shadows in the soul bentley d c scott

D.M.R. BENTLEY

Shadows in the Soul:Racial Haunting in the Poetry

of Duncan Campbell Scott

Now have the ages met in the Northem midnight.And on the lonely, loon-haunted Nipigon reachesRises the hymn of triumph and courage and comfort,

Adeste Fideles.

Tones that were fashioned when the faith brooded in darkness.Joined with sonorous vowels in the noble Latin,Now are married with the long-drawn Ojibwa,

Uncouth and mournful. Scott, Poems 23-24

Thus does Duncan Campbell Scott (1862-1947) in the central stanzas of'Night Hymns on Lake Nipigon' (1905) present an instance of the blendingof European and Native in the Canadian wilderness near the beginning ofthe twentieth century. In using the word 'haunted' to describe the 'lonely... reaches' of Lake Nipigon, Scott was enlisting two senses of the word tosuggest that the landscape of western Ontario is frequented or inhabited byloons and to evoke the long-standing association of the loon's cry with thesupernatural. But the 'reaches' of Lake Nipigon are not the only features ofScott's poem that are 'haunted.' Literary and ideological presences chargedwith the Victorian colonizing impulse and tradition haunt its every line: theperception of the event that it describes as a meeting of 'ages' conjureslevels and degrees of civilization; the 'faith' that brood[s] in [its] darkness'

I am grateful to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and theUniversity of Westem Ontario for their generous support of my research, and to MarleneGoldman, Manina Jones, Gerald Lynch, Joanne Saul, and J.M. Zezulka for their generouscontributions to the betterment of this essay.

1 In his chronology of Scott's poems, R.L. McDougall notes that 'Night Hymns on LakeNipigon' was composed on 13 September 1899 and, according to E.K. Brown, '"calledSapphics (Saphics) [sic] in ... [his] notebook"' (20). The poem was thus composed afterScott had retumed to Ottawa in late August or early September, having, as he told PeihamEdgar in a letter of 4 September, 'been away among the Indians' 'for the greater part of thesummer' (letter). For a discussion ofthe poem's form, see Ross S. Kilpatrick's 'D.C. Scott's"Night Hymns on Lake Nipigon."'

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is imbued with the Spirit that 'sat[] brooding on the vast Abyss' in theopening invocation in Paradise Lost (1:21); and hovering over the poem asa whole is the entire tradition of Christian proselyting within the Europeanimperial project. Nor are these the only literary and ideological presencesthat haunt 'Night Hymns on Lake Nipigon.' An emanation of GeorgeMonro Grant's Ocean to Ocean: Sanford Fleming's Expedition through Canadain 1872 can be recognized in the scenario of the poem/ as can manifesta-tions of the racial and linguistic stereotypes that make Latin 'noble' andOjibwa 'uncouth.' With the word 'married' Scott figures the blending ofvoices, languages, cultures, and races 'in the Northern midnight' as aharmonious union of alterities, but in the five poems to be examined here- 'The Onondaga Madorma' (1898), 'The Half-Breed Girl' (1906), 'Powas-san's Drum' (1926), 'A Scene at Lake Manitou' (1935), and 'At Gull Lake:August, 1810' (1935) - what he terms the 'Uncouth,' the 'pagan,' and the'savage' are not conducive or amenable to harmony but, rather, hauntingspectres that manifest themselves in alarming, threatening, and evendeadly ways.

Both because they are a major part of the oeuvre of a canonical Canadianpoet and because that poet was an increasingly powerful figure - eventu-ally deputy chief superintendent - in the federal Department of IndianAffairs from 1879 to his retirement in 1932, Scott's poems about Nativepeoples and people of Native origin are of very special interest and con-sequence. As a poet, Scott occupied a carry-forward position between the

