 Gérard Fabre, “Les passerelles internationales de la maison d’édition Parti Pris,” Revue de Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec, no. 2 (2010): 6–17. Recently, Michel Nareau has also explored the role of Latin America in Parti Pris. See Michel Nareau, “Fanon, Cuba et autres Journal de Bolivie. L’Amérique latine à Parti pris come modalité de libération nationale,” Bulletin d’histoire politique 23, no.1 (2014). 38 Michel Lacroix and Stéphanie Rousseau, “Introduction. ‘La terre promise de la coopération’: Les relations internationales du Québec à la lumière du missionnariat, de l’économie sociale et de l’éducation,” Globe: Revue internationale d’études québécoises 12, no. 1 (2009): 14. 39 Catherine LeGrand, “L’axe missionnaire catholique entre le Québec et l’Amérique latine: Une exploration préliminaire,” Globe: Revue internationale d’études québécoises 12, no. 1 (2009). For major works rethinking pre-1960 Catholicism, see Michael Gauvreau, The Catholic Origins of Quebec’s Quiet Revolution (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2005); E.-Martin Meunier and Jean-Philippe Warren, Sortir de la “Grande noirceur”: L’horizon “personnaliste” de la Révolution tranquille (Sillery: Les Éditions du Septentrion, 2002). Also see Catherine LeGrand, “Les réseaux missionnaires et l’action sociale des Québécois en Amérique latine, 1945−1980,” Études d’histoire religieuse 79, no. 1 (2013); Jean-Philippe Warren, “Les commencements de la coopération internationale Canada-Afrique. Le role des missionnaires canadiens,” in Les Relations entre le Canada, le Quebec et l’Afrique depuis 1960: esquisse de bilan et de perspectives, ed. Jean-Bruno Mukanya Kaninda-Muana (Paris: Harmattan, 2012); and Serge Granger, “China’s Decolonization and Missionaries: Québec’s Cold War,” Historical Papers: Canadian Society of Church History (2005). 40 Louis Favreau, “Coopération internationale de proximité: Histoire, fondements et enjeux actuels des OCI du Québec,” Globe: Revue internationale d’études québécoises 12, no. 1 (2009). 41 Samy Mesli, “Le développement de la ‘diplomatie éducative’ du Québec,” Globe: Revue internationale d’études québécoises 12, no. 1 (2009). 42 Maurice Demers, “L’autre visage de l’américanité québécoise: Les frères O’Leary et l’Union des Latins d’Amérique pendant la Seconde Guerre mondiale,” Globe: Revue internationale d’études québécoises 13, no. 1 (2010); Demers, Connected Struggles: Catholics, Nationalists, and Transnational Relations between Mexico and Quebec, 1917−1945 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2014); and Demers, “De l’exotisme à l’effet miroir: la repre­ sentation de l’histoire latino-americaine au Canada français,” Mens: revue d’histoire intellectuelle et culturelle 13, no. 1 (2012).

