The "civilizing" of indigenous people in nineteenth-century Canada

Abstract

This article explores the nineteenth-century concept of "civilization" that was used to direct policies toward indigenous peoples in Canada. In Canada attitudes toward native people were shaped by the construction of a theory of "civilization" as material culture, which was seen as independent from, and superior to, other aspects of culture.

Headnote

The "Civilizing" of Indigenous People in Nineteenth-Century Canada*

IT HAS been claimed that the Victorian epoch is the colonial age par excellence and also that it is the period in which Europeans shifted from a range of relatively benevolent attitudes toward indigenous peoples to a more deeply negative racism.l This claim is associated with a second argument that there was a single modem global theory of "biological" racism, which began with Buffon and his views on animal types in the eighteenth century and was adumbrated in the nineteenth by imperialist pundits, such as H. M. Stanley on the Africans and Raffles on the Javanese and Malays.2 In this article I agree that the Victorian era marked a departure from earlier periods in its novel coinage of harsh racial attitudes toward indigenous people, but I dispute the suggestion that these always took a "biological" character. Further, I reject the claim that Victorian ethnicity should be called "modern," if by that one means that there was a great divide between, on the one hand, a period in which ethnicity was based on philosophical and moral doctrines and, on the other, "modern times"-the nineteenth and twentieth centuries-in which racism was based on natural science. Such a division is flawed in two respects. First, not all varieties of nineteenth-century racism depended on biological typecasting, and second, while Victorian racism might have been more pervasive, or more widespread and intrusive, than earlier varieties, it was quite distinct from twentieth-century attitudes to indigenous peoples. In order to demonstrate that there is no overarching modern theory of European colonial racism that can explain the perceptions and treatment of indigenous peoples, I shall examine the notion of "civilization" as it pertains to nineteenth-century Canada. There "civilization" largely depended on an advocacy of the virtue of a sophisticated material culture, which the indigenous people lacked. The intention behind this explanation is not to substitute another universal claim or constant (i.e., that nineteenth-century racist attitudes were always caused by a strong emphasis on the superior material culture of the European ethnic group) for one stating that all Victorian attitudes were derived from a belief in animal typology and natural science. Rather my intention is to plead for a more nuanced and accurate account of how ethnicity has been constructed. In order to show part of the route to a more adequate account, I will analyze the writings on civilization by both English anthropologists and by Canadian officials and missionaries. "Civilization" is now virtually synonymous with "culture." Both terms refer to an interconnected web of the arts, sciences, politics, religion, social relations, and material goods of a people. This has become such a commonplace that when we reflect on how scholars during the early twentieth century used the terms, it takes an effort of the imagination to see that a definition that attempts holistically to embrace a wide variety of activities, relationships, and knowledge was a novel concept at that time. The importance such scholars attributed to this holism, and the resistance they expected it to encounter, can be seen in the writings of the Toronto anthropologist, T E McIlwraith: To the anthropologist the term culture means the sum total of the manners, customs, practices and beliefs of a community. It is equivalent to the term civilization, as commonly applied to the life of more complex societies. A single culture includes such elements as language, literature or oral traditions, religious beliefs and practices, social organizations, political institutions, ethical and traditional modes of behaviour and attitudes towards law, as well as the elements of strictly material culture, arts and crafts, industries, means of transport, and economic pursuits. Any one of these traits can be studied specifically, but it must be borne in mind that the individual member of society grows up in an environment in which all the elements are interwoven and naturally interactive. Added together, they comprise the life of his group, to which he unconsciously adjusts himself from infancy.3 McIlwraith insisted that the varied parts of a culture or civilization are interwoven. He reinscribed this point by claiming that the disparate elements of civilization/culture are so interconnected that any sudden or significant change in a culture disrupts its other aspects.4 This sentiment had a sharp implication for those officials who concerned themselves with the welfare of the native population: no one aspect of indigenous civilization could be modified or improved without change cascading through all its parts. Mclwraith's flat and scientific assessment, which appeared in the introduction to the conference deliberations of Canadian and American Indian officials, published in I939, was meant to mark the end of an era in which governments "civilized" native peoples by adjusting their religious habits, their livelihoods, and their education. In that era, "civilization" had not meant that the native peoples would be assimilated, but rather that-at least for the time being-they would remain a separate, though improved, "race of men." At some later moment, they would be readied for eventual absorption into European society. Seen from this older perspective, McIlwraith's comments represented a new-found sensitivity to the problem of handling Indians.5 The new vantage point was one from which anthropologists would advise officials about possible social effects of policies, effects that would ramify throughout a culture. That is, it would no longer be possible to make a simple adjustment to one feature of a civilization without considering the whole.6 The new use of "civilization" was not necessarily accompanied by the hopes for reform expressed at the Toronto conference. Canadian readers were already accustomed to a much more pessimistic vision of indigenous civilization. The great folklorist, Marius Barbeau, had reached outside the professional anthropological readership to wam that indigenous culture was in wreckage with no remnants of internal authority. The Indian should be adapting himself to modern conditions, but, instead, he remained sullen and discontented, nursing antiquated griefs while "voluntarily stooping as it were over the edge of an open grave." Why would he not fight his way defiantly through lifedull and humiliating though it might be-as so many white men have done in the forlorn wastes of the New World?7 Barbeau suspected that the Indian's reluctance to adjust to civilization was because "we" had shaken the ancient beliefs, notions, and myths to their roots. The Indian, whether seer or sorcerer, wise man or fool, could see no salvation. "We" could do nothing for the Indian now since as a "superior" (Barbeau's irony) race, "we" had, through missionaries, assured the Indian of the veracity of our creeds.8 This Christian cultural penetration was only superficial, but it still had been sufficient to leave the Indian lost on "a starless sea" with a clouded mind and a decreasing population) Barbeau's bitterness, which included a sweeping condemnation of the artificial neo-Indian culture created by European contact, was based on his sense of the interconnectedness of the parts of a civilization. His dark vision left no room for anodyne policies that would improve single aspects of Indian education or mode of living. He was lamenting what had already passed. In the words of John Kayrahoo, an old "half-breed" Wyandot: "But one kind of customs is now bound to exist for all in this country. The same thing happens to all Indians. We were all advised to take up work. The old customs of the past are merely what we talk about. That is all. Moreover, we have now forgotten most of these things; . . . I am a man of the past."lo In "Our Indians" Barbeau put forward the paradox of despondency. There is an antithesis: First, life was made easier because of the rifle, the steel axe, and the iron pot. Second, physical benefits were accompanied not by civilization, but by unease, alienation, and resistance to European culture. "In a word they were uncivilized; they were savage men of the wilds with unaccountable ways of their own."" The paradox was unbalanced; the metal weapons and implements lasted better than the dreams. Barbeau, the folklorist and the recorder of memories, here argues that the defining attribute of the doomed Indian civilization was its transformation through the adoption of European material culture.

Whether Indians could be saved or whether they should be lamented, the essence of "civilization" was the same. It was an interwoven delicate set of beliefs and relationships that might very well be beyond instrumental adjustment by government. The imposition of Christianity, the gift of tools, instruction in a trade school, or the prohibition of a dance or a potlatch could never be a simple matter again. So much is now obvious: like McIlwraith and Barbeau, we have all resorted to a concept that makes it wrong to treat "others"-that is, indigenous peoples-as if they belonged to a group that lacked some essential quality, knowledge, or skill, and who would, therefore, be improved by a Promethean gift. Instead, we live with an insistence that the total assemblage of a people's cultural knowledge has to be respectfully treated as a whole upon which we intrude at the risk of damaging a group's identity.lI The moral obviousness of this prohibition leads to a historiographical mystery. In the past scholars and officials did not share this sensitivity, and, therefore, their motives have become opaque to us. I shall show that this opaqueness exists because of a shift in the meaning of "civilization." If there is a mystery about the opinions of scholars and officials during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it is not a product of the Indian problem. "Civilization" was a European problem; it was the Europeans' struggle with their own civilized identity that obscured, because it left Europeans of the Victorian period even less well prepared than before to appreciate, or to weigh, the cultural values of anyone else. Victorians' uncertainty about their own cultural identity was not the only freight carried by the concept of "civilization." The older meaning of the term as the antonym of "barbarism" flickered on through the nineteenth century and had a continuing impact in structuring European views of aboriginal peoples.l3 However, the partial preservation of this meaning should not conceal a major shift in the discourse of "civilization." The nineteenth century saw a discarding of an important series of connotations as well as the erection of a new meaning. Both of these processes were to have serious implications. On what was discarded: the eighteenth-century associations between "civilization" and refinement of manners and between "civilization" and order were largely jettisoned. This had a bearing on how Europeans treated native peoples. Refinement of manners was often regarded as an individual rather than a group characteristic, but, like order, it had an objective quality. An Indian could possess refined manners, or an Indian society, such as the Iroquois, could be credited with a sense of order. Therefore, according to the pre-Victorian understanding, either could be singled out as examples of "civilization." This identification was easier before the Victorian era because "civilized" qualities were seemingly independent of each other. For example, refinement or wisdom could be attained without commercial prosperity. The Victorian invention of a new and primary meaning for "civilization" was even more significant. The new meaning was increasingly seen as an efflorescence of material wealth and as a quality lacking in an indigenous people. "Civilization" was mostly emptied of the moral and philosophical qualities it had possessed for earlier Europeans who had been thrown into contact with Indians.

During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries American colonists did not use progressive language when referring to their attempts to "civilize the Indian." Instead of speaking, in the way Victorians did, of the need to "improve" Indians or to raise them up to a "higher level," the colonists usually expressed their aims as the need to "reduce" Indians to "civility."14 This linguistic difference hints at a great conceptual divide between early colonial views and Victorian ones about the meaning of "civilization." It suggests that there was a paradigmatic shift at the end of the eighteenth century. I shall show that Victorian attitudes toward indigenous peoples were fundamentally different in emphasis because they were based on a belief that "civilization" was dependent upon material culture and, in addition, that it was secular and universal. In contrast to this, pre-Victorian notions of "civilization" were religious, particularistic (in the sense of referring to the qualities of particular nations, such as the English or the French), and based on a belief that the arts of civil life and humanity were best summed up as philosophical and educational goals.