2 The passage in Ocean to Ocean that may be in the background of Scott's poem describes astorm on the Lake of the Woods and its aftermath: 'an inky belt of cloud stretched over usfrom north to south, and when it burst, the torrent was as if the lake tumed upside down.The storm moved with us, as in a circle, flashes of lightning coming simultaneously fromopposite quarters of the heavens. First we had the wind and rain on our backs, then onthe left, then in our faces, and then on the right.... [After the storm. Grant and his party],except for the pagan Ojibbeways [assembled for a brief religious service in which] the VeniCreator was sung in Iroquois by the Indians.... To hear those children of the forest, on alonely lake that Indian tradition says is ever haunted by their old deities, chanting thehymn that for centuries has been sung at the great Councils and in the high Cathedrals ofChristendom, moved us deeply' (64-65). Besides being 'a masterful travel narrative'(Jackel, 7), Grant's account of the 'preparatory survey-work' (22) for the Canadian PacificRailway 'celebrates the possibilities of the new country... and did much to promote interestin the northwest and to generate poUtical support for the railway' (Mack, 405). It was alsoregarded by the historian of Canadian writing who most influenced the Confederationgroup of Canadian poets of which Scott was a member, Joseph Edmund Collins, as 'a sortof pastoral poem, written in prose, containing a wholesome spice of the practical with theexuberant and the spiritual' {Life and Times, 449). 'We have read and re-read [Ocean toOcean], not alone with delight, but with enthusiasm,' writes Collins in the chapter on'Thought and Literature' in his Life and Times ofthe Right Honourable Sir John A. Macdonald(1883), 'for it is redolent of the breath of the mountains, the mystery of the wood, and theperfume of wild flowers' (449).

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poets of the Confederation group, whose interest in Native mythology andspirituality he expanded and transformed, and the poets of the modemmovement in Canada, who found more to admire in his poetry than in thatof any other member of the Confederation group, except, perhaps, Archi-bald Lampman. As a bureaucrat, Scott had a major impact on the formula-tion and administration of policies pertaining to Canada's Native peoplesand on the perception and conception of their characteristics and traditionsin political as well as bureaucratic circles. Steadfast in his conviction that'the Government will in time reach the end of its responsibility as theIndians progress into civilization and finally disappear as a separate anddistinct people ... by gradual assimilation with their fellow-citizens' {Ad-dresses, 2:423), he nevertheless asked the readers of his poems to considerthe persistence of racial traits as psychologically detrimental to individualsof mixed races and as a possible impediment to the process of assimilation.In this, as in much else and as will be seen, he was very much a product ofhis time - an heir alike to post-Enlightenment beliefs in reason and prog-ress, to late Victorian fears of the potentially regressive eruption of theirrational, the instinctual, the primitive, and tofin-de-siecle and later inves-tigations and fictionalizations of split and multiple personalities such asRobert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case ofDr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886),Henry James's The Private Life (1893), and Joseph Conrad's 'The SecretSharer' (1911).

II

First published in the Atlantic Monthly in Septeinber 1894 as 'An OnondagaMother and Child,' 'The Onondaga Madorma' depicts a Native woman andher infant son in a manner that reflects the belief, prevalent in Canada sinceat least the early nineteenth century and still very much in evidence in thestatement from Scott's 1931 essay on 'The Administration of Indian Affairsin Canada' just quoted, that North America's Indigenous races weredoomed to disappear. 'Nations are daily dwindling away,' Adam Kidd hadwritten in The Huron Chief and Other Poems (1830), 'and in a few years hencewill scarcely leave a memorial to perpetuate their names, as the oncemighty rulers of the vast American regions' (3). When John Macleanlistened to the songs of the Indians of the '"western plains'" some fiftyyears later he heard "'the dying requiem of the departing savage"' andwhen critics reviewed an exhibition of Indian artefacts and paintings ofIndians by Scott's friend Edmund Morris they praised him for his '"fine...souvenirs"' of '"a race which will soon be no more than a tradition'" (qtdin Erancis, 23, 27-28). As late as the 1930s, when the Native population ofCanada had been increasing, for several years, none other than MariusBarbeau and Diamond Jenness were still maintaining that the '"indicationspoint convincingly to the extinction of the race"' (Barbeau) and that

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'"doubtless all the tribes will disappear"' (qtd in Francis, 56).' Written andpublished shortly after Pauline Johnson began to dress and act the part ofa living relic in her recitals (see Bentley, The Confederation Group, 256-57),'The Onondaga Madonna' is a thoroughly stereotypical representation ofthe supposed characteristics as well as the supposed fate of North Amer-ica's Native peoples: 'pagan passion bums and glow^s' in her features, 'Herblood.../... thrills with war and wildness in her veins,' and 'The... savagelurk[s] in her face,' but she is also a 'tragic' figure, a member of a 'weirdand waning race' whose 'blood is mingled with her ancient foes,' andwhose child is 'The latest promise of her nation's doom' {Poems, 230).

