To Know the Indigenous Other: A Century of Indians in
Canadian History
ALLAN DOWNEY
Abstract
Celebrating its centenary in 2022, the Journal of the Canadian Historical
Association (JCHA) has been home to scores of articles on Indigenous history
within the colonial borders of Canada. Offering a historiography of the past
one-hundred years of scholarship appearing in the journal focused on Indigenous topics, this article argues that the JCHA offers a unique case study of
the history of the field. While the journal has offered a dearth of scholarship
on people of colour, leading to the erasure of Black Canadians as prominent
actors in Canada’s past, the zealous study of “Indians” within the journal’s
pages is salient. However, much like the larger field of Canadian history, the
journal has a fraught and contentious past with Indigenous Peoples, stories,
and methods. Unlike the erasure of Black Canadians, the fervent focus on
“Indians” in Canadian history has had the significant effect of Canadians
coming to “know” the Indians who were produced within the power structures
of Canadian imperialism, settler colonialism, and the academy as they sought
to identify, classify, and organize the Other. More recently however, there has
been a slow trickle of articles produced by historians of Indigenous history that
is contributing to an intellectual sovereignty that situates Indigenous history as
an independent and unique course of study not tied exclusively or directly to the
nation-states of the United States and Canada.
Résumé
Célébrant son centenaire en 2022, la Revue de la Société historique du
Canada (RSHC) a recueilli de nombreux articles sur l’histoire autochtone à
l’intérieur des frontières coloniales du Canada. En proposant une historiographie des cent dernières années de travaux d’érudition publiés dans la revue et
portant sur des sujets autochtones, cet article soutient que la RSHC offre une
étude de cas unique de l’histoire du domaine. Bien que la revue ait présenté
une pénurie d’études sur les personnes de couleur, ce qui a mené à l’effacement
des Canadien.ne.s noir.e.s en tant qu’acteurs/trices important.e.s du passé du
Canada, l’étude zélée des « Indien.ne.s » dans les pages de la revue est saillante.
Cependant, à l’instar du domaine plus vaste de l’histoire canadienne, la Revue
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a un passé chargé et controversé en ce qui concerne les peuples, les récits et les
méthodes autochtones. Contrairement à l’effacement des Noir.e.s canadien.ne.s,
l’accent tout particulier mis sur les « Indien.ne.s » dans l’histoire canadienne
a eu pour effet significatif que les Canadien.ne.s ont appris à « connaître » les
Indien.ne.s qui ont été produit.e.s au sein des structures de pouvoir de l’impérialisme canadien, du colonialisme de peuplement et de l’université, qui cherchaient
à identifier, classer et organiser l’Autre. Plus récemment cependant, on assiste
à une croissance lente du nombre d’articles produits par des historien.ne.s de
l’histoire autochtone qui contribuent à une souveraineté intellectuelle qui situe
l’histoire autochtone comme un cours d’étude indépendant et unique qui n’est
pas exclusivement ou directement lié aux États-nations des États-Unis et du
Canada.
In 2022, the editors of Journal of the Canadian Historical Association
(JCHA) celebrated the journal’s centenary by organizing two roundtables at the annual meeting of the Canadian Historical Association
and inviting a group of established scholars to examine how the work
of historians has changed over time in the journal. The result of those
roundtables was the publication of their findings in this edition of the
JCHA. Claudine Bonner’s work for this project focuses on “Black Canada,” Jim Walker’s on “Race,” Adele Perry’s on “Colonialism,” Donald
Wright’s on “CHA Presidential Addresses,” Penny Bryden’s on “Political History,” Lara Campbell’s on “Women and Gender,” and I focus
on “Indigenous History/Indigeneity.” My selection, I suspect, was the
result of my collaborative Indigenous community-based research over
the past decade that resulted in the publication of The Creator’s Game
(UBC Press, 2018) and the digital animation Rotinonshón:ni Ironworkers (2020). I am Dakelh from Nak’azdli Whut’en — I was born and
raised in Waterloo, Ontario — as well as a Canada Research Chair
at McMaster University, and my research focuses on the history of
Indigenous nationhood, self-determination, and sovereignty. While
placing an emphasis on reciprocal community-based research partnerships, my work employs ethnohistory — the combination of written
and oral sources — to frame its analyses and is centred around, as
discussed below, the theories of “intellectual sovereignty” and “resurgence.” Certainly, my personal and professional background, as it does
in all my work, had an important impact on how I approached this
historiographic project.
Over the past century, the JCHA has published scores of articles
on Indigenous history within the colonial borders of Canada. As a
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sampling of Canadian historiography, the JCHA offers a unique case
study of the history of the field. While the journal has offered a dearth
of scholarship on people of colour, for instance leading to the erasure
of Black Canadians as prominent actors in Canada’s past,1 the zealous
study of “Indians”2 in the pages of the journal is salient: over ninety
pieces were reviewed for this historiography. However, much like the
larger field of Canadian history, the journal has a fraught and contentious past with Indigenous Peoples, stories, and methods.3 Unlike the
erasure of Black Canadians, the fervent focus on Indians in Canadian
history has had the significant effect of Canadians coming to “know”
Indians who were produced within the power structures of Canadian
imperialism, settler colonialism, and the academy as they sought to
identify, classify, and organize the Other.4 As Linda Tuhiwai Smith
observes,
Imperialism and colonialism are the specific formations
through which the West came to “see,” to “name,” and to
“know” Indigenous communities. The cultural archives
with its systems of representation, codes for unlocking systems of classification, and fragmented artefacts of
knowledge enabled travellers and observers to make sense
of what they saw and to represent their new found knowledge to the West through authorship and authority of their
representations.5
Certainly, the JCHA and the discipline of history as a whole have contributed to this process of knowledge formation and the control it
attempts to exert over Indigenous Peoples.
