"Arts, Faculty of"@en . "Anthropology, Department of"@en . "DSpace"@en . "UBCV"@en . "Greenwell, Kim"@en . "2009-07-27T19:23:39Z"@en . "2001"@en . "Master of Arts - MA"@en . "University of British Columbia"@en . "Despite the recent proliferation of work around the subject of residential schools, few\r\nanalyses have deconstructed the concept of \"civilizing the Indian\" which animated the\r\nschools' agendas. This thesis examines the discourse of \"civilization\" as it was expressed\r\nand enacted in two missions in late nineteenth-century British Columbia. Archival primary\r\nsources and published secondary sources are drawn on to provide an understanding of what\r\n\"civilization\" meant to Euro-Canadians, specifically missionaries, and how it was to be\r\n\"taught\" to the indigenous peoples they encountered. Colonial images and photographs, in\r\nparticular, reveal how missionaries constructed a vivid and compelling contrast between\r\n\"civilization\" and \"savagery.\" An intersectional framework is employed to highlight the\r\nways in which ideas about \"race,\" class, gender and sexuality were essential elements of the\r\n\"civilizing\" project. The goal of the thesis is to show how \"civilizing the Indian\" was\r\npremised not only on a specifically hierarchical construction of Whites versus Natives, but\r\nalso intersecting binaries of men versus women, normal productive heterosexuality versus\r\ndeviant degenerate sexuality, bourgeois domesticity versus lower class depravity, and others.\r\nUltimately, it is argued, the discourse of \"civilization\" regulated both the \"colonized\" and the\r\n\r\n\r\n\"colonizers\" as it secured the hierarchical foundations of empire and nation."@en . "https://circle.library.ubc.ca/rest/handle/2429/11294?expand=metadata"@en . "10316878 bytes"@en . "application/pdf"@en . "TEACHING CIVILIZATION: GENDER, S E X U A L I T Y , R A C E A N D CLASS IN TWO L A T E NINETEENTH-CENTURY BRITISH C O L U M B I A MISSIONS by K I M G R E E N W E L L B. A.(Honours), Queen's University, 1996 A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL F U L F I L L M E N T OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF M A S T E R OF ARTS in THE F A C U L T Y OF G R A D U A T E STUDIES (Department of Anthropology and Sociology) We accept this thesis as conforming to the required standard THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH C O L U M B I A January 2001 \u00C2\u00A9Kim Greenwell, 2001 In presenting this thesis in partial fulfilment of the requirements for an advanced degree at the University of British Columbia, I agree that the Library shall make it freely available for reference and study. I further agree that permission for extensive copying of this thesis for scholarly purposes may be granted by the head of my department or by his or her representatives. It is understood that copying or publication of this thesis for financial gain shall not be allowed without my written permission. Department of The University of British Columbia Vancouver, Canada Date J/ftlUMtf <2>Ol100\ DE-6 (2/88) A B S T R A C T Despite the recent proliferation of work around the subject of residential schools, few analyses have deconstructed the concept of \"civilizing the Indian\" which animated the schools' agendas. This thesis examines the discourse of \"civilization\" as it was expressed and enacted in two missions in late nineteenth-century British Columbia. Archival primary sources and published secondary sources are drawn on to provide an understanding of what \"civilization\" meant to Euro-Canadians, specifically missionaries, and how it was to be \"taught\" to the indigenous peoples they encountered. Colonial images and photographs, in particular, reveal how missionaries constructed a vivid and compelling contrast between \"civilization\" and \"savagery.\" An intersectional framework is employed to highlight the ways in which ideas about \"race,\" class, gender and sexuality were essential elements of the \"civilizing\" project. The goal of the thesis is to show how \"civilizing the Indian\" was premised not only on a specifically hierarchical construction of Whites versus Natives, but also intersecting binaries of men versus women, normal productive heterosexuality versus deviant degenerate sexuality, bourgeois domesticity versus lower class depravity, and others. Ultimately, it is argued, the discourse of \"civilization\" regulated both the \"colonized\" and the \"colonizers\" as it secured the hierarchical foundations of empire and nation. T A B L E OF CONTENTS A B S T R A C T i i LIST OF FIGURES v A C K N O W L E D G E M E N T S vi TITLE P A G E WITH PICTURE vii Chapter I Introduction: Residential Schools and the Civilizing Mission 1 Civilizing the Other, Othering Civilization Excavating the Mission Field II (De)Constructing the Colonial Encounter: Tools and Tactics 22 Review of Literature Theoretical and Methodological Frameworks Missionary Histories Vanguards of Empire? Authors of Empire Case Studies III Encoding Empire: Missionaries, Savages, Maidens & Mimics 54 Divide and Conquer Colonizing the Quotidian Spectacular Civilization Ordering the Colonial Frontier Family Values Civilizing Industry Colonial Mimicry IV Empiricizing Bodies 84 Bodies of Knowledge Regime of the Clean The Empire's New Clothes Disciplining the Body The Medicine-Man Engendering Civilization: \"Stalwart Men and Comely Maidens\" Civilizing White Women Demarcating Masculinity Sexual Empire iii V Conclusion: The Civilization of a Nation 140 WORKS CITED 163 APPENDIX A 174 iv LIST OF FIGURES Title Page with Picture \"Crosby Teaching Indian Chief' (Crosby 1907, facing page 128) vii Figure 1. \"Schools in British Columbia and North\" (Miller 1996, facing page xii) 49 2. \"Three Litle Indians - Wild and Untaught\" (Ferrier 1906,4) 62 3. \"Three Little Indians-Institute Pupils\" (Ferrier 1906, 5) 62 4. \"An Indian Family\" (Ferrier 1906, 23) 64 5. \"New Bella Bella - A Christian Village\" (Crosby 1914, facing page 186) . . . . 68 6. \" A Heathen Village - An Appeal for the Gospel\" (Crosby 1914, facing page 186) 68 7. \"Early Native Types\" (Crosby 1907, facing page 18) 89 8. \"Amos Cushan, Sarah Shee-at-ston, David Sallosalton, 'Captain John' Su-a-lis\" (Crosby 1907, facing page 208) 90 9. \"The Militant Missionary - Dr. Crosby and the Medicine Man\" (Crosby 1914, facing page 254) 100 10. \"The Queen of Sheba\" (Crosby 1914, facing page 30) 110 11. \"Girls at the Kitamaat Home\" (Crosby 1914, facing page 30) 110 12. \"Legaic, Chief of all the Tsimshean Chiefs, Attacking Mr. Dunan\" (Wellcome 1887, facing page 12) 123 13. \"Legaic as a Simple Citizen and Carpenter of Metlakatla\" (Wellcome 1887, facing page 40) 123 v A C K N O W L E D G E M E N T S The writing of this thesis would not have been possible without the assistance and support of numerous individuals. I would like to thank first, and foremost, the three members of my thesis committee - Gillian Creese, Becki Ross and Jean Barman. Your collective enthusiasm and inspiration buoyed me throughout this sometimes arduous process and made the overall experience richly enjoyable. Your confidence in me, and in this project, has meant more than I can say. It has been a privilege to work with each one of you. Archival research, tackled for the first time, was made far less intimidating by the friendly assistance of Bob Stewart at the British Columbia Conference Archives of the United Church, and Doreen Stephens at the Anglican Church of Canada Archives, Vancouver, B.C. While writing, I had the immense pleasure of meeting some of the women whose work I have drawn upon. Susan Neylan and Carol Williams both offered valuable encouragement and insights, as well as much appreciated copies of actual articles and theses. Anne McClintock was as engaging in person as she is on paper, and it was thrilling to discuss my ideas with her. I am also indebted to her for alerting me to the Comaroffs' work which, combined with her own, provided much of the foundation for my analysis in this thesis. Thanks to Becki Ross and Gillian Creese for also giving me the opportunity to work as a research assistant on two very exciting projects during my time here. In addition, I am grateful for the University Graduate Fellowship which funded my first two years of study in the Master's program. The unwavering support and tactful advice of friends, family and fellow graduate students was totally invaluable. In April, 2 0 0 0 , 1 had the privilege of presenting some preliminary findings from my research at the Graduate Student Symposium, hosted by the Centre for Research in Women's Studies and Gender Relations. Thanks to all those who presented that day and to those in the audience - your feedback and suggestions were greatly appreciated. Andrea Long and Michelle Swann assured me, repeatedly, that all graduate students go through the same ordeal but you do get through it - they even completed their theses successfully to prove it! And while I'm sure I bent the ear of anyone and everyone who would put up with my incessant moaning about this project, I am particularly indebted to those who had no choice but to listen and love me anyway: Kelly Greenwell, Jennifer Straub, Tammy Wang and Martin Woons - 1 couldn't have done it without you. Finally, I would like to dedicate this thesis to five beautiful women who have touched my life: Nora Kelly, Kelly Greenwell, Fran Gibbins, Phyllis Parker and Bridget Moran. I consider myself truly privileged to have grown up with such powerful women around me, living extraordinary lives and demonstrating a commitment to social justice which inspires me to this day. I give thanks to every one for instilling in me the belief that one person can make a difference. TEACHING CIVILIZATION: GENDER, S E X U A L I T Y , R A C E A N D CLASS IN TWO L A T E NINETEENTH-CENTURY BRITISH C O L U M B I A MISSIONS by K I M G R E E N W E L L D E P A R T M E N T OF ANTHROPOLOGY A N D SOCIOLOGY UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH C O L U M B I A Thesis Committee: Dr. Gillian Creese (Chair), Sociology Dr. Becki Ross, Sociology Dr. Jean Barman, Education Studies Chapter One: Residential Schools and the Civilizing Mission The history of residential schools in Canada is constituted and contested through our collective struggles to define, understand and come to terms with it. These struggles are continually being reshaped and renegotiated by actors and institutions at various levels -personal, political, legal, academic and others. Over the last ten years, the discourse surrounding residential schools has exploded into the public arena and still the \"residential school issue\" remains a controversial and emotionally charged debate, the parameters and implications of which have yet to be agreed upon. In Canada, survivors of the schools have come forward with their experiences and First Nations communities have rallied together around the schools and their legacy as a powerful political focal point. Governments and Churches have stumbled over how to respond to the revelations, the anger, and the demands for retribution. Criminal charges have been laid, multi-million dollar healing funds have been announced, and official public apologies have been offered.1 There has been a relatively recent (but long overdue) proliferation of work looking not only at residential schools in Canada, but also at similar schools and policies in the United States, Australia and the South Pacific, raising critical questions about the role of education in the oppression of indigenous peoples in a variety of colonial contexts.2 In Canada, while some studies have examined the schools through analyses of government and missionary documents,3 others j 1 See Assembly of First Nations (1998) for a brief, but informative discussion of the $350 million Healing Fund announced by the federal government in January 1998, the apologies issued by four of the major Churches that ran schools in Canada, and First Nations responses to these events. 2 For research in the United States, see for example, Adams (1995), Lomawaima (1994) and Mihesuah (1993). For research in Australia and the South Pacific, see for example, Kidd (1997), Langmore (1989) and Young (1989). Armitage (1995) provides a particularly valuable comparative analysis of education policies and practices in Canada, Australia and New Zealand. 5 See, for example, Barman (1995), Barman et al. (1986), Furniss (1995), Miller (1996), Milloy (1999) and Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (1996). have given primacy to uncovering Native voices and perspectives though the use of interviews and oral histories.4 Furthermore, studies have varied according to their emphasis on the oppressive policies, practices and objectives of the dominant groups involved, versus the often obscured forms of resistance and agency of First Nations individuals and communities. Perhaps most importantly, a growing number of these works have been authored by First Nations scholars - a significant shift given the problematic ways in which indigenous research has so often been pursued and even appropriated by non-indigenous academics.5 Despite these differences in content and perspective, there seems to be a common consensus and focus around the following interrelated themes: the collaboration of church and state in the oppression of Native populations, the racist and colonial discourses underlying the residential schools project, the Eurocentric nature of the \"civilizing\" and \"Christianizing\" objectives of the schools, and the use of education as a tool in the cultural assimilation/attempted genocide of First Nations peoples. Consider how the following passages from a range of studies frame and encode the \"residential school issue,\" establishing what Jo-Anne Fiske has described as a \"well-established discursive battleground\" (1996, 666): At the heart of the vision of residential education... there was a dark contradiction, an inherent element of savagery in the mechanics of civilizing the children. The very language in which the vision was couched reveals what would have to be the essentially violent nature of the school system in its assault of child and culture. The basic premise of resocialization, of the great transformation from 'savage' to 'civilized', was violent. \"To kill the Indian in the child,\" the department [Indian Affairs] aimed at severing the artery of culture that ran between generations and was the profound connection between parent and child sustaining family and community. (Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples 1996, 365) 4 See, for example, Assembly of First Nations (1994), Fournier and Crey (1997), Haig-Brown (1988), Ing (1998), Jaine (1993), and Knockwood (1992). 3 For excellent discussions of this issue in Canada, the U.S. and New Zealand, respectively, see Haig-Brown and Archibald (1996), Mihesuah (1998) and Tuhiwai Smith (1999). 2 For almost a century the federal government in Canada sought to control the lives and souls of Aboriginal peoples. Outwardly espousing assimilation through education, the federal government neither took the leadership nor provided the financial resources to achieve any other goal than the self-affirming prophecy inherent in racist rhetoric. Religious denominations may have acted from the highest motives, but lives were destroyed nonetheless.. . The system's attributes made possible no other goal than Aboriginal people's absolute marginalization from Canadian life - a goal that schools achieved with remarkable success. (Barman 1995,74-75) . . . Europeans have taken it upon themselves, to varying degrees in different historical periods, to transform Native peoples, both physically and culturally, into an image more acceptable to European sensibilities. This effort has been legitimized by a fundamental conviction that Native people require the guidance of Europeans to live successful lives, and that European intervention in Native peoples' lives, even when forcefully applied, is ultimately in Native peoples' 'best interests.' (Furniss 1995,16) In British Columbia, the missionaries and governments worked hand in hand to deal with the Indian 'problem'. Government must have seen the religious orders's [sic] efforts to control as most beneficial. Rather than sending soldiers and guns to control the lives of the owners of the land, the governments had the missionaries who influenced the Native people to limit their movements, take up an agrarian lifestyle, and abandon their culture. (Haig-Brown 1988, 34) Rather than critiquing the rich and valuable work which has been done to bring this aspect of colonial history to public attention, the intent of this thesis is to examine what has been obscured and left out of the story as it has been framed and analysed thus far. To carry on with Fiske's notion of the \"discursive battleground,\" one must ask what seemingly unimportant skirmishes, quiet victories and everyday casualties are overlooked when we confine ourselves to this terrain. The devastating cultural impact of residential schools for First Nations communities has been and continues to be the focus of discussion, research and analysis - and justifiably so. But at some point in this process, we seem to have narrowed our understanding of \"culture\" in a way that not only excludes certain aspects of identity and experience, but also ignores their crucial interaction and imbrication in the colonial context. We have yet to track 3 the tangled paths of race, class, gender and sexuality which infiltrated and upheld the schools, from their earliest legitimations to their most intricate and intimate operations. And yet much within the work thus far already suggests that this sort of historical navigation is called for. One of the most commonly noted, but generally unanalysed, features of residential schools has been the often vigilant segregation and differential instruction of male and female students. Numerous accounts detail the ways in which boys were taught skills such as farming, carpentry, and blacksmithing, while girls were instructed in duties such as sewing, knitting, cooking, laundry and cleaning. Linkages between these practices and, for example, specifically gendered, bourgeois notions of domesticity and \"civilization,\" however, are almost never made. Sexuality also surfaces for brief moments in these studies, only to disappear again, weighed down by heteronormative assumptions and dismissals. The glimpses, however maddening, are also exciting and engaging. They reveal that gender and sexuality were far from marginal concerns, but rather essential arenas of \"civilization\" which required constant surveillance and regulation. In its 1994 report on residential schools, the Assembly of First Nations relates a number of incidents which suggest potentially fertile grounds for analysis: One woman remembered returning to school as a young girl wearing a sundress. Her arms were exposed and the nun made a public display of how immodest and indecent she was. She remembered how such an innocent act left her feeling confused and ashamed about her body and herself. (Assembly of First Nations 1994,45) A final example provided by an adult interviewed is that of an older sister who upon seeing her younger brother, ran over and hugged him, violating the rule of gender interaction. The brother was made to wear a dress while the rest of the children were told to make fun of him. The sister was made to watch this and later was punished much more severely. (Assembly of First Nations 1994,42) Similarly, Celia Haig-Brown's study of the Kamloops Indian Residential School reveals that female students were told to wear their underwear while taking showers, so grave (and 4 racialised) were the concerns that their breasts might be seen, even while changing clothes (Haig-Brown 1988,108); and also, that the dining hall was divided by a partition so that the sexes could not even view each other during meals (Haig-Brown 1988, 55). From these few glimpses, one already begins to recognize the body as an important site of colonial surveillance and intervention, around which discourses of race, class, gender and sexuality merged and converged. What generally remains buried within these texts, however, are the ways in which notions of shame and \"decency,\" the enforced mockery of gender transgression, and the regulation of such everyday spaces as showers and dining halls, were all part of a broader transformative project intent on shaping the sexual identities, (reproductive possibilities, and erotic boundaries of nation and empire. The importance of intersectional historical analyses attentive to these tangled webs of race, gender, class and sexuality is being highlighted today by the challenges of those whose experiences and identities have been silenced and marginalized within both historical and contemporary studies. First Nations women have raised compelling critiques of both the male-dominated Aboriginal rights movement, and the white, middle-class dominated feminist movement.5 Increasingly, First Nations women are demanding that analyses of their experiences and concerns, both historical and contemporary, integrate questions and understandings about race, class, gender, sexuality and the intersections in between. As Patricia Monture-Angus writes, \"My world is not experienced in a linear and compartmentalized way. I experience the world simultaneously as Mohawk and as woman\" (1995,178). The challenge has been taken up by some and an encouraging number of works have emerged which explore the margins of traditional colonial analyses and suggest new 6 See, for example, Maracle (1996), Monture-Angus (1995), Monture-Okanee (1992) and Native Women's Association of Canada (1992). 5 directions for research. Adele Perry, for example, ventures into the silences surrounding the sexual cultures of colonial society and retrieves accounts of homosociality among settler men (1999) and the shaping of white women's sexuality in the late nineteenth century (1995). Ann Laura Stoler's work (1997) highlights questions of race, class, gender, sexuality and their interaction in colonial settings. She examines the \"politics of race and sexual morality\" by linking them to the regulation of hierarchies of gender and class in both colonies and metropoles. She also reveals how maintaining bourgeois, colonial and racial authority required constant sexual surveillance and regulation of not only the \"colonized,\" but also the \"colonizers\" - a provocative insight which suggests that analysis of how agents of empire set out to \"civilize\" others may reveal as much about the shaping of Euro-Canadian colonial identities as the attempted re-shaping of First Nations identities. Finally, writers such as Paula Gunn Allen (1986), Susan Beaver (1991), Sue Ellen Jacobs (1997), Sabine Lang (1998), Will Roscoe (1998) and Jean Young (1999) have begun the important work of tracing the history of gender and sexual variation in First Nations cultures, exploring the lives of \"berdaches\" or \"two-spirit\" peoples, their same-sex relationships, and often elevated status in Native societies prior to European contact. The trend towards a unitary and frequently uni-dimensional narrative of residential schools and their implications is all the more surprising given the recent and welcome range of histories which have examined the complex processes of nation and empire building in other contexts, and highlighted the interwoven centrality of race, class, gender and sexuality to imperial regimes and national projects. The editors of the provocative collection, Painting the Maple: Essays on Race, Gender, and the Construction of Canada write, \"... we 7 See, for example, McClintock et al. (1997), Mohanty and Alexander (1997), Pierson and Chaudhuri (1998), Stasiulis and Yuval-Davis (1995), and Strong-Boag et al. (1998). 6 must scrutinize the discursive formation of nation to see where, how, and why some discursive practices (stories, texts, voices) install themselves in the narrative of nation and others do not, why some discursive categories appear to be left out altogether and others must fight from the margins for attention\" (Grace et al. 1998, 8). Too often, they argue, our analytical tools and methods have partitioned race, class, gender and sexuality off from one another, allowing them only isolated moments of interaction which fail to reveal their interdependent constructions and intimate alliances. Stasiulis and Yuval-Davis's analysis of settler societies similarly contests traditional historical accounts by disrupting dichotomous notions of (im)migrants, indigenous peoples, race, class, gender and sexuality. They point out that the \"hegemonic myths\" of settler societies are gendered, racialized, and animated by attempts to harness the sexual energies and productive potentials of bodies and markets (Stasiulis and Yuval-Davis 1995, 8). Also attentive to the \"powerful mythmaking machine of empire,\" Mufti and Shohat (1997) approach the construct of \"nation\" as \"a historically produced, unfinished and contested terrain\" which is \"necessarily littered with unresolved contradictions and dilemmas\" (Mufti and Shohat 1997, 3-4). Others, such as Ross (1998), Maynard (1999) and Kinsman (1996) highlight the central (yet still analytically marginalized) significance of sex and sexuality in these discourses of nationhood and belonging. For too long, Canadian historians have turned a blindly heteronormative eye to the ways in which \"nation and citizenship have been largely premised within parameters of hegemonic masculinity and naturalized heterosexuality\" (Ross 1998,188). If, as Maynard argues, \"nations and their histories - their national games and pastimes, symbols and institutions - depend on sex\" (Maynard 1999,2), then it would seem that we have much work to do. The erotic exigencies and libidinal boundaries of nationhood and citizenship 7 have yet to be fully explored, let alone acknowledged as legitimate topics of historical inquiry. Residential schools were structurally and imaginatively mired within, and constitutive of, the processes of nation and empire building, yet they have not been subjected to the same kind of historically nuanced, intersectional scrutiny as other colonial and national enterprises. Part of this is due, perhaps, to the controversy surrounding the banner of \"post-colonialism/ postcolonialism\" and \"post-colonial studies\", under which many of these recent, critical historical analyses can, at least to a certain extent, be grouped (even if not identified as such by their authors). Given that even the authors of Key Concepts in Post-Colonial Studies acknowledge the difficulty in defining \"postcolonialism\" and note that it has been a \"site of disciplinary and interpretive contestation almost from the beginning\" (Ashcroft et al. 1998, 186), one can appreciate the wariness and reluctance to approach the relatively new, and still contested, field of First Nations history from such an ambiguously defined and internally unstable perspective (which shares much in terms of controversy and confusion with its equally slippery counterpart, \"postmodernism\"). Others, notably McClintock (1995), Stoler and Cooper (1997), and Comaroff and Comaroff (1997) have discussed the \"pitfalls\" and problematic potentials of postcolonialism, not least its tendencies to simultaneously critique and evoke linear, progressive notions of history, to obscure historical and cross-cultural multiplicities and continuities, and to posit its own global, panoptical meta-theory. Yet, for all this, an argument can still be made that aspects of the post-colonial perspective can be deployed in ways which add much needed depth and complexity to analyses of Canada's colonial history. Indeed, much debate, it seems to me, could be mediated, if not resolved, by differentiating between those theories and analyses which have 8 prematurely and problematically announced the arrival of a truly /?osr-colonial time and space, and those which recognize the insidious continuity and potency of colonialism, applying historical and contemporary lenses that do not rely on such dangerously unnuanced binaries as colonizer-colonized, metropole-colony, civilized-savage, and the uni-dimensional/directional analyses which have traditionally followed such binaries. For the purposes of this thesis, the contested implications of \"postcolonialism\" as ruptured state and/or authoritative label, will be, admittedly, elided. Rather than wading into these often unwieldy and confusing debates around definitions and designations, I prefer to draw from these latter approaches which have been described, for better or for worse, as \"post-colonial,\" but which herald less a newly arrived post-colonial reality than a new approach to all things (old and new, pre- and post-) \"colonial.\" For Mufti and Shohat, for example, the value of much post-colonial criticism has been in \"its reading of the colonial archive as archive, a reading that seeks to displace the latter's (epistemological, political, ethical) authority\" (Mufti and Shohat 1997, 8-9). Post-colonial analyses can be used to render visible (and thus contestable) both the production of colonial accounts as knowledge, history and truth, and the exclusion of other forms of experience and knowing. Williams and Chrisman side-step the controversy to a certain extent by referring to a dual construct of \"colonial discourse analysis and post-colonial theory\" without ever really defining either, but arguing that both represent \"critiques of the process of production of knowledge about the Other\" (Williams and Chrisman 1994, 8). Perhaps the most useful guidance comes from the work of Ann Laura Stoler and Frederick Cooper (1997). As mentioned above, Stoler and Cooper express reservations about the arrival of \"postcoloniality\" or a \"post-colonial moment,\" but they do seem to accept, and even embrace, some of the interests and inquiries pursued by post-9 colonial analyses. In their reading, the problem inheres not in the focus of these works on, for example, cultural hybridities and fractured identities, but in the suggestion that such issues are actually \"new\" and indicative of some unprecedented historical rupture. Having noted and challenged this tendency, Stoler and Cooper are able to acknowledge the welcome shift in recent post-colonial analyses towards exploring the vastly fissured, contradictory and tension riven nature of colonial projects and identities. Their own work highlights permeable boundaries, interstitial groups and polyvalent dynamics as they argue \"colonial regimes were neither monolithic nor omnipotent. Closer investigation reveals competing agendas for using power, competing strategies for maintaining control, and doubts about the legitimacy of the venture\" (Stoler and Cooper 1997, 6). They take up the challenge to disrupt the binaries of traditional colonial analyses by providing compelling accounts of how these dichotomies \"took hard work to sustain, were precariously secured, and were repeatedly subverted\" (Stoler and Cooper 1997, 34). It is with this sort of cautious, but admittedly aroused, endorsement of post-colonial analyses in mind that I propose a \"new\" kind of analysis of residential schools, their colonial animation and discursive legitimation. Civilizing the Other, Othering Civilization \"Historical reality has many ways of concealing itself. A most effective way consists in displaying itself in the full view of all.\" (Octavio Paz, cited in Comaroff and Comaroff 1997, 1) The focus of this research has shifted in many ways during the unruly journey from outset to completion. What began as an interest in how residential school experiences were mediated by gender alone quickly grew into a more complex (and often more difficult) examination of how entangled understandings of race, class, gender and sexuality were 10 inextricably woven into the colonial agendas and objectives of the schools. I planned a unique contribution to the field that would focus particularly on how these discourses attempted to delimit, reshape and channel the sexual bodies, practices and identities of students. I hoped to examine the schools' policies around, for example, menstruation, masturbation, homosexuality and other gendered sexual transgressions. However, I soon came up against a stumbling block familiar to all historical researchers - the limits imposed by the colonial archive itself. Relying as I was on the records and texts of missionaries (an issue discussed in following sections), it was perhaps not surprising that the silent injunction against referring to such things directly was almost deafening. While a preoccupation with erotic, libidinal potentials could constantly be sensed, the specific examples I had focused on were too often left lurking just beyond \"proper\" discursive boundaries. Armed with Michel Foucault's notion (1978,27) that an interrogation of discourse finds significance in the silences which emerge, I began to shift the angle of my perspective and quickly discovered yet another aspect of the colonial project which seemed ever-present, yet also ever shrouded. From then on, the focus of my project shifted more and more out of a growing interest in this one particular concept. As I read both primary texts and historical analyses, I kept coming across and literally passing over references to \"civilization.\" My understanding of \"civilization\" was so taken-for-granted and unexamined that I almost failed to notice, let alone critique the consistent failure throughout to define and deconstruct this concept. It seemed that an assumed familiarity with the idea had bred a form of analytical contempt, or at the very least, a persistent blindness to the too evident. Even opposing actors in the debates surrounding the schools have unanimously agreed that, whatever their merits or failures, the schools did share a common agenda: the \"civilization\" of Indians. What is 11 remarkable is how few analyses have paused to elaborate and map out what exactly this process entailed and enforced, how it was actualized in the everyday lives of the students and the teachers, and why it was so central to the colonial projects of nation and empire building. Drawing on post-colonial approaches, I want to render visible/contestable the production and regulation of \"civilization,\" to open the concept up to interrogation instead of constantly invoking it while simultaneously relying on, and reinforcing, its rarely challenged ambiguity. I have decided to approach \"civilization\" as both a colonial process and objective, and to ask: what did this process involve, and how did one identify the end product? Revisiting the historical materials, one finds that the \"answers\" are there, but, ironically, often so offensively blatant or seemingly self-evident that they are never clearly articulated or commented on. The goal of this thesis, therefore, is to show how \"civilizing the Indian\" was premised not only on a specifically hierarchical construction of Whites versus Natives, but also intersecting binaries of men versus women, normal productive heterosexuality versus deviant degenerate sexuality, bourgeois domesticity versus lower class depravity, and so on -and that these binaries, far from naturally occurring, required much ideological effort, and at times, outright coercion and violence, to regulate and enforce. Excavating the Mission Field The notion of \"excavation\" suggests fertile and exciting possibilities for this project. It allows me, first of all, to pay tribute to Michel Foucault, who described much of his own work as \"archaeology,\"8 and to whose insights and interrogations I am indebted. How I I refer here to the titles of Foucault's works, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (1970), The Archaeology of Knowledge (1972), and The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception (1973). 12 draw on his work, specifically, will be discussed in the following chapter, but I have to credit him as an inspiration here. \"Excavating\" conjures ideas of discovering things long buried and evokes a layered sense of reality or \"truth\" residing below surface appearances. I want to play with and re-deploy these meanings, however, in order to perform an excavation of the surface itself.9 As discussed above, the idea of \"civilization\" was often so rhetorically present in colonial, particularly missionary discourses that it has since been rendered analytically absent. As a result, I seek to excavate that which has been buried by its own salience, its own apparent transparency. Writing about \"moral purity\" campaigns at the turn of the century, Mariana Valverde notes that the abundant \"rhetorical flourishes\" of the texts seem so familiar that few have analysed their social and historical roots. She argues that rather than simply dismissing such discourse as excessive, flowery symbolism, we should examine how \"certain images, words, or constellations of both resonated with pre-existing social cosmologies,\" thereby acting as \"the inconspicuous vehicles in which truths about moral and social reform were conveyed\" (Valverde 1991, 34-35). In order to excavate the notion of \"civilization\" in the colonial context, I argue we must look for what is both carefully buried and boldly displayed in its construction and expression. In the colonial context, in particular, we must be attentive to the ways in which discursive strategies not only \"resonated with pre-existing social cosmologies,\" but were also actively formative of colonial identities and boundaries. For as Comaroff and Comaroff (1997), Stoler and Cooper (1997) and McClintock (1995) have all compellingly argued, the relationship linking colonies and metropoles, colonizer and colonized, was always more interdependent and mutually 9 One connotation of \"excavation\" that I must emphatically reject is any suggestion that the process is a finite one, the end-point of which is \"truth.\" Instead, I conceive of my project as part of an ongoing and hopefully never-ending process in which historical narratives are continually explored and investigated as invaluable, but contestable sources of meaning and memory. 