Whether the Onondaga woman's 'ancient foes' were Europeans ormembers of another Indian nation is unclear, but the ensuing descriptionof her child strongly suggest that he is of mixed race:

Paler than she her baby clings and lies.The primal warrior gleaming from his eyes.He sulks, and burdened with his infant gloom.He draws his heavy brows and will not rest. (Poems, 230)

Exhibiting typical and stereotypically European and Native extemal andintemal characteristics, the child is apparently derued peace of mind andtherefore 'rest' by the persistence within him of 'savage' traits of the sortvisible on his 'savage' and darker mother's face."* Divided within and evenagainst himself, he is inherently dissonant and unstable both individuallyand socially. Evidently, Scott accepted the idea, which was widely held in

3 For further discussion of the vanishing Indian, see Bentley, Mnemographia Canadensis,1:167-76.

4 In contrast to the child in 'The Onondaga Madonna,' the Native figures in 'On the Wayto the Mission' (1905) and 'The Forsaken' (1905) do achieve 'peace' or 'rest' {Poems, 25,28).In the former, the eyes of the Montagnais trapper who is taking his wife's body for burialat the mission are 'circles of peace' despite (or because of) the 'fore-knowledge' that he willbe killed by the 'white men servants of greed' who think that he is transporting valuablefurs (25). In the latter, the Chippewa woman twice achieves 'rest,' the first time when, asa young woman, she saves her life and that of her son by baiting a 'fish-hook' with herown flesh and the second time when, as an old woman, she has become a burden on herfamily and they leave her to die in the snow (29, 31). Neither figure is mixed race. Bothpoems contain hauntings of a kind, however: before they kill the Montagnais trapper, the'white men servants of greed' in 'On the Way to the Mission' see 'something flit by hisside' that makes 'Their hearts stop ... with fear' and after they abandon their elderlymother her son and grandchildren are said by the narrator of 'The Forsaken' to have'slunk' away, perhaps because, as Lee B. Meckler has argued, greater contact with whiteculture has made them feel guilty about a practice that she accepts as normal. It shouldalso be noted that the Iroquois woman in 'Watkewenies,' a sonnet that Scott paired with'The Onondaga Madonna' in his collections, is depicted as pensive rather than troubledby the contrast between her past life as a warrior and her present existence on a reserve(see Poems, 230).

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the United States as well as in 'North Europe and Great Britain' in his day,that 'racially mixed children are flawed' and prone to 'physical, mental,and behavioral' problems (Davis, 25). "The weaker, mixed race will soondisappear,' wrote Scott's American contemporary N.S. Shaler in 'The NegroProblem' (1884): 'half-breeds are more inclined to vice and much shorter-lived ... and are of weaker mental power, than the pure race' (706).

Of course, the lineage of Scott's conception of the ignoble savagestretches back through the nineteenth century to the four stages theory ofsocial development according to which hunter-gatherers occupied thelowest rung of the ladder that all societies climb on their way from'rudeness' or 'uncouth[ness]' by way of pastoralism and then agricultural-ism towards the 'polish' and 'refinement of advanced commercial societysuch as that of Britain.' By the late runeteenth century, such ideas had beengiven a new twist and new impetus by Charles Darwin's The Descent ofMan (1871), Herbert Spencer's Principles of Sociology (1876), and thenumerous texts derived from them that maintained (in Darwin's words)that certain 'rude habits' - 'pagan passion' and 'war and wilderness' wouldcertainly be among them* - are characteristic of 'lower races' but relativelyabsent in 'civilised nations' because the process of natural selection hasadvanced the 'intellectual,' 'moral and social faculties' of the populationsof such nations (1:158-84). So close was the identification in Scott's time ofdark skin with 'lower races' and 'civilisation[s]' and, by the same token, ofpale skin with higher races and 'civilisation[s]' that it was used to calibratethe ascent of 'uncouth' 'savage[s]' towards European refinement. 'Wenoticed ... that ... some of the old Indians had skins almost as black asNegroes [but] the young men and women were comparatively fair,' wroteGrant in Ocean to Ocean. "The explanation is that the young... are taking tocivilized ways' (191). Either consciously or unconsciously such remarkselide the possibility that the 'comparative fair[ness]' of the new generationwas the result of 'mixed marriage or union' (Reade, 5:37), a topic that wasgenerating a welter of commentary in Canada as well as the United Statesat the time when Scott composed and published 'The Onondaga Madonna.'Indeed, it was in the very periodical in which the poem first appeared thatthe 'harmonious blending' of the Indigenous and European races in NorthAmerica was seen as 'the great solution of the Indian question as regardsthe five civilized tribes [that is, the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek,and Seminole], which with the rising generation will do away with

5 See my Mimic Fires, 31-35,44-47, and elsewhere for discussions of the four stages theoryand its impact on early Canadian poetry.