When pre-Victorian views on "civilization" were applied to indigenous peoples, they resulted in a simple dichotomy between the absence and presence of "civil" qualities. First, the Europeans believed that the Indians were deficient in the qualities of which "civility" consisted. Second, Europeans sought to instil various positive qualities into the Indians to remedy this. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Indians were perceived as lacking three essential qualities: order, manners, and industry.ls These "civilized" qualities seem oddly assorted until we see how they should work in unison to control what the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century observer saw as the "Indian problem." According to the observer of that era, the "generic" Indian was subordinated to his passions; he was either childish or animal-like.l6 His notion of justice was without common rules, and he had not mastered the arts of "civil" life and humanity.l7 That is, the Indian did not live in an ordered way, nor did he possess the kind of manners that a proper education would have bestowed upon him. Further, his mode of living lacked "industry" which, for the European of that period, was a description of the moral qualities a person would gain from laborious work or toil.Is "Industry" was the antithesis of idleness; it was not merely a matter of the production of material wealth. The second aspect of the early colonial desire to transform Indians was the imposition of those positive "civil" qualities possessed by Europeans. For French missionaries (except for the Jesuits after 1640) and for New Englanders, "civility" meant their respectively unique national heritages and/or Christianity.l9 "Civility" and Christianity were seen as closely connected even where the desire to impart Christianity was paramount. Even missionaries deemed it necessary that "civility" must precede knowledge of the ways of Christ.20 To "reduce" the Indians to "civility," it was necessary first to teach them the arts of civil life in classically oriented schools. In other words, they must be given the same intellectual apparatus that Europeans thought had been essential for replicating civic life since the time of ancient Greece and Rome. Since civic culture could only exist as part of urban life, Indians would have to give up their rootless existence in forests and settle in permanent communities under regular laws. For the early colonial English, "civility" referred to an extension of English patriotism; it was their particular national heritage, not the secular and universal quality it denoted to Victorians. In colonial America "civility" was a palladium that contained the qualities of a true national life, which, by association with the ideal of the polis or the republic of the ancient world, was believed to contain the essential ingredients of civil life. For the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European, Indians would not simply become civilized; they became civilized as English or French. Although this early colonial idea had important ramifications for the indigenous mode of living, it was not, as it became later for Victorians, primarily a belief that material culture was the essential core of "civilization."

John Stuart Mill, writing at a moment (I836) when he could still glimpse the older meaning of "civilization," remarked that it had a double meaning. In one sense, "civilization" referred to human improvement in general. Thus, a country was civilized if its people were more eminent in the best characteristics of individuals and society, "further advanced in the road to perfection; happier, nobler, wiser."zl In another sense-and this was the sense that became increasingly familiar during the later nineteenth century-"civilization" stood only for improvement, which distinguished nations from groups of savages or barbarians. The second usage, which was attractive to Mill as a social critic worried about the debilitating effect of mass politics in "civilized" societies, was lacking in the benign moral features of the first usage. That is, the second usage shed the idea that universal qualities, such as happiness, nobility, and wisdom, were universals that one could possess, or lose, at any time or in any social condition. Another feature of Mill's second version of "civilization," and one that was less than benign, was its narrow conception of human improvement, which distinguished a civilized nation from a barbaric one solely in terms of its preeminence in material goods. This distinction between "civilized" and "barbaric" was formerly accompanied by a notion that the "civilized" included a broad range of manners, moral refinement, and political wisdom that the "barbaric" lacked. In the earlier period wealth was thought to be conducive to the production of nonmaterial qualities, whereas Mill was uncomfortably aware that his modern age had separated the two. For Mill, the separation of "civilization" into two doctrines meant that he could occasionally flay his contemporaries for allowing their increasing material wealth or opulence to displace amiable and impressive virtues. In England, the possession of riches had produced gentlemen whose "moral effeminacy" made them unfit for any kind of struggle.22 The leaders of society had acquired the characteristics of torpidity and cowardice.23 Mill's moral-cum-historical analysis of the failure of nineteenthcentury gentlemen to live up to the classical model of the hero, while at the same time adopting the supposed vices of the opposite sex, did not prevent him from indulgently employing the narrow sense of "civilization" when it suited his argument. That is, when it came to the question of "savages," Mill treated them as a mere residual category that possessed no characteristics that were not impressed upon them by their environment. "Savages" existed only in tribes that wandered over vast tracts of land, in contrast to "civilized" peoples whose land was densely populated and who dwelt in towns and villages. Mill's "savages" are denoted only by the qualities they lacked. Their life had no commerce, no manufacture, and no agriculture. Further, it had no law, no government (except during war), no administration of justice, and "no systematic employment of the collective strength of society to protect individuals against injury from one another."24 In contrast, "civilized" people had those positive qualities that came from membership in large societies. Chiefly these were property, intelligence, and the power of cooperation.25 Mill was emphatic that the "savage" possessed individual qualities-bodily strength, courage, and enterpriseand was "often not without intelligence," but these did not lead to any benefit. This insistence means that Mill's moralism was subordinate to his acceptance of the proposition that society defined itself in terms of measurable qualities, and this prevented him from adequately addressing the other sense of "civilization" he had put forth-the general improvement of humanity through increased happiness, nobility, and wisdom. In short, individual perfection was no longer the goal of "civilization."

The emphasis on "civilization" as the increase of wealth and technology at the expense of its other meanings became more dominant in the later nineteenth century. At times, especially in the hands of anthropologists and archaeologists, the alternative meanings disappeared or became vestigial-almost subliminal-connotations whose only effect was to soften the harsher messages of material culture. E. B. Tylor and John Lubbock are examples of the kind of author who adumbrated the gospel of "civilization" as material culture. Tylor's description of the development of culture from savagery, through barbarism, to civilization was specially dependent on what he called material and intellectual culture. "Acquaintance with the physical laws of the world, and the accompanying powers of adapting nature to man's own ends, are, on the whole, lowest among savages, mean among barbarians, and highest among modem educated nations."26 When Tylor stressed that intellectual qualities accompanied material development, he neither deprecated the rational abilities of the "savage" mind nor praised those of the "civilized" one. It was obvious to him from a survey of indigenous religions that these had such high qualities of consistency and logic that there could be nothing wrong with the minds of those who contemplated them.27 This suggests that in considering intellectual culture as linked to material culture Tylor was not referring, as Francis Galton did in this period, to the mental properties or intelligence possessed by an ethnic group. Tylor's concept of "intelligence" was not an objective biological or psychological property of individuals-whether "savage" or "civilized"-but the property of a progressive group, such as a modem nation. Of course, Tylor did not believe that everyone in such a group would be intelligent. For him development was not a homogeneous process. Further, like many other Victorian social scientists he was often disposed to see virtue as a casualty of progress because it had become separated from intelligence "in the great movements of civilization."28 However, moral regret such as this did not hinder Tylor from recommending, as an ethical judgment, the notion that any known "savage" tribe would be improved by the judicious application of "civilization." Such improvement would consist of an increase in wisdom as well as material capability. Of course, Tylor's ethics, like those of his contemporaries, were not concerned with the growth of an individual's moral sentiment, but with the greater social entity whose overall ethical standing could be measured as if it possessed an objective weight. Beyond this, there was no need to question the psychological origins of moral sentiments that might register the virtuous intent of "savages" or "civilizers." That would involve examining individuals' psyches-an unnecessary task if one could discover that a group possessed uniform ethics. Tylor's contemporary, John Lubbock,29 did attempt to address the question of whether the individual "savage" was indeed virtuous. He was coarser intellectually than Tylor, and he found it easier to dismiss evidence of savage rationality.30 Instead of admiring savage ideas that displayed complex and structural reasoning, he simply rejected them as absurd.31 Lubbock also failed to make a distinction between virtue and modem intelligence of the kind that had mollified Tylor's judgment.32 "Man," Lubbock thought, had made more progress in his moral than in his material or intellectual advancement because savages almost entirely lacked moral feelings.33 He realized that, in saying this, he was contesting the opinions of eighteenth-century moralists, such as Lord Kames and David Hume, who believed that each human being contained within himself or herself the ability to construct moral sensibilities. However, this seemed to him to be contrary to the findings of contemporary psychology. Like the psychologists on whom he relied (Alexander Bain and Herbert Spencer), Lubbock preferred to attach his theory of moral growth to the growth of the human psyche as a process that took place in a species. Whether this adaptation of the human species was caused entirely or partly by utilitarian pressures from without or by internal drives34 mattered little in the context of his argument since, for Lubbock, moral capacities existed fully only in "civilized" nations, not in the "savages" who were the subject of his study. His framework contained no place for a concept of "civilization" within which uncivilized individuals were able to acquire sophisticated manners or mores, nor was there a sense that they could acquire the ability to make moral decisions.

This shift in the meaning of "civilization" was to have an enormous impact on how indigenous peoples were viewed. The focus on groups rather than on individuals as the key components of culture resulted in a repudiation of "uniformism."Is That is, when Tylor and other well-established anthropologists toyed with the idea of stages of development, they imagined that intermediate groups, such as barbarians, bridged the gap between "savage" and "civil." In this theory human groups thought to be distant in evolutionary terms were linked by the existence of intermediate groups. This echoed uniformism in the natural world, in which it was postulated that there were no sudden gaps in evolutionary processes. No such sophistication was present when it came to the subject of the North American Indian. There a crude anthropological theory dismissed individually possessed cultural values and concealed any links between "savages" and "civilizers." It was as if there were two distinct types of humans: "savages," and their virtues, were individualized, whereas "civilized" people who lived in nations that possessed collective powers had a significant cultural inheritance from the past. Despite its avoidance of saltatory moves, anthropologically driven theory had created a gap between native peoples and whites that seemed incapable of being filled by the "partly civilized Indian" or the "half-breed."36 The differences between cultures had become absolute.

