It’s never too late to speak one’s truth

by Maurice Switzer*

In grade school I recall having to memorize poems by Duncan Campbell Scott, oblivious to the fact that the author was responsible for devising a network of residential schools that caused irrevocable damage to the lives of thousands of Indigenous kids like me.

We were assigned to read the rhymes of venerated Canadian authors like Bliss Carman, Pauline Johnson, and—nearing Remembrance Day— Col. John McCrae, then stand and recite them to our less-than-enthusiastic classmates. Scott’s poems were often included in our English literature curriculum.

I can’t recall most teacher selections but they were usually of a bucolic nature. I’m pretty sure I would have remembered if we had been asked to memorize “The Half-Breed Girl”—in which Scott describes his subject’s “savage  life,” “undiscovered dreams,” and  “troubled breast”— or “The Onondaga Madonna” about a “tragic savage…of a weird and waning race” whose “pagan passion burns and glows.”

His artistic pursuits notwithstanding— Scott published nine volumes of poetry, as well as fiction and non-fiction titles and short stories and was president of the Ottawa Symphony Orchestra and a founder of the Dominion Drama Festival and hung around with legendary painters like Lawren Harris and Clarence Gagnon—his biographers tend to euphemistically refer to his “complicated legacy”.

This was the same single-minded civil servant who, as deputy-superintendent of the federal Department of Indian Affairs for 19 years, doggedly pursued his goal “to get rid of the Indian problem”. His primary assimilationist tool was the notorious network of Indian Residential Schools, for which Canada and the church denominations which operated the schools have issued abject apologies and paid out some $7 billion to settle lawsuits representing the interests of the 150,000 students forced to attend the institutions. Those children suffered abuses which no less an esteemed personage than Pope Francis  has characterized as genocide.

Records show that Scott was clearly aware of the extent of the problems at the schools, ignoring the advice of Canada’s Chief Medical Officer, Dr. Peter Bryce, who in 1907 submitted a report noting that  unsanitary conditions and overcrowding were spreading disease, primarily tuberculosis, and that students were dying as a result. Scott disregarded the report and Dr. Bryce was subsequently dismissed. In the face of such troubling evidence, Scott’s response was to push for changes to the Indian Act in 1920 that made attendance at the schools mandatory for Indigenous children aged 7 to 15.

A century later, Canadians are still trying to come to grips with the harm caused to Indigenous communities and the country’s reputation as a global human rights champion.

As unaware as I was in elementary school about some troubling aspects of Scott’s poetry, I was similarly uninformed at the time that my maternal grandfather, Moses Muskrat Marsden, had been a 19^th century student at the Alnwick Industrial School in Alderville First Nation, from which he ran away at the age of 8, for reasons that neither he nor wife Nellie Orma Franklin would never share with their  13 children.

By most realistic standards, Catharine Parr Trail certainly does not belong in the contemptible historic company of people like Duncan Campbell Scott, who deliberately used their authority and influence to create policies that caused irreparable harm to others, including people much like my own grandparents.

When we think of CPT, we imagine a prim and proper Englishwoman, transplanted in 1832 from  comfortable Suffolk surroundings to what she would call “The Backwoods of Canada.”

Excerpts from her 24 books—and from the 19 publications authored by younger sister Susanna “Roughing It In The Bush” Moodie—have routinely been required reading for students in schools across Canada. Their influence has been substantial in how Canadians saw Indigenous peoples for over a century.

The daughters of Elizabeth and Thomas Strickland both married retired soldiers and both set up their first Upper Canadian homes in the settlement of Lakefield, a village near Peterborough, Ontario, whose founding fathers included their brother Col. Samuel Strickland.

I grew up in Lakefield, and spent my elementary and secondary school years there. The village recently commemorated the establishment of its first Indigenous household by my grandparents after they left Alderville First Nation in the early 1920s.

Boyhood friend Tam Grant lived in a one-and-a-half-storey white clapboard house on the western shore of the Otonabee River. I have eaten sandwiches in the kitchen and slept overnight in the dwelling where Catharine Parr Traill lived from 1862 until her death at 97 in 1899, and where she composed most of her manuscripts.