362  Sean Mills 43 Catherine Foisy, “Et si le salut venait aussi du Sud ‘missionné’? Itinéraire de L’Entraide missionnaire (1950−1983),” SCHEC, Études d’histoire religieuse 79, no. 1 (2013); Catherine Foisy, “Des Québécois aux frontières: dialogues et affrontements culturels aux dimensions du monde. Recits missionnaires d’Asie, d’Afrique et d’Amerique latine (1945−1980)” (Concordia, PhD diss., 2012); Foisy, “La décennie 1960 des missionnaires québécois: vers de nouvelles dynamiques de circulation des personnes, des idées et des pratiques,” Bulletin d’histoire politique 23, no. 1 (2014); Serge Granger, “L’Inde et la décolonisation au Canada français,” Mens: revue d’histoire intellectuelle et culturelle 13, no. 1 (2012); Granger, “La longue marche du Québec vers l’acceptation de la reconnaissance diplomatique de la Chine communiste,” Bulletin d’histoire politique 23, no. 1 (2014); Granger, Le Lys et le lotus: les relations du Quebec avec la Chine de 1650 à 1950 (Montreal: VLB, 2005); Eric Desautels, “La representation sociale de l’Afrique dans le discours missionnaire canadien-français (1900−1968),” Mens: revue d’histoire intellectuelle et culturelle 13, no. 1 (2012); and Maurice Demers, “S’appro­ prier le passé des autres: les usages de l’histoire internationale au Québec avant la Revolution Tranquille,” Mens: revue d’histoire intellectuelle et ­culturelle 13, no. 1 (2012). José del Pozo, Les Chiliens au Québec: Immigrants et réfugiés, de 1955 à nos jours (Montreal: Les Éditions du Boréal, 2009). 44 Sean Mills, The Empire Within: Postcolonial Thought and Political Activism in Sixties Montreal (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2010). 45 Pierre Beaudet, On a raison de se révolter: Chronique des années 70 (Montreal: Les Éditions Écosociété, 2008), 51. For another author working to develop an international perspective, see Jean Lamarre, “‘Au service des étudiants et de la nation’: L’internationalisation de l’Union générale des étudiants du Québec (1964–1969),” Bulletin d’histoire politique 16, no. 2 (2008). Beaudet’s memoir was quickly followed by his history of international ­solidarity in Quebec: Qui aide qui? Une brève histoire de la solidarité internationale au Québec (Montreal: Boréal, 2009). 46 Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 6. I have also explored this subject in The Empire Within. Also see JeanPhilippe Warren, Une douce anarchie: Les années 68 au Québec (Montreal: Boréal, 2008); Jean-Philippe Warren, Ils voulaient changer le monde: Le militantisme Marxiste-Leniniste au Québec (Montreal: VLB Éditeur, 2007). 47 Marjolaine Péloquin, En prison pour la cause des femmes: La conquête du banc des jurés (Montreal: Les Éditions du remue-ménage, 2007). 48 Serge Mongeau, Non, je n’accepte pas. Autobiographie, tome 1 (1937–1979) (Montreal: Les Éditions Écosociété, 2005).

Third World Decolonization and Canadian History  363 49 Sean Mills, The Empire Within; Ian McKay, Rebels, Reds, Radicals: Rethinking Canada’s Left History (Toronto: Between the Lines, 2005), 185. For a recent memoir of ex-FLQ member Jacques Lanctôt during his time in Cuba, see Jacques Lanctôt, Les plages de l’exil (Montreal: Stanké, 2010). 50 For a selection of his work, see Alfie Roberts, A View for Freedom: Alfie Roberts Speaks on the Caribbean, Cricket, Montreal, and C.L.R. James, ed. David Austin (Montreal: Alfie Roberts Institute, 2005); David Austin, “Contemporary Montréal and the 1968 Congress of Black Writers,” Lost Histories, 1998; David Austin, “All Roads Led to Montreal: Black Power, the Caribbean, and the Black Radical Tradition in Canada,” Journal of African American History 92, no. 4 (2007); David Austin, ed., You Don’t Play with Revolution: The Montreal Lectures of C.L.R. James (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2009). For other discussions of these questions, see Marcel Martel, “‘S’ils veulent faire la révolution, qu’ils aillent la faire chez eux à leurs risques et périls. Nos anarchistes maisons sont suffisants’: Occupation et répression à Sir George-William,” Bulletin d’histoire politique 15, no. 1 (2006); Dorothy W. Williams, The Road to Now: A History of Blacks in Montreal (Montreal: Véhicule Press, 1997). 51 For a fascinating study, see Jane Jenson and Martin Papillon, “Challenging the Citizenship Regime: The James Bay Cree and Transnational Action,” Politics & Society 28, no. 2 (2000). 52 Magda Fahrni, “Reflections on the Place of Quebec in Historical Writing on Canada,” in Contesting Clio’s Craft: New Directions and Debates in Canadian History, ed. Christopher Dummitt and Michael Dawson (London: Institute for the Study of the Americas, 2009), 15. 53 Ibid., 17. 54 See, for example, Nathalie Peutz’s ethnography of Somalis who have been deported from Canada (and the United States): “Embarking on an Anthropology of Removal,” Current Anthropology 47, no. 2 (April 2006). For works on how anti-deportation activism and non-status peoples have shaped political debate, see Peter Nyers, “Abject Cosmopolitanism: The Politics of Protection in the Anti-Deportation Movement,” Third World Quarterly 24, no. 6 (2003); Jenny Burman, “Absence, ‘Removal,’ and Everyday Life in the Diasporic City: Antidentention/Antideportation Activism in Montreal,” Space and Culture 9 (2006). For an important book that looks to both Canada and Quebec and their interactions with Africa, see Jean-Bruno Mukanya Kaninda-Muana, ed., Les relations entre le Canada, le Québec et l’Afrique depuis 1960 (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2012).