As this article will demonstrate, historically, articles appearing
in this journal repeatedly cast Indigenous Peoples within a savage/
civilized dichotomy, eliminated their agency, criminalized Indigenous
self-determination, jettisoned their modernity, and ignored their sovereignty. They frequently placed Indigenous Peoples on the periphery
and at times outright erased them from the historical record. The
resulting damage to Indigenous communities has been staggering.
Canadians’ understanding of Indigenous Peoples, as shaped by the
scholarship within this journal, and others like it, has informed policy,
education, and law at the expense of Indigenous communities. One of
the major trends the journal has contributed to is the positioning of
Indigenous history as “Canadian history,” thereby centring Indigenous
history on the nation-state with little regard for the intellectual sov165
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ereignty of Indigenous communities.6 The term intellectual sovereignty
comes from the work of Robert Allen Warrior, who argues that Indigenous intellectuals, through their work and cultural production, can
play a critical role in Indigenous sovereignty and self-determination.7
I attempt to expand on this theory in my work and apply it to Indigenous historiography, arguing that historians of Indigenous history can
contribute to an intellectual sovereignty that situates Indigenous history as an independent and unique course of study not tied exclusively
or directly to the nation-states of the United States and Canada.8
Few Canadian historians have acknowledged the fact that Indigenous history — and Indigenous communities, for that matter — can
and do exist outside of the nation-state since most studies have situated themselves as describing the significance of Indigenous historical
action in relation to the development of Canada (Fur Trade, Indian
Policy, etc.).9 Yet, while the journal’s past with Indigenous history has
been rocky, it has also been home to several important articles that
helped push historians and the field in new directions that attempted
to end the obscurity of Indigenous Peoples as historical actors and
carve out important intellectual spaces within the discipline as well
as within settler-colonial studies and Indigenous historiography. Articles by James W. St. G. Walker, Sylvia Van Kirk, Olive Dickason,
Keith Thor Carlson, Madeline Knickerbocker, and Karen R. Duhamel
made significant contributions, which have made the JCHA — primarily targeted at “professional” historians and non-Indigenous
audiences — fruitful, if limited, for the study of Indigenous history
within the colonial borders of Canada. One of its more significant
limitations in the pages of the JCHA is the almost complete lack of
histories published by Indigenous Peoples themselves. A comprehensive review yielded only three Indigenous contributors in the journal’s
one-hundred-year history.10 As will be discussed, this absence is not
inconsequential, since there are now dozens of Indigenous historians in
the field, and reflects larger problems within the field itself.
Crafting this historiographical essay involved a painstaking eighteen-month process of reading through over ninety articles that include
or had some focus on Indigenous topics. All of the ninety-plus articles
were synthesized and compiled into a master document that included
their key arguments, evidence, and approaches in chronological order.
Once completed, I sifted through the master document to identify
any trends, themes, and/or gaps, and I first presented my findings as
part of a roundtable at the annual meeting in 2022. What became
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immediately clear in my analysis was the absence of Indigenous voices
from the pages of the JCHA, which will be discussed in the following
pages. In response, I made a point of inserting Indigenous historians
and various other Indigenous theorists to help complement my analyses in this article while recognizing that its readership would mainly
be professional non-Indigenous historians. Given the page constraints
of this article, I also had to make several difficult decisions regarding
what articles to include, mainly by identifying which articles seemed
to fit general patterns, while attempting not to overlap the other articles included in this volume. For instance, and again because of the
page constraints and sheer volume of Indigenous-focused, full-length
articles in the journal, I have not included an analysis of the presidential addresses or roundtables held to discuss recipients of book prizes,
a few of which included Indigenous-focused books and one that was
co-authored by Métis-Cree historian Jesse Thistle reflecting on Sarah
Carter’s Imperial Plots.
Decades of Erasure
The early years of the journal (1922–1950), like Canadian historiography as a whole, focus on the fur trade or on early contact that
downplays Indigenous Peoples as significant actors. If included at
all, “Indians” are presented as a faceless homogenous group who
occupy the savage side of the savage/civilized dichotomy. As a potential threat to civilization, they are condemned to play a secondary
role to Canada’s “firsts.” As Jean M. O’Brien has argued, “firsting” is
the assertion by non-Indigenous Peoples — through local histories,
for instance — that they were “the first people to erect the proper
institutions of a social order worthy of notice.”11 Whether the topic
is the fur trade, the so-called Spanish discovery of British Columbia, or Alexander Mackenzie’s trip to the Pacific, Indigenous Peoples
are mentioned only in passing and described in stereotypical terms,
such as warlike, thieves, drunkards, pagans, and simplistic, if they
are described at all.12 Certainly, this “professional evidence” of backwardness would have detrimental implications for how Canadians
— including politicians, policymakers, educators, legal professionals,
and the like — would approach Indigenous Peoples. As Robin Jarvis
Brownlie argues, “Racism is ‘fundamentally a theory of history.’ . . .
