Paper Talk: A History of Libraries, Print Culture, and Aborginal Peoples in Canada before 1960 (review)

The story of First Nations' relationship with European modalities of print and language is complex and dispersed. Bibliography offers one essential cornerstone: Joyce Banks's Books in Native Languages in the Rare Book Collections of the National Library of Canada grounds us in the onslaught of print by which Europeans sought to convert and contain Aboriginal Canadians, while James Danky and Maureen Hady's Native American Periodicals and Newspapers, 1828–1982 continues the story with many examples of Indigenous communities creating their own print resources. Paper Talk, approaching the topic through First Nations' attitudes toward and access to reading, provides a different entrance. Its "plot" is the unfolding of a struggle over the powerful medium of print, as Aboriginal communities sought its benefits without utterly yielding to the agendas of church and state.

The result of thorough research in government archives, supported with copious notes and references, Paper Talk is a valuable compact resource on the history of Aboriginal literacy in Canada. It begins with an introduction to prevailing indigenous pre-contact sign systems such as wampum belts, petroglyphs and pictographs, winter counts, and pictorial birchbark scrolls. Presenting Canada's First Peoples as inclined to forms of literacy before the arrival of Europeans, Edwards deals carefully with the delicate issue of the origins of the scripts known as M'ikmaq hieroglyphics (first described in the seventeenth-century by Récollet missionary Father Christian LeClercq) and Ojibwe and Cree syllabics, whose attribution to the Methodist missionary, Reverend James Evans, is under some dispute. With both languages, Edwards notes, Evans enjoyed considerable assistance from educated Native advisors. Once established in 1840, the Cree system spread quickly, due to the fact that it "drew on shorthand, as well as symbols already in use among the Cree" (51).

For missionaries, Native literacy was inseparable from conversion; Edwards informs us that in the records of the Department of Indian Affairs, "the earliest report of a library in any Aboriginal community" is a Sabbath school library conducted in 1864 by the Wesleyan Methodist Society for the Saugeen Chippewas at French Bay on the Bruce peninsula (49). For the Department of Indian Affairs, Native literacy was one component of a larger program of control and improvement, in which only salutary texts were recommended. Hence recreational reading received little support, and the libraries of the Indian day schools contained few attractive titles. Some Native elders regarded Western literacy with suspicion, linking reading with idleness and loss of traditional skills. However, Edwards is more interested in tracing the stories of Native individuals and groups who sought to encourage reading and establish libraries but were thwarted by a bureaucratic and short-sighted system that, under the administration of Duncan Campbell Scott, lacked sympathy and imagination.

Throughout the volume, figures emerge who are dedicated, fascinating, and often heroic. Especially valiant is Charles A. Cooke, a Mohawk clerk and translator who spent more than thirty years (from 1893 to 1926) working for the Department of Indian Affairs. His efforts render Edwards's account of the first quarter of the twentieth century brighter than the following period, although his proposal for an inclusive circulating collection of Native records, to be known as the "Indian National Library," was limited by Scott to a small disorganized body of material restricted to government employees. Cooke also produced one of the first newspapers in the Mohawk language (Onkweonwe, 1900), compiled important linguistic data on Iroquois personal names, and in his last years assisted Marius Barbeau and others at the National Museum of Canada. Another lost cause documented by Edwards is the 1901 attempt of Joshua Adams, the Dominion Government Indian Lands Agent at Sarnia, to enable the members of the Aamjiwnaang community to create a free circulating library on their Reserve. However, the Department of Indian Affairs refused to envision anything beyond the books in the day school that they already administered. It was up to...