13 transformative than uni-directional/dimensional. Finally, \"excavating the surface\" can also describe the invaluable investigation pioneered in large part by Anne McClintock in Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Context (1995) and to which I hope to make a contribution. McClintock engages with imperial \"progress\" as a scopic, visually driven process and narrative, in which empirical markers and boundaries categorized colonial bodies, spaces and practices as \"civilized\" or \"savage,\" at the same time encoding and inscribing them as gendered, sexualized and re/productive. Following McClintock's exciting lead, I will pay close attention to \"civilization\" as spectacle and the variety of ways in which its visible markers and manifestations were displayed for both consumption and contestation. Rather than providing a history of residential schools per se, this thesis examines the colonial, specifically missionary, discourses which legitimated and animated the schools, in the hopes that by widening the scope of analysis to include the broader \"civilizing project\" pursued by early missions, we can better understand the dimensions and implications of the schools and their place in the colonial continuum. Comaroff and Comaroff have written extensively and convincingly on the unique position of missionaries in colonial contexts. Armed only with their \"rhetorical potency\" and \"moral sanction\" (Comaroff 1997, 184), missionaries produced narratives of Promethean voyages into the often dark, but soon to be illuminated, mission field: Their writing became part of a long-established tale that postenlightenment Europeans told each other about the march of civilization into the dark places on earth. Dispatches from the field assumed a stylized form, diligently probing virgin vistas of self and landscape to satisfy a hungry readership at home. (Comaroff & Comaroff 1991, 37) Comaroff and Comaroff highlight the interstitial and contradictory economic, political and social position of missionaries (to be discussed in greater detail in the next chapter) and argue 14 that \"in viewing the colonial process through their eyes - focused as they were by the ambiguities of their own social situation - we gain an especially penetrating insight into its internal struggles and inconsistencies\" (Comaroff 1997,166). From this perspective, we can also witness the crucial ways in which colonial encounters with \"Others\" enabled missionaries to hone \"a sense of themselves as gendered, national citizens, as Godly, right-bearing individuals, and as agents of Western reason\" (Comaroff & Comaroff 1997,6). Given the total transformation of Native lives and identities deemed necessary for \"civilization,\" not all aspects of the project can be traced within residential schools alone. For a more complete understanding, we must examine the broader, encompassing context of the mission station, its spaces, roles and regulations. This means shifting our analysis further back in time than more contemporary residential school discussions and examining the mission field which included, but was not limited to, the missionary boarding-schools which presaged the later state-sanctioned, church-run formal residential school system. As historians such as Fisher (1992) and Miller (1996) have argued, the nineteenth century saw the shift from fur-trade Indian-European relations to increasingly aggressive colonial policies of settlement and administration. Missionaries who arrived on British Columbia's Northwest coast in the last half of that century were among the vanguard of this shift. I focus on the records produced by and about two such missionaries whose evangelical labours among the Tsimshian peoples provide windows onto the \"civilizing project\" as it was pursued by two different men, representing two different churches, yet inextricably part of the same colonial enterprise. From 1862 to 1887, Anglican catechist William Duncan's \"model,\" Christian village of Metlakatla stood as a paragon of missionary success for many in British Columbia and abroad who saw it as metonymic of civilization's triumph over savagery. Similarly, 15 from the moment Thomas Crosby established his Methodist mission in Fort Simpson in 1874 to when he retired twenty-three years later, his efforts to bring salvation and civilization to the Tsimshian were emblematic of colonial desires and anxieties, poetics and preoccupations. The texts and images generated by both, responses to them recorded in missionary journals and memoirs, and the secondary analyses which they have provoked will all be drawn on in the chapters which follow. Both cases are bound by motive, time and place and thus their analysis is provided as representative only of one particular project in late nineteenth-century British Columbia. It is not purported to reveal the full depth or breadth of all missionary experiences or colonizing strategies, much less anything about indigenous responses, across Canada. Such an ambitious project, while surely invaluable and overdue, is far beyond the scope of this particular investigation. My aim, therefore, is both more modest and hopefully attainable: to excavate from these case studies an understanding of how the process and objective of \"civilization,\" and all the entangled meanings, practices and identities that this inscribed, was produced and patrolled in mission schools and stations. What follows is neither a history of residential schools (especially as these are more commonly defined and understood), nor of the missions themselves, but rather an \"archaeology\" inspired by Foucault among others, of the discursive formation which these were both formed by and formative of. Celia Haig-Brown has raised some extremely important critiques concerning the overwhelming imbalance in the literature and research around residential schools (but also symptomatic of a general trend in colonial analyses) whereby the records of dominant groups are privileged, while little or no attention or voice is accorded to Native perspectives and experiences (Haig-Brown 1988,130-32,137). She points out that too often academics 16 writing about Native history have relied on the texts and artifacts of white (and I would add, male) fur traders, settlers, Indian agents and missionaries. While these materials are not unworthy of examination, they cannot be accepted as presenting an unbiased history of Native peoples, much less their perspectives. Haig-Brown's arguments are valid and insightful. They also resonate with increasingly popular trends towards analyses intent on recovering examples and understandings of how the \"colonized\" were never, at any time or place, a homogenous group, universally oppressed and historically passive. Two excellent and relevant examples of this work are Susan Neylan's \"The Heavens are Changing\": Nineteenth Century Protestant Missionization on the North Pacific Coast (1999) and Clarence Bolt's Thomas Crosby and the Tsimshian: Small Shoes for Feet Too Large (1992), both of which explore Tsimshian roles and responses to the missionaries in their midst. In order to defend, in advance, my own research in light of these issues and implications, I posit the following arguments. First of all, the texts of dominant groups remain valuable for what they can reveal about their members' perspectives and objectives, especially when dimensions of these remain obscured in contemporary analyses. Paige Raibmon, whose work explores principal George Raley's negotiation of the residential school experience (1996a; 1996b), makes an important point about the ongoing telling of residential school history: Some argue that the horrific nature of the residential school legacy renders the intentions of those who participated in the system both incomprehensible and irrelevant. This attitude stems from the assumption that to explore and understand the motives of those who ran the schools is to come dangerously close to condoning their actions... The more realistic, and perhaps more frightening, possibility of a complex, multi-dimensional history, in which these \"evil perpetrators\" were perhaps not deviant at all, is thus conveniently and comfortably sidestepped altogether. (Raibmon 1996a, 31) 17 It is hoped that by linking the underlying agendas and objectives of residential schools to broader, colonial notions of \"civilization\" and their imbrication with still potent Western discourses of race, class, gender and sexuality, much needed attention will shift away from, for example, individual abuses of power, to the structures, relations and ideologies which made such abuses possible. This is in no way meant to detract significance from the individual abuses which did occur, or the community/individual tragedies and political-legal struggles that have followed as a result; but rather, simply a reminder that the contexts and configurations which enabled such events merit just as much attention as the events themselves. Traditionally privileged sources of knowledge and information continue to provide one way of examining the dominant discourses of a historical period, their expression and application in various arenas. A discourse analysis, especially the type I pursue in this study, has the advantage of rendering the \"biases\" in a text or artifact central, even essential, components of the analysis, rather than hindrances to it. Part of this is because such analysis neither seeks nor claims to establish \"truth,\" but instead examines different, often conflicting, ways of telling \"truths.\" In its report on residential school experiences, their impact and legacy for First Nations individuals and communities, the Assembly of First Nations provides an interesting comment on the construction and interpretation of \"history\": Truth is built and rebuilt over time through the stories we tell, individually and together in community, about our experience of a particular event such as residential school... As individuals, families and communities, it is the meaning, the interpretations or understandings found in our stories which determines, at least to a certain point, the impact of that experience on our lives. (Assembly of First Nations 1994, 5) Regardless of whether their contributions were positive or negative, accurate or distorted, the \"stories\" of colonial agents such as missionaries comprise an undeniable part of this process 18 of \"truth building.\" As historians and sociologists, we are rarely, if ever, presented with information and sources devoid of certain biases and limitations. Within these biases and limitations, nonetheless, are mines of insight and meaning awaiting our interpretation. Our analysis and use of historical sources must always weigh the balance between these considerations. Finally, I return once again to the argument that colonial projects, the forces motivating them and the strategies resisting, even subverting them were always more complex, multi-faceted and multi-directional than traditional analyses would have us believe. Recent challenges have pushed us to re-map the \"tensions of empire,\" its fissures and contradictions (Stoler and Cooper 1997). I am not suggesting that the discovery of ambivalence within colonial regimes necessarily and automatically presupposes agency and resistance, an idea which has been soundly critiqued by McClintock (1995,61-65). But, following Comaroff & Comaroff (1991; 1997), I do suggest that re-examining colonialism through more nuanced lenses presents promising research directions and opportunities to balance the skewed nature of dominant historical accounts. Simply exploring how colonialism played out not so much through monolithic, structural oppression as, perhaps more importantly, through the everyday colonization of quotidian spaces, practices and consciousness, one gains new insight into how pervasive the process was, but also how potentially precarious and permeable it could be. It is hoped that by providing an even more thorough and complex understanding of colonialism and \"civilization,\" my work will actually facilitate and enrich efforts to construct histories attentive to the complex intersections and articulations of race, class, gender, sexuality, oppression and resistance. 19 In the following chapter, I review some of the work which has inspired this research. Various authors have explored questions of race, class, gender and sexuality in the colonial context and, specifically, in mission and residential school settings. I discuss the valuable insights offered in these analyses, and their invitation to pursue further investigation. The key elements of my theoretical and methodological frameworks are explained, and the decision to focus on the narratives and perspectives of missionaries is discussed in greater detail. In Chapter Three, I deconstruct colonial discourse to reveal persistent patterns in the \"civilizing\" process. Taking each strand of the discourse in turn, I describe how \"civilization\" required the transformation of the most intimate arenas of everyday life -identity, relationships, space, and work - imposing on each a hierarchical grid of race, class, gender and sexuality. I argue that missionary efforts to effect these changes reveal as much about their own agendas and aspirations, as their reports \"back home\" were purported to reveal about the \"saving of the savage.\" Particular attention is accorded to imperial images and missionary techniques to paint discursive pictures of their \"progress.\" Using the concept of \"mimicry,\" I argue missionary narratives reveal not only what \"civilization\" supposedly \"looked like,\" but also where its unspoken limitations lay. In Chapter Four, I explore these ideas further by examining the ways in which \"civilizing\" strategies converged around the body. I discuss how campaigns to cleanse, clothe and discipline Native bodies were designed to produce empirical proof of \"civilization,\" while harnessing the powerful re/productive potentials of the body to imperial markets. From depictions of medicine-men as spectacles of \"savagery,\" to idyllic images of 20 \"neat Indian maidens,\" I chart the ways in which different bodies were defined, and their desires patrolled through colonial discourse. Finally, in Chapter Five, I conclude by reconnecting my analysis with contemporary controversies. By taking residential schools as my starting point, I locate my work within a set of highly politically and emotionally charged debates. I explore how these debates have been constructed in public discourse, and identify some of the ways in which \"civilizing\" discourse continues to demonstrate its powerful appeal. 21 Chapter Two: (De)Constructing the Colonial Encounter: Tools and Tactics The questions I engage with in the following chapters are neither new nor unique: how can we begin to map out the multilayered and ever-shifting landscapes on which colonial encounters played out? How do we define what \"colonial encounters\" were and, even more problematic, whose records and narratives do we rely on to tell this history? How can we critique the binaries of colonizer-colonized, metropole-colony and others when they have served for so long (however problematically) to navigate the tangled terrain of empire? While a range of (post-)colonial theorists, historians, sociologists and anthropologists have grappled with these questions, the answers remain elusive and contested. Few, if any, have found ways to convey the vastly fissured, unstable nature of colonial regimes while also critiquing the deeply coercive, inherently violent ideologies and practices which remained their foundation. As Anne McClintock reminds us: Imperialism was a situation under constant contest, producing historical effects that were neither predetermined, uncontested nor ineradicable - in the context, it cannot be forgotten, of extreme imbalances of power. (1995,16) Even fewer, it seems, have successfully integrated multiple facets of identity and interaction into their investigations, focussing instead on single dimensions of race, class, gender or sexuality in colonial contexts. In this chapter, I will review some of the work which has been done around residential schools and their missionary predecessors, and point out both their problems and their possibilities. I will then discuss the theoretical and methodological frameworks which are woven together for this study - a hybrid blend of Foucauldian discourse analysis, intersectional and (post-)colonial approaches. Who and what I examine in 22 order to piece together my understandings and arguments will be explained, their advantages defended and their omissions admitted. Review of Literature Far from providing an exhaustive survey of the many works which could easily pertain to and shed light on this project, I have selected instead a sampling of studies which have influenced my thinking and shifted my perspective. Whether they pointed me in new directions, or pursued approaches I disagreed with, all of these studies illustrate the difficulty of attending to race, class, gender and sexuality in any single analysis. At the same time, however, they reinforce my conviction that such multilayered investigations are urgently needed if we are to grasp more fully the complexity of colonial projects and imperial agendas. Karen Anderson (1988) performs a skilful, historical discourse analysis which reveals the gendered nature of the colonial project, specifically as it was pursued by 17th century Jesuit missionaries among the Huron and Montagnais-Naskapi Indians of New France. She examines the images of Huron and Montagnais-Naskapi women as they appeared in Jesuit texts, and traces these images back to hierarchical, gendered binaries rooted in Western thought and Christian doctrine. The coercive transformation of Huron and Montagnais-Naskapi women from equal, sexually autonomous members of their societies to docile, chaste and compliant Catholic daughters and wives is identified as a crucial component of a broader colonial project. Analyzing missionary texts, Anderson discusses the way in which Western, Christian discourses of gender were brought to bear on Native women's sexuality and their obedience (or lack thereof) to male/Church authority. A familiar madonna/whore 23 dichotomy and dynamic emerged as native women were consistently portrayed as either \"lambs\" or \"shrews\" (Anderson 1988, 570).1 Drawing on Foucault, Anderson identifies sexuality as a key site in the constitution and contestation of power relations. The sexuality of Huron and Montagnais-Naskapi women was not simply suppressed, it was subjected to intense surveillance, channeled in narrow directions and legitimated only within specific spheres. Anderson's examination of missionary texts as \"strategic documents\" illustrates the potential of archival research to interrogate historically sedimented notions of gender and sexuality by charting their discursive construction and implementation in colonial contexts of power. While she explores one aspect of colonial power relations, however, she inadvertently perpetuates the silencing of another. There is a troubling failure to mention, let alone address, the ways in which Jesuit and colonial discourses were not only gendered, but also racialised and /leterosexualised. Subsequently, we are given no sense of how the discourses constituting and patrolling Native women's gender, (hetero)sexuality and \"race\" intersected and overlapped in complex and crucial ways. The absence of such a discussion is highly problematic given the colonial context of Anderson's work, a context in which racialised discourses were far from absent or irrelevant, and heterosexual normativity was essential to the (re)productive potentials of empire. Anderson does note that in order to impose their ideas and practices, missionaries needed to establish \"social institutions and practices capable of enforcing those definitions in day to day social practices\" (1988, 561). It 1 It is both significant and disturbing to note, however, that while white women were categorized as \"madonnas\" or \"whores,\" native women's designation as \"lambs\" or \"shrews\" was cast in animalistic terms. Racialisation ensured that Huron and Montagnais-Naskapi women were discursively constituted as women and sexual beings in ways similar to, but always distinct from (and inferior to) European women. Anderson, unfortunately, does not explore this issue. 24 is exactly this agenda of redefining and regulating quotidian spaces, activities and identities which will be explored in the following chapters. Drawing on a range of historical sources, Jean Barman (1998) provides a compelling analysis of the race, gender and sexual discourses in late nineteenth-century British Columbia. She documents the colonial intersection and articulation of these discourses as they converged around Aboriginal practices, traditions and Aboriginal women's sexuality, in particular. Aboriginal women's sexuality shifts from the margins of traditional historical analysis to occupy the forefront of Barman's study of colonial power, cultural and sexual imperialism. Barman discusses the ways in which Christian doctrines around gender and sexuality meshed with racist colonial discourses to sexualize any and all displays of Aboriginal women's autonomy. She identifies what she calls a \"tripartite alliance\" among three groups of men - missionaries, government officials and Aboriginal men - all seeking to \"tame\" Aboriginal women's sexuality and thus gain control of Aboriginal peoples (Barman 1998,249). The campaign launched by this informal alliance had two primary objectives: first, keeping Aboriginal women at home and, thus, under control, and second, cleansing and desexualizing the Aboriginal home to mimic the European model (Barman 1998,251). She charts the strategies which ensued, including petitions to legislate Aboriginal women's domesticity, attempts to hierarchize and privatize Aboriginal familial space and housing, the sexualization and banishment of potlatching, and the establishment of residential schools for Aboriginal children. Barman's attention to the complex and varied sites and forms of Aboriginal women's agency and resistance provides valuable contrast to depictions of Aboriginal women as passive, irrelevant or, simply absent. Her discussion of residential schools, in particular, 25 while brief, remains one of the few analyses to link these institutions with a specifically gendered agenda aimed at controlling the sexuality of the students. Having said that, however, there are also some aspects of Barman's analysis, which suggest directions for future research. Exploring the relations between Aboriginal women and non-Aboriginal men, Barman makes the following statement: \"When a non-Aboriginal man saw an Aboriginal woman, what he may have perceived was not so much her Aboriginality as her gender and, certainly, her sexuality\" (1998, 247). A number of troubling questions arise. Can one separate race, gender and sexuality so easily when so many analyses (including Barman's own) suggest they were inextricably interwoven? The very quotes Barman offers of white men lamenting the absence of \"women\" in the colony (1998,246) suggest that these men defined \"women\" as white women, thus ensuring Aboriginal women comprised a separate category that would always denote Aboriginal women. Furthermore, Barman's statement rests upon and inadvertently supports problematic assumptions of the heterosexuality of both the Aboriginal women and the non-Aboriginal men. It needs to be recognized more explicitly that it was Aboriginal women's heterosexuality which was being tamed and rendered compulsory. Similarly, as work such as Adele Perry's suggests (1999), the homoerotic desires and possibilities among settler men comprise yet another history which remains to be explored. J.R. Miller's history of residential schools (1996) includes a chapter entitled, \"The Misfortune of Being a Woman \": Gender, making it one of the few analyses to explicitly address the question of gender and its impact in the schools. By devoting an entire chapter of his book to this issue, Miller calls attention to gender as an \"omnipresent factor\" (1996,248) shaping residential school dynamics. Miller documents the ways in which male and female 26 students were \"fanatically segregated\" (1998,219), exposed to hierarchical ideologies of gender, and taught gender specific skills and behaviours. He also discusses the ways in which discourses around gender, sin, sexuality and race converged with particularly oppressive results for female students. While the historical research is rich and undeniably valuable, Miller's framing and analysis is often problematic. \" Race\" filters in and out of the analysis - sometimes surfacing as an extra layer of oppression simply added on top of gender, sometimes disappearing from the discussion completely, eliding the ways in which \"race\" was as omnipresent a factor as gender. Either way, the effect is problematic. Like the title of the chapter, Miller suggests that the \"misfortune of being a woman\" was a burden uniting white and Native women in a shared oppression. By ignoring the myriad ways in which race mediated and interacted with gender, he obscures the ways in which women's \"misfortune\" varied with racial and colonial privilege. Furthermore, \"race\" is considered only in the discussion of Native students, but then vanishes when analysis turns to the white women missionaries. Miller's failure to interrogate whiteness as a position of racial privilege and power inadvertently perpetuates whiteness as the norm which need not be deconstructed. This analytical oversight results in an even more troubling blindness to power imbalances among different groups of women. Issues of power, in general, are too often either ignored or only superficially addressed in Miller's work. A more Foucauldian analysis would have provided important insights into the system of power, control, and surveillance which existed in the schools. Miller discusses, for example, \"concerns\" about students post-graduation and the missionaries' involvement in arranging marriages (1996,227-231). What he doesn't discuss are the ways in which such \"concerns\" converged around Native female students in particular, subjecting them to 2 7 intensely patriarchal and heteronormative authority and surveillance. More often than not, Miller seems to accept the legitimation that was given to such actions by framing them as \"protection\" for the girls and not critiquing such paternalistic discourse. He writes that it was \"especially important to protect female pupils from temptations\" (Miller 1996,229). In other words, it was especially important to control the sexual agency of Native women - an analytical translation that Miller doesn't make. He offers some gentle critique, but needs to move beyond discussing missionary \"high handedness\" and \"prurience\" (Miller 1996,232) in order to reveal the specifically gendered, racialised and heteronormative system of control and surveillance that was operating. Like Miller, K. Tsianina Lomawaima includes a chapter devoted to the impact of gender in her study of the early twentieth-century Chilocco Indian residential school in the United States (1994). Unlike Miller, however, she develops an intricate understanding of race and gender discourses and their interaction within colonial class hierarchies. Compelling links are drawn between specific practices and broader agendas, between individual bodies and the project and processes of \"civilization.\" Lomawaima acknowledges that the struggles of Indian women and girls within the schools were not burdens shared by all women; rather, they were infused with racist ideologies and forged within the structures and relations of colonialism. She links the domesticity training for girls in the schools with bourgeois, Victorian gender ideologies, but she also discusses the critical ways in which these ideologies were mediated by race. Consequently, her analysis is able to account for the flexibility of gender discourses when applied to Indian, rather than white, women. Enshrining bourgeois and upper class white women's fragility required the naturalization, through racial discourse, of non-white women's drudgery and exploitation. Lomawaima 28 makes a powerful argument that training in domesticity was, in reality, training in \"subservience and submission to authority\" (1994, 81). Lomawaima's work around issues of power and surveillance in the schools is particularly insightful. She identifies the body as a \"battleground,\" an important site of power and control, and highlights the relationship of bodies to \"civilization.\" Most importantly, she notes the ways in which \"civilization\" was inscribed differently on different bodies according to race and gender. She discusses how the uniquely gendered experience of menstruation intensified \"authority's gaze\" on Indian girls and women and their bodies, as matrons at the schools dispensed pads and kept track of the girls' cycles (Lomawaima 1994, 91). Unlike Miller, Lomawaima doesn't frame menstruation as simply an added \"burden\" that female staff and students shared alike, but rather, she identifies it as an opportunity for female staff to increase their surveillance of female students. Her silence around issues of sexuality, however, provides a troubling oversight in her analysis. She never addresses or explores, for example, the heteronormative assumptions built into a system of guarding female sexuality through monitoring menstruation. Similarly, she discusses the fascinating phenomenon of \"practice cottages\" where girls lived together and role-played different familial gender roles (Lomawaima 1994, 87-88), without exploring the opportunities for female bonding and intimacy which these cottages provided. Unfortunately, the possibility of the homoerotic remains just outside of an otherwise comprehensive critical analysis. Finally, Jo-Anne Fiske's work (1996) represents one of the few analyses to integrate race, gender and sexuality in a specific discussion of British Columbia residential schools. Fiske argues that \"sexuality and spirituality marked moral boundaries on the North American colonial frontier,\" a frontier that she argues can be more accurately understood as a \"sexual\" 29 and \"im/moral frontier\" (1996,664,671). She characterizes colonial encounters as the continuing clash of \"moral strangers\" and argues that dichotomous constructions of Native women's sexuality lay at the heart of this contest (Fiske 1996, 664-665). The mythic icon of Pocahontas has a long colonial history and continues to reinforce images and understandings of Aboriginal women as chaste \"princesses\" or denigrated \"squaws.\" Fiske takes this construct as her starting point and employs it skillfully to reveal how central gender and sexuality were to colonial projects and, specifically, to the \"im/moral regime of religious residential education\" (1996,666). Drawing on postcolonial approaches, she engages with contemporary Carrier women in central British Columbia as the \"metaphorical granddaughters\" (Fiske 1996,664) of Pocahontas to reveal how they have, in many ways, resisted and subverted the legacy of the Catholic-run Lejac residential school. Fiske's work is particularly enlightening for my own research because she highlights the significance of women's bodies and, particularly, women's sexuality to the discourse and supposed demonstration of \"civilization.\" She writes, \"Images of women's bodies and presumptions about female morality were central signifiers of relative stages of 'civilization'\" (Fiske 1996, 663). What exactly these images looked like, and what assumptions they expressed, are issues which I address in the following chapters. Fiske's attention to the ways in which images of women's sexuality could contradict one another, yet continue to co-exist is also extremely valuable and insightful. The complexity of her analysis, however, falters when she discusses how these ideas actually played out in the residential schools. She writes that \"European constructions of sexual morality forced the aboriginal students into a repressive life,\" and she also argues that awareness of the princess-squaw dichotomy led those running the schools to \"[vacillate] between acts of repression and 3 0 protection\" (Fiske 1996,672-674). As I argue in the following section and throughout this thesis, repression was indeed part of the \"sexual frontier,\" but it cannot be relied upon for a complete understanding of colonial sexual dynamics. Nor can repression/protection be accepted as the equally dichotomous construction of European (a)sexual agendas. Although Fiske points out the danger of constructing the residential school story as a monolithic narrative of oppression, she fails to explore the ways in which complexity marked the strategies of not only the \"colonized,\" but also the \"colonizers.\" Furthermore, because her analysis of sexuality masks, yet again, an unspoken focus on heterosexuality, the ways in which residential schools were aggressively formative of heternormativity remain obscured. Nonetheless, Fiske's work provides an encouraging example of how questions of gender and sexuality are beginning to reshape our understanding of residential schools, revealing uniquely textured narratives which challenge uni-dimensional analyses. Theoretical and Methodological Frameworks The inspiration and insights for this research have been drawn from a wide range of fields, including contemporary social theory, feminist theory and history, (post-)colonial studies, cultural studies, and queer theory and history. Ironically, Michel Foucault's work, which provides one of the major theoretical and methodological influences, evades capture into any one of the above categories, instead spilling its insights and interrogations into all of them. A Foucauldian discourse analysis involves examining the historical texts, records and artifacts of a certain period, while theorizing their place and relation within networks of power and knowledge. The History of Sexuality (1978), in particular, suggests a valuable framework for my project. In this book, Foucault outlines a history of sexuality which 31 challenges all traditional understandings of not only sex and sexuality, but also knowledge, discourse and power. Using the \"repressive hypothesis\" as a sort of analytical foil, Foucault provides a genealogy of sexuality's construction, administration and obfuscation through discourse. He challenges us to question not, \"why are we repressed?\" but rather, what are the ever-shifting, polymorphous ways in which sex has been \"put into discourse?\" (Foucault 1978,11). Far from a one-dimensional prohibition, Foucault argues that \"sex was driven out of hiding and constrained to lead a discursive existence\" (1978, 33). He traces the history of institutional incitements to speak of and about sex, to invest it with a mysterious significance as our secret truth, and to relentlessly patrol its boundaries with vigilant surveillance. The proliferation of sexualities, perversions, sexual identities and pathologies is charted as a discursive process mediated through various centers and networks of power/knowledge -medicine, education, the family, and so on. Sexuality is identified as an \"especially dense transfer point for relations of power\" and Foucault discusses how strategic unities of power and knowledge have converged around and constructed women's bodies, children's sexuality, procreation, and \"perverse\" sexualities, particularly within the sexualized terrain of the family (1978, 103, 104-114). Traditional understandings of residential schools and the sexual discourses within them have relied on the repressive hypothesis with a remarkable lack of critique or nuance: sex was banished into silence and sexuality was repressed, only surfacing as \"perversion\" for isolated, easily coded incidents of sexual abuse. Using Foucault, however, we can examine the ways in which sexual discourses and power relations were ever present in residential schools and mission stations, precisely by interrogating the apparent silence surrounding them. As Foucault writes in a particularly memorable passage: 32 Silence itself - the things one declines to say, or is forbidden to name, the discretion that is required between different speakers - is less the absolute limit of discourse, the other side from which it is separated by a strict boundary, than an element that functions alongside the things said, with them and in relation to them within over-all strategies. (1978,27) His analysis of eighteenth century secondary schools provides a brilliant illustration of his arguments and an invaluable model for my own work. Rather than accepting the impression that \"sex was hardly spoken of at all in these institutions,\" Foucault explores the myriad of subtle ways in which a constant preoccupation with sex was revealed - through architectural design, classroom structures, recreational regulations, dormitory layouts and bedtime arrangements (1978,27-30). Far from absent, sex permeated every level of the pedagogical institution, as Foucault argues: The builders considered it explicitly. The organizers took it permanently into account. All who held a measure of authority were placed in a state of perpetual alert, which the fixtures, the precautions taken, the interplay of punishments and responsibilities, never ceased to reiterate. (1978,27-28) Schools actually served to multiply and legitimate the discourses surrounding and penetrating the sexuality of children and adolescents. In the following chapters, I will discuss the ways in which missionary discourses and practices aimed at \"civilizing the Indian\" afforded a similar license to discuss, patrol and reshape sexual bodies, spaces, and potentials. The limitation of Foucault's work is that he fails to explore the ways in which discourses of sexuality were mediated and sometimes transformed through their interaction with other discursive tropes and strategies. This aspect of his work becomes particularly troubling when we attempt to apply his analysis to colonial contexts in which discourses of sexuality were always articulated and enmeshed with those of race, class, gender and empire. Foucault's history of sexuality is stubbornly focussed in the metropoles of Europe, and fails to examine the ways in which discourses and power relations not only shifted in the colonies, 33 but also returned \"home\" and prompted changes there. Consequently, Foucault's influence is both complemented and critiqued by the work of Ann Laura Stoler. In her book, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault's History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things, Stoler argues that European discourses of sexuality cannot be charted in Europe alone, but rather, we must trace the \"more circuitous imperial route\" these discourses traveled (1995, 7). By emphasizing the mutually constitutive relationship between metropoles and colonies, she highlights the importance of applying Foucault's insights not only at \"home,\" but also abroad. The project is not simply to extend Foucault's analysis to yet another terrain, but to recognize the imperial imbrication of terrains, discourses and identities. Bringing colonial/post-colonial studies and Foucault's work together is a long overdue and necessary endeavour, as Stoler argues: In short-circuiting empire, Foucault's history of European sexuality misses key sites in the production of that discourse, discounts the practices that racialised bodies, and thus elides a field of knowledge that provides a contrast for what a \"healthy, vigorous, bourgeois body\" was all about. (1995, 7) Understanding how imperial discourses of race, class, gender and sexuality played out in the colonies is thus shifted from a marginal sub-field, to a crucial element in understanding the generation and transformation of these most flexible and enduring discourses. It forces us to reconsider the notion that colonial powers simply exported ideas and identities which were uncontested at \"home.\" Stoler suggests instead that, far from a \"secure bourgeois project,\" colonialism was \"not only about the importation of middle-class sensibilities to the colonies, but about the making of them\" (1995,99, emphasis in original). Stoler also demands greater attention to the ways in which discourses of race, class, gender and sexuality buttressed and transformed one another. She points out, for example, that the \"racial lexicon of empire and the sexualized images of it, in some cases, may have 34 provided for a European language of class as often as the other way around\" (Stoler 1995, 123). Her discussion of degeneracy, in particular, highlights this interaction. The hybrid discourse of degeneracy animated and expressed deep-seated colonial (and metropolitan) fears around racial contamination, sexual transgressions, body boundaries and class insurgency. The degenerate \"Other\" came to embody the specifically gendered, dangerously racialised, sexual threats to bourgeois, colonial rule. Stoler emphasizes that degeneracy was \"not a European disorder, or a specifically colonial one, but a 'mobile' discourse of empire that designated eligibility for citizenship, class membership, and gendered assignments to race\" (1995, 32). The mobility of the discourse enabled its deployment against not only the \"savages\" of exoticized colonies, but also the \"heathen\" poor of rapidly industrializing metropolitan cities. The discourse did not, of course, impact all bodies and practices equally, as Stoler notes that some were automatically configured as degenerate threats. Sexual promiscuity and restraint, she argues, were \"often post-hoc interpretations contingent on the racialized class and gender categories to which individuals were already assigned.\" Women of colour and poor women were pre-coded as \"erotically driven, sensually charged, and sexually precocious by definition\" (Stoler 1995,155). Anne McClintock's Imperial Leather (1995), the third strand woven into my theoretical framework, is an engaging and critical account of empire, its fears, fetishes, desires and discourses. Among other considerable contributions, Imperial Leather introduces a lexicon of concepts invaluable for any discourse analysis in the colonial context. The first, and perhaps most powerful of these, is McClintock's framing of race, class, gender and sexuality as \"articulated categories\" which comprise the \"formative categories of imperial modernity\" (1995, 61). She argues that the relations, structures and identities constructed in 35 and through these categories must be studied neither in isolation, nor in blandly pluralistic interaction. She conveys instead a complex, even unstable, web of triangulated connections, riven with contradictions and fused together by power. Race, class, gender and sexuality \"come into being in historical relation to each other and emerge only in dynamic, shifting and intimate interdependence\" (McClintock 1995, 61). McClintock broadens the scope of colonial analyses beyond one-dimensional studies which privilege one discursive trope over another, but also argues that attention must never drift away from essential issues of power which may overdetermine different situations for race, class, gender or sexuality. Her framework provides an indispensable tool for mapping the complex terrain of colonial contexts. As McClintock herself argues, however, mapping and exploration both have long histories as penetrative, imperial projects concealing a Western, male will to power (1995, 21-30), so it is important to note that her mapping is of a fundamentally different kind. It is an equally wide-ranging and ambitious endeavour, yet one which thrives upon contradictions and tangled, shifting paths. None of this is to suggest that her portrayal of empire seeks to deny or minimize the exploitation, coercion and violent oppression which constituted imperialism's core; quite the opposite, McClintock presents a finely honed discourse analysis which never relinquishes its grip on lived realities. Because her work has been so central in influencing my own investigations, many of the analytical tools and concepts she provides will be introduced, discussed and employed throughout the following sections and chapters. Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff have written extensively and brilliantly about missionary colonialism and the \"civilizing\" project. Their two volume work, Of Revelation and Revolution (Comaroff and Comaroff 1991, vol. l;Comaroff and Comaroff 1997, vol. 2) tracks the inseparable dialectics of political economy and cultural imperialism in the \"dark 3 6 continent\" of Africa. Missionary work among the Griqua and Tswana of South Africa is examined as an integral component of a broader, often unstable, but always oppressive agenda. They focus, in particular, on the ideological processes whereby missionaries and those they sought to \"save\" were defined and delimited as historical actors, an analysis which reveals, as John Comaroff puts it, \"much about the contradictions of colonialism, here and elsewhere\" (Comaroff 1997, 165). Their insights serve as inspiration for this research as they explore a process unfolding not only in Africa, but in all the corners of empire. In Volume 1, they explain: Our story is woven from two contrapuntal narratives. One speaks of a specific Christian mission and its consequences; the second, of a more general postenlightenment process of colonization in which Europe set out to grasp and subdue the forces of savagery, otherness, and unreason (Comaroff and Comaroff 1991,11) If, indeed, Africa served as an \"imagined landscape,\" a \"symbolic terrain\" and an indispensable negative trope in the formation of European identities (Comaroff and Comaroff 1991, 86-87), then missionaries, as the agents of empire charged with the translation and transformation of native cultures, played a pivotal role. By excavating the layered realities of mission stations, the Comaroffs are able to chart the ways in which missionaries continuously constructed \"civilization\" for themselves and Others. They argue that missionaries were in a unique position to pioneer this process for their influence resided not in \"top-down\" structures and institutions, but was enacted through the quotidian conquest of bodies, spaces, practices and identities. The very essence of colonization, they assert, \"inheres less in political overrule than in seizing and transforming \"others\" by the very act of conceptualizing, inscribing, and interacting with them on terms not of their choosing...\" (Comaroff and Comaroff 1991,15). This process reached into the most intimate and 37 seemingly mundane arenas of everyday life, transforming consciousness through clothing, hegemony through housing, identity through industriousness. Both of these issues, the focus on missionaries and the significance of \"everyday\" colonization, will be discussed in greater detail in the following sections. The theoretical and methodological inspiration offered by the Comaroffs cannot be overstated, for their work provides one of the most thoughtful and innovative forays into the intricate and intimate realms of empire. Missionary Histories This investigation is launched from the colonial terrain inhabited, described, and eventually transformed by Christian evangelical missionaries. Like the Comaroffs, I believe much can be learnt by examining the ideas, practices and identities of the men and women whose divine duty sent them among \"heathen\" Others as heralds of a new cultural and material order known as \"civilization.\" In this section, I will discuss \"who\" missionaries were and why their records continue to warrant critical analysis and interpretation. I will explore what was significant about the texts and narratives they produced and how these contributed to the discursive (re)construction of nation and empire. Finally, I will introduce the two missionaries whose projects are examined in this thesis - William Duncan and Thomas Crosby, and describe the range of texts and images produced both by and about them and how these will be drawn on in the chapters to follow. Vanguards of Empire? \"The story of missionary effort and enterprise among the people of this or any other land is one of the most thrilling and interesting that its history can reveal. What deeds of heroism! What struggles and loneliness! What sacrifice of personal comfort and ambition! What inspiration and sublime hope! What determination, in spite of fearful odds! Enough here to make a romance that would stir the heroic heart of a nation with pride in its noble sons and daughters, willing to brave the hardships of 38 isolation, and the dangers among savage tribes, that to those in darkness they may bring the Light of Life and raise the less favored of the earth to the higher planes of Christian civilization! Every story of true missionary zeal and effort enriches the historic annals of a people; and yet the whole missionary story of this land of ours will never be told. Many a beam of revealing light has flashed upon the dark corners of earth; later generations knew it not, for its pathway was not recorded in their histories. To have known it would have been to understand better than we do the heroisms of the past and to be nerved for a nobler future.\" (Sipprell 1914, vii) These thoughts, offered in the introduction to Thomas Crosby's memoirs, Up and Down the North Pacific Coast By Canoe and Mission Ship (1914), provide a valuable starting point for my analysis. In the over eighty years since their writing, missionary projects in \"this land of ours,\" residential schools in particular, have been subject to increasingly fierce scrutiny and legitimately harsh criticism. In light of recent arguments and allegations, the rhetoric above no longer resonates with the same conviction, and the sentiments expressed seem not only self-aggrandizing, but, to many, blatantly offensive. Although it may not be a particularly popular stance to take up, I argue that such texts, their rhetoric and rationale, remain valuable historical studies, perhaps now more than ever. Surely those of us critical of colonial projects would do better to plumb the very depths of the discourses which animated them than to disregard them as impenetrably and inexplicably evil. By engaging with texts such as the one above, we can discover how missionaries legitimated their actions and, in the process, attempted to define themselves and others, revealing much about colonial structures and practices in general. As Nicholas Thomas has pointed out, to pursue only the privileged \"side\" of the story is an incomplete but worthy analysis, for \"the varieties of colonial discourse which are present in popular culture and scholarship and which continue to condition our ways of thinking owe a good deal to their religious and secular antecedents\" (1992,389). 39 Missionaries were vanguards of empire, in a sense, but their role and position was one fraught with tensions and contradictions. It is exactly this feature that has led many to focus on their endeavours. As mentioned already, Comaroff and Comaroff have described the interstitial status of missionaries and argued compellingly that, because of this status, missionary texts and images provide unique insights into colonialism's complex workings (Comaroff and Comaroff 1991; Comaroff 1997). Missionaries' liminal position in a shifting class structure meant their experiences and aspirations were shot through with the contradictions of colonial political economy. John Comaroff argues that while missionaries were the \"most active ideological agents\" of empire, they were precariously placed \"between a displaced peasantry, an expanding proletariat, and the lower reaches of the rising British bourgeoisie.\" They were located, as he succinctly puts it, at the \"ideological core yet the social margins\" of a vastly fissured class structure (1997, 166-169). Their biographies followed a course of modest upward mobility and the ongoing quest for bourgeois respectability. Small surprise then that the principles and practices demanded by industrial capitalism figured so strongly in their teachings, for the lessons they carried into the mission field were infused with their own ambitions and ambivalence: ... inasmuch as they were to evangelize and civilize by personal example - itself part and parcel of bourgeois morality - the road along which they were to lead the heathen was to retrace their own pathways through British society. Or, rather, toward an image of that society as they wished to see it. (Comaroff 1997,169) Susan Neylan (1999) describes how the working-class backgrounds of missionaries such as Duncan and Crosby were also linked to the evangelical traditions which spurred their work among the unconverted poor and \"heathen\" masses. Protestant evangelicalism, she argues, had long \"preached its message directly to the urban poor of England's industrial working families, stressing values of self-reliance, self-discipline and hard work alongside the need 40 for spiritual transformation\" (Neylan 1999, 86). Missionary work was a \"respectable choice\" which enabled members of the lower classes to rise above their backgrounds and, through their teachings, disseminate and reinforce the hierarchical order that afforded them their limited social mobility (Neylan 1999,92). Any discussion of \"who\" missionaries were must also acknowledge that in rhetoric, if not in reality, this role was encoded and understood as explicitly male and implicitly heterosexual. Missionary memoirs and narratives reflected and replayed the racialized, gendered, and (hetero)sexualized designations of epic masculine heroes and largely invisible women. As discussed by Stoler (1995), much discursive work went into promoting the image of manly, virile empire builders - a narrative which often left women missionaries either obscured, or ambiguously located as vitally necessary \"civilizing\" agents without any agency. The two case studies for this research provide interesting insights into this phenomenon. Reading biographies and even critical analyses of the two missions, one is struck by the remarkably absent presence of Thomas Crosby's wife, Emma, and the scandalously ever-present absence of a (white) \"female companion\" for William Duncan in Metlakatla. It seems that the domestic and (re)productive duties performed by missionary wives became most apparent and appreciated only when they were missing. Because missionary texts so often enacted and affirmed a deeply patriarchal, familial discourse which cast missionaries as benevolent parent-guardians to undeveloped, child-like savages, it is perhaps no wonder that the often foundational \"civilizing\" work performed by women was so often portrayed as secondary to, and/or directed by, the men who seemingly single-handedly presided over mission stations. The \"civilizing\" process was very much about patrolling the race, class, gender and sexuality of not only the masses, but also the messengers. So 41 although women such as Emma Crosby were an integral part of missionary projects, their role was constantly overshadowed by the need to keep the gendered, sexual hierarchies of \"civilization\" intact.2 Chapter Three will further explore the complex intersections of race and gender by examining the construction of masculinity and femininity for missionaries and their converts. Authors of Empire As symbolic terrains, colonies sustained a much more vivid, epic existence through discourse than could likely be attributed to them in \"reality.\" Missionaries played a crucial role in the production and performance of this discourse. By the mid-nineteenth century and into the early twentieth century, missionary newsletters, journals, memoirs and magazines enjoyed a wide, popular readership. A featured aspect of almost all such missionary publications was the sharing of \"letters from the field,\" reports penned by the brave souls who ventured forth to spread the twin lights of Christianity and \"civilization\" into the dark corners of the earth. Peter Murray, a contemporary William Duncan biographer, argues that post-1840, following David Livingston's \"triumphant\" return from Africa, English missionary movements experienced a surge in popular interest and investment: \"Support groups sprang up in every city and town, publications appeared extolling the exploits of devoted men in faraway lands, and money poured into the coffers of the half-dozen major societies\" (Murray 1985,17). Both the Church Missionary Society (C.M.S.) and the Missionary Society of the Methodist Church of Canada, the evangelical organizations that 2 See Lynne Marks' study (1992) of working-class women's involvement in the Salvation Army for an intriguing insight into how intersecting class and gender dynamics afforded some women unique roles and opportunities within religious organizations. Marks strikes a careful balance in her analysis of how evangelical work simultaneously resisted and reinforced existing class and gender hierarchies. 42 sponsored Duncan and Crosby, respectively, produced monthly and yearly reports exalting the progress in their widespread mission fields. Another Duncan biographer, historian Jean Usher writes: The Church Missionary Society's publications provided the Victorian public with much of its information about aboriginal peoples and their social environment. The colourful accounts of heroism and stories of exotic cultures captured the popular imagination, and missionary literature of all kinds enjoyed a great popularity in Victorian homes. The [Church Missionary] Intelligencer accepted that part of its function was to provide factual accounts of the comparatively unknown regions of the world in which its missionaries worked. (1974, 12) Missionaries proved themselves to be \"especially diligent providers of stories about their own intentions, projects, and achievements\" and their writing blossomed into a \"literary genre unto itself (Comaroff and Comaroff 1991, 35; Neylan 1999,321). Alongside popular travel narratives, anthropological writings and increasingly widespread photographic records, missionary reports were responsible for providing many with an image and an understanding of the unseen, uncivilized Other. What made their contribution unique was what Comaroff and Comaroff have described as an \"assertively personalized, epic form\": Being soldiers of a spiritual empire, the churchmen described their deeds and achievements - and especially their battles with the forces of darkness - as conquests of civilization; here was history told, in the true spirit of Carlyle.. .as the autobiography of heroism. (Comaroff and Comaroff 1991,172) These narratives served to transform, at least in discourse, previously poor, often minimally educated men from the margins of bourgeois society into \"singularly transcendent and historically empowered figures\" (Thomas 1992,383). Even more importantly, they framed and encoded the \"civilizing\" mission as part of a much broader colonial, morality tale. Consider again the dramatic introduction to Crosby's memoirs; one could hardly have read such vivid and stirring prose without feeling that a drama of epic proportions was sure to follow, with missionaries clearly cast as the unsung and uncontested heroes. 43 It is important to consider why missionaries were so \"diligently\" discursive. One of the most obvious and pressing motivations was money. Garnering wide popular support for their work was vitally necessary in order to secure the contributions which funded their projects. Writing letters, reports and memoirs, in addition to personally touring and speaking in public, were often missionaries' primary means of fundraising. Clarence Bolt argues that financial pressures influenced the tone and content of missionary discourse itself, sharpening the contrasts drawn between \"heathen ways\" and \"Christian ways.\" Such emphasis was financially worthwhile, for \"the amount of support they could gain would often coincide with the immorality and degradation of the Natives as well as the danger, adventure, and heroism demanded in changing them\" (Bolt 1992, 103). Peter Murray describes how William Duncan's writing was shaped by this process from the very beginning, with his first report from Fort Simpson: Duncan's C.M.S. report was markedly different in tone from his journal entries, which included low-key and positive descriptions of some of the Indian customs... But knowing his report would be circulated to a wide audience through the Society's publications, Duncan provided a frightening account of his labours among a horde of blood-thirsty savages calculated to bring forth a flood of donations. (1985,42-43) Another factor to consider is the extent to which denominational conflicts and competition over the mission field itself may have shaped the writings produced about it. While accounts vary over how strong and/or divisive denominational rivalry was in nineteenth-century British Columbia, it seems generally agreed upon that the mission field was by no means uncontested territory. Whatever the intensity of competition, missionaries were, at the very least, aware of other churches' efforts to establish a presence in the province. Nicholas Thomas, writing about mission work in the South Pacific, argues that missionaries' representations were \"not motivated exclusively by the projects of knowing the other and 44 representing a certain relation of alterity but arose as well from the mission's competitive interest in justifying its specific programme and orientation\" (1992, 371). The point here is not to emphasize the significance of denominational differences among missions (a subject worthy of independent investigation), but rather to recognize that awareness of such differences may have contributed to the oppositional, dramatic narrative style of much missionary discourse. Further insights can be gained by turning the analysis on its head, so to speak, and asking instead: why were missionary texts and images so popular? What was it about their poetics and preoccupations that resonated so powerfully with audiences at \"home\"? Drawing on Comaroff and Comaroff (1991), McClintock(1995), Stoler (1995), Stoler and Cooper (1997) and others, one can argue that it was through both the construction and the consumption of missionary narratives that Europeans and Euro-Canadians developed a sense of \"home\" as a place and an identity defined in opposition to the colonial terrains they imagined. Opposition was not the only relationship established though, for the colonies were also drawn upon to furnish the racialized language used to regulate the internal boundaries of sexuality, class and gender in metropolitan centres. As Comaroff and Comaroff argue, \"the experiments of the godly pioneers at the margins of empire came to color perceptions and policies back in England, foreshadowing \"missions\" to other \"Africas,\" not least to the terra incognita of the Victorian industrial city\" (1997, xvi-xvii). The \"analogy between slum and colony was tirelessly evoked\" and colonial discourse was consistently deployed to control and contain unruly urban spaces and inhabitants (McClintock 1995,120; see also, Thome 1997). Usher states that \"[w]ork among the poor of England was considered good preparation for work among the heathen, for the same moral depravity that kept the heathen 45 in a state of barbarism was seen as the cause of the social condition of the working class\" (1974,10). From one methodological standpoint, these aspects of missionary discourse, its ideologies and interests, render missionary texts problematic as legitimate, let alone accurate, records of historical \"truth.\" From another perspective, missionary narratives remain valuable for exactly their expression of the \"cultural semantics of a political moment\" (Stoler and Cooper 1997,18). When we pay attention to the telling of colonial \"tales,\" we can identify patterns in the poetics which are metonymic of colonialism more generally. Like the broader colonial enterprise of which it was a part, missionary discourse was constantly attempting to mediate its own inner ambivalence and inconsistencies. For example, although vivid descriptions of native savagery were often financially fruitful, they could not be cast in such certain and irreparable terms as to render missionary work inherently futile. Nicholas Thomas points out: \"If savages are quintessentially and irreducibly savage, the project of converting them to Christianity and introducing civilization is both hopeless and worthless. The prospect of failure would be matched by the undeserving character of the barbarians...\" (1992, 374). Missionaries thus struggled to maintain a precarious balance in their narratives - one which emphasized the \"lamentable distance between savagery and civilization\" (Comaroff and Comaroff 1991,174) - but which, at the same time, proposed and promoted the bridging of that distance. They worked hard to produce what I will call \"savable savages\" a category which reflected the paradoxical nature of the civilizing process, and into which native \"students\" were to be ushered but never quite allowed to outgrow. For the fundamental contradiction remained - missionaries could only induct their converts into the realm of \"civilization\" by establishing a hierarchical relationship with them which conflicted 46 with the supposed aims of the project. As Thomas notes, \"It is problematic to assimilate the other through the disavowal of hierarchy while implicitly sustaining the inequality that all colonialism presupposes\"; he further argues that what is significant is \"not the mixture of positive and negative elements in the portrayal of the other.. .but that this ambivalence is rhetorically central, a necessary predicate for the history of conversion\" (1992, 386-387, 375). Missionary discourse thus rehearsed, but never resolved the inherent tensions of colonial, \"civilizing\" projects. Another contradiction missionaries had to contend with was posed by the troublesome presence of other representatives of white man's \"civilization\" in the colonies, such as miners, traders and eventually settlers. At the same time that the \"arts\" and \"comforts\" of civilized life were extolled in missionary discourse, a parallel anxiety about civilization's \"vices\" was also being expressed. Thomas Crosby reported that the Tsimshian at Fort Simpson were in desperate need of a missionary for they were being \"decimated by the vices and diseases of civilization,\" which, he argued, followed the arrival of miners in 1858 (Crosby 1914,16). By discursively linking the destructive potentials of Native-European contact to a specific group of colonial actors, missionaries (and others) were able to contain an otherwise disturbing challenge to the legitimacy of civilizing projects. At the same time, discourse which cast specific whites as questionable representatives of European/Euro-Canadian culture and identity also served to patrol and buttress important racial and class boundaries. Robin Fisher notes that, despite their \"white skins,\" Hudson's Bay Company men \"were said to be only one degree removed from the Indians\" (1992, 59). Deep-seated fears around racial degeneracy and \"staying too long\" in the colonies, or \"going native,\" were applied to any who blurred the binaries of colonizer/colonized, and whose rank 4 7 in colonial class hierarchies was already in question. Anglican Bishop George Hills warned against the danger of too many gold miners in the colonies, \"many of them of a class not calculated to be the best element of order\" (Columbia Mission 1859,21). This remarkably flexible splitting of the discourse enabled missionaries, who had only just begun the ascent towards middle-class respectability themselves, to acknowledge and disavow the \"degrading\" effects of contact with other Europeans, while simultaneously making a case for their own, supposedly beneficial, bourgeois influence in the colonies. Case Studies \"Although incurring great personal risk, and several times narrowly escaping assassination, Mr. William Duncan, with rare fortitude, and genius, began single-handed a mission among them: he educated them and taught them Christianity in the simplest possible manner; at the same time gradually introducing peaceful industries; and by these means he wrought in a single generation a marvelous transformation. A work that stand absolutely without parallel in the history of missions.\" (Wellcome 1887,1) \"A conflict like that in which Thomas Crosby spent his life was no mere holiday parade. It was a grapple to the death with the powers of evil, in which no quarter was asked or given. He gave his life for the redemption of a people for whose souls no man cared, and fought - sometimes almost single-handed - a life-long battle against superstition, immorality, and godlessness of every kind.\" (Sutherland 1907, iv) Reading these Homeric descriptions, it is hard to believe that the inspirations for such prose were mere mortals, let alone naive and inexperienced young men when they began their mythic crusades. The evangelical aspirations of William Duncan and Thomas Crosby led them both far from home to the Northwest coast of British Columbia. The two missionaries engaged primarily with the Coast Tsimshian peoples who had relocated to live around the Hudson's Bay Company trading post at Fort Simpson, established in 1834 between the mouths of the Nass and Skeena Rivers, and renamed Port Simpson in 1880 (see Figure 1 for location of the two missions). Both Duncan and Crosby were in their early 48 Schools in British Columbia and North Figure 1: Schools in British Columbia and North3 3 Map reproduced from Miller (1996, facing page xii) twenties when they arrived in the province, equipped only with their moral fervour and pious devotion. Neither had any prior knowledge of the cultures they were to encounter, nor any previous mission experience beyond working among the poor of London, England, in the case of Duncan, and of Woodstock, Ontario, in the case of Crosby. Yet, they went on to establish two of the most influential, and controversial, missions in late nineteenth-century B.C. William Duncan arrived at Fort Simpson from England in October of 1857, and by the spring of 1862, he was able to convince a group of about fifty Tsimshian followers to move twenty miles south with him and establish a new settlement at Metlakatla in Prince Rupert Harbour. The \"model Christian village\" which resulted grew and thrived until 1887, when Duncan's numerous conflicts with the Church Missionary Society led to his estrangement from the Church of England and the relocation of the Metlakatla community to Alaska. Duncan's work among the Tsimshian remains one of the most in/famous missionary endeavours in British Columbian history, and while a range of historical accounts have singled him out for both celebration and condemnation, Jean Usher makes a valuable point: William Duncan was undoubtedly an unusual man, but he was not the daring social reformer that others have described. He was not, in fact, a century ahead of his time; rather, he was essentially a typical Victorian of the lower middle classes. Victorian ideals and Victorian attitudes to Christianity and social reform shaped his thought; Victorian evangelicalism and the policies of a Victorian missionary society directed his actions. (1974,2) Susan Neylan similarly acknowledges the fame and controversy which still surrounds Duncan's legacy, but emphasizes the significance of Metlakatla as an attempted \"utopia\" which was supposed to demonstrate the merits of European civilization. His mission provides a valuable case study because, as Neylan states: Both as a model of practice and as a physical base from which to launch new 50 missionary endeavours and regular itinerant circuits, Metlakatla lay at the heart of Anglican activity for the region. Radiating outward like spokes on a wheel, Anglican missions and church personnel spread from the mission, yet constantly relied upon it as a point of reference. (1999,69) At the height of Metlakatla's perceived success, C.M.S. officials and publications highlighted Duncan's work as a shining example of missionary triumph. After visiting the village in 1866, Bishop Hills spoke glowingly of the community in order to raise funds for the Columbia Mission: \"No town is of more importance next to New Westminster in the Colony than Metlacatla [sic], whether viewed in its influence upon the Christian civilization of the Indians, its effect in a more just and fair system of trade, or as a centre of light of the Gospel\" (cited in Usher 1974, 87). Duncan jouraalled regularly and sent extracts of his diary, as well as formal reports, to the C.M.S. throughout his time at Metlakatla. Usher notes that his work was followed avidly by readers of the Church Missionary Intelligencer, the Gleaner and Mission Leaves; that by 1870, Metlakatla was adopted by several branches of the C.M.S. as \"mission of the month; and that \"ladies' groups and Sunday-school classes\" in England were regular contributors to the far-away mission (1974, 86-87). While others have written more extensively about the circumstances leading to Metlakatla's establishment and eventual relocation,4 this study will focus on what Wellcome described as the \"halcyon days\" of the mission (1887,45), for it was during this time that the \"civilizing\" project was apparently running not only as planned, but par excellence. Born in England, and raised in Ontario, Thomas Crosby entered the British Columbia mission field in 1862, one year after reading a series of letters in Christian Guardian that appealed for spiritual workers to come to the province. He spent several years travelling 4 See, for example, Murray (1985), Neylan (1999), Usher (1974) and Wellcome (1887). 51 throughout British Columbia, preaching and leading spirited Methodist \"revivals.\" By 1871, Crosby was ordained and appointed as missionary to all the Native people of British Columbia. Three years later, he established his mission among the Tsimshian at Fort Simpson, who had actually requested a new missionary to, in many ways, fill the void left by Duncan's earlier departure.5 Crosby's tenure at Fort Simpson lasted twenty-three years, during which time he and his wife, Emma, established the mission as a Methodist stronghold in the province. Like Duncan, he came from a poor background with minimal education, which made missionary work one of his best means of climbing the social ladder. Unlike Duncan, his work has not garnered quite as much attention or ill-repute, even though the transformation of Tsimshian culture he demanded and effected was no less than that achieved by Duncan. His mission was well-known and influential in Methodist circles, and his direct influence was perhaps even greater than Duncan's, for Crosby traveled extensively throughout the province, visiting and establishing new missions as well as managing his own at Fort Simpson. Reports of his endeavours were regularly published in Christian Guardian and Missionary Outlook, the latter of which reported that his tours brought in \"record amounts of money\" (cited in Bolt 1992, 58). Notably, Crosby's lengthy memoirs were also deemed worthy of publication - first, in 1907, with Among the An-ko-me-nums, an account of his early travels around the province, and then in 1914, with Up and Down the North Pacific Coast by Canoe and Mission Ship, which focuses on the Fort Simpson mission, as well as Crosby's work in outlying areas. 5 The implications of Crosby's invitation by the Tsimshian are not discussed here, for the \"receptivity\" of the Tsimshian to the two missionaries is not the focus of this study. For two excellent analyses of Tsimshian roles and responses, see Neylan 1999 and Bolt 1992. 52 I have drawn on a variety of sources for this research. Published primary sources, such as Crosby's memoirs, have been particularly valuable. So also have missionary periodicals, notably the C.M.S.'s Columbia Mission and Mission Field, and the Methodist Missionary Society's Missionary Notices, Missionary Outlook and Christian Guardian. In addition, William Duncan's journals, notebooks and reports have been preserved, cited and analysed in a number of secondary sources which I have used to access his work. Duncan did not write or publish his own memoirs, but a number of others at the time were inspired to write them for him. Like Crosby's memoirs, these often took the form of highly dramatized, celebratory accounts of his work, and have been drawn on here, if not as \"factual\" records, then as rich discursive resources. Finally, texts generated by both the Anglican and the Methodist church which comment on the \"Indian problem,\" \"civilization,\" or mission work more generally, have also been cited to provide insight into the broader context of meaning and motivation which shaped missionary projects. While many of these records have been accessed and interpreted in other historical analyses, they have not been mined for the same issues and implications as I examine in this research. 53 Chapter Three: Encoding Empire: Missionaries. Savages. Maidens & Mimics In this chapter, I outline some of the most enduring and effective themes in colonial, particularly missionary, texts and images, and discuss how these worked to construct a social lexicon of \"civilization,\" its messengers and markers. I return to a question posed in my introduction: what did the \"civilizing process\" involve, and how did one measure its success or subversion? By examining the texts produced by and about missionaries like Duncan and Crosby, we can identify the discursive patterns and symbolic icons which distinguished the \"civilized\" from the \"savage.\" Although present-day understandings of \"civilization\" tend to obscure the multiple facets of its construction, colonial discourse wove together a myriad of entangled ideas to produce a template which was to regulate the bodies, spaces and activities of both the \"colonized\" and the \"colonizers.\" Missionaries, savages, maidens and mimics -none of these four figures were universal entities existing a priori; rather, they were historically constructed, culturally contingent roles and identities in the performance and production of \"civilization.\" They were cast in an uncertain imperial drama which sought to regulate the hierarchical boundaries of race, class, gender and sexuality. How these roles were to be performed and how this story was to unfold, at least from the missionary perspective, is what the following sections will address. Before doing this, however, I must acknowledge and address why one of the most prominent aspects of missionary discourse will not be included in this discussion. Any understanding of missionary colonialism must recognize its deeply spiritual, evangelical underpinnings. For missionaries, spreading \"light\" to the \"dark\" lands and peoples of the colonies was seen as a divine duty, an integral part of their Christian faith and devotion. For 54 the purposes of this study, however, the religious foundation of missionary work is not the primary focus; instead, its significance is as a discursive context which framed \"civilization\" in powerfully symbolic and sanctified terms. \"Civilizing\" and Christianizing were seen as twin projects, inextricably intertwined and mutually dependent. While missionaries struggled with the order in which the two should be pursued, their conviction that their work included both was unwavering. Crosby indignantly rejected suggestions that his work was too encompassing. He wrote: Indeed, some had the audacity to say that all the Missionaries had to do was to teach religion. It is not out of place here to say that the Missionary who cannot teach the Indian or heathen how to build his home and cultivate his land, or is too lazy to do it, is not a practical or successful Missionary. How can a man teach religion and not teach industry, cleanliness and thrift of all kinds, for the Bible is full of such lessons? (Crosby 1914, 80) Similarly, when Duncan first arrived at Fort Simpson, he realized that, \"I must wait for circumstances to change and for the Indians to gain some knowledge of civilization before I press the Gospel upon them\" (cited in Usher 1974, 50). Later in his career, he reflected that, in order to be successful, a missionary \"must aim at doing good to the bodies, as well as the souls, of his people - and concerning himself with whatever concerns them\" (Duncan cited in Wellcome 1887,408). While their devout discourse sometimes obscured the mundane, secular aspects of mission work, I argue that these comprised an equally, if not more important component of the missionary agenda. It is precisely because this less \"glorious\" side to mission work could so easily be overshadowed that it warrants analytical priority. From the missionary perspective, \"civilizing\" and Christianizing were both required for the Kingdom of God; from a broader colonial perspective, seizing and transforming the Other, through whatever means necessary, was the most important prerequisite for a different kind of Empire. 55 Divide and Conquer Western, \"rational\" thinking rests on a foundation of division. Self/Other, male/female, culture/nature, white/non-white, order/chaos, civilization/savagery - these dualisms and others provide the framework for post-Enlightenment \"reason\" and \"logic.\" Most significantly, these dichotomies have been cast as not only oppositional, but also hierarchical. Colonialism, as an ideology and a practice, is dependent upon, and legitimated by, this mode of thinking. Imperial projects have long been cast as the triumph of the first half of each binary (as listed above) over the second. (Post-)Colonial critiques, among others, have challenged both the legitimacy and the accuracy of such dualisms, pointing out the hybrid realities they silence and the oppressive power imbalances they sanction. At the same time, however, this does not mean disregarding such dichotomies as irrelevant or erroneous. For it is exactly this discrepancy between rhetoric and reality, this ability of discourse to endure in spite of, even because of'its distortions that is so fascinating and analytically suggestive. If colonialism was a precarious project rife with contradictions and inconsistencies, it was equally and simultaneously a coercive process of masking and mediating such internal tensions. Dichotomous constructions of race, class, gender and sexuality, while frequently ruptured and blurred in colonial contexts, were rhetorically indispensable as imperial indexes dividing the ruling from the ruled, the \"civilized\" from the \"savage.\" Colonizing the Quotidian \"Colonial missionaries might have conceived of their crusade, and represented it, in heroic terms. But, as we have said, theirs was no ordinary epic. It was an epic of the ordinary.\" (Comaroff and Comaroff 1997,29) 56 Throughout the following sections and chapters, I focus particular attention on the ways in which missionary discourse and practice penetrated into the most intimate and mundane aspects of indigenous life. Tracking this process in Africa, the Comaroffs argue colonialism was as much, if not more, concerned with colonizing the consciousness, and transforming the everyday worlds of colonized peoples, as it was about direct coercive conquest. \"Civilizing the savage,\" from this perspective, demanded a \"revolution in habits,\" a revolution that \"had to be won on the diffuse terrain of everyday life\" (Comaroff and Comaroff 1992,44). Missionaries, as discussed earlier, were uniquely situated to access and thus undermine this facet of indigenous life and much of their colonial authority was achieved through this arena. Consequently, much of the \"excavation\" I perform is directed at the \"everyday.\" Like the concept of \"civilization\" itself, the textures and terrains of the everyday are often overlooked because of their seeming self-evidence. They are, as the Comaroffs put it, \"the amorphous, largely unremarked medium of life itself (Comaroff and Comaroff 1997, 31), which is exactly why they should be closely examined. Some critical historians, such as Michael Harkin (1993) and Susan Neylan (1999) have taken up this work by investigating the everyday as a fertile field for the sowing of cultural hegemony. Missionary efforts to infiltrate and transform Native bodies, spaces and everyday activities were not simply the trivial trappings of empire. It was through this conquest of the quotidian that colonial power was often most invasive and effective. Spectacular Civilization \"The spectacle is not a collection of images; rather, it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images.\" (Debord 1994, 12) 57 Rooted as it was in such dichotomous patterns of thought, colonial discourse translated easily and effectively into a wealth of visual metaphors and symbolic icons. The \"rise\" of empirical science synchronized with the forward \"march of progress\" to shape the discursive framing of colonial projects. The \"objective\" mapping and codification of colonial lands and peoples fed into a broader enterprise that aimed to see, and thus gain mastery over the expanses of Empire. McClintock argues that all imperial projects shared a \"commitment to an optics of truth,\" an ideal \"science of surface appearances\" which promised to contain and classify the world for those privileged enough to enjoy this \"panoptical stance\" (1995, 81-82,122). Paired with the notion of \"progress,\" empiricism cast both the seers and the seen in an implicit hierarchy which reinforced the foundational binaries of race, class, gender and sexuality. Stoler points out that the discourses based on such binaries share a common feature which accounts, in part, for their extraordinary flexibility and resilience: All hinge on visual markers of distinction that profess to - but only poorly index - the internal traits, psychological dispositions, and moral essence on which these theories of difference and social membership are based. The strength and weakness of such social taxonomies is that they are malleable, their criteria opaque and ill-defined. (1995, 133-134) Empiricism provides the tenet, \"seeing is believing,\" but in colonial contexts a discursive \"dialect\" emerges and is translated into \"seeing is civilizing.