Seen but Not Seen: Final Thoughts

What a pleasure it was to participate in the April 2023 virtual roundtable hosted by the Canadian Historical Association on Seen but Not Seen: Influential Canadians and the First Nations from the 1840s to Today. The generous comments of discussants Jan Noel and Hamar Foster were – and still are – warmly appreciated. My book might best be called a “sequential biography.” I love biography as it humanizes the past. In Seen but Not Seen, I explore in chronological order the ideas and life stories of sixteen influential Canadians to narrate the history of Indigenous peoples’ marginalization and to understand why non-Indigenous Canadians failed to recognize Indigenous societies and cultures as worthy of respect. To expand my study, I also included at least twenty other intriguing characters. My interest in the topic of the relationship between settlers and Indigenous peoples extends back over half a century, to my MA in Canadian history at the Université Laval in Quebec City, and my PhD at the University of Toronto. History is continually being reinterpreted, conditioned by the assumptions of the time and the place where it is written. New facts are uncovered, new questions are asked, and new interpretations are advanced. As Jan Noel and Hamar Foster both emphasize, I attempt throughout Seen but Not Seen to understand people in their historical context, to reconstruct the atmosphere and mentality of their age, and to reveal their outlooks and situations. I try to avoid, as much as I can, what historians call “presentism,” the judgment of the past uniquely through the lens of the present. As Foster notes, this caution about presentism “is not a plea for the suspension of judgement. It is rather a warning that the past is complex, and that context is important.” The catastrophic impact of John A. Macdonald’s Indigenous policies on the plains cannot escape comment. The central reality of Canadian history to recent times is colonialism, a form of conquest in which a nation, in this case the newly formed Dominion of Canada, takes over a distant territory, introduces its own people, and controls and attempts to direct the Indigenous inhabitants. In the nineteenth century, Canadians had a worldview dramatically different from those of the early twenty-first century. As historian Christopher Moore reminds us, “In the years around Confederation, all Canadian politicians and all political parties endorsed the forced assimilation of Indigenous peoples.” In mid- and late nineteenth-century Canada, assimilation — or “cultural genocide” as it is commonly called today — and residential schools were the progressive views of the day. Assimilation was regarded as both the natural and desirable solution. In writing my manuscript, I kept in mind the advice I received a mere forty-nine years ago in 1974 at the beginning of my university teaching career. The Rev. Enos Montour (1899–1984), a retired United Church minister and a member of the Delaware First Nations community on the Six Nations Territory in Ontario, kindly read and commented on a draft of my PhD thesis on the history of the nineteenth-century Mississauga First Nations on the north shore of Lake Ontario. Generously, he said that he liked what I had written but then calmly advised that, for readability, I should “put more raisins in the dough.” Additional invaluable advice about writing followed several months later in December 1974. Lovat Dickson (1902-1983), Grey Owl’s publisher in England in the mid-1930s, had returned to Canada following his retirement from Macmillan in the late 1960s. The distinguished publisher and noted author who managed the literary affairs of the Macmillan publishing empire for over two decades also read a …