6 One of the traits that four stages theorists held to be characteristic of savages is a fiercedesire for revenge or vengeance, a trait that Scott gives to the 'nation' of the eponymousfemale figure in 'Watkewerues': 'Vengeance was once her nation's lore and law: / Whenthe tired sentry stooped above the rill / Her long knife flashed, and hissed, and drank itsfill' {Poems, 230).

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prejudice, and establish peace and good will between the Whites andIndians' (qtd in Reade, 5:37).̂ 'Let us hope so,' commented John Reade, atthe conclusion of a five-part discussion of the implications of 'the admix-ture of Indian and European blood' for 'Nation-Building' in June toDecember 1887 issues of the Week (Toronto), but 'so far unhappily it has nothad that result either in the United States or Canada ... [and] look at theCelt and the Saxon in Ireland after seven centuries of intercourse!' (5:36,37).

In his 1914 history of 'Indian Affairs' in Canada from 1763 to 1912, Scottflatly states that a combination of 'intermarriage and education will finallyovercome the lingering traces of native custom and tradition' {Addresses,1:212), but the message of 'The Onondaga Madonna' is very different andcloser to Reade's than to Grant's. In the short and medium terms, itsuggests, racial characteristics do not disappear as a result of 'miscegena-tion' or 'racial intermingling' (Reade, 5:37) but, on the contrary, remainembedded in the blood, where their presence causes psychologicaldisturbances in the individual and may pose a threat to the peace andharmony of society. 'The progeny both of crossed species and varietiesretain for a long period a tendency to revert to their ancestors, especially tothat one which is prepotent in transmission,' asserts Darwin at one pointin The Descent of Man, and at another: 'injurious characters tend to reappearthrough reversion, such as blackness in sheep; and with mankind some ofthe worst dispositions, which occasionally without any assignable causemake their appearance in families may perhaps be reversions to a savagestate, from which we are not removed by very many generations'(1:223,173). Unlike Peter O'Leary, who wrote admiringly in his Travels andExperiences in Canada, the Red River Territory and the United States (1877) thatthe 'dark eyes' of the 'half-breeds' whom he encountered in the GeorgianBay area 'sparkl[ed] with the impulsiveness of their Indian nature' (114),̂Scott sees the faces and eyes of the Onondaga mother and child as'gleaming' with a potentially revenant savagery. Not only does 'TheOnondaga Madonna' display the anxiety of white Canadian society in theaftermath of the bloody resistance of Saskatchewan Metis in 1884 (theNorthwest or second Riel Rebellion), but it also rests on beliefs about raceand miscegenation that lie at the core of much late nineteenth-century racistthinking: the belief that 'some races are superior to others, that racialdifferences cause cultural and temperamental differences, and that racialmixing causes the biological and cultural degeneration of the "superior

7 Reade is quoting from 'The Indian Territory' by Theodora R. Jenness in the April 1879number of Atlantic Monthly (Boston), 449-50.

8 By contrast, see Isabella Valancy Crawford's Malcolm's Katie (1884), 2:165-67, where MaxGordon is assisted in his creation of a homestead by 'a half-breed lad, / With tough, lithesinews and deep Indian eyes, / Lit with a Gallic sparkle.'


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races'" (Davis, 30)' or, in this case, a conflicted consciousness that, becauseit is racial in origin, will resist resolution until, to adapt Darwin's phraseol-ogy, its inheritors are removed from the 'savage state' by 'many genera-tions.'

Very likely because in post-Darwinian psychology women were held topossess certain innate mental and temperamental characteristics such as'female intuition' and emotional susceptibility that were regarded asthrowbacks to pre-rational and infantile stages of personal and societaldevelopment," all the conflicted figures of racially mixed descent in Scott'spoetry with the exception of the child in 'The Onondaga Madonna' arewomen. Like 'The Onondaga Madonna,' the first of these, the similarlyurmamed and eponymous figure in 'The Half-Breed Girl,' may also derivein part from Ocean to Ocean, in this instance, from Grant's remark thatchildren of a Scottish father and an Indian mother tend to 'take more afterthe father than the mother'(i83). To someone less wedded than Scottapparently was to a belief in the existence and persistence of racial/mentalcharacteristics and to the notion of interracial 'marriage or union' asproductive of conflicted consciousness. Grant's remark and others like itmight have been taken as an argument in favour of miscegenation as a keyto displacing the savage by the civilized in Canadian society. Whether thefemale figure in 'The Half-Breed Girl' has Scottish blood from a male orfemale parent or ancestor is not clear, but the historical reality that thepoem assumes and the fact that the girl has lived the 'savage life' of 'thetrap and the paddle' both suggest a Scottish male ancestor. Whatever thecase, her consciousness is so conflicted as to render her little short of insaneand suicidal.