Theories of history based on ideas about race have provided members
of colonial societies with a justification for displacing, dispossessing,
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and destroying Indigenous peoples.”13 In several histories of the Red
River region and the Prairies, the Métis are absent in the history of
the area, as are the First Nations. As Mary Jane Logan McCallum has
argued, “Aboriginal history was not just ‘obscure’ before the 1960s,
it was made so.”14 Written out of existence, Indigenous Peoples in
these histories are relegated to the periphery and the past. Historians placed Indigenous Peoples out of sight in order to tell the “real”
stories of white grandeur, discovery, and institution building, as captured by Walter N. Sage in his 1928 article:
Between 1880 and 1890 the United States frontier was
closed. Free land was exhausted and there existed no longer a frontier line, a “meeting point between savagery and
civilization.” Canada still possesses such a line, which she
will in all probability retain for many years to come. In fact
in all the provinces except Prince Edward Island and Nova
Scotia there are still frontier areas where settlement is being
steadily pushed into the wilds.15
The meeting of savagery (i.e., Indians) and civilization (i.e.,
British/Canadian institutions) would be a common interpretative
framework throughout this period. In addition to the savage/civilized
discourse, the introduction of Canadian “firsts” and the erasure of
Indigenous Peoples — both intellectually and physically — during
this period was further aggravated by the criminalization of Indigenous communities. In his 1939 article “The Illegal Fur Trade Out of
New France, 1713–60,” Jean Lunn examines the “illegal” fur trade
between Montreal and Albany, identifying Haudenosaunee intermediaries from Kahnawà:ke and Kanehsatá:ke as the primary “culprits”
because they had circumvented the “legitimate” French-controlled
trade in favour of trading with the English and Dutch at Albany.
Despite Haudenosaunee citizens’ conducting these diplomatic and
trading relations within their own sovereign territory, their self-determination is considered criminal. Criminalization, whether of the
eighteenth-century fur trade or the twenty-first-century cigarette
trade, as Audra Simpson has demonstrated in Mohawk Interruptus, had
its origins in publications such as Lunn’s, with enduring consequences
for the way the public came to “know” Indigenous self-determination.16 Depictions of Indigenous Peoples as criminal, violent, and
backward are commonplace during this period. Between 1922 and
1952, only one article focuses on an Indigenous person or topic exclu168
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sively: F. W. Howay’s 1930 biographical sketch of the Siksika chief
Crowfoot.17 Howay’s biography, while short, offers an interpretation
of Crowfoot as an honourable figure in Canadian history, celebrating
his loyalty to the Crown during the “North West Rebellion.” In doing
so, it helps cast those that fought for their survival in the “Rebellion”
as criminals, while describing Crowfoot as a “fearless” leader among
the supposed uncultivated savagery of his people and the “changing
times” brought upon by the influx settlers and whiskey traders — all
the while withdrawing the agency of settlers in the violent reconfiguration of Canadian settler colonialism.18 While Howay would offer
the only focused study of an Indigenous subject during this time, that
would begin to shift two decades later.
Ushering in the Indian Problem
The 1950s ushered in a noticeable shift in histories about Indigenous
topics. George Stanley offers the first acknowledgement that Indigenous Peoples were central and significant to North American history
in his article “The Indian Background of Canadian History.”19 He does
so, however, while offering a narrative of victimization and describing
Indigenous Peoples as uncivilized. As Stanley would argue, “Despite
their early superiority in numbers, the Indians were unable completely
[sic] to withstand the impact of a more highly developed civilization.”20
Furthermore, Stanley advances the idea of an “Indian Problem” — the
notion that Indians stood in the way of civilization and progress and
needed to be paternalistically managed while considering the arrival
of non-Indigenous Peoples to the continent to be the start of history.
Nonetheless, his recognition of Indigenous Peoples as central to
North American history is a noticeable change from the articles that
preceded his. As Stanley argues:
Ever since the day Christopher Columbus landed on the
shores of San Salvador, the Indian has been one of the principal actors upon the state of American history. To-day his
role, in Canada at least, may be limited to a walking-on
part, but he has never been dropped from the cast. The
Indian is not a vanishing but a permanent factor in history:
he is a problem or a resource in every country of the two
American continents. . . . Abused in peace and in war, he
has been saved by the vastness of the country and by his
ability to adapt himself to his environment.21
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By reinforcing a victimization narrative, portraying Indigenous
Peoples as a homogenous group, and employing the damaging notion
of the “Indian problem”— as opposed to the colonial problem22—
Stanley’s writing typifies several other articles that appear during this
time that push these narratives while also examining Indian policy.
“Between the pre-literate, pre-industrial civilization of the Indians,”
Stanley argues, “and the competitive, capitalist civilization of the
Europeans, there could be no easy integration. The two peoples could
not, however, live together in the same country in complete isolation.
Contact between them was inevitable: and contact just as inevitably posed the problem of acculturation.”23 This supposed problem of
acculturation as discussed by Stanley would soon become a focus area
of future historians.
Soon after Stanley’s article was published, a series of articles
focusing on eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Indian policy,
foregrounding the “Indian problem” in particular, began to appear in the
journal, including S. F. Wise’s “The Indian Diplomacy of John Graves
Simcoe,” Leslie Gray’s “The Moravian Missionaries, Their Indians, and
the Canadian Government,” and Yves Zoltvany’s “The Problem of
Western Policy under Philippe de Riguad de Vaudreuil, 1703–1725.”24
Similar to Stanley’s, Zoltvany’s article acknowledges the importance of
Indigenous Peoples in Canadian history, specifically, the position of the
Haudenosaunee as power-agents in their role as intermediaries during a
period of French imperialism in the West prior to 1754. To understand
France’s policy of westward expansion during this period (which he calls
expansionism) and gain an appreciation of the larger French project, he
argues one must understand the role of the Haudenosaunee actors.25
While these articles do not centre Indigenous Peoples themselves
— Indigenous Peoples are mostly being acted upon in these pieces rather
than acting as agents of their own will — they do mark a change in
focus to Indian policy. In doing so, the scholarship emphasizes a notion
of the “Indian problem” preceding the author’s to determine, if possible
at all, the prospect of Indian acculturation. A series of articles in the
1970s would mark a noteworthy shift in interpretative frameworks.