"Civilization," as a signifier whose primary meaning was the presence of a high level of material culture rather than of manners and refinement, was not only invoked by Mill, Tylor, and Lubbock to explain the problems of general social development, it was also the key term used by scholars and missionaries when they were providing a specific explanation of why the indigenous peoples of Canada had made so little progress in the 300 years since the Spanish, French, and English breached the pre-Columbian fastness.37 To begin with scholars, it seems obvious that no matter how well disposed they were toward native peoples, such sympathy never disrupted the idea that Indians were outside of "civilization." When Horatio Hale reported to the British Association on the Kootenay Indians of British Columbia in I892, he commented on their good moral character and behavior. They were "moral, honest, kind and hospitable," and only when they were imposed upon by bad Indians from other tribes and by bad whites did worse traits appear.38 However, the possession by the Indians of internalized moral virtues did not signify to Hale that these people were "civilized." On the contrary, he believed that tribal habits were destructive of the "civilization" that was being imparted to the Indians in schools.39 Franz Boas, regarded as one of the forerunners of modern anthropology and as a man with unswerving loyalties to the Indians of the northwest coast, insisted the potlatch ceremony should not be interfered with; it was a lingering survival that we should be slow to take away from the native who was struggling against the forces of "civilization."4

What Hale and Boas did implicitly, Daniel Wilson, with his extraordinary combination of literary scholarship and archaeology, did overtly. That is, he painstakingly defined "civilization" in such a way that it contained qualities that native peoples could not claim. When Wilson posed the question "What is civilization?" in I865 he used it to strip away from Indians anything but their material culture. He offered a contrast between the "Euroamerican" and the Indian in which the former adapted the accumulated inherited scientific knowledge, arts, laws, and social economy to his novel circumstances, while the latter, after centuries of contact, was still restricted to hunting and dwelling in wigwams made of buffalo skin and birch bark.41 This was a nonsymmetrical description because, as Wilson noted, the difference between the white and the "Redman" was caused by an attribute of the former. This attribute was not that individual white men possessed qualities that, when aggregated, made them superior, but that the whites as a group possessed the essence of "civilization." "Civilization is for man's development. It is self-originated; it matures all the faculties natural to him and is progressive and seemingly ineradicable."42

Wilson's definition of "civilization" was unsymmetrical in another sense as well. That is, not only were the whites unique in possessing the progressive qualities of self-development, they also had nonmaterial internalized parts to their lives, while the Indians were described solely in terms of their crude and laborious occupations and dwellings. Indians were characterized as the simple products of their material culture; they could be nothing else. When he later dealt harshly with American scholars, such as Horatio Hale and Lewis Henry Morgan, for romanticizing the Indian past by attributing to the Iroquois concepts they could not possibly have had,43 Wilson was considering intellectual culture entirely as a projection of material culture. If the Six Nations were said to possess a Prince of Peace or a Hiawatha, this could only be an echo transmitted from their developed European neighbors. Wilson could accept that the Iroquois were capable of forming a prudential confederacy in order to reduce internal feuding, but not that they could design a universal federation for the Indian race. A civilization of the kind that could produce a farsighted philanthropic reformer who sought a universal peace was far above the social condition of a tribe.44 Wilson's objective here was specifically directed against any attempt to attach "civilization" to the qualities an individual might possess. The individual Iroquois was produced by the process of warfare, and while in Wilson's opinion he was not more inherently barbarian than Europe's Grand Monarch, Louis XIV, had been, he could not escape this socialization.45 The purpose of comparing an Indian to a king whose court was known for elegance and sophistication was to etch his point that refinement or manners weigh little in the scales of "civilization." They were simply the qualities of an individual and, like other personal attributes (for example, courage, loyalty, and prudence), were not compatible with an advanced society. This was a stunning refusal to accept Voltaire's notion of "civilization," which placed the court of Louis XIV as the pinnacle of human achievement. Wilson's "realism" here was forged in opposition to the romanticism of Hale and Morgan on the subject of Six Nations government and religion. Instead of adopting such "fantasies," he commended the views of the historian Francis Parkman, whom he quoted as remarking that an Iroquois was "a thorough, yet a finished and developed savage. He is perhaps an example of the highest elevation man can reach without emerging from his primitive condition of the hunter."46 Parkman's fine sense of modernity had left the individual qualities of the Iroquois in the past. They could only be a projection of their mode of living. To identify the virtues of a people as belonging to the past had serious modern ramifications. If the Iroquois were only a paramount barbarous nation, then their previously admired form of government could not be a true polity. "Civilization" could not be construed as meaning that the Iroquois should be included among civil societies because of their statecraft and their skill at diplomacy. Those activities were merely the kind of politics that could exist without the presence of a true civic culture. This culture, in turn, could not exist without wealth and technological sophistication. When Wilson and Parkman focused on the flawed material culture of the Iroquois-such as their lack of a potter's wheel and the absence of forging47-it meant that Indian political wisdom could not be interpreted as a sign of citizenship or civic values. To say, as both did, that the Iroquois could never have developed a civilization of their own implied that, left to themselves, even the wisest of the Indians could not be self-governing. The new doctrine of "civilization" significantly denuded the political qualifications of Indians. If the older definition of "civilization" as the presence of virtue or manners had remained in place, then at least some individual Indians could have been regarded as politically competent. The newer doctrine of "civilization" was a logic for political assimilation and governance. It carried a message that only when Indians had shed their cultural characteristics-when, in fact, they ceased to be Indianscould they possess civic values. Until then, they had to be governed.

Missionaries, like ethnographers and prehistorians, played an important role in creating an impression that the salient characteristic of Indians was their material culture. Even when they were critics of government efforts to "civilize the Indian" through the use of material goods, missionaries themselves adopted the same criteria of "civilization" as governments had. If Indians ate their plow animals and kept their axes shiny by refraining from clearing the forest, then it was necessary for Christianity to precede the gift of "civilization."48 Christianity carried the values of thrift, prudence, and industry, and without these cultural values, civilization would not take root. The gift of "civilization" was to be a tangible one. Egerton Ryerson Young quoted another prominent missionary, Alexander Sutherland, when he poetically envisioned "civilization" as driving back the game together with the Indian hunters who preyed on it, and replacing both with the dwellings of the industrious white man, whose iron roads and factories were wondrously displayed against a backdrop of golden fields of ripening grain, crystal lakes, and emerald rivers of ice.49 The glittering language left little space for those personal virtues with which traditional Christianity was often associated. As has been observed by Catherine Hall, some nineteenth-century propagators of Christian ideals not only absorbed race theory, but became fixated on the external signs of "civilization."50 That is, they focused on externalities, such as clothing or its absence, rather than restricting their gaze to traditional areas of spiritual inquiry, such as the soul within. One particularly naive Canadian missionary account poignantly illustrates this. Reverend Frost, who styled himself as "For Thirty Years A Missionary to the Indians," asked the question, "Is the Indian of today any better than the Indian of long ago-before the white man came? or to put it this way, Is the Christian Indian any better than the pagan Indian?"51 Frost's first attempt to answer his question resorted to ambiguous statements about how an individual pagan who paid his debts and was otherwise honest compared to a Christian Indian who was not honest.52 Frost's answer was that it all depended on the quality of the Christian Indian of whom one was speaking. He then took refuge from such ambiguity in the concrete certainties of the improved way of life of the Christians. "The Christian Indians on Lake Nepigon [sic] are deeply struck by the differences in themselves now from what they were and what the pagan Indians are now who roam the woods. The latter only have one kettle and all eat out of that. They have no dishes or plates-just eat off the ground."53 "The Christian Indians say that the pagans do not take the trouble to build a wigwam, but sleep on the ground."54 In contrast to the bare earth, Frost had seen homes in Christian villages that were just as good as, if not better than, some of the homes of their white neighbors. He also gave a telling example of the bishop of Algoma who, in company with a lady from England, visited a cabin where they had surprised an old man. He initially refused them entry to his home, saying it was too littered up and not fit for gentlefolk. Investigation proved that it was untidy because the woman of the house was engaged in making baskets (a commercial task that whites had encouraged Indians to undertake) and had littered her home with fiber. Frost and the others applauded the fact that the house was very clean, as were the fragments of basketwood.55 The strong materialist bent of Frost's account is also to be found in the writings of the much more complex and sophisticated missionary, John Maclean, whose books on the Indians offered a view of civilization very similar to those of Tylor and Wilson.56 The chief difference between the cleric and the anthropologist here was not a matter of content, but rather a matter of the former's more earnest desire to apply his knowledge to government policy. Maclean was aware that political and ecclesiastical leaders meant different things when they desired "civilization" of the Indian race, and that they differed about the means by which to accomplish this. This disagreement was rooted in the fact that people were captured by theories that were "untried, puerile and antagonistic to the customs and training of the Indians."57 Maclean's own theories focused on the need to see that Indians were not simply a series of primitive groups that lacked some specific moral or technical elements, but instead were peoples who already possessed interlinking sets of beliefs, customs, and relationships-none of which could be transformed in isolation. According to Maclean, the wouldbe civilizer of the Indian faced innumerable hindrances, because to civilize implied the "full metamorphosis" and development of the nature of the individual as well as the complete overthrow of the religious, political, and social customs (including domestic relations) of the people.58

According to Maclean the Indians' reluctance to adopt European civilization was because they already possessed one of their own.59 Maclean had some sympathy with this Indian perception, even though it made his task more difficult. "It is perfectly legitimate for the savage of the west to be proud of his native culture, adapted as it is to his needs, and apparently better suited to him than the civilization of the white race under whose influence he sees his fathers and brethren rapidly dwindling away."60 For Maclean, the native was not only justified in his recalcitrance, but fitted into a modern scientific trend. That is, Indians believed firmly in the theory of evolution, which meant that they would object to the European system of education as rendering them unfit for their environment. The only knowledge they wished to absorb was that which would improve their hunting and fighting, and "fit their children to become better Indians."61 Maclean, like many scientifically informed Christians of his period, grasped the Darwinian message that human beings were formed by their struggle with the environment. He thought this particularly applied to the Indian. "In the struggle for existence, he has laboured under the sternest conditions. Incessant war, continual hardship, and uncertain means of subsistence, have kept the tribes at the lowest numbers compared with the vast regions over which they had roamed."6z "Survival of the fittest" provided Maclean with an explanation of Indian cultural and demographic weakness, not a legitimization of racial conflict for the whites. That there was a clash of cultures was abundantly clear to Maclean. "We wish to make them white men, and [Indians] desire them[selves] to become better Indians. They believe the native culture is best suited for themselves."63 Maclean saw Indian civilization as an integrated whole, but not as something he wished to cherish and protect. Rather, it had to be destroyed in order to rescue Indians from their struggle with the harsh Canadian environment. For this reason, their beliefs as to what was best suited to themselves were to be ignored. Maclean suspected that the white treatment of Indians was, at heart, part of a racial conflict that could end in the natives adopting the mode of life of their conquerors.64 Therefore, Maclean could not adopt the strategy of a twentieth-century liberal sympathizer with indigenous people of taking refuge in the multicultural belief that all civilizations are equally deserving of respect and preservation. The racial conflict he observed always ended in a defeat of the Indians. Like many Canadians, Maclean took a grim satisfaction in mentioning that matters were even worse south of the border. In the United States, the Indians' struggles to retain their independence had always ended in the massacre and oppression of the Indians.65 It would have seemed morally vacuous to Maclean if he had used his understanding of Indian civilization as the basis for recommending pluralistic policies that would attempt to conserve it. In any case, his own developmental theories would have been against this. That is, although he respected the Indian, he had been captured by a historiography that owed much to writers, such as Charles Kinglsey and Hippolyte Taine, who viewed modern nations as absorbing the moral qualities of their predecessors. Behind Maclean's claim that "barbarism has rights which civilized man must respect is the idea that Indians are like the Picts, Scots, Celts, and Gauls during the early centuries of the Christian era.67 If these peoples, and their traditions, had not been absorbed, the later European cultures would have been impoverished.

