Corps de l’article

This year marks one hundred years that the Canadian Historical Association/Société historique du Canada (CHA/SHC) has published a journal. The journal has gone by three names: the Report of the Annual Meeting/Rapport de l’assemblée annuelle (1922–65); Historical Papers/Communications historiques (1966–89); and the current name, Journal of the Canadian Historical Association/La Revue de la Société historique du Canada (JCHA/RSHC, 1990–present). In its different iterations, what I will shorthand as the JCHA/RSHC has served several purposes: as a repository for the organizational records of the CHA/SHC and its affiliates; as an archive of the annual conferences, or parts of them; and a peer-reviewed forum for historical ideas, arguments, and research, much of it focused on Canada. In its different iterations, the JCHA/RSHC is a meaningful record of the views and arguments of the self-styled profession of history of Canada and in Canada for over a century.

My contribution to this discussion of the JCHA/RSHC examines how colonialism has been addressed in the journal. This analysis is admittedly selective, and I am quite certain I have missed something. The argument made here is also connected to other topics tackled in this special issue. These includes Allan Downey’s analysis of Indigenous history, James Walker’s discussion of race, Lara Campbell’s examination of gender, and Penny Bryden’s analysis of political history. The history of colonialism traced here is not one of absence to appearance, or celebratory to critical. In the first half-century of the JCHA/RSHC’s publication, colonialism was often discussed in distinctly celebratory terms and paired with the language of white supremacy. It was also often registered through a colony-to-nation framework that centred settlers as the object of inquiry and naturalized colonialism as a developmental stage preceding nationhood. A new pattern emerged in the last decades of the twentieth century with the renewed focus on Indigenous history and growing interest in thinking of Canadian history through the lens of settler colonialism. This trajectory was never consistent or linear and was always marked by gaps and returns. Substantial discussions of Indigenous histories complicated the consensus about colonialism and its inevitability that marked many of the JCHA/RSHC’s essays in the publication’s first decades. Calls for a return to a focus on British empires, peoples, and sentiments in the 1990s and 2000s likewise troubled the overall shift toward overtly critical discussions of colonialism. In 2022, historians Crystal Gail Fraser and Allyson Stevenson called on Canadian historians to scrutinize how our discipline has contributed to colonialism and the ongoing dispossession of Indigenous people, communities, and nations.[1] Taking note of how historians have engaged and failed to engage histories of colonialism in the JHCA/RSHC is one of the many necessary responses to this and related calls for knowledge and accountability. By taking note of how colonialism has been discussed in the JCHA/SHRC over the course of a century, I hope to contribute to a wider conversation about connections between colonialism, Indigenous dispossession, and the work of history and historians.

Historians have long taken pains to distinguish between imperialism, understood as the creation and maintenance of a formal political empire, and colonialism, understood more capaciously to include the economic, social, and cultural work of establishing rule of a people and territory by another. Such distinctions necessarily blur in practice. This is perhaps especially true when historians centre the histories of colonized places. Antoinette Burton argues that historians of imperial Britain have tended to see imperialism as conclusive, orderly, and seamless, while historians of “colonialism in situ” have emphasized conflict, disruption, and disorder.[2] We can understand colonialism as the exploitation that undergirded the expansion of Europe for the last four hundred years.[3] This exploitation is simultaneously political, economic, cultural, environmental. It is also gendered and embodied. Colonialism includes both the formal and informal practices of exploitation and rule. There is no one single history of colonialism. Colonialism has played and continues to play out differently both in different locations and at different points in time, and takes a number of specific forms.[4] In the context of the parts of northern North America now territorialized as Canada, colonialism is what Glen Coulthard calls a “structured dispossession,” where economic, gendered, racial, and state power work to continually facilitate and consolidate the dispossession of Indigenous lands and resources.[5] One way this dispossession is continually secured is through the administration of settler populations, communities, and governments — often along differential lines of race, gender, class, citizenship status, and more.