Shifting Interpretations
Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, the proliferation of pan-Indigenous organizations helped push Indigenous politics into the settler
public consciousness.26 Against a backdrop of 1960s social movements
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and the rise of the transnational Red Power movement, Indigenous
leaders once again — as they had been doing for decades — voiced
a challenge to Canadians to reimagine their relationship with Indigenous Peoples.27 While the 1969 White Paper and the response to it
by Indigenous leaders have received the most attention from scholars,
who mark it as the beginning of the modern Indigenous movement,
Sarah Nickel rightfully points out that attributing the rise of Indigenous political movements to this singular moment flattens Indigenous
history and ignores decades of political activism preceding the White
Paper: “This direct causality implies that Indigenous politics exists,
and is relevant and conceivable, only in relation to the settler state.
Such a position not only disregards generations of Indigenous political
interaction but also erases the flurry of political activity in the decades
before the White Paper.”28 In the pages of the JCHA, these histories
of political activism would be nearly non-existent as these community-based stories were not within the purview of professional Canadian
historians of the time.
While the discipline of history was slow to respond to the
increasing visibility of Indigenous political and court action during the
1970s, an early article published by James W. St. G. Walker in 1971
signals the beginnings of a significant shift in the history of the journal
and how historians approached Indigenous history. In a historiographical essay examining undergraduate bibliographies from universities
across the country, Walker critiques the way Indigenous Peoples have
been portrayed in Canadian history. Noting that Indigenous actors
are often described as childlike (reflecting bloodthirsty or noble savage myths) and rarely understood within their own historical context,
Walker concludes, “Clearly he is not often considered to be deserving
of serious attention, or his society of scholarly analysis.”29 Walker’s
article was an important, though problematic,30 call to action that
identifies several reasons for the mistreatment and dehumanization
of Indigenous Peoples in Canadian historiography. Foremost, Walker
notes, is the reliance of historians on problematic source materials such
as the Jesuit Relations, early travel narratives, and fur traders’ journals,
which offer grossly skewed portrayals of Indigenous communities and
actions. According to Walker, “Canadian historical writing reflects a
belief in the manifest destiny of European civilization spreading across
the continent from sea to sea.”31 Therefore, Canadian historians need
Indians to be villains in their national histories as they prop up the
“heroics” of figures such as Champlain and the Jesuit martyrs. “One
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almost imagines that any defence of the Iroquois would be considered
sacrilege or treason,” he writes. “Martyrs must have murderers, they
must be righteous and wronged. No justifiable homicide is possible.
The Iroquois made possible the martyrdoms and therefore must themselves be martyred to the memory of the martyrs.”32 Prioritizing the
“founding nations” of the English and French — as opposed to centring the various Indigenous communities within the colonial borders
of Canada — even when considering topics of Indigenous history, further obscures Indigenous histories, he argues.
Such tendencies were soon to change, thanks in large part to two
pivotal articles that would make the JCHA a site of influential Indigenous histories. The widely popular “Women in Between,” by Sylvia
Van Kirk, appeared in 1977, followed by Olive Dickason’s “Europeans and Amerindians: Some Comparative Aspects of Early Contact.”
Van Kirk’s article, which became a staple of Canadian historiography,
included on syllabi across the country, argues that Indigenous women,
a rarity in Canadian historiography, were critical intermediaries during
the fur trade era who were able to advance their power and influence as
“women in between” Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities.33
While not receiving as much attention at the time, Dickason’s article offers a ground-breaking examination of the colonizing
endeavours of various empires (France, Britain, Spain, Portugal, the
Netherlands, and Sweden) that seeks to revise and reconstruct the
early colonial history of North America. In her article, Dickason not
only points out the numerous similarities between these empires and
the structure of settler colonialism, a theory later developed by Patrick Wolfe, but also recognizes the sovereignty of Indigenous Peoples
decades before it became popular to describe Indigenous nations as
such: “Throughout all these dealings, Amerindians were hampered by
the fact that Europeans never accepted them as sovereign members of
the ‘Family of Nations’: neither did they accord them equality in social
status.”34 Once celebrated as a trailblazing Métis historian, Dickason
did not, as biographer Darren R. Préfontaine painstakingly documents
in the biography Changing Canadian History, have Métis ancestry and
would not be considered Métis by today’s criteria.35 Nonetheless, her
article and larger volume of work are extraordinary for the time and
forever transformed the way Indigenous Peoples were approached in
Canadian history, law, and popular culture. While historians Arthur
Ray, Sylvia Van Kirk, and Olive Dickason have been celebrated as key
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ent Indigenous Peoples as agents of history and important in their
own right, Indigenous historians such as Mary Jane Logan McCallum
have pointed out, as stated previously, that the Indigenous obscurity they were correcting was produced by the discipline in the first
place. Thanks to new popular areas of focus, such as Métis history,
several articles would help bring to the surface other ignored histories
beginning in the late 1970s and help reconsider the prevailing interpretations.