In the first five stanzas of the poem, the Scottish racial inheritance thathaunts the 'half-breed girl' is not identified as either Scottish or racial or,for that matter, as an inheritance, but merely as a 'something' that 'Shineslike a veil' 'behind her savage life' and invades both her sleeping and her

9 "Their mental characteristics are ... very distinct; chiefly as it would appear in theiremotional, but partly in their intellectual, faculties,' writes Darwin of the races in TheDescent of Mam 'Every one who has had the opportunity of comparison, must have beenstruck with the contrast between the tacitum, even morose, aborigines of S[outh] Americaand the light-hearted talkative negroes. ... The American aborigines, Negroes andEuropeans differs as much from each other in mind as any three races that can be named'(1:261, 232).

10 Again, Darwin in The Descent of Man: 'It is generally admitted that with women thepowers of intuition, of rapid perception, and perhaps of imitation [a 'principle' to wWch'apes are much given, as are the lowest savages'], are more strongly marked than in man;but some, at least, of these faculties are characteristic of the lower races, and therefore ofa past and lower state of civilisation. The chief distinction in the intellectual powers of thetwo sexes is shown by man attaining to a higher eminence, in whatever he takes up ...whether requiring deep thought, reason, or imagination, or merely the use of the sensesand hands' (2:327-28; 1:161).

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waking hours with spectral presences that are unintelligihle and destruc-tive of her peace of mind:

Her dreams are undiscovered.Shadows trouble her breast.

When the time for resting comethThen least is she at rest.

Oft in the moms of winter.When she visits the rabbit snares.

An appearance floats in the crystal airBeyond the balsam firs.

Oft in the summer morningsWhen she strips the nets of fish.

The smell of the dripping net-twineGives to her heart a wish.

But she cannot leam the meaningOf the shadows in her soul.... (Poems, ^^)

Suhsequent stanzas reveal the trouhling 'shadows' to be racial memoriesof her ancestral past in Scotland:

The reek of rock-built cities.Where her fathers dwelt of yore.

The gleam of lock and shealing,"The mist on the moor.

Frail traces of kindred kindness.Of feuds by hill and strand.

The heritage of an age-long lifeIn a legendary land. (Poems, 55-56)

As a consequence of the disjunction between her racial memories and herIndian way of life, the 'half-breed girl' exhibits several symptoms of severeneurosis: 'She fears for something or nothing / With the heart of afrightened child' (anxiety); 'She sees the stars... [as] the eyes of dead souls'(morbidity); and she hears 'A voice... from the rapids' promising her morethan her present existence (fantasy). The poem concludes by depicting heras a fearful and doomed victim of racial dualism who lives a half-life

11 For the 'shealing' (shieling) - that is, a summer pasture and/or a cattle or sheep herder'ssummer hut - as a focal point of Scottish emigrant nostalgia, see my MnemographiaCanadensis, 1: 257-63.


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between a Scottish heritage to which she cannot gain access and a Nativeexistence that part of her being finds odious:

She covers her face with her blanket.Her fierce soul hates her breath.

As it cries with a sudden passionFor life or death. (Poems, 56)

The suggestion is strong that death will be the half-breed girl's only meansof escape from the racially conflicted consciousness that has rendered herall but insane.

I l l

Neither 'The Onondaga Madonna' nor 'The Half-Breed Girl' focuses on afigure or figures that can be identified, but this is not the case with'Powassan's Drum,' which, though composed in January and February1925 (McDougall, 21) and published a year later in Scott's collected Poems,appears to have had its origins more than two decades earlier in an eventthat occurred during the northern journey that he undertook in thesummer of 1905 as part of the process of negotiating Treaty 9. So at leastargues Stan Dragland in his searching discussion of the poem as 'a key tounderstanding Scott and the Indians' (172) in Floating Voice: DuncanCampbell Scott and the Literature of Treaty Nine. The incident concerned tookplace in July 1905 on Lac Seul in northern Ontario, where, according toScott's 'The Last of the Indian Treaties' (1906), 'the sound of a conjurer'sdrum far away pervaded [some] day[s] like an aerial pulse' and where, ashe recorded in his journal, he had a 'long argument with an old medicineman' - a 'cunning old devil with [a] swollen jaw' - who had apparentlybeen ordered by 'Powassan the head medicine man' to hold an OjibwaWhite Dog Feast - that is, a ritual in which one or more white dogs were'strangled, hung up, and ceremonially burned with prayers to the Creator'(Scott, qtd in Dragland, 161,156-57; Blau, 97).

