The Figure of the Indigene in Settler Canadian Children’ Literature

Cheryl Cowdy

“The importance of the alien within cannot be overstated. In their need to become ‘native,’ to belong here, whites in Canada, New Zealand, and Australia have adopted a process which I have termed ‘indigenization.’ A peculiar word, it suggests the impossible necessity of becoming indigenous. For many writers, the only chance for indigenization seemed to be through writing about the humans who are truly indigenous, the Indians, Inuit, Maori, and Aborigines”

(Terry Goldie 1989).

Just as writers of literature for adults published in settler colonial nations adopted a process of “indigenization” to rationalize their claims of belonging, the authors of American, British and Canadian children’s literature set in Canada had a complicated relationship to Indigeneity that is evident in the illustrations within the books, and on their spines and covers.  Depictions of Indigeneity within adventure stories, historical fiction and Robinsonades tended to feature figures of the Indigene as “noble savages” and as fierce warriors who represent the “threat to civilisation and the establishment of a Canadian society.”[1] Texts by key authors of this period, such as Evelyn Everett-Green, J.M. Oxley, R.M. Ballantyne, G.A. Henty, and Egerton Ryerson Young, highlight the central role of the figure of the Indigene and the process of indigenization in the enculturation of child settler-readers to the nation-building project in Canada. As these illustrations demonstrate, stereotypical representations of Indigenous characters as warriors and “noble savages” reinforce the message that Indigeneity was a threat that needed to be circumscribed into the cultural values of the colonizers, either through death, defeat or assimilation. When Indigenous characters do function as allies or “valued guides in the wilderness” to the British child settler/ explorer, they often do so in the role of servant or buffoon.[2] As Elizabeth Galway argues, “the repeated portrayal of the Indians’ superior skill in the outdoors figures them as closer to nature than their white counterparts, which underscores their perceived distance from civilisation, which the white man’s ineptitude only emphasises.”[3]

Complicating such stereotypical representations of the Indigene in early Canadian settler children’s literature are the poems, short stories and autobiographical sketches of Tekahionwake (E. Pauline Johnson). Born on the Six Nations Reserve near present-day Brantford in Ontario, Tekahionwake was of mixed Haudenosaunee and European descent. Known primarily for her poetry collection Flint and Feather (1912), Tekahionwake also published short stories in juvenile periodicals including The Boys’ World; some of the pieces, such as “A Red Girl’s Reasoning,” in the posthumously-published The Moccasin Maker (1913),are remarkable for depicting the perspective of a young Indigenous woman and her complicated relationship to identity.

Later examples in the collection demonstrate the continuing fascination held by white settler colonial authors for appropriating the traditional stories of Canada’s First Nations and publishing books for children with subjects relating to Indigeneity.  Titles such as Isabel M. Reekie’s Red Paddles (1968), Tales the Totem Tell by Hugh Weatherby (1944), Clara Lois Tyner’s Totem, Tipi and Tumpline (1955)and Tales of Nanabozho by Dorothy M. Reid(1963)are among those published in the later nineteenth-century by white retellers, particularly during the heightened nationalism surrounding Canada’s Centennial year in 1967. However well-researched some of these books may have been, it is evident that they sought to entertain and instruct settler child readers with Romanticized versions of traditional Indigenous stories, that their illustrations often trivialize the Indigenous figures in the stories, marking their complicated relationship to the process of indigenization identified by Terry Goldie, and the history of cultural appropriation by white settler Canadian authors.