A.A. den Otter - Civilizing the Wilderness: Culture and Nature in Pre-Confederation Canada and Rupert's Land

A.A. den Otter

Civilizing the Wilderness: Culture and Nature in Pre-Confederation Canada and Rupert's Land

Edmonton, The University of Alberta Press, 2012

xxxiv + 438 pp. Paper. ISBN 978-0-88864-546-3

A.A. den Otter demonstrates how a volume of linked essays on aspects of a theme can subtly broaden and subversively revise pervasive interpretations. His Introduction explores the inter-related concepts of civilization and wilderness in the nineteenth-century British North American mind, tracing their classical and religious origins. Chapter One examines the imperative to exploit apparently empty western territories, described by M.H. Synge in 1852 as 'sinfully waste and wasted' (11). Yet, as den Otter shows in an essay on two English-born missionaries, individual perceptions of wilderness were variable. William Mason hated the landscape and sought to organise Native people into settled villages, while William Rundle celebrated the open plains as evidence of a glorious Creator. The irony was that Mason struggled with Shield country, while Rundle travelled the potentially fertile Saskatchewan valley. They are contrasted with two assimilated Native mission workers, with the Europeanised names Henry Budd and Henry Steinhauer, who pragmatically coped with the challenges of spanning two worlds. Den Otter moves on to David Anderson, the Anglican bishop, who supplied a theological dimension to the key themes. Anderson was at the Red River from 1849 to 1865, a time of flux that made him aware that change might not equal betterment: he feared that 'the rapid influx of strangers' might damage 'the simple piety of our people' (133). However, at this point, den Otter has another card to play. The 1849 Sayer trial is seen as a social and political landmark in Métis history. Den Otter reinterprets it as an economic and intellectual turning point, the moment when the community adopted the European view of wilderness 'as a place laden with valuable resources' (162). Next he traces George Simpson's intellectual long march from defending the fur trade to accepting the inevitability of settlement on the southern prairies. Simpson influenced the 1857 Westminster parliamentary committee, which produced the important shift in British elite attitudes that designated 'the great colony of Canada' as the inheritor of the West. Implicit in this view was the assumption that Aboriginal culture and identity would be blanketed by the incomers. Cue here a re-examination of Peter Jones and the Upper Canada Mississauga, to argue that Aboriginal peoples could have been encouraged to adopt aspects of modernisation on their own terms. A ninth essay argues that twentieth-century historians long recycled the Victorian view of the Métis as 'primitive, if not savage' (272), failing to appreciate that they were a dynamic community that did not need to be civilized from without. A succinct Conclusion emphasises the convoluted intellectual baggage that Canada imposed upon the West from 1870. As a straightforward collection of essays, we might have expected a different grouping -- Anderson and Simpson paired as voices of authority, Budd and Steinhauer placed alongside Peter Jones, the Sayer trial leading into den Otter's historiographical discussion. The contributions would still have read well, but they are linked here through chronology and the inherent overlap of themes. The result is a quiet, cumulative and thought-provoking exercise in revisionism.