A Problematic Past and the Promise of Light in Seen but Not Seen

I expect anyone who is reading this knows how hard it is to narrate history’s dialogue between the past and the present. How does one remain true to the past, yet speak in relevant tones to today’s audiences? Even being a historian involves somehow balancing the passion that has drawn us into this not-exactly-rich-in-jobs field with the dispassion that is required to render an honest historical account. Passion is in the air. We’ve heard about how politicians face constant online harassment and threats, but it also affects veterans of the once tweedy, bespectacled backwater of pre-Confederation history. The Canadian Historical Association has seen disagreements, while the public has made calls to rewrite the Canadian story wholesale, and even to cancel Canada Day. I know several current faculty members who will voice only confidentially their more complex assessment of controversial figures like Egerton Ryerson. “I don’t want to be crucified in social media,” a colleague told me. And there is understandable indignation from people who have suffered abuse and from their supporters who call for reform. Fortunately, a highly qualified scholar has stepped into the fray to discuss attitudes of influential Canadians from the 1840s onward. From his 1974 publication on Indigeneity in New France and his 1987 biography of Kahkewaquonaby (Peter Jones) to his award-winning 2013 monograph Mississauga Portraits: Ojibwe Voices from Nineteenth-Century Canada, Donald Smith has a wealth of knowledge across cultural divides. On the University of Toronto’s Mississauga campus, we taught his searing article “The Dispossession of the Mississaugas.” Exploited by government agents, whiskey traders, and lecherous soldiers, the Mississaugas were pushed to the margins by a tidal wave of settlers who ruined the fishery and stole timber from the ever-shrinking Credit River village. When Smith came to my classroom to speak about it, he invited his friends from New Credit to join the discussion. And when his 2021 Ontario History article attempted to exonerate Egerton Ryerson — as an ally of Indigenous peoples — he spoke not from on high but spent pages inviting others to continue his research and suggesting untapped sources. Smith is also aware of other dispossessed groups, such as evicted Highlanders and Famine Irish who arrived among the waves of mass migration after 1815. His co-authored textbook Origins: Canadian History to Confederation recounts their plight, along with that of people arriving on the Underground Railroad from the US South. The influx was so massive that the majority Anishinaabe population of 1780 had died or moved to remote areas by the mid-nineteenth century, becoming less than 1 percent of Upper Canada’s population and nearly invisible to the newcomers. Having explored the histories of all these groups, Smith is well positioned to referee discussion of people whose views on race, gender, and religion do not match those of today. Smith points out one belief common to almost all the Canadians he studied in the century after 1840, remarkably still expressed by ethnologists Marius Barbeau and Diamond Jenness in the 1930s: the Indians were a “dying race,” making assimilation the only viable course for the few survivors. Prominent Canadians acted on the belief with varying degrees of good and ill will. Regardless of white views, few Indigenous men were willing to give up their status in exchange for the franchise, which Smith reads as clear rejection of assimilation. The twentieth century saw the Indigenous population begin to rebound, particularly in the 1930s with better prevention and treatment of contagious diseases, and better nutrition and hygiene. Opening his crate of apples, Smith finds a few rotten ones. Foremost was Duncan Campbell Scott, superintendant of the Department of …