'Scott may have drawn on other sources of drumming, other evidenceof "paganism" than the White Dog Feast on July 6,1905,' writes Dragland,'but when he composed "Powassan's Drum" in January and February1925, it was clearly the drum across Lac Seul that he was remembering. InApril of that year, when the poem was performed ... at Scott's first publicreading, the Globe reported it as a "a h[a]unting treatment of an incident inthe Northland with an uncanny drum-beat by an Indian medicine manheard fifteen miles across water"' (161). Despite its inspiration, however,'Powassan's Drum' is not ethnographically accurate, for, as Draglandpoints out, if Scott had an Ojibway 'shaking tent' in mind as a basis for the'dwarf wigwam' in which he pictures Powassan crouching at his drum and



'Making great medicine / In memory of hated things dead / Or in menaceof hated things to come' {Poems, 59), 'he ... simplified and stylized it intosomething iconic, symbolic. ... "dwarf wigwam" sounds unlikely to bedrawn from anything else than a shaking tent; there is nothing of the sweatlodge about it. ... Scott was inventing his wigwam, inventing his drum-ming' (172)." In short, 'Powassan's Drum' may have been inspired by adisconcerting contact with Ojibway ritual, but it is not an accurate'reflection of Native culture' (Dragland, 172).

The fact that on 6 July 1905 Scott wanted to 'speak to Powassan' in orderto enlist his help in preventing a ceremony that might have threatened ordelayed the success of the treaty-making expedition suggests that hethought of 'the head medicine man' of the Ojibway as a leader who haddealt and would deal honourably with the Canadian government. ̂ ^ If this

12 Perhaps in composing 'Powassan's Drum' Scott went back in memory to Grant'sdescription of the 'small tents' - or, as he soon discovered, 'sweat booths' - that heencountered in what is now Alberta. Certainly, there is a similarity between Grant'sdescription and the 'dwarf wigwam' constructed of 'poles / Covered with strips ofbirchbark / And branches of poplar' in which Powassan grows fierce with 'anger' in thepoem {Poems, 60,61) that may explain its lack of resemblance to an Ojibwa 'shaking tent':'At first we mistook [the sweating booths] for small tents. They are made in a few minutesof willow wands or branches, bent so as to form a circular enclosure, with room for oneor two inside; [a] buffalo robe is spread over the frame work so as to exclude the air asmuch as possible, and whoever wants a Russian bath [generated by water poured overheated stones] crawls into the round dark hole.... Doctor Hector thought the practice anexcellent one, as regards cleanliness, health and pleasure; but the Indians carry it to anextreme that utterly enervates them. Their medicine-men enlist it in aid of theirsuperstitions. It is when under the influence of the bath, that they become inspired; andthey take one or two laymen in with them, that these may hear their oracular sayings, andbe able to announce to the tribe when there is a chance of stealing horses or of doing someother notable deed with good prospect of success. It is easy to see, too, what a capitalopportunity the medicine-man has, when thus inspired to gratify his private maUce orvengeance, or any desire. Many a raid and many a deed of darkness has been started inthe sweating booth' (Grant, 197-98). The resonances between this passage and'Powassan's Drum' are strong and the differences between them - most notably theabsence in the passage of any mention of drumming and the absence in the passage of anyreference to steam or attendants - can only reinforce Dragland's contention that Scottdrew inspiration from the events of July 1905 and his argument that, all things considered,'Powassan's Drum' is a 'simplified ... stylized ... iconic, [and] symbolic' representation ofNative ritual (172). This barrage of adjectives is intended as a criticism of Scott for notattending to cultural specificity, but it also suggests that the poem might be better read,understood, and even appreciated as being wider in its compass and implications.