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Contributors

Kristine Alexander is Canada Research Chair in Child and Youth Studies and assistant professor of History at the University of Lethbridge. Her research investigates the place of children and childhood in transnational organizations and processes, and she has published articles and book chapters on the history of the global Girl Guide movement and Canadian girls during the First World War. She is currently completing on a book about the imperial and international histories of the Girl Guide movement. Bettina Bradbury was a professor in the History departments in the Faculty of Liberal and Professional Studies and at Glendon, as well as in the School of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies, York University, until her retirement in July 2014. Before that she taught at the Université de Montréal. Her latest monograph is Wife to Widow: Lives, Laws and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Montreal. Her current research explores issues of marriage, property, and inheritance in nineteenth-century white-settler colonies through the family histories, biographies, and inheritance struggles of women who migrated to Australia, New Zealand, the Cape, or Quebec from England in the mid-nineteenth century. Tolly Bradford holds a PhD in history from the University of Alberta. He is currently assistant professor of history at Concordia University College of Edmonton. His work examines the ways Christianity and other forms of cultural colonialism have shaped Indigeneity and colonial politics in frontier settler societies, especially western Canada. His first monograph is Prophetic Identities: Indigenous Missionaries on British Colonial Frontiers, 1850–75.

366 Contributors

Fred Burrill is an activist and historian engaged in tenants’ rights work, migrant justice struggles, and anarchist organizing in Montreal. Ann Curthoys is an Australian Research Council Professorial Fellow in the history department at the University of Sydney. She has written on many aspects of Australian history and on historical theory and writing. Her recent publications include Is History Fiction? (with John Docker), How to Write History That People Want to Read (with Ann ­McGrath), and Rights and Redemption: History, Law, and Indigenous People (with Ann Genovese and Alexander Reilly). She is currently writing, with Jessie Mitchell, a book provisionally titled Taking Liberty: How Settlers in the Australian Colonies Gained Self-Government and Indigenous People Lost It. Karen Dubinsky teaches history and development studies at Queen’s University. She works on global childhood issues (including adoption/migration history and the politics of childhood), Cuban musical cultures, and Canadian–Third World relations. Her recent books include Babies without Borders: Adoption and Migration across the Americas, New World Coming: The Sixties and the Shaping of Global Consciousness (with Catherine Krull, Susan Lord, Sean Mills, Scott Rutherford, eds.) and, most recently, the co-edited anthology Habáname, la ciudad musical de Carlos Varela (The Musical City of Carlos Varela). Penelope Edmonds is a historian of colonial and postcolonial histories with a special interest in Australian and Pacific region contact and transnational histories. Penny is an Australian Research Council Future Fellow, School of Humanities, University of Tasmania. She is the author of Urbanizing Frontiers: Indigenous Peoples and Settlers in 19th-Century Pacific Rim Cities. Elizabeth Elbourne is an associate professor in the Department of History and Classical Studies, McGill University. Past publications include Blood Ground: Colonialism, Missions and the Contest for Christianity in Britain and the Eastern Cape, 1799–1852 and Sex, Power and Slavery (co-edited with Gwyn Campbell). From 2010 to 2014 she was co-editor with Brian Cowan of the Journal of British Studies. Ryan Eyford teaches in the Department of History at the University of Winnipeg. His research examines the role of land reserves in

Contributors 367

dispossessing Indigenous peoples and facilitating settler expansion in the Canadian North-West during in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Karen Flynn is an associate professor in the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies and the Department of African-American Studies Program at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She is the author of Moving Beyond Borders: Black Canadian and Caribbean Women in the African Canadian Diaspora. Laura Ishiguro is an assistant professor in the Department of History at the University of British Columbia. A historian of nineteenth-century British Columbia in the global and imperial context, she is currently working on a study of family, affect, and the sensory in nineteenthcentury British Columbia. Esyllt W. Jones is the author of Influenza 1918: Disease, Death and Struggle in Winnipeg. Her most recent book is Imagining Winnipeg: History through the Photographs of L.B. Foote. She is currently completing a monograph on the history of socialized medicine in Canada. Catherine C. LeGrand is associate professor of Latin American history at McGill University. Co-editor of Close Encounters of Empire: Writing the Cultural History of US–Latin American Relations, she has also published on the British Columbia Sugar Company in the Dominican Republic. She is currently researching the transnational history of Quebec Catholic missionaries and of the Antigonish cooperative movement in Latin America in the second half of the twentieth century. Renisa Mawani is associate professor of sociology and the first chair of the Law and Society Minor Program at the University of British Columbia (2009–10). She works on the conjoined histories of Indigeneity, Asian migration, and settler colonialism and has published widely on race, law, and coloniality as well as legal geography. Her articles have appeared in numerous journals. Her first book, Colonial Proximities: Crossracial Contacts and Juridical Truths in British Columbia, 1871–1921, details the dynamic encounters between Aboriginal peoples, Chinese migrants, mixed-race populations, and Europeans in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.­

