In her preface to Writing the Circle: Native Women of Western Canada, a poetry collection published in 1990, the Métis scholar and poet Emma LaRocque asked, “Here are our voices — who will hear?” The question emphasizes Indigenous women’s determination to tell their own stories, in their own words. But, as LaRocque acknowledged, there are no guarantees such voices, even when spoken, will actually be heard.
The historian Donald B. Smith, an expert on Confederation and nineteenth-century Indigenous histories, makes a similar point in his new book, Seen but Not Seen. From the 1840s until the 1960s, many well-known politicians, artists, scholars, journalists, and clergymen, including Sir John A. Macdonald, Emily Carr, George Monro Grant, and Abbé Lionel Groulx, interacted with Indigenous people in their everyday lives. Some had important, personal relationships with them. Macdonald, for instance, sponsored a young Iroquois man, Thomas Green, in...
Elaine Coburn is an international studies professor at York University.
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