How has colonialism, defined in these terms, been navigated in a century of the JCHA/RSHC’s publication? The Report of the Annual Meeting/Rapport de l’assemblée annuelle was first published in 1922, following the formation of the Canadian Historical Association/Société historique du Canada (CHA/SHC) in the same year. The journal was one among a series of watersheds in the process of creating a self-conscious historical profession that had begun in the 1890s and was consolidated in the interwar years. What Donald Wright dubs the “boundary work” of the historical profession had points of flexibility and hard edges.[6] Certainly the Report of the Annual Meeting had no apparent commitment to a narrow disciplinary practice. The JCHA/RSHC’s early issues reflected a range of contributors with many interests and different expertise. As Marlene Shore explains in her study of the Canadian Historical Review, the interwar era was a time of methodological and disciplinary plurality, and that there was a “lack of agreement among Canadian historians about certain aspects of professionalization.”[7] Significant numbers of contributing authors worked for different branches of the Canadian state, including the National Museum’s Marius Barbeau and the first director of the Geological Society of Canada, F.J. Alcock.[8]

By any number of definitions, colonialism was a central concern of these authors and of the journal they contributed to. In the 1920s, some of these discussions were clearly invested in an enthusiasm for empire, especially the British Empire, and invested in the hierarchical ideas of race that underwrote it. In 1925, University of Toronto historian George Wrong contributed an essay called “The Two Races in Canada.” He wrote here of “the masterful white man,” and yoked himself and his presumptive audience to this mission, explaining that “we ourselves belong to this race.”[9] Daniel Meister’s The Racial Mosaic: A Pre-History of Canadian Multiculturalism argues that whiteness had two boundaries: “between white and non-white” and between “grades of whiteness.”[10] Wrong believed in whiteness, and in divisions within it. Wrong characterized English-speaking Ontarians and their relationship to empire and to their French-speaking neighbours. Ontario was an enthusiastic if somewhat unimpressive member of empire: “They speak English, what literature they read is English, they feel themselves as an important part of the great British Empire, and they have reverence, sometimes passionate, for that symbol of their patriotism, the British Flag.”[11] Ideas of white superiority were combined with misogyny to legitimate the dispossession of Indigenous societies. In 1929, Saskatchewan-based historian and librarian A.S. Morton published an analysis of the nineteenth-century Red River settlement. He described the Hudson’s Bay Company leadership as “characteristically English in being slow to convince themselves that their system was antiquated” but, more importantly, “truly English in the courage with which they faced it, and in the practical wisdom of their final determination.” He described the English as “our unmilitary race.” The history of the Red River he offered included efficient English management, the “squaws and dusky families” and wives of retiring officers, and “the restless and turbulent swarm of half-breeds.”[12]

Early twentieth-century whiteness, as historians Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds argued, was “a transnational form of racial identification,” one that was “at once global in its power and personal in its meaning, the basis of geo-political alliances and a subjective sense of self.”[13] It also helped animate the presumption that colonies, or at least ones inhabited by white people, should and usually did progress into self-governing nations. In the first half-century of the CHA/SHC’s journal, colonialism was perhaps most legible when seen in terms of a developmental transit from colony to nation. This presumed process envisioned a specific role for history and historians. Catherine Hall has shown how British historian and Whig politician Thomas Babbington Macaulay (1800–59) used history in the service of a specific vision of nation. Only some peoples were destined for modernity and liberty, and “it was the possession of their history that secured their progress.”[14] In the context of Canada in the interwar period, history had a different mission: to secure the status of nationhood and build connections between its principal actors, French- and English-speaking settlers. Lawrence Burpee was the English Secretary of the International Joint Commission, and a founder of the CHA/SHC. He explained the birth of the organization as an effort to create a “national historical society,” one that would join other groups working “in bringing into more perfect harmony the two great races that constitute the Canadian people.”[15]

Understood in these terms, colonialism was what settler people and historians were working to separate themselves from. It was a matter of politics, but also of sentiment and connection. In a 1927 article on “The Development of Imperial Relations,” W.T. Waugh explained that the self-governing colonies, including Canada, were “no longer ‘colonies’ at all, but ‘Dominions.’” He further suggested that Britain herself had little interest in maintaining its power, especially over racialized people. Empire was “an unhappy word” that obscured the fact that British people “have always shown themselves singularly incapable of ruling such an Empire, and they have rarely betrayed any wish to govern white men who dwell beyond the limits of the British Isles.”[16] A US-based scholar of poetry who published in the JCHA/RSHC in 1944 defined colonialism as “a spirit that gratefully accepts a place of subordination, that looks elsewhere for its standards of excellence and is content to imitate with a modest and timid conservatism the product of a parent tradition.”[17]