\" Missionary texts are rife with references to the visible results of their \"civilizing\" and Christianizing work, as if the bodies, spaces and practices of the Indians served as canvasses on which the empirical reality of European superiority could be displayed. In the African mission field, missionaries revealed a similar fixation with discerning the devout: Would-be converts were told repeatedly that minimal Christian living standards had to be signaled in their dwellings and dress; the internal transformation assumed to be 58 taking place inside them and their families had to be played out on socially legible surfaces, for all to read. (Comaroff and Comaroff 1992, 54-55) The practical implications of such scopic, visually driven and determined projects were far reaching, disturbing and invasive. Monitoring missionary success required the surveillance and regulation of increasingly intimate aspects of everyday life. Nothing could be left outside the imperial gaze, for herein were to be found the markers of colonial submission or subversion. Although they undoubtedly underestimated the ability of indigenous peoples to exercise their agency and resistance, missionaries in B.C. made sweeping claims based on what they believed to be the spectacle of their success: A gradual change for the better is already to be observed. The people are more cleanly, more faithful in their matrimonial alliances, fornication of less frequent occurrence, prostitution almost extinct, several medicine-men (sorcerors) have given up their profession, and as they had no books to burn, they have sacrificed their gains; gambling, once perniciously general, has all but ceased throughout the district, and everywhere are observable the outward marks of that inward change which, by the aid and blessing of God, is coming upon these inhabitants of the desert. (Rev. J.B. Good in Mission Field 1869, 227, emphasis mine) Under pressure at all times to legitimate and garner support for their endeavours, missionaries relied on discourse to produce the proof they needed. Through the stirring imagery of transformation, they reinforced the linear distance to be traveled from \"savagery\" to \"civilization\" and highlighted the extent of their achievements. Enter into this picture the camera, invented in 1839. The camera, like the telescope and the mirror, was an optical invention seized upon to provide empirical proof of imperial truth. Photography played a key part in the scopic narrative of progress by shifting \"the authority of universal knowledge from print language to spectacle\" and, perhaps most importantly, producing this spectacle in a form which was easily classified, exchanged and available for popular consumption (McClintock 1995,123-125; Williams 1996, 35). Carol 59 Williams chronicles the rise of photography as an integral device of colonial management and, particularly, settlement. Between 1858 andl871 in British Columbia, photography \"emerged as the standard form to document, as well as promote, all aspects of 'frontier' social and cultural existence to outsiders in Eastern Canada, the United States and at home in Britain\" (Williams 1999,4). The analysis of photographs in this study has been guided and inspired by the work of both Williams and McClintock, as both provide compelling analyses of the medium and its colonial significance. Their attention to the context and potential contestation of photographs is invaluable, for they remind us that \"meaning is animated for viewers not so much by the trace - the photograph itself- as by the discursive claims made on behalf of the image\" (Williams 1998, 29). These discursive claims were, in turn, mediated by a reciprocal process involving both \"author\" and audience and the objectives and desires of each. To further complicate matters, Williams points out that photography was also capable of masking the specialized techniques which often went into its construction and manipulation. She lists \"editing, montage, re-photography, [and] retouching\" among several other methods which enabled photographers to construct meanings beyond their \"objective\" means (Williams 1998, 29). Despite these modifications, or perhaps even because of them, photography became widely accepted as representing the truth of colonial relations and realities. Although their editorial construction was concealed, I argue that photographs became such a popular medium precisely because they lent themselves easily to such behind-the scenes alteration, thus enabling colonial audiences to see what they wanted to see without compromising their adherence to \"scientific,\" \"empirical\" principles. 60 Even when photographs were not explicitly modified, their framing and presentation was a powerful factor in their perception. Most of the photographs reproduced in missionary texts, for example, were taken by commercial photographers who produced images for an avid colonial market. These images were purchased and reproduced in a variety of different formats which then failed to acknowledge their source, let alone the specifics of their date, setting or situation.1 The absence of this information was more than made up for by the meaning injected into the captions accompanying photographs, and the narratives implied by their placement. For example, the \"Before and After\" sequence was an extremely popular device used to cast conversion and \"civilization\" through a scopic, linear iconography which was visually striking and ideologically compelling. Images showing supposedly the same individuals at two sequential points in time were contrasted as visual testimony to the superiority and success of \"civilization.\" While the pictures themselves may not have been doctored, their framing relied on the audience's failure to question a number of assumptions, not least, whether the subjects in both pictures were indeed the same, and in what order the photographs were actually taken. Consider, for example, Figure 2 and Figure 3. Both photographs are taken from Indian Education in the North West (1906), a small book written by Rev. Thompson Ferrier and published by the Methodist Church of Canada. The book outlines Ferrier's vision of the future of missionary-directed Indian education. There is no information provided regarding who took the two photographs, when or where. The only thing Ferrier does comment on is what the photographs supposedly portray, or at least, what he wants his audience to perceive. The captions and the placement of the images on facing pages implies a temporal progression 1 1 am indebted to Carol Williams for alerting me to these issues and their implications during a conversation we shared in May 2000. 61 Figure 2: \"Three Little Indians: Wild and Untaught Figure 3: \"Three Little Indians: Institute Pupils\" documenting the transformation of the same three children before and after missionary intervention. A wealth of imperial assumptions are implied and reinforced in the presentation of these images. The phrase, \"Three Little Indians,\" imposes the monolithic category of \"Indians,\" completely eliding and devaluing any specific tribal memberships. The patronizing tone and infantilizing effect of \"little\" is also found with other photographs in the book entitled \"Indian children,\" even when many of the subjects appear to be young adults. Of key significance is the lack of names for the subjects, suggesting that their individual identities are of little relevance and their significance is as \"types.\" Williams has noted that captions were frequently used to typify, rather than individuate Native subjects (1996, 37), and I found that this politics of naming, or rather, not naming, recurred again and again in how images were framed and valued in missionary texts. In both pictures, the children are presented as passive participants, whose personal emotions or actions are unnecessary to the narrative, because the camera, as panoptical technology of surveillance, supposedly captures and represents their \"truth.\" In Fig. 2, the caption of \"wild and untaught\" rests upon and reinforces racist, Eurocentric assumptions about Indians as inherently savage and untamed, and there is an implicit disavowal and devaluation of any indigenous education the children have had. In this first image, they are shown in a field devoid of any boundary markers between \"man\" and \"Nature,\" and nothing about their appearance - clothing, hair, accessories - makes their gender distinct and/or hierarchized. Both of these features challenge the colonial obsession with imposing order and demarcating boundaries, thereby gaining control over bodies and spaces which were deemed unruly and therefore threatening. By contrast, in Fig. 3, the subjects are clearly identified and subtly ranked according to their gender. Their clothing and \"grooming\" emphasizes European 63 standards of cleanliness and neatness, and they are presented against a curiously neutral background in which nature has been carefully excluded. In this particular case, the photograph has been specifically edited to meet the demands of the \"Before and After\" narrative. It was only by chance that I noticed the similarity of the subjects in Fig. 3 and the subjects in another seemingly unrelated picture presented eighteen pages later - see Figure 4. Figure 4: \"An Indian Family\" In an extraordinarily symbolic gesture, the children have been literally cut out of one setting and inserted into another, this time not as members of \"An Indian Family\", but rather as \"Institute Pupils\" at a missionary school. The documentary integrity of Fig. 4 is already questionable given the Eurocentric, nuclear structure of the \"family\" portrayed and its spatial organization within the photographic frame, but any sense of unity is destroyed when we realize how Fig. 3 has been derived and doctored. Although Ferrier does not discuss Crosby or Duncan's missions specifically, his work remains relevant for it enacts some of the most compelling strategies in colonial missionary literature. As this discussion has revealed, these 64 strategies were not always accurate, honest or evident. This insight brings us back to the work of Anne McClintock and Carol Williams, for both are attentive to the same invaluable point: \"Photography was both a technology of representation and a technology of power... The immobility of the sitter conceals behind the surface of the photograph the violence of the colonial encounter\" (McClintock 1995, 126). In the British Columbian context, Williams argues that Indians were \"continuous subjects of the colonial gaze\" which then produced for the public a \"detailed visual grammar of the social body\" (1996, 35). The colonial gaze itself was predominantly white, male and bourgeois in its inclinations, thus it should come as no surprise that its vision tended to reproduce and reinforce hierarchical constructions of race, class, gender and sexuality. Similarly, the missionaries who seized upon colonial photographs to provide vivid illustration for their arguments belied much about their own identities and ideologies in the process. Ordering the Colonial Frontier The scopic nature of colonialism was not, however, without its attendant perils. In order to lead others up the path of progress, missionaries and other colonial agents had to navigate the \"unknown,\" dangerously uncontained terrain of the \"uncivilized\" world. This venturing into the territory of the Other was both a constitutive aspect of colonial projects and identities, and the cause of their greatest anxiety and confusion. Terms such as \"empire,' \"frontier,\" and even the more ambiguous \"colonial landscape\" are problematic in so far as they suggest a socio-spatial \"reality\" which was both understood and uncontested. These terms are still valuable, but only with the proviso that they refer more accurately to shifting 65 fields of power and resistance, the boundaries of which were constantly being redrawn and reimagined, than to geographical entities which could be easily contained and classified. The \"terrain,\" both symbolic and literal, of colonial encounters was not merely the background or setting across which history was unfurled, but rather, itself a site of often heated contestation. Missionary narratives of \"progress\" were frequently cast in spatial terms which emphasized the symbolic distance between \"civilization\" and \"savagery.\" Crosby, for example, entitled one chapter in his memoirs, \"The Forward Movement of 1874\" and went on to write of \"lifting\" the Indians to the \"level of Christian civilization\" (1914,27, 58). This movement towards \"civilization\" demanded a fundamental transformation in how indigenous spaces were both conceived and constructed. The colonies served as a mirror, reflecting back to the metropoles the image by which they could define themselves in opposition; but, at the same time, the perceived chaos of the colonies also threatened to upset colonials' sense of order, reason and rationality. Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin point out that the lack of boundaries and clear demarcations offended European understandings of land and property which relied on enclosure as the marker of \"civilized\" space (1998,180). This dilemma surfaced discursively as a \"peculiarly intense preoccupation with rigid boundaries\" which, McClintock argues, was a defining feature of bourgeois Victorian culture. In colonial narratives \"boundary objects and liminal scenes recur ritualistically\" in an attempt to negate the \"disorder\" which colonials encountered (McClintock 1995,33). As Comaroff and Comaroff put it, missionaries sought from the start \"to impose the square on the 'primitive' arc. They were determined to rationalize the undifferentiated chaos of 'native' society by laying upon it the rectangular grid of civilization\" (1992, 53). Thus, in a celebratory account 66 of the mission at Metlakatla, Henry Wellcome praises Duncan for his great accomplishment: \"how he has brought order out of chaos\" (1887, 144). To meet this objective, entire villages were transformed to conform visibly with European standards. Crosby wrote about this aspect of the Nanaimo mission in his early memoirs, in a chapter entitled, \"Christian Street vs. Heathen Street.\" He argued that the \"education of the people would not be complete unless they were taught habits of order and industry,\" and he complained that \"their old houses and their surroundings were wretchedly filthy and disorderly, and little calculated to help them in their efforts to rise\" (Crosby 1907, 49). \"Progress\" soon followed his arrival, however, as straight rows of uniform, one-family houses were built on individual lots, complete with white picket fences and neat little gardens. Crosby noted with approval, \"In time a street was clear and graded in front of these houses, and the contrast with the heathen village which faced the beach was complete\" (1907, 50). In his later memoirs, he presented two photographs to illustrate this difference between \"civilized\" and \"savage\" space - see Figures 5 and 6. The carefully demarcated spaces of \"New Bella Bella - A Christian Village\" provide stark contrast with the unruly contours of \"A Heathen Village\" and its alleged \"Appeal for the Gospel.\" In Figure 5, the boarded walkway and the walls of the houses themselves ensure a clear separation of \"culture\" from \"nature.\" In Figure 6, the blending of water and wharf, landscape and lodgings must have seemed far too haphazard to missionary eyes. Duncan's mission adhered to similar standards of order and regularity with parallel rows of white houses, gardens and 2 It must be noted, however, that the transformation of indigenous space was not necessarily evidence of a corresponding transformation of indigenous culture. Susan Neylan provides a valuable discussion, for example, of how the Tsimshian often incorporated the missionaries' changes to village spaces and dwellings for reasons which had little to do with conversion or \"civilization\" (1999, 283-293). 67 N E W B E L L A B E L L A \u00E2\u0080\u0094 A CHRISTIAN V I L L A G E . Figure 5 A H E A T H E N V I L L A G E \u00E2\u0080\u0094 A N A P P E A L FOR T H E G O S P E L , Figure 6 68 picket fences arranged along streets set at right angles to the shore. The Nanaimo Tribune published one visitor's description of the village at Metlakatla: The town is triangular in shape; the Mission-buildings being located on a bold promontory forming the apex... .The church, of octagonal form, having a handsome portico and belfry, and surmounted with the emblem of Christianity and peace, occupies a prominent position in the foreground.... The houses, numbering about fifty, are all of a uniform size - 16 x 24 feet - good frame, weather-boarded and shingled, glazed windows, and having neat little gardens in front. . . . (cited in Wellcome 1887,118) As Jean Usher comments, \"with a church reputed to be the largest west of Chicago and north of San Francisco, the village of Metlakatla presented an imposing picture of civilized life in the wilderness\" (1974,1). Houses were the focus of particular concern for, as Comaroff and Comaroff point out, colonial evangelists believed that houses \"literally constructed their inhabitants, that their functionally specific spaces laid out the geometry of cleanliness and godliness\" (1992, 55). Crosby insisted, \"There is no better teaching than the object lesson of a good and well-ordered Christian home... Indeed, this is the only way to win the savage from his lazy habits, sin and misery\" (1914, 74). The transformation of housing was a key means of differentiating and literally imposing distance between Christian and \"heathen\" Natives. As another Methodist missionary, Rev. Pollard, explained: In order to raise them higher in civilization and refinement there must be a complete revolution in the style of their dwelling houses, and in their domestic arrangement. Their old houses, which are very large and have but one room, must be taken down and smaller houses built, with at least three rooms in each house. At present several families live and sleep in the same room, and when it happens, as it often does, that part of them are inclined to religion and part are not so inclined, it makes it unpleasant to conduct family worship, and is attended with other drawbacks. (Pollard in Missionary Notices (June) 1875, 56) The shift to European-style dwellings provided yet another visible spectacle of success. Crosby proudly proclaimed that, \"A glance at their villages will show the change which has 6 9 taken place, for there is a marked contrast between the old heathen lodges and their new and neat Christian homes\" (1907,241). Furthermore, within these houses, the properly gendered and (hetero)sexualized patterns of work, space and identity were to be enacted and enforced. The creation of domestic space and the regulation of domestic work went hand in hand, and both campaigns secured the relations of race, class, gender and sexuality upon which colonial projects were founded. Soap, cleaning and other domestic rituals, for example, were crucial to this process and were soon fetishized for their ability to reinforce physical and social boundaries and hierarchies (McClintock 1995, 33). As the discussion of colonial domesticity will reveal, these discourses were not only bourgeois in origin, but also specifically gendered and racialised in their repercussions. Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin point out that colonial discourse invented frontiers and categories \"for which the spatial was always and only a loose image for a perceived or desired racial, cultural or gendered divide\" (1998,108-109). Ordering the colonial frontier also meant that missionaries and other colonial agents had to find a way to integrate the cultural diversity they encountered during their travels with an unquestioned assumption in the superiority of their own \"civilized\" society. Anne McClintock's concept of \"anachronistic space\" provides a key insight into how they did this. It is a concept which captures the central contradictions and configurations of colonial discourse and its efforts to contrast, yet contain the Other. She explains: According to the colonial version of this trope, imperial progress across the space of empire is figured as a journey backward in time to an anachronistic moment of prehistory.... Geographical difference across space is figured as a historical difference across time.... The stubborn and threatening heterogeneity of the colonies was contained and disciplined not as socially or geographically different from Europe and thus equally valid, but as temporally different and thus as irrevocably superannuated by history. (McClintock 1995,40) 70 The notion of anachronistic space is repeatedly invoked in missionary discourse, highlighting all the more the Herculean nature of their \"civilizing\" project. Frequent references are made to the \"temporal advancement,\" and/or \"temporal affairs\" of the Natives, suggesting a double-edged play on the connotations of the term as both \"secular\" and \"related to time.\" The ever-present danger of \"backsliding,\" for example, relied on a conceptualization of \"progress\" which suggested that any reversion to indigenous ways of life was a movement backwards in both space and time. To prevent \"backsliding,\" guest-houses were constructed to ensure the \"retrograding\" influence of \"uncleansed and barbarous\" visitors was kept as far as possible from converted Natives (Wellcome 1887,19,23). By allowing for carefully isolated and contained pockets of anachronistic space within the missions, colonial evangelists hoped to prevent the \"regression\" of entire villages. In his account of Duncan's mission, Henry Wellcome cites one colonial author who articulates the concept of anachronistic space perfectly: \"The difference between the cultured and primitive man lies chiefly in the fact that one has a few centuries start of the other in the race of progress\" (Bancroft cited in Wellcome 1887,154). Missionaries were thus able to cast themselves as the benevolent teachers helping the \"primitive\" in their efforts to catch up. The grim consequences of failure to catch up were also presented in dire descriptions of what could happen if the colonized were to reject or resist their own advancement. The introduction to Crosby's memoirs offered this warning about the fate of the \"Red Man\": \"In the West he is gradually yet sullenly retreating before the progress of the White Man and his civilization, and the day seems not far distant when he must be absorbed by that advancing progressive life or be pushed into the Western Sea\" (Sipprell 1914, vii-viii). This kind of dramatic imagery was not uncommon, and the \"vanishing Indian\" was, of course, not a new discursive 71 trope (see, for example, Lyman 1982), but it did serve to buttress linear, temporal understandings of Natives as inhabitants of anachronistic space who would have to succumb to civilization or be swept away by its superiority. Finally, ordering the colonial frontier demanded the transformation of not only indigenous space, but also non-\"rationalized\" conceptions of time. Indeed, the conversion of both was inextricably interwoven as spaces inscribed routines, and routines regulated spaces. \"Civilized\" buildings conformed to standards of functional specificity, separating public from private, sacred from secular, work from leisure, and the rhythms of quotidian life were reconfigured within these orderly spaces. Susan Neylan notes that the mission environment continued the transformation of temporal space also demanded by the introduction of the wage-labour system. She writes, \"Church bells, mandatory attendance at certain classes and services, and residential schools adhered to a strict daily schedule. New habits and disciplines more in keeping with Euro-Canadian work rhythms were encouraged\" (Neylan 1999,292). Writing about the same process in African missions, the Comaroffs argue that \"the civilizing mission hoped to make them march to the grand imperial clock, and synchronize their domestic schedules to serve the fixed agendas of the public domain: the workplace, the school, and the church\" (1992,49). Indeed, one history of residential schools in British Columbia reflects this insight with its apt title, \"Living by Bells\" (McFadden 1971). Michael Harkin links these temporal changes with the consolidation of disciplinary power and ever-growing systems of surveillance: The measurement of time, time's alliance with a moral/teleological program, and its deployment within a disciplinary grid introduce an entirely novel mode of power relation, \"panoptical\" in the sense that all members of the community.. . participate in this temporality both as observers and observed. (1993,11-12) 72 Reconfiguring time served to regulate the spaces and activities of both the \"colonized\" and the \"colonizers,\" drawing both into the carefully regimented schedules of \"civilization.\" As the Metlakatla timetables (Appendix A) drawn up by Duncan reveal, mission life afforded almost \"no rest for the wicked,\" but even less for the \"worthy.\" Family Values One of the most commonly noted narratives in colonial discourse relies upon the metaphor of the family. This metaphor had two distinct, but inextricable effects: the infantilization of indigenous peoples, and the legitimation of colonialism as paternal benevolence. In missionary texts, familial narratives frame civilization as a natural process which brings Natives towards spiritual and temporal maturity. \"Child-like savages\" are cast opposite compassionate colonial \"parents\" whose disciplinary authority is exercised only in the former's \"best interests.\" William Duncan, for example, attempted to keep his converts away from the vices and temptations of \"civilization\" which, he argued, were \"too fascinating for the Indian in his presently morally infantile condition to withstand\" (cited in Usher 1974, 66). Like almost all missionary discourse, this narrative belied an undercurrent of unresolved contradictions. Yoking the benevolent imagery of the family to the oppressive agendas and aspirations of colonialism served to mediate one of the key tensions and contradictions inherent to missionary projects. As discussed earlier, missionaries' need to construct \"savable savages,\" presented a thorny discursive dilemma. As Comaroff and Comaroff put it, missionaries were \"caught in the old modernist tension between universal truth and local (for which read racialized, cultural) difference. In order to convert \"natives\" into \"civilized\" Christians they had to make other into same, to erase the distinction on which 73 colonialism was founded...\" (Comaroff and Comaroff 1992, 7). What they needed was an ideology that incorporated difference into unity, that naturalized hierarchy as evolutionary. Anne McClintock argues that the pseudo-scientific, imperial trope of the \"Family of Man\" filled this need. The family, she argues, \"offered an indispensable figure for sanctioning social hierarchy within a putative organic unity of interests,\" while also giving a range of imperial interventions the \"alibi of nature\" (McClintock 1995,45). Racial and familial discourse intersected to construct Natives as especially unruly and undisciplined. The custodial actions of missionaries were deemed necessary not simply because Natives were deemed vulnerable and infantile, but also because racial discourse cast them as especially predisposed towards degeneration and decline. Henry Wellcome wrote: From the very incipiency of his development, primitive man has thus been led by the things that satisfy his corporeal cravings. We find the savage to-day intellectually in his infancy, steeped in the vices of generations - a demon in brutish instincts - a combination of childlike simplicity, and unmeasured ferocity. (1887,167) A disciplinary regime in which missionaries required an extensive scope of surveillance and regulation was thus legitimated. The model for this regime was the nuclear family. With its patriarchal hierarchy and heteronormative membership, the nuclear family provided a template for the social, cultural and economic expression of gender and sexuality. It had, by the eighteenth-century in Europe, become \"the point of articulation between civil society and the (ostensibly) free individual, the ideological atom upon which bourgeois economy and society depended\"(Comaroff and Comaroff 1992, 67-68). Missionary work reflected the roles and regulations of the nuclear family through both its specific lessons about, and its practical expression of the gendered, sexual division of labour. Through the civilizing process, missionaries attempted to reshape indigenous bodies, spaces and work practices 74 according to this familial construct, while reinscribing its identities and ideologies among their own membership. Civilizing Industry \"God well knew what He did, when He placed a practical business man as missionary among these Indians.\" (Arctander 1909,175) Christian evangelism had long directed its efforts towards the working-class and poor of urban metropoles and, as McClintock (1995), Thorne (1997) and others have argued, these classes were discursively racialized in ways which made their salvation comparable to that of the savage Other. Missionary campaigns to \"civilize\" both the urban poor and the non-white Other promoted a hybrid blend of industrial rationality and Christian morality. They i celebrated, through both their discourse and their practice, the saving grace of an imperial marketplace which fused worship with work, and conversion with consumption. The \"currency of salvation\" hinged on individuals' willingness to participate in a form of \"sanctified commerce,\" to perform the visibly productive tasks of \"righteous industry\" (Comaroff and Comaroff 1997,168; 1992,48). As Duncan sternly advised the residents of Metlakatla, \"This is the place for toil, heaven the place of rest\" (cited in Usher 1974, 86). Usher points out, however, that toil alone was not sufficient to meet the demands of this moral economy: Not only were Metlakatlans taught the importance of work in a true Christian life, but they were required to cultivate the right spirit of work. It was not toil with resentment that Duncan wanted from the Tsimshian, but a willingness to contribute to the common good and a desire to elevate their moral worth by cheerful, honest labour. Of twenty men working on the village roads, Duncan commented that \"some set to yesterday Morning - but not in the right spirit -1 must speak again to put them to right.\" (1974, 86, emphasis mine) The Rev. Cridge noted with approval that Duncan's converts set themselves to their work 75 \"with the constancy of the English laborer,\" rather than the \"fitful disposition of the savage\" (cited in Wellcome 1887, 84). Missionaries were perfectly positioned to ensure such a work ethic because, as the Comaroffs explain, \"It did not take the presence of the state, in other words, to create the conditions for an industrial labor supply. It took a state of mind, and that was a product of forces much greater, much more embracing, than those enclosed in the political domain\" (1997,22). To ensure both the proper spirit and the constant spectacle of industry, missionaries sought to instill not only \"the routines and dispositions of wage work,\" but also the \"pleasures of consumption,\" cultivating desire for commodities which were fetishized for their \"civilizing\" powers (Comaroff and Comaroff 1997,33; McClintock 1995). Neylan points out that consumption of Euro-Canadian consumer goods was taken as a sign \"that the 'authentic Indian' was being replaced by a reformed, 'civilized,' and Christianized one\" (1999,302). In Metlakatla, Usher argues that the store itself acted as an \"important agent of acculturation\" (1974,67), as patrons were required to behave quietly and courteously, while Duncan kept the shelves stocked with the goods he deemed \"necessary for the civilized life and tending to elevate the tastes and improve the appearance\" (Duncan cited in Usher 1974, 67). The following chapter will explore how soap and clothing, in particular, were promoted for their ability to render the Native body properly cleansed, contained, and gendered. Duncan and Crosby both recognized, however, that such enlightened consumption did not come cheaply. The increased outlay demanded by \"civilization\" required expanded forms of industry and, most importantly, surplus sources of money. As one Duncan biographer put it: The spirit of improvement which Christianity has engendered within this people, needs fresh material and knowledge in order to develop itself. The sources of industry at present in the hands of the Indians are too limited and inadequate to enable them to meet their increased expenditure as a Christian and civilized community, who 7 6 are no longer able to endure the rude huts and half nakedness of the savage. (Begg 1910,12) Similarly, Crosby felt the Tsimshian needed to develop new attitudes toward work and property, for they \"did not seem to have the drive necessary to 'get ahead' and 'rise' socially, to engage in economic activities in a manner which would bring them surplus, 'cash' wealth\" (Bolt 1992, 66). Implanting a new culture of consumption was vitally necessary, for as the Comaroffs have so eloquently phrased it, \"Saving the savage meant teaching the savage to save\" (1997, 166) and, again, this required transforming a state of mind as much as the patterns or conditions of work. The reconceptualizing of time, discussed earlier, factors powerfully here, for standardizing time made it also a commodity to be valued, saved and maximized. New notions of time, the Comaroffs argue, encouraged converted individuals \"to temper immediate desire with discipline; and to pay due attention to longer-term rewards\" (1997,198). The rational distribution and utilization of time promised not only to impose European standards of order, but also to enable Native peoples' production and consumption within ever-expanding imperial markets. Whether their participation in these markets was ever meant to exist on an equal footing as that of white participants is, of course, another matter entirely. Work, like space, had to be brought in line with colonial hierarchies of race, class, gender and sexuality if it was to be \"civilized.\" Through the doctrine of domesticity, missionaries ensured the transformation and regulation of both. Domesticity encodes a set of specifically gendered, (hetero)sexualized, bourgeois norms of work, space, and identity as indexes of civilized society. Until relatively recently, \"to domesticate\" and \"to civilize\" were ideologically inseparable endeavours which missionaries pursued simultaneously: ... the mission station became a threshold institution for transforming domesticity 77 rooted in European gender and class roles into domesticity as controlling a colonized people. Through the rituals of domesticity, increasingly global and more often than not violent, animals, women and colonized peoples were wrested from their putatively \"natural\" yet, ironically, \"unreasonable\" state of \"savagery\" and inducted through the domestic progress narrative into a hierarchical relation to white men. (McClintock 1995, 35) Anne McClintock, Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff have highlighted the dual faceted nature of domesticity as both social and spatial. The notion of the \"domestic\" refers to and regulates not only a specific space, but also the activities and relationships which are enacted within that space (Comaroff and Comaroff 1997,275; McClintock 1995, 34-35). Both aspects of domesticity are encapsulated in yet another key imperial icon - the \"home.\" The notion of \"home\" celebrates the marriage of family and domesticity, investing both with emotional richness and moral sentiment. As Comaroff and Comaroff explain: Home connoted a commensality of feelings, of refined emotions, of devotion. And sacred, marital sexuality. Connubial intimacy, femininity, and interiority were the tropes that, along with enclosed privacy, held it together as an imaginative construct, and gave it its sanctified moral status, its physicality and its spatial form. (1997, 275-276) In contrast, \"savagery\" was seen as typically lacking a similar sense of \"home,\" for its familial relations and spaces were seen, according to Eurocentric standards, as too unbounded, ill-defined, and unrefined. \"Civilizing the savage\" thus required cleansing and transforming native \"home\" life to mirror (or mimic) European standards of properly gendered labour, sexual decorum and moral hygiene. Native girls and women played a pivotal, even if unwilling, role in this process. They were identified and targeted as needing a very specific kind of \"civilization,\" in which they were initiated, coercively if necessary, into the cult of domesticity. Through domesticity, indigenous women's relation to social space and labour was recast as confined to the private sphere of the \"home.\" Their \"civilization\" was reflected in their ability to regulate the 78 boundaries of domestic spaces and bodies by imposing order and cleanliness over chaos and dirt. Both Duncan and Crosby established a separate boarding house or Mission \"Home\" in which girls were rigorously trained in their supposedly \"natural\" domestic arts and inclinations. Training girls and young women to cook, sew, clean, mend, and generally serve and care for the needs of (male) others was deemed crucial to producing good Christian wives and mothers who could then exert a civilizing influence in both their families and their communities. As Emma Crosby explained, the missions sought to produce \"capable Indian women\" who would \"establish Christian homes for themselves where, as wives and mothers, they may show what industrious habits and a Christian spirit can do\" (in Missionary Outlook (Nov-Dec)1881,140). Thomas Crosby praised those women who \"married into Indian homes in the different villages and, by their industry and cleanly habits... showed the marvellous civilizing influence such work as ours may exert on whole communities\" (1914, 92). Native boys and men, on the other hand, were targets of a similarly gendered \"civilization\" process in which their appropriate realms and responsibilities were defined in opposition to the doctrine of domesticity. While girls and young women were put in charge of the \"home\" and the routines it inscribed, their male counterparts were expected to be just as visibly industrious performing appropriately masculine labour outside of domestic confines. At his early mission in Nanaimo, one of Crosby's first steps was to take the boys and men to the woods to extract \"posts and rails and pickets,\" and then to show them \"how to fence and cultivate a garden\" (Crosby 1907,49). Later, at Port Simpson, he enlisted Tsimshian men to help with the building of the Mission House and Church, a project which \"became a means of real education to them\" (Crosby 1914, 74). Similarly, Duncan 79 employed men at Metlakatla to \"saw boards, split shingles, build roads and erect a protective embankment around the mission building\" (Murray 1985, 86). As the following chapters will explore further, however, the gendering of Native labour was always complicated by its intersection with the discourses and demands of \"race\" and class. \"Female domesticity\" and \"masculine industry\" were malleable constructs that afforded different opportunities, and imposed varied expectations according to one's position in colonial hierarchies. \"Civilizing\" Native work required the demarcation of male work from female work, but it also meant channeling that work into the lowest echelons of the colonial class structure where it would pose the least danger to the security of white rule. Colonial Mimicry \"They have all the qualities necessary to make men of themselves.\" (Duncan cited in Wellcome 1887,391) \"Around this time, the Macleod Gazette was regularly mocking the appearance and behaviour of Aboriginal women in the town of Fort MacLeod, drawing distinctions between their appearance and behaviour and that of 'real' ladies. In 1885 the paper published an article, intended as humourous, in which it lamented that the 'broncho,' 'fresh from the camp,' had disappeared from the dance floors of the town. In dance-hall language the broncho was not a horse, the Gazette explained, but a 'lady of the copper colored persuasion who is being initiated for the first time into the intricacies of a \"white\" ball room, and to whom the many intricacies of the quadrille and waltz are as the labyrinthe of old, a mess which, the further she gets into it, the less hope she has of ever coming out of it alive.'\" (Carter 1997,175) The first statement is taken from William Duncan's address before the Board of Indian Commissioners, the Conference of Missionary Boards, and Indian Rights Associations in Washington, D.C, on January 6,1887. Duncan was appealing to the American government to allow the community of Metlakatla to relocate in Alaska following his split from the Church Missionary Society. The first Metlakatla had been, in the eyes of many, a 80 resounding success - the proof that savages could be \"civilized.