Contact Zones: Aboriginal and Settler Women in Canada’s Colonial Past, and: With Good Intentions: Euro-Canadian and Aboriginal Relations in Colonial Canada (review)

That these two books were published in successive years points to the great interest scholars currently have in decolonizing Canada’s continuing Native and (relative) newcomer relationships. As only two scholars (Sarah Carter and Jean Barman) are represented in both collections, the breadth of interest is particularly pronounced. Although both books are concerned with decolonizing, their focuses otherwise diverge. With Good Intentions looks at ‘white’ – or socially constructed ‘white’ –colonial figures who to some extent acted or wrote against the grain of colonialism and imperialism. Contact Zones focuses on gendered relationships, both those that explicitly take place in the Aboriginal/settler ‘contact zone’ and those experienced or related by Euro-Canadian women. Unlike With Good Intentions, its contributors do not include Indigenous scholars.

With Good Intentions is, as its editors say in the introduction, essentially a collection of essays on ‘white studies.’ It shows how colonizing ensnared even those whites with ‘good intentions’ who in different ways recognized and attempted to address the flaws in the colonizing process and the injustices it produced for Aboriginal societies and individuals. These studies are important, not because the figures in some way show that white people were really ‘good’ or that their existence mitigates colonization, thus assuaging white guilt, but because they demonstrate that current criticisms of colonialism are neither written with 20/20 hindsight nor the creation of ‘presentist’ scholars. Euro-Canadians in colonial Canada did recognize and document the failures of colonialism even as they were themselves implicated in it.

For instance, one would hardly expect to find respect for Native resource rights among the entrepreneurial capitalists of resource exploitation in the Upper Great Lakes, but Allan Macdonell (1808–88) and his cousin Simon J. Dawson (1818–1902) considerably complicate this assumption. Both would ally themselves with Native peoples to press for both their own and Native advantage. While one could make the counter-argument that Macdonell and Dawson were simply using Metis and Ojibway people and claims to advance their own interests, during the mid-nineteenth century they did lay out plausible and well-argued defences of Native resource rights. Similarly anthropologist Horatio Hale (1817–96) and missionary E.F. Wilson (1844–1915) both actually paid attention to what Native people, especially the Iroquois or Haudenosaunee (Hale) and Cherokee (Wilson) were saying and doing. After learning the sophisticated languages, the complex cultural heritages, and the intelligent and pragmatic adaptations of the people to Euro–North American pressures, both Hale and Wilson realistically noted that racist assumptions of European cultural and intellectual superiority were baseless.

Not surprisingly, the most astute of the Euro-Canadians were those raised with or married into the Aboriginal cultures that they engaged with or described. Amelia McLean Paget came from a mixed-blood missionary family that was catapulted to fame as ‘captives’ of Big Bear during the 1885 Northwest Resistance. As a person with Aboriginal ancestry who had both a social and economic interest in constructing herself as ‘white,’ Amelia Paget nonetheless managed to write and publish a ‘sympathetic and nuanced’ description of The People of the Plains as a small book in 1909. James Teit, a Shetlander married into the Nlaka’pamux people of south interior British Columbia, undertook to salvage anthropology, researching a supposedly ‘vanishing’ people for Franz Boas, but, far more important, used his skills to record contemporary issues animating the Indigenous peoples he knew, while also quietly and efficiently providing translations during meetings with government and other influential non-Native officials. As the editors and authors repeatedly point out, these white or white-constructed figures were all to some extent complicit in colonialism, but their critiques of it and their labours against the injustices and misperceptions that...