Reconsidering the Fur Trade and Métis History
While articles from the late 1970s to the early 1990s continue to
explore Indigenous agency, they also repeat hard-dying myths about
the “benefits” of Canada’s assimilation policies. However, one of the
highlights of the period is, beginning in 1979, a burgeoning, and later
hotly debated, genre of Métis history focusing mostly on the nineteenth century and almost exclusively on Métis men.36 In one such
article that appeared somewhat later in this period, Lyle Dick examines the shifting discourse around the 1816 Seven Oaks Incident and
argues that only after 1870 was the event reinterpreted by Anglo
Canadian historians as a massacre, an interpretation then used to justify dispossessing the Métis of their lands.37
Reflecting these shifting patterns of interpretation, Philip Goldring’s 1986 article “Inuit Economic Reponses to Euro-American
Contact” not only offers a rarely seen focus on an Inuit topic but it
also subscribes to a thesis of “accommodation and adaptation,” an
approach then gaining popularity that recognizes Indigenous Peoples
as agents in their own right. As Goldring argues, “It is now recognized that native populations often affected the pace and direction
of Euro-American penetration of British North America’s resource
frontier. . . . Incomers relied on natives for information, for indigenous technology for survival and travel, and for labor, before overseas
investors made continuous commitments of men, capital, and good
to remote regions.”38 Goldring’s article signals a significant change in
historical scholarship produced about, but not by, Indigenous Peoples
leading into the 1990s.
The 1990s — marked by the Canadian military invasion of Oka
in 1990, the Gustafsen Lake Standoff and the Ipperwash “Crisis” in
1995, the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples in 1996, and the
Delgamuukw decision in 1997 — saw an explosion of revisionist stud173
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ies, influenced by the larger events of the time, that accord agency
to Indigenous Peoples beyond a victimization narrative.39 John Lutz
challenges the idea that Indigenous Peoples became irrelevant after
the fur trade, arguing instead that they played an important role in
the economic development and industrialization of British Columbia
during the second half of the nineteenth century. Jean Monroe contests the victimization of Indigenous Peoples in her examination of
twentieth-century hydroelectric systems, as does Janet Chute, whose
1996 article about Anishinaabe leader Shingwaukonse relies heavily on Indigenous perspectives and sources, a growing trend during
this time in the larger historiography. In her piece, Chute wades into
a prominent debate within Canadian historiography that sought to
identify what “Native agency” entails. For “Native agency” to be a
more useful analytical tool, Chute argues, it needs to move beyond the
agent/victim dichotomy so prevalent in the field.40 As Gerald Vizenor’s
work reminds us, the notion of “agency” is in itself quite problematic,
in that it can be used to frame Indigenous Peoples and history within
narratives of victimization, tragedy, and dominance.41 Instead, Vizenor
offer us the theory of “survivance” as a release from those narratives
in which “survivance is an active sense of presence, the continuance of
native stories, not a mere reaction, or a survivable name. Native survivance stories are renunciations of dominance, tragedy, and victimry.
Survivance means the right of succession or reversion of an estate, and
in that sense, the estate of native survivancy.”42 Another limitation
of the histories of this time is that they still tend to treat the nationstate and its structures as the linchpin of Indigenous history. What
occurred within Indigenous communities, beyond and between the
cracks of colonialism — which is to say, Indigenous self-determination
— remains absent.43
With the infusion in the late 1990s and early 2000s of “new”
methods and sources — certainly they were not new to Indigenous
historians such as Knowledge Keepers and Elders — such as Indigenous oral history, and ensuing debates about their utility, Indigenous
scholars such as Linda Tuhiwai Smith and Winona Wheeler caution researchers against employing Western analytical lenses when
conducting Indigenous research or working with Indigenous communities.44 Wheeler argues in relation to Canadian historiography:
So when historians have no relationship with the storyteller,
or lack the lived experience, or have no personal investment in the histories they study, or do not understand the
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nature, quality, and role of Indigenous oral histories, it is
no surprise that our oral histories become de-spiritualized,
sanitized, amputated. The stories and teaching do not die
when they are recorded on tape, rather it is the way they are
treated by historians that kills them.”45
Following such challenges set out by Wheeler and the pivotal publication of Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s Decolonizing Methodologies, a slow
but influential stream of scholarship produced with, rather than on,
Indigenous communities begins to make itself felt within Canadian
historiography and the pages of the JCHA.
A New Millennium of Scholarship and Community-Based
Research Partnerships
The past two decades have witnessed a sharp increase in articles examining Indigenous history within the journal. By the early 2000s, the
savage/civilized dichotomy and victimization narratives were no longer in use and historians pushed their interpretation of Indigenous
self-determination in new directions. Historians also used new and
influential interpretive lenses to approach Indigenous topics. Myra
Rutherdale and Jim Miller employed Benedict Anderson’s theory of
“imagined communities” in their article about the Indian Pavilion at
Expo 67, while Mary-Ellen Kelm used Mary Louise Pratt’s theorization of “contact zones” in her examination of rodeos in the Canadian
West.46 These articles have contributed to the rewriting of Canadian
and Indigenous history by focusing on the power and influence of
Indigenous Peoples within their own histories. While significant, they
are nonetheless limited by their reliance on non-Indigenous theorists.
By the late 2000s, however, the journal was publishing interpretations
that increasingly employed Indigenous methodologies, theories, and
sources focused on deeply collaborative research partnerships. Such
articles as Keith Carlson’s “Precedent and the Aboriginal Response
to Global Incursions,” my own “Engendering Nationality” — which
is also the journal’s first article by an Indigenous author — and
Madeline Knickerbocker’s “What We’ve Said Can Be Proven in the
Ground” were part of a growing trend among historians of Indigenous
history to base their studies on Indigenous theories, methods, sources,
and community-based research partnerships.47 Each of the forementioned articles, produced in collaboration with Indigenous mentors,
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adopts Indigenous perspectives, self-determination, time frames, and,
at times, languages as the foundation of its analysis. These articles are
what I, along with other Indigenous historians, would classify as resurgent histories; that is, they are Indigenous histories from the inside that
consciously value the intellectual sovereignty of Indigenous communities and employ Indigenous and decolonial research methodologies.
