Copway and Traill in a Conversation That Never Took Place Daniel Coleman Mcmaster University

Grappling with Respect: Copway and Traill in a Conversation that Never Took Place Daniel Coleman McMaster University

s to ghosts or spirits they appear totally banished from Canada,” Awrote Catharine Parr Traill in what has become one of Canadian literature’s most infamous statements. Here there are no historical associations, no legendary tales of those that come before us. Fancy would starve for lack of marvellous food to keep her alive in the backwoods…. No Druid claims our oaks; and instead of poring with mysteri- ous awe among our curious limestone rocks, that are often singularly grouped together, we refer them to the geologist to exercise his skill in accounting for their appearance; instead of investing them with the solemn characters of ancient temples or heathen altars, we look upon them with the curious eye of natural philosophy alone. (128) This statement from Traill’s The Backwoods of Canada, an epistolary account of traveling to and clearing a farm in the 1830s near what is now Lakefield, Ontario, is an archetypal passage in one of the most reprinted books in the canon of early Canadian literature. This passage is a classic statement by a new arrival of how difficult it will be for an immigrant populace to forge a literature in a new land. The colony’s first English writ-

ESC 39.2–3 (June/September 2013): 63–88 ers must start from zero, from scratch, since they do not have access to a pre-existing local tradition. In the absence of already existing myth and history, they must build a foundation based upon unsuperstitious reason Daniel Coleman and scientific observation. teaches and carries out The great irony in Traill’s words is also archetypal because, of course, research in Canadian there are historical associations and legendary tales that are well known literary cultures at to the Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg inhabitants of the Pamashkodeyong- McMaster University. He Nogojiwanong region where Traill and her husband have come to home- has published Masculine stead.1 Indeed there exists a remarkable opportunity for her to learn about Migrations (1998), The them when she passes through Pamashkodeyong (Rice Lake) in 1832. Scent of Eucalyptus “[B]eyond the Indian village,” writes Traill, (2003), White Civility The missionaries have a school for the education and instruc- (2006), and In Bed tion of the Indian children. Many of them can both read and With the Word (2009). write fluently, and are greatly improved in their moral and Of his nine co-edited religious conduct. They are well and comfortably clothed, volumes of literary and have houses to live in. But they are too much attached and cultural criticism, to their wandering habits to become good and industrious the most recent are settlers. During certain seasons they leave the village, and Retooling the Humanities encamp themselves in the woods along the borders of those (2011) and Countering lakes and rivers that present the most advantageous hunting Displacements (2012). and fishing-grounds…. Certain it is that the introduction of the Most recently, he has Christian religion is the first greatest step towards civilization published articles and and improvement; its very tendency being to break down the strong-holds of prejudice and ignorance, and unite mankind produced the YouTube in one bond of social brotherhood. (59–60) video series of interviews on different systems of knowing between 1 In Dancing on Our Turtle’s Back, Leanne Simpson, Nishnaabe historian and pro- indigenous, diasporic, fessor at Trent University, writes, “Nishnaabeg is translated as ‘the people’ and refers to the Ojibwe, Odawa (Ottawa), Potawatomi, Michi Saagiig (Mississauga), and Western cultures. Saulteaux, Chippewa and Omámíwinini (Algonquin) people. Nishnaabeg people are also known as Nishinaabeg, Anishinaabeg, Anishinaabek, and Anishinabek, reflecting different spelling systems and differing dialects” (25 n1). Deriving her discussion of these and many other Nishnaabeg terms from discussions with various elders, whom she carefully credits throughout her book, she explains further that “Michi Saagiig or ‘Mizhi-zaugeek’ ” people live at the eastern door- way of the Nishnaabeg nation, located in what is now known as eastern Ontario. According to [Michi Saagiig Nishnaabe elder] Doug Williams, “the word ‘Mis- sissauga’ is an anglicized version of Michi Saagiig or Mizhi-zaugeek” (26 n2). She also identifies the following place names: Pamashkodeyong (Rice Lake) and Nogojiwanong (Peterborough, the place at the foot of the rapids) (93 n131; 99 n132). Whenever possible, I will refer to Nishnaabe (singular) or Nishnaabeg (plural) in this essay. Copway uses the term “Ojibway” to describe his tribal group, and the term is still commonly used today by Nishnaabeg writers such as Basil Johnston and Scott Lyons.

64 | Coleman It is too bad that, pressed as they are to complete their long journey from England to their homestead, the Traills do not have time to stop in and actually visit the children in the Rice Lake School. Had she met the students there, perhaps direct contact with them may have modified her certainty that the benefits of civilization and religion would constitute a one-way transfer from the settlers to the Nishnaabeg. She could then have encountered one of the students named Kahgegagahbowh, who, under the English name George Copway, went on to publish several books detailing the history, tales, and spiritual traditions whose absence Traill laments.2 Among the first indigenous people in North America to produce books in English, Copway was Nishnaabe from the very Michi Saagiig region that Traill details in her writings, and it is tempting to speculate about whether she might have met the young Kahgegagahbowh, if not in 1832 when she did not stop at the Rice Lake School, then in 1834 when she describes two visits to the winter and summer camps of the Nishnaabe hunter Peter Nogan and his family.3 Perhaps Kahgegagahbowh, sixteen

2 It would be tempting to hope that Traill made her infamous statement about the lack of history or legend in the district in a moment when she simply wasn’t thinking about indigenous people, but she then quotes an unnamed female poet friend who names indigenous people even as she denies their relevance: “It is the most unpoetical of all lands; there is no scope for imagination; here all is new—the very soil seems newly formed; there is no hoary ancient grandeur in these woods; no recollections of former deeds connected with the country. The only beings in which I take any interest are the Indians, and they want the warlike character and intelligence that I had pictured to myself they would pos- sess” (128). To add yet another layer of irony to this passage, Traill then breaks from these comments on Upper Canada’s lack of poetic inspiration and Natives’ lack of intelligence to describe the making of maple sugar, a process incoming settlers would have learned from indigenous people. (See Simpson 74–81 for a retelling of the traditional story of how Nanabozho or Elder Brother learned to make maple syrup.) Regarding Copway’s writerly output, between 1847 and 1851 he published The Life, History and Travels of Kah-ge-ga-gah-bowh (George Copway), a Young Indian Chief of the Ojebwa Nation … (Albany: Weed and Parsons, 1847; Phila- delphia: Harmstead, 1847), The Ojibway Conquest: A Tale of the Northwest. By Kah-ge-ga-gah-bowh, or G. Copway, Chief of the Ojibway Nation (New York: G.P. Putnam, 1850), Organization of the New Indian Territory, East of the Mis- souri River … (New York: Benedict, 1850), Running Sketches of Men and Places, in England, France, Germany, Belgium, and Scotland (New York: Riker, 1851), and The Traditional History and Characteristic Sketches of the Ojibway Nation (London: Gilpin, 1850). He also edited the weekly newspaper Copway’s American Indian for four months, July to October 1851. 3 Traill refers only to “Peter” by his first name in The Backwoods of Canada, sometimes adding “the old hunter” or “the Chief.” But he appears also in her sister Susanna Moodie’s Roughing It in the Bush and is identified as “Peter Nogan (see

