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  • The Red Man's on the Warpath: The Image of the 'Indian' and the Second World War
  • Michael D. Stevenson
The Red Man's on the Warpath: The Image of the 'Indian' and the Second World War. R. Scott Sheffield. Vancouver: UBC Press2004. Pp. vii, 232, illus. $29.95

The Red Man's on the Warpath provides a superb account of the impact of the Second World War on attitudes held by English Canadians about First Nations people. Scott Sheffield examines these attitudes in a two-pronged analysis that highlights the images of the 'administrative Indian' held by government officials and the 'public Indian' held by the general non-Native population between 1930 and 1948. Ultimately, Sheffield identifies two dichotomous themes concerning the public and administrative images of Native Canadians. First, English Canada's view of Aboriginals proved to be flexible and adaptable; several negative stereotypes of Native Canadians were modified to account for Aboriginal support of Canada's war effort. But Sheffield also highlights the continuity of established opinions about Canada's Native population that saw policy-makers and the public refuse to abandon deeply rooted assumptions about the superiority of English-Canadian culture. These assumptions allowed assimilation to be championed as the ideal path for Native Canadians to follow when postwar legislative changes on the status of Aboriginals were considered.

Sheffield divides his book into three parts. In the first, he examines the mindset of government officials and the public regarding Native Canadians during the 1930s. In this period, senior Indian Affairs Branch bureaucrats adopted a 'uniformly negative and derogatory' view of their Aboriginal charges. This monolithic administrative opinion was not matched by popular conceptions of Native Canadians. Sheffield adroitly uses print media advertisements to demonstrate that English Canada's primary image of Aboriginals centred on their exoticism and the concept of the 'noble savage.' But this romantic stereotype was countered by traditional viewpoints that emphasized the 'debauched and pathetic' state of Native Canadians, who were prone to criminal behaviour and alcoholism. [End Page 559] These perceived weaknesses also cultivated widely accepted theories that Canada's First Nations were inevitably destined to vanish as a race.

The second and most detailed portion of The Red Man's on the Warpath examines the impact of the Second World War on government and public attitudes towards Aboriginals. Sheffield argues that the picture of the 'administrative Indian" remained largely unchanged between 1939 and 1945. Indian Affairs Branch officials maintained an official policy of unyielding paternalism towards First Nations, viewing military service for Aboriginals as a desired method of assimilation, while vigorously opposing any attempts by Native Canadians to resist compulsory military training. The image of the 'public Indian,' however, underwent significant change as a result of the highly publicized participation of Canada's Native community in the war effort. In the first years of the war, the media generated a comprehensive picture of the 'Indian-at-war' that fostered national unity and assuaged the guilt many English Canadians felt about the historical treatment of Native Canadians. But this improved view of the Native population did not translate into English Canada's advocacy of progressive – and Native-sanctioned – solutions to the problems facing Canada's Aboriginal population in the last half of the war. Instead, the increased visibility of Native Canadians only created a second public wartime image of the 'Indian victim' who, the majority of Canadians believed, could be rescued by assimilation into the mainstream of white society.

Finally, Sheffield examines the competing images of Native Canadians that were considered by a Special Joint Committee of the House of Commons and the Senate, which convened in May 1946 to consider changes to the direction of Aboriginal administration in Canada. Sheffield convincingly demonstrates that although Native Canadians were able to have their central grievances considered, the Special Joint Committee chose to recast the prevailing views of Aboriginals into a single image of the 'potential Indian citizen,' who would be created through assimilation. The Special Joint Committee, therefore, recommended functional changes to policies affecting Natives while maintaining the fundamental principles that had guided government supervision of Aboriginal affairs for decades; many of these recommendations would subsequently be embodied in a new...

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