Why does Frye not find it relevant that Duncan Campbell Scott played a “highly active role in the purposeful destruction of Indigenous people’s cultures”? (Paterson, Lesson 3.1)

Duncan Campbell Scott was the deputy superintendent of the Department of Indian Affairs, from 1913 to 1932. Before, during, and after that time, he wrote poetry that “reflects the colonialist myth of the vanishing Indian—a notion that exposure to European cultures would destroy Indigenous ways of life” (CanLit Guide, n.p.).

I first met Duncan Campbell Scott in an English class that mentioned nothing about his government role or colonizing agenda. I understood him as a great Canadian writer. His story “The Desjardins” stuck firmly in my memory, maybe just because I thought it was beautiful. When I learned more about him and his work, it was hard for me to connect those two separate understandings of Duncan Campbell Scott. It’s a little bit like Stephen Leacock, who wrote about my hometown in “Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town”. I grew up seeing him as a local hero, a great Canadian, a brilliant humorist, and loved him even more when I studied his short stories in an English class. But during that class, I also learned about his staunchly anti-feminist, generally bigoted philosophy. And now, I am forced to confront the thinking of Northrop Frye, whose words I revere and swoon at. I have this image of him as the Peter Mansbridge of the literary world. I wish we didn’t have to question his nobility! But this is what we’re doing here – questioning our stories. My stories of all of these (male, white, anglo) Canadian figures are seriously incomplete.

So, what does Northrop Frye have to say about Duncan Campbell Scott?

It’s intriguing to see how little he says about Indigenous peoples, when discussing things so obviously connected. For example, Frye states that “Canada became a colony in the mercantilist sense, treated by others less like a society than as a place to look for things” (223). This statement could very well represent how settlers treated Indigenous peoples in this land, but for Frye, it doesn’t. It is settler-Canadians who are treated in a certain way ‘by others’, not them who treat others in any particular way. In the same way, he describes “the conquest of nature by an intelligence that does not love it” (226); the “conquest of nature” but not conquest of the people who live in it. The “vast unconsciousness of nature” as a denial of human morality (227), but not the settler view of Indigenous peoples as lacking humanity (in “The Onondaga Madonna”, for example, Scott describes a Mohawk woman as careless, savage, “with war and wildness in her veins”). Frye mentions Indigenous peoples only to dismiss their role in the Canadian “historical imagination” (226).

The CanLit Guide tells us that “attempts to recover Scott tend to try and separate his poetics from his racist politics,” but those attempts forget that “the beauty of a poet’s expression is itself an ideological tool” (CanLit Guide, 6.2). This ideology is crystal clear, reading Campbell’s poetic descriptions of Indigenous people. Frye says that early Canadian writers were very certain of their ideological stance, and used words to attack those who disagreed with them (228-229). But, we are told that rhetoric as an ideological weapon is not the same as poetry (Frye, 230). And, the Canadian literary mind “was established on a basis, not of myth, but of history” (233).

So, if Frye were to write seriously about Indigenous peoples, he might argue that Scott’s poetry was separate from his policy, because literature “cannot be derived from any experience outside literature”. He says that Canadian writers can only form expression “from what [they have] read, not from what [they have] experienced” (Frye, 234). Frye might say that Scott, in his poetry, was “not actively shaping his material at all” (235), even though he was actively shaping his legal and political material. If, as Frye says, Indigenous peoples “were seen as nineteenth-century literary conventions”, was Scott transposing that image onto his real-life political actions, rather than the other way around? Rather than writing poetry inspired by and intended to promote his racist, colonizing goals, were his racist colonizing goals inspired by the literary conventions that had taught him how he should see Aboriginal peoples? Here again, we come back to the power of stories. As a reader of shallow and dangerous literary descriptions of Aboriginal people, those images may be the reason he became a proponent of destroying those Peoples and a creator of residential schools. In turn, his own literature created similar images in other Canadians’ minds. The stories seem much more important than the policies of the Department of Indian Affairs, simply a consequence sandwiched between the real problem.

A poem linked from the CanLit Guide offers a fascinating look at both sides of Scott, the poet and the bureaucrat. For me, the most powerful line applies to all of ‘us’, and all of our Canadian heroes who we must question – perhaps even to Northrop Frye.

They say he asks many questions but
doesn’t wait to listen. Asks
much about yesterday, little about today
and acts as if he knows tomorrow.

“Poem for Duncan Campbell Scott” by Armand Garnet Ruffo

 
Works Cited

CanLit Guides. “Reading and Writing in Canada, A Classroom Guide to Nationalism.” Canadian Literature. Web. 25 June, 2015. http://canlitguides.ca/guides/nationalism/6/2

Frye, Northrop. “The Bush Garden: Essays on the Canadian Imagination.” Toronto: Anansi, 1995. Web. UBC Library. 24 June 2015. http://site.ebrary.com/lib/ubc/reader.action?docID=10209804&ppg=22

“Jacques Boathouse Small.” n.d. Leacock Museum, Orillia. Leacock Museum, National Historic Site. Photograph. Web. 25 June 2015. http://leacockmuseum.com/photo-gallery/

Leacock, Stephen. “Sunshine Sketches of a Small Town.” Toronto, Bell and Cockburn, 1912. Web. Project Gutenberg Canada. 25 June 2015. http://www.gutenberg.ca/ebooks/leacock-sunshine/leacock-sunshine-00-h-dir/leacock-sunshine-00-h.html

Paterson, Erika. “Lesson 3.1.” ENGL 470A Canadian Studies: Canadian Literary Genres May 2015. University of British Columbia, Vancouver, n.d. Web. 25 June 2015. https://blogs.ubc.ca/courseblogsis_ubc_engl_470a_99c_2014wc_44216-sis_ubc_engl_470a_99c_2014wc_44216_2517104_1/unit-3/lesson-3-1/

Ruffo, Armand Granet. Poem for Duncan Campbell Scott. Opening in the Sky. Penticton: Theytus, 1994. Web. 25 June 2015. http://canpoetry.library.utoronto.ca/ruffo/poem5.htm

Scott, Duncan Campbell. “The Desjardins.” In the Village of Viger. Boston: Copeland and Day, 1896. Web. Canadian Poetry Press. 25 June 2015. http://www.canadianpoetry.ca/confederation/DCScott/village_of_viger/the_desjardins.htm