Abstract Résumé

Strata Darren Reid RACIAL TRANSFORMATIONS: APPROACHING EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURY RACIAL BOUNDARIES THROUGH BUFFALO CHILD LONG LANCE AND GREY OWL DARREN REID MA student, University of Victoria Abstract This paper contends that understanding Buffalo Child Long Lance’s and Grey Owl’s racial transformations from non-Indigenous to Indigenous is crucial for our understanding of racial boundaries in early twentieth century Canada, and in the British Empire as a whole. Yet it also recognizes that few historians have been drawn to the subject. To facilitate further research, this paper explores the three historiographical approaches that have been applied to Long Lance and Grey Owl, materialist, psychoanalytical, and discursive, and analyzes the strengths and weaknesses of each. This paper also identifies three key areas for further research: centring Indigenous voices, analyzing Long Lance’s and Grey Owl’s afterlives, and expanding the discursive approach to address intersectionality. Résumé Cet article soutient que les transformations raciales de non-autochtones à autochtones de Buffalo Child Long Lance et de Grey Owl sont essentielles pour notre compréhension des frontières raciales au début du XXe siècle au Canada et dans l’ensemble de l’Empire britannique. Cependant, il reconnait également que peu d’historiens ont été attirés par l’étude de ce sujet. Pour ouvrir la voie à de plus amples recherches, cet article explore les trois approches historiographiques qui ont été appliquées à Buffalo Child Long Lance et Grey Owl, matérialiste, psychanalytique et discursive, et analyse les forces et les faiblesses de chacune. Il s’agira aussi identifier trois domaines clés pour des recherches plus approfondies : mettre en valeur les voix autochtones, analyser la vie après la mort de Long Lance et de Grey Owl, et développer l’approche discursive afin de traiter de l’intersectionnalité. __________________________________________ 3 Strata Darren Reid A pivotal moment in the history of nineteenth and twentieth century settler colonialism was the development of scientific racism. Variously referred to as Social Darwinism, biological or racial determinism, and innatism, the concept of scientific racism attempts to capture an epistemological paradigm shift from a sense of man as primarily a social being…to a sense of man as primarily a biological being. It was a move away from an eighteenth-century optimism about man and faith in the adaptability of man’s universal ‘nature,’ towards a nineteenth century biological pessimism, and a belief in the unchangeability of ‘racial’ natures.1 In terms of settler colonialism, this shift from optimism for adaptability to biological pessimism heralded a change in perceptions of, and attitudes towards, Indigenous peoples by “cast[ing] doubt on the very idea of the ‘civilizing mission.’”2 If a people’s culture was biologically determined and the races existed in a rigid civilizational hierarchy, then there was no longer any point in expending resources on helping a lost cause. As a consequence, British imperial historians have shown that an empire-wide “waiting for them to disappear” attitude replaced a civilizing attitude by the second half of the nineteenth century.3 In Canada, this paradigm shift manifested as a pessimism about the potential for Indigenous peoples to truly assimilate. In her influential 1990 monograph Lost Harvests, Sarah Carter identified this pessimism in the 1905 superintendent of Indian Affairs, Frank Oliver: Oliver had a low estimate of the potential of Indians; he believed they would never be ‘civilized’ and would never profitably use their land. Therefore it was useless to try to make farmers out of them.4 1 Nancy Stephan, The Idea of Race in Science: Great Britain, 1800-1960 (London: Macmillan, 1982), 4. 2 Alexander Barder, “Scientific Racism, Race War and the Global Racial Imaginary,” Third World Quarterly 40, no. 1 (2019): 5. 3 See, for instance, Zoe Laidlaw and Alan Lester, eds., Indigenous Communities and Settler Colonialism: Land Holding, Less and Survival in an Interconnected World (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), or Christopher Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780- 1914: global connections and comparisons (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004). 4 Sarah Carter, Lost Harvests: Prairie Indian Farmers and Government Policy (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1990), 245. 