This new wave of scholarship is being led by Indigenous women, particularly historians such as Brittany Luby, Sarah Nickel, and Lianne
Leddy to name a few.
In addition to this series of resurgent histories, several important works in the past decade have sought to decolonize not only the
field of history but also the institutions, such as museums, that perpetuate this history. An article by Anishinaabe-Métis scholar Karine
R. Duhamel on the response of the Canadian Museum for Human
Rights to “Canadian 150” and “re-storying” the foundations of Canadian nation-building is a perfect example. In the article, which details
the planning and curatorial process undertaken for the museum’s
exhibit, Duhamel urges those working with Indigenous histories to
move beyond the “politics of recognition” and foreground accountability and reciprocity:48
Chiefly, Museums wanting to engage in Indigenous histories must focus on the process by which they conduct
research and prepare exhibitions, understanding that the
way in which they establish processes and conduct research
is as important as the product itself. Institutions themselves
must move beyond recognition and be willing to acknowledge alternative constructions of history and time as well
as new ways of knowing. It is only through working with
Indigenous peoples and in truly and authentically representing them as they wish to be represented (or, in some
cases, not be represented) that tangible museological reconciliation can happen.49
Although its target is museum practices, Duhamel’s challenge also
rings true — or at least it should — with the field of Canadian history
and the scholarly publications that spread Indigenous histories. These
more recent publications do not simply mark a change in the Indigenous topics that scholars are working on but rather in how those
topics are approached to begin with. Through the use of Indigenous
community-engaged methods, these publications not only changed
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what historians were writing about but how they were writing about
Indigenous topics in collaboration with Indigenous communities.
Conclusion
While major contributions to Indigenous historiography have
appeared within the pages of the JCHA, there remain several glaring omissions in topics, themes, approaches, and authorship. Topics
such as Canadian Indian residential schools (there are two articles
on early seventeenth-century Jesuit schools and one on day schools),
the North, Indigenous Two-Spirit and queer history, and Indigenous
women, especially Métis women, are largely absent in the Journal’s
pages. To the best of my knowledge, despite the extraordinary number of full-length articles on Indigenous Peoples over the past century,
only three Indigenous historians have appeared in the pages of the
journal: myself (Dakelh), Karine R. Duhamel (Anishinaabe-Métis),
and Jesse Thistle (Métis-Cree). This absence is neither insignificant
nor innocuous. As McCallum has argued, the professionalization of
the field, with its restrictions on who is allowed or not allowed to
know, teach, and practise history and its relationship to Canada’s
assimilation policies in the arena of education has limited Indigenous
critique and participation.50 This trend has begun to change: Brittany
Luby, Sarah Nickel, Mary Jane Logan McCallum, Susan Hill, Winona
Wheeler, Rob Innes, Alan Corbiere, Lianne Leddy, Crystal Fraser, Kim
Anderson, and Allyson Stevenson are but a few of the award-winning
Indigenous historians working in the academy today. However, they
have chosen to publish elsewhere.
In addition to the concern about authorship, a critical mass of
Indigenous scholarship not tied to the nation-state and exercising
intellectual sovereignty has yet to find its way into this journal. Admittedly, this journal may not be the place for sovereign histories, given
its ties to the nation-state and the Canadian Historical Association
— an organization that has recently made significant strides but that
has historically been hostile to Indigenous historians, methods, and
interpretive lenses. Nonetheless, critiques of Canadian settler colonialism, its connection to white supremacy, or critical reflections on the
journal’s role in promoting “foundational” Canadian nation-building
narratives would still find room in the journal. While the journal has
made important contributions over its history, and there is a limited
sampling of deep community-based research partnerships, scholars
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must turn to other scholarly publications to find the most innovative
and ground-breaking studies of Indigenous history, ones that centre
the Indigenous methodologies, regeneration, and decolonial research
practices currently making waves in the field and place community
accountability and reciprocity at the fore.
***
ALLAN DOWNEY is Dakelh, Nak’azdli Whut’en, and a Canada
Research Chair in Indigenous History, Nationhood, and Self-Determination. An Associate Professor in the Department of History and
Indigenous Studies Department at McMaster University, Allan is the
co-director of Rotinonshón:ni Ironworkers (2020) and the author of The
Creator’s Game (UBC Press, 2018) which received the 2019 Canada
Prize from the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences.
ALLAN DOWNEY est Dakelh, Nak’azdli Whut’en et titulaire d’une
chaire de recherche du Canada sur l’histoire, la nation et l’autodétermination autochtones. Professeur agrégé au département d’histoire
et au département d’études autochtones de l’Université McMaster,
Downey est le codirecteur de Rotinonshón:ni Ironworkers (2020) et
l’auteur de The Creator’s Game (UBC Press, 2018), qui a reçu le Prix du
Canada en sciences humaines 2019.
Endnotes
1
2
Claudine Bonner, “Black Canada,” Paper presented at annual meeting
of the Canadian Historical Association, online, May 16, 2022.
I use the term Indians intentionally here to place an emphasis on the historical construct of the Indian and to distinguish that from Indigenous
Peoples and nations. As Gerald Vizenor argues, “indian, misgiven here
in italics, insinuates the obvious simulation and ruse of colonial dominance. Manifestly, the indian is an occidental misnomer, an overseas
enactment that has no referent to real native cultures or communities.”
Gerald Vizenor, Manifest Manners: Narratives on Postindian Survivance
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999), vii. For more, see Philip
Deloria, Playing Indian (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998);
and Daniel Francis, The Imaginary Indian: The Image of the Indian in
Canadian Culture (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 1992).
