From: The Encyclopedia of Canada's Peoples/Aboriginals: Introduction/J.r. Miller
Most writing about aboriginal peoples was done not by academics but by private citizens, usually self-trained amateurs, who had a personal, often nostalgic, interest in the communities they saw in disarray around them. A pioneer in this field was Peter Jones or Sacred Feathers. In the early nineteenth century Jones, a mixed-blood of Mississauga origin and a Methodist cleric, produced several volumes about the Ojibwa whom he was trying to help through religion and schooling from the 1820s to the 1850s. Later in the nineteenth century, Jones’s work was taken up by non-native amateurs such as Horatio Hale in Ontario, who produced much of the early ethnographic writing on the Iroquois. Hale and others like him were anxious to salvage some record of peoples who were obviously in a weakened state and might be destined for extinction. Other examples of the non-specialist approach to this brand of ethnography could be found among missionaries who ministered to First Nations communities across the country at a time when most Canadians were uninterested in native peoples. The Anglican Edward Francis Wilson in Sault Ste Marie, Ontario, and Charles M. Tate in British Columbia reported in considerable detail on several First Nations, and the Oblate missionary Adrien-Gabriel Morice produced an enormous body of literature on the languages of aboriginal peoples in western Canada.
Father Morice, a missionary from France, typified another feature of the early writing about aboriginal peoples: there was greater interest in the subject abroad than within Canada itself. With the distinguished exception of anthropologist Daniel Wilson of the University of Toronto, most of the scholars in this field were from Europe. Franz Boas of Germany made the study of the northwest coast peoples his life’s work, producing an enormous volume of scholarship. Diamond Jenness, a New Zealand anthropologist, started around World War I to study and record his observations of a number of aboriginal groups. He began with studies of the Inuit but went on to investigate the Ojibwa in Ontario and the Carrier in British Columbia. Towards the end of his career he was pronouncing on all manner of native-policy issues before parliamentary committees and in print. Unlike Boas and Jenness, both of whom spent lengthy periods in Canada, the French ethnographer Marcel Giraud produced a monumental work on the Metis of western Canada after only a few years’ field research in the 1930s. Boas, Jenness, Giraud, and others such as the Canadian Marius Barbeau of l’Université Laval laid the foundation for studies by numerous twentieth-century anthropologists.
Indeed, anthropology has dominated the scholarly approach to recording information about aboriginal peoples in this century. Anthropologists began their work in the spirit of the inventory science that prevailed in the middle of the nineteenth century: they sought to classify the peoples they observed according to social, political, economic, and religious practices and structures. As universities slowly developed throughout Canada, especially from the 1960s onwards, more researchers began to devote themselves to the study of First Nations. Although the classification method still prevailed, anthropology was also pursuing other approaches by the 1970s and 1980s. Long before other scholars showed any interest in such aspects of aboriginal life, anthropologists were paying attention to native medicine, and they were also the first to catalogue the destructive impact of government policies on Inuit and Indians in the north and elsewhere.
The first scholars from other fields usually employed investigative techniques and questions developed by anthropologists. For example, in his 1937 study, The Conflict of European and Eastern Algonkian Cultures, 1504– 1700, New Brunswick historian Alfred G. Bailey produced an early form of ethnohistory, which can be described simply as the product of research in historical sources such as European documents interpreted through the lens of anthropological knowledge of native peoples. Several decades later ethnohistory would emerge as the pre-eminent investigative tool for scholars working on aboriginal subjects. Another import was military history, exemplified in George F.G. Stanley’s landmark 1936 book The Birth of Western Canada, which focused on what Stanley termed the “Riel rebellions” of 1870 and 1885. Marrying an interest in military history to American-inspired notions about the influence of the frontier on institutions and human actions, Stanley’s work paralleled, undoubtedly unintentionally, another American scholarly emphasis, a preoccupation with the role of aboriginal peoples in European-inspired diplomacy and war. On the whole, this approach, with a few distinguished exceptions such as Robert Allen’s His Majesty’s Indian Allies, has not taken hold north of the border. Indeed, until well into the 1970s historians in Canada still had their face resolutely turned away from the First Nations. It took brilliant practitioners from other disciplines, such as McGill archaeologist-anthropologist Bruce Trigger, to demonstrate the potential fruitfulness of historical studies on aboriginal peoples.
