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Fictions of Race: American Indian Policies in Nineteenth-Century British North American Fiction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 December 2016

OANA GODEANU-KENWORTHY
OANA GODEANU-KENWORTHY*
Affiliation:
Department of American Studies, Miami University, Ohio. Email: godeano@miamioh.edu.
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Abstract

This article explores the hemispheric and transatlantic uses of race and empire as tropes of settler-colonial otherness in the novel The Canadian Brothers (1840) by Canadian author John Richardson. In this pre-Confederation historical novel, Richardson contrasts the imperial British discourse of racial tolerance, and the British military alliances with the Natives in the War of 1812, with the brutality of American Indian policies south of the border, in an effort to craft a narrative of Canadian difference from, and incompatibility with, American culture. At the same time, the author's critical attitude towards all European military and commercial interventions in the New World illuminates the rootedness of both American and Canadian settler colonialisms in British imperialism, and exposes the arbitrariness and constructedness of the political boundaries dividing the continent.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 52 , Issue 1 , February 2018 , pp. 91 - 113
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press and British Association for American Studies 2016 

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References

1 For representative works on these topics see Beasley, David, The Canadian Don Quixote (Simcoe, ON: Davus Publishing, 2004)Google Scholar; Ross, Catherine S., ed., Recovering Canada's First Novelist:Proceedings from the John Richardson Conference (Toronto: Porcupine's Quill, 1984)Google Scholar; McGregor, Gail, The Wacousta Syndrome (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984)Google ScholarPubMed; Duffy, Denis, A World under Sentence: John Richardson and the Interior (Toronto: ECW, 1996)Google Scholar; Healy, Jack, “Richardson, Indians and Empire: History, Social Memory and the Poverty of Postcolonial Theory,” Kunapipi, 16, 3 (1994), 93–105 Google Scholar; Hurley, Michael, The Borders of Nightmare: The Fiction of John Richardson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992)Google Scholar; Ivison, Donald, “‘I too am a Canadian’: John Richardson's The Canadian Brothers as Postcolonial Narrative,” in Moss, Laura, ed., Is Canada Postcolonial? (Waterloo, OH: Wilfred Laurier Press, 2003), 162–17Google Scholar; Coleman, Daniel, “The National Allegory of Fraternity: Loyalist Literature and the Making of Canada's White British Origins,” Journal of Canadian Studies, 36, 3 (2001), 131–56CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Coleman, White Civility: The Literary Project of English Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006)Google Scholar.

2 Early Canadian literature is in itself an artificial construct that projects retroactively national categories onto the complex regional variety of British North American colonialisms in the nineteenth century.

3 Tiffin, Chris and Lawson, Alan, eds., De-scribing Empire: Post-colonialism and Textuality (London, New York: Routledge, 1994), 231 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 Moss, Laura, “Is Canada Postcolonial? Re-asking through ‘The Forgotten’ Project,” TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies, 27 (2012), 47–65, 48Google Scholar.

5 For American literature see Bauer, Ralph, “The Hemispheric Genealogies of ‘Race’: Creolization and the Cultural Geography of Colonial Difference across the Eighteenth-Century Americas,” in Levander, C. and Levine, R., eds., Hemispheric American Studies (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2008), 36–56 Google Scholar; Bauer , “Early American Literature and American Literary History at the ‘Hemispheric Turn,’” Early American Literature, 45, 2 (2010), 217–33CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bauer, Ralph and Mazzotti, José Antonio, eds., Creole Subjects in the Colonial Americas: Empires, Texts, Identities (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009)Google Scholar; Godeanu-Kenworthy, Oana, “Creole Frontiers: The Fiction of John Richardson and Fenimore Cooper,” Early American Literature, 49 (2014), 741–70CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Levander, Caroline and Levine, Robert, eds., Hemispheric American Studies (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press 2008)Google Scholar; Sandra Gustafson, “Natty in the 1820s: Creole Subjects and Democratic Aesthetic in the Early Leatherstocking Tales,” in Bauer and Mazzotti, Creole Subjects, 465–90; Gustafson, Sandra, Imagining Deliberative Democracy in the Early American Republic (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gustafson, “Cooper and the Idea of the Indian,” in Cassuto, Leonard, Eby, Clare Virginia, and Reiss, Benjamin, eds., The Cambridge History of the American Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 103–16CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Watts, Edward, “Settler Postcolonialism as a Reading Strategy,” Early American Literature, 45, 2 (2010), 447–58Google Scholar.

