Jonathan Kay on the odd ways that the “noble savage” imaginary model is holding back actual First Nations people in Canada:

A few months ago, I spoke at a small academic conference in Toronto about the future of Canada. As with many events of this type in my country, it began with sacred rituals. An Ojibway elder, described to us as a “keeper of sacred pipes,” took to the podium and showed us a jar of medicine water. In her private rituals, the elder explained, she would pray with this water, and talk to it as she smoked her pipes. After this, she instructed us to join her in “paying respect to the four directions” — which required that we stand up and face the indicated compass point, moving clockwise from north to west as she performed her rituals. “With this sacred water, we smudge this space,” she said. “Let us live the lesson of being in harmony with all creatures.”

Then the elder instructed us to bend down, touch the floor, and say migwetch — thank you, in her Ojibway language — to signal our gratitude. The room was full of middle-aged former politicians who, like me, did not want to seem impolite. But after turning in place on command, this floor-touching business seemed a little much. Nevertheless, the men and women around me began hunching downward, extending palms toward the floorboards, until the whole room resembled a congregation at prayer. There were only perhaps a half-dozen of us who hesitated slightly, and were now anxiously casting eyes about the room for co-conspirators.

I tried to look nonchalant as I remained upright. But I wondered whether some conference official would call me out for this act of defiance. Or perhaps someone would snap a picture and put it on Twitter. I felt like Cosmo Kramer from Seinfeld, when confronted by a pair of strangers after refusing to wear a ribbon during an AIDS walk.

But there also was something more serious at play — for the whole scene was a microcosm of a larger cultural phenomenon that’s been playing out in Canadian society for generations. How did it come to be, I wondered, that this room full of intellectuals and policy-makers, plucked from among one of the most secular nations on earth, should be called upon to genuflect en masse to animist spirits?

Ask this question on social media, and culture warriors on both sides will provide plenty of snappy answers. But to answer properly, and constructively, requires at least some understanding of the distorted way in which white Canadians — and Westerners, more generally — have come to conceive of Indigenous peoples. And these distortions are producing disastrous effects on the very Indigenous societies that we’re all trying to help.

If you’re not familiar with the Grey Owl referenced in the headline:

Both Canada and the United States eventually imposed policies aimed at annihilating Indigenous cultural practices and languages. Yet, paradoxically, these same white-dominated societies would also lionize individual Indigenous chiefs, warriors, spiritual leaders, artists and writers. In Canada, none would become more famous than the self-proclaimed “Wa-Sha-Quon-Asin, Grey Owl, North American Indian, champion of the Little People of the Forests.” During the 1930s, in fact, Grey Owl would become the most famous Indigenous writer in the world — despite the fact that (as the world learned after his death) he was actually a British immigrant from Hastings, England named Archibald Stanfield Belaney.

Grey Owl was a gifted, if somewhat didactic, middlebrow writer who produced sentimental narratives about the Canadian wilderness he roamed throughout his adult life. Even if he’d been honest about his identity as a white man, he might well have made a successful living from his books. But the ingredient that made him a true literary star — both in Canada and internationally — was his allegedly Indigenous bloodline, which editors and readers alike believed gave him special insight into the secrets of nature and the animal kingdom. Having grown up as an English schoolboy fascinated by First Nations and their habitats, Grey Owl knew exactly what his readers wanted: gauzy sketches of a simpler, more noble, more sacred world than the smog-choked cities they inhabited. Sadly, the simplistic and infantilizing stereotypes he peddled persist to this day.

Canadians now take for granted the portrayal of Indigenous peoples as conscientious, pacifistic stewards of the earth. But as University of Alberta literature professor Albert Braz has noted, this conception of Indigenous life didn’t become popularized until the early twentieth century. Prior to that, it was just as common to hear tales of Indigenous hunters (and fighters) performing wanton slaughter, annihilating other tribes, or whole species of animals. It was Grey Owl, a white man, who led the campaign to rebrand Indigenous peoples as innocent children of the forest. He even went so far as to suggest that it would be preferable for Indigenous peoples to disappear from the planet rather than be “thrown into the grinding wheels of the mill of modernity, to be spewed out a nondescript, undistinguishable from the mediocrity that surrounds him, a reproach to the memory of a noble race.”