4 Strata Darren Reid J.R. Miller also identified this pessimism in his 1989 monograph Skyscrapers Hide the Heavens, this time in the 1910 redesign of industrial schools: While the original intention of the founders of industrial schools had been to prepare Indian youths to live and compete with non-Native Canadians, henceforth the schools would seek ‘to develop the great natural intelligence of the race and to fit the Indian for civilized life in his own environment [emphasis mine].’5 It is in light of this narrative of hardening racial boundaries and biological pessimism that I find individuals such as Buffalo Child Long Lance and Grey Owl to be such important subjects of historical analysis, for the simple reason that they do not quite fit the narrative.6 Buffalo Child Long Lance was born Sylvester Clark Long in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, in 1890. Although he had some Cherokee ancestry, he and his family were socially classified as “coloured” and lived as such. He first began identifying himself as having Indigenous ancestry in order to attend the Carlisle Indian School, where he took the name Sylvester Long Lance. After travelling to Canada to fight in the First World War, Long Lance immigrated to the Canadian Prairies, where he worked as a reporter in Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba between 1919 and 1924. When he first started at The Calgary Herald in 1919, he identified as a Cherokee named Sylvester Long Lance, but in 1922 he was adopted as an honorary chief by the Kainai of Southern Alberta, and given the name Buffalo Child. At that point he began identifying as Chief Buffalo Child Long Lance of the Kainai. In 1924 he was hired as a press representative for the Canadian Pacific Railway, in 1927 he wrote his autobiography of growing up as a Kainai child, and in 1929 he starred as an Ojibwe chief in The Silent Enemy: An Epic of the American Indian. He committed suicide in 1932.7 5 J.R. Miller, Skyscrapers Hide the Heavens: A History of Native-Newcomer Relations in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989), 267. 6 Scholars of Long Lance and Grey Owl waver between referring to them by their birth names and by their adopted names. In this paper, I will refer to them by their adoptive names, as these are the names they desired to be called by and they never reverted to their birth names. 7 Donald Smith, “LONG, SYLVESTER CLARK (Sylvester Chahuska Long Lance, Buffalo Child, Chief Buffalo Child Long Lance),” in Dictionary of Canadian Biography, 5 Strata Darren Reid Grey Owl was born Archibald Belaney in Hastings, England, in 1888. He moved to Ontario and began working as a fur trapper and wilderness guide around Temagami. He married Angele Egwuna of the Bear Island Anishinaabe in 1910, the first of his four marriages, and began living with her on Bear Island. It was at this point that he started identifying as an Anishinaabe man named Grey Owl. Unhappy with the sedentary lifestyle he developed after the birth of their child, he left to fight in the First World War. After the war he lived briefly in Hastings again, where he married his second wife and old love interest, Ivy Holmes, but he quickly grew unhappy in England and departed back to Ontario in 1917. He worked as a trapper and lived with the Espaniels, an Ojibwa family near Biscotasing. After divorcing Ivy, but still technically married to Angele, he married his third wife, a Haudenosaunee woman named Gertrude Bernand, in 1926. It was Gertrude who inspired him to give up trapping and become an environmental advocate. He began publishing articles in Forest & Outdoors in 1925, published his first book in 1931, and in the same year was hired by James Harkin to work for the Dominion Parks Branch. He published another three monographs on Anishinaabe culture and the environment and embarked on a lecture tour of Britain, the US, and Canada between 1935 and 1937. Gertrude, herself an avid adventurer, grew unhappy with Grey Owl’s new public lifestyle. They parted ways in 1936, and Grey Owl married his fourth wife, a French- Canadian woman named Yvonne Perrier, that same year. He died of pneumonia two years later, in 1938.8 At a time when racial boundaries were hardening in the British empire, broadly, as well as in Canada, specifically, we have these two individuals who very successfully crossed those boundaries. Long Lance and Grey Owl are somewhat anomalous within the historical narrative of deepening racial boundaries and are for that reason of substantial historical significance. Just as Michel de Certeau calls for a history that “seek[s] out ‘exceptional details’ and ‘significant vol. 16, University of Toronto/Université Laval, 2003–, accessed April 10, 2019, http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/long_sylvester_clark_16E.html. 8 Donald Smith, “BELANEY, ARCHIBALD STANSFELD, known as Grey Owl and Wa-sha-quon-asin,” in Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 16, University of Toronto/Université Laval, 2003–, accessed April 10, 2019, http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/belaney_archibald_stansfeld_16E.html. 6 Strata Darren Reid deviations’ from actions or events readily accommodated within the explanatory models,” and as Giovanni Levi argues that “working from the exceptional and the marginal enables the historian to rewrite grand narratives,” I contend that understanding Long Lance’s and Grey Owl’s somewhat anomalous9 racial transformations is crucial for our understanding of racial boundaries in early twentieth century Canada and in the British empire as a whole. 10 This paper explores the various approaches scholars have taken in their studies of Long Lance and Grey Owl, evaluates their strengths and weaknesses, and considers how they help us understand racial boundaries in early twentieth century Canada.

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