368 Contributors

Her second book (in progress) is a transnational history of the Komagata Maru. Sean Mills is an assistant professor of history at the University of Toronto. He is the author of The Empire Within: Postcolonial Thought and Political Activism in Sixties Montreal, and co-editor of New World Coming: The Sixties and the Shaping of Global Consciousness. Adele Perry teaches history at the University of Manitoba. She is the author of works on Canadian, colonial, and gender histories. Her most recent book Colonial Relations: The Douglas-Connolly Family and the Nineteenth-Century Imperial World was published in 2015. Angela Wanhalla is a senior lecturer in the Department of History and Art History at the University of Otago, and a member of the Centre for Research on Colonial Culture. She specializes in the history of sexuality, race, and colonial history. Her recent publications include In/visible Sight: The Mixed Descent Families of Southern New Zealand, Early New Zealand Photography: Images and Essays, co-edited with Erika Wolf, and Matters of the Heart: A History of Interracial Marriage in New Zealand. Henry Yu is committed to expanding the engagement between academic research and the communities which the university serves, and is involved in the collaborative effort to reimagine the history of Vancouver and of Canada by focusing on how migrants from Asia, Europe, and other parts of the Americas engaged with each other and with First Nations peoples historically. He is completing a book project entitled Pacific Canada, and his current research examines the history of Chinese migration in the Pacific world.

Index

Aboriginal peoples, 29–33, 37–40, 42, 50–1, 55, 57–8, 61, 65–9, 76–87, 91– 6, 98, 109, 119–24, 126–7, 129–30, 133, 161, 171, 178–9, 195, 199, 201, 205, 285–6, 341, 343, 346–7, 354–6. See also Indigenous peoples Aborigines Protection Society, 37–9, 66 anti-Asian politics, 188, 191, 199, 202–5 anti-Asian discourse on coolie labour, 204–5 anti-Chinese discourse, 189, 199, 201–4 anti-Punjabi Sikh riot, 203 anti-slavery or Abolitionism in England, 172, 174 Asiatic Exclusion League, 203. See also Fowler, A.E ‘Asiatic’ immigrants, 258–9, 265 assimilation, 50, 59, 68, 91–2, 94–6, 98–9, 101,103, 107. See also evolution assimilation policy, 91–2, 95–6, 98–9, 107; in homes, 98–100, 103, in schools, 92, 94, 98, 107 Australia, 25–34, 36–40, 42, 63–5, 115–35

‘Australia for the White Man,’ 133 Australian self-governing colonies, 27 Baden-Powell, Olive, 279–80, 282, 285–7 Bannister brothers, 13, 49–69 Bannister, John William, 51, 56, 60, 64–5, 67–8 Bannister, Mary Anne, 52, 60 Bannister, Saxe, 50, 51, 60–2, 64–5, 67–8 Bannister, Thomas, 62–8 Barbados, 168–9, 171–5, 182, 233, 236, 238 Brant, John, 52 The Beehive (La Colmena), 319–21 Blatchford, Mary Ann, 145–50, 152–5, 158, 161 British Columbia, 5, 11, 31, 95, 100–1, 117, 119, 120–2, 124, 127–34, 181, 187–9, 193, 195, 197, 199, 200, 203, 212–13, 215, 221–3, 257–8, 265 British Columbia’s Boundary Commission (1858–1862), 95 British Indians, 253–9, 261–3, 265, 267–70 British North America Act (1867), 6