Grappling with Respect | 65 years old that year, was one of the young men practising tomahawk throws on the warm Sunday afternoon in June when she and her husband visited Peter’s family—or better yet, perhaps he was one of the people she notices lying on blankets in the shade and reading (Backwoods 231). Neither of them ever writes about having met the other, but, whether or not the two met in person, Kahgegagahbowh’s family was well known to settlers in the Pamashkodeyong district. Indeed, for a time the Copways had a settler named Lewis staying in their home, while Kahgegagahbowh was growing up. His father, a Christianized 1812 War veteran who went by the name of John Copway, was also a renowned medicine maker widely respected for his knowledge of Nishnaabeg history and tradition. The boy himself was a bright star at the Methodist mission where his aptitude as a student caused the teacher to recommend him as a translator and apprentice at the Lake Superior Mission of the American Methodist Church, a move which evolved into three years of schooling at Ebenezer Manual Labor School in Illinois and a position as missionary with the Methodist church.4 So here is the gist of my essay: George Copway’s presence in the neighbourhood flies in the face of Traill’s denial of history, legend, and literacy in the Pamashkodeyong district. He and his family demonstrate not only that there is history, but that the people who know that history are literate, not just in their own Nishnaabemowin language but also in English. How then do we read Traill’s history-blanking statement? It is easy to read it as a statement of colonial racism, as Traill’s contribution to the intellectual ground-clearing that accompanied the actual cutting down of trees and displacement of indigenous peoples that was central to the settler-invader project. But this kind of reading foreshortens a rigorous inquiry by pin- ning racism to Traill herself as an individual and thus fails to see how the system of ideas that produced her statements remains active and current in our own minds almost two centuries later.5 Instead, I propose to expand our inquiry by imagining a conversation between Traill and Copway that

also Nugon, Nogy, Noggan, Nogee, Nogie)” in Michael A. Peterman and Carl Ballstadt’s editorial headnote to “A Visit to the Camp of the Chippewa Indians” in Forest and Other Gleanings: The Fugitive Writings of Catharine Parr Traill. Traill says she made visits to Peter’s camp in winter and in the month of June 1834. Copway left Rice Lake in July that year to continue his studies and carry out translation work at the Lake Superior Mission of the American Methodist Church in what is now Michigan (Smith 26). 4 Biographical details on Kahgegagahbowh’s life are derived from Smith. 5 I am informed here by Sara Ahmed’s approach to an ethics of encounter with others. Ahmed writes,

66 | Coleman never took place. My reasons to do so are to show how the worldviews that shaped their writings would have disallowed a true engagement with Nishnaabe history, knowledge, and culture. By tracking the mismatch in their epistemological traditions, rather than in their personal intentions or individual biases, I aim to show how we continue to live in the long shadow of that systemic mismatch. There is merit in imagining even an impossible conversation, because paying attention to why it was impossible, noticing the gap between the two conceptual worlds, and observing what made them incomprehensible to one another has the potential to open up ethical space. As Willie Ermine, the Cree philosopher from the Sturgeon Lake First Nation in the north central part of Saskatchewan explains, the idea of the ethical space, produced by contrasting perspectives of the world, entertains the notion of a meeting place ... The space offers a venue to step out of our allegiances, to detach from the cages of our mental worlds and assume a position where human-to-human dialogue can occur. The ethical space offers itself as the theatre for cross-cultural conversation in pursuit of ethically engaging diversity and disperses [total- izing] claims to the human order. (202)

My hope is that by imagining the missed dialogue between Catharine Parr Traill and Kahgegagahbowh, we can generate this kind of ethical space in which we can detach from the mental cages of universalism and naive notions of dialogue taking place on a level playing field. Because that field has long been overdetermined by Euro-Enlightenment canons of thought, I will devote considerable space to outlining the Nishnaabeg epistemological traditions that enable us to see the contrast in perspectives that Ermine says is necessary to the creation of ethical space. The dialogue I wish to imagine does not rely on juxtaposing pure, monolithic representatives of two opposed parties. For Traill’s part, we know that she came from a family that included what we might call racial progressives who were actively involved in the abolitionist movement in

One possibility is to avoid using particularity as a description of an other, which turns “this-ness” into a property of her body or her speech. Instead, we can begin to think of particularity as a question of modes of encounter through which others are faced. That is, we can move our attention from the particularity of the other, to the particularity of modes of encountering others…. Certainly, this is partly about locating the encounter in time and space: what are the conditions of possibility for us meeting here and now? (144–45)

Grappling with Respect | 67 England before they came to Canada,6 and we can see in The Backwoods of Canada that she herself admired much of her Nishnaabeg neighbours’ knowledge of nature, arts, and crafts (135–40). Her acknowledgement of indigenous ingenuity and knowledge is even more manifest in a second work by Traill that I will discuss in some detail in the second half of this essay, Canadian Crusoes: A Tale of the Rice Lake Plains (1852). So, if we can imagine that she was well-disposed, if patronizing, toward her Nishnaabeg neighbours, and since she was clearly curious to learn about the human and natural environs in which she found herself, how do we understand her dismissal of Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg’s literary precedence at the start of her writing career in Canada? For his part, Copway does not have the record of an unblemished champion of Nishnaabeg culture. Despite his many writings about his nation, including moments of clear condemnation of British and American mistreatment of them,7 some today think of him as a sellout. Following his parents, Copway converted to Methodism as a young man. He and his family were not alone in this, for there were as many as twelve hundred Nishnaabeg members of the Methodist church by 1834 (Ruoff 18). Although Copway’s conversion was undoubtedly sincere, it was also his pathway to education and a career. His biographer Donald Smith suggests that Copway clearly wanted to assimilate to the settler’s way of life—indeed, he named one of his daughters Pocahontas out of his stated admiration for that lady’s preference for the English colonists over her own people (40). Copway’s ambition got beyond his reach, and in 1845 he was accused of embezzling funds from the Saugeen Methodist mission near Lake Huron as well as stealing from his own band at Pamashkodeyong. 6 Before emigrating to Canada, Traill’s sister Susanna Strickland (later Moodie) wrote two biographical pamphlets on the sufferings of escaped slaves Mary Prince and Ashton Warner, both of whom she met in the home of Thomas Prin- gle, Secretary of the Anti-Slavery League (Peterman, “Susanna” 65). In Roughing It in the Bush, Moodie also exposed the hushed up murder of a black man who had married an Irish woman in the Pamashkodeyong (Rice Lake) district (see Antwi, chapter 3). Traill herself published Prejudice Reproved; or, The History of the Negro Toy-Seller in 1826 (Ballstadt 151). 7 For instance, Copway writes, The white men have been like the greedy lion, pouncing upon and devouring its prey. They have driven us from our nation, our homes, and possessions; compelled us to seek a refuge in Missouri, among strangers, and wild beasts; and will, perhaps, soon compel us to scale the Rocky Mountains; and, for aught I can tell, we may yet be driven to the Pacific ocean, there to find our graves. My only trust is, that there is a just God. Was it to perpetrate such acts that you have been exalted above all other nations? Providence intended you for a blessing and not a curse to us. (Life 161)