Comparative analysis served two functions for Maclean. One was simply to excuse the more objectionable Indian customs by referring to analogous ones among other peoples, many of whom were protoEuropeans. For example, the willingness of Indian tribes, such as the Bloods and Piegans, to accept compensation for injury and loss of life could also be found among the Arabians, Germans, and Hungarians.68 Similarly, ancient Germans behaved like Indians in their gambling, drinking, and feasting, and their harsh treatment of women caught in adultery.69 (Maclean claimed both peoples cut off the woman's nose, beat her, and drove her away from the group.) However, in addition to offering an apology for Indians, Maclean's comparisons carried a more potent message. In drawing a parallel between Indians and early Britons or Germans, he was suggesting that both exhibited the barbarian spirit of freedom. Without this infusion of spirit in the European past, white civilization would now lack an essential ingredient. The white man's burden was, therefore, a familial one. The barbarian deserved respect because "we" too were once barbarians. For Maclean "barbarism" was not, as it had been for many other European writers, the antonym of "civilization"-it was a component of it. The rights of barbarians meant that whites had corresponding duties. First and foremost, these were negative ones, which Maclean wrapped in evangelical language. "Believing and teaching the Gospel of brotherhood, we are not at liberty to [kill the Indian], nor even to pauperize him."70 Christianity also imposed positive obligations to "civilize and Christianize" the native. Some of this mission was the traditional one in which souls were to be saved, but Maclean had translated this traditional proselytizing. He took the evangelical concept that referred to the transformation of the Christian individual into "the new whole man," and applied it to Indians as a race.71 As a Christian, one had the positive duty of changing the social condition of Indians. In this way, Christianity and racial doctrine were harmonized. Maclean had found a formula that retained the Christian belief in the individual Indian's salvation while interpolating into this the notion that the Indian belonged to a separate order of mankind. As he put it, civilizing did not mean the compulsory acceptance by the Indian of the white man's customs, but it did imply "the transformation of the whole man." There was an obvious sense in which "the whole man" could no longer be an Indian.

Maclean believed that the transformation of the Indians was to be accomplished by changing their social condition. This, in turn, required an alteration in their mode of production. This might sound like Karl Marx, but Maclean took his text from a fellow missionary. He quoted Reverend Wilbur-from the mission to the Yakima Indians-saying, "The plough and the Bible go together in civilizing Indians." While Maclean found this injunction to be quaint and homespun, he also believed that it contained an important truth: that the Indian should voluntarily adopt the customs of the white man as well as their material culture. The government's maxims should be: "hand, head and heart training must go together in elevating the Indian race." The emphasis for Maclean was on the primacy of material culture. To labor in the same way, or to create the same produce as the whites, would "civilize" the Indian. Maclean suspected that the spiritual side of Christianity would be ineffective in reaching Indians unless their mode of life was fundamentally altered. Nothing else would suffice, not even attempts to create a sense of awe to overwhelm Indians with a sense of their inferiority. The government policy of demonstrating the superiority of white culture was futile by itself. When the federal government had sent some western chiefs to Ontario and Quebec to witness the work and wealth of the white man in order to give them a real knowledge of their position, this had been ineffective. While the chiefs had responded in the desired way when back east, they lost their sense of awe upon their return to their own environment. A display of material wealth and technology was not enough to disrupt Indian civilization.72

On the need to change the Indian mode of living, the missionary was united with the secularly minded anthropologist. Although they started from different premises about the nature of humankind, both ended with the desire to elevate natives by changing their technology and their view of labor. Anthropologists tended to see the Indian as a product of an impoverished lifestyle who lacked various qualities that were present in developed human beings. As a result of this, they were able to deprecate what Indian virtues they could recognize as similar to their own. Virtues such as wisdom, bravery, or fortitude did not signify that an individual Indian was, or could be, "civilized." Missionaries still tentatively retained a Christian view that the essence of human beings was something above and apart from their society, but in order to bring Indians to salvation, Indian culture had to be uprooted, since it would interfere with the creating of the whole man. By themselves, Indians could never activate their "latent powers."73

Up to this point, I have discussed the evolution of a Victorian concept of "civilization" as it applied to indigenous people in general and to Canadian Indians in particular. This concept was suggestive of certain policies in that it emphasized that Indians were to be treated as a homogeneous "red" ethnic group in opposition to whites, rather than as tribes/nations or as individuals. This image of an ethnic group was not based on biology, but on material culture. "Civilization" had become a marker that denoted the presence or absence of a high level of material culture. The use of this simple benchmark indicated that the Indians were a group that either lacked "civilization" or possessed a grossly inadequate one. Older definitions of "civilization" as the possession of qualities, such as refinement, manners, or virtue, had meant that individual Indians or particular tribes could be regarded as "civilized," but these meanings were largely supplanted in the Victorian period. My main contention in this article is that the new concept of "civilization" structured much of the language and, by implication, the policies of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century officials. For the officials the conceptual apparatus of "civilization" was a reservoir filled with the thoughts of scholars and missionaries who claimed to possess significant knowledge about indigenous peoples. Borrowings by officials from the reservoir were usually simplistic. If one had been able to ask them why they used the word "civilization" in a certain way, they would have replied that they had no need of theories, or that they felt no need to define or explain a notion whose meaning seemed so obvious. Nonetheless, Indian officials in Canada were imbued with theories, and these were closely connected with the policies that they often promulgated as well as administered. The first significant report on Canadian Indians predated confederation. The Pennefeather Report was compiled for the Province of Canada in I858. Judging previous Canadian policy to have been a failure, the authors of the report regretted that residential schools for Indians had not brought about any noticeable improvement in their graduates. "They do not seem to carry back with them to their homes any desire to spread among their people the instruction they have received."74 This failure was observable in the subsequent behavior of the children: the girls did no housework, nor did the boys assist on the farms.75 The fact that educational failure was adduced from the subsequent lack of household and agrarian labor suggests that Indian education was primarily viewed as a device to change Indian habits, and not as a way to impart scholarship or spiritual values. When the report specifically mentioned "civilization," it was to refer to progress in working habits and technology: "their advance in civilization and intelligence is not yet sufficient to make them as a people capable of wholly taking care of themselves."76 Those who appreciated the blessings of civilization were also said to be the opposite of those who preferred "the wild freedom of savage life."77 The report thus summoned up two of the connotations of "civilization" that both appear in scholarly literature and run through later government reports. "Civilization" meant working toward, and possessing, the material goods that were its signs. However, this was in contradiction to the "savage" or "barbarian" lifestyle, which was accompanied by freedom. The government's task was to educate Indians so that they could trade in their freedom for the ability to create material wealth.

The first post-Confederation report on Indians used the term "civilization" in the same way as the Pennefeather Report had done. Commenting on the additional responsibility that came with the overview on Indian affairs for Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, the deputy secretary of Indian affairs, W. Spragge, observed that no progress had been made in the maritime provinces in prevailing upon the natives to form themselves into communities of the kind that had long existed in Ontario and Quebec. There, "occupying farms or village lots they enjoy, in settled and permanent habitations, many of the comforts and advantages of civilization, combined with systematic and continuous education, and the Pastoral care of religious instructors."78 From the perspective of Ottawa, the policy of the two new provinces had been one not of "civilization," but of charitable aid. The small parliamentary grants ($,300 for Nova Scotia and $I,zoo for New Brunswick) only afforded some relief from indigence, medical allowances for the sick, and some clothing, blankets, and seed grain.79 Pecuniary thrift such as this, Spragge noted, did not allow for the elevation of these people. However, the deputy secretary would not be content with raising the Micmac to the level of the more advanced Indian communities in Ontario and Quebec, with their better sanitation and relative freedom from smallpox. Even these communities were anxiously scanned for signs of progress. As usual, the Six Nations were singled out for commendation. They had an agricultural society and some temperance organizations. Also important, "the cause of good order is no doubt gaining ground." The highest compliment of all was, in Spragge's opinion, that their 3,ooo-person community experienced no more misconduct than a similar settlement of white persons would.so While this was intended to be a liberal sentiment, it also signals that Spragge thought that Indians became "civilized" to the degree that their society resembled a white one.

The Pennefeather and Spragge Reports represent the traditions of the British colonial civil service.81 Much of their direction comes from the desire for increased efficiency. Little can be done to get at the intentions behind the official use of "civilization." It is only later that one finds theoretically explicit statements explaining Indian policy. Nicholas Flood Davin's I879 report is a good example of a theoretically loaded official document. Curiously for a figure who had earlier made a profession of gloating that Americans treated their Indians with less humanity than the British,82 he was sent to the United States to report on the nation's Indian schools, with the intention of copying some ideas. Despite his British imperial bias, Davin was impressed with the American practice of "aggressive civilization," which had been inaugurated by President Ulysses S. Grant in I869.83 Under this policy, Indians had been consolidated on a few reserves, where they had been provided with "permanent individual homes." In addition, there had been an attempt to abolish tribal relations so that Indians could speedily became U.S. citizens. The American government saw it as its duty to give the Indians any reasonable assistance in their preparation for citizenship "by educating them in industry, and in the arts of civilization."84 The experience of the United States struck Davin as identical to Canada's as far as the adult Indian was concerned. "Little can be done with him. He can be taught to do a little at farming, and at stock raising, and to dress in a more civilized manner, but that is all."85

Davin's pessimism about the fruits of Indian policies was accompanied by an ambiguity that shrouded the concept of "civilization" for him. At some level he recognized that the attempt to "civilize" Indians by altering their mode of living and their appearance was not affecting the rest of their customs and behavior. He was not willing to recognize that Indians had a culture, but he suspected that fully acculturated Indians possessed traits that would prevent them from accepting European culture. "The Indian is a man with traditions of his own, which make civilization a puzzle of despair."86 Davin listened carefully to any evidence that might convince him that Indians should give up a culture they were not supposed to possess. Indian informants, such as Colonel Pleasant Porter of the Creek Nation, assured him that the chief thing when dealing with "the less civilized or wholly barbarous tribes was to separate the children from the parents."8 Chief White Cloud, a Chippewa in Minnesota, sent word to his people in Canada "to travel along the white man's way, and educate their children."88

Davin, whose background as a jingoistic Anglo-Irish journalist gave him a firm grasp of scientific racism, was uncertain whether even the separation of children from their parents would be effective in elevating the Indian. He had a nonenvironmentalist grasp of this issuethat is, he thought that the Indians' physiology might interfere with their education. The Indian was a noble type of human being in a very early stage of development. His savage temperament was mostly lymphatic and "might or might not be modified by advance of civilization in the course of generations."89 In an official document of the day, this was a rare intrusion of biological racism. It would not have been normal utterance for a bureaucrat to remark, as Davin did, that the individual Indian was not a child but that "the race is in its childhood."90 Most accounts of Indians assumed that the only feature of Indians that was backward was their material culture.

Davin's biological views were not Darwinian: they were similar to a popular eugenics account of the need to breed a hybrid race by crossing Indians with another race. He was not echoing Francis Galton, who had been railing against miscegenation. Galton believed that the decline of empires was due to mixed blood. The Athenians and their empire had disappeared because of lack of racial purity, and so would the British.91 Contrary to this, Davin wanted to unite "savages" with Saxons and Celts in order to produce a cross with great staying power that would often be highly intellectual 92 Yet, he believed, even this sort of breeding experiment could be unsuccessful, as "some of the halfbreeds of high intelligence are incapable of embracing the idea of nation -of a national type of man-in which it should be their ambition to be merged and lost. Yet he realises that he must disappear."93 The touch of romanticism here should not obscure Davin's hard-nosed and materialist core. He concluded his somber assessment of the fate of the natives with the prophecy that the modern Indians could no longer produce a figure, such as a Pontiac or Tecumseh, with large ideals. He believed that modern civilization had no place for the notable individual. Progress was now solely a pursuit for the race or nation. Davin's moralizing outburst was extraordinarily passionate for an official document that purported to reinforce the belief that residential schools for Indians would have positive outcomes. This may be the reason he followed it with a less gloomy prognosis. His words were softened with the remark that "we" need not reflect on past Indian heroes in order to respect the "latent powers" of the Indian. A survey of "our" own barbarous past will do. As "we" were once, so the Indian is now, and therefore, Davin surmised, there was a familial duty to protect and educate the Indian.

The decade of the 1870s not only produced Davin's biological pessimism, it also witnessed the harshest nonbiological, environmentalist racial policy to be enunciated in Canada. This came in the form of the publication in I875 of Joseph Trutch's defense of British Columbia's policies.94 As a new province of Canada, and one that accepted little federal guidance in the area of native affairs, British Columbia found itself the subject of external criticism. Trutch, as premier of the province and as the person who had previously been the architect of Indian policy there, felt defensive about adverse comment that emanated from Ottawa as well as from the clergy and from the Aboriginal Protection Society. It was the criticism from the capital that seems to have been particularly irritating. The dominion commissioner had claimed that the crown colony government had made no effort to "civilize" Indians, but had just let them alone. This accusation of laissezfaire was accurate enough, and at the time it was a stinging rebuke because every properly constituted British colonial government was supposed to be under an obligation to "civilize" indigenous peoples. Since the British Columbia government had, in fact, neglected to institute any "civilizing" policies, Trutch strained to find some euphemistic way in which to defend the province. The result revealed the underlying conceptual apparatus more clearly than did other Canadian accounts. It relied solely on the simplest and most basic idea of "civilization" in the Victorian period-material culture.

Trutch's defense of the local system was that it needed not reform but more funding to encourage Indians in "the pursuits of civilized life."95 He defined "civilization" as the presence of physical goods, things that had been given to the Indians just as much as-sometimes more freely than-to the whites. The Indians had partaken, in equal status with "our white people," of all the advantages of "civilization," which for Trutch were first and foremost the use of roads and trails throughout the country. These roads and trails had cost nearly the whole of the public debt, and the Indians were free of the tolls that had been imposed on most white people. This, in turn, made food cheaper for them. The Indians also benefited from "civilization" because they now possessed the implements of husbandry and agriculture, as well as superior tools for hunting and fishing. Finally, the Indians had received "the blessings which result from the preservation of law and order throughout the country, instead of the scenes of bloodshed and robbery which prevailed formerly among them."96 This account of the expenses incurred by the British Columbia government was not phrased in the usual Victorian language of welfare. Many of the benefits it listed consisted of negative aid. For example, the local government had suppressed the liquor trade and freed the Indians from customs duties as well as from tolls. These last boons were "virtually money payments."97 In addition, British Columbia had continued the colonial practice of presenting gifts on the queen's birthday. As many as 4,ooo Indians had attended such a celebration in 1865, and a large number had come in subsequent years.ys The lieutenant governor had met the Indians and had distributed monies and other prizes to competitors in games and water sports. He also had supervised the giving of presents of food and clothing. The practice of giving gifts was only countenanced rather than encouraged because it ran counter to the provincial government's policy of introducing selfreliance. Also, more bluntly, the practice reduced the need for Indians to labor when workers were scarce.99

Trutch was smug in his sentiment that the "degree of civilization" introduced by the Europeans had conferred infinite benefits.loo His defense was remarkable because his list of advantages Indians had received as a result of "civilization" did not include any notion of letters or arts, but chiefly concerned material goods. There was also no sense in which the native people were included in the political community, nor even a suggestion that they should be educated so that one day they would take their place in such a community. The argument for "civilization" here is not an assimilationist one; it remained primarily on the level of physical benefits. Of course, Trutch accompanied his defense with pious hopes that a later generation of Indians would grasp revealed religion and would mingle with the whites, but these expressions were disingenuous because he also thought that such outcomes were unlikely. The first was undermined by the dismissive comment that in twenty years on the coast he had not found a single full-born Indian with a glimmering of the Christian God.lot The second looks less pious in light of the provincial refusal to recognize indigenous land claims or to provide treaty-based reservations of the kind the dominion government had negotiated elsewhere in western Canada. At heart, Trutch's rationale for provincial policy was neither segregationist nor assimilationist. Segregation seemingly would have necessitated the establishment of large, and therefore expensive, reserves, while assimilation would have resulted in educational costs Trutch would have wished to avoid. If one is to assign any rationale to his policy defense other than racially motivated thrift, then it would lie in his vision that when Indians mingled with and lived among the white population, they would be gradually weaned away from "savage" life by the acquisition of habits of peace, honesty, and industry. In comparison to dominion policy this seemed remarkably simple, but it was a consequence of Trutch's adherence to the language of "civilization" as material culture. This was so persuasive to him that he was prevented from clearly articulating one of the two widely accepted but antithetical philosophies on how to deal with indigenes-protection or assimilation. Trutch's view was less complicated than either; he relied on the Indians disappearing as they were overwhelmed by the technology and industry that surrounded them. Late nineteenth-century Canadian federal officials were more sanguine than Trutch about the future of the Indians, but they had doubts about the wisdom and effectiveness of their policies. In particular, the policy of assimilation or amalgamation often elicited doubts. Even among the Indians who had been in contact with Europeans the longest, such as the Six Nations, there was resistance to European customs and practices. There were still important groups that avoided Christian morality and European-style elective politics. Self-appointed Indian spokesman and critic, Dr. P. E. Jones, was still pleading with the Iroquois to integrate themselves with the white community a century after they had settled in Upper Canada. Jones asked them to abandon tribal relations, give up superstition, forsake "savage" habits, and learn the arts of "civilization."l02 Those who dealt with isolated and more truculent Indians held the same views: the Indians cared little about the progress they made in becoming like whites. S. R. Marlatt, an inspector of Indian affairs, reporting on the Manitowapah Agency (reserves on Lake Manitoba, Lake St. Martin, and Lake Winnipegosis), concluded that while the Indians there appeared to be contented and satisfied with their lot, "the great mass of them think only of today, and, so long as they have plenty to eat, they think little of the future and were it not that they are obedient, and anxious to carry out our instructions, their progress would be slow indeed."l03 Marlatt's point was a common one: the Indians did not desire to become like whites or to adopt their aspirations. If "civilization" were to be grafted onto the native people, it would have to be forced on them. Canadian official doubts about whether the Indians would change were sharpened by demographic facts. That is, it was thought that the Indians were not being assimilated and that they were growing in numbers. For example, in I895 the deputy secretary of Indian affairs noted that although the Indians had not been modified by "civilization," they had increased by more than 2,ooo souls in the previous year.l04 While this reflection seemed to provide proof that the Canadian authorities were benevolent, it also led to a heightened sense of alarm in official reports coming from Ottawa. These did not echo the wistful tone of American experts who coined scientific elegies for the disappearing Indian, because their own Indians seemed to be growing in numbers.l05

The reports of the Indian Affairs Department during the I89Os used a different language when referring to the treatment of Indians, one that was similar to the "aggressive civilization" language of the United States. Two senior officials of the department, Hayter Reed and James A. Smart (they served in succession as the chief Indian official in Ottawa, with the title deputy superintendent general),lob enunciated a theory of "civilization" that went beyond the usual almost exclusive reliance upon material culture and added a concept of political culture.107 Like the late nineteenth-century American theory of how to "civilize the Indian," this addition relied upon an egalitarian notion of citizenship. Reed and Smart reported that the Indians were inclined to take advantage of the legislation that had given them special status. Although this status might have accurately reflected their stage of evolution at the time it was granted, this was no longer the case. Its new function allowed the Indians "to shrink from assuming the responsibility of citizenship." To Reed, "it seems at least as reasonable to insist upon Indians, who are to an extent a privileged class, taking advantage of means provided for the material benefit of themselves and of the State, as to require white members of the commonwealth to subject their children to proper educational influences."loa

This insistence that Indians and whites be treated the same is not as innocent as Aristotle's dictum that equals be treated equally. The latter, in the hands of a modern liberal democrat, might be construed to allow some respect and restraint toward cultures different from one's own, while the former permitted no such thing. This is not to say that Reed lacked sympathy with his native subjects. His definition of equality even produced benign statements, such as that which favorably compared the conduct of Indians with their fellow subjects in the dominion.l09 However, it had harsh outcomes as well. For example, when Reed reflected upon the low attendance of Indian pupils at day schools, he blamed this on the parents' fondness for their offspring, which prevented the exercise of the kind of firmness that was necessary "even to compel children more or less prepared by heredity to undergo the confinement and discipline of school."110 Smart's reformulation of this point was even more striking, as it equated "civilization" with chastisement. Smart not only reinscribed Reed's observation that heredity had done much to overcome the white child's natural aversion to the monotonous work and confinement of schools, while Indian children possessed this aversion in its strongest form, he also added that Indian children have a disadvantage because their parents give them sympathy and prefer not to force their inclinations by disciplining them and subjecting them to personal chastisement.lll These sentiments ultimately derived from Walter Bagehot's belief that modern society rested upon the advantages received from compelling people to work as a form of repetitive drill. The opposite of this, natural behavior, was seen as destructive of a high level of "civilization."

Natural behavior was to be repressed. It seemed that some Indian bands (the ones Reed referred to as "the less civilized bands") were rightly suspicious of the government's intention to place their children in industrial boarding schools. They were correct because Reed's goals were not confined to forcing Indian economic development from a "stone age" culture to a modern industrial one. Their native languages were to be replaced with English, and "the retarding influence of the reserve" was to be checked.ll2 Smart's aim was equally wide ranging. He believed that before education could take place, Indian culture had to be modified. A great deal had to be done in the way of eradicating superstition and prejudices, and "in overcoming fear not unnaturally entertained by the parent that education will not only destroy sympathy between them and their offspring in this life, but, through the inculcation of religion separate them in a future state of existence."'13 The official intention here was no longer to improve the material culture of the Indians. To Smart, that indigenous people might adopt a new technology or derive a benefit from it or save themselves from being overreached by the whites was of little importance.114 Improved material culture was no longer an end in itself, but merely a means to assimilate the Indians, to make them the same as white citizens.

The citizenship core of the 1890s notion of "civilization" did not last. Canadian discourse had briefly paralleled the American, but it reverted to its former pattern. When a senior Indian official from the United States reported on Canada in I5, he saw the two countries as differing sharply. The American practice was to break up the tribal community and segregate individual members on tracts of land surrounded by white persons. It was, he remarked, "our frank and avowed policy to have them as quickly as possible lose their identity as Indians. Canada's policy is to develop civilized communities of Indians."115 The official, Frederick H. Abbott, was full of praise for Canada's treatment of Indians, and for the fact that it had been largely initiated and implemented by long-serving officials who stood outside partisan politics."6 However, he was critical of one aspect of the dominion's treatment of those eastern Indians who had had a long period of contact with whites. He used a long quotation from an article by the chief of Indian affairs in Ottawa, Duncan Campbell Scott, to make his point. Scott's article had appeared in a recently published series of books titled Canada and Her Provinces. Abbott took advantage of Scott's public defense of his official stance to launch an attack on Canada's failure to grant voting rights to any band other than the long-assimilated Wyandottes of Anderson.117 This use of Scott is interesting because it confronted him at the very point on which he had been backtracking from the American-style "aggressive civilization" language of the 1890s.

Scott had defended this change with the remark that it was not the present desire of his government "to force Indians into full citizenship."118 Instead, it would examine whether some bands in Ontario and Quebec were "ripe" for the kind of enfranchisement granted the Wyandottes in 1881. He believed that a kind of slow evolution had come about through education and intermarriage.119 The Indian Act would also be amended to allow those eastern Indians who dwelt apart from reserves to embrace full citizenship.120 However, the reserves themselves would stay in existence even for the relatively developed eastern Indians. Scott thought it foolish to end the reserve system when it had brought so much benefit. In any case, "there is nothing repugnant to the policy which is being carried out or to the exercise of useful citizenship in the idea of a highly civilized Indian community living upon land which its members cannot sell."121

What had changed for Scott was the primary direction of "civilization." He had reverted to the Victorian language that encouraged Indians to become "civilized" without becoming assimilated. Industrial schools had failed, and their failure meant that the purpose of Indian education had become clearer. "It is now recognized that the provision of education for the Indian means an attempt to develop the great national intelligence of the race and to fit the Indian for civilized life in his own environment.122 This was not the kind of culturally sensitive and anthropologically informed policy that became common in the mid-twentieth century. When Scott advocated that Indians should be fit for their own environment, he was not recognizing that their culture contained valuable cultural insights. Nor was he advocating the protection of indigenous culture. Instead, Scott, who had been with the Indian Affairs Department for thirty-five years, was merely harking back to the pre-I8gos desire to alter Indian material culture. With this in mind, he imagined that Indians would live in separate communities but, like the general population, would earn their living from the soil or as members of a mercantile or industrial community. To quicken this process, there would be a substitution of Christian ideals of conduct and morals for the aboriginal conceptions of both. The school program, which had been complex because of its recent assimilationist goals, would be simplified. There would also be an attempt to remedy the problems that Indian children faced in learning English, a foreign language, while lacking proper winter clothing and food for lunch.l23 For the rest, Indians would be assisted by a grant of cattle, implements, tools, and building materials.24 Indigenous needs were material ones. When Scott commented that "Indian agencies have always been among the pioneer posts of civilization in the undeveloped territories," he was reaffirming his adherence to the belief that the possession of technology and wealth was the chief criterion of "civilization."

During the Victorian period, notions of civilization that referred to the possession of virtue or refinement or to civic equality were usually either abandoned or relegated to minor secondary meanings. On a practical level this had important ramifications, as it meant that individual Indians, such as Joseph Brant, Tecumseh, or Pontiac, who could have been portrayed as "civilized" in an earlier period, could no longer be pictured this way. While a Brant might have possessed the requisite amount of individual refinement, political wisdom, or nobility in the late eighteenth century to pass for a "civilized" person, his successors were denied this. They could only be perceived as components of an ethnic or racial group. "Civilization" had become primarily a developmental concept that referred to progress caused by the possession of advanced technology and wealth. This new concept appeared to have a hard scientific basis, since the extent to which Indians had achieved "civilization" could be accurately gauged and did not depend upon attitudes, manners, or refinement-attributes that were immeasurable or imponderable. In any case, to have relied upon perceptions of individual social standing would have seemed misleading to Victorians. They, whether English or colonial, were more familiar with the measurement of modern national identities, compared to which individual variation seemed insubstantial. For similar reasons, "civilization" rarely referred to the possession of political sophistication or to excellent decision-making qualities-either of which could be easily linked to European civic culture. The Indian was seldom viewed as someone who might possess the qualifications of a citizen. Although at the end of the Victorian period only the western provinces and New Brunswick specifically disallowed the vote to Indians, enfranchisement was difficult in the other provinces as well. Since the whole purpose behind government intention to improve Indians was to elevate them as an ethnic or racial group, it seemed irrelevant to consider individual Indians.

To say that "civilization" was primarily a developmental theory in this period is not to imply that it was essentially a biological theory of either a Darwinian or non-Darwinian type. If by "Darwinian" one means that Canadian anthropologists, missionaries, and officials wished to subject indigenous peoples to the forces of natural selection, this would usually be false. (The major possible exception would be the laissez-faire attitude of Joseph Trutch in British Columbia, whose defense of Indian policies was the expression of a hope that Indians would disappear.) To the extent that official policies took account of phrases such as "struggle for existence," the effect was to insist that Indians be compelled to undergo a lengthy process of artificially imposed adaptation so that eventually they could compete on an equal footing with whites. Non-Darwinian biological concepts of evolution were also rarely applied to Indians, if by "non-Darwinian" one means a Lamarckian analysis in which a species willed its own adaptation. This could not be easily reconciled with the common late nineteenthcentury and early twentieth-century observation that Indians were apathetic and uninterested in self-improvement. Rather than copying a scientific biological model, the developmental theory applied to indigenous Canadians drew upon historical analogies with the European past. The Indians were imagined to be like the ancient Britons or Germans in their combination of savagery and the love of freedom. Such analogies tended to reinforce the belief that tutelage for Indians would be a lengthy process lasting some generations and that, as in the European past, it would mean an exchange of freedom for the possession of great technological competence and wealth. This trade-off would involve the use of confinement and discipline to force the Indians quickly through an evolution Europeans had laboriously and slowly undergone without external help. Reserves and industrial schools in which isolated groups of Indians would face restriction and, in the case of children, chastisement fitted neatly with the conception that mechanically repeated drill would speedily achieve "civilization" of the kind that natural change had taken centuries to accomplish.

Discipline also meshed with the overarching reliance upon a definition of "civilization" as a high form of material culture. When officials such as Hayter Reed insisted that "civilization" was an artificial rather than a natural condition, they were justifying their desire to compel Indians to progress to higher levels of prosperity and technology. Since "civilization" itself was an artificial condition, there could be no objection to altering the customs or social relations of Indians. These were merely projections of a way of life that was controlled by the environment or nature. In order for Indians to move toward "civilization," it was necessary to force them away from nature so they could adopt an artificial culture. Such a transformation was inevitably connected with pain and dislocation, but Victorians would not have been disconcerted by this reflection. Their concept of "civilization" was a smug reaffirmation of commercial success, but it also carried a sense of loss, which they believed was part of their own identity. They felt that they too had been barbarians whose wild love of freedom had been curtailed by the confinement and discipline that was the concomitant of "civilization."

Footnote

* Much of the research on which this article is based was conducted in Canada when I was the recipient of a Canadian Studies Faculty Research Award. Many people in Canada helped make my trip a pleasant as well as an informative experience, but several deserve to be mentioned by name. I am especially grateful to John Leslie, chief of the Claims and Historical Research Centre of Indian and Northern Affairs, Canada, Pat Kennedy and Trish Maracle of the National Archives of Canada, Joyce Banks of the National Library of Canada, and Trish Nicks of the Department of Ethnology of the Royal Ontario Museum. I am also grateful to S. A. M. Adshead, Joanna Goven, and Lyndsay Head for comments on an early version of the article.

1 Nicholas Thomas, Colonialism's Culture: Anthropology, Travel and Cio Government (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994), pp. I2, 79.

2 Ibid., p. 81. Thomas protests that scholarly attempts to study racism in historical periods inhibit attempts to grapple with the subject as a global phenomenon. In opposition to periodization he erects a notion of modem racism that appeared c. 18oo. This strategy appears to be a rejection of sophisticated forms of periodization in favor of two periods separated by a single cataclysmic shift from the past to the present. Rather than being postmodernist, it resembles Augustinian historiography.

Footnote

3 The North American Indian Today (University of Toronto-Yale University Summer Conference, Toronto, 4-16 September 1939), edited by C. T Loram (Obit.) and T. E McIlwraith (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1943 ), P. 21. 4 Ibid.

Footnote

5 There seems to be agreement that the Great Depression of the 1930s was the highwater mark of government regulation and interference in the daily lives of Canadian Indians and that following this there was a new social awareness. See Ralph W. Johnson, "Fragile Gains: Two Centuries of Canadian and United States Policy toward Indians," Washington Law Review 66 (1991): 673; and John Leslie and Ron Macquire, The Historical Development of the Indian Act, 2nd ed. (Department of Indian and Northern Affairs, Canada, 1979), p. 132.

I Mcllwraith's views were similar to those of his contemporaries, such as Edward Sapir, a student of Franz Boas. His theories were not drawn from the famous definition of culture that appeared at the beginning of Edward B. Tylor's Primitive Culture. George W. Stocking

Footnote

Jr. has rightly rejected the idea that Tylor was working with the modern anthropological idea of culture during the i86os and I87os. See George W. Stocking Jr., Race, Culture and Evolution: Essays in the History of Anthropology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 82), p. 89; and Stocking, Victorian Anthropology (New York: Free Press, 1987), p. 302. 7 Marius Barbeau, Indian Days in the Canadian Rockies (Toronto: Macmillan, 1923), p. 166.

Footnote

8 Ibid., p. 167. 9 Ibid., pp. 166, 196-201..

to Marius Barbeau, Huron and Wyandot Mythology (Ottawa: Government Printing Bureau, I915), p. 36.

Footnote

" Marius Barbeau, "Our Indians-Their Disappearance," Queen's Quarterly (autumn I931): 705.

Footnote

12 Official attitudes toward Indians became less peremptory not simply because of increased cultural sensibility but also as a result of shifts in political theory. From the midtwentieth century an idea was propagated that government should be less dictatorial toward Indians because they were the possessors of rights and should be consulted about the direction of their affairs. This was the opinion in 1946 of the director of Indian affairs, R. A. Hoey, who had been reading the Meriam Report (I 928), an American document that was influential in the U.S. reform of Indian legislation in 1934. See Special Joint Committee of Senate and House of Commons (appointed to examine and consider the Indian Act), sess. 1946, "Minutes and Proceedings of Evidence," no. I, p. 25.

Footnote

13 On ancient and early modem uses of civilization, see Anthony Pagden, The FaLl of Natural Man (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). Until the eighteenth century "civility" could mean the antonym of "savagery" or "the possession of manners or virtues." In the early nineteenth century "civilization," which had replaced "civility," took on a materialist meaning. See, for example, Sydney Smith (I824), who praises the Americans for having "a higher proof of civilization than painted tea-cups, waterproof leather, or broad cloth at two guineas a yard" (The Works of Sydney Smith [London: Longmans, 1869], p. 465).

Footnote

14 See James H. Merrill, "The Custom of Our Country: Indians and Colonists in Early America," in Strangers within the Realm: Cultural Margins of the First British Empire, ed. Ber

Footnote

nard Bailyn and Philip D. Morgan (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), p. 127; James Axtell, The European and the Indian: Essays in the Ethnohistory of Colonial North America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), pp. 45, 6I; and James Axtell, The Invasion Within: The Contest of Cultures in Colonial North America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 135. is Axtell, The European and the Indian, p. 46.

16 Ibid., p. 44. See also Anthony Pagden, European Encounters with the New World, from Renaissance to Romanticism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), P. 154, who notes the common belief in the eighteenth century that passions were the overwhelming threat to all forms of civility.

17 Axtell, The Invasion Within, p. 135. The schools Indians attended were classically oriented. See James Axtell, After Columbus: Essays in the Ethnohistory of Colonial North America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 59. is Axtell, The European and the Indian, p. 48.

Footnote

19 Axtell, The Invasion Within, p. 133; Axtell, After Columbus, pp. 53, 24i. The eighteenth-century insistence that "civility" was only possible in association with a national life was not exclusively a religious perception. Anthony Pagden dwells upon passages in the work of Diderot and Rousseau that emphasize the necessity of patriotism in creating civil life. Pagden also tellingly cites Raynal to the effect that the savage alone knows that "sa patrie est partout," which suggests that "civility" was so far from being a universal quality that it could only be attained by those who had advanced away from a common nature by becoming part of a national group. Pagden, European Encounters, pp. 152-53.

20 Axtell, The Invasion Within, pp. 133 and 272. See also Anthony Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man, pp. 16, 71-72, for an earlier account of the same belief.

Footnote

i John Stuart Mill, "Civilization," in Essays on Politics and Society, vol. 18 of Collected Works of John Stuart Mill (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977), p. IIg. Bernard Semmel has written a monograph on Mill that overemphasizes his theory of civilization as the defense of individual virtue against material progress. See Bernard Semmel, John Stuart Mill and the Pursuit of Virtue (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), pp. 82-119. 2 Ibid., p. I.

Footnote

23 Ibid., p. 132. Mill was influenced by Coleridge's discussion of the duties of the aristocracy. On Coleridge see John Morrow, Coleridge's Political Thought: Property, Morality and the Limits of Traditional Discourse (London: Macmillan, 1990), pp. 111-21. Mill's antifeminist bias in the passage cited here contrasts sharply with the sensitivity on this subject that he later displayed in The Subjection of Women.

Footnote

Ibid., p. 12o. Ibid., pp. 121-23.

Edward B. Tylor, Primitive Culture, 2nd ed. (London: John Murray, 1873), p. z7.

Footnote

27 Ibid., pp. 22-23. This idea was derived from his reading of Max Muller. On Tylor's relationship with Muller, with whom he often disagreed, see Stocking, Victorian Anthropology, pp. 61-62, 305-307.

26 Ibid., p. 28. When Tylor and other Victorians linked "civilization" to membership in a modern national group, they might be seen as engaging in an argument similar to that of the eighteenth-century figures referred to by Anthony Pagden and James Axtell, but there is an important distinction here about what was meant by "nation" in the two periods. In the eighteenth century, it was believed that one could assume membership in a national group by freely adopting a different language and moral and civic ideals. In the nineteenth century such matters were less likely to be seen as voluntary and in the power of individuals.

Footnote

2 To treat Lubbock after Tylor is not to suggest that the former was dependent upon the latter. Indeed, it has been suggested that Tylor borrowed his theory of technological progress from Lubbock. Adam Kuper, The Invention of Primitive Society (London: Routledge, 1988), p. 8 . Tylor is discussed first because although like Lubbock he occasionally blurs his categories of material culture and biology, he was more insistent in focusing on material culture as the primary cause and effect of social change. Stocking, Victorian Anthropology, p. 235; Stocking, Race, Culture and Evolution, p. 96.

Footnote

30 John Lubbock, The Origin of Civilization and the Primitive Condition of Man (London: Longmans, I870), p. 3. 31 Ibid.

Footnote

32 That is, Tylor's suggestion that modern intelligence had worked against the production of virtue meant that he thought savages possessed beneficial qualities lacking in more advanced peoples. This, in turn, meant that he could not wholeheartedly espouse a theory of progress.

33 Lubbock, The Origin of Civilization, p. 26I. 34 Ibid.. D. 277.

Footnote

35 Uniformism is a term applied to the doctrine held by natural scientists, such as Charles Lyell and Charles Darwin, who avoided catastrophic changes when theorizing about evolution. Instead they preferred to work with a model in which the natural world changed in a gradual and uniform way.

Footnote

36 In this respect, nineteenth-century Canada was similar to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century American colonies. In both cases there was no intermediate "barbarian" stage between "savage" and "civil" people. "Indianized" colonists played no role in the formation of colonial culture. See Axtell, The European and the Indian, p. 283. 37 In the late Victorian period, as in the twentieth century, "civilization" and "culture" were sometimes interchangeable. See, for example, Daniel Wilson and E. B. Tylor, Anthropology and Archaeology (New York: Humboldt, 1885), p. 33.

38 Horatio Hale, "Eighth Report," in Reports on the North-Western Tribes of the Dominion of Canada (Section H of the British Association meeting in Bristol, 1889), p. 8. [I have used the copy of this document that can be found in the library of the Department of Northern and Indian Affairs in Ottawa. It appears to be scarce, as there is no copy listed with the British Association material in the National Union Catalogue.] Hale had earlier been an American ethnographer noted for his work on the Iroquois. Later he settled in Canada. See Douglas Cole, "The Origins of Canadian Anthropology, 1850--1910," Journal of Canadian Studies 8, no. I (February 1973): pp. 38-39.

Footnote

39 Hale, "Eighth Report," p. 9.

40 Franz Boas, "Twelfth and Final Report," in Reports on the North-Western Tribes, p. 55. 41 Daniel Wilson, Prehistoric Man, 2nd ed. (London: Macmillan, I865), p. 5. 42 Ibid., p. 6. Despite his use of the racial term Redman, Wilson rejected contemporary accounts that discussed Indians and blacks as biologically inferior. See Bruce G. Trigger, "Sir Daniel Wilson: Canada's First Anthropologist," Anthropologica, n.s. 8, no. I (1966): 15.

Footnote

43 Daniel Wilson, "The Huron-Iroquois of Canada: A Typical Race of American Aborigines," Transactions of the Royal Society of Canada (Section II) (r884): 83. According to Robert F. Berkhofer, the consensus among modem scholars is to see L. H. Morgan's treatment of the democracy and utopian harmony of the Iroquois as an imaginative romanticization of pre-Contact Indian life. Robert E Berkhofer, "White Conceptions of Indians," in History of Indian-White Relations, vol. 4 of Handbook of North American Indians (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, rg88), p. 533. However, noncritical accounts of Morgan can still be found. See, e.g., Kuper, The Invention of Primitive Society, pp. 47, 7o-72. 44 Wilson, "The Huron-Iroquois," p. 83. Also see pp. 6547. 45 Ibid., p. 83. 46 Ibid., p. 67.

Footnote

47 Wilson went to considerable efforts to disprove the theory that Indians had once possessed the knowledge to harden the implements they made from free deposits of copper. Trigger, "Wilson," p. rz.

4 Egerton Ryerson Young, By Canoe and Dog Train, Among the Cree and Salteaux Indians (London: Charles H. Kelly, 1892), pp. 178-79.

Footnote

49 Egerton Ryerson Young, Stories from Indian Wigwams and Northern Camp Fires (London: Charles H. Kelly, 1903), pp. 67-69. Young was a Methodist, and it may seem surprising that, as a member of that church, he had so abandoned otherworldliness in favor of materialism. However, William Westfall has explained that nineteenth-century Methodists had joined other denominations to form a common Ontario Protestantism that stopped seeing the sacred as exclusively otherworldly. See William Westfall, Two Worlds: The Protestant Culture of Nineteenth-Century Ontario (McGill-Queen's University Press, 89), pp. 192-96.

50 Catherine Hall, "From Greenland's Icy Mountains . . . to Afric's Golden Sand: Ethnicity, Race and Nation in Mid-Nineteenth-Century England," Gender and History 5, no. 2: 212-30.

Footnote

Si E Frost, Sketches of Indian Life (Toronto: William Briggs, I904), p. 28I. 52 Ibid., pp. 282-86. 53 Ibid., p. 287.

54 Ibid., pp. 2I4-I5, 2I8-I9.

Footnote

iS Ibid., pp. 288-89.

56 That is, Maclean's definition of "culture" is similar to the one Tylor coined in Primitive Culture. In addition, like Tylor and Wilson, Maclean was conscious that "civilization" was a contestable term that needed definition.

57 John Maclean, The Indians, Their Manners and Customs (Toronto: William Briggs, 889), p. 262.

Footnote

58 Ibid.

59 Ibid., p. 276

Footnote

60 John Maclean, Canadian Savage Folk, The Native Tribes of Canada (Toronto: William Briggs, 1896), p. 542.

61 Ibid.

62 Ibid., p. 552.

63 Ibid., p. 543.

64 Ibid.

Footnote

65 Ibid., p. 546. 66 Ibid., p. 551-52. 67 Maclean, The Indians, p. 276. 68 Ibid., p. 277. 69 Ibid.

Footnote

70 Maclean, Canadian Savage Folk, p. 552. 71 Ibid., p. 263.

Footnote

72 Maclean, The Indians, p. 27 I. Maclean's analysis sounds similar to Marx's homo faber because he is not simply identifying civilization with material culture but also offering a notion that human consciousness is mediated through the process of production. This is not to suggest that Marx was influential here, but rather to point out that the nineteenth century tended to transfigure materialism.

73 Maclean's phrase "latent powers" can also be found in the works of Hale and Wilson. This, like other similarities, suggests that the division between missionary and anthropologist was not extreme.

Footnote

74 Report of the Special Commissioners to Investigate Indian Affairs in Canada (Toronto: Queen's Printer, 1858), p. 97.

75 Ibid.

76 Ibid., p. 103

77 Ibid., p. 104

Footnote

78 Canada, Department of the Secretary of State, Indian Branch, Annual Report, 186768 (Ottawa), p. 5.

79 Ibid.

80 Ibid.

Footnote

81 John Leonard Taylor, "Canada's North-West Indian Policy in the 1870s," in Sweet Promises: A Reader on Indian-White Relations in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991 ), p. 208. On the subject of Indian policy before confederation, see John S. Mil

Footnote

loy, "The Early Indian Acts," in Sweet Promises, pp. 145-54; John F Leslie, Commissions of Inquiry in Indian Affairs in the Canadas, i828-1858: Evolving a Corporate Memory for the Indian Department, (Ottawa: Indian Affairs and Northern Development Canada, February 1985); and Douglas Leighton, "A Victorian Civil Servant at Work: Lawrence Vankoughnet and the Canadian Indian Department, 1874-1893," paper delivered to the meeting of the Canadian Historical Association, London, Ontario, 30 May 1978. 82 Nicholas Flood Davin, British versus American Civilization: A Lecture Delivered in Shaftesbury Hall, Toronto, rg April 1873 (Toronto: Adam, Stevenson, 1873), p. 41. 83 Davin noted that the policy also predated Grant. 84 Nicholas Flood Davin, Report on Industrial Schools for Indians and Half-Breeds (Ottawa: Minister of Interior, 1879), p. i. E. Brian Titley claims that Davin's recommendations were eventually acted upon. See E. Brian Titley, A Narrow Vision: Duncan Campbell Scott and the Administration of Indian Affairs in Canada (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1986), p. 77.

85 Ibid.

Footnote

86 Ibid., p. 10.

87 Ibid., p. 7.

88 Ibid., p. 8.

Footnote

89 Ibid., p. to. Time was important to Davin; even when he was not speaking about Indians, he felt comfortable with statements such as that "we all feel that the education of any human being should begin two or three centuries before he was born." See Nicholas Flood Davin, Culture and Practical Power: An Address Delivered at the Opening of Landsdowne College, Portage La Prairie (Regina: Northwest Territories, I889), p. 2.

90 Ibid.

Footnote

91 Francis Galton, Hereditary Genius: An Inquiry into Its Laws and Consequences (London: Macmillan, 1869), pp. 342-43.

92 Davin, Report on Industrial Schools, p. 10.

Footnote

93 Ibid., p. I.

94 On Trutch's background and policies, see Robin Fisher, Contact and Conflict: IndianEuropean Relations in British Columbia, 1774-1890, 2nd ed. (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1992), pp. 160-74.

Footnote

95 Joseph Trutch to secretary of state, 26 September 871, in British Columbia: Papers Connected with the Indian Land Question,1850-1875(Victoria: Richard Wolfenden, 1875), p. 100. % Ibid.

Footnote

97 Joseph Trutch, "Report of the Government of British Columbia on the Subject of Indian Reserves," in British Columbia: Papers Connected with the Indian Land Question, p. 3. 98 Ibid.

Footnote

99 Ibid.

100 Trutch to secretary of state, 26 September 1871, p. 101.

101 Ibid.

Footnote

102 The Indian (A Biweekly Newspaper Edited by Dr. P. E. Jones on the Six Nations and Mississaugas Reserve) 9 (12 May 1886): 101. Some Iroquois still resisted European religious, marital, and political customs after the Victorian period had ended. In 1923 Colonel Thompson reported that 8oo non-Christian Indians lived on the Six Nations reserve and conducted their relations "without wedlock." Modernizing Christian Indians objected to this, and to the nondemocratic tribal council that gave control to the oldest woman in those families that had a right to elect a chief. The reformers wanted to replace this "antiquated" system with a "democratic" one that would exclude women from the franchise. Col. Andrew T. Thompson, Report (of) Commission to Investigate and Enquire into the Affairs of the Six Nations Indians, 1923 (Ottawa:, King's Printer, 1924), pp. 9-12.

103 Report of the Department of Indian Affairs for the Year Ended June 30, 1899 (Ottawa), p. 98.

Footnote

104 Report of the Department of Indian Affairs for the Year Ended 30th June, 1895 (Ottawa), p. xxi.

105 See the brilliant description of "salvage ethnology" of the American anthropological establishment in Curtis M. Hinsley Jr., Savages and Scientists (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1981). In Canada the image of the vanishing Indian has been over-etched recently by Daniel Francis, The Imaginary Indian (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp, 1992).

Footnote

106 Reed, who was a long-serving official, was sacked by Clifford Sifton and replaced by Smart, a politician and official from Manitoba. Since Sifton did not introduce any dramatic changes in the department, there is no reason to believe that the change in officials caused a change in the policies referred to in this article. See D. J. Hall, "Clifford Sifton and Canadian Indian Administration, 1896-1905," in As Long as the Sun Shines and Water Flows, ed. Ian A. L. Getty and Antoine S. Lussier (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1983), pp. 122-23, 136-37. Reed's policies have been extensively analyzed by Sarah Carter, Lost Harvests: Prairie Indian Reserve Farmers and Government Policy (McGill-Queen's University Press, 1990), pp. 141-58.

107 To say that there was a shift away from an exclusive reliance on the discourse of material culture does not mean that it no longer played a part in official rhetoric. On the contrary, officials were still strongly attached to the idea that training Indian children in industrial schools was an important means of transforming them. At one level, industrial schools fitted neatly into the ongoing Victorian belief that the task of the civilized was to bring prosperity and technology to the poor and backward Indian. However, at another level, there was a shift to a new rationale for civilization.

Footnote

108 Report of the Department of Indian Affairs for the Year Ended 30th June, i894 (Ottawa), p. xxii.

109 Report . . . 1895, p. xxi.

110 Ibid., p. xxii.

111 Report of the Department of Indian Affairs for the Year Ended 3oth June, 1897 (Ottawa), xxvi.

Footnote

112 Report. . . 1895, p. xxii.

113 Report . 1899, p. xxxi.

114 Ibid.

115 Frederick H. Abbott, The Administration of Indian Affairs in Canada: Report of an Investigation Made in 1914 under the Direction on of the Board of Indian Commissioners (Washington, D.C., 1915), p. 42.

116 Ibid., p. 25.

Footnote

117 Ibid., p. 44. Abbott was correct in his suspicion that Canada did not encourage its Indians to seek the franchise. From I857, when the enfranchisement process was enacted, to 1920 only slightly more than 250 Indians were granted the vote. John L. Tobias, "Protection, Civilization, Assimilation: An Outline History of Canada's Indian Policy," in Historical Perspectives on Law and Society in Canada, ed. Tina Loo and Loma R. McLean (Toronto: Copp Clark, 1994), P.299.

118 Duncan C. Scott, "Indian Affairs, 1867-12," in Canada and Its Provinces (Toronto: T. and A. Constable, 1914), vol. VII, p. 605. There is a hostile account of Scott's article in Titley, A Narrow Vision, pp. 34-35. 119 Scott, "Indian Affairs, I867-1912," p. 605. 120 Ibid., p. 606. 121 Ibid., p. 623. 122 Ibid., p. 616.

Footnote

123 Ibid., pp. 616-17.

124 Ibid., p. 616.