She called the frame house “Westove” after her husband’s family home in Scotland’s Orkney Islands. Located at 16 Smith St. In Lakefield, it is still a private residence with a historical plaque in place at the driveway entrance.

Neither Strickland sister had married into wealth, and like many of their fellow countrymen, found themselves living pioneer lifestyles in unfamiliar surroundings by necessity, and hoped that their first-hand experience could dispel some of the rosy fictions being spun by British agents eager to encourage migration to the distant colonies.

In her introduction to “Backwoods,” Catharine cautioned that “the old and the young, the master and the servant, are alike obliged to labour for a livelihood, without respect to former situation or rank!”

In addition to chronicling the pioneer lifestyle, the sisters produced children’s books, poetry, and field guides to the flora and fauna they catalogued in their new surroundings. In “Sisters in the Wilderness”, biographer Charlotte Gray notes that both women had a great influence on England’s understanding of colonial Canada, as well as on Canada’s own vision of its young self. Their writings became essential elements of Canadian studies courses for decades and are still considered classic examples of pioneer memoirs.

As well as cementing her reputation as a reliable chronicler of early European settlement in Canada, Catharine came to be regarded as an accomplished botanist, collecting Canadian flowers and plants and pressing them between the pages of books, while writing detailed notes about each species.

Together with her niece, Susanna’s daughter Agnes Dunbar FitzGibbon—a skilled flower illustrator—Catharine produced “Studies of Plant Life in Canada” and “Canadian Wildflowers”, still considered seminal field guides. She created more than 20 bound herbaria (blank books filled with pressed plants and annotations) that now hold treasured places in the Canadian Museum of Nature’s plant collection, along with first editions of her field guides.

It was these works that made Dorothy Lander, the author of the book you are reading, feel like a kindred spirit. She referred to Catharine Parr Traill as her “floral godmother”, the inspiration for her accumulating and writing about a vast personal collection of dried plant specimens.

Lander is a self-described writer and nature artist who, with husband John Graham-Pole, operates a social enterprise publishing house based in Antigonish, Nova Scotia. The epiphany she credits with inspiring her to write Re-Reading Catharine Parr Traill; Stranging the Familiar occurred during the pandemic lockdown, when the couple adopted the daily routine of re-reading aloud to one another passages from Nature books.

One of these books was CPT’s 1852 novel Canadian Crusoes: A Tale of the Rice Lake Plains, the first full-length work of fiction by a Canadian author. Lander, now in her eighth decade, recalled last hearing the story read aloud to her by her father 65 years earlier in the family’s farmhouse located on the south shore of Rice Lake.

In addition to feeling a naturalist’s bond to Catharine Parr-Traill’s botanical bent, Lander also felt strong geographic links to CPT’s writings about the area of her own birthplace, a temperance farm community known as Plainville. Some of Lander’s inventory of dried plant specimens were picked in the Rice Lake Plains.

Canadian Crusoes is a fanciful story about three children—an English-Canadian boy and girl and a French-Canadian boy—who become lost in the Canadian wilderness, depicted by the author as the Rice Lake area in south-central Ontario. They must fend for themselves to survive, as did the book’s namesake and central character of Daniel Defoe’s 1719 novel “Robinson Crusoe”.

The trio are immeasurably helped by the skills of a Mohawk Girl, Indiana, and the group’s cultural composition has led some scholars to speculate that the story is Parr Traill’s metaphor for the kind of cooperation that would be required to forge a Canadian nation.

Dorothy Lander’s re-reading triggered much different responses.

Whereas she was “captivated” as a child by her father’s expressive recital of Canadian Crusoes, she now heard its words in a different light.

When Louis, one of the three lost children, spots “the figures of many naked savages,” he runs away from the “wild wretches” saying “I think I just saved my scalp.” This might have had a swashbuckling appeal for an eight-year-old, but since then Lander’s learning has included the findings and recommendations of a national Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

In Parr Traill’s telling, Louis is unwilling to  credit Indigenous ingenuity for the skill of canoe-making: “Why should we be more stupid than these untaught heathens?” But Lander has since read “Braiding Sweetgrass,” Robin Wall Kimmerer’s bestselling treatise on the contributions of Indigenous traditional knowledge to scientific understanding of the natural world.