68 | Coleman For these indiscretions, he was defrocked by the Methodists and spent time in debtor’s prison in Toronto. His subsequent books on Ojibway life and history were efforts to generate a new living on the lecture circuit in Europe and the United States by trading on the exotic figure of the savage- turned-sophisticate (Smith 32–33).8 Having failed to achieve secure status as either a Methodist missionary or a famous author and speaker, Copway fell into poverty. He advertised himself in 1867 in the Detroit Free Press as a practitioner of the “healing art” and invited the sick to “come and be cured” (Smith 47). A year later, long-estranged from the Methodists at Rice Lake, he showed up at the Sulpician Catholic mission at the Lake of Two Mountains (Oka), asking to convert to the Catholic faith. The Sulpicians baptized “Doctor Copway” into the new name of “Joseph-Antoine” on 11 January 1869, several days before his death at age fifty-one (Smith 48). It is a sad ending to a short and dramatic life. My point, however, is that the conversation I imagine here does not depend on monolithic representatives of cultural authenticity. Nonetheless, Kahgegagahbowh’s family did live in Traill’s neighbourhood, and they do represent the existence of a present and evolving Nishnaabeg history and tradition. Why didn’t Catharine Parr Traill see in her neighbours’ tradition and knowledge an archive from which a new writer in Canada might benefit? Copway did, even if exploitatively. To try to trace this question, I am going to focus on a single word, respect, as it appears in Traill’s and Copway’s writing, and use it as a kind of aperture through which we might glimpse a great divide between the kinds of thinking available to Traill and her Nishnaabeg neighbours.9 My hope is that, by attending to this divide, we may begin to see why Traill did not recognize the cultural richness on which she was trampling. We may also see why, or at least how, Copway both promoted and profited from that richness. Perhaps most importantly, we may see how we our- selves, whether settlers or indigenous, are challenged in the present to 8 Instead of reading Copway’s ambiguous attitudes as damning and inauthentic, Deanna Reder writes, “it is possible to recognize Christian and Western conventions in Copway’s life narrative but also to acknowledge its Anishinaabe conventions without being drawn into discussions of cultural contamination or authenticity” (159). 9 My method here takes inspiration from Carol Gluck and Ana Lowenhaupt Tsing’s project in Words in Motion to follow specific words across time and geography in order to show “how words and worlds are made at different scales, ranging from particular class niches and political campaigns to transnational realign- ments of culture and power. This task involves watching words move across space and time” (Tsing 11). I am grateful to William Coleman for alerting me to Gluck and Tsing’s book.

Grappling with Respect | 69 respect and learn from the knowledge, history, and traditions that First Peoples have retained against the assimilative reach of Euro-Canadian assumptions of Christian-liberal universalism.10 Perhaps, by attending to Respect is the gaps and differences between intellectual and discursive systems, we may open up Ermine’s “ethical space” between unequal parties in dialogue ubiquitous as that can allow us to see that, in fact, what we know is shaped by different ways of knowing, by different structures or protocols of knowledge, by a concept and the epistemologies that shape what Sara Ahmed has called the “mode of encounter” (144–45). Perhaps we will see that it is important to recognize value this gap in ways of knowing before we rush to close it over with coercive assurances that we all mean the same thing. I hope to open this space by throughout grappling with the term “respect” and to think about it in the context of what indigenous Sami scholar Rauna Kuokkanen calls “the logic of the gift” indigenous (32), about which I will have more to say in the second half of my essay. But first, respect. Respect is ubiquitous as a concept and value through- cultural and out indigenous cultural and political history in Canada. Whether we look back to eighteenth-century promises of respect between British colonial political history officials such as Sir William Johnson and the twenty-four First Nations (including the Nishnaabeg), who met in treaty with him at Niagara in 1764 in Canada. (see Borrows 125–27), or we look at contemporary statements of how Nish- naabeg people understand their interrelations with land and neighbour, respect recurs as a central concept.11 As Cree-Métis writer Harold Car-

10 By “Christian-liberal universalism,” I mean the tendency within Christian thinking to deny particular differences in the effort to establish a universal humanity. Jewish diaspora theorists Daniel and Jonathan Boyarin argue that St Paul’s famous universalism—in Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek, male nor female, slave nor free (Galatians 3:26)—colonized or appropriated Jewish- ness (and other differences) by spiritualizing and allegorizing it, thus empty- ing Jewishness of its specificity and difference (87). Their argument does not depend on a naïve notion of Jewish innocence, for they assert that Christianity and Judaism generated two opposed, mirror images of anti-racism as well as racism. Christianity’s impulse is to include everyone; Judaism’s is to leave others alone. Christianity’s universalism can deny others the right to their differences, while Judaism’s notion of the chosen people can become xenophobia (96–97). 11 Nishnaabe scholar Borrows writes, My grandfather was born in 1901 on the western shores of Geor- gian Bay, at the Cape Croker Indian reserve. Generations before him were born on the same soil. Our births, lives, and deaths on this site have brought us into citizenship with the land. We par- ticipate in its renewal, have responsibility for its continuation, and grieve for its losses. As citizens with this land, we also feel the presence of our ancestors and strive with them to ensure that the relationships of our polity are respected. Our loyalties, allegiance,