\" To a point. For in this speech, William Duncan belied the very nature of the \"civilizing\" project and its objectives. Even after twenty years among the Tsimshian, Duncan's words revealed a resilient chord of racism. The Indians had all the qualities necessary to make men of themselves - but they were not men yet. Constructed as \"savable savages,\" they were civilizable, but this very status, conferred upon them by those who were always already civilized, confirmed the inherent futility of the civilizing process. I argue that given the terms in which colonial discourse was cast, Indians were ushered into a process which they could never, by implicit definition, complete. The \"civilization\" of \"savagery\" was an enterprise without an end, a campaign that defeated itself in the same moment that it cast its characters. The second quote is taken from Sarah Carter's study of colonial images of white and Aboriginal women in Canada's Prairie West (1997). Through this passage we can begin to understand how Aboriginal women's efforts to enter into civilized society provided a constant source of, often derisive, contrast and comparison. It also highlights the specifically gendered nature of the civilizing process, despite the almost invariably male discourse employed (see Duncan above). \"Civilizing\" Aboriginal women meant turning \"bronchos\" into \"ladies,\" a process which the Gazette aptly compared to a labyrinthe - the further one got in, the less hope there was of getting out. Even when Aboriginal women met all the standards of feminine domesticity and decorum, they never escaped comparison with the white women they could strive to emulate, but never become. In 1876, the Earl of Dufferin declared that the \"neat Indian Maidens\" at Metlakatla were \"as modest and as well dressed as any clergyman's daughter in an English parish\" (cited in Usher 1974,1). The \"compliment's\" efficacy depended on the taken-for-granted assumption that Native women 81 were normally, without missionary intervention, the stark contrast by which delicate English femininity could be defined and identified. Indian Maidens could be \"as modest as\" and \"as well dressed as\" only because they could never fully achieve and be the standard by which \"civilized\" femininity was measured and judged. Consider again the images from Ferrier's book, Indian Education in the North West (1906) - Figure 2 and Figure 3, and recall that the captions of colonial photographs were often as significant as the content of the images themselves. Despite the \"progress\" suggested by the \"Before and After\" framing of these photographs, the subjects remain, first and foremost - \"Three Little Indians.\" The images and their captions symbolically reveal the in-built contradictions and limitations of the \"civilizing\" project. No amount of education, grooming and repackaging can erase the indelible Indianness and implied inferiority of those requiring \"civilization\" in the first place. The subjects seem doomed to what Homi Bhabha has called \"mimicry\" - an ambivalent recognition of them as \"almost the same, but not quite\" (1997,153). Bhabha's exploration of mimicry in terms of both colonial power and resistance is an intricately nuanced and insightful (post-)colonial analysis. Mimicry, for Bhabha, suggests elements of both mockery and menace - an \"ironic compromise\" at the heart of colonial discourse which threatens to reveal its ambivalence and disrupt its authority (1997, 153-155). He writes: ... colonial mimicry is the desire for a reformed, recognizable Other, as a subject of a difference that is almost the same, but not quite. Which is to say that the discourse of mimicry is constructed around an ambivalence; in order to be effective, mimicry must continually produce its slippage, its excess, its difference. (Bhabha 1997,153) While Bhabha's work emphasizes mimicry's subversive potential, its opportunities for disavowal and disjuncture, others, such as Anne McClintock, have challenged his claims about the extent of this potential (see McClintock 1995,62-65). Rather than wading into this 82 debate, I would like to deploy the notion of \"mimicry\" in a slightly different direction. In this study, I repeatedly encountered moments of mimicry which, far from disrupting colonial authority, seemed to defuse any menace to it, reinforcing instead its implicit hierarchies and inequalities. Mimicry, in this context, describes the constant containment of the \"civilizing\" process, its inevitable incompletion. The familial narrative so popular in missionary discourse provides a perfect illustration of how Natives were pre-coded as infantile and immature - perpetual participants who could never control or conclude the \"civilizing\" process. Bhabha writes that mimicry presents a \"flawed colonial mimesis, in which to be Anglicized is emphatically not to be English\" (1997,154). Similarly, \"to be civilized\" was emphatically not to be civilized, a paradoxical statement that mirrors the fundamental contradictions of colonial discourse and practice. The aim of my argument is not to dispute that opportunities for rupture and resistance existed, nor to deny that the Tsimshian may have manipulated mimicry to their own advantage. Instead, I wish to draw attention to the complex ways in which mimicry manifested itself in the colonial encounter. Alternately confounding the agendas and objectives of both the \"colonizers\" and the \"colonized,\" mimicry was a strategy engaged by all, but controlled by none. 83 Chapter Four: Empiricizing Bodies Numerous colonial studies have pointed out the centrality of the body as both a symbolic and an objective battleground in the power struggles of \"colonizers\" and \"colonized.\" The lived physical reality of the body is one of the most expressive and essential means through which individuals define themselves and their interaction with others, their culture and community. Controlling and contesting the politics of the body have thus been key strategies in all colonial encounters. In this chapter, I examine the spectacle of the body in the colonial imagination, and discuss how \"civilizing\" missions sought to seize and transform Native bodies according to intersecting hierarchies of race, class, gender and sexuality. Colonial projects demanded the \"empiricizing of bodies\" in the sense of both rendering them visible to the penetrating gaze of empirical science, and regulating their performance and productivity within the arena of empire. In the following sections, I will explore missionary efforts to establish a visual grammar of the body, one which would provide eloquent testimony for both the need and the nobility of their work. I will chart the various campaigns launched to cleanse, clothe, and discipline \"savage\" bodies, to recast them for specifically gendered roles and responsibilities, and to transplant a range of unresolved sexual tensions and anxieties onto the imagined terrain of Native sexuality. As will become clear, my analysis begins with the body but does not confine itself there. Instead, I employ the body as a powerful analytical device which connects us to the grounded, physical realities of colonial projects, but which also provides a window into other arenas and agendas of the \"civilizing\" process. The politics of the body extend beyond the body itself, spilling over to the spaces bodies inhabit, the labours they perform, and the longings they inspire. 84 Throughout this chapter, I will also reflect on how these endeavours patrolled the decorum and desires of the missionaries themselves, perhaps even more effectively than those they sought to \"civilize.\" For as an increasing number of colonial studies have pointed out, the body served also as one of the most effective and indomitable sites of Native agency and resistance. By examining how focussed colonial authorities were on the powerful potentials of the body, we can begin to understand how threatening and counter-hegemonic corporeal politics could be. Bodies of Knowledge Both Michael Harkin and Susan Neylan have argued that, in the eyes of missionaries, the body became the stage on which the triumph of \"civilization\" over \"savagery\" was to be enacted (Harkin 1994, 595; Neylan 1999,268). The problem was, however, that the body provided a site through which this performance could be both displayed and subverted. As a result, missionaries devoted much attention and energy to its surveillance. Their writing reflects a constant quest to gain knowledge and control of the Natives they encountered by observing, describing, and classifying their physical appearance. The progress of \"civilization\" was told through a scopic, visually driven narrative which first held up the Native body as degraded and degenerate, then painted starkly vivid pictures of its contrast following colonial intervention. Descriptions of Natives prior to missionary teaching almost invariably focused on their unkempt, unruly appearance and its divergence from European standards of neatness, cleanliness and order. Thomas Crosby wrote of some of his first students at Nanaimo: My pupils were a wild-looking lot of little fold, with painted and dirt-begrimed faces and long, uncombed hair. Some of them were clothed in little print shirts, others had 85 a small piece of blanket pinned around them, while some had no clothing at all. (Crosby 1907,42) During his journey to Fort Simpson, William Duncan carefully recorded his sightings of Indians, noting how they sat on their \"haunches,\" with \"their faces painted or stained - all looked dirty and very few wore anything but a blanket thrown loosely over them.\" In one letter, he argued that \"to attempt to describe their condition would be but to produce a dark, revolting picture of human depravity\" (Duncan cited in Wellcome 1887, 8). Such descriptions fed easily into existing ideologies of racial hierarchy which depended on visual markers for their membership. Anne McClintock has highlighted the iconography provided by the Family of Man and its framing of racial difference within a familial, and thus \"natural,\" hierarchy (1995, 37-39). Missionary writing often revealed similar efforts to compare and categorize those they encountered as racial \"types,\" classifying them through what McClintock calls an \"imperial science of the surface\" (1995, 36). Consider, for example, this passage from Crosby's memoirs: In physique, the Coast Indians are short as compared with those of the plains and of the eastern forest region, with relatively longer bodies and short, sturdy limbs. This fact has been attributed to their life in canoes, but is probably more inherently racial. Their faces resemble those of the Japanese so closely that a newcomer to the Province has at first some difficulty in distinguishing between them. In general, however, they are larger, heavier in build, and lack the physical grace which is characteristic of their Oriental cousins. (1914, 7-8) Crosby simultaneously reaffirms notions of racial difference while invoking the narrative of the family to mediate such difference. The similarities and differences among Coast Indians, and between Coast Indians and their \"Oriental cousins\" are recorded in an ongoing attempt to catalog, and thus contain, the bodies of non-white Others. McClintock has also pointed out the colonial preoccupation with the face as one of the most powerful symbols in racial narratives. In Victorian images, the facial features of the racial, sexual, class and/or gendered 86 Other were constantly caricatured to portray the visual stigmata of degeneracy (McClintock 1995,104-107). Missionary narratives were animated by similar attempts to provide both \"civilization\" and \"savagery\" with a face, a physical illustration that could be seen and read. Duncan described the Indian as a \"skulking, filthy creature\" and declared that \"gloom and vacancy sit with undisturbed security on his face\" (cited in Murray 1985,25). Once Indians were supposedly converted and \"civilized,\" attention turned once more to the visage as vindication. One visitor to Metlakatla marveled at the evidence of change: The apathy, and listlessness, which is observable in the countenance of an untutored Indian has entirely departed from the Metlakahtlans. Most of their faces are remarkable for an animated appearance and intelligent expression. (McKenzie cited in Wellcome 1887,120) Focus here also meant that Native face-painting was one of the cultural practices that missionaries fiercely contested and attempted to eradicate. Its bold display on such symbolic space as the face must have seemed like an intolerable challenge to the colonial gaze, an unsanctioned expression of indigenous identity. Subsequently, the presence or absence of face-painting was one of the most commonly noted features when comparing \"civilized\" versus \"savage\" Indians. The narrative of transformation was a popular one and missionaries repeatedly made contrasts between the physical appearance of the two groups, drawing conclusions which extended far beyond the evidence before their eyes. The Bishop of Columbia wrote of the Indians at Metlakatla: Marked indeed was the difference between these Indians and the heathen. They were clean, bright, cheerful, intelligent, well-mannered; they have evidently risen in the scale of human creatures. Christianity and looking to God and their Saviour had elevated them intellectually, morally, and even physically.... There were a few heathen with them, relatives who had been used in former days to fish with them. These were painted red or blackened, and were dirty and forbidding, and served to make the contrast more striking. {Columbia Mission 1862, 57) 87 Four years later, his reports continued to comment on the contrast: It happened that a large body of Indians of the Quoquolt tribes came to Metlacatla to-day. They were a strange contrast to the Metlacatlas, as darkness to light, as barbarism to civilization. Their attire was blankets, hardly enough to cover their nakedness; their faces were painted black and red, and their hair was matted and dishevelled. They were greatly astonished, and eventually hid themselves away, as if shamed. {Columbia Mission 1966,44) These dualistic descriptions were especially compelling because, like the \"Before and After\" narratives discussed in the previous chapter, they produced what McClintock has called panoptical time, \"the image of global history consumed - at a glance - in a single spectacle from a point of privileged invisibility\" (McClintock 1995, 37). Missionary narratives produced \"civilized\" and \"savage\" Indians as empirical icons in an imagined exhibition. Their supposed \"progression\" over time was captured in a spatial metaphor which compared one group of bodies with another. The more striking the contrast, the more remarkable and heroic the work of the missionary. Thus Native bodies, both \"civilized\" and \"savage,\" were seized upon to legitimate the colonial authority and agendas of those who sought to change them. Photographs were especially effective in disseminating the embodied spectacle of colonial encounters. By capturing visible \"truth\" and silencing the voices of their subjects, photographs provided vivid illustration for imperial allegories. They also intensified the authority of the invisible imperial gaze by disguising editorial motives and manipulations behind the technology of \"objectivity.\" Images of \"civilized\" and \"savage\" Indians allowed colonial audiences to witness the narrative of transformation for themselves. Figures 7 and 8, from Crosby's Among the An-ko-me-nums (1907), provide an excellent example of how photographs were presented to perform a particular story. In Figure 7, the subjects are 88 E A R L Y N A T I V E T Y P E S . Figure 7 Figure 8 shown as exemplary specimens of a racial classification. Contextual cues such as names, dates and/or locations are omitted in favour of the single master caption: \"Early Native Types\" Because the subjects are \"types\" rather than individuals, their personal narratives are irrelevant; instead, their faces, hair, dress and demeanour are displayed as visual testimony to their inner identities. The word \"early\" adds a temporal dimension that suggests their appearance is not only \"uncivilized,\" but also atavistic. In one photograph, the subject is shown sitting on the ground - a common technique used to signify Natives' supposedly more primitive, unbounded relationship with dirt and disorder. It is also important to note that neither hair-length nor clothing clearly differentiates male and female subjects and in at least one picture the gender of the subject appears ambiguous. Figure 8 provides a striking contrast. The subjects in these photographs are signified as \"civilized\" through a variety of visual and discursive markers. Their bodies are carefully groomed and completely covered. Their posture is erect and deliberately posed for the camera. Their hair and clothing is appropriately \"masculine\" and/or \"feminine,\" and their gender is also emphasized through their new Christian names - names which further suggest that once \"civilized,\" the Indian literally becomes a new person. And not only are these subjects (re)named, but page numbers are provided which refer the reader to more detailed descriptions of their personal transformation. Crosby does not compare Figures 7 and 8 directly - they are, in fact, presented almost two hundred pages apart - but the contrast between the two sets of photographs remains clear. The pages in between reflect the distance traveled in symbolic time from one set of images to the other. 91 Regime of the Clean One of the most powerful strategies of colonial transformation, not least for its potent symbolism, was the crusade to cleanse the non-white body. Operating in the arena of the everyday, missionaries were well placed to inspect and regulate the physical (and implied moral) hygiene of the Natives. As the Comaroffs have argued, the \"civilizing\" process was often enacted through the quotidian colonialism of \"small, sanitizing gestures\" (1997, 336). Furthermore, as they put it, \"If cleanliness was next to Godliness, what was clean was European! Aesthetic ethnocentrism masqueraded, here, as moral virtue\" (Comaroff and Comaroff 1997,270). Racial discourse, however, ensured that the cleanliness of Native bodies would always be contaminated by their inherent \"darkness.\" The vigilance with which imposed standards of cleanliness were patrolled and enforced revealed an undercurrent of suspicion that \"the dirty, lousy, greasy aborigine\" (Ferrier 1906,14) would resurface, like an indelible stain. Campaigns to cleanse the Native body were animated less by evidence that sanitary standards were actually absent, than by imperial imagery which inevitably viewed the Other as unwashed and dangerously unhygienic. Again, Anne McClintock provides valuable insight into the underlying implications of this colonial agenda: The poetics of cleanliness is a poetics of social discipline. Purification rituals prepare the body as a terrain of meaning, organizing flows of value across the self and the community and demarcating boundaries between one community and another. Purification rituals, however, can also be regimes of violence and constraint. People who have the power to invalidate the boundary rituals of another people thereby demonstrate their capacity to violently impose their culture on others. (1995,226) Describing indigenous bodies as \"dirty\" and designating their hygiene as sub-standard was far from benevolent sanitation; it was, instead, an effort to reinscribe the Native Other as physically deficient, inferior, and potentially infectious. It legitimated a range of actions that invaded the intimate territory of the body, and invalidated the cultural norms surrounding it. 92 The schooling of children provided one of the most direct methods of enacting this process -not, as might be expected, through pedagogy, but through actual physical policing. So significant was this step to the \"civilizing\" process that missionaries often went to great lengths to ensure the cleanliness of their students. Thomas Crosby described one strategy he used at a mission school in Nanaimo: A lot of the little folk followed me, and I went from house to house arousing others, getting them out from under their dirty blankets, washing their faces, and then taking them along to school. This method I followed for a while. Sometimes there was nothing near at hand with which to wash them, and they would run off without it. To overcome this difficulty we got a big barrel, and sawing it in two, filled the two halves with fresh water and placed them on either side of the school-house door. Then we got one or two big barley sacks and cut them up into strips for towels, and supplied some bits of soap and a couple of big combs. And now everybody had to do his [sic] toilet before came into school. (1907,44) In his early years at Fort Simpson, William Duncan employed a similar system with his students; he reported, \"I inspect them every day and so most have now got in the way of washing hands and face\" (cited in Usher 1974,47). The symbolic power of soap seems to have been as decisive in the Canadian colonial context as in the South African terrain analysed by Anne McClintock in Imperial Leather1 By the mid-nineteenth century, colonial discourse and imperial advertising had invested soap with the symbolic power to preserve racial purity by sanitizing body boundaries. Progress and cleanliness were inextricably linked in the imperial imagination and soap was the medium through which both were to be transmitted (McClintock 1995,208-231). In the case of the mission schools, soap acted as a boundary mechanism which decontaminated the Native body for colonial interaction, 1 In the Canadian context, see Mariana Valverde's (1992) analysis of soap advertisements that appeared in publications of the Women's Christian Temperance Union at the turn of the century. She examines the ways in which campaigns extolling the cleansing powers of soap were enmeshed with racial discourse and efforts to construct a \"pure,\" \"white\" Canada. 93 symbolically and literally preparing a \"clean slate\" upon which missionary teachings could be more easily inscribed. Both Crosby and Duncan employed soap as an integral aspect of their \"civilizing\" work. It was central to establishing the sanitary regimes of the mission station and both missionaries bestowed it as a reward for good behaviour and a gift for festive occasions. Duncan even went so far as to learn how to manufacture it, establishing soap-making as one of the many industries pursued at Metlakatla (Usher 1974,72; Wellcome 1887, 393). The connection between imperial commodity and progress, cleanliness and industry was thus cemented by the persuasive power of profit. The Empire's New Clothes European clothing, like soap, emerged as an imperial icon with transformative powers. Missionaries displayed an almost obsessive fixation with the problem of \"nakedness,\" commenting on it frequently in their descriptions and making its eradication a priority. If dirty students were unacceptable in the mission schools, then naked students were unthinkable. Crosby wrote that lack of clothes was \"the most trying condition of things,\" leaving some of his students with only \"the scantiest dress, and some no dress at all\" (Crosby 1907,44). At Metlakatla, Duncan insisted on clogs for his students because, as he argued, \"naked feet are a hindrance to our progress in school\" (cited in Usher 1974, 50). Both missions requested and received donations of clothing from readers of missionary journals who were eager to support the cause. Furthermore, as colonial commodity, clothing represented a form of \"enlightened consumption\" (Comaroff and Comaroff 1997,220) which served to draw indigenous bodies into imperial markets. The unclothed \"savage\" body was perceived as problematic, the Comaroffs argue, because \"it evoked degeneracy and disorder, 94 the wild and the wanton, dirt and contagion\" (Comaroff and Comaroff 1997,224). Its very presence threatened to transgress and undo all the boundaries which had been so carefully constructed to protect the sanctity of the European body. European clothing promised to impose order and discipline onto a body which was perceived as wild and unrestrained. Even such a simple item as clogs performed an important symbolic function, separating feet from earth, bodies from nature. Indigenous clothing was not only too sparse for European tastes, it was too ambiguous and amorphous. It failed to classify and contain Native bodies for colonial viewing, leaving their gender unspecified and their sexuality, it was assumed, uncontrolled. The blanket became a key target in the clothing campaign for exactly these reasons. It simultaneously revealed too much and too little to the colonial gaze. In his biography of William Duncan, author John Arctander argued: When a heathen, [the Indian's] old, dirty blanket was sufficient, both for a suit and for bedclothes. His wife and children, most of the time, trotted around only half-clothed. When he became a Christian, he needed a decent suit to go to church in, and another for his daily work. His wife required a civilized dress, and the children must also be clothed and shod. (1909, 175) The Comaroffs argue the blanket's versatility as both clothing and bed covering offended European sensibilities which valued clothes for their refined, and usually gendered, specificity. Unlike the multi-functional blanket, \"civilized\" clothes were \"put on in a particular manner, at particular times, by particular people, over particular parts of the body, for particular activities\" (Comaroff and Comaroff 1997,270). The blanket certainly lacked this functional and gendered specificity, but I suggest it also shocked missionary sensitivity because it blurred colonial boundaries with its implicit eroticism. The blanket brought the intimate arena of the bed to the public performance of the body. It failed to differentiate between public and private space by transgressing the boundaries of both. Furthermore, its 95 covering of the body was, to European eyes, incomplete and precarious at best, so that nakedness seemed like an ever-present possibility. Replacing the blanket with European dresses and pants, suits and skirts thus ensured that Native gender and sexuality were kept in check by the regulatory power of the closet. Disciplining the Body While the \"battleground\" of the body was often beset with struggles of a symbolic nature, it must be acknowledged that other efforts to control it were more explicitly coercive, if not unquestionably violent. \"Civilization\" required reshaping the very way in which Native bodies interacted with their natural and social worlds. The simplest activities demanded new forms of body management and restraint. During his early years at Fort Simpson, for example, Duncan decided to withhold religious instruction from the Tsimshian until they were properly trained in the \"manner and stillness of prayer\" (Usher 1974,48). When Bishop Hills evaluated Duncan's later work at Metlakatla, he praised the orderly manner in which students presented themselves: \"... on going out, they did not dart up and run helter skelter, but at the word of command all stood - then face about, and one by one went out in order\" (cited in Usher 1974, 77). Such a fundamental transformation required new regimes of discipline and surveillance - both internal and external. By instilling strict notions of cleanliness, domesticity, shame, and industry, missionaries hoped to enlist converts in their own monitoring and regulation.2 When this system of self-surveillance failed, however, external intervention was deemed necessary. It was this disciplinary aspect 2 The extent to which these teachings were actually internalized by students is, of course, another issue entirely and one which has been explored in other works (although primarily only in more contemporary studies). See, for example, Assembly of First Nations (1994), Fournier and Crey (1997), Haig-Brown (1988) and Ing (1991). 9 6 of missionary work which earned Duncan, in particular, an infamous reputation as a harsh, even brutal, master. His journals do little to refute this understanding, as the following excerpts will show: Have had to give several severe floggings to my houseboy Alford tonight. I do not know whether I have done yet although I have strapped his bare back and marked it very much... I never flogged a boy so much before and I hope never to flog another like him. He certainly seemed subdued... after a long talk with him - he knelt down and I prayed with him. (Duncan cited in Murray 1985, 53) I imprisoned Calvah the slave for a week and flogged him with sticks.... After twenty lashes had been given him. . .1 asked him if he now felt his sin to smart. He said he did and thanked me for having had him punished.3 (Duncan cited in Usher 1974, 83) ... last night I had to chastise Susan for inattention and gave all a very severe lecture in their careless, dirty and lazy habits -1 had Margaret in prison (the cupboard under the stairs) two days and nights for pilfering and also added a severe beating. (Duncan cited in Usher 1974, 77) Duncan's measures are disturbing not only for their physical violence, but also for their psychological dimension. Corporal punishment was always accompanied by \"lectures\" or \"long talks,\" and often the \"guilty\" party was expected to be grateful. Jean Usher has argued that Duncan's \"seemingly harsh\" discipline \"was probably no different in kind or degree from that exercised in many Victorian homes\" (1974, 77), but such commentary completely elides the much broader, and more troubling significance of Duncan's actions given their colonial context.4 She fails to connect the disciplinary regimes of colonial evangelists with the imperial campaign to produce docile bodies and obedient subjects. Furthermore, by drawing the parallel to discipline within a \"home,\" Usher inadvertently invokes and applies 3 The reference to \"Calvah the slave\" is, unfortunately, as unexplained as it is intriguing. Usher provides the quote from Duncan's journal, but we are told nothing about the context or meaning of the comment. 4 Usher's comparison also elides the much more germane question of whether such discipline differed \"in kind or degree\" from that exercised in Native homes. My thanks to Gillian Creese for this insight. 97 the same familial, parent-child discourse that missionaries employed so frequently and effectively to legitimate their actions among \"immature\" and \"undeveloped\" peoples. The Medicine-Man In missionary narratives, one menacing figure came to embody all that was hated and feared about Native \"heathenism.\" Medicine-men, or shamans, were identified as one of the most dangerous threats to the \"civilizing\" mission.5 They were condemned as \"demon[s] among heathen peoples\" who represented the \"grossest features of paganism\" (Crosby 1907, 119). Their continuing power to define key cultural practices, particularly those surrounding the body, was viewed as a direct challenge to missionaries' own incipient authority. Crosby declared, \"The tyranny of this wretched despot and the awful absurdity of his miserable pretensions, together with his fiendishly bitter opposition to everything that is good, leads him to be feared and hated\" (1907, 119), revealing more about his own feelings than those of the Natives themselves. To Duncan and Crosby, medicine-men represented all that was deviant and degenerate about the Native body, its management and manifestation in Native culture. As a result, missionary efforts concentrated on eroding the corporeal authority of the shamans, and colonial discourse constructed their bodies, in particular, as spectacles of savagery. In the Story of Metlakatla, Henry Wellcome wrote: The medicine-man, claiming direct intercourse with the spirit-world, held great influence over the people. He arranged himself, in the skin of a bear or wolf, the head and muzzle of which formed a helmet, the tushes falling about his temples; and a hideously carved mask covered his face, armlets and anklets of repulsive design encircled his shrivelled limbs. To add to the ferocity of his appearance, the exposed parts of his body were daubed with red and black paint, and he was covered with 5 While I employ the gender-specific term of \"medicine-man\" in this section, I recognize that its implications may be misleading. Arguments raised by Lang (1998), Roscoe (1998) and others complicate the assumption that the gender of medicine-men was unambiguously male. The possibility of female and/or alternative gender shamans, and the significance of this to missionary discourse, will be discussed in the following section. 98 pending charms.. .which dangled about him as he advanced into the room with a series of postures and jerks. (1887, 5-6) Others deployed gruesome detail and animalistic imagery to provoke horror and repulsion among their audiences. Brother Jennings wrote of Port Simpson: No longer than ten years ago the \"medicine men\" would go and exhume the dead and go through the village with portions of the corpses in their hands tearing them with their teeth; or, one in a state of nudity, with a rope around his body, held by men as wild and savage as himself, would prance through the village with a dead dog in his arms, tearing him to pieces with his teeth. Such rites as these were kept up from year to year. Murder was a common occurrence, and the lowest vices were practised. {Missionary Outlook (Dec) 1882, 189) The most stunning example of the medicine-man's role in missionary discourse is found, however, in Crosby's 1914 memoirs. Susan Neylan has pointed out that narratives of \"showdowns\" between medicine-men and missionaries were a \"classic\" and compelling literary device. More significant than whether such incidents actually occurred or how accurate their descriptions were, Neylan argues, is what we can learn about the tensions underlying missions by examining these rhetorical conventions (1999, 113-114). In Up and Down the North Pacific Coast by Canoe and Mission Ship, Crosby provides a richly symbolic, strikingly illustrated account of his encounter with a \"hostile\" medicine-man. He writes: Another illustration of the opposition with which we had to contend, and which had a somewhat amusing side, was furnished by an incident connected with our first visit to Kitimaat. A Council had been called by the Chiefs, to which I was invited. They proposed that, if I would not pray the judgments of God upon them, they would in turn prevent any evil to me and any interruption to our services from the conjurer who was then in the mountains preparing to destroy us. I promised that if they would desist from their wicked practices on the next day, which was the Sabbath, we would not offer any prayers against them. They readily promised. I seized the opportunity to challenge them with their want of power while our service was proceeding the next night, when the conjurer with his crowd came rushing to the place, howling and r destroying property in his track, and declaring that he would put a stop to the proceedings. This man, with his tongue protruding, was the most diabolical-looking object that one could imagine. He had a thick rope around his waist to which his 99 followers had been clinging. His object doubtless was to let it be known in that heathen tribe and on the Coast that the conjurer had more power than the Missionary and his religious story. It was then that the Missionary felt it necessary to assume the role of the militant preacher; and, taking his position at the door, boldly challenged the savage to come on, at the same time suggesting what might be the consequences to him. To the surprise of those assembled, the fellow was cowed and slunk away with a scowl on his countenance, leaving us to our devotions. (Crosby 1914, 254-255) Figure 9 shows the picture provided to illustrate the incident. T H E MILITANT MISSIONARY\u00E2\u0080\u0094DR. CROSBY AND T H E MEDICINE MAN. Figure 9 Crosby's narrative conforms almost uncannily to the formula described in Neylan's analysis when she writes: In the missionary literature, the \"medicine men/women\" or \"witch-doctors\" are cast as always resenting the intrusion of Christianity and perceiving the missionary as a threat to their authority and power. They frequently suffered humiliation or were discredited by the missionary, and sometimes even were converted to the \"truth\" of Christianity. In the heroic vein of missionary discourse, the missionaries always won the \"showdown.\" (1999,114) 100 The \"defeat\" of the medicine-man in this encounter is as inexplicable as it probably was imaginary. While such an incident certainly could have occurred, its \"true\" details and dynamics remain shrouded by the allegorical ambitions of Crosby's discourse. Medicine-man and missionary are vividly constructed as opposing characters in an imperial drama. As the heroic protagonist, Crosby provides the \"objective,\" panoptical perspective of the narrator. He even shifts, at one point, into third-person narration, thereby emphasizing this as a conflict of icons, rather than individuals. The description of the medicine-man reinforces racial stereotypes and animalistic imagery. He is a \"diabolical-looking object\" who \"howls\" and rushes about, \"tongue protruding,\" destroying property until he is boldly confronted, at which point he is instantly \"cowed\" and slinks away scowling. He is, in short, everything which the \"civilized\" man is not. This portrait is actualized in Figure 9. An artist's rendition of Crosby's account, \"The Militant Missionary - Dr. Crosby and the Medicine-Man\" confirms that \"civilization\" and \"savagery\" can indeed be seen in the spectacle of the body. Crouched almost on all fours, the medicine-man is figured as a hybrid whose claw-like hands, horns/ears of feather and tail of rope, blur the boundaries of animal and human. His face, darkened with paint and dirt, is contorted in a terrible grimace as his eyes bulge and his tongue hangs from his head. His dishevelled hair flies in all directions, much like the ragged edges of his scanty loincloth. Confronting Crosby, he stands outside in the dirt, without even shoes to separate his feet from the ground. Crosby, on the other hand, stands fully erect and completely clothed in the liminal space of a doorway, shielding the sacred domestic space of the interior from the dangerous threat outside. His hair and beard are carefully groomed and the expression on his face is calm, but resolute. He appears physically larger and substantially brawnier than 101 photographs of him might otherwise suggest, and his clenched fists symbolize his readiness to protect those within. While Crosby's narrative mentions nothing of a house, or inhabitants within, the illustration heightens the drama by placing Crosby at the threshold of \"civilized\" space. Intersecting hierarchies of race and gender are reinforced as the figures within are portrayed as passive and vulnerable, dependent on the benevolent protection of white masculinity. At least one of the figures within, the small child, appears to be female, while the suit and cropped hair of the male figure to Crosby's left suggests a faithful, but feminized Native convert. Once again, one also witnesses the spectre of panoptical time as the white, male figure of progress confronts and, ultimately, overpowers the primitive throwback of anachronistic space. The picture, in short, enacts almost every visual metaphor and symbolic strategy of colonial discourse. Through it, we see the embodied fears and fetishes of the imperial imagination, and the ongoing attempts to predetermine through discourse the uncertain outcome of colonial encounters. Engendering Civilization: \"Stalwart Men and Comely Maidens\" \"I have visited Mr. Duncan's wonderful settlement at Metlakahtla, and the interesting Methodist Mission at Fort Simpson, and have thus been enabled to realize what scenes of primitive peace, and innocence, of idyllic beauty, and material comfort, can be presented by the stalwart men, and comely maidens of an Indian community under the wise administration of a judicious and devoted Christian mission. I have seen the Indians in all phases of their existence, from the half-naked savage, perched, like a bird of prey, in a red blanket upon a rock, trying to catch his miserable dinner offish, to the neat maiden in Mr. Duncan's school at Metlakahtla, as modest and as well dressed an any clergyman's daughter in an English parish...