The vocabulary of kinship, family, and developmental growth was critical to making these metaphors of colonialism and imperialism hold together. Framing colonialism as a matter of care, concern, and tutelage, sometimes overbearing, would appeal to historians until the middle decades of the twentieth century. In 1945, a footnote in UBC historian Walter Sage’s CHA/SHC presidential address defined colonialism as “the attitude of mind which emphasizes the larger loyalties to Mother Country and Empire, almost to the complete exclusion of loyalty to one’s native colony, province, or country.” Sage admitted that it was “impossible to draw any fixed and definite line of demarcation between the colonial and national periods,” but still believed that the former would proceed the latter.[18] In 1959, prize-winning US-based historian Lawrence H. Gipson contributed a discussion of North American British colonies in 1763 to the JCHA/RSHC. He framed it as a story of children and parents, and more particularly mothers. He saw 1763 as a story of “a dilemma that can arise when a mother country suddenly finds itself in possession of mature offspring no longer willing to keep in leading strings,” no longer interested in seeing “her government as that of a protecting parent but rather as that of a wicked and tyrannical enemy.”[19]

The ways that colonialism, imagined as both a part of history, an analytic frame, and a lived present, was framed in this publication reflects who wrote for the journal and who their imagined audience was. The dispossession of Indigenous people could show up in these discussions, briefly. In 1953, Arthur Lower explained French Canada’s “passionate love of the land it had made its own and the soil it had won from the wilderness and the natives” before returning to his main topic, the relationship between French and English.[20] At other times, essays in the JCHA/RSHC negated dispossession wholesale, against all evidentiary odds. One article told the story of Canada’s 1872 Dominion Lands Act without reference to Indigenous people, rights, or treaty.[21]

Yet the erasure of Indigenous peoples and histories and the elision of histories of dispossession and colonialism were never total or easily secured. Like the Proceedings of the Royal Society of Canada studied by Ian Wereley, the JCHA/RSHC excluded Indigenous people from its authors but regularly included material on Indigenous histories. As Wereley argues, this combination of erasure and presence represents “a desire to physically, culturally, and intellectually conquer Indigenous peoples and their knowledge.”[22] Indigenous history was part of the Annual Report’s scope from the outset. The yearly reports provided by the Historic Sites boards were careful to include both “Prehistoric” and “Historic.” This framing codified the presumed distinction between Indigenous and colonial histories, but it also identified both as meaningful topics of inquiry. Articles specifically addressing Indigenous history included historian and judge F.W. Howay’s 1930 essay on Siksika leader Crowfoot.[23] The fur trade was a significant concern in the early decades of the JCHA/SHRC. In his 1925 presidential address, Burpee described it as a topic of “intense interest, tied up as it is with the history of exploration and western expansion.” Part of the appeal was how the fur trade blurred and challenged presumptions of racial lines. Burpee explained that canoes were “manned by crews that are practically indistinguishable though some are red and others supposed to be white.”[24]

As the twentieth century wore on, authors in the JCHA/RSHC would sometimes distance themselves from languages of racial hierarchy and superiority. In 1955, historian Blair Neatby published a discussion of Prime Minister Wilfrid Laurier and imperialism. Neatby characterized the “most articulate form” of Canadian nationalism as one “based on the assumption of racial superiority: the belief that Anglo-Saxons were destined for world leadership.”[25] Neatby did not accord much historical weight to this kind of nationalism. But in identifying it as a component of the past and analyzing it, he suggested the possibility that historians might be scholars of this kind of racial thinking rather than examples of it.