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3
For this historiographical review, I focus on full-length articles featured
in the journal. Because of the sheer volume of articles, I have organized
this review chronologically. This is not to insinuate that there has been
an evolutionary “improvement” in Canadian historiography.
4 Linda Tuhiwai Smith, “Colonizing Knowledges,” in The Indigenous Experience: Global Perspectives, ed. Roger C. A. Maaka and Chris Andersen
(Toronto: Canadian Scholars’ Press, 2006), 92–93.
5 Tuhiwai Smith, “Colonizing Knowledges,” 93.
6 Robert Allen Warrior, “Intellectual Sovereignty and the Struggle for an
American Indian Future,” Wicazo Sa Review 8, no. 1 (1992): 1–20; Robert Allen Warrior, Tribal Secrets: Recovering American Indian Intellectual
Traditions (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995).
7 Warrior, “Intellectual Sovereignty”; Warrior, Tribal Secrets.
8 Allan Downey, The Creator’s Game: Lacrosse, Identity, and Indigenous
Nationhood (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2018), 19.
9 There are notable exceptions to this, particularly appearing in this journal, including the work of Benjamin Hoy, “A Border without Guards:
First Nations and the Enforcement of National Space,” Journal of the
Canadian Historical Association / Revue de la Société historique du Canada
25, no. 2 (2014): 89–115; Olive Patricia Dickason, “Europeans and
Amerindians: Some Comparative Aspects of Early Contact,” Historical
Papers /Communications historiques, 14 (1979): 182–202; as well as others
in Canadian historiography, such as Adele Perry, On the Edge of Empire:
Gender, Race, and the Making of British Columbia, 1849–1871 (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 2001).
10 See Allan Downey, “Engendering Nationality: Haudenosaunee Tradition, Sport, and the Lines of Gender,” Journal of the Canadian Historical
Association / Revue de la Société historique du Canada 23, no. 1 (2012):
319–54; Karine R. Duhamel, “Kanata/Canada: Re-storying Canada
150 at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights,” Journal of the Canadian Historical Association / Revue de la Société historique du Canada 28, no.
1 (2017): 217–47; and Carolyn Podruchny, Jesse Thistle, and Elizabeth
Jameson, “Women on the Margins of Imperial Plots: Farming on Borrowed Land,” Journal of the Canadian Historical Association / Revue de la
Société historique du Canada 29, no. 1 (2018): 158–81.
11 Jean M. O’Brien, Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians Out of Existence in
New England (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), xii.
12 See, for instance, Marius Barbeau, “Fort Simpson, on the Northwest
Coast,” Annual Report 2 (1923): 84–89; Lawrence J. Burpee, “The
North West Company,” Annual Report 2 (1923): 25–38; F. W. Howay,
“The Spanish Discovery of British Columbia in 1774,” Annual Report
2 (1923), 49–55; Harlan Smith, “The End of Alexander Mackenzie’s
Trip to the Pacific,” Annual Report 3 (1924): 48–53; W. N. Sage, “Sir
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13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
James Douglas, Fur-Trader and Governor,” Report of the Annual Meeting
4 (1925): 49–55; R. O. MacFarland, “Indian Trade in Nova Scotia to
1764,” Report of the Annual Meeting 13 (1934): 57–67.
Robin Jarvis Brownlie, “First Nations Perspectives and Historical Thinking in Canada,” in First Nations, First Thoughts: The Impact of Indigenous
Thought in Canada, ed. Annis May Timpson (Vancouver: University of
British Columbia Press, 2009), 21.
Mary Jane Logan McCallum, “Indigenous Labor and Indigenous History,” American Indian Quarterly 33, 4 (Fall 2009), 531. As Robin Jarvis
Brownlie has noted, there were a few Indigenous historians in North
America such as George Copway, Peter Jones, Edward Ahenakew, Joseph
Dion, and Mike Mountain Horse writing between 1850–1960 but they
remained the exception. With a lack of interest from the public as well
as limited opportunities to publish, very few Indigenous historians were
writing during this time. Robin Jarvis Brownlie, “First Nations Perspectives and Historical Thinking in Canada,” in First Nations, First Thoughts:
The Impact of Indigenous Thought in Canada, ed. Annis May Timpson (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2009), 22–27.
Walter N. Sage, “Some Aspects of the Frontier in Canadian History,”
Report of the Annual Meeting 7 (1928), 62.
Audra Simpson, Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life across the Borders of Settler States (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 125.
F. W. Howay, “Crowfoot: The Great Chief of the Blackfeet,” Report of the
Annual Meeting 9 (1930): 107–111.
Howay, “Crowfoot.”
George F. G. Stanley, “The Indian Background of Canadian History,” Report
of the Annual Meeting / Rapport de l’assemblée annuelle 31 (1952): 14–21.
Stanley, “Indian Background,” 14.
Stanley, 14.
For more of an examination of this topic, see Lisa Monchalin, The Colonial Problem: An Indigenous Perspective on Crime and Injustice in Canada
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016).
Stanley, “Indian Background,” 14.
S. F. Wise, “The Indian Diplomacy of John Graves Simcoe,” Report of the
Annual Meeting / Rapport de l’assemblée annuelle 32 (1953): 36–44; Leslie
R. Gray, “The Moravian Missionaries, Their Indians, and the Canadian
Government,” Report of the Annual Meeting / Rapport de l’assemblée annuelle
34 (1955): 96–104; Yves F. Zoltvany, “The Problem of Western Policy under Philippe de Riguad de Vaudreuil, 1703–1725,” Report of the
Annual Meeting / Rapport de l’assemblée annuelle 43 (1964): 9–24.
