Dark history
Arguing with Duncan Campbell Scott
Ottawa was humming in the fall of 1920. A 2,530-seat movie palace opened on the corner of Queen and Bank in the presence of a dozen silent-film stars. The Ottawa Hunt Club hired a leading Scottish architect to design a new 18-hole golf course. And the Stanley Cup champion Senators were so dominant that the National Hockey League stepped in and transferred two of their players to other Canadian teams.
Engrossing though these matters were to many local residents, they were not the concerns that delayed lifetime civil servant and poet Duncan Campbell Scott’s annual report to the minister of Indian Affairs. Preparing amendments to the Indian Act and shepherding them through Parliament had taken up much of his time and energy. In several provinces, veterans of the Great War had obtained title to “unused” Indian land. By contrast, Aboriginal soldiers returning from Europe were facing widespread racism.
That fall, when Scott closed the green baize door of his office in the Booth Building and turned away from the muted piano to the papers on his heavy desk, he could look back with satisfaction on what he had achieved. Above all, Parliament’s approval of the new rules “give the department control and remove from the Indian parent the responsibility for the care and education of his child, and the best interests of Indians are protected and fully promoted.” (Nearly a century later, the astonishing thing about that sentence is that it didn’t seem astonishing at all in 1920.)
Moreover, the department now enjoyed much greater power to enfranchise adults by removing their Indian status, whether or not they agreed. Scott kept a distance from the day-to-day business of his department — the repair of bridges, the construction of drains, the sale of Douglas fir, and so on — but he was deeply attentive to “the ultimate object of our Indian policy ... to merge the natives in the citizenship of the country.” Addressing a House of Commons committee earlier in the year, he had put the matter this way: “I want to get rid of the Indian problem ... Our objective is to continue until there is not a single Indian in Canada that has not been absorbed into the body politic, and there is no Indian question, and no Indian department, and that is the whole object of this Bill.”
In his belated annual summing-up, he seized the chance to reflect on the government’s tireless efforts. “After a hundred years of civilization,” he began, “the Canadian Indian is a difficult subject to treat within the limit of a brief report.” He went on to do so, nonetheless. “Asked to describe a Canadian Indian, one might choose between a medical graduate of McGill University, practising his profession with all the authority of the faculty, or a solitary hunter.” The graduate he had in mind, Joseph Jacobs, was a Mohawk from Kahnawake, just across the St. Lawrence River from Montreal, who had earned a B.A. from McGill University in 1911 and an M.D. four years later. He had attended l’Institut Feller, a Protestant boarding school that functioned mainly in French; few if any of the other students were Indians.
As the department’s accountant in 1908, Scott had backed Jacobs’ request that Indian Affairs should pay his university fees and buy his textbooks, though he scribbled a skeptical note on the file: “This young man may be over-estimating his ability: but if this is so we will find it out before long.” As it turned out, Jacobs would succeed in his university studies and go on to spend more than 20 years as a doctor in Kahnawake. Above the entry in his college yearbook appears a line that Shakespeare’s Cleopatra utters in her final hour: “I have immortal longings in me.”
The reference to Jacobs appears in the opening paragraph of Scott’s 1920 report. He began the third paragraph in a tone of mingled pride and praise: “Confidently it may be said that the Indian has justified the trust that the early missionaries placed in him, his mentality and temperament and constitution fitted him for progress, and he has valiantly borne the ordeal of contact with our boasted civilization. Although he has been wasted in the struggle, he has not been worsted.”
The linguistic play in the last line reveals a rare flash of Scott the poet in a document written by Scott the civil servant, though exactly what he meant by those two verbs is an open question.
To Aboriginal people, as he well knew, contact with settlers had proved to be a constant ordeal. Survival demanded courage. And because a great many Aboriginal people were not just brave but intelligent, cool-headed and physically strong — at least, this is what I take from “his mentality and temperament and constitution” — their future could be happy.
The second paragraph of the report tells a different story. It plunges off in another direction, as if Scott were having an inconclusive argument with himself. “It may be conceded,” he writes, “that the typical Canadian Indian is the hunter and trapper, and, when one thinks of him, buckskins and beadwork and feathers are still cloaking him with a sort of romance.”
Romance had wandered in from Scott’s other life, his inner life — not the world of memorandums and legislation but the realm of fiction and poetry, where he tried to sustain his own immortal longings. “But these are rarely seen, except in pageants and on holidays when the superior race must be amused by a glimpse of real savages in warpaint.”
The superior race? He would later republish this part of the report in two very similar versions, without bothering to change the phrase. Yet he seems to have used it nowhere else. Was he in earnest? Is that what he truly believed? Or was this simply a weary moment where a shot of irony misfired?