Crusoe Hector says: “It is a sad thing for Christian children to live with an untaught pagan,” but Lander now understands the racism implicit in the Catholic Church’s Doctrine of Discovery, which legitimized the colonization of North and South America and the consignment of the hemisphere’s Indigenous inhabitants to “perpetual servitude.”

She admits that it may have been a source of youthful pride that cousin Herbert, a Methodist pastor assigned to Hiawatha and Alderville reserves on Rice Lake, was made an “honourary Red Indian Chief” and presented with a headdress by the communities he served. But she has now witnessed heated public debates about cultural appropriation of Indigenous customs and heard bitter denunciation of an Alberta First Nation bestowing a war bonnet on the visiting Pope Francis.

The wallpaper in her brothers’ bedroom portrayed a Mounted Policeman on horseback, looking down at a subserviently positioned Indigenous man in a flowing Plains headdress, a home decoration choice that now gives her pause.

She recalls  high school history class tributes to Sir John A. Macdonald—the “architect of Confederation”—but learned much later as an adult that it was during his  mandate that the racist Indian Act was imposed, the residential school genocide was launched, and that it was on his political watch that Canada’s first prime minister told the House of Commons that his government’s policy included “refusing food until the Indians are on the verge of starvation.”

It is up to readers of Lander’s book to decide, firstly, if Catharine Parr Traill was in reality a “racist colonizer”, or a regurgitator of the uninformed opinions and attitudes that early settlers in Canada fostered about Indigenous peoples. The fact that her writing played a major role in spreading such views makes her, at best, an unwitting accomplice to the power brokers responsible for enshrining such bigotry in the country’s legislative agenda.

She cites author Elin Elgaard’s assessment of the Strickland sisters as authors of work “expressing middle-class hypocrisy, bigotry, pride, and a patronizing attitude towards inferiors,” an appraisal that seems more appropriate than Lander’s characterization of Parr Traill’s dialogue as “an undeniable white supremacy script.”

There most certainly would have been many Traill-era settlers who would not have shared the author’s opinions that Indigenous peoples were, as British military hero Jeffrey Amherst termed them, “an execrable race.”

Unfortunately for mankind, those whose opinions—however noble and preferable—differ from the majority of those held by their fellow citizens tend to keep their thoughts to themselves, a sin of omission which legitimizes the most outrageous and harmful polemics of political leaders like John A. Macdonald and Donald Trump.

Secondly, those who pick up Re-Reading Catharine Parr Traill: Stranging the Familiar will likely ask themselves if they agree with Lander’s self-excoriation  for a variety of perceived sins. She feels “shameful” for performing a role as an Indigenous child in a Sunday School rendition of The Huron Carol; she is troubled that Hollywood Westerns were a main influence on her opinions of Indigenous peoples, and that her Uncle George used to say he saw Indians  living on “our land” in teepees when he was a boy.

She says her re-reading of Catharine Parr Traill made her embarrassingly aware of “the raft of assumptions that have coloured my views on gender relations, land rights and stewardship, spirituality, and what it means to be Christian.” She felt guilty of the same “cognitive dissonance” of which she had accused CPT.

She confesses to have been “jolted off my childhood moorings.” She feels like she is guilty of “complicity in Canada’s colonialization project.”

She feels shame.

My grandfather Moses was born in the Rice Lake Plains around the time Catharine Parr Traill’s husband Thomas died and she moved into her Lakefield clapboard cottage.

While serving as Alderville First Nation Chief from 1904-09 he and other community leaders tried to get the provincial and federal governments to honour treaty agreements they had made and keep settlers from squatting on their lands. He was in the room on Nov. 19, 1923, when government commissioners promised Alderville headmen that agreeing to the Williams Treaty would enable them to continue their way of life.

They lied.

For almost a century, members of the seven Williams Treaty communities were forced to hunt, fish, and trap in secrecy because the treaty commissioners had misled them about the terms of the treaty, by which they claimed the Indians had literally surrendered their rights to feed themselves as they always had in their traditional territories. Some went to jail or were fined or were shot at by farming settlers.

It took almost 100 years before the governments resolved the treaty for seven affected Michi Saagig and Chippewa nations with a settlement that amounted to  $85 an acre for the land which the Crown claims was “surrendered” by the terms of the Williams Treaties, from the shore of Lake Ontario to Lake Nipissing in the north, from Lake Huron east to the Ottawa River.

