Colonists and Micmacs

Colonists and Micmacs L. F. S. UPTON Halifax was celebrating the marriage of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert with a grand parade. Prominently featured was a group of Micmacs in picturesque costumes, followed by the band of the 23rd Regiment and a venerable chief in a carriage drawn by a beribboned horse. "A shade of melancholy mixed with the pleasure of the occasion," commented the Nova Scotian. "The chief and his poor followers, a remnant of his tribe, reminded of the captives which the Romans led in their triumphs, and which told the conquests of the masters of the soil." 1 What Nova Scotia was to become in the hands of its conquerors was displayed for the world to see at the Great Exhibition of 1851: a province "capable of supplying the whole British Empire with steel and charcoal iron, equal to the best foreign articles, and at greatly reduced prices." But the most numerous items in the colony's display were "specimens of native manufacture of the usual simple description": a canoe, paddles, a dress, cradle, chairs, mats, cigar cases, fans, purses, hoods, mocassins, baskets. New Brunswick, which regrettably sent no information with its exhibits, had as its centrepiece a canoe with three full size Micmac figures in state costume.2 "At that ever memorable exhibition," fumed Alexander Monro, "how did New Brunswick figure? By a lump of asphaltum, the figure of an Indian, and a bark canoe/"3 Faced with the need to represent themselves to the outside world, the colonists could find little that was original in their own society, whose dearest striving was to imitate that of the mother country: to display something distinctive , emblematic in ·its way, they had to turn to the crafts of the native people. Yet inside each colony those same natives were the lowest of the low, ignored as much as was humanly possible, and considered fit for the publ·ic gaze only when paraded Roman fashion before their conquerors. 44 Within each colony, parades excepted, the ideal Indian was the invisible one. The young white was spared the trouble of learning anything about the natives. Dawson's Handbook ... for the use of Schools and Families carefully named the first settler in each county of Nova Scotia and lovingly described the flora and fauna, but of the Indians it made no mention.4 Yet outside the colony readers would always find mention of the Indians in the popular travelogues of the day. Some visitors were disappointed in their hopes of finding noble savages: Captain Moorsom was distressed at his "first sight of abject beings who loiter about the wharfs, or infest the barbers' shops of Halifax - meagre, squalid, dirty in person and habit."5 Other visitors came with gun and rod, as well as pen, in hand, and they were much more positive in their comments, eloquent in praise of the Indian as hunter and forest guide. They wrote stories of the campfire , the canoe, the wigwam, of superhuman feats of tracking and endurance. Their Indians retained dignity even in the unfamiliar surroundings of the town: "Outcasts , as it were, in their own country, and sensible of their pos-ition, they bear themselves with becoming haughtiness towards the mob of staring Europeans in the crowded street; and, hastily purchasing their few necessaries, they retreat, as they came, to their hunting grounds in the interior." 6 Every mention of the Indians in books of travel was an embarrassment to colonial boosters who feared that the stories of wigwams and forest life would frighten potential immigrants into thinking that their lives would be in danger as soon as they stepped off the boat. It was necessary to assure newcomers that, far from plunging themselves into the midst of "Indian squalor," they would be settling in an area where there were less than 2,000 natives to half a million whites. When the Reader in Chemistry and Mineralogy at the University of Durham calculated that New Brunswick alone had land enough to support a popul·atfon of Revue d'etudes canadiennes 5,600,000, the thought that the publicity the Indians were receiving might be interfering with this glorious destiny was hard to bear...