{"id":43198,"date":"2018-04-24T06:00:28","date_gmt":"2018-04-24T10:00:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=43198"},"modified":"2018-04-23T16:11:36","modified_gmt":"2018-04-23T20:11:36","slug":"canada-suffers-a-bad-case-of-grey-owl-nostalgia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2018\/04\/24\/canada-suffers-a-bad-case-of-grey-owl-nostalgia\/","title":{"rendered":"Canada suffers a bad case of Grey Owl nostalgia"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jonathan Kay<\/a> on the odd ways that the “noble savage” imaginary model is holding back actual First Nations people in Canada:<\/p>\n

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 \u201ckeeper of sacred pipes,\u201d 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 \u201cpaying respect to the four directions\u201d \u2014 which required that we stand up and face the indicated compass point, moving clockwise from north to west as she performed her rituals. \u201cWith this sacred water, we smudge this space,\u201d she said. \u201cLet us live the lesson of being in harmony with all creatures.\u201d<\/p>\n

Then the elder instructed us to bend down, touch the floor, and say migwetch<\/em> \u2014 thank you, in her Ojibway language \u2014 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.<\/p>\n

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<\/em>, when confronted by a pair of strangers after refusing to wear a ribbon during an AIDS walk.<\/p>\n

But there also was something more serious at play \u2014 for the whole scene was a microcosm of a larger cultural phenomenon that\u2019s 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<\/em> to animist spirits?<\/p>\n

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 \u2014 and Westerners, more generally \u2014 have come to conceive of Indigenous peoples. And these distortions are producing disastrous effects on the very Indigenous societies that we\u2019re all trying to help.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

If you’re not familiar with the Grey Owl referenced in the headline:<\/p>\n

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 \u201cWa-Sha-Quon-Asin, Grey Owl, North American Indian, champion of the Little People of the Forests.\u201d During the 1930s, in fact, Grey Owl would become the most famous Indigenous writer in the world \u2014 despite the fact that (as the world learned after his death) he was actually a British immigrant from Hastings, England named Archibald Stanfield Belaney.<\/p>\n

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\u2019d 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 \u2014 both in Canada and internationally \u2014 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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019t 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 \u201cthrown 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.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,84,7,11],"tags":[262,438,947,351,99],"class_list":["post-43198","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cancon","category-government","category-history","category-religion","tag-culture","tag-firstnations","tag-mysticism","tag-politicalcorrectness","tag-racism"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-beK","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43198","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=43198"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43198\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":43199,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43198\/revisions\/43199"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=43198"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=43198"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=43198"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}