Donald B. Smith - Seen but Not Seen: Influential Canadians and the First Nations from the 1840s to Today

Before reading a book it is desirable and quickens interest to know something with regard to the author.

A.C. Rutherford, foreword to The Law Marches West (1939)

In the mid-1960s, as Canada approached its memorable Centennial year, most non-Indigenous Canadians harboured a long-established blindness to the Indigenous peoples in this country. I was one of them. Their history and contemporary living conditions remained unknown, a closed book. Yet, in these same years, the Indigenous peoples were on the verge of returning to the top of the public agenda for the first time since the North-West Resistance of 1885. Although I did not know it at the time, of course, two experiences in 1966 directed me towards a lifelong study of how non-Indigenous Canadians viewed Indians, as the First Nations used to be known. A January student conference at the University of Toronto, and a summer job on a railway gang in Western Canada, awakened me to Indigenous Canada. My journey visiting archives, reading constantly about Indigenous Canada, and travelling to First Nations communities seriously began half a century ago in my year at the Universit Laval in Quebec City.

I was born in Toronto in 1946 and grew up in Oakville, located halfway between the cities of Hamilton and Toronto. During my boyhood I cannot recall a single reference in public or high school to the Mississauga First Nations, Ojibwe-speakers who call themselves, Anishinabe (meaning in English, human being), or in its plural form, Anishinabeg. I do not remember meeting anyone in Oakville who self-identified as Indian. Indigenous people did not enter into the conversation. First Nations were not mentioned in the newspapers.

Cowboy movies and adventure films, such as those based on the American Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier, frequently appeared in our two local movie theatres. One film on a North American Indian theme made a lasting impression because it portrayed the First Nations positively, without negative stereotyping. The Light in the Forest came out in 1958, the year before I entered high school. I read the 1953 historical novel by Conrad Richler, on which the film is based, some years later: After a 1764 peace treaty between the Lenni Lenape (Delaware) and the British, the First Nations promised to return all the settlers children taken in border skirmishes. A young man, adopted and renamed by the Delaware at the age of four, and raised by them for over a decade in the Ohio country, must now return against his will to his settler family in Pennsylvania, despite his wish to retain the language and rich culture of the Delaware that he now called his own.