13 Part of the evidence that Dragland adduces to reach this conclusion is a pair of quotationsfrom James Redsky's Great Leader of the Ojibway: Mis-quona-queb (1972) and SelwynDewdney's The Secret Scrolls ofthe Ojibway (1975) that identify Powassan(g) as one of iheNative representatives who signed the Northwest Angle Treaty (Treaty 3) on behalf of theOjibway in 1873 (see Dragland, i72n). Interestingly enough. Grant describes this verytreaty in an appendix that he added to the second edition of Ocean to Ocean (1877) and, indoing so, mentions Powassan(g) by name to support his contention that the Canadiangovemment must fully honour the treaties that it makes with the Native peoples: 'In


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was SO, then why, twenty years later, did he use Powassan's name in apoem about 'great medicine' that is employed, not for the purposes ofpeace, but as a weapon against either 'a memory of hated things dead' or'a menace of hated things to come' {Poems, 61)? What moved him inJanuary and February 1925 to depict Powassan as a horrific figurecrouched in a 'dwarf tent' and capable through his 'great medicine' ofsummoning up the 'murdered shadow' of an 'Indian still as a statue ... /Headless [and] ... Trail[ing] his severed head / Through the dead water'beside his canoe {Poems, 62)?''' In short, is 'Powassan's Drum' a productand expression of more than the events of July 1905 at Lac Seul?

In A Narrow Vision: Duncan Campbell Scott and the Administration of IndianAffairs in Canada, E. Brian Titley identifies the early to mid-i92os as a periodin which Scott was dealing with a variety of highly complex administrativematters, one of which seems especially likely to have caused him greatprofessional and emotional stress: the controversy surrounding the SixNations' demand for special status and the consequent replacement of theirhereditary council with an elected council, an assault on Native traditionthat he himself masterminded. Besides involving a religious issue that alsofigures in the Ojibway background to 'Powassan's Drum' - the hereditary

October, 1873, Treaty No in was made at the North-west Angle of the Lake of the Woodswith the Saulteaux tribe of the Ojibbeways, by which the country between Ontario andManitoba - now forming the Territory of Kewatin - was ceded.... What is the secret of...[Canada's] success in dealing with the Indian? We acknowledge their title and right to theland; and a treaty once made with them, we keep it.... the Indian is a man, and God hasimplanted the sense of justice in the breast of all men. To the Indian his land or fishingground is as important as it would be to you, and the memory of his fathers may be assacred.... Something more than making a treaty is needed. It must be kept to the letterand in the spirit. ... The words of Mawedopenias, who with Pow-wa-sang ... carried onthe negotiations that resulted in the North-west Angle Treaty, shows that their eyes areopen when they treat with us, and that their covenants are made to be sacred' (385,386,388).

14 The canoe itself may be derived in part from the spirit canoe and the white canoe of someNative mythologies as treated by several Canadian and American writers, includingCharles Sangster in 'Tapooka' (1864) and Alan Sullivan in The White Canoe, and Other Verse(1891). It is also possible that Scott's 'headless' Indian apparition owes something to oneof nineteenth-century Canada's best known and most gruesome mysteries involvingNative peoples, 'the headless Indian' that Viscount Milton and W.B. Cheadle discoveredin the Rockies and described in their much-reprinted The North-west Passage by land. Beinga Narrative of an Expedition from the Atlantic to the Pacific (1865) (see 291-92). Ocean to Oceancontains an engraving of the 'SkuU of the Headless Indian,'and much speculation aboutthe cause of its owner's death occasioned by the fact that the skull was found by packerson the Fleming expedition 'a hundred and fifty yards from the body' (254-55). Accordingto Grant, one member of the group could not 'persuad[ed] ... that the man's head haddropped off, and been carried to a distance by the wind or some beast. He had seen headsbroken, or cut off, but he had never heard before - and neither had we as far as that goes- of a head rolling off; and therefore concluded that "there had been some bad work here"'(278).



chiefs and their supporters adhered to the White Dog ritual (see Titley, i i i )- the Six Nations' Status Case included legal representations to theCanadian govemraent, the League of Nations, and King George v thatmust have been as disconcerting to Scott as they were damaging to hisreputation. It scarcely seems coincidental that 'Powassan's Drum' waswritten during the very period when the case came to a climax with thefinal appeal of the head of the hereditary council to the king (October 1924)and publicly expressed fears (in the 14 February 1925 issue of the TorontoStar Weekly, for example) that the demise of the Six Nations' hereditarycouncil was 'a regrettable severing with the past' (Titley, 126), a destructionof Native history and tradition in the name of progress and democracy. InJanuary and February 1925, having borne the brunt of powerful Nahveresistance to an act of political decapitation, Scott had good reason tobelieve in the persistence or resonance of the Native power that twentyyears earlier he had likened to 'an aerial pulse.'