70 | Coleman dinal and his co-editor, Walter Hildebrandt, put it in their summation of numerous interviews with Saskatchewan treaty elders, “It is their view that ‘respect’ is an essential pillar upon which good relations (miyo-wîcêhtowin) between First Nations peoples and others living in Canada can be brought about. Without a positive and respectful view of First Nations peoples, good relations (miyo-wîcêhtowin) between First Nations peoples and others living in Canada cannot be achieved” (22). Traill’s statement with which this paper opened seems to me an archetypal moment in which we can see the failure of respect. What did respect mean to her in 1836, when she published The Backwoods of Canada? And what did it mean to her Nishnaabeg neighbours? What did it mean to Kahgegagahbowh, writing as George Copway? Although he does not indicate what Nishnaabemowin words or concepts may have informed his use of the English word respect, this English term appears in key moments in his writing.12 By investigating these two neighbours’ different understandings of the concept of respect, we may be able to do something more than uncover what went wrong in the past. To borrow from Slavoj Žižek’s reworking of Walter Benjamin, we might be able to reanimate “the crushed potentials for the future that were contained in the past” (90). One of Copway’s most telling uses of the word respect appears in his 1850 volume, The Traditional History and Characteristic Sketches of the Ojibway Nation. In a passage that defies the common assumption that pre-contact indigenous peoples of North America were illiterate, Cop- way describes the ancient Nishnaabeg practice whereby what he calls the “moral law” and “ancient form of worship” were transcribed in picto-

and affection are related to the land. The water, wind, sun, and stars are part of this federation; the fish, birds, plants, and animals share the same union. Our teachings and stories form the constitution of this relationship and direct and nourish the obligations it requires. (138, emphasis added). 12 Leanne Simpson discusses a Nishnaabemowin equivalent for “respect” in her explication of Gdigga Migizi’s (elder Doug Williams’s) unpacking of the seven keywords in the Seven Grandfather Teachings that are fundamental to Nish- naabeg tradition: “Mnaadendiwin is often translated as ‘respect’ or the ‘art of respect,’ but Gdigga Migizi explained that this means we are to … work towards seeing each other and cherishing each other for who we are, and in doing so, we become one…. This teaching flows into Aanjigone [non-interference] in that we are to be very slow to judge one another” (125). Although he does not include the Nishnaabemowin words, Basil Johnston also links respect with non-interference: “[T]he most suitable … way of exercising this respect is by allowing others to exercise their growth and scope, by non-interference…. For the same reason no man or woman ought to attempt to seek the control of another’s vision and person” (116).

Grappling with Respect | 71 graphic form onto plates made of “slate-rock, copper, lead, and the bark of birch-trees” (132). These records were placed in underground, cedar-lined depositories near Lake Superior, in the western heart of Nishnaabeg territory. Every fifteen years, in a secret ritual, the ten elders chosen to be the guardians of these records would open the depository, renew any of the plates that had deteriorated, and install new elders to take the places of any who may have died since the last opening (131). Of this ritual, Copway writes: This secrecy is not generally known by those people who have searched with interest the Indian ... to get an idea of his religion and his worship, which however absurd they may have seemed, have nevertheless been held in so rigid respect that he has formed for it a cloak of almost impenetrable mystery. He concluded that all Nature around him was clothed in mystery—that innumerable spirits were ever near to forward a good object and retard a bad one, and that they existed as a chain connecting heaven and earth.... With this great awe of spiritual things in his mind, he feels reluctant to reveal all that he knows of his worship and the objects and rites which perpetuate it. (130–31, emphasis added) Copway is hard to read here, straddling as he does his Methodist training that makes him concede that Nishnaabeg beliefs might seem “absurd” to Christian people while he maintains “rigid respect” for the sacredness of their secret rituals by not telling his readers where the depositories can be found nor what the exact protocols are for the secret rituals of Nishnaabeg record-keeping. Perhaps, as a Nishnaabe who took the path of Christianity, he himself was excluded from knowing these secrets. One wonders why he uses the word “rigid” to describe Nishnaabeg respect for ceremonies such as this. Perhaps he chose this word because of his own departure from Nishnaabeg tradition and his desire to take on Euro- American ways.13 Whatever his own intentions may have been, this rigidity is necessary to the strict maintenance of a sacred tradition of pre-contact Nishnaabeg literacy that gives Copway a strong case for the sophistica- tion of the very history and culture that Catharine Parr Traill denies. For 13 Smith draws attention to Copway’s restlessness with Nishnaabeg traditional leadership in his 1850 proposal to the U.S. Senate that a Western Native Terri- tory be reserved for indigenous people in what is now South Dakota. Copway argued for a non-Native governor and a well-educated Native lieutenant-governor in the territory to replace “ ‘elder Indians,’ ” whose “ ‘prejudicial views have ever unfitted them to become a fit medium of instruction to their people’ ” (Traditional History 277; Smith 37).

72 | Coleman it is the rigid maintenance of this ancient practice that allows Copway to insist not only on his people’s pre-colonial print culture but also upon Nishnaabemowin superiority to English in expressiveness and efficiency (Traditional 124–25). Respect here is explicitly tied to sacred mystery as expressed in an interdependent understanding of nature, one which perceives a “chain connecting heaven with earth” that extends well beyond the world of human interactions to include the more-than-human community of the earth as well as the world of spirits. Respect, in Copway’s passage, is a way of being that does not aim at mastery but submits to mystery, to nature’s implicate order.14 Cognizant of “awe,” the person animated by respect does not try to master the world with knowledge but “feels reluctant to reveal all that he knows of his worship and the objects and rites which perpetuate it.” Instead of knowing everything possible about the object of respect, even the tradition-exploiting Copway emphasizes interdependency and relationship, as well as an approach that upholds the difference or ultimate unknowability of that which it respects. This approach is beholden to the logic of the gift that I will discuss later in this essay. Given the code of secrecy and mystery demanded by what Copway calls “rigid respect,” it is understandable why Catharine Parr Traill did not send an interlibrary loan order to the keepers of the Nishnaabeg archives and read up on the history and lore of the land in which she had arrived.15 Most Canadians to this day do not know that many pre-contact peoples were literate and had developed sophisticated cultural and historical records such as the birchbark scrolls of the Nishnaabeg people.16 But it is 14 I am indebted to Agnes Kramer-Hamstra’s article, “Rumours of a Larger Story,” for the mastery-mystery wording. Here the concept of respect relies upon Aanjigone or non-interference, understood in relation to what Copway calls a “chain connecting earth with heaven.” Quoting Sákéj Henderson on creation’s implicate order, Simpson explains, Aanjigone means that “if someone else does wrong, the ‘implicate order’ will come back on that person and correct the imbalance in some other way…. There is then no need to criticize or be angry with … perpetrators because they will pay the price for their destructive action, one way or another, and this will be mediated by the Spiritual world” (54). 15 Traill does joke about there being an unofficial circulating library in their area since each settler’s library is “passed from friend to friend in due rotation; and, fortunately for us, we happen to have several excellently furnished ones in our neighbourhood.” She notes there is a public library in York and a small circulating library nearer by in Coburg, “but they might just as well be on the other side of the Atlantic for any access we can have to them” (Backwoods 234). 16 See Mi’kmaq scholar Marie Battiste’s discussion of the mutually intelligible, intercontinental system of ideographical and petroglyphic writings that span from “the Tupi-Gurani’s Ayvu Rapyta or Origin of Human Speech, to the

Grappling with Respect | 73 also telling that Traill did not think to inquire, even when she saw that the Christian hymnbooks being read by the young men in Peter the hunter’s camp were printed in face-to-face English and Nishnaabemowin translation (Backwoods 232). She did not ask where the Nishnaabemowin version had come from or if the Nishnaabeg readers had been literate before the arrival of the mission school. She did not think to make these inquiries because she was part of a movement to modernize the domain of respect. She was influenced by the broad effort, following the revolutions of France and America, to liberate the notion of respect from the rigidities of ancient hierarchies and calcified traditions. The modernization of respect comes to the fore in a debate Traill and her husband, Lieutenant Thomas Traill, have with a Scottish engineer on their steamboat journey up the Otanabee River from Pamashkodeyong to Nogojiwanong in 1832.17 The engineer’s “manners were surly, and almost insolent,” Traill writes. “He scrupulously avoided the least approach to courtesy or outward respect” (Backwoods 75, emphasis added). He delib- erately defied both gender and class conventions when he sat down impo- litely close to Mrs Traill and observed that among the many advantages this country offered to settlers like him, he did not reckon it the least of them that he was not obliged to take off his hat when he spoke to people (meaning persons of our degree), or address them by any title but their name; besides, he could go and take his seat beside any gentleman or lady either, and think of himself to the full as good as them. (75)

This discussion is familiar in early Canadian emigrant literature, perhaps most famously in Susanna Moodie’s irritation at the rudeness and famil-

Yucatac-Mayan paper screenfolds, to the Algonquian Walam Olum or Red Score, Medewiwin or Grand Medicine Scrolls, and Mi’kmaw hieroglyphics” (“Print” 111). For anthropological detail on Nishnaabeg birchbark scrolls, see Selwyn Dewdney. 17 Neither Traill nor the Scottish engineer indicates awareness of the meaning of the name of the river on which they are traveling. Simpson provides Elder Gdigaa Migizi’s etymology for “Otonabee”: “the first part means ‘heart,’ com- ing from the word ode; and the word odemgat means boiling water, because when water boils, it looks like the bubbling or beating of a heart…. Otanabee is an anglicised version of Odenabe—the river that beats like a heart” (94). The very names of the places Traill passes through constitute land-based historical associations and human-orienting narratives that she finds lacking in Upper Canada.

74 | Coleman iarity of her Irish and Yankee neighbours in Roughing it in the Bush. For both the Scottish engineer and the Traills, emigration to the colonies means the possibility of starting over, free of the constraints of the class system of Britain, with its protocols of primogeniture, land inheritance, and ancestrally derived social status. For an ethnic Scot of what Traill calls “the inferior class” (75), this freedom from rigid protocols for respect is part of his narrative of self-improvement. He has a technical education, and, free from the system that privileges inherited wealth back home, he can become a self-made man in Upper Canada.18 Alexander McLachlan’s much-quoted poem title captures the engineer’s mantra: in Canada, “Jack’s as good’s his master.”19 But emigration brings increased freedom to the Traills too. For when the engineer challenges Lieutenant Traill to define what a gentleman is, the Oxford-educated but subsequently déclassé Thomas Traill replies, “Good manners and good education.… A rich man or a high-born man, if he is rude, ill-mannered, and ignorant, is no more a gentleman than yourself” (76–77). Thereafter, Catharine writes, the engineer treated her and her husband with the “utmost respect” (76). As members of the educated, genteel middle class who migrated to the colonies because they could not see a viable economic future in Britain, ambiguously positioned people like the Traills hope, like the engineer—and the ambitious Copway too—to re-establish themselves on their own merits, and they believe that their education added to their good manners should give them a boost in the hierarchy of self-improving, civil subjects that will come to constitute what I have elsewhere called “white civility” in Canada.20 Thus, this whole discussion takes place within the context of a wider movement toward modern ideas of social organization that are repositioning the concept of respect.

18 See chapter 3, “The Enterprising Scottish Orphan” in my White Civility for a full discussion of the importance of this figure in early Canadian literary culture. 19 See McLachlan’s “Young Canada: Or, Jack’s as Good’s his Master” in his Poeti- cal Works 207. 20 The link between the Traills’ uncertain class status and their investment in genteel education is profound. Una Pope-Hennessey writes that Catharine’s Strickland family at Reydon Hall in Suffolk “socially fell between stools … It is evident that though their circumstances were genteel, their upbringing gentle, and their residence a Hall, they were not at this time accepted by the county families who avoided all suspicion of contact with trade or middle-class” (20– 21). Thus, the Strickland family did not interact much with their neighbours and educated the children at home in history, geography, the natural sciences, and languages, including French, Italian, and possibly German. This education was meant to inculcate “the importance of independence, self-reliance, discipline,

Grappling with Respect | 75 Compared to Copway’s “rigid respect,” characterized by awe for a mys- terious world where nature is animated by the sacred and humans consider themselves subject to its intuited but unmastered order, in Traill’s narrative respect is presented as something of a sacred cow. It is something to be exposed as outmoded and tied to stifling traditions that need to be modernized and changed. For the Scottish engineer, the respect he felt compelled to perform in the old country upholds an unjust and oppressive order. For the Traills, respect should be loosened from this old order and accorded only to the educated and well-mannered—that is, to a new elite of those who know, who have mastered knowledge, and who treat others with genteel civility. Whether for the engineer or the Traills, respect does not refer to the kind of eco-spiritual chain that, in Copway’s text, links earth to heaven but to a social chain that organizes how people perceive and treat one another. The Traills portray a confidence that they know all about respect and how it might best be expressed. Indeed, they know better than the disconcerted engineer, figured by Traill as a “candidate for equality” (76) who is “confounded” at their witty verbal “manoeuvre” (75). Educated and mannerly as they are, they knew the correct protocol for respect before they arrived on the Otanabee and met their interlocutor. What I have done so far in this essay is imagine a cross-cultural encounter that never took place, a conversation about the meaning of respect derived from Catharine Parr Traill’s early work The Backwoods of Canada and George Copway’s Traditional History and Characteristic Sketches of the Ojibway Nation. But it would not be fair to Traill if we looked only to her earliest work written in Canada and censured her for not respecting literary resources and traditions already existing in her neighbourhood, for, later in her life, Traill did become aware of Nishnaabeg sources around her, and she cited Nishnaabeg oral histories as well as George Copway as authoritative resources. By the time she published The Canadian Crusoes: A Tale of the Rice Lake Plains (1852), a novel for children that went on to feature as one of her most often reprinted books,21 Traill has consulted

and responsibility” (Schieber xxiv). For his part, Thomas Traill was “raised as a gentleman” and “attended Wadham College at Oxford until he matriculated without a degree” before joining the 21st Scottish Regiment of Fusiliers. Traill stood to inherit his father’s Westove estate in the Orkney Islands, but the estate was in constant financial decline, requiring him to seek his fortunes, on the advice of his fellow officer in the Fusiliers, John Dunbar Moodie, in Upper Canada (Ballstadt, Hopkins, and Peterman, I Bless You 10–11). 21 By my count from Schieder’s summary of Canadian Crusoe’s publishing history, there were twenty-one reprintings of the novel before the ceect he edited in 1986. There have been five subsequent reprintings of the ceect edition, for a

76 | Coleman the son of Mosang Poudash, a Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg chief in the Pamashkodeyong area, about the conflicts between the Nishnaabeg and the Kanienkehá:ka (Mohawks) that installed the Nishnaabeg in the region at the start of the eighteenth century (Crusoes 190),22 and she quotes from There are The Life, History, and Travels of Kah-ge-gah-bowh, (George Copway), A Young Indian Chief of the Ojibway Nation, first published in 1847. Having moments when now read his work, Traill bills Copway as “an intelligent Rice Lake Indian” and appeals to him repeatedly as an ethnographic authority.23 One might indigenous think that, with the knowledge she has gathered over the sixteen years since she published the Backwoods of Canada, there is a better possibility technologies, Traill would understand respect as her Nishnaabeg neighbours understood it. Or at least that she would respect their views about it. But such is not ingenuity, and the case. The Crusoe myth, which structures the book, ensures that this is not knowledge are the case. As with Defoe’s novel, Traill’s story for children takes up the story of European adventurers who become lost in a landscape that is simul- held up by Traill taneously rich in provision and terrifyingly uncharted. Like the original, Traill’s Canadian story deploys the central fantasy of a hostile wilderness, for populated by dangerous animals and violent savages, eventually tamed by Christian industriousness. Sharing the irony of Robinson Crusoe, this admiration, process is facilitated and enabled by the labour and industry of a Native character, who provides the European protagonists with necessary knowl- even as the edge of how to survive in this apparent wilderness and then, having pro- vided this crucial knowledge, assimilates to the self-evidently preferable overall narrative Christian and British mores. Thus, there are moments when indigenous technologies, ingenuity, and knowledge are held up by Traill for admira- never questions tion, even as the overall narrative never questions the superiority of British knowledge, religion, and governance. Respect, then, as it is practised in the

total of twenty-seven (see Schieder, “Editor’s Introduction,” xxxi–xxxix). The superiority of page references throughout this essay refer to the McClelland and Stewart 1923 edition of the novel, which is itself based, as is Schieder’s ceect edition, on the British original 1852 published version. 22 Scheider indicates Mosang Poudash (or Paudash), circa 1818 to circa 1893, “was knowledge, a Mississauga or Ojibwa Indian of Rice Lake” (“Explanatory Notes” 266 n141.2). Robert Surtees writes that the Mississauga Ojibways expelled the Iroquois from the north shore of Lake Ontario and the Trent River valley, including the Rice religion, and Lake district, around 1700 (94). Kanienkehá:ka means “people of the flinty ground” after the rocky terrain of the territory in eastern upstate New York from which the Iroquoian people who became known as Mohawks hail. (See governance. Maracle, ix, for a discussion of the names for Iroquian/Six Nations people.) 23 See Crusoes 144 as well as appendices d, f, and k at the back of the novel.

Grappling with Respect | 77 this novel, does not open an ethical space in which a conversation about cultural differences can take place between equals. Nor does the encounter cause self-reflexive reassessment on the part of the novel’s intrusive narrator in regard to her own views and assumptions. Canadian Crusoes follows the fortunes of three children, Hector and Catharine Maxwell, children of a Scottish father and French mother, and Louis Perron, son of their French neighbours, who get lost in the woods sometime in the later half of the eighteenth century near their settlement and end up surviving without adult help on the shores of Pamashkodeyong for almost three years.24 Their chances of survival increase greatly when they encounter “Indiana,” a young Kanienkehá:ka girl, who has been left to die by her Nishnaabeg captors. A crucial moment in the story occurs when Catherine is captured by some Nishnaabeg and is freed when Indiana substitutes herself for Catherine, who, in turn, organizes a quick-witted and successful appeal for Indiana’s release. As with Defoe’s Friday, a servile bond forms the relationship between the Native figure and her European rescuers. The book appeals to young readers who are encouraged to imagine how they would survive alone in the woods, and it ascribes a good deal of Native knowledge to the character of Indiana, allowing Catharine Parr Traill to display her studies in Canadian flora and fauna. In the end, the children learn through a French-Canadian logger and trapper that they have been wandering all this time within eight miles of their home settlement, and they are soon reunited with their families. The book concludes with an allegorical tableau of Canada’s multi-ethnic, interracial future when the French boy Louis marries the Scottish Catharine and the Scot- tish Hector marries the Kanienkehá:ka Indiana.25 Much of this narrative may look at first like respect for French and Native difference, for Traill’s narrator admires Louis’s artisanal skills in carving, cooking, or making other household objects for the children’s cabin. She also shows how Indiana knows the land, how to procure food from it, and how to prepare for winter by making moccasins, snowshoes, or buckskin dresses. But it is Catharine’s empathy and Christian charity

24 See Schieder for an account of how Traill’s reading of a notice in the Coburg Star about a lost six-year-old child inspired several iterations of the theme of lost children in her writings (xvii–xix). 25 Clara Thomas notes that through what are admittedly “racial stereotypes,” Traill shows how “these four children are capable of melding together and as- similating one another’s strengths” (36–37). As Ballstadt puts it: “The Canadian Crusoes offers a microcosm of the society Traill envisions. The cooperation of her characters with one another, Scots, French, and Indian, each contributing his or her strength to a common enterprise, suggests a model for Canada” (174).

78 | Coleman that make her the moral and spiritual centre for the little group, and it is Hector’s mature steadiness and civil decency as the oldest child of the group, not to mention his industriousness, that make him their natural leader. In one of the rare uses of the word “respect” in the novel, we are told that each day seemed to increase [Indiana’s] fondness for Catharine, and she appeared to delight in doing any little service to please and gratify her, but it was towards Hector that she displayed the deepest feeling of affection and respect. It was to him her first tribute of fruit or flowers, furs, moccasins, or ornamental plumage of rare birds was offered. She seemed to turn to him as to a master and protector. (162, emphasis added)

Here, then, the concept of respect remains imbedded in Traill’s redefini- tion of the term away from inherited status or social class and toward the notion that respect ought to be based on individual merit, self-improvement, and gentlemanly decency. Hector is the hardest worker of the three settler children; he plans and initiates ways to improve their shelter, fur- nishings, and food supplies. “To be up and doing, is the maxim of the Canadian,” writes Traill, in a statement that echoes the main themes of her earlier Backwoods of Canada. “The Canadian settler … brings up his family to rely upon their own resources, instead of depending upon his neighbours” (Crusoes 219).26 Hector has learned the settler family’s lessons, and his merits, according to Traill, are readily apparent to all, including the Kanienkehá:ka girl. But there is a revealing moment when Indiana departs from Hector on an important matter. To her credit, Traill traces their divergent views to the different worldviews that inform their encounter, and this moment therefore provides an aperture in the text through which we may perceive a conversation that has the potential to open ethical space. This moment brings us into consideration of the indigenous logic of the gift and the way in which it positions the concept of respect. About halfway through the novel, Indiana shows Hector and Louis how to hunt migrating ducks from a blind of rushes and branches she has woven on their canoe. They have great success, bringing down many

26 Perhaps we can see how this figure of settler independence disabled the kind of neighbourly intimacy that would have allowed the Traills to consult the Copways about local history and lore in Pamashkodeyong. I thank Jennifer Blair for this observation on an earlier draft of this essay.

Grappling with Respect | 79 fowl to furnish their winter larder. I will quote the relevant passage in full. Indiana tells Hector that The Indians offered the first of the birds as an oblation to the Great Spirit, as a grateful acknowledgment of the bounty in having allowed them to gather food thus plentifully for their families; sometimes distant tribes with whom they were on terms of friendship were invited to share the sport and partake of the spoils. Indiana could not understand why Hector did not follow the custom of her Indian fathers, and offer the first duck or the best fish to propitiate the Great Spirit. Hector told her that the God he worshipped desired no sacrifice; that his holy Son, when he came down from heaven and gave himself as a sacrifice for the sins of the world, had satisfied his Father, the Great Spirit, an hundred-fold. (Crusoes 178) What Indiana presents as a sign of gratitude for provisions abundantly received from the land and its ducks and fish—gratitude which spreads from the land and its beings to include human residents (distant tribes)— Hector interprets within a Christian theology shaped by exchange-economy thinking. He did not raise the story of Christ’s sacrifice rendering all gifts unnecessary when Indiana earlier had given him “her first tribute of fruit or flowers, furs, moccasins”; apparently, in that instance, the tribute seemed so appropriate it called for no comment from him or the narrator. But when she offers this kind of tribute to what Traill calls “the Great Spirit,” Hector understands her act by means of the theology of Christ’s sacrifice once and for all.27 27 In a fascinating commentary on European translations of indigenous terms for spiritual forces, Mi’kmaq scholar Marie Battiste and Choctaw scholar James Youngblood (Sákéj) Henderson write, Indigenous peoples often talk about forces of creativity rather than about a personal Creator. The creative processes can be expressed using verbs of being and becoming. Using these sounds, the missionary-linguists imposed the idea of a personal God. Thus, such terms as Knij’kaminau or Niskam (Mi’kmaq), Gichi-mani- doo (Ojibwein-Ikidowinan), Ma’ura (Winnebago), or Ma?heo?e (Tsistsistas or Tsetsehestahase) were manipulated to create God.… Missionaries and ethnologists have often described the Lakota phrase wakan anka (the Great Spirit) as their person God. In La- kota thought, wakan means “sacred” and tanka means “vast” or “great”; thus wankantanka symbolizes all sacred processes in the universe.… Similarly in Cherokee thought and linguistic structure, unehleanvhi represents the spiritual nature of the universe, but it has been reduced to “the creator” by Eurocentric theology.

80 | Coleman Hector’s interpretation of what Rauna Kuokkanen calls “the logic of the gift” reads Christ’s sacrificial death as the fundamental model of gift-giving, and it reads it in terms of an exchange economy. “Forgive us our debts,” read some translations of the Lord’s Prayer, “as we forgive our debtors” (other translations use the word “sins” or “trespasses”). In her historical overview of the lengthy debates within Western anthropology, whereby philosophers, theologians, and economists have tried to understand practices of giving in “archaic” societies, Kuokkanen observes that they most commonly view these practices in terms of sacrifice and its accompanying assumption of gift-giving as exchange. One gives in order to compensate a crime, to build social alliances, to pay off a debt of gratitude, or, oppositely, to anticipate a gift in return (23–29). By contrast, she notes, in “the environment-based worldviews of many indigenous peoples … giving entails an active relationship between the human and natural worlds, one characterized by reciprocity, a sense of collective responsibility, and reverence towards the gifts of the land” (23). Exchange-based concepts of the gift, she notes, are founded upon the scarcity principle that drives a market economy, whereas environment-based concepts of the gift are founded upon the notion of creation’s abundance (30). In an exchange- based economy, reciprocity means that one gift “pays off” another by giving exact value back, allowing the giver “to remain self-contained and to avoid being obligated to anyone” (37). Such concepts accompany the idea of there being no strings attached and that giver and receiver are now even-steven. This is not the place for a rehearsal of the long history of debate among anthropologists over these concepts. Suffice it to say, with Kuokkanen, that these ideas of gift as exchange are associated with the “existence of self-contained individuals with minimal responsibili- ties toward one another” (37). Hector’s reading of Indiana’s gift-giving in terms of Christ’s sacrifice cancels out the necessity for ongoing gift-giving. Although this is not the overt intent of his interpretation, its practical effect is the cancelation of ceremonies of gratitude. By contrast, Indiana’s understanding of the gift is based upon a cos- mology that, far from liberating the individual, embeds all individuals in recognition of and responsibility to a common ecological community. Nishnaabeg writers Basil Johnson (56–57), John Borrows (16–20), and

These phrases are not analogous to the noun-God, Supreme- God, or Son-of-God concept of Eurocentric theology. They are more than simply divergent—they exist in an altogether different realm.... These differences provide different foundations for ethics, personal decision making, and purposes. (103)

