Insight, Blindness, and Unexamined Assumptions in Seen but Not Seen

No one could describe Donald Smith as a man of little learning: he drinks deep, and his topic is sobering. For more than half a century, he has been researching and writing about relations between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples in Canada. Seen but Not Seen is the culmination of this work. As one reviewer commented, Smith’s characterization of Alberta historian Hugh Dempsey as “a bridge between two worlds, communicating valuable information about the Indigenous world to non-Indigenous [people]” is in fact “an apt description” of Smith himself. The thesis of Seen but Not Seen is in its title: the visibility of Indigenous people in non-Indigenous Canada has fluctuated over time, but for most of our mutual history it has been low, and anything like a nuanced understanding has been well below the event horizon. For me, a spectacular example of this invisibility occurred in 2012 when journalist Stephen Hume wrote an excellent piece in the Vancouver Sun on the 150th anniversary of the devastating smallpox epidemic of 1862–63 that likely killed at least 60 percent of the Indigenous people in British Columbia. The mortality rate was probably greater than during the Black Death in Europe in the fourteenth century, and its effect on BC’s Indigenous peoples was catastrophic. That history is still very much with us. Yet, while most British Columbians knew that 2012 was the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic, when I sent this article to my law school colleagues, one who had gone to school and university in British Columbia asked a pointed question: “How did I grow up in this province without being told about this?” How, indeed. The dramatis personae of Smith’s book includes ministers (e.g., George Monro Grant), missionaries (e.g., John McDougall), academics (e.g., Franz Boas, Kathleen Coburn), an artist (Emily Carr), a judge (Chancellor John A. Boyd), a schoolteacher (John Laurie), a politician (Sir John A. Macdonald), a bureaucrat/poet (Duncan Campbell Scott), an Indigenous activist (Harold Cardinal), a newspaper publisher (Maisie Hurley), and even an intriguing imposter (Chief Buffalo Child Long Lance). Nor is this the whole list: as Jan Noel notes, there are several additional “walk-ons.” The examples of both insight and ignorance in Seen but Not Seen raise at least two questions. Why were only a small minority of non-Indigenous Canadians able to see through the prejudices of their times, and why were they able to see only so much? I think part of the answer to the first question is that these were generally people who had developed meaningful and enduring relationships with Indigenous people and communities, and therefore rejected popular misconceptions about them. Part of the answer to the second question is that even many of these people were unable to transcend the limitations imposed by their commitment to versions of Christianity and theories of civilization that were dominant at the time — and which, ironically, were often the motivation behind their involvement with Indigenous people in the first place. As one reviewer wrote, Seen but Not Seen is a book about “determined unseeing.” I agree, provided that, with respect to most of the persons in the book, “determined” does not mean intentionally obtuse, but hampered by unexamined assumptions. As John Webster Grant observed forty years ago, “To an extent that is seldom recognized, the assault on Indian culture bemoaned by social activists today was led by social activists of an earlier era.” This raises another issue, one that Smith addresses in the book and that also came up in the question period at the virtual roundtable: presentism. He writes in the prologue that …