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A little learning is a dangerous thing;

Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring:

There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,

And drinking largely sobers us again.

Alexander Pope (1688–1744)

No one could describe Donald Smith as a man of little learning: he drinks deep, and his topic is sobering. For more than half a century, he has been researching and writing about relations between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples in Canada. Seen but Not Seen is the culmination of this work. As one reviewer commented, Smith’s characterization of Alberta historian Hugh Dempsey as “a bridge between two worlds, communicating valuable information about the Indigenous world to non-Indigenous [people]” is in fact “an apt description” of Smith himself.[1]

The thesis of Seen but Not Seen is in its title: the visibility of Indigenous people in non-Indigenous Canada has fluctuated over time, but for most of our mutual history it has been low, and anything like a nuanced understanding has been well below the event horizon. For me, a spectacular example of this invisibility occurred in 2012 when journalist Stephen Hume wrote an excellent piece in the Vancouver Sun on the 150th anniversary of the devastating smallpox epidemic of 1862–63 that likely killed at least 60 percent of the Indigenous people in British Columbia.[2] The mortality rate was probably greater than during the Black Death in Europe in the fourteenth century, and its effect on BC’s Indigenous peoples was catastrophic. That history is still very much with us. Yet, while most British Columbians knew that 2012 was the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic, when I sent this article to my law school colleagues, one who had gone to school and university in British Columbia asked a pointed question: “How did I grow up in this province without being told about this?” How, indeed.

The dramatis personae of Smith’s book includes ministers (e.g., George Monro Grant), missionaries (e.g., John McDougall), academics (e.g., Franz Boas, Kathleen Coburn), an artist (Emily Carr), a judge (Chancellor John A. Boyd), a schoolteacher (John Laurie), a politician (Sir John A. Macdonald), a bureaucrat/poet (Duncan Campbell Scott), an Indigenous activist (Harold Cardinal), a newspaper publisher (Maisie Hurley), and even an intriguing imposter (Chief Buffalo Child Long Lance). Nor is this the whole list: as Jan Noel notes, there are several additional “walk-ons.”[3]

The examples of both insight and ignorance in Seen but Not Seen raise at least two questions. Why were only a small minority of non-Indigenous Canadians able to see through the prejudices of their times, and why were they able to see only so much? I think part of the answer to the first question is that these were generally people who had developed meaningful and enduring relationships with Indigenous people and communities, and therefore rejected popular misconceptions about them. Part of the answer to the second question is that even many of these people were unable to transcend the limitations imposed by their commitment to versions of Christianity and theories of civilization that were dominant at the time — and which, ironically, were often the motivation behind their involvement with Indigenous people in the first place. As one reviewer wrote, Seen but Not Seen is a book about “determined unseeing.”[4] I agree, provided that, with respect to most of the persons in the book, “determined” does not mean intentionally obtuse, but hampered by unexamined assumptions. As John Webster Grant observed forty years ago, “To an extent that is seldom recognized, the assault on Indian culture bemoaned by social activists today was led by social activists of an earlier era.”[5]

This raises another issue, one that Smith addresses in the book and that also came up in the question period at the virtual roundtable: presentism. He writes in the prologue that he has tried “to understand people in their historical context, through the reconstruction of the atmosphere and mentality of their age to help reveal their outlooks and situations.” In other words, he has tried to avoid “what historians call ‘presentism,’ the judgment of the past through the lens of the present” (xxii). And in case we missed the point the first time, he repeats it in the epilogue: “We should always keep in mind that in judging the past those responsible were individuals of their times, and the times were not ours. For me the good news is, over the course of my three-quarters of a century in this country, I now see a growing political, regional, and public awareness of Indigenous Canada — Seen and Now Seen” (273).[6]

The question is, does avoiding presentism mean that historians may not pass judgment on what has happened in the past? Of course not, and Smith does just that. He praises when he thinks praise is due and criticizes when he thinks it is not. He is an admirer of E. H. Carr, who wrote that “when we take up a work of history, our first concern should be not with the facts it contains but with the historian who wrote it.”[7] I learned a related lesson in the first history course I took at university: a work of history tells one as much about the period in which it was written as it does about the period it was written about. There is therefore a sense in which one cannot help but see the past through the lens of the present. The real problem is different: it is the sort of 20/20 hindsight that causes myopia, not the unseeing described by Smith, but myopia, nonetheless.[8]

This, I think, is Smith’s most important point. The caution about presentism is not a plea for the suspension of judgment. It is rather a warning that the past is complex, and that context matters. There can therefore be no “official” version of an historical issue that renders it beyond debate. As one of the greatest historians of English law said in 1888, a “lawyer must be orthodox, or he is no lawyer; an orthodox history seems to me to be a contradiction in terms.”[9]

Historian Theodore Binnema has written that the problem with “simply condemning the actions of the past is that it reinforces a natural tendency to see ourselves as morally superior to the people who committed them.” This minimizes “the very real challenges and difficult choices that earlier generations, both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal, had to make.”[10] A remarkable Indigenous example is Ga’axsta’las (Jane Cook) who, as the only female member of the executive of the Allied Indian Tribes of British Columbia, was both an Aboriginal rights campaigner and a supporter of the potlatch ban.[11]

A good non-Indigenous example is the briefest walk-on in Seen but Not Seen, Arthur Eugene O’Meara, because he was both a man of his time and ahead of it (208). An Anglican priest and a lawyer, O’Meara combined the two professions most calculated to get under the skin of government, especially as he devoted the last two decades of his life to what was then called the “British Columbia Indian Land Question.”[12] In 1909, he presented the Cowichan Petition to the Privy Council in England; in 1910, he cofounded the Conference of the Friends of the Indians of British Columbia; in 1913, he presented the Nisga’a Petition to the Privy Council; he was active in the Indian Rights Association; and he was general counsel to the Allied Tribes from its inception in 1916 to its demise in 1927. O’Meara’s dedication to the cause of Indigenous rights not only exposed him to criticism by the press and politicians, who unjustly described him as incompetent and equally unjustly accused him of getting rich by fleecing his clients; it also may have lost him the affection of his family.[13]

By the spring of 1928, deputy superintendent of Indian affairs Duncan Campbell Scott had agents gathering evidence to lay a charge against O’Meara under the 1927 amendment to the Indian Act that effectively made fund raising for land claims illegal.[14] But O’Meara outfoxed them by dying of a heart attack before a charge could be laid. His last will and testament revealed that he had no cash to speak of, and no stocks, bonds, or property. His entire estate consisted of two life insurance policies for his wife and children, which on two occasions he had had to borrow against.[15] Yet Arthur O’Meara, whose dedication to the progressive cause of land claims stemmed primarily from his Christian faith, was, for the same reason, a staunch advocate of residential schools. As Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe, the author of Things Fall Apart, wrote, the legacy of colonialism is not simple.[16]

Alexander Pope’s eighteenth-century warning about a little learning being a dangerous thing is therefore a salutary one. Charlotte Gray’s twenty-first-century version is less polite: “If we want the future to respect our moment in history,” she wrote, “perhaps we should expand our knowledge of the past before we [judge it].”[17] This is what Smith has done in his book: he has expanded our knowledge, and he has done so in conformity with Claude Levi-Strauss’s admonition that the “denial of complexity is the greatest tyranny.”[18] Smith also hopes that “young scholars, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous,”[19] will continue this work, and that one day we will “see a full study of the Indigenous populations’ perceptions of non-Indigenous Canadians since the 1840s” (xxiv). Given the increasing numbers of excellent Indigenous scholars in Canada, such an equally contextual companion volume to Seen but Not Seen would be welcome.