370 Index Budd, Henry, 77–86 Budge Budge Massacre, 254 Calcutta, 253–6, 262 Campesinos, 314, 316, 318–19, 321–3. See also Mestizo Canada and peacekeeping, 344 Canadian Fair Play for Cuba Committees, 348 Canadian Girl Guides, 276–88; Anglo-Saxon underpinnings of, 277, 280, 287; persistence of racial hierarchies in, 285–8; transnational nature of, 276–8, 282–4, 286–8 Canadian Historical Association (CHA), 5, 7–8 Canadian Nursing Association (CNA), 230 Canadian Pacific Railway, 193, 198, 205 Cantonese migrants, 188–92, 194–7, 199–206 Cantonese Pacific, 192, 195, 199, 201 Cape Colony, 60–2, 77–79, 81–6, 145–61 Caribbean nurses, 228–45; racial prejudices against, 231 Caribbean Nurses Organization (CNO), 233–4, 236, 239–40, 243, transnational characteristics of 239–40 Caribbean Registered Nurses (CRN), 230, 232, 235, 237 Catholic Church, 311, 314, 316–21, 324–5, 328–9 Centre for Peasant Formation (Centro de Capacitación para Campesinos), 319. See also The Beehive or La Colmena childhood and youth, 92, 107–10, 153, 276–88

Chinese people, 187–207 Chinese Exclusion Act, U.S.A. (1882), 202 Chinese Head Tax (1885), 202. See also Chinese Immigration Act Chinese Immigration Act (1885), 203 Choluteca, 313–14, 316, 318–20, 322–3 Christianity and Aboriginal people, 81–3, 86, 96 Church Missionary Society (CMS), 77, 79 cold war, 297, 316, 344 CEGEPs (Collèges d’enseignement général et professionnel), 326 colonial self-governance, 27 colonialism, 50–1, 54–5, 60, 66–9, 146–7, 151, 154, 157–9, 161–2. See also settler colonialism The Commonwealth of Oceana, 115. See also Oceana Communism, 296–8, 314, 316–18, 322 condolence letters (see also epistolary space), 212, 214–19, 222–3 Considerations on Representative Government (John Stuart Mill), 37 coolie labour, 192, 205 Co-operative Commonwealth Federation/New Democratic Party, 293–6, 298–300, 305 Cuban Revolution, 314 Custom of Paris or Coutume de Paris, 147–9, 151–3, 159, 161 decolonization, 341, 343, 345–9, 351–6 decolonization, Quebec, 348–52 Department of Indian Affairs (DIA), 91–110 Department of Indian Affairs photographs and assimilation, 92–9, 105, 107–10

Index 371 Dilke, Charles Wentworth, 115, 125–9, 131 Douglas, James, 121 Douglas, Tommy, 293, 295–6, 301, 304 Durham Report, 32, 34, 36–8. See also Report on the Affairs of British North America, Dower Act, England, (1831), 148 epistolary space, 212, 214–20, 222–3 evolution, 99–100, 105. See also assimilation family, 49–69, 189–90, 214–23 Fowler, A.E, 203–4. See also AntiPunjabi Sikh riot Froude, James, 115–18, 125–6, 128–31, 133–4 General Nursing Council of Great Britain (GNC), 231–3 `Gentlemen’s Agreements,’ Japan and Canada, 203 Gold Mountain, 195–6. See also jinshan and Gum San. gold rushes, 120, 122–4, 126, 132 Gradual Civilization Bill (1857), 40 Gum San, 195–6. See also Gold Mountain Guongdong, 189, 191–3, 196–7 Honduras, 311, 313–16, 318–13, 326–9 Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC), 87, 121 Icelandic people, 169–71, 176–181; Anglo-Canadian society and, 170, 178–81 imperialism, 116, 269, 278, 327, 343, 346–8, 350, 352

India, 254–70, 282–4, 286–8 Indian Act (1876), 7 Indian Lands and Properties Act (1860), 40 Indigeneity, 77, 81, 83–86 Indigenous Dispossession, 13, 25, 27–8, 35, 117, 121, 124, 128–9 Indigenous peoples, 5–6, 17 27–42, 50–1, 54, 57–9, 64, 67, 77–8, 87, 117, 119–22, 124–5, 127–30, 135, 147–8, 151, 161, 170, 182, 187, 190–1, 195. 200–1, 305 Indigenous policy, 28, 32, 40. See also Aboriginal peoples Inheritance law, 148–62 International Council of Nurses (ICN), 232–3, 235, 239–41, 243; transnational characteristics of, 239–241. Immigration policy and South Asian immigration, 254 Jamaica, 243 Jamaican Nurse, 241–5 Jeunesse Étudiante Catholique (JEC), 324 Jewish people, 295, 297, 297–301 Jewish Women of America, 298 jinshan, 195–6. See also Gold Mountain Kingston Public Hospital (KPH), 233–5 Komagata Maru, 4, 188, 253–70, global responses to, 261–6 La Colmena (The Beehive), 319 land expropriation, 121 law, 147–62 151, 153, 155–7, 159–61, 261–6