Property in that region of central Ontario currently sells for between $12,000 and $15,000 per acre.

My grandfather was one of many who left their reserve because of the lack of employment and educational opportunities. He lost his rights as a status Indian and never got to enjoy any of the financial benefits of the eventual 2018 treaty settlement.

He built a modest bungalow out of fieldstones and mortar across the river in Lakefield from Catharine Parr Traill’s “Westove” and my grandparents lived out their 64-year marriage in a house with no running water, central heating, or indoor plumbing. They raised 13 children without the health care for themselves and education for their children that were treaty promises “for as long as the sun rises in the east.”

They were loving, God-fearing people who did nothing to harm anyone. Canada cheated them out of their birthright.

That disappoints me. It saddens me. It angers me.

But I do not want conscientious Canadians like Dorothy Lander to feel guilty about a past in which they played no part. Blame and guilt are not good foundations on which to build what is currently being called Reconciliation.

My hope is that what they have now learned about Indigenous peoples inspires them to action, whether that action means correcting stereotypical or racist assumptions that they hear voiced around dining room tables, or forming community Reconciliation Circles to demand that local politicians be involved in responses to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s 94 Calls to Action.

Or writing books like this one.

Like Dorothy Lander, I sat through hours of Hollywood westerns in which settlers circled their wagons to avoid the same fate feared by the Canadian Crusoe Hector—losing their scalps to marauding Indians. I read through stacks of comic books in which the “good guys” had names like Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, and Hopalong Cassidy. The Lone Ranger did have an Indian sidekick, but we kids weren’t aware of the subservient role in which Tonto had been deliberately cast.

I do not feel guilty that I once was the proud owner of a two-holster set of gold-plated Roy Rogers’ six-shooters.

We only know what we are taught.

Like Dorothy Lander and me, most adult Canadians did not learn about Canada’s true history in school. Their history textbooks did not talk about how their governments put Indians to jail for practising their culture and sent their children to prison-like institutions called schools just for being who they were.

Most Canadian schoolchildren of my generation were certainly not taught that Duncan Campbell Scott was an architect of genocide. We simply had to memorize and recite his poetry.

We have had to learn about Canada’s Indigenous truths on our own.

Dorothy Lander listened to her father read stories by Catharine Parr Traill, whose writing was an attempt to accurately describe life in a fledgling country.

The immigrant Strickland sisters were certainly naive about cultures different from their own—like those of their Indigenous neighbours. They may even have presumed them to be inferior and doomed to extinction. But they never advocated their destruction, like the civil servant Scott, whose artistic values were at great odds with his humanistic ones. Could Catherine Parr Traill be time-transported into modern-day Canada, I believe she might well support the need for Reconciliation between Indigenous peoples and her immigrant descendants.

I would hesitate to presume the same insights for Duncan Campbell Scott.

The Dorothy Landers of this country are the real “allies” required by Indigenous peoples if Reconciliation is to succeed. As citizens in a country of which they want to be proud, they want to learn everything they can about its past—warts and all—so they can have a baseline against which to measure improvement over past practices.

Today’s students are learning many things in school that their parents and grandparents did not: how many more elements there are in the Periodic Table than there used to be; what it’s like to walk on the surface of the Moon; the contributions Indigenous peoples have made—and continue to make—to Canada’s success.

Through the creation of this very book, Dorothy Lander is making a personal contribution to the gaps in knowledge about Indigenous peoples that have existed since Catharine Parr Traill and her ancestors first set foot on the shores of Turtle Island.

It may have happened later in her life than she would have liked.

But whereas she was once a mere listener, now we can hear her voice.

In the words of that familiar old Christian hymn, “I once was lost, but now I’m found.”

***

Maurice Switzer is a citizen of the Mississaugas of Alderville First Nation. He lives in North Bay, Ontario, where he serves on the boards of Nipissing University and the North Bay Indigenous Friendship Centre. He has not read a single poem by Duncan Campbell Scott since he was in Grade 4. To learn more about Maurice Switzer, click here

*KINDLY NOTE: This originally appeared as the foreword to the HARP title Rereading Catherine Parr Traill: Stranging the Familiar.