Allan Gregg’s essay on “Tecumseh’s Ghost” has been making the rounds over the various social media and traditional media platforms today to mark the 200th anniversary of Tecumseh’s death during the War of 1812. It’s a worthwhile project, and an interesting read that I would heartily encourage everyone to do. But in the end, I found it to be rather unsatisfying for a number of reasons.
The first half of the essay is about the history of Tecumseh, and the role he played in the War of 1812. While Tecumseh has been appropriated by much of the Canadian government’s propaganda campaign around the War of 1812, in which Gregg calls out the fact that Tecumseh has been recast as “Laura Secord with a feather,” he does provide a fairly good overview. I was familiar with much of that history, having recently read Alan Taylor’s The Civil War of 1812, which was a fairly comprehensive understanding of the issues at play. Taylor goes into more detail about the way in which constructions of race played into the War of 1812, but Gregg provides a good overview. Where he starts to drift, however, is during the peace negotiations at the end of the war. While Gregg is right to call out the lack of interest in maintaining the relations with the First Nations on the British side, he ignores the fact that the Canadian delegates felt equally betrayed by the outcome because they had staked their own personal honour on fulfilling their promises. It also ignores the broader geopolitical concerns that Britain had, which prompted them to press for a quick settlement with the Americans, even though they could probably have carried on the war another year and crushed the Americans, who were by that point bankrupt and still only just learning how to mount an effective fighting force.
Where Gregg really lost me was in the second half with an unsubtle and rather coloured recounting of the history of the First Nations relations post-Confederation, which was written in a rushed and ham-fisted manner that casts the Canadian government as unrepentant villains, a bunch of moustache-twirlers with John A. Macdonald at the fore, all of them allegedly no better than the American presidents who authorised outright slaughter. Having read Richard Gwyn’s two-volume biography on Macdonald, plus a number of excellent journalistic pieces on the history of the treaties of Northern Ontario that were written at the height of Idle No More fervour early in the year, I have to say that Gregg’s reading of history is dubious at best.
For one, Gregg homogenises the various First Nations in Canada, and treats their relations as the same, which was not the case. Those First Nations in Eastern and Central Canada had a long history with the settler populations, and there tended to be greater degrees of respect afforded to them, whereas the Plains Indian populations were a different story. The violence of the Northwest Rebellion turned most Eastern Canadians against that Aboriginal population in a way that they hadn’t with their more local First Nations. Gregg entirely ignores the crisis that erupted with the collapse of the buffalo populations that had sustained those First Nations and Métis and was decimated by their own wasteful overhunting, and how the resulting cultural collapse posed an outright philosophical challenge to a government that did not provide social welfare to its own people, let alone the indigenous populations that required food aid. (Remember, charity was the domain of the church, not the government at this point in history). And while, the government made a great many mistakes, Gwyn’s reading of Macdonald’s history doesn’t show the kind of malice that Gregg would otherwise suggest existed. In another case, efforts were made with some First Nations to provide them with the kinds of lands and territories to continue their traditional lifestyles, especially in places like Northern Ontario, but that practice broke down much later when permanent settlements began to replace a nomadic existence, and more problems arose from that cultural change. The issue of the Métis was yet another kettle of fish, when they had been granted land after the Red River uprising, only to see them sell that land and head further west, where they again demanded more land during the Northwest Rebellion. (This is no doubt part of why there are prohibitions against private property in the Indian Act – to prevent this same pattern of land being sold off cheaply that Macdonald had witnessed post-Red River). All of this context Gregg completely sweeps away.
The “Tecumseh’s Ghost” essay is a worthwhile project for trying to re-open that dialogue between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Canadians, but Gregg’s own lack of historical awareness undermines his own argument. Yes, we need to recognise our differing world views, and come to a better perspective on our shared histories. But Gregg’s own reading only serves to complicate that history by trying to enforce a binary when there was a much more nuanced history at play, and that those nuances are where better bridges and understanding can be built.