6 Godeanu-Kenworthy, 4.

7 Upper Canada roughly corresponds to present-day Ontario, while French-speaking Lower Canada covered most of what is today Quebec. The two were merged by imperial decree in 1840 as the Province of Canada, a decision that came after a decade of political strife and controversy, punctuated by rebellion and violence.

8 For more on the topic see Harring, Sidney L., White Man's Law: Native People in Nineteenth-Century Canadian Jurisprudence (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998)Google Scholar; Huzzey, Richard, Freedom Burning: Anti-slavery and Empire in Victorian Britain (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Banner, Stuart, Possessing the Pacific: Land, Settlers, and Indigenous People from Australia to Alaska (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007)Google Scholar.

9 Miller, J. R., Skyscrapers Hide the Heavens: A History of Indian–White Relations in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000), 132; Harring, 95Google Scholar.

10 King, Thomas, The Inconvenient Indian (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 82 Google Scholar.

11 Transcript of President Andrew Jackson's Message to Congress, “On Indian Removal” (1830), Our Documents: 100 Milestone Documents from the National Archives, at https://ourdocuments.gov, accessed 8 Sept. 2016.

12 For more on the civilization policy in Canada see The Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, Volume I (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2015), 56–62, at www.trc.ca, accessed 8 Sept. 2016.

13 Gustafson, “Natty in the 1820s,” 474–75.

14 See Yokota, Kariann, Unbecoming British: How Revolutionary America Became a Postcolonial Nation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011)Google Scholar.

15 For more on this nineteenth-century construction of Britishness see Coleman, White Civility.

16 Ivison, “‘I Too Am a Canadian,” 173.

17 Coleman, “National Allegory,” 132.

18 Veracini, Lorenzo, Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), 30 Google Scholar.

19 Coleman, “National Allegory,” 147.

20 Phanuel Antwi, “Hidden Signs, Haunting Shadows: Literary Currencies of Blackness in Upper Canadian Texts,” PhD dissertation, McMaster University, Hamilton, ON, 2011, 42.

21 Gustafson, “Natty in the 1820s,” 472.

22 Richardson, John, The Canadian Brothers: Or the Prophecy Fulfilled. A Tale of the Late American War, C.E.E.C. T edn (Ottawa: Carleton University Press, 1992; first published 1840), 34 Google Scholar.

23 Brock is not a fictional character; the writer met him in person during the War of 1812 and had for the British officer a deep admiration.

24 Richardson, 33.

25 Ibid., 41.

26 Goldie, Terry, Fear and Temptation: The Image of the Indigene in Canadian, Australian and New Zealand Literatures (Kingston and Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press,1989), 32 Google Scholar.

27 Richardson, 25.

28 Ibid., 26.

29 Ibid., 433.

30 Ibid., 24.

31 Ibid., 69.

32 Ibid., 94.

33 Ibid., 93–94.

34 Ibid., 94.

35 Beasley, The Canadian Don Quixote, 157.

36 Richardson valued the pro-imperial message of book; the 1840 Preface includes his correspondence with Windsor Castle, and points out that “although works of fiction are not usually dedicated to the Sovereign, an exception was made … grounded on a chapter of the book, which the seeker after incident alone will dismiss hastily, but over which the more serious reader may be induced to pause” (4).

37 Ibid., 4.

38 Ibid., 5.

39 Ibid., 78.

40 Ibid., 87.

41 Richardson's point was based on historical facts. In 1837 and 1838, disgruntled colonists in Upper and Lower Canada staged violent rebellion and American supporters crossed the border to help them. These colonial rebellions and the American involvement in them reminded British officials of the military and political risks involved in abandoning the Indians or removing them from Upper Canada.

42 Richardson, 73.

43 Ibid., 79.

44 Ibid., 80.

45 Ibid., 84.

46 Pease, Donald, “National Narratives, Postnational Narration,” Modern Fiction Studies, 43, 1 (1997), 1–23, 4CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

47 Ibid., 4.