Grappling with Respect | 81 Leanne Simpson (110–15) all tell versions of the story of how the deer, moose, and caribou left the land of the Nishnaabeg for the protection of the crows because the Nishnaabeg had disrespected them, abusing their generosity by wasting animal meat and not treating animal bodies with reverence. When the leader of the Nishnaabeg asked them how they could make amends, the chief deer said they must honour the animals by not wasting their flesh and by leaving tobacco in recognition of the anguish humans have caused them. Ceremonies of thanksgiving were ways to honour their interdependent relationship. Judy DaSilva, Nishnaabekwe from Grassy Narrows, explains that, to this day, When a hunter kills a moose, there is a certain part of the moose that the hunter takes off, and leaves in the forest, and with that the hunter will say a few words to thank the moose for providing food for his family … My brother said our grand- mother told him that you do not get an animal because you are a good hunter, but because the animal feels sorry for you and gives himself to you to feed your family. This is why when our people hunt, these thoughts are ingrained in their minds and their hearts and they have great respect for the animals they get. (quoted in Simpson 110–11)28 In Indiana’s version of the gift, giving back the first duck is part of a tradition of respect and gratitude for the natural community’s bounty. The Haudenosaunee people, of which her Kanienkehá:ka ancestors are one nation, are renowned for the Ohén:ton Karihwatéhkwen, translated into English as the Thanksgiving Address or The Greeting, a ceremonial statement of recognition and thanks to all the human and non-human members of the surrounding world—from water and grass to the Thunders, Moon, and Sun—that make everyday human life possible. This address is performed at all important gatherings and meetings in order to ensure a “good mind” among people who are called upon to make plans and take decisions.29

28 An avid hunter himself, Copway describes similar protocols of gifting he was taught by elders: “When you kill a deer, or bear, never appropriate it to yourself alone, if others are in want; never withhold from them what the Great Spirit has blessed you with” (Life 83). He also describes how, when his Nishnaabeg relatives kill a bear, “The head and paws are festooned with colour cloth and ribbons, and suspended at the upper end of the Indian’s lodge. At the nose they bestow a very liberal quantity of tobacco, as a sort of peace-offering to the dead animal” (Traditional 30). 29 For different English versions of the Ohén:ton Kariwatéhkwen see Tom Porter (Sakokweniónkwas) 8–26 and Taiaiake Alfred 13–16.

82 | Coleman In Hector’s and Indiana’s different understandings of the gift, we encounter a massive gulf between settler-Canadian worldviews and indigenous ones. Think about the very different understandings of the treaty process, for example, that come from once-and-for-all exchange thinking In Hector’s and (we give you this money, this paper, in exchange for this land in perpetu- ity) as compared to an understanding that gifts are given repeatedly and Indiana’s ceremonially in recognition of shared interdependencies within an ecosys- tem. In the first, the treaty exchange reifies the relationship by expunging different under- obligation. The past is now the past—signed, sealed, and delivered. Then think about the different implications of these two ways of understanding standings of the treaty giving in relation to the environment. Simpson writes: gift, we Canadians are taught that treaties are legal agreements through which Indians ceded our lands for cash. The Canadian char- encounter a acterization of treaties is almost like a receipt for a business transaction…. Indigenous Peoples, however, have a different perspective on the history of treaty making. At the time of massive gulf contact we had been making treaties with animal nations and with other Indigenous nations for generations…. [N]egotiating between set- treaty is about persistence and patience. It is about ensuring the relationship for the long term. It is about commitment tler-Canadian and compassion. It is about a love of the land and a love for the people. (107–08) worldviews In exchange-based concepts, objects (money, promises of education, provisions) are exchanged for land, which is an object, a property, whereas and indigenous under the indigenous logic of the gift, the land is alive, a being, a community of human and more-than-human relationships. Under this conception, ones. the giving of gifts serves as a regular reminder of the kinships between all inhabitants of an environment upon which the welfare of all those inhabitants depend. It is never even-steven; not signed, nor sealed, nor delivered. The meaning of respect, under the logic of the gift, is a cherished relationship of shared recognition and responsibility. The discussion between Hector and Indiana opens, unfortunately, only a momentary aperture in Traill’s text. For despite the huge philosophical and political divergence opened up by their differing views of the gift, the novel quickly closes this potential ethical space for engagement. The novel leads us to believe that Indiana is convinced of the superiority of Catha- rine’s and Hector’s Christian British way of life and is assimilated to Traill’s vision of an interracial, interethnic Canada governed and ordered by white civility. George Copway may have risen to the status of an “intelligent Rice Lake Indian” by the time Traill wrote Canadian Crusoes, but this does

Grappling with Respect | 83 not mean that his writing about respect as based upon an interdependent understanding of nature, one which perceives a “chain connecting heaven with earth” that extends well beyond the world of human interactions to include the more-than-human community of the earth’s flora and fauna as well as the world of spirits and the implicate order—none of this means that the Nishnaabeg intelligence Traill recognizes many years after arriv- ing in the region causes Traill to readjust her preconceptions. Perhaps the compromises in Copway’s writing made it difficult for her to see the ways in which it challenged her own views. Traill goes on to become renowned for her botanical knowledge of Upper Canada, conveyed to the public in her 1868 book Canadian Wild Flowers. But this knowledge remains contained within the world of the Linnean system of classification. Her love of nature may serve as a means of “adoring the Creator through his glorious works” (Backwoods 12), but it does not become a site of encounter with the Nishnaabeg or Kanienkehá:ka logic of the gift. Nor does it mean that nineteenth-century Nishnaabeg literacy, of which Copway is but one instance, enters her awareness as a legitimate foundation for a new Canadian literature. By tracing the reasons why a dialogue between Traill’s and Copway’s worlds could not take place, by investigating the conditions determining the mode of encounter between contemporaries like Copway and Traill, we can learn to see what the epistemological differences were that made real conversation impossible. And because these differences are not limited to nineteenth-century writers but remain prevalent as forms of sanctioned ignorance30 in our own time, perhaps by becoming aware of these differences we can enter consciously into the delicate, difficult work of creating ethical spaces wherein new conversations, ones previously missed, can begin. Fortunately for us, the archive of Nishnaabeg history, stories, and teachings was not destroyed by Traill’s dismissal. Indeed, Nishnaabeg literary writing has flourished since Copway penned some of its earliest works, and some of the most prolific and renowned indigenous writers in the world—from Basil Johnston, Gerald Vizenor, and Louise Erdrich to Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm, Drew Hayden Taylor, John Borrows, and Leanne Simpson—continue to draw from and expand upon that Nish- naabeg archive. The vitality and power of this archive is most recently demonstrated in Jill Doerfler, Niigaanwewidam James Sinclar, and Heidi Kiiwetinepinesiik Stark’s Centering Anishinaabeg Studies: Understanding

30 See Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s discussion of this coinage in Death of a Dis- cipline 9, 31.

84 | Coleman the World through Stories (2013). Works such as this show that there are more and better opportunities for new conversations, for the opening of new ethical spaces, than ever before. Let us not miss them again.

Acknowledgements I am grateful to Jennifer Blair, Hayden King, and two anonymous reviewers for esc for their comments on earlier versions of this essay.

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