372 Index Letter from Sydney, 33 `letteracy,’ 216 left, Canadian, 14, 295–6, 299, 305 liberation theology, 312. 320, 323, 326–7, 350 Lower Canada, 32–4, 36–7, 150, 153, 158 Manitoba, 169–71, 176–82 Maori, 37, 39–41, 77, 94, 103–5, 107 marriage law, 147, 148–62 Mestizo, 314 Mill, John Stuart, 33, 37, 41, 267–8 missionaries and missions, 57, 61, 76–87, 96, 120, 129, 169–71, 175, 282, 286–7, 311–29 myth of settler colonialism, 205–6. See also settler colonialism Natal, 62, 68 National Federation of Honduran Campesinos (FENACH), 318 New Deal, 296, 301–2, 305 New Zealand, 10, 13, 15, 29–33, 36–7, 39–42, 50, 77, 91–5, 101, 103, 107–10, 115, 119, 122, 125–6, 128, 131–2, 189, 200–4, 262, 264, 281, 284; Department of Education, 94; Department of Native Affairs, 94; Health Act (1920), 104 New South Wales, 56–60, 62, 120–1, 129, 132 North-West Territories, 169–71, 176–82. Nurses Association of Jamaica, 241. See also Jamaican Nurse Journal Oceana, 115–17, 125, 131, 133–5. Orientalism, 35, 283

Orienting Canada: Race, Empire, and the Transpacific (John Price), 345 Pacific Rim, 118–19, 124, 130, 132, 134–5 Patriotes, Lower Canadian, 25–7, 42 Quebec Act (1774), 152 Quebec Prêtres des MissionsÉtrangères (p.m.é.), 314, 316–21, 323, 325, 327 Quebec, 54, 145, 146–61, 187, 243, 311–29, 341–2, 344, 348–56 Quiet Revolution, 311–13, 324, 326 racial amalgamation, 107. See also assimilation policy Red River, 77 Rupert’s Land, 77–87 Reform Act, United Kingdom, (1832), 50 Report on the Affairs of British North America, 34. See also Durham Report residential schools, 96, 98, 107–10 responsible government, 28–9, 34–9 Roman-Dutch Law, 147–8, 151, 153, 155–7, 159–61 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 302 Saskatchewan, 293–306 Sierra Leone, 56, 62–5 Sheps, Mindel Cherniack, 296–304 Sigerist, Henry, 296–7, 299, 301–4. See also Socialized Medicine in the Soviet Union Singh, Gurdit, 263, 268–9. slave trade, 168, 170–2, 180 socialism, 298–300, 305

Index 373 socialized medicine, 293–7, 303–3 Socialized Medicine in the Soviet Union, 297 Soga, Tiyo , 77–86 South Africa, 60, 61, 68, 77–86 South Asian migration, 253–5, 257–61, 263, 265, 267, 269–70 Stevens, H.H., 259 Soviet Union, 295, 297, 302, 304 Taylor, John, 168–82, put on trial, 172 Texas, 174 transcolonial history, 27 transfrontier identities, 77, 80–1, 85–6 transnational family networks, 214–16 See also condolence letters. transnationalism, 8–16, 76–7, 86–7, 91–2, 214–16, 228–9 235, 239, 244, 254–5, 294, 305, 311–13, 328–9, 341–2, 347, 350–1, 353, 355–6 transpacific migrants. 188–92 transpacific movements, 196, 198, 204, 269–79 Trutch, Julia Elizabeth, 212–23 United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People, 119

University of Toronto School of Nursing (UTSN) and enrollment of Caribbean women, 236–38 Upper Canada, 32–4, 36–7, 39–40, 52–6, 66 Van Diemen’s Land, 25–6, 32–3, 38, 64–5 Vancouver Race Riot (1907), 203–4. See also anti-Asian politics Vatican, 313–14, 316–19, 324, 329 Wagner-Murray-Dingell Bill (USA), 297 white supremacy, 188–9, 191, 199–205, 207 women, 58, 61, 151–3, 160–2, 194–5, 203, 228–36, 276–88, 299–303 World Association of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts (WAGGS), 280–2; second biennial report (1932) of, 278 Xhosa people, 78, 147, 151–2 Zionism, 299 Zulu people, 61–2, 151