The last quarter of the twentieth century has witnessed the flowering of historical writing on aboriginal peoples and their relationships with European newcomers. Some of the best early work, such as Cornelius Jaenen’s Friend and Foe, focused on New France, while an interest in regional approaches to Canadian history led to such outstanding studies as Robin Fisher’s Contact and Conflict, a treatment of native-newcomer relations in British Columbia to 1890. Also important were new examinations of fur-trade history, such as Daniel Francis’s and Toby Morantz’s Partners in Furs, and studies on the place of women and families in the fur trade by Jennifer S.H. Brown (Strangers in Blood) and Sylvia Van Kirk (‘Many Tender Ties’). These revisionist fur-trade studies were reinforced by the important work of a historical geographer, A.J. Ray, whose two-volume Indians in the Fur Trade placed native traders in the centre of the story rather than on the margins to which they had been consigned by earlier writers. The same forces and fashions that stimulated Brown and Van Kirk persisted to produce a steady volume of articles and books on native women, especially in interaction with Europeans. In contrast to the preoccupation of the pioneering studies by Brown and Van Kirk, however, writing on this theme in the 1980s and 1990s has concentrated on native women in relation to Christian missionaries and fur-trading companies. The other important development that emerged by the 1980s was increasing attention to government policy towards aboriginals and the latter’s response. Among the works emerging from western Canada were Gerald Friesen’s The Canadian Prairies: A History and Brian Titley’s A Narrow Vision, an analysis of the influential bureaucrat D.C. Scott. In the 1990s other works from the same region included Sarah Carter’s Lost Harvests, an examination of misguided agricultural policy, Katherine Pettipas’s “Severing the Ties That Bind,” which explores attempts to suppress summer ceremonials on the prairies, and Douglas Cole’s and Ira Chaikin’s An Iron Hand upon the People, a study of the campaign in British Columbia against the potlatch (a sharing and redistributive winter ceremonial). The 1990s also witnessed the publication of syntheses of aboriginal history by J.R. Miller (Skyscrapers Hide the Heavens) and Olive Dickason (Canada’s First Nations) as well as efforts by writers of Canadian history textbooks – now usually teams rather than individuals – to integrate the origins and experiences of First Nations into the national story. Whereas texts written before the 1980s generally started with the Vikings, those that emerged in the 1980s and 1990s almost always began with the origins and pre-contact experience of First Nations.
However, just as historical writing on the aboriginal peoples produced clear signs of maturity in the 1990s, historians began to be supplanted by authors from other fields. Part of the reason for this development was historians’ preoccupation with new forms of social history that emphasized microscopic studies of groups and classes. But a more important explanation involves the constitutional and social issues that dominated the national agenda in the 1980s and early 1990s. The political soap opera of attempted constitutional reform, from Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau’s initiatives following the election of the Parti Québécois government in 1976 to the failures of the Meech Lake and Charlottetown accords in the 1990s, cast First Nations as political debaters and constitutional lobbyists. The result has been that lawyers, political scientists, and even some sociologists have become the academic interpreters favoured by the literate public. Simultaneously, a growing preoccupation with the social pathology that had emerged in many native communities by the 1980s attracted the vulture-like attention of journalists, who produced a series of works as notable for their prurience and sensationalism as for their insight.
Recent fashions in writing on aboriginal peoples symbolize, in a perverse way, the historical and contemporary role of natives in Canadian society. Historically, natives were taken seriously by Euro-Canadians when they had something the newcomers wanted, such as furs, military muscle, agricultural lands, or mineral resources. Today, when non-native observers comment on aboriginal issues, they are most likely to focus on incarceration, family breakdown, substance abuse, violence in defence of native lands, and aboriginal leaders’ insistence that their communities be heeded in debates on constitutional reform or Quebec’s potential secession. The sheer strength of aboriginal communities in the last decade of the twentieth century has forced non-natives to pay more attention. Yet, on the whole, non-native observers of native society are inclined – understandably, perhaps, if unfortunately – to pay attention to aboriginal issues only when they intersect with their own priorities, such as energy production, forestry expansion, or constitutional change.
