Lessons from Tecumseh
Centuries later, great chief’s spirit still resonates with the minorities
A year ago, as summer waned, Allan Gregg gave a lecture at Carleton University. It dealt with the worrisome partisanship, polarization and cynical manipulations in modern politics, most notably as practised by the current federal government. Gregg didn’t expect it to resonate much beyond the four walls of the auditorium. He was wrong. The speech — which he called “1984 in 2012: The Assault on Reason” and posted online — went viral, became the subject of much chattering-class attention and now approaches half a million views.
In an era when news media are largely preoccupied with the doings of celebrities or curiosities such as “cats playing pianos,” Gregg was pleasantly shocked at the obvious appetite for long, sophisticated discussions of substantive issues.
This week, he’s back. Gregg is distributing to his considerable social network a 6,000-word essay on the 200th anniversary of the death in battle of the great Shawnee chief Tecumseh at Moraviantown, Ont., during the War of 1812. And he’s asking them to pass it on.
If the power of social networks and media give Gregg a place to stand, he’s hoping the story of Tecumseh gives him a lever big enough to move the world — or at least that part of it dealing with Canada’s sorry relations with its Aboriginal Peoples.
Gregg sees in Tecumseh a metaphor for that relationship — how the charismatic chief was misunderstood, feared, betrayed and, in the generations since his death, largely ignored by mainstream history.
Great blight
To those who met Tecumseh, he was “a sagacious and gallant warrior” who, but for the America’s colonial juggernaut, might have been “the founder of a glorious empire rivalling Mexico or Peru.”
Gregg has long understood that aboriginal relations are the great blight on Canada’s reputation and this country’s most important unaddressed issue.
When Gordon Campbell was premier of British Columbia, he would ask Gregg to arrange dinners with “movers and shakers” in Toronto, Ottawa and Montreal when he visited central Canada.
Campbell would ask, Gregg recalls, “what’s the issue that we really have to grapple with that we’re not grappling with. And almost to a person, over the course of these dinners, they said we have to do something on this aboriginal file.”
Still, even as a voracious reader, amateur historian and intellectual who had a Canadian history minor while working on his PhD, Gregg was embarrassed at how little he knew of the issues or, as this anniversary approached, of Tecumseh.
Delving into aboriginal history last year, Gregg found himself offended by the “orgy of celebration” of the War of 1812’s bicentennial and the attempts to turn Tecumseh into “Laura Secord with a feather,” standing at Isaac Brock’s elbow, ready to do the bidding of his British brethren.
In fact, Tecumseh was anything but compromising, Gregg writes. He was determined to reclaim land the Americans had taken from his people, cared little for the white man or Canada, believed there was an inherent difference between Indians and whites.
Gregg hears the reverberations of that militarism in the protests of modern ab- original leaders and the Idle No More movement. He says that, given demographic patterns that make aboriginals the fastest-growing group in Canada, “it will be impossible to ignore them for much longer.”
Need and opportunity
Gregg’s essay was conceived as an article for The Walrus magazine, but grew into something more. Seeing what happened after his lecture last year, Gregg decided to “use the anniversary of Tecumseh’s death to get all these people sending this out at the same time and see what happens . . . see if I can motivate and animate them.”
There was both a need and, with the anniversary, an opportunity for such an initiative, he told the Star. As much as it might have been the making of Canada, the War of 1812 was also “the pivot point” in both the United States and this country for relationships with Aboriginal Peoples — who after it were systematically dispossessed, relocated and swept from mainstream consciousness.
Canadians did not massacre Indians on the same scale as occurred in the U.S., he says, but “we did remove them in much the same way, relocating them to isolated and remote areas, relegating them to the status of the other, and hiding them out of sight of our conscience. “To eliminate the Indian, it became necessary to demonize and dehumanize the Indian,” Gregg says. And that was duly done.
Two hundred years after Tecumseh, Canadians still “don’t get it,” he says.
“We say, why is Shawn Atleo wearing that funny hat? What’s all that drumming and banging and wanting to live a 16thcentury lifestyle? This goes to our notion of saying, Why don’t you just fit in?
“But Shawn Atleo, by wearing that hat, is saying you can’t kill the Indian. You haven’t been able to kill the Indian for 200 years and you’re not going to. So start dealing with us on our terms. Get some sense of a different way of looking at the world, a different way of defining land, a different way of interrelating with resource development.”
What’s heartening to Gregg is the momentum he sees building at the elite level. Notables such as Paul Martin, Joe Clark and Sheila Fraser are all “incredibly invested in this issue.” And the likes of Bob Rae and former Supreme Court justice Frank Iacobucci are committing the latter years of their public lives to a matter such as development of the Ring of Fire chromite deposits in Northern Ontario.
“There’s some momentum out there. Not so much at the public level. I look at the public opinion stuff and it’s horrifying for a people who fancy themselves as morally superior as a nation. . . . At an elite level, I really do think there’s a growing consensus that we have to do something.”
Closing of a circle
For Gregg, a former TVO interviewer and former member of CBC’s At Issue panel, his transition from pronouncing on daily politics to reflecting on matters more profound serves as a sort of closing of the circle.
But after decades focused on the transitory matters of daily politics and media, he “got tired of being in the moment.”
“I thought in this last part of my life maybe I could do a little atonement for some of the things I’ve done earlier and kind of stir the pot and make a difference in a couple of files. That’s the plan.”