Yet histories of North American history premised on a dichotomy between supposedly savage Indigenous people and supposedly civilized Canadian imperialism continued to appear in the JCHA/RSHC. In 1952 George Stanley had returned to Canada from doctoral studies at Oxford and was teaching at the Royal Military College. He published “The Indian Background of Canadian History,” a sweeping historical analysis and a telling defence of Canadian policy published at the height of the residential school system. Stanley’s article is one we ought to revisit in light of Fraser and Stevenson’s call to address how historians of Canada produced work that aided the development and justified the maintenance of a system of residential schooling that lasted for over a century.[26] Canadian Indian policy, Stanley explains, aspires “to train them in habits of self-support within the general economic structure of the country, and to encourage them to adopt the religions and the culture of the whites.” To Stanley, this is a story of civilization and its power and authority, something that “the Indians of Western Canada” did not “feel the full force of” until the middle of the nineteenth century.[27]

In 1966, the journal was renamed Historical Papers/Communications historiques. The inclusion of reports from CHA/SHC officers and sub-organizations and lists of members became less regular. The revamped journal looked more like a standard scholarly journal, minus the book reviews, and including the annual presidential address and a list of members. Many of the patterns of discussing colonialism persisted, particularly in the context of Canada. In 1970, W.L. Morton, then affiliated with the University of Manitoba, contributed an essay that continued Stanley’s line of analysis. Morton explained that the great question of Red River settlement was one of civilization, and where Indigenous people fit and failed to fit in it: “How, finally, was the Indian to be brought into a Christian community, how was the half-breed to be accepted into white society?” he asked.[28] Here was a clear example of the civilization and savagery dichotomy that Fraser and Stevenson argue “served, and continues to serve, as an ideological justification for settler colonial relations premised on the naturalization of state governance of Indigenous lands and bodies.”[29]

From the 1970s onwards, these dichotomies and hierarchies and the ideological work they did would be challenged by new scholarship on Indigenous history published in the pages of the JCHA/SHRC. Necessarily, this prompted different — and more critical — discussions of colonialism. Only one year after Morton analyzed the Red River settlement through the language of Christian civilization and Indian and “half-breed” assimilation, James W. St. G. Walker offered a close reading of how Canadian historians had dealt with “The Indian.” He noted a suite of issues that Mary Jane Logan McCallum would return to in the 2010s: the tired racism, the reluctance to accord full humanity to Indigenous people, and the tendency to associate Indigenous people with geography and a few select events and chronologies.[30] In making this argument, Walker also confronted histories of colonialism, noting that “Canadian historical writing reflects a belief in the manifest destiny of European civilization spreading across the continent,” and the “good Indian” was one who assisted white settlement, lived on reserve, and “signed away his land without resistance.”[31] In the 1970s, an emerging field of Indigenous history offered different kinds of readings. In the pages of the JCHA/SHRC authors sketched, in broad strokes, the parameters of an emerging field of Indigenous history, one with an almost entirely non-Indigenous authorship.

Some of the work that is generally included in discussions of Indigenous history might also be understood as new histories of colonialism. Simon Fraser University’s Robin Fisher published a 1975 article that argued that British Columbia’s Joint Commission on Indian Land demonstrated “that the provincial government, representing settler society, would not willingly make any concessions to the Indians on the crucial matter of land.”[32] A few years later, Olive Patricia Dickason offered a broad analysis of European-Indigenous contact that was, in effect, a discussion of the dreams of colonization, and the resistance and accommodation that Indigenous people responded with.[33] Sylvia Van Kirk’s 1977 essay was a powerful insistence of the possibility of narrating Indigenous women’s history in the face of a secondary literature that presumed its impossibility. In this essay Van Kirk also provided a different way of understanding a significant chapter in the history of colonialism in northern North America, the western fur trade.[34]

Discussions of colonialism were also reoriented by a reshaped and sharpened attention to the global. The journals of the CHA/SHC had never been narrowly local or national, despite all the commitment to a particular kind of Canadian and bilingual nation-building. The journal was renamed the Journal of the Canadian Historical Association/Review de la Société historique du Canada in 1990. In the 2000s, issues edited by Steven Li, Joan Sangster, and me put the colonial and the global into direct conversation. A 2006 issue on the theme of “Colonialism and Postcolonialism” paired discussions of postcolonialism in African history with a discussion of First Nations participation in the “Indian Pavilion” at Canada’s Expo 67.[35] Three years later, an issue focused on social histories of empire had three subsections that crossed continents and historiographies: one on violence, gender, and empire; one on Canada, empire, and decolonization; and one on empire in south and southeast Asia.[36]