Titley maintains that during the Six Nations' Status Case, Scott's 'poeticimagination' was 'dulled by the exigencies of administrative convenience'(128), and Dragland regards 'Powassan's Drum' as his quintessential 'poemof white incomprehension' (261). Yet surely the poem's extremely vividand forthrightly wondering awareness of the extraordinary power of atraditional Native leader and ritual to conjure up a spirit from a differenttime and place, to remember forward into the present and future theviolence and mystery of the past, speaks of anything but imaginativedullness and white incomprehension. 'Powassan's Drum' is a powerfulpoem about Native power that, for all its questions about the motivationand purpose of Powassan's drumming, never for a moment doubts theefficacy of his 'great medicine.' No less than 'The Piper of Aril' (1898), itspeaks to the unfathomable ability of intense emotion and affective musicto call into existence entities from the hidden realm of the spirit(s).'' Incontrast to the dreamy realm of 'The Piper of Aril,' however, the realm of'Powassan's Drum' is a nightmarish place in which the Native 'conjuror'draws energy from the very 'pulse of Being.' {Poems, 60) in a manner thatis all but incomprehensible to those whose imderstanding of the worldflows from post-Enlightenment beliefs in the materiality of external natureand the supremacy of human reason. It can never be to Scott's credit thathe failed to appreciate and protect many aspects of the Native cultures withwhich he was confronted in the Six Nations' Status Case and on numerous

15 It needs to be mentioned that from before the tum of the centiuy, Scott had displayed akeen interest in the supernatural and in more or less occult forms of spirituality, and thatin 1931 he would marry EMsa Aylen, a woman whose theosophical interests wouldeventually take her to India. For discussions of some of the manifestations of Scott'sspiritualistic interests see my 'Alchemical Transmutation in Duncan Campbell Scott's "AtGuU Lake: August, 1810"' and The Confederation Group of Canadian Poets, i88o-i8gy,231-40.


764 D.M.R. BENTLEY

Other occasions, but the 'triumphant throh - throb - throb - / Throbbingof Powassan's Drum' {Poems, 63) suggest that in 1925 he had come tocomprehend something of the enduring power of Native leaders andNative spirituality.

IV

Perhaps because they were written after his retirement from the Depart-ment of Indian Affairs in 1932,̂ ^ 'A Scene at Lake Manitou' (1935) and 'AtGull Lake: August, 1810' (1935) do not treat of the terrifying power ofNative spirituality but, rather, of Scott's earlier theme of the conflictedconsciousness of women who are caught between Native and Europeancultures. In 'A Scene at Lake Manitou,' the female protagonist, 'WidowFrederick / Whose Indian name means Stormy Sky,' watches first herhusband then her son die of an unnamed illness, the latter after she hasceased to pray for his life to 'Jesus' and 'Mary his Mother' and after she hasattempted to propitiate 'the Powers of the Earth and Air, / The Powers ofthe Water' by rejecting the possessions that she has accumulated byparticipating in the white economy ('her blankets... her gramophone... Her... hand-sew^ing-machine') {Creen Cloister, 501-55). Before embarking on thisfutile course of action, her 'tired brain' had harboured 'thoughts' of both'Nanabojou' and 'Jesus.' After her son's death, she returns to this bifur-cated state, believing him to have gone 'To hunt in the Spirit Land / Andto be with Jesus and Mary,' and she plans to continue to participate in thefur-trading economy by hunting in the winter and 'Revisit[ing] the Post' inthe spring {Green Cloister, 52).

Any comforting sense that Widow Frederick/Stormy Sky represents asuccessful blending of Native and European cultures is severely under-mined by the elegiac tone of the poem's final lines, which suggest not onlythat the 'woods' where she hopes to 'gather ... fur' have been destroyed,but also that the way of life that she has resolved to continue is all butextinct:

The late August air was coldWith a presage of frost.The islands had lostTheir mirage-mooring in the airAnd lay dark on the burnished waterAgainst the sunset flare-Standing ruins of blackened spiresCharred by the fury of fires

16 McDougall gives 'Dec. 1933' as the date of composition of the fonner and 'Autumn 1934'for the latter (25).



That had passed that way,̂ ''That were smouldering and dying out in the WestAt the end of the day. (Green Cloister, 53)

At the outset of the poem, the islands had been 'hronze-green ... [with]cedars and pines.' Now^ the trees are 'Charred' remnants whose figurationas 'ruins' and 'spires' brings with it the suggestion that Christianity hasfared no better than the fur trade at the hands of the fire that has devas-tated the forest - the fire, perhaps, of the modernity whose baleful effectsScott had bemoaned in 'Poetry and Progress' (1922), 'Ode for the KeatsCentenary' (1926), