“The Death of General Wolfe”, a 1770 painting by Benjamin West.[1] This painting depicts the death of British General James Wolfe at the 1759 Battle of Quebec during the French and Indian War. Note the romanticized depiction of an Indigenous man on the bottom left.
Indigenous stereotypes are pervasive in Canadian society. This may be because stereotyping and mythologizing about Indigenous peoples started on day one of the making of project Canada.
How did it all begin? The first step was the settlers adhering to the doctrine of discovery. This doctrine is a piece of the colonizer ideology, holding that when European explorers “discovered” unfamiliar lands, they gained special rights over that land (regardless of any inhabitants).[2] The colonizers allowed themselves to make special rules, allowing themselves to treat the land as vacant, even though it was not.[3]
When European explorers set foot on the new lands’ soils, they considered it “terra nullius” or empty lands.[4] The emptiness helped to provide the doctrine of discovery a necessary foothold; these “empty” lands were simply waiting for European colonizers to arrive. These lands were occupied by non-Europeans, but were not being used in a way that Europeans understood or approved of.[5] This “terra nullius” idea helped settlers to see themselves as benevolent peacemakers, positively building a new world, and bringing their religion with them. The land that became Canada was assuredly empty – or empty enough – in colonizer eyes, devoid of people, religion, culture, and settlements.
The implementation of this idea was only the first step on the road to a number of myths and stereotypes about Canada’s Indigenous. What of the people who already lived here? These people became the ‘savage injun’ – wild, unruly, and ungovernable.[6] Some settlers thought these “savages” simply did not know better. These were “noble savages”: innocent, and peace-loving, “free of the vanity that came with contemporary society.”[7] Or, settlers presumed that the Indigenous were a declining minority anyway – they became “vanishing Indians”, a vestige of history, to be documented but not otherwise integrated in modern society.[8] Through stories, art (like the image above), staged photographs, and other mediums, Indigenous individuals were romanticized, exoticized, and subsequently ostracized.
The Doctrine of Discovery was a crucial first step to mythologizing Canada’s Indigenous and setting the stage for an ideological power imbalance between settlers and Indigenous people. In the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s 94 Calls to Action, all levels of government (federal, provincial, territorial, and municipal), religious denominations and faith groups, and parties to the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement are asked to “repudiate concepts used to justify European sovereignty over Indigenous peoples and lands, such as the Doctrine of Discovery and terra nullius.”[9] By way of responding to these calls to action, ideally some of the damage that this doctrine has inflicted can be remedied – and the myths and stereotypes it encouraged can eventually be undone.
Until next time,
Team ReconciliAction YEG
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[1] Benjamin West, “The Death of General Wolfe” (1770), oil on canvas, online: <upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4f/Benjamin_West_005.jpg)>.
[2] Larissa Behrendt, Discovering indigenous lands: the doctrine of discovery in the English colonies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010) at 3-5.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid at 8-9.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Daniel Francis, The Imaginary Indian, 2nd ed (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2011) at 76.
[7] Ibid at 23.
[8] Ibid at 50-53.
[9] Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada: Calls to Action (Winnipeg: Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada), 2015, ss 45(i), 46(ii), 47.
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