Zoltvany, “Problem of Western Policy,” 9.
Sarah A. Nickel, Assembling Unity: Indigenous Politics, Gender, and the
Union of BC Indian Chiefs (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2019), 19.
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27 Nickel, Assembling Unity.
28 Nickel, 19. See also Susan M. Hill, The Clay We Are Made Of: Haudenosaunee Land Tenure on the Grand River (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba
Press, 2017); Megan Harvey, “Story People: Stó:lō-State Relations and
Indigenous Literacies in British Columbia, 1864–1874,” Journal of the
Canadian Historical Association / Revue de la Société historique du Canada
24, no. 1 (2013): 51–88; Allan Downey, “Playing the Creator’s Game
on God’s Day: The Controversy of Sunday Lacrosse Games in Haudenosaunee Communities, 1916–24,” Journal of Canadian Studies 49, no. 3
(2015): 111–43.
29 James W. St. G. Walker, “The Indian in Canadian Historical Writing,”
Historical Papers /Communications historiques 6 (1971): 21.
30 In Walker’s discussion of Canadian historiography, he uses a racist term
to describe Indigenous women (one that was broadly accepted at the
time the article was written) when making his point that woman were
depicted as “slaves” to Indigenous men. Walker, “The Indian,” 24.
31 Walker, 37.
32 Walker, 36.
33 Sylvia Van Kirk, “‘Women in Between’: Indian Women in Fur Trade
Society in Western Canada,” Historical Papers /Communications historiques
12 (1977): 30–46; Dickason, “Europeans and Amerindians,” 182–202.
34 Dickason, 201.
35 Darren R. Préfontaine, Changing Canadian History: The Life and Works
of Olive Patricia Dickason (Saskatoon: Gabriel Dumont Institute Press,
2021), 320–21.
36 Gerald Friesen, “Homeland to Hinterland: Political Transition in Manitoba, 1870 to 1879,” Historical Papers /Communications historiques 14
(1979): 33–47; Gerhard J. Ens, “Dispossession or Adaptation? Migration and Persistence of the Red River Metis, 1835–1890,” Historical
Papers /Communications historiques 23 (1988): 120–44; Lyle Dick, “The
Seven Oaks Incident and the Construction of a Historical Tradition,
1816 to 1970,” Journal of the Canadian Historical Association / Revue
de la Société historique du Canada 2 (1991): 91–113; Gerhard J. Ens,
“Prologue to the Red River Resistance: Pre-liminal Politics and the
Triumph of Riel,” Journal of the Canadian Historical Association / Revue
de la Société historique du Canada 5 (1994): 111–23. For a response to
this period of Métis scholarship, see Chris Andersen, Métis: Race, Recognition, and the Struggle for Indigenous Peoplehood (Vancouver: UBC Press,
2014), 119–24.
37 Dick, “Seven Oaks Incident,” 91–113.
38 Philip Goldring, “Inuit Economic Responses to Euro-American
Contacts: Southeast Baffin Island, 1824–1940,” Historical Papers /Communications historiques 21 (1986): 147.
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39 For instance, Mary-Ellen Kelm identifies the Oka Crisis as having a
profound impact on her scholarship in Douglas Cole, J. R. Miller, and
Mary-Ellen Kelm, “Notes and Comments: Desperately Seeking Absolution: Responses and a Reply,” Canadian Historical Review 76, no. 4
(1995): 628–42.
40 Janet E. Chute, “A Unifying Vision: Shingwaukonse’s Plan for the Future
of the Great Lakes Ojibwa,” Journal of the Canadian Historical Association
/ Revue de la Société historique du Canada 7 (1996): 56. As Chute notes see,
Cole, Miller, and Kelm, “Notes and Comments,” 628–42.
41 Gerald Robert Vizenor, Manifest Manners: Narratives on Postindian Survivance (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999), vii.
42 Vizenor, Manifest Manners, vii.
43 Michael A. Robidoux, Stickhandling through the Margins: First Nations
Hockey in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012), 12.
44 See Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (Dunedin, NZ: University of Otago Press, 1999).
45 Winona Wheeler, “Reflections on the Social Relations of Indigenous
Oral History,” in Walking a Tightrope: Aboriginal Peoples and Their Representations, ed. David T. McNab (Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier
University Press, 2005), 196.
46 Myra Rutherdale and Jim Miller, “‘It’s Our Country’: First Nations’
Participation in the Indian Pavilion at Expo 67,” Journal of the Canadian
Historical Association / Revue de la Société historique du Canada 17, no. 2
(2006): 148–73; Mary-Ellen Kelm, “Riding into Place: Contact Zones,
Rodeo, and Hybridity in the Canadian West, 1900–1970,” Journal of the
Canadian Historical Association / Revue de la Société historique du Canada
18, no. 1 (2007): 107–132.
47 Keith Thor Carlson, “Precedent and the Aboriginal Response to Global
Incursion: Smallpox and Identity Reformation among the Coast Salish,”
Journal of the Canadian Historical Association / Revue de la Société historique
du Canada 18, no. 2 (2007): 165–201; Downey, “Engendering Nationality,” 319–54; Madeline Rose Knickerbocker, “‘What We’ve Said Can
Be Proven in the Ground’: Stó:lō Sovereignty and Historical Narratives
at Xá:ytem, 1990–2006,” Journal of the Canadian Historical Association /
Revue de la Société historique du Canada 24, no. 1 (2013): 297–342.
48 For more on the politics of recognition, see Glen Sean Coulthard, Red
Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014).
49 Duhamel, “Kanata/Canada,” 240.
50 McCallum, “Indigenous Labor,” 524, 528.
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