We might see the increasing purchase of settler colonialism as a framework for understanding Canadian history as a logical outcome of the continued growth and expansion of Indigenous history and this renewed and revamped attention to the global. The term “settler colonialism” shows up in the pages of the JCHA/RSHC with new and focused attention in the 2000s. In 2002, Timothy Stanley analyzed the Victoria Chinese Student’s Strike of 1922–3 as part of “the Anglo-European settler colonialism that dominated British Columbia.”[37] In 2006, Ryan Eyford showed how the 1876–7 smallpox epidemic in Manitoba’s Interlake “demonstrates how Aboriginal dispossession and settler colonialism were linked through the overlapping governmental apparatuses of territoriality and public health.”[38]

Discussion of settler colonialism became more legible in the pages of the JCHA/RSHC in the 2010s, discussed more often and with wider aim and reach. In 2015, the journal published responses to James Daschuk’s prize-winning 2014 book Clearing the Plains: Disease, Politics of Starvation, and the Loss of Indigenous Life. Taken together, the responses by Carolyn Podruchny, Mary-Ellen Kelm, Ian Mosby, Susan Neylan, and Daschuk’s own reflection identified a thicket of issues around genocide, colonialism, and the work of historians that has marked historians’ conversations in the decade that followed.[39] Another set of responses to a prize-winning monograph, this one Sarah Carter’s 2016 book, Imperial Plots: Women, Land, and the Spadework of Colonialism on the Canadian Prairies, show the possibilities of thinking about settler colonialism in gendered terms.[40] So does Joan Sangster’s 2017 presidential address on “Confronting Our Colonial Past.”[41]

It is in this context that Allan Greer began his 2019 historiographical essay with the comment that “Suddenly, we see term settler colonial/ism everywhere.” Greer calls for a more nuanced understanding of the kinds of colonialism practiced in the northern parts of North America over the longue durée, one that complicates what he calls the “always-already projection of settler colonialism into the distant past” and acknowledge the import of other modes of colonial exploitation, including extractivism.[42] In many ways, Laura Ishiguro’s entry on settler colonialism in northwestern North America provides a model of how to recognize the significance of this form of colonialism without generalizing it to spatial or temporal contexts where it is ill-fitted, or buying into its self-aggrandizing image. Before 1900, Ishiguro argues, “the emerging settler order in northwestern North America could be both powerful and partial, inconsistent in its imposition, and complicated it is effects and never inevitable or without resistance.”[43]

In different ways, historians are reaching for ways to think about northern North America in ways that take seriously ancient Indigenous histories and the range of forms of colonialism practiced on these lands and waters. Settler colonialism may not be the only one, but it has provided scholars with ways to think outside a brittle and totalizing settler state that works to render Indigenous histories and sovereignties fungible and invisible. As Karine Duhamel argues in her 2017 JCHA/RSHC article on re-storying Canada in the wake of Canada 150, settler colonialism provides a way of thinking that “aims to transcend colonialism as naturalized, normalized, unquestioned, and unchallenged.”[44]

The concern that the focus on settler colonialism would serve to further detract historians’ attention away from other histories, including that of the fur trade, is not readily borne out by the example of the JCHA/RSHC. In different ways, three essays published between 2015 and 2019 show how recent work on global histories and the field of Indigenous Studies could work to engage fur trade histories. Krista Barclay uses family artifacts and community records to centre Indigenous women in the history of fur trade families who relocated to southern Ontario. Erin Millions also examines migration and material culture, but her emphasis is on how photographs, burial sites, and gravestones can be used as archives for histories of elite, Indigenous fur trade children who travelled overseas for school. In 2019, Elyse Bell traced the material and emotional experience of home in the correspondence of an elite, white fur trade family.[45] The 2016 JCHA/RSHC forum engaging Jean Barman’s prize-winning study of Indigenous women and French-Canadian men in the Pacific Northwest also suggest how the fur trade continues to be an import focus for historians working on Canada’s colonial and Indigenous histories.[46]