\" (Dufferin cited in Wellcome 1887,104-105) In 1876, the Earl of Dufferin, then Governor General of Canada, returned from visiting the missions of Duncan and Crosby to deliver a passionate speech in Government House, Victoria, about what he had witnessed. His stirring discourse and eloquent imagery 102 did more than simply praise the virtues of mission work. It also revealed integral, but often unexamined, dimensions of the \"civilizing\" project - most importantly, the critical significance of gender. \"Civilizing\" the Indian hinged on the installation of explicitly dichotomous, specifically hierarchical gender roles and responsibilities. The Native body was not legible, let alone manageable, to the imperial/empirical gaze unless its gender was both clearly defined and delimited. Similarly, the spectacle of missionary success could hardly be inscribed on defiant bodies which resisted or blurred the boundaries of European masculinity or femininity. \"Stalwart men\" and \"comely maidens,\" on the other hand, embodied the imperial ideals by which \"civilized\" Indians were to be neatly categorized and contained. From their earliest encounters, missionaries fixed on gender as one of the most important means of classifying and thus controlling the Native body. In its simplest form, this process could be very subtle, but effective nonetheless. In one Indian village, the Bishop of Columbia performed an essential imperial exercise by gathering all the children together, then immediately constructing a list which ordered the unruly bodies into two neatly divided columns of \"GIRLS\" and \"BOYS\" (Columbia Mission 1859,19). Crosby's work with his first students in Nanaimo reveals a similar impulse to impose European markers of gender onto the often ambiguous young bodies. As alluded to earlier, clothing played a pivotal role in articulating gender. Once donations of clothing arrived, Crosby described with approval the \"exciting time\" which followed: The sparkling eyes and eager faces of the dusky little mortals was a picture indeed. Of course, many of the clothes were much too large and had to be \"fixed up,\" but what did that matter? Like white children, they wanted to \"try on.\" One little girl was soon inside of a dress about twice too long for her, and holding up the front, with the long train following, she went prancing up and down in it, looking very proud. The excitement became great. One little boy was trying on a coat much too big for him. Another fellow got hold of a little pair of pants which he thought were the thing for him, and was buttoning up the waist, when the others burst into loud 103 laughter and told him he had got into them the wrong side first. (1907,45) Describing the mistakes and mishaps of the children, Crosby adopts the role of a benevolent father-figure looking on with approval. More important than whether the clothes actually fit, or are even worn \"properly,\" is the fact that girls and boys are now wearing clothes which clearly signify their gender as male or female. Far from a mere amusing anecdote, Crosby's narrative thus highlights a crucial stage in the \"civilizing\" process. Recent works by Lang (1998), Roscoe (1998), Young (1999) and others add yet another dimension to our analysis of colonial gender dynamics. By exploring the prevalence and prestige of \"berdaches,\" \"two-spirit peoples,\" and \"third and fourth genders\" in North American Native cultures, these historians add much needed depth and complexity to our cross-cultural understandings of gender and sexuality. Sabine Lang argues that \"the changing of gender roles - the adoption, for the most varied reasons, of the culturally defined social role of the opposite biological sex - has been reported worldwide for numerous cultures and for all historic periods\" (1998, 3). According to both Lang and Roscoe, alternative genders were not only relatively common across North America, but also almost universally accepted by the Native cultures in which they have been documented.6 Will Roscoe writes: Alternative gender roles were among the most widely shared features of North American societies... Because so many North American cultures were disrupted (or had disappeared) before they were studied by anthropologists, it is not possible to state the absolute frequency of these roles. Those alternative gender roles that have been documented, however, occur in every region of the continent, in every kind of society, and among speakers of every major language group. (1998,7) 6 For the purposes of this discussion, the term \"alternative gender(s)\" will be used for both simplicity and clarity; however, the terminology in this area remains hotly contested. For a more detailed discussion about these terms and the debate surrounding them, see Roscoe (1998, 7-8, 16-19) and Lang (1998, xii-xvii, 6-11). 104 He goes on to state that both ethnographic literature and contemporary narratives suggest that alternatively gendered people were \"accepted and integrated members of their communities,\" to whom special respect and privileges were often accrued (Roscoe 1998,11). While their prevalence among the Tsimshian, specifically, remains unclear, Roscoe reports that persons of alternative gender were \"fairly common\" among the Northwest Coast Haisla and Bella Coola, directly to the east and south of the Tsimshian, respectively (1998,15). Similarly, Young charts evidence of alternative genders among the St6:l6, Squamish, Nooksack, Skagit, Puyallup-Nisqually, and Cowichan (1999,23). The possibility of gender variance in the Native cultures which missionaries encountered suggests an intriguing insight into why European conceptions of gender were so fiercely promoted and patrolled in colonial encounters. It suggests that a considerable dimension of the conflict between \"civilization\" and \"savagery\" was generated by the clash of fundamentally different gender cultures. Lang explains that her work seeks to understand how and why alternative genders were able to exist as they did in Native cultures. She notes: One factor is surely the construction of alternative gender statuses in addition to the standard masculine and feminine ones. Western culture does not admit entry into gender ambivalence; it recognizes only a polarization into male and female, masculine and feminine. Ambivalent individuals consequently have to choose one or the other of these poles.... In other cultures, quite obviously, there are more than two alternatives. (1998, 15) Native cultures not only afforded the possibility of alternative roles and identities, they often accorded those who explored these possibilites unique status and esteem. Even Young, who acknowledges the stigmatization of alternatively gendered people in some Native cultures, notes a paradoxical but persistent pattern linking this stigma with the attribution of exceptional powers to these individuals at the same time (1999,21). While the connection between medicine-men and alternative genders remains ambiguous, both Roscoe and Lang 105 note that persons of alternative gender were, in many cases, granted a special spiritual status and attributed supernatural powers. In some cases, they were clearly identified as the shamans or \"doctors\" of their communities (see, for example, Roscoe 1998,14). We can, at least, raise the question of whether some medicine-men were alternatively gendered, and explore the possibility that Native acceptance of such gender variation may have been at the root of missionary hostility towards the medicine-men they encountered. Once missionaries were able to identify those who were to become \"stalwart men\" versus \"comely maidens,\" however, their focus turned with particular intensity to the construction and conversion of the latter. Missionary discourse carved out an especially precarious position for Native women. As feminist theorists and historians have long argued, discursive constructions of femininity and womanhood were and are fraught with unresolved tensions and contradictions. Comaroff and Comaroff, for example, comment: Women were held at once to be sensitive and delicate, yet hardy and longer-lived; passionate and quintessentially sexual; yet innocent and intuitively moral. Given the political load that the anatomy of woman had come to bear, such ambiguities were bound to fuel angry dispute; it is not surprising that her body soon became an ideological battleground. (1991,107) What the Comaroffs surprisingly fail to acknowledge, however, is the extent to which these contradictions were displaced and, to a certain degree, mediated on colonial terrain. The fracturing of femininity was negotiated in racial and class terms which allowed/enforced different women to inhabit different dimensions of this discourse. Littlefield (1990), Green (1975) and Carter (1997) argue that for Native women in North America, this meant classification into one of two or three categories constructed in the imperial imagination. Littlefield identifies \"savage,\" \"squaw\" and \"victim\" as three images which were applied at different times to Native women along the Northwest Coast, while Green describes the 106 \"Pocahontas perplex,\" which opposed Native women as either beautiful \"Indian princesses\" or dirty, immoral \"squaws\" (Littlefield cited in Neylan 1999,133; Green cited in Carter 1997,161). While both Littlefield and Green frame these categories in terms of when they fell in and out of use in colonial discourse, I find such periodizing extremely problematic. I am not disputing that certain \"trends\" or \"patterns\" in the prevalence and potency of each image can be charted over time, but I question the value of such an exercise when we weigh its insights versus its ability to obscure. By periodizing images such as \"squaw,\" \"princess,\" \"savage\" and \"victim,\" we efface their remarkable historical resilience and flexibility, their ability to exist simultaneously, even buttressing one another. I argue that such images may have become more or less resonant under different circumstances, but rather than ceding any authority over the Native female body, these discourses remained always in the \"sidelines,\" ready to be called forth again whenever necessary. In the context of the \"civilizing\" project, in particular, missionary discourse often deployed these discourses together. It was necessary to construct Native women as \"savages,\" but victimized savages who were thus capable of being \"saved.\" Similarly, missionaries see-sawed continually in their casting of Native women as either \"princesses\" capable of exerting a \"civilizing\" influence among their people, or as the \"squaws\" most resilient to change and prone to \"backsliding.\" The transformation narratives so popular in missionary reports and memoirs depended on all the contradictory constructions of Native femininity, for each image embodied different ambitions and anxieties underlying the \"civilizing\" project. Women's bodies, in particular, figured centrally in these transformation narratives. McClintock cautions us to recognize that the \"gendering of imperialism\" varied from context to context and she points out: 107 North African, Middle Eastern and Asian women were, all too often, trammeled by the iconography of veil, while African women were subjected to the civilizing mission of cotton and soap. In other words, Arab women were to be \"civilized\" by being undressed (unveiled), while sub-Saharan women were to be civilized by being dressed (in clean, white, British cotton). (1995,31) But perhaps the key point is one that the Comaroffs would raise - that in any and all of these contexts, including the North American one McClintock does not address, the \"civilizing\" mission was played out in the theatre of the everyday, and focussed specifically around the bodies of women. Women's bodies, whether veiled/unveiled, dressed/undressed, clean/unclean, remained the most potent canvas on which the markers of \"civilization\" and \"savagery\" were to be both displayed and contested. Thus, in 1868, Anglican Reverend J. Reynard drew the contrast between two Native villages by comparing the \"dirty and slatternly\" appearance of the \"women-folk\" in one, with the well-clad \"wife,\" whose clean face, \"sleek and shining\" hair were among the \"marked signs of prosperity\" in another (Reynard in Mission Field (vol.13) 1868, 141, 139). Similarly, in another speech given by the Earl of Dufferin, he urged the Tsimshian to look to \"your wives, your sisters, and your daughters contributing so materially by the brightness of their appearance, the softness of their manners, their housewifely qualities, to the pleasantness and cheerfulness of your domestic lives...\" as evidence of their \"civilization\" (Dufferin cited in Wellcome 1887,102-103). Consider again Dufferin's speech cited at the beginning of this section. In it, he contrasts the \"half-naked savage, perched, like a bird of prey, in a red blanket upon a rock, trying to catch his miserable dinner of fish\" with the \"neat maiden in Mr. Duncan's school at Metlakahtla, as modest and as well dressed as any clergyman's daughter in an English parish...\" (Dufferin cited in Wellcome 1887,104-105). Not only does Dufferin evoke the popular spectacle of panoptical time, he also genders the supposed transition from 108 \"savagery\" to \"civilization\" by exhibiting it on the imagined bodies of Native men and women. Here again the camera played a pivotal role in producing Native women for imperial exhibition. The scopic spectacle of women's \"civilization,\" or lack thereof, lent itself easily to the photographic medium for, as Crosby argued, \"It was not difficult, in visiting around among the villages, to pick out those Christian mothers who had the privilege of the \"Home\" life and training\" (1914,92). Carol Williams notes that \"the photograph was employed as positive propaganda fueling campaigns for the success of missionization\" (1999,14). She argues that Indian women who had adopted \"white ways\" were depicted as visually distinct from those \"resistant to assimilation\" (Williams 1996,37). Consider, for example, Figures 10 and 11, presented together on a single page in Crosby's 1914 memoirs. In the first picture, a Native woman is shown frontally, holding a stick and sitting on the ground against the outside wall of an unidentified building. Williams points out that all of these elements were common photographic practice in the portraits of older, \"unassimilated\" women, for they reinforced their casting as \"closer to the 'natural' pagan world\" (1996,37). Everything about the woman's appearance transgresses the norms of \"civilized\" femininity which missionaries were so intent on instilling. She wears a blanket rather than a dress, her hair is hidden beneath a scarf, and while not wearing any face-paint, she displays a visible facial piercing. The blanket she wears also appears to be a Hudson's Bay company blanket, an item Williams argues was often included in such photographs to root the subject in the \"deep\" history of the fur trade (1999,9). The description of the woman as a \"grandmother of the old days\" further relegates her to historical passivity, a primitive anachronism whose day 109 \" T H E Q U E E N OK S H E B A . \" A grandmother of the old days. Figure 10 Figure 11 has passed. The caption, \"The Queen of Sheba\" is particularly intriguing, for it seems at first to assign the woman a somewhat geographically misplaced regal status. It is, however, more likely a sardonic reference to the Biblical figure, the Queen of Sheba who \"came to Jerusalem with a very great train, with camels that bore spices, and very much gold, and precious stones\" (1 Kings 10:1-3). Describing someone as dressed up \"like the Queen of Sheba\" was, in fact, a popular Euro-Canadian convention which was meant to ridicule and mock the person in question.7 Far from bestowing a compliment then, the caption \"The Queen of Sheba\" was actually a sarcastic comment on what missionaries perceived as the disheveled, unrefined appearance of the unassimilated Native woman. In Figure 11, the \"Girls at the Kitamaat Home\" are provided as contrast in an implicitly linear, temporal progression. These subjects symbolize the \"civilization\" of their \"race\" and their gender with their clean, white, appropriately feminine dresses, their carefully groomed and controlled hairstyles, and their location in front of the \"home\" as boundary markers of domestic space. The scopic nature of the \"civilizing\" process is reinforced by the sub-caption, \"The result of Christian training,\" suggesting that these results are visible, capable of being captured and consumed in a photograph. As Figure 11 suggests, nowhere was the focus on \"civilizing\" women more apparent than in the Mission Homes/Schools and their lessons in domestic femininity. As mentioned earlier, missionary discourse constructed Native women as \"savages,\" but victimized savages who could potentially be saved. The discourse of degradation was one of the most popular means of justifying missionary intervention. It allowed missionaries to emphasize the 7 My thanks to Valerie Raoul at the Centre for Research in Women's Studies and Gender Relations, U.B.C., for alerting me to the Biblical origins of this reference. I am also indebted to both Valerie and my mother, Kelly Greenwell, for pointing out the popular usage of this phrase and its implications. I l l \"depraved\" and \"miserable\" existence of Indian women, thereby legitimating even the most coercive actions as benevolent and compassionate. Crosby wrote: At one time among the Indians, as among all heathen people, the girls were counted of little value. If they grew up they were to become the burden-bearers of their masters of the other sex. An Indian mother has been known to take her little baby girl out into the woods and stuff its mouth with grass and leaves and leave it to die. And when asked why she did so, she would say, \"I did not want her to grow up and suffer as I have suffered.\" (1907,62) As Sarah Carter notes, \"The central message the missionaries conveyed was that the lives of women were dramatically transformed for the better with the advent of 'civilization' and Christianity. Women were being offered liberation from centuries of oppression\" (1997, 163). Duncan and Crosby both argued that Native girls and young women required special protection and supervision in order to be properly \"civilized.\" As the Bishop of Columbia put it, such work protected the \"tender plants from too early or ill-advised exposure to the blasts and storms of the voyage of life\" (Columbia Mission, 1866, 31). What such discourse masked, however, was the implicit devaluation of the Native families, and particularly the Native mothers, from which these girls were taken. In missionary narratives, the family home became a theatre for the staging of domesticity, and women were held responsible for both the success and the subversion of the performance. Both Native homes and Native women were condemned for their lack of apparent domesticity and thus, it was argued, they provided no fit environment for the teaching of civilized manners and graces (Bolt 1992,63; Harkin 1996,651). If not corrupted by the depravity of their home life, Native girls were also in danger of being sold into \"a slavery worse than death,\" a fate which missionaries alluded to incessantly, but never actually defined. Crosby explained: We had not been long at Simpson when it was evident to the Missionaries that something must be done to save and protect the young girls of that coast from being sold into the vilest of slavery. They would come, one after another, and ask the 112 Missionary's wife for her protection; and thus one and another and another were taken into the house until it was crowded and we had to enlarge it. (1914, 85) The sexual anxieties and assumptions underlying these arguments will be discussed further in a following section, but for now, such discourse is drawn upon to demonstrate the kind of dire, compelling straits missionaries constructed to authorize their colonial agendas. The lessons of the Mission Home/School were not always ones which the students were eager to receive, however, at least not as the missionaries envisioned them. Emma Crosby complained that the girls did not prioritize their \"civilized\" activities properly, for too often \"they want to play the organ before they know how to make bread\" (cited in Bolt 1992, 64). Coercion was, indeed, necessary at times, as Clarence Bolt relates: The matrons of the home had to constantly battle a spirit of restlessness and discontent and had to be on guard against the ever-present threat of \"heathen\" friends enticing the girls away. On one occasion, two girls ran away from the heavy work load and were apprehended and brought back by the village constables. Kate Hendry reported that \"they were locked up in our work room nearly a week where I had talked to and prayed with my two prisoners every day.\" (1992,63-64) Discipline and domesticity, it seems, went hand in hand for truly the two were not that dissimilar. Once a resident in the Mission Home/School, the Native female body was caught in the firm embrace of both. The disciplinary power of domesticity also extended to those outside of the Mission Home/School, as the Reverend A. J. Hall explained to the Church Missionary Society: \"The training of these girls keeps a check upon the young men who are all anxious to obtain a wife from the house, and are aware that good conduct is necessary to obtain such a prize\" (cited in Usher 1974, 76-77). The discipline enacted both literally and symbolically by such domestic training was also legitimated and intensified by the racialisation of Native femininity. The discourse of domesticity accorded neither the same roles nor the same responsibilities to white women 113 and women of colour alike. The \"beasts of burden\" discourse which missionaries drew on so effectively to condemn the supposed subjugation of females within Native cultures simultaneously animated their own arguments that Native girls were better suited to the more strenuous, dirty and physically demanding aspects of domestic labour than their non-Native counterparts. Michael Harkin notes that at one point, Kate Hudson, one of the matrons of the Crosby Girls' Home, did worry about the younger girls, for the work might be \"too heavy for their growing strength,\" but even she decided that the \"weekly routine\" took precedence over any problems the girls might encounter (Hudson cited in Harkin 1996, 652). The system of \"outing\" established in the later residential school system made this racialised division of domestic labour even more explicit. Miller notes that female students of residential schools across the country were placed \"in service\" as maids, nannies, and other household servants with Euro-Canadian families (1996,253-256). While affording white households a cheap source of labour, this system made it clear that a racialised cult of domesticity reserved very different opportunities for Native women than their white female employers. Civilizing White Women \"Friends, whose hearts beat with sympathy for the devotion which led the Female Missionaries to answer the call of Christian duty, and leave their English home, will read the following statement with deep interest.... After the school is over, Miss Anna Penrice goes three times a week with Mr. Garrett, to the Indian School, for two hours, to teach the women and children to work. The children are much pleased when her kind face appears at the door. They stroke her hand, and say it is \"beautiful and clean.\" Through her interpreter (Mr. Garrett) she assures them that theirs may become as beautiful and clean, if they will but wash them....\" (Bishop of Columbia in Columbia Mission 1860,94-95) In Figure 11, a white woman, most likely the matron of the Home, is also pictured among the Native \"girls.\" As matron, she would have played a pivotal role in the \"domestication\" of the female residents, but she remains nameless nonetheless, and her 114 specific contribution is not commented on by Crosby. It is enough, apparently, that her presence in the photograph signifies the visible standard against which Native women were to be judged. In the above passage, Bishop Hills describes the \"civilizing\" influence of one female missionary in Victoria. Her \"beautiful and clean\" hands and her words to the children symbolize the crucial domestic lessons women missionaries were to teach, and yet the hands themselves, as well as the Bishop's narrative, reveal nothing about how these lessons were actually taught. Through these examples we can begin to discern the simultaneously indispensable, yet, to a certain degree, invisible role of white women in the \"civilizing\" project. While the position of white women was vastly more privileged than that of Native women, it was, in some ways, equally precarious and as carefully patrolled. As the symbolic icons of \"civilized society,\" white women were discursively ever-present in missionary narratives, even when they were absent from the missions themselves. Once there as actual teachers, missionary wives and/or Home matrons, however, a bizarre, but familiar discursive slippage occurred in which the significance of their work was romanticized, but the specific details of its performance were elided. Anne McClintock provides insight into this paradox by pointing out that, through imperial narratives, \"the domestic labor of women suffered one of the most successful vanishing acts of modern history\" (1995, 164). Victorian culture, she argues, faced a dilemma: \"how to represent domesticity without representing women at work\" (McClintock 1995,216). The bourgeois household demanded the disavowal of the very female labor which sustained its respectability. For women whose membership in the \"refined\" middle-class was not guaranteed, this illusion of idleness was even more essential to distance them from the domestic servitude which their class background was more likely 115 to allow them. In the case of missionary women, I argue, the situation was particularly dire. As discussed in Chapter Two, their interstitial class background both frustrated and fueled their bourgeois aspirations. But to further compound matters, the racially contaminated colonial context in which missionary women lived and worked threatened to taint them with the same racialised status that McClintock argues was applied to working-class domestic servants in the urban metropoles (1995, 164-165). A paradoxical situation resulted. White women were urgently needed in the colonies to ensure the performance and productivity of domesticity; but, in order to sustain their construction as the pure, refined bearers of \"civilization,\" their labour in the mission field had to be concealed at the same time it was celebrated. As mentioned in Chapter Two, it seems the domestic duties of missionary women were sometimes brought into sharpest relief when they were found to be absent or inadequate. In his biography of William Duncan, author John Arctander includes an \"amusing\" anecdote regarding the arrival of the Tugwells, a young married couple sent by the Church Missionary Society to assist with the work at Metlakatla: On arriving at the Fort, [Duncan] addressed Mrs. Tugwell: \"Now, don't bother about the luggage, Mrs. Tugwell! Your husband and I will look after that. But we have no bread in the house. Will you kindly make us some biscuits? You will find the flour over there.\" \"Why, Mr. Duncan,\" was her answer, \"I don't know how to make biscuits. I never made any biscuits in all my life.\" One can hardly blame Mr. Duncan, when he, of later, in speaking of this incident, said: \"What do you think of that? The Church Missionary Society had sent more than five thousand miles, some one to help me to teach the Indians Christian home-life, and here I was, obliged to make bread for her myself, the very first day she was in my house.\" (1909,142) Duncan's indignation at the situation signalled both the vital significance of white women to the \"civilizing\" process, and the extent to which their contribution was taken for granted as the \"natural\" skills of feminine domesticity. 116 Campaigns to \"civilize\" Native women were essential to reinforcing and securing white femininity and domesticity in the colonies. As Carter, McClintock, Stoler and others have shown, imperial discourse cast white women as key \"civilizing\" agents, reproducers of the race, and \"the moral and cultural custodians\" of the colonial community (Carter 1997,6). This imagined identity was forged in opposition to the degraded and depraved constructions of their non-white counterparts. As Carter points out: What it meant to be a white woman was rooted in a series of negative assumptions about the malign influence of Aboriginal women. The meanings of and different ways of being female were constantly referred to each other, with Aboriginal women always appearing deficient. The power ideologies of white and Aboriginal femininity functioned to inform both groups of their appropriate space and place. (1997,205) Missionary discourse also emphasized the \"wildness\" of colonial contexts to dramatize the endangered but devoted presence of women missionaries. The Women's Missionary Society of the Methodist Church provided one particularly avid audience for reports of this kind, and correspondence between Emma Crosby and this group was published regularly in Missionary Outlook. A Mrs. Piatt later chronicled the history of the Society in a book entitled, Story of the Years, in which she explains: Previous to the organization of our auxiliary we knew nothing of the character of the work undertaken by Mrs. Crosby; and it was indeed a revelation that such a state of things could exist in our own Dominion and that one of our own refined and cultured women had been called to spend her life in such surroundings. From the atmosphere of a minister's home, a graduate and teacher of Hamilton Ladies' College, Mrs. Crosby had been transferred to a heathen village, six hundred miles north of Victoria; and for some years was the only white woman in the place. What this life meant to Mrs. Crosby, and what her beautiful Spirit-filled life meant to these benighted people, only the future will reveal. (Piatt cited in Crosby 1914, 88) With the selfless assistance of women like Emma Crosby, Native women could be guided through the \"civilizing\" process, but their performance within it was always measured against the standard of white femininity - a standard which was reinforced each time Native 117 women fell short of it. It is, in part, because the \"savage\" Native woman served as such an integral imaginative resource in the construction of white femininity that I argue Native women could never, from a Euro-Canadian perspective, successfully conclude the \"civilizing\" process. Even the most celebrated of female converts, the students at the Mission Homes, were constrained within the margins of mimicry. As Emma Crosby wrote in one report, \"The girls are, as a rule, quick to learn, both in school and housework, though, of course, we find some who naturally lack all idea of order, and can never be thoroughly neat and clean\" (Missionary Outlook (Nov-Dec) 1881, 141). Mimicry meant that the racialised hierarchies of gender were secured rather than subverted by the \"civilizing\" process. While white women aspired to the \"idle ideal\" of bourgeois domesticity, Native women were under constant pressure to be visibly industrious as evidence of their \"civilization.\" The supposedly leisured existence of the bourgeois housewife was never a possibility for Native women who were channeled, from the start, towards a very specific rung of the racialised class structure. Recognizing how white women stood to gain, however unintentionally, from the discursive constructions of non-white women is essential to understanding the complex intersections of race, class, gender and sexuality in the colonies. As Anne McClintock reminds us, \"white women were not the hapless onlookers of empire but were ambiguously complicit both as colonizers and colonized, privileged and restricted, acted upon and acting\" (1995, 6). Demarcating Masculinity A growing number of scholars have pointed out the failure to examine masculinity as a gendered construct with the same historical depth and complexity as social constructions of femininity. Gillian Creese and Victoria Strong-Boag note that: Like women, men live in a world in which their sense of self, the social norms they learn to accept, their sense of appropriate social roles for themselves and others, and 118 generally the structure of possibilities and constraints throughout their lives, are all shaped by the social construction of patriarchy and masculinity and their variation by class, race, culture, sexual orientation, and historical period. (1995,12) With these insights in mind, I want to explore some of the ways in which \"civilization\" inscribed itself differently on the bodies of Native men and women. Anne McClintock provides an intriguing analysis of how the colonization of \"virgin lands\" was \"libidinously eroticized\" as the male ravishment of feminized peoples and places (1995,22). She notes: \"Knowledge of the unknown world was mapped as a metaphysics of gender violence.... In these fantasies, the world is feminized and spatially spread for male exploration, then reassembled and deployed in the interests of massive imperial power\" (McClintock 1995, 23). This raises an interesting question however: what happens to men who are to be \"colonized,\" rather than \"colonizers\" in this symbolically masculine endeavour? McClintock argues that colonial discourse subtly feminized non-white men by using the language of gender to mediate the hierarchies of race. Discursively (and in some cases, literally) stripping non-white men of their masculinity defused them as threats to patriarchal colonial authority, at least in the imperial imagination. Native men in British Columbia were no exception and one can see the process of feminization at work in both missionary discourse and practice. In 1890, the Crosbys added a Boys' Home to their mission, for, as Thomas Crosby explained: \"It soon became evident that we must care also for the boys, as we had several little orphan boys in the Girls' Home\" (1914, 88-89).8 Within the Boys' Home, It is interesting to note the difference in how these institutions were legitimized. Girls, it was argued, required protection from sexual dangers and temptations - problems to which their parents and families were seen as contributing. Boys, on the other hand, required supervision if they were orphans - a category missionaries likely imposed irrespective of Native kinship structures that did not conform to the nuclear family model. In both cases, missionary discourse devalued Native parents and families, but only in the case of the Girls' Home was the discourse of sexual danger deployed. Native boys were not constructed as sexual victims/sinners in the same way as Native girls; in fact, there seems to be a strange silence around the subject of Native male sexuality in general - both in missionary discourse and historical analyses. It remains to be investigated, for example, why Native men did not emerge, symbolically, as the same sexual threats to white women as non-white men did 119 subtle forms of feminization were enacted. Along with more \"masculine\" jobs like cutting wood, boarders were taught to \"cook food, do dishes, and sweep the house\" (Bolt 1992,64) -domestic duties usually designated and devalued as \"female.\" Furthermore, as McClintock points out, \"the rationed privileges of race all too often put white women in positions of decided - if borrowed - power, not only over colonized women but also over colonized men\" (1995, 6). Native males were further feminized when placed under the supervision and instruction of missionary women. While it is unclear whether Emma Crosby and the various matrons of the Girls' Home were as involved with the Boys' Home, their status as white authority figures did place them in positions of power over students, both male and female. But it is also apparent that the feminization of Native males was complicated by the specifically gendered demands of the \"civilizing\" process, leaving Native men in a strangely ambiguous and ambivalent position. \"Stalwart\" masculinity remained the ideal to which Native boys were to aspire, and missionary transformation narratives praised those who adopted appropriately masculine appearance and activities. While Native girls and young women were \"civilized\" via domesticity, Native boys and young men were \"civilized\" via properly \"masculine\" industry and rigorous physical recreation. Boarders in the Boys' Home may have been taught some domestic skills, but a substantial amount of emphasis was also placed on teaching \"male\" trades such as carpentry, blacksmithing, and farming. Males at Metlakatla were provided with gymnastic bars and swings, and the Bishop of Columbia in other colonial contexts. The \"hypersexed,\" predatory images of Black men in the United States, for example, have garnered much attention and analysis - see, for example, Collins (1990), Davis (1978) and hooks (1981; 1992). However, in Canada, Jean Barman asserts that \"colonizers never viewed Aboriginal men as sexual threats\" (1995, 240-241) and while my own research generally supports this, I remain unsatisfied with the explanations (or lack thereof) for why this was so. Drawing on McClintock, we can consider whether this de-sexualization of Native men was part of their colonial feminization. A comparative study examining the racialised images of non-white men's sexuality in Canada and the U.S. could shed much needed light on these issues. 120 noted with approval that the boys there \"play at marbles and ball as eagerly as boys do anywhere\" (Columbia Mission 1866, 32). At Port Simpson, young men were identified as needing \"some amusement,\" and so Crosby organized games of football, a Fire Company, a Brass Band, and a Rifle Company, among other activities (Crosby 1914, 77). Women and girls, it seems, did not require such outlets of energy and expression. It is crucial to recognize, however, that the trades for which Native males were trained, while appropriately \"masculine,\" were also invariably manual, ensuring that Native men, like Native women, would be relegated to the bottom ranks of a racialised class structure. In Indian Education in the Northwest, Rev. Thompson Ferrier advocates this training in a passage which reads more accurately as a self-fulfilling prophecy: Of the 18,000 Indians of school age in Canada at least two thirds must settle down and draw a living out of the soil. Some will fish and hunt. A small number will enter the general labor market as lumbermen, canners, miners, freighters, sailors, railroad hands, ditchers, and what not. Only an odd one will enter the over-crowded trades and professions of to-day. Every Indian boy and girl ought to know how to speak and read simple English (the local newspaper), write a short letter, and enough of figures to discover if the storekeeper is cheating him. Beyond these scholastic accomplishments his time could be put to its best use by learning how to repair a broken harness, how to straighten a sprung tire on his wagon wheel, how to handle carpenter, garden and farm tools, how to care for horses, cattle, poultry, pigs, till the ground, produce a garden, learning the great possibilities of the soil. (1906, 15-16) Such training marshalled the boundaries of race and class to patrol Native men's access to the public/political arenas of (white) male power; for, in reality, the opportunities and possibilities offered by \"the soil\" were not always that \"great.\" Wrapped in the \"common sense\" discourse of \"practical\" education, manual training was deployed to limit the ability of Native men to challenge colonial rule. Cordonning off the \"over-crowded trades and professions\" was just another way of securing the separation of the \"ruling\" from the \"ruled.\" 121 In the Story of Metlakahtla (1887), Henry Wellcome provides a gendered transformation narrative which highlights some of the contradictions in the construction/destruction of Native masculinity. Figure 12 is an artist's rendition of yet another \"showdown,\" this time between William Duncan and a hostile Tsimshian chief, Paul Legaic. According to Wellcome's account, shortly after beginning a school among the Tsimshian, Duncan was violently threatened and confronted by Legaic and a group of medicine-men, \"all hideously painted, and decked in feathers and charms.\" Legaic, \"fired with drink, and in a furious passion\" is described as \"savagely gesticulating\" before drawing his knife to attack Duncan. Just like the medicine-man in Crosby's encounter, however, Legaic is suddenly and inexplicably defeated. Suddenly his arm falls, \"as if smitten by paralysis\" and \"he cowed and slunk away.\" In this case, an explanation is actually discovered. Clah, a \"faithful\" Native convert who is shown behind Duncan, had drawn a revolver and made it visible to Legaic, and \"it was the sight of this defender that repulsed the would-be assassin\" (Wellcome 1887,11-13). Later in Wellcome's book, we are presented with another picture of Legaic, Figure 13, this time depicting the spectacle of his transformation after conversion and \"civilization.\" Susan Neylan has analysed both of these pictures and their contrast within the \"showdown\" convention. She points out some of the most significant differences, noting how Legaic's face is \"contorted with anger or madness\" in the first image, but calm and austere in the second. Conversion and \"civilization\" has also stripped Legaic of status. In Figure 12, he is portrayed as a threatening, but undeniably powerful chief; in Figure 13, Neylan points out that he is \"now a 'simple citizen' rather than a chief, and has an occupation readily approved by the Euro-Canadian authorities\" (1999, 118). 