CANADA
The Tyee
By Mark Abley, Today, TheTyee.ca
[Editor’s note: Author Mark Abley has long been haunted by the contradictory figure of Duncan Campbell Scott, known both as the architect of Canada’s most destructive Aboriginal policies and as one of the nation’s major poets. In a new biography, Abley holds the longtime deputy minister of Indian Affairs to account for Canada’s deplorable abuses of indigenous children, while also acknowledging the chilling attitudes that initiated the residential school program he supervised. With permission from Douglas & McIntyre, we reprint an excerpt of this frank dramatization of early 20th century colonialism.]
The traditional ways were dying: Duncan Campbell Scott believed this.
Nearly everyone believed it. The past was nomadic; the future was agricultural and industrial; he trusted it would also be imperial. The poet in him had started off as something of a cultural nationalist, keen to evoke Canadian landscapes, proud to write on Canadian themes. Yet the poet in Scott was at the mercy of his political convictions, his public faith. As an old man in 1939, he fulfilled a commission to celebrate a royal tour by delivering a servile ode in which he promised the people of this country would “do our part in high and pure endeavour / To build a peaceful Empire round the throne.” The CBC broadcast the poem from its Halifax studios as the king and queen were sailing out of Halifax harbour back to an England on the brink of war. Three months before Scott died, he semi-facetiously wrote to a friend, “Why don’t you order a poem on some special subject, say the marriage of Princess Elizabeth, if the CBC would pay me for it!” Against what he had called, in his ode, the “ageless, deep devotion” of Canadians to the Crown, he found it only natural to believe that Aboriginal cultures, languages and ways of life were doomed.
The surprise, or paradox, or twist of the knife is that while doing his utmost to enforce government control over indigenous people, Scott made them the subject of his most vibrant writing. Of the 11 pages Margaret Atwood found for him in the New Oxford Book of Canadian Verse, eight are devoted to poems about Indians. These items form a small minority of his total output; they also show his talents at their best. When John Masefield spoke at a memorial service held for Scott in St. Martin-in-the-Fields, London, the British poet laureate declared that Scott had been deeply impressed by many of the Indians he had met: “Admiration is a great help to understanding. In his poems and stories about them we are brought, perhaps for the very first time, to a living knowledge of what they are.”
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