In the last five decades, there have been significant changes in how historians writing in the JCHA/RSHC have conceptualized and analyzed colonialism. The journal has witnessed a marked shift toward more critical analyses of colonial regimes and societies that attend to connections with Indigenous histories and global histories of empire.” But the trajectory of this arc has been neither uncomplicated nor uncontested. In his 1993 CHA/SHC presidential address, Phillip Buckner argued that Canada had been “relegated to the margins of imperial historiography” and that historians of Canada had returned the disinterest by becoming locked into “a teleological framework which is obsessed with the evolution of Canadian autonomy.”[47] Buckner calls on historians of Canada to return to their earlier interest in the ties between Canada and the British Empire, and has little to say about where Indigenous people or sovereignties might fit. Like some of the contributing authors to the JCHA/RSHC earlier in the twentieth century, Buckner imagines the story of empire as one of essentially agreeable settlers and metropolitans. C.P. Champion’s 2005 JCHA/RHSC essay on Britishness and Canadians makes similar moves with different evidence and interests. Champion explains that there “is little in Canadian life and culture that does not reflect Canada’s emergence as an organically British society that has changed externally, adapting to time and circumstances, without losing its British essence.”[48]

These historians were, in essence, suggesting a return to an older kind of historical practice and way of seeing Canada and the British Empire. Some two decades later, these arguments changed into critiques of contemporary historical scholarship and professional advocacy, especially that engaging histories of Canada, Indigenous people, and genocide.[49] These discussions are not Canada’s alone. They are mirrored in debates on the historiography of the British Empire in the United Kingdom, and scholarship on slavery and white supremacy in the United States.[50] In the Canadian context, pushback to the new scholarship on colonialism and Canada did not appear in the pages of the JCHA/RHSC or similar journals as much as it did in open letters, newspaper op-eds, and online forums. In these places, critics made clear that the changes that have marked how historians write about colonialism and Indigenous people have been far from uncontested.

Conclusion

Colonialism has always been part of the CHA/SHC’s journal. How colonialism has been analyzed and discussed has changed over the century of the journal’s publication, and the change has occurred in a discernable pattern. In the first half-century of the JCHA/RSHC’s publication, colonialism was often discussed in terms that either celebrated or naturalized the exploitation of Indigenous lands and resources by European empires and centred the experience of non-Indigenous people, their languages, and identities. Colonialism appeared most often in terms that presumed a relatively orderly and desirable transition from colony to nation. Discussions of colonialism changed in the 1970s, and this shift is inseparable from the reframing and growth of Indigenous history that occurred in these years. From the 2000s onwards, historians increasingly explained Canadian history as a chapter in a wider history of settler colonialism.

These changes were uneven, contested, and variable. In the first decades of the JCHA/RSHC (since 1990 onwards), substantial examinations of Indigenous history occasionally complicated the brittle and sharply racialized discussions of colonialism that were mainly on offer. Calls to return to a focus on the cheerful, consensual connections between Canadians and the British Empire appeared as historians were responding to the reckonings of twenty-first century Canada with more critical evaluations of the relationship between Canada and Indigenous people. In the last decades, and especially since the release of the final report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada in 2015, we have witnessed some historians in Canada working to address the role that colonialism and dispossession have played and continue to play in the discipline of history, in the books we write, the classes we teach, what communities and audiences we are answerable to, and what histories we let drive the narrative. These efforts have been tentative and partial. They have been limited by the discipline’s longstanding histories and the deep grooves they have worn in our departments, publications, and organizations. Attempts to address the connections between the work of historians and the projects of colonialism have been far from universal. The work that has been done has been met with support and enthusiasm, but also contestation, ambivalence, and inaction. These are costs that are not borne equally and, as Fraser and Stevenson remind us, have fallen hardest on the small numbers of Indigenous historians working in Canada. The work of addressing the relationship between the discipline of history and colonization is enormous, and it will not be done easily or quickly. One small part is to take seriously the way that historians have addressed colonization, including in institutions like the CHA/SHC’s journal.