122 LEGAIC, CHIEF OF ALL T H E TSIMSHEAN CHIEFS, ATTACKING MR. DUNCAN. Figure 12 Figure 13 What I would like to add to Neylan's analysis, however, is a consideration of how these images track the simultaneous gendering and feminizing of Native men demanded by the \"civilizing\" process. Through the transformation of Legaic, we can discern the complex and contradictory ways in which Native men were both masculinized and emasculated. In Figure 12, Duncan stands calm and unafraid, his hand resting on a desk, a symbol of European knowledge and learning; his hair is short and he wears a suit. According to European standards, his masculinity appears both unambiguous and rational. The masculinity of Legaic is less straightforward. Confronting Duncan, he stands aggressively with a knife raised in one hand and a spear clutched in the other. His face is contorted, his hair is long and his blanket is wrapped around him like a skirt. Legaic is thus hyper-masculinized as violent and aggressive, but he is also feminized by other aspects of his appearance and his seemingly cowardly defeat. As in Crosby's confrontation with the medicine-man, the \"showdown\" narrative symbolically emasculates the Native male challenge to white male authority. When we turn to Figure 13, we find similar processes at work. On the one hand, Legaic's \"civilization\" is signaled through his change in hair and clothes which are now not only European as Neylan points out, but also specifically gendered and visibly masculine. Legaic's status may be diminished, but he is now accorded membership in two male-encoded categories: \"citizen\" and \"carpenter.\" As the Bishop of Columbia comments with approval: \"He is industrious, and gains a good livelihood, and lives in a comfortable house of his own building\" (cited in Wellcome 1887, 71). While the Legaic of Figure 13 conforms to many of the gendered standards of \"civilization,\" however, his masculinity remains compromised by the very process that \"civilizes\" him. The same process which inscribes his masculinity in his appearance and his clothing, also feminizes 124 him as docile and passive, seated submissively before the (male) imperial gaze - a far cry from the threatening, upright figure of Figure 12. As Wellcome writes, the \"brutal murderer\" is \"humbled and led like a lamb\" (1887, 39-40). Once again, it seems the \"civilizing\" process simultaneously enforced an ideal, while ensuring its impossibility. In the missionary imagination, Native men were consigned to the mimicry of European masculinity -recognized as \"civilized\" men only once they were symbolically and literally disarmed of masculine power. Sexual Empire The \"civilization\" of sexuality was a key component in the construction of empire. It was, in many ways, the underlying force animating all of the campaigns to cleanse, clothe, discipline and domesticate bodies in the colonies. The unclean, unclothed, unruly and uncontained body was so threatening because it seemingly brought to the surface that which was \"unspeakable.\" Given sexuality's \"unspeakable\" status though, missionary discourse revealed an almost obsessive preoccupation with the erotic boundaries and libidinal potentials of empire. The Native body became the discursive lens through which a range of sexual longings and anxieties were refracted and regulated. The Bishop of Columbia declared that among the Indians, the \"sins of the flesh\" were \"particularly glaring (cited in Wellcome 1887,49); Emma Crosby argued that their ignorance and lack of refinement made them \"an easy prey to many temptations\" (Missionary Outlook (Nov-Dec) 1881,141); and Henry Wellcome suggested \"the most anxious watch-care\" was necessary, for the Indians were \"just wrested from dark superstitions and vicious habits, and liable to the natural weaknesses of mankind\" (1887, 34). That colonial discourse displayed an almost lurid 125 fascination with the sexual desires and dynamics of empire is not, of course, a new revelation. A range of colonial studies have turned their attention to this intimate arena, but as Anne Laura Stoler points out, their analyses tend to remain problematic: In colonial historiography, questions of desire often occupy a curious place. While the regulation of sexuality has come centre stage, Foucault's reworking of the repressive hypothesis and thus the cultural production of desire has not.... Much mainstream colonial history has preceded not from a Foucauldian premise that desire is a social construct, and sex a nineteenth-century invention, but from an implicitly Freudian one. (1995, 168) Too often, Stoler argues, we continue to cast desire as \"a basic biological drive, restricted and repressed by a 'civilization' that forces our sublimation of it\" (1995,171). Sexual repression was an undeniable aspect of colonial campaigns, but it was not the only, or defining aspect; instead, \"colonial management of the sexual practices of the colonizer and colonized was fundamental to the colonial order of things\" (Stoler 1995,4, emphasis mine). Anxieties around racial purity, blood boundaries and degeneration, for example, animated a form of sexual imperialism which was as aggressively formative of colonial identities, as it was violent and oppressive towards colonized bodies. Because discourses on libidinal desires were \"invariably shaped by how those desires were seen in relationship to their reproductive consequences\" (Stoler 1995,48), both Stoler and McClintock argue we must trace the anxieties around interracial sexual relations and their mixed-blood offspring to the threatened legitimacy of white rule which these were seen to embody. As Anne McClintock puts it, \"Panic about blood contiguity, ambiguity and metissage expressed intense anxieties about the fallibility of white male and imperial potency\" (1995,47). Consequently, colonial discourse set about actively constructing and enforcing European heteronormativity and (re)productivity, at the same time that it \"tamed,\" restrained and/or \"rescued\" indigenous sexuality. 126 Central to this process was the reciprocal construction of white and non-white women, specifically the racialised constructions of their sexuality. Once again, the missionary imagination reserved a particularly precarious position for women of colour. While white women were cast as the virtuous guardians of \"civilized\" society, Native women were simultaneously vilified and victimized. In her study of colonial British Columbia as an \"im/moral frontier,\" Jo-Anne Fiske argues that the racialised \"princess/squaw\" construct appropriated Native women's sexuality as \"patriarchal exotica,\" thrusting them into a \"racially or ethnically divided world of misrepresented sexuality and underrepresented social reality\" (1996,663). Hypersexualized and promiscuous, Native women posed a threat to the racial hygiene and moral boundaries of colonial communities. Degraded and abused within their own cultures, they required rescue and salvation (whether they wanted it or not). Either way, controlling Native women's sexuality was key to reinscribing the hierarchies of colonial rule. Within missionary discourse in particular, the Indian girl became a \"potent symbol of the task at hand. Both victim and sinner, she was the first priority of the missionary enterprise\" (Harkin 1996,647). Missionaries justified the gendered segregation of the Mission Homes/Schools for Girls by stressing the sexual dangers and immoral temptations which racialised notions of sexuality suggested Native girls were both threatened by, and disposed towards. William Duncan wrote to the C.M.S: Those most in danger from the coming flood of profligate miners are the big girls... I deem it my duty to take them under my special care. I see no better plan than taking a number of them into my house, feeding, clothing and instructing them, until they find husbands from among the young men of our own party, (cited in Murray 1985,157) In a journal entry, he rationalized that this step was \"absolutely necessary\" in order to save the Tsimshian from \"utter ruin\" and \"bring them into a virtuous channel and socially improve 127 them\" (Duncan cited in Usher 1974,76). Thomas Crosby's writings express a similar preoccupation with the sexual implications of Native women's domesticity, or lack thereof. Shortly before establishing the Crosby Girls' Home, he explained: Perhaps there is no part of our work here that is more trying and yet more important than that connected with the young women of the place; they are exposed to peculiar temptations, and up to this time there has been no restraint to their course of sin. Now we feel they must be cared for, and in some cases the only way to save them is to take them to the mission house. (Crosby in Missionary Notices (June) 1876,130) Missionary discourse fluctuated constantly in its portrayal of Native female sexuality as either endangered or excessive, but most often it contained a mercurial mix of both. This discursive tension was often mediated by framing \"civilization\" as a process that was generationally staged. The Mission Home/School for Girls was a particularly popular strategy because it promised to control the inherently untamed sexuality of women by saving and protecting the threatened virtue of young girls. Adding this \"temporal\" dimension enabled missionaries to legitimate their efforts among some Native females, while still condemning the immoral examples and environments supposedly provided by others. The editors of Missionary Outlook, for example, emphasized the \"life of utter wretchedness and infamy\" which Indian girls faced outside of the Crosby Girl's Home (Missionary Outlook (January) 1881,4), and the Bishop of Columbia praised Duncan for removing girls from the \"vortex of vice\" created by the \"evil influence of their heathen homes\" (Columbia Mission 1866, 31). Native women who failed to conform to European standards of gendered domesticity and sexual passivity were held responsible for these immoral and degenerate conditions. As discussed in the previous chapter, campaigns to \"civilize\" indigenous space focused with particular intensity on Native housing and its failure to conform to European 128 notions of cleanliness, order and domesticity. Perhaps the most problematic and provocative aspect of Native dwellings, however, was their failure to contain the supposedly uncontrolled and potentially \"deviant\" sexuality of their inhabitants within the clearly demarcated and disciplinary confines of heteronormative privacy. The seemingly indiscriminate intermingling of beds and bodies within Native houses literally aroused missionaries' most fervent and heated responses. Writing about this issue incited a sort of ecstasy of eloquent insinuations, a precarious fusion of revulsion and fascination, vehemence and voyeurism. Crosby declared the old heathen house a \"hot-bed of vice\" and asked his readers, \"Is it any wonder that disease and vice flourished under such favourable surroundings?\" (1907,49-50). The children in these houses, he argued, were \"morally corrupt\" for they had the \"lessons of human wickedness ever before their eyes\" (Crosby cited in Bolt 1992,65). Another Methodist, Reverend Evans referred to the \"nightly orgies\" which took place in such \"wretched abodes.\" He refrained from providing any further details, but assured his readers that they presented a \"most exciting and revolting spectacle\" (Evans in Missionary Notices (Feb) 1869,23). One author, writing about the living conditions of Natives in Alaska suggested details were hardly necessary to condemn such obvious immorality: The houses of the Indians are not fitted for any decency of home-life, nor for maintaining health. The houses are often without partitions, and are inhabited by many Indians together, of all ages and both sexes. There is no possibility of securing modesty of demeanor, purity of thought or cleanliness of living under these circumstances. Polygamy of the most shameless type exists, and child-marriages are common. There is no need to expatiate on the moral degeneration resulting from twenty, thirty or more persons living in one room: the results would be evident to any idiot. (Wright cited in Wellcome 1887,135-136) Woe to the \"idiot,\" such writing suggested, who questioned that such living was inevitably and indubitably wicked and abberrant. The coercive shift from communal longhouses to one (nuclear) family dwellings was thus celebrated by missionaries as evidence of their converts' 129 \"due regard for the decencies of life\" (Cridge in Columbia Mission 1868, 73). Furthermore, the proof of such propriety could now be patrolled, for one of the most acclaimed aspects of the new houses was their in-built technology of surveillance: windows. McClintock's analysis of the window as an \"icon of imperial surveillance\" (1995, 32) is given exemplary illustration in a Heiltsuk oral tradition stating that \"Victorian clapboard houses... were designed with especially large windows so that missionaries could look in and detect any prohibited behavior\" (Harkin 1996, 648). A \"depraved\" home-life, however, was not the only peril from which young girls required vigilant protection. Missionary narratives identified the \"streets of Victoria\" as another key danger, infamous for the \"life of shame\" which they inevitably entailed. In my research, I found few explicit references to prostitution or venereal disease, but missionaries employed the \"streets of Victoria\" as a spatial metaphor that enabled them to dwell on the horrors of sexual agency and exchange. McClintock's analysis of prostitution provides a key insight into the tension ridden relationship between female labour and sexuality. Because, she argues, prostitutes \"visibly transgressed the middle-class boundary between private and public, paid work and unpaid work\" with their demands to be paid \"for services middle-class men expected for free,\" they were the targets of especially intense stigmatization (McClintock 1995,42-56). Missionary discourse was in a bind, however, for it needed to construct a way in which such wayward women could be reprimanded, but also rescued through the saving grace of conversion and \"civilization.\" By emphasizing instead the unfit character of the Native parents who supposedly pushed their daughters into the profession, and the dangers posed by the \"low, wicked white men\" (Crosby 1907, 60) who supplied the demand for it, missionary narratives discursively divested Native girls and young women of 130 any agency, and simultaneously provided an alibi for their own benevolent intervention.9 The discourse of victimization combined with the generational staging of female conversion and \"civilization,\" discussed earlier, to help missionaries negotiate the tension between condemnation and compassion. In some cases, unfortunately, the perceived corruption and degeneration of the Native female body had progressed too far. In these cases, missionary narratives insisted that \"ruin\" invariably resulted and the spectre of death was an especially popular dwelling point. Allegorical narratives of \"fallen\" women returning to the missions from the streets of Victoria and dying tragic deaths were common and particularly compelling. As Emma Crosby explained in a letter to the Women's Missionary Society: A gay life in Victoria, or other places has led away many, very many, of the young women of these tribes. There are Indian villages where scarce a young woman can be found, the whole of that class having left their homes for a life of dissipation and shame, and only to come back, in nearly every case, after a few years, to die a wretched, untimely death among their friends. (Missionary Outlook (Nov-Dec) 1881, 139-140) Such sexually sinful women could never really be \"civilized\" but they could, through death, be saved. Thomas Crosby related one such incident: A poor unfortunate young woman, who had spent a short life in sin and shame on the streets of Victoria, came home to die. She was led to the Saviour and was very happy in Christ for some weeks before she died. She said to me, \"I have been very wicked, but Jesus paid it all,\" and she died in a few moments. Thus ended the suffering life of poor Ellen. (Missionary Outlook (March) 1882,47) In other cases, a rescue other than death was still possible and these women were often among the most celebrated of missionary victories. Henry Wellcome wrote with pride, \"Many are the Magdalens whom Mr. Duncan has fully reclaimed from degradation\" (1887, 9 See Barman 1998 for a particularly compelling analysis of the efforts to contain Aboriginal women's agency and sexuality. 131 82). Similarly, Crosby described how \"another of our 'Home family' was a young woman who came from the streets of Victoria. She was converted and became a very happy Christian\" (1914, 91). Through the Mission Homes/Schools for Girls, missionaries targeted another \"horror\" of heathen life which impeded their control of Native sexuality. Native marriage customs were denounced as little more than sexual slavery as missionaries described a heartless barter system in which girls were callously bought and sold. As Sarah Carter points out, \"The popular view of Aboriginal marriage customs held by non-Aboriginal people was one of a cluster that symbolized the shortcomings of Aboriginal society, contributing to the overall impression that women were dreadfully mistreated\" (1997,165). Polygamy was identified with \"dreadful misery and degradation\" (Crosby 1907,96) and the \"sale\" of young girls to white men (particularly miners and other \"low class\" colonials) was the focus of particularly vehement condemnation. Thomas Crosby declared that: ... heathenism crushes out a mother's love and turns the heart to stone and changes a father into a foul, indifferent fiend. And so when the miners came the natives willingly sold their daughters, ranging from ten to eighteen years of age, for a few blankets or a little gold, into a slavery which was worse than death. (1907, 62) Jean Barman argues that such exchanges, while sensationalized in the descriptions of missionaries like Crosby, were \"likely viewed by some as only continuing traditional marital practices.\" She challenges the narratives of coercion and degradation to suggest instead that Aboriginal women were capable of exercising their own agency and decision-making in many of these situations (Barman 1998,245-246). From the missionary perspective, however, any exercise of female sexual agency was seen as both \"uncivilized\" and subversive. The Mission Homes/Schools were deemed essential to turn Native girls into \"good Christian wives\" - in other words, into the docile, 132 sexually chaste, and domestically industrious mimics of white, bourgeois femininity. Through their administration of the Mission Homes/Schools for Girls, missionaries attempted to gain explicit control of Native marriages and, thus, implicit control of Native sexuality (both male and female). Crosby reported with approval: Instead of a young man with his friends going with property and buying a wife, as was done formerly, many of our brightest young men tried to make the acquaintance of the girls in the Home. There was no doubt in our minds that real, true love again and again developed between the young people who thus became acquainted. This acquaintance finally resulted in their marriage and the happy life that followed. We taught them to consult their parents, as well as the Missionary, at this time, and also to pray much to the Lord for help. (1914,92-93) William Duncan explicitly advised the Tsimshian men of Metlakatla \"not to marry any of the young women in the camp at Fort Simpson, who had been taken to Victoria, and there exposed to the most degrading vices, but to defer taking unto themselves wives until the girls in his mission training school were through with their education\" (Arctander 1909,220). When a group of men asked Duncan for permission to marry women from outside of the community, \"He told them of the evils involved in union with a heathen woman and the benefits of marrying a Christian. They were not forbidden to take brides from other tribes, but told that if they did, the women must first be placed under his instruction. He would rule if the marriage could take place\" (Murray 1985, 86). Meanwhile, girls in the Mission House who displayed any sexual agency whatsoever were punished severely. In one journal entry, Duncan recorded: \"I had to flog Rebeckah very severely last night, and after I had flogged her she very piteously cried, 'Thank-you Sir'. Her offence was sending a message to a young man in Legaic's house and calling him to speak to him - unknown to me. She seems truly sorry and has been crying very much yesterday and today\" (Duncan cited in Murray 1985, 159). 133 The dangers of degeneracy demanded the surveillance of not only the \"colonized,\" but also the \"colonizers,\" for their sexual desires and erotic activities had the potential to both ensure and endanger imperial rule. As Stoler and Cooper point out: While the colonies were marketed by colonial elites as a domain where colonizing men could indulge their sexual fantasies, those same elites were intent to mark the boundaries of a colonizing population, to prevent those men from \"going native,\" to curb a proliferating mixed-race population that compromised their claims to superiority and thus the legitimacy of white rule. (1997, 5) Sexual relations which crossed the boundaries of race were not the only problem. Ann Laura Stoler distinguishes herself as one of the only writers to theorise the connection between colonial constructions of European masculinity and, in the eyes of many, the most subversive of all sexual degeneracy - homosexuality. The epic, heroic figures of colonialism and \"civilization\" were almost always straight, white, upwardly mobile men, celebrated as defenders of the \"race\" and nation. Citizenship was pre-coded as a masculine faculty and privilege with specific (re)productive responsibilities and, as Stoler puts it, \"empire provided the fertile terrain on which bourgeois notions of manliness and virility could be honed and put to patriotic test\" (1995,129). In colonial contexts, however, heterosexual masculinity was perceived as both more endangered and essential. Heteronormativity, as always, was haunted by its inner constitutive boundary, its threatening but indispensable sexual Other. Stoler astutely points out: If the colonies were construed as sites where European virility could be boldly demonstrated it was because they were also thought to crystallize those conditions of isolation, inactivity, decadence, and intense male comradery where heterosexual definitions of manliness could as easily be unmade. (1995,175) Even in those texts which do not discuss the threat of homosexuality openly, one can sense a barely subdued anxiety about the erotic opportunities projected onto the colonies. In a 134 speech reprinted in Columbia Mission, the Lord Bishop of Oxford offered these dire, but \"discreet\" words of warning: ... I need not dwell upon those degrading moral abominations which will be introduced into the population of that young state, unless you bring about an equality of the sexes... . And then remember, every one of these evils recoils upon your own colonists. Thus you deeply taint the young colony. The more you degrade its moral sense, the more deadly is the evil which you do. Those men are to be the progenitors of nations. {Columbia Mission 1861, 51 -52) Stoler's work reminds us that colonial discourses patrolled the sexuality of the \"civilized\" and the \"savage\" with equal vigilance, and that which was boldly promoted was always intimately shadowed by its undesirable opposite. The only troubling, but not unique omission in Stoler's analysis is the failure to discuss colonial constructions of white femininity and their erasure of women's homoerotic potentials and possibilities. Unfortunately, discussion of this subject is absent from not only Stoler's work, but also the vast majority of colonial, historical studies. As a result, the question of colonial women's erotic desires and defiance remains just that - a question - leaving yet another aspect of empire in the proverbial closet. Herein lies another possible clue to the intense animosity directed towards medicine-men and shamans. Both Sabine Lang (1998) and Will Roscoe (1998) state that same-sex relationships were commonly accepted in those Native cultures in which alternative genders have been documented. Roscoe argues that sexual activity with members of the same sex was part of the \"cultural expectations\" for alternatively gendered individuals, along with spiritual powers and special prestige (1998, 8). Lang notes that missionaries rarely commented on the fact that \"most women-men and men-women maintained sexual relations or even marriages with partners of the same sex\" as their Christian beliefs deemed such activities \"immoral.\" In the eyes of these Europeans, she argues, \"the institution of gender 135 role change was tainted from the very beginning with the stigma of sexual perversion\" (1998, 17-18). Although it remains unclear whether Tsimshian medicine-men were indeed alternatively gendered, missionary descriptions of both their appearance and their activities constantly insinuated sexual \"impropriety\" and \"deviance.\" In yet another confrontation with a medicine-man, Thomas Crosby described his horror upon finding the shaman \"all painted up and nearly naked, and partly stretched out upon the body of [a] sick man, howling and rattling away. My indignation was aroused....\" (1907,121). Considering missionaries' almost lurid fascination with the unclothed savage body and its sexual potentials, one cannot help but wonder if Crosby's \"indignation\" was all he found aroused. As argued earlier, however, the regulation of sexuality in the colonies was not simply a story of repression. It was also about actively inciting certain forms of sexuality and enshrining their legitimate arenas of expression. The only acceptable arena for the expression of missionary sexuality was within the domestic confines of the mission house. Jean and John Comaroff argue that in the case of married missionary couples, like the Crosby's, the mission house served in many ways as diorama: \"On its stage was displayed, for all to see, the domestic round of 'the exemplary married couple'\" (1997,292). In William Duncan's case, however, his bachelor status precluded this performance of marital bliss and eventually called into question the credibility of his missionary work in general. Because Native women were so readily assumed to be immoral and promiscuous, the work of single, male missionaries among Native peoples was often prone to sexual innuendo and speculation.10 Indeed, \"scandal\" had already surfaced once at Metlakatla in the late 1860's. 1 0 Interestingly enough, it seems that the innuendo and speculation during this period remained staunchly heteronormative in its assumptions. The \"propriety\" of single, male missionaries working among Native boys and men was never constructed as the same cause for concern or critique as their work among Native girls and women. This is somewhat puzzling as anxieties about homosexuality among white men in the colonies were 136 Robert Cunningham, a lay assistant sent by the Church Missionary Society, married a young Native woman, Elizabeth Ryan, one of the female boarders under Duncan's supervision. The marriage was performed in Duncan's absence and, it was discovered later, the couple had already been sleeping together for some time. Duncan was outraged, Cunningham was eventually dismissed and the two apparently remained bitter enemies (Murray 1985, 96).11 The irony of the situation did not become evident until several years later when Duncan himself was subject to similar accusations and insinuations. As soon as Duncan had brought female boarders into the Mission House, questions had been raised about the propriety of the arrangement, given his single status. Duncan had assured the C.M.S. that the arrangement was \"absolutely necessary\" to preserve the girls' virtue, but even he seemed to acknowledge the difficulty of the situation at the same that he defended it: It is not the matter of household management which calls so loudly for a married lady to come here, but rather the fact of my being unmarried; but whatever may be thought or said by the outside world disparagingly on that score, in the mission itself nothing of the kind is thought or heard of. I have the full confidence of the Indians around me, and especially of the parents of the children I protect. (cited in Murray 1985,158) Nevertheless, by the early 1880's, any speculation which had been previously subdued now erupted to the surface. In 1879, the Church of England divided the British Columbia mission field into four dioceses. Duncan's mission at Metlakatla was now under the authority and not uncommon (see, again, the quote by the Lord Bishop of Oxford, provided on p. 135), however, these anxieties did not seem to consider inter-racial possibilities. The issue suggests fertile ground for careful future research. I specify \"careful,\" because as Steven Maynard (1999) has pointed out, there has been an extremely troubling tendency in some historical studies to \"homosexualize\" the sexual abuse in residential schools, while obscuring the possibility of consensual same-sex relations between teachers and students. He notes that \"a keen, historical awareness of the differences between sexual acts and sexual identities, will be necessary when historians turn to the topic of sexual abuse and sexual relations in and out of institutional settings\" (Maynard 1999, 10). As for the work of single, female missionaries among Native girls and women, it seems that the possibility of female homosexuality was so marginalized within even the colonial imagination that the potential for \"scandal\" was never, to my knowledge, discussed. 1 1 Unfortunately, it remains unclear exactly when the incident with Cunningham occurred. Peter Murray states that Cunningham was finally dismissed in 1865, but Jean Usher writes that Cunningham did not join Duncan's mission until 1867 (see Murray 1985, 95-96; Usher 1974, 95). 137 supervision of the Bishop of Caledonia - a newly appointed and remarkably inexperienced young man named William Ridley. Duncan and Ridley clashed from the outset and conflicts between the two eventually culminated in Duncan's dismissal from the Church Missionary Society and his decision to relocate in Alaska. In 1882, when tensions between the two men were at a fever-pitch, Ridley authored a twelve-page pamphlet about Metlakatla which he had privately printed. As Peter Murray observes: The pamphlet's full title was deceptive: \"Senator Macdonald's Misleading Account of His Visit to Metlakatla Exposed by the Bishop of Caledonia.\" The real target, of course, was Duncan. Ridley put into print for the first time the innuendos circulated by Duncan's critics. Presiding as House-master of a bevy of Indian maidens, and his open use of corporal punishment, had made the pious Duncan an inviting target for gossip. Ridley now attempted to give me rumours credibility. (1985,152) Ridley disparaged notions of Metlakatla as a Utopian community by accusing Duncan of \"inhuman cruelty\" and the concealment of several \"shameful scandals\" (1882, 7-8). His melodramatic writing only served to sensationalize the supposedly salacious events: Happy village, indeed, where men and women have been publicly flogged for sins the flogged retorted on the flogger! Happy village! where men and women have been forced to marry against their will, and at the conclusion of the dark ceremony the terror stricken bridegrooms torn from the brides and thrust into horrid prison cells!\" (Ridley 1882, 5) Duncan's strict control over Native marriage (and sexuality) was used by Ridley to portray him as a sort of sexual tyrant: \"In this same 'happy village' I have seen Mr. D. write out an I.O.U. in his own favour to the amount of hundreds of dollars and compel a young man to sign it for daring to fall in love with one of his young women favourites\" (Ridley 1882, 5). Furious, Duncan wrote to the C.M.S., arguing that Ridley produced the pamphlet \"for the purpose of trampling me in the mire.\" He further maintained, \"I have never cohabited with any woman married or single in my life\" (Duncan cited in Murray 1985,153,155). 138 For the purposes of this discussion, the significance of the Duncan \"scandal\" lies not in whether the allegations were \"true\" or \"false,\" but in the ease with which such speculation could be aroused. Unchannelled within the \"respectable\" confines of a (white) Christian marriage, Duncan's sexuality was prone to the degenerate contamination of the colonies. As Ridley was quick to point out, Duncan also came from a less than ideal class background and \"having only received the advantages of a common day school education\" (Ridley 1882,4), his sexual probity was already suspect. But while many have noted the harm done to Duncan's reputation, few have pointed out how such accusations served to bolster oppressive constructions of Native women's sexuality. Ridley's pamphlet relied upon and reinforced notions of Native women as both \"victims\" and \"sinners,\" the hapless targets of male lust, and the hypersexualized sources of white men's downfall. Duncan may have been the most obvious target of Ridley's sexual reprobation, but only because Native women had long since been discredited through colonial discourse. The scandal at Metlakatla reinscribed the boundaries within which European and Native sexualities were to be contained and managed. In doing so, it revealed just how saturated with sexuality colonial landscapes were, and why empiricizing bodies was such a crucial component of the \"civilizing\" process. 139 Chapter Five Conclusion: The Civilization of a Nation The \"civilizing\" projects examined in this thesis provided the ideological animation and practical foundation for the formal residential school system which has been at the centre of so much controversy today. The insights to be gained from two British Columbia missions in the late nineteenth century may seem, on the surface, to be limited. Indeed, one issue that merits further attention is the way in which \"civilizing\" projects and residential school policy changed over time, and from region to region. In B.C. alone, my research suggests that missionaries were already beginning to concentrate their efforts almost exclusively on the children of Native communities by the turn of the century. Native parents and other adults were increasingly cast as \"lost causes\" who were resistant to \"civilization,\" and from whom children needed to be separated if they were to be \"saved.\" As missionary attitudes began to change, they set the stage for later residential school policy, not to mention child welfare law and its shameful deployment against First Nations families. Thus, as we debate the residential schools of the twentieth century and their continuing legacy, a valuable question to consider is this: how can we hope to dismantle any system of oppression without understanding just how deep its roots go? In addition, however, we must also ask: what are the implications of dismantling one system of oppression when efforts to do so inadvertently reinforce others? As the residential school controversy polarizes around issues of abuse, intersecting articulations of race, class, gender, and sexuality in the \"civilizing\" project continue to be obscured - or worse, made even more problematic for those already marginalized. Steven Maynard, for example, has examined the disturbing tendency in some historical analyses to attribute sexual abuse in the 140 schools to the presumed homosexual identity of the abusers. This presumption is particularly problematic in the context of our homophobic culture, he argues, for it makes \"historical writing complicit in perpetuating myths of gay men as child molesters\" (Maynard 1999, 8). In other cases, the connections between historical policies and contemporary issues have been continually overlooked. With the valuable exceptions of Jo-Anne Fiske (1991) and Dian Million (2000), for example, few scholars have drawn links between residential school policy and the present-day political struggles of First Nations women. Combined, these issues highlight the need for analyses which draw on the insights and interrogations of both history and sociology. The relevance of two nineteenth-century British Columbia missions to contemporary First Nations' struggles is best understood when we recognize the crucial links between these two disciplines, and the invaluable insights to be gained from their interaction. In this study, I have drawn on both approaches in order to understand not only the historical roots, but also the contemporary implications of \"civilizing\" discourse. Historical methods enabled me to investigate how this discourse has been constructed over time, while a sociological perspective pushed me to examine the tangled webs of race, class, gender and sexuality holding the discourse together. For too long, the discursive power of \"civilization\" has resided in its elusive ambiguity, its seemingly timeless ability to mask its own internal complexity. Only by stripping the concept of this power, I argue, can we finally begin to dismantle its effects, without reproducing its inequalities. My research has been animated, from the very beginning, by both an awareness of the residential school controversy, and an interest in how historical studies are shaped by contemporary concerns and vice versa. Therefore, it seems only appropriate to conclude my work by locating it in the context of ongoing debates around First Nations issues in Canada, 141 and around the pursuit of social historical research in general. I will also comment on some of the ways in which \"civilizing\" discourse continues to be mobilized today, revealing that constructions of \"civilization\" and the \"nation\" remain as inextricably interwoven as ever. In the two and a half years since I began the Master's program in Sociology at U.B.C., First Nations' issues have been strangely, and simultaneously central, yet marginalised in the public political agenda. It has become increasingly common for debate about First Nations historical and contemporary concerns to be featured in the headlines, and on the front pages of newspapers across the country. At the same time, however, much about the debate itself remains depressingly familiar. Even when these issues are picked up by the media, they continue, at best, to be framed in ways which tend to polarize discussion, and obscure both the diversity of the Nations involved, and the complexity of the issues they raise. At worst, coverage and characterizations of First Nations issues rely on and reinforce racist stereotypes and assumptions. When one looks back on the events and arguments of the past three years alone, it remains unclear whether understanding, let alone \"justice,\" has been forthcoming. Battles fought in the legal arena seem to suggest, at best, a very precarious form of progress. The fierce backlash to last year's Marshall decision by the Supreme Court, recognizing Native fishing rights in the Maritimes, erupted into violent confrontations and blatant racism in Burnt Church, New Brunswick, this summer.1 The passage of the Nisga'a treaty into law in April 2000 competed for attention with the Reform Party's fear mongering tactics to prevent it, and already courts are having to field challenges to the treaty's constitutional validity. Meanwhile, land claim and treaty negotiations across the country 1 For media coverage of the Marshall decision and the fishery dispute in Burnt Church, see Cox (1999), DeMont (1999, 2000a, 2000b), Ha (1999), Leblanc (1999), Makin (1999), and Sallot (2000). 2 For media coverage of the Nisga'a treaty and the controversy surrounding it, see Addis (1999), Frobisher (1999), Geddes (1999), Lewis (1998), Newman (1998), Scoffield (2000), and Wood (1998). 142 remain stalled despite the Supreme Court's 1997 Delgamuukw ruling, recognizing Aboriginal land title.3 Of the most direct relevance to this thesis, of course, has been the ongoing national drama and debate around residential schools. On January 7,1998, the federal government responded to the report released two years earlier by the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples. In a \"Statement of Reconciliation,\" then Indian Affairs minister, Jane Stewart, expressed the government's \"profound regret\" for the physical and sexual abuse suffered by children within the schools, and acknowledged the negative impact of past federal policies on First Nations communities and cultures. A $350 million Healing Fund was announced and the government, if no one else, seemed poised to pronounce this particular chapter of Canadian history closed, complete with a happy ending.4 While First Nations groups were careful to accept the apology as only the beginning of a longer process, others were not so cautious with their responses. The fiercely right-wing Western Report gained particular notoriety when it published an article by Patrick Donnelly only weeks later, entitled \"Scapegoating the Indian residential schools: The noble legacy of hundreds of Christian missionaries is sacrificed to political correctness\" (Donnelly 1998). On the cover of the magazine, a photograph of Native students in a classroom was emblazoned with the words: \"Canada's Mythical Holocaust: Ottawa's $350 million apology for the horrors of Indian residential schools is rooted more in fiction than fact.\" Donnelly's suggestions that \"the Indian leaders who now revile the schools might be motivated by the prospect of federal compensation\" (1998,6), were so inflammatory that the Assembly of 3 For media coverage of the 1997 Delgamuukw decision, see Goldberg (1998), Gray (1998), and Hunter (1997). 4 The full text of the \"Statement of Reconciliation\" is available online at the Indian and Northern Affairs Canada website, http://www.inac.gc.ca/nr/spch/1998/98j7_e.html. For media coverage of the announcement, see Anderssen (1998) and DeMont (1998). 143 First Nations decided to challenge the magazine before the Canadian Human Rights Commission - an effort that was ultimately unsuccessful (Coates 2000,114).5 The issues and interests at stake extended far beyond a single article, however, and the two sides of an increasingly bitter debate were clearly established and entrenched in public discourse. What I would like to highlight here is the crucial, yet contested role played by \"history\" in all this. Underlying the debates about not only residential schools, but also fishing rights, land claims, self governance, and countless others, is a potentially irreconcilable dispute about history - what \"really\" happened, who has the authority to tell us, and how contemporary policies should integrate this information. History has emerged as yet another embattled resource, competing versions of which are drawn upon or pushed aside by opposing actors in the debates. These struggles to define and deploy history submerge each one of these debates, whether we like it or not, in yet another one about \"national\" history. It was prominent historian, Michael Bliss, who ignited (and named) the long smoldering \"national\" versus \"social\" history debate with his 1991 article, \"Privatizing the Mind: The Sundering of Canadian History, The Sundering of Canada.\" Bliss attributed the country's \"current constitutional and political malaise\" to the \"disintegration of Canadian history as a unified discipline.\" The culprit, he argued, is a divisive new force called \"social history,\" a force which Bliss insisted has all but taken over history departments across the country, fragmenting the discipline and alienating the public. Bliss sounded the alarm that 5 1 should note that in Coates' article, he refers to the magazine as Alberta Report. The exact name of the magazine is, in fact, unclear at times. The issues in the Koerner Library collection at U.B.C. are entitled Western Report, but their inside covers list the website address as . Furthermore, online periodical indexes, such as the Canadian Periodical Index, refer to the publication as Report Newsmagazine, with \"BC Edition\" or \"Alberta Edition\" specified in brackets. 144 political and constitutional history have been abandoned, as attention has turned to such \"non-national connections\" as \"region, ethnicity, class, family and gender\" (1991, 5-6). Lest anyone feared the debate would remain within the same academic circles which were being attacked, then-editor, Kenneth Whyte, took the controversy to the public with an article in the popular magazine, Saturday Night (May 1997). Whyte identified Bliss as one of the few \"rebel scholars [aiming] to make our past relevant again\" while resisting the onslaught of historians turned \"fire breathing activists.\" He echoed Bliss' arguments by contrasting the tyranny of \"new history - narrowly focused researches on domestic, social, and cultural themes, with special attention to matters of race, gender and class,\" with the valiant struggles of \"old history\" which, unlike its nemesis, is primarily concerned with \"issues, persons and events central to the development of Canada as we know if (Whyte 1997, 17, emphasis mine). Not to be left out, die-hard historian, Jack Granatstein, entered the fray in 1998 with his book, Who Killed Canadian History?, a \"national bestseller\" at that. Granatstein painted a particularly vivid and alarming picture: the pursuit of Canadian history has been hijacked by a fanatical mob of Marxists, feminists, Natives, gays, lesbians and other \"minority\" groups - or, as Granatstein calls them, \"the grievers among us, the present day crusaders against public policy or discrimination.\" Preoccupied with the \"black marks\" of Canadian history, these social historians have imposed a tyrannical regime of political correctness which wallows in \"tiny, trivial subjects of little or no general interest\" to the \"rest\" of the country (Granatstein 1998, xi, 94, 76). Significantly, Granatstein singles out First Nations issues, specifically residential schools, as one of these subjects. Writing about the federal government's \"Statement of Reconciliation,\" he only allows that the apology \"might be justified,\" but then snidely adds, \"it is certainly politically expedient\" (Granatstein 1998, 94). 145 With this comment, and his decision to discuss the schools only in a footnote, Granatstein reveals both his contempt for First Nations history, and his alarm at its encroachment upon his \"national\" territory. Collectively, these arguments construct a false dichotomy between \"national\" (read: legitimate), and \"social\" (read: sundered) history. The use of the term \"political\" is particularly telling. As the story goes, when national historians examine the political (with a capital \"P\"), they look at important events, such as wars, and influential leaders, such as Prime Ministers - in short, an objective, supposedly \u00C2\u00ABo\u00C2\u00AB-political (with a small \"p\") history which emphasizes the ties that bind \"us\" together as a \"nation.\" National historians are unbiased by the petty political (small \"p\") agendas which drive social historians, selflessly animated instead by a broader, more benevolent vision of \"saving\" the country from a form of anomic amnesia. National history, it is suggested, has never been tainted by the politics of race, class, gender and sexuality. The argument collapses in on itself, however, every time \"national\" history is contrasted with the histories of women, Natives, non-white immigrants, working-class labourers, gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and anyone else who has dared to venture forth from the traditional historical margins. What historians such as Bliss and Granatstein are saying in other words, although they vehemently deny it, is that \"national\" history should not be about anyone from those groups, but rather, it should focus on the one group that remains, and which supposedly represents who \"we\" Canadians are: middle class, straight, white, men, preferably of Northern European descent. By dichotomizing the two forms of history, these \"non-political\" political historians reveal exactly who and what they would prefer to see excluded from the \"nation.\" In doing so, they prove exactly the point that so many social 146 historians have been making: that defining and delimiting the \"nation,\" its \"legitimate\" members and memories, is an on-going and highly political project, from which issues of race, class, gender and sexuality are far from absent or irrelevant. The very struggle the national historians bemoan to find a cohesive understanding of what \"Canada\" and \"being Canadian\" means signals the extent to which such symbolic entities and imagined identities are socially and historically constructed. If, for example, First Nations issues are as threatening to national history and identity as these historians would have us believe, it is only because they have been so effectively excluded from how national discourse has traditionally been defined and defended. History is, and always has been, a project inextricably entangled with dynamics of power and politics. To suggest otherwise is to pretend our perspectives are not shaped by our identities and experiences, and also to caricature \"politics\" as the arch enemy of a mythical, heroic \"objectivity.\" It's only in relatively recent years that the political interests and agendas of the dominant few defining the \"nation's\" history have been challenged sufficiently to send some of them into the streets, shouting that the sky is falling and Canadian history is dead. This challenge has come from historians like Gregory Kealey, Linda Kealey, Ruth Pierson, Joan Sangster, Veronica Strong-Boag, and Steven Maynard - academics who not only pursue social history, but defend it ably when it has been demonized.6 These historians, and others, realize that to brush off this rhetoric as reactionary or right-wing is dangerous, for the national historians do raise at least one point that has some validity - that \"academic\" history has become increasingly disconnected from the non-academic public it often seeks to 6 Here I am thinking, specifically, about three articles which have addressed the \"national versus social history\" debate explicitly, providing invaluable counter-arguments to those made by Bliss, Granatstein et al. See, Kealey (1992), Kealey, Pierson, Sangster and Strong-Boag (1992), and Maynard (1999). 147 empower (Kealey 1992,126). The danger is that if we fail to engage critically with the arguments of Bliss and Granatstein, the vilified version of social history is the one the public will remember in the absence of any accessible alternative. One of the most insightful and effective strategies so far has been to ask the crucial, but too often forgotten question posed by Kealey, Pierson, Sangster and Strong-Boag (1992): \"whose 'national' history are we lamenting\" anyway? Who killed Canadian history? The first thing we should ask is: who's saying it's dead? Similarly, in response to Jack Granatstein's question, \"Why should any nation's texts stress the 'black marks'?\"(1998,94), Steven Maynard redirects our attention to \"what as a nation we choose to forget,\" and what this reveals about the underlying politics of history and memory (1999,10). As Kealey, Pierson, Sangster and Strong-Boag point out, the subjects of social history are, in fact, crucial to understanding the contemporary political landscape: If students do not understand regional, native, and women's histories, they will not understand why Elijah Harper voted against Meech Lake, why and how women are lobbying for changes to the constitution, and why regions are insisting on different political priorities. In other words, they will understand neither Canada nor the thinking or policies that produced the problems we face today. (1992,130) As the current debates around First Nations issues make clear, this point remains as salient today as it was in 1992. Any First Nations issue on the public political agenda relies upon, and gains resonance from, a contested reading of history. Whether the topic is residential schools, fishing rights, land claims, or any one of the myriad issues affecting Native communities across the country, First Nations scholars and political leaders have argued that these issues cannot be debated, let alone resolved, without an understanding of history. Historians, both Native and non-Native, have made considerable efforts in the last twenty-five years to ensure that First Nations voices and experiences are no longer excluded from 148 the \"national\" historical record. They have, to a large extent, been successful, as one historian reviewing the field recently concluded (Coates 2000). But when respected and highly visible historians such as Michael Bliss and Jack Granatstein question the very legitimacy of First Nations history, among other histories, and portray it as a divisive force with hidden political agendas, they add fuel to the fires of those already eager to put First Nations issues \"back in their place.\" While working on this project, I have been very aware of both the \"national versus social history debate,\" and the public debates which have raged around residential schools. I have wondered how my research might be received by naysayers like Bliss, Granatstein and others of the \"national history\" school. Ironically, given my focus on the narratives and perspectives of two straight, white, Anglo-Protestant, men who were, at least, aspiring towards the middle class, my research could be warmly embraced by national historians as a return to the kind of subjects who were \"really\" important. Something tells me, though, that this welcome will not be forthcoming. As I have discussed already, I agree with arguments that historically privileged narratives have much to tell us, but I view their potential quite differently than others who might defend them. My goal with this research has been to study these narratives in order to enrich our knowledge and understanding of exactly one of those \"black marks\" in Canadian history that Granatstein, for one, would have us forget. Rather than simply dispensing with the subjects and stories espoused by national historians, we can gain further insight by turning them on their head, so to speak, and interrogating the assumptions underlying them. In doing so, we can re-read even the most \"national\" of narratives to reveal just what \"national\" means, whose stories it celebrates, and whose it excludes. 149 Most importantly, I have wondered how my research might be received by First Nations groups and individuals dealing with the impact of residential schools both personally and politically. As a non-Native academic writing about such an emotionally charged aspect of First Nations history, I have endeavoured to produce respectful research which is mindful of the privilege accorded to academic analyses. At the same time, however, I have pursued this research because of a concern with the way in which some discussions have framed \"the residential school problem.\" In public debates, in particular, attention and anger have focussed on issues of abuse - physical, sexual, emotional, and cultural. Indeed, this emphasis has often been necessary to ensure that the devastating legacy of the schools receives recognition. Along with recognition, however, two responses have been generated in reaction to this emphasis which present problematic implications. The first is the \"national apology,\" discussed briefly above. It should, in many ways, raise suspicion when the same institutions which ran and administered residential schools for so long, with no discernible qualms, suddenly appear willing to offer public apologies for what they now acknowledge as their historical misdeeds. The federal government played its part on January 7,1998, with its \"Statement of Reconciliation.\" The Anglican, Catholic, Presbyterian and United Churches joined together in St. John's, Newfoundland, this September to offer a collective, public apology for abuse in the schools. Why then do these eloquent and seemingly heartfelt apologies leave some listeners feeling strangely unsatisfied? Matthew Coon Come, for one, the newly elected Cree leader of the Assembly of First Nations, remains sufficiently wary of these apologies that he has publicly rejected them.7 7 For media coverage of the joint apology offered by the four Churches, see Cox (2000). For media coverage of Coon Come's response to the apologies, see Dueck (2000) and MacKinnon (2000). 150 Writing in the Australian context, Elizabeth Povinelli offers an astute analysis of what's unconvincing about these confessions. Through the staged spectacle of national apologies, she argues, governments, courts, (and I would add, churches) seize upon the traumatic memories of a \"nation,\" while actually restoring their own threatened authority under the guise of remorse and reparation. The apology becomes, in reality, an opportunity to perform \"the nation's aversion to its past misdeeds,\" but even more importantly, to proclaim and celebrate \"its recovered good intentions.\" Through a \"collective moment of shame and reconciliation,\" the \"nation\" and its institutions emerge cathartically cleansed and, ultimately, stronger (1998, 581). As Povinelli points out, even the impassioned rhetoric of these apologies serves to reinforce the very discourses they pretend to disavow: By referring to the shame of \"our\" law and \"our nation\" and the good of recognizing \"their\" laws, \"their\" culture, and \"their\" traditions, [those offering the apologies are] able to cite and entrench an understanding of the nation as confronting its own discriminatory practices and facing up to and eliminating a dark stain on its history even as it iteratively reproduces the nation as Anglo-Celtic and \"ours.\" (1998, 589) By focussing the residential school debate in Canada so emphatically around issues of abuse, it may be that the \"guilty parties\" and the public at large have found a way to publicly acknowledge, yet effectively ignore the depth and complexity of the issues involved. The effect of the federal government's apology, ultimately, was to forestall further discussions of damage, and reestablish non-Native control of the residential school issue. Apologizing for the abuse within the schools not only distilled the debate down to a single issue, but also implied that this issue was now \"dealt with\" and it was time to move on. Despite the limited nature of these apologies, even a little remorse is too much for those who equate such concessions with national blasphemy. The aforementioned and infamous, Western Report, has been the flag-bearer for this backlash. Writers such as Ted 151 and Virginia Byfield (1996), Patrick Donnelly (1998), Les Sillars (1998), Kevin Steele (1999) and the publisher himself, Link Byfield (1998), have used the magazine as a forum from which to launch their offensives, attacking \"travesties\" such as the government's apology, and the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, re-dubbed the \"It's All Your Fault Commission\" (Byfield 1998,2). Seizing upon the issue of abuse, these authors have deployed doubt, fed stereotypes, and exploited \"inconsistencies\" to attack the legitimacy of the whole First Nations movement. In an article entitled, \"Anyone Who Was Not Abused?,\" Kevin Steele alleges that \"local sources and even some of the [abuse] claimants themselves have said that the payouts have fuelled wild parties and extended drinking binges.\" To make things worse, he adds, \"all this is occurring amid persistent rumours and reports that at least some of the abuse claims are bogus\" (Steele 1999,7). Steele's article is an \"extreme\" one, but only in the sense that he blatantly articulates that which is sometimes more subtly ingrained. By playing on racist stereotypes of drunken and dishonest Indians, Steele simply exploits and enhances ideas which continue to resonate with a depressing proportion of the non-Native population. Trying out a different strategy, other authors have appropriated former students' memories of positive experiences in ways which seek to deny the broader impact of the schools. Ever since the Royal Commission's report, the magazine has featured articles framed as scandalous \"exposes\" which suggest the \"true\" story of residential schools has been silenced. In one article, Ted Byfield and Virginia Byfield ask,\"... if they were places of such unrelieved horror, why did so many people at Williams Lake remember the priests so fondly?\" The Byfields insist that the schools were \"characterized by merry times, happiness, and great food,\" but that \"in the present enslavement to the Politically Correct... this half of 152 the story has been suppressed\" (Byfield and Byfield 1996,40). Similarly, Patrick Donnelly's piece, \"Scapegoating the Indian Residential Schools,\" which so angered the Assembly of First Nations in 1998, intermingles allegations against First Nations leadership, with narratives of former students who remember happy times and Native authority within the schools. Finally, and perhaps most effectively, in an article entitled, \"Pay Day for Indian Boarding School Abuse,\" Les Sillars deploys photographs in his argument that the schools have been vilified in order to finance illegitimate claims. In one particularly effective image, two young, First Nations students, neatly groomed and dressed, are shown sitting at desks in a classroom. One student reads silently while another smiles up at the nun standing beside his desk. The caption reads simply: \"Teaching nun with students: Some schools were admirably run\" (Sillars 1998, 8). The result is a chilling reminder of how timeless and effective photographs are as discursive devices (and thus, how valuable analyses deconstructing their historical usage can be). Collectively, these authors attempt to mine what they perceive as a weakness in the residential school narrative. Their strategy is telling, however, for the perception of \"weakness\" rests upon widespread understandings of First Nations issues and identities as singular and homogenous. Instead of recognizing and respecting the diversity of First Nations perspectives, these authors seize upon differences as discrepancies, twisting the complexity of residential school experiences into evidence of a present-day political conspiracy. In the face of such disturbing strategies, survivors of the schools, and those who would analyze the schools' impact have been understandably wary in their discussions of such complicated issues as agency, resistance, and unintended benefits. Too often, however, this wariness has resulted in silence. As Jo-Anne Fiske points out, \"given the overwhelming 153 negative impact of the schools...this hesitation is not surprising,\" but she argues, \"that this silence is misplaced and that the contours of the frontier struggle are misunderstood\" when we flatten out such complexity in our critiques (1996,669). In many ways, the appropriation and exploitation of positive memories and narratives serves as a valuable reminder to those of us committed to addressing the residential schools' legacy - if we do not find a way to include these voices in our analyses, others will. At the same time, however, such tactics also provide a sobering example of how individuals' experiences, and academics' explorations can be deployed to serve discourses not of their choosing. Robin Brownlie and Mary-Ellen Kelm (1994) offer a careful, but compelling critique of recent colonial studies which have emphasized Native agency and resistance. Too often, they argue, arguments acknowledging Native agency have been employed, regardless of authorial intent, as a means of minimizing the negative impact of colonialism. The \"crucial process of dismantling the antiquated stereotype of Aboriginal people as passive victims in the era of settlement,\" must be balanced with a keen awareness that \"published academic work is accessible to the larger, non-academic world, and conclusions, like facts, can be employed for political ends by anyone who has reason to construct a case\" (Brownlie and Kelm 1994, 543). Similarly, efforts to expose the ambivalent nature of colonial projects, and to celebrate Natives' ability to extract empowerment from oppression, cannot be converted into new understandings of benevolent intent. Brownlie and Kelm write: The residential schools may not have been monolithic instruments of colonial oppression, but they were designed to disrupt Native home-life, to promote abhorrence of Aboriginal tradition, and to train a body of semi-skilled, semi-literate labourers to fit into the capitalist labour market without displacing non-Native workers. The fact that Native people have long been aware of the ambivalent legacy 154 of the schools does not, and should not, be taken to prove that the residential schools were not intended for and did not have the effect of cultural dislocation. (1994, 551) What is needed, they argue, is not a return to silence and political paralysis, but rather a more nuanced understanding of both colonial oppression and Native struggles to resist it. Efforts to focus on the latter when the depth and complexity of the former remain unmapped are problematic. Brownlie and Kelm point out that by minimizing \"the forces [Natives] were confronting,\" some studies end up trivializing the very agency they seek to highlight. Ultimately, they argue: We must... be able to delineate in full the realm of colonial policy and practice before we can seek to understand the ways in which Native people mediated the impact of those governmental initiatives. Only then can we produce truly balanced and nuanced histories in which neither Native actors nor colonial power is ignored. (1994, 556, emphasis mine) It is from this perspective that I have pursued the research and analysis within this thesis. The realm of colonial policy and practice was infused throughout by the concept of \"civilization,\" yet so much about this multi-faceted objective and process has remained unexplored in traditional historical analyses. In order to appreciate how First Nations individuals and communities may have resisted the \"civilizing\" project, it can only help to understand more fully its \"inner workings,\" how these were implemented in everyday life, and to what extent its effects and aspirations were mediated by race, class, gender and sexuality. Furthermore, deconstructing what \"civilization\" meant, what it supposedly \"looked like,\" and how it was to be achieved in colonial practice, equips us to recognize the ways in which it continues to patrol the legitimacy of actors and arguments in present-day, supposedly post-colonial politics. Ironically, a historical understanding of \"civilization\" can be invaluable for not only its excavation of the unexpected, but also its depressing finding of the familiar. 155 Consider, for example, yet another article written in response to the federal government's apology. While Western Report has provided one of the most virulent voices of opposition in this area, disturbing discourse has by no means been confined there. On January 13, 1998, an article by David Frum appeared in the Financial Post, entitled, \"Express regrets, don't go overboard: No reason to apologize to natives for settling the continent.\" In it, Frum draws on and demonstrates the continued resonance of \"civilizing\" discourse in ongoing efforts to construct \"national\" history. An apology which expresses any regret for \"the settlement of this continent by Europeans,\" he decries, \"is utterly, absolutely unjustified\" (Frum 1998,19). In a passage hauntingly evocative of missionaries' epic narratives, Frum writes: As this week's horrible ice storm reminds us, the north half of North America is one of the harshest, most inclement corners of the globe. It's cold, it's unpredictable and it's deadly. On this punishing terrain, European settlers built one of the wealthiest and most technologically sophisticated societies on Earth - also one of the fairest and most humane. Disasters like the Great Storm remind us of how breathtakingly difficult that accomplishment was and how fragile in many ways it remains. And yet we did it. (1998,19) The achievements accorded to First Nations are not as considerable. In fact, reflecting back on bis understanding of history, he declares, \"The Indians didn't live in harmony with the environment; they lived at the mercy of it. It was the European settlement that rescued them.\" Saving his most powerful discursive resource for the very end, Frum concludes: The descendants of the Europeans have had the good taste never to demand a thank you from the descendants of the aboriginals. They shouldn't demand it now. But at the very least they are entitled to refuse to bow and scrape and abase themselves for the sin of having tamed and civilized this inhospitable land. (1998,19, emphasis mine) Like the missionaries and colonial agents who wrote before him, Frum relies upon an understanding of colonialism which weds conquest with compassion, dismissing any claims 156 to the contrary as evidence of ingratitude. His argument demonstrates the crucial significance played by \"civilization\"'in national mythology. Portrayed as a benevolent process with an admirable outcome, \"civilization\" masks the violence and oppression of colonial contact, buttressing the fictional foundations on which the \"nation\" was built. There have also been efforts to yoke the discourse of \"civilization\" to arguments supporting various First Nations causes - but with equally problematic results. In a November 1998 Maclean's editorial entitled, \"In Support of the Nisga'a,\" Robert Lewis cites then B.C. Premier, Glen Clark's, explanation for why the Nisga'a, in particular, were successful in their treaty negotiations. In the words of the Premier: \"The Nisga'a people have never blockaded a road... they have never used civil disobedience, they have never challenged the orthodoxy other than through legal means.\" Lewis notes the fact that the Nisga'a were also \"able to establish a paper trail in support of their claim dating back to 1890,\" and he concludes: \"To use a contemporary phrase, the Nisga'a got their deal the old-fashioned way - they earned it\" (Lewis 1998,4). As both Clark's and Lewis' comments make clear, First Nations issues only gain legitimacy when they accede to the very ideologies and institutions that excluded them in the first place. Their credibility as claimants hinges on the \"civilization\" of their strategies, and their willingness to conform to Euro-Canadian standards of evidence and entitlement. As Lewis' final comment suggests, First Nations groups and individuals unable or unwilling to meet these expectations may find their \"worthiness\" questioned by not only their opposition, but also their so-called \"supporters.\" As other First Nations have discovered the hard way, \"civilization\" is a slippery, double-edged discourse. In fact, debate around contemporary First Nations issues reveals that the discourse can be deployed just as effectively (if not more so) to defuse claims of 157 damage, and to discredit demands. A proverbial formula for post-colonial political legitimacy might read: all successful First Nations are \"civilized,\" but not all \"civilized\" First Nations are successful. Herein lies the paradox. To successfully negotiate with the state, First Nations must strike an untenable balance. They must engage in debate using only \"civilized\" methods, but they must not appear \"too civilized\" in their memories or motives. In short, they must conform to what Marlee Kline describes as the myth of \"static Indianness,\" or have the authenticity of their arguments undermined. Because First Nations people have been defined historically by their assumed differences from \"whites,\" Kline points out that their adoption of any aspect of \"civilization\" has meant that their status and, consequently, their claims as \"real\" First Nations have been called into question (1994, 57). She notes how the 1991 Delgamuukw decision was animated by this myth when Supreme Court Justice, Allan McEachern, dismissed the land claims of the Gitskan and Wet'suwet'en because he concluded they were no longer living an \"aboriginal life\" (cited in Kline 1994, 464).8 More recently, evidence that such thinking is alive and well among not only judges, but also the \"public\" could be found on a CBC website entitled, \"Your Space,\" which invited Canadians to post their thoughts on the \"Fishing Fury\" in Burnt Church, N.B., this summer.9 As one contributor from Cambridge, Ontario wrote in: \"Enough of this double standard! The natives don't live in huts. They live in our modern society with all the conveniences. Quit pandering to them! This guilt trip is crap\" (Kitchen 2000). A similar argument was made by a writer in Wedgeport, N.S.: As for the treaty rights of the natives, if they want to make \"a moderate living\" and 8 For further discussion of the 1991 Delgamuukw ruling, see Kline's full article and, in particular, the Autumn 1992, Special Issue of BC Studies (no. 95). 9 The address for the site is . It can also be accessed by going through the CBC's online feature, \"In Depth - Fishing Fury\" at . Specific contributors whose words are cited above are listed and cross referenced in the bibliography. 158 \"preserve their culture,\" they can fish using the same techniques that were used when the treaty was signed, and not 45-foot, diesel powered, fibreglass [sic] lobster boats. (Doucet 2000) For those unsure about such cyberspace citations, consider again the article published in the Financial Post, by David Frum (1998). To strengthen his not-so-subtle suggestion that Natives should be grateful for their colonization, Frum catalogues their consumption of \"civilized\" comforts, and suggests an alternative inspired by the colonial imagination: If, by some freak of history, the European settlement of North America had never occurred, native people who are today living in heated houses, travelling by truck and skidoo, treating sickness with modern medicines (at no charge to themselves) and eating hygienic food, would instead be living in miserable frozen shanties, walking in unsoled shoes from one frozen hunting ground to another, desperately attempting to catch their dinner with stone-tipped arrows, and dying by the thousands every time the wind gusted from the north. (1998,19) Like the missionaries and colonial agents before him, yet again, Frum uses discourse to distort the reality of colonial encounters. He contrasts skidoos with shanties, heated houses with hunting grounds, suggesting that First Nations' adoption of these items invalidates their arguments. Shamefully unoriginal, Frum also employs the age-old discursive device of falsely lamenting pre-contact Natives' \"misery\" and \"desperation\" in order to recast colonial intervention as a misunderstood act of mercy. Perhaps the most stunning thing about Frum's rhetoric is its similarity to the 1876 speech made by Lord Dufferin, and discussed in Chapter Four. Though uttered over a century ago, Dufferin's description of a \"half-naked savage, perched, like a bird of prey, in a red blanket upon a rock, trying to catch his miserable dinner of fish\" sounds eerily familiar when revisited today. Little did Dufferin know his oratory style would be picked up and parroted in the pages of the Financial Post one hundred years later. 159 Frum does, at least, bring my discussion full circle. The enduring power of such imagery to evoke emotion and capture the post-colonial imagination should serve as a reminder that we dismiss \"historical\" discourse at our peril. As debates around First Nations issues consistently make clear, the concept of \"civilization\" remains a potent one, not least for its ability to patrol the boundaries of \"belonging\" and \"nation.\" Resilient echoes of mimicry reveal the limits of the \"civilizing\" process and its promises, as First Nations today discover that their \"civilized\" status can still be contested, or even marshaled against them. Whether they adopt too much or too little of \"civilization,\" First Nations' membership in the hierarchical order it inscribes is still undermined by the menace of mimicry. For Euro-Canadians in the nineteenth-century (and beyond), the discourse of \"civilization\" was as crucial to demarcating their own membership, as it was to excluding all Others from it. As argued in Chapter Three, mimicry ensured that Natives could never successfully conclude the \"civilizing\" process - despite missionaries' claims to the contrary. And just as \"to be civilized\" meant never truly being \"civilized,\" \"to be civilized\" has also meant never truly being \"Canadian.\"10 Hence the insidious ability of \"real\" Canadians, from the nineteenth century to today, to call into question the place of First Nations issues on the \"national\" agenda. According to colonial discourse, \"civilization\" was both the foundation of \"nation,\" and a process through which Others could be guided in order to become members of the \"nation.\" As I have argued throughout this thesis, however, the process did not deliver on its promises. Most importantly, it could not deliver, because built into the concept of \"civilization\" were intersecting hierarchies of race, class, gender and sexuality which ensured 1 0 My thanks to Becki Ross for this insight. 160 that those who needed \"civilizing\" in the first place could never truly belong within the symbolic boundaries of \"citizenship\" and \"nation.\" It is still puzzling that the discourse of \"civilization\" has not been subject to greater scrutiny, especially given the recent trend towards examinations of the \"nation building\" project. While studies seem to have focussed on separate strands of the story - constructions of race, class, gender or sexuality, and how they have been woven into the \"nation,\" few have examined the imbrication of all four (let alone more). And yet the discourse of \"civilization\" suggests a perfect opportunity to do so, for it simultaneously mediated and masked all of these elements while constructing the \"nation\" and demarcating its membership. The relationship between \"civilization\" and \"nation\" is difficult to pin down and define, for it reflects the complexity of the two concepts themselves. Further studies could explore the ways in which \"civilizing\" discourse may have varied when deployed in the service of \"nation building\" versus \"empire building.\" As Stoler and Cooper (1992,22) have pointed out, the two projects are related but distinct, and post-colonial studies have yet to map out the differences. One might consider, for example, how the terms in which \"civilizing\" projects were cast changed as the distant outposts of empire were discursively, and in some cases, literally, transformed into the \"empty lands\" upon which settlement and \"nations\" could be unfurled. Most ironically, it is Jack Granatstein who calls for exactly these sort of inquiries, when he writes: \"I want a history that puts Canada firmly in the context of Western civilization, but gives full weight to the non-Western world. I want a history that recognizes what men and women, great and ordinary, did to build a successful nation\" (1998,103). Funnily enough, that's exactly what I thought when I started this thesis, only I doubt my analysis is what Granatstein had in mind. As the arguments made by Bliss, 161 Granatstein, McEachern, Byfield, Donnelly, Frum, and countless others make clear, the discourses and desires of \"yesterday\" remain extremely tenacious \"today,\" highlighting the crucial links between history and sociology, past and present politics in this Canadian nation. \"Teaching civilization\" was a project that began long ago, but its final outcome and our \"lesson\" remains to be seen. Hopefully, armed with a better understanding of its history, we will be able to transform the pedagogy of the past into education for a more equitable future. 162 WORKS CITED PRIMARY SOURCES Missionary Notices. Annual Reports and Periodicals Christian Guardian (Toronto). 1893. United Church of Canada, British Columbia Conference Archives, Vancouver, B.C. (microfilm). Columbia Mission (London). 1859-1872. Anglican Church of Canada Archives, Diocese of New Westminster/Provincial Synod of B.C. & Yukon, Vancouver, B.C. Missionary Outlook: A Monthly Advocate, Record and Review (Toronto). 1881-1885. United Church of Canada, British Columbia Conference Archives, Vancouver, B.C. (microfilm). The Mission Field: A Monthly Record of the Proceedings of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, at Home and Abroad (London). 1862-1871. Anglican Church of Canada Archives, Diocese of New Westminster/Provincial Synod of B.C. & Yukon, Vancouver, B.C. 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P.M. 10:00-10:30 Singing and Prayer 2:00 - 2:30 1st class: Copybook Parables: Discussion 2nd class: Arithmetic History of Our Lord 2:30 - 3:00 1st class: Arithmetic 10:30-11:00 Composition on Slates- 2nd class: Copybook on Black-Grammar board 11*0-11:30 1st class: Irish Readers Book 3:00 - 3:30 1st class: Tsimshian Scriptures Circle of Knowledge Gospel and Daniel New Short Series Commandments* 2nd class: New Short Series Psalms Old Short Series Parables First Reading Lesson 2nd class: Second Short Series 11:30-12:00 Geography: Monday and 3:30 - 4:00 Catechism Thursday Singing Dictation: Tuesday and Friday Secular Singing: Wednesday Table 2 Duncan's Daily Time-Table, 1 January 1865' A.M. P.M. 6:00- 6:00 Private 1:00 - 2:00 Private 6:00- 8:00 Outdoor work, trade and 2:00 - 4:00 School for children cash accounts 4:00 - 6:00 Seeing sick, mourners, offend-8:00- 8:30 Family prayers ers, debtors, promise breakers. 8:30- 9.-00 Breakfast and reading backsliders, doubters, domestic 9:00- 10:00 Household duties and quarrels, r .on-church attenders, general work non-taxpayers 10:00- 12:00 School for children 6:00 - 7:00 Dinner and reading 12:00- 1:00 Translating and language 7:00 - 9:00 Adult school and evening prayers 9:00-10:00 Study or letter writing 10:00 to Journal and register up 1 Reproduced from Usher (1974, 137). "@en . "Thesis/Dissertation"@en . "2001-05"@en . "10.14288/1.0099536"@en . "eng"@en . "Anthropology"@en . "Vancouver : University of British Columbia Library"@en . "University of British Columbia"@en . "For non-commercial purposes only, such as research, private study and education. Additional conditions apply, see Terms of Use https://open.library.ubc.ca/terms_of_use."@en . "Graduate"@en . "Teaching civilization : gender, sexuality, race and class in two late nineteenth-century British Columbia missions"@en . "Text"@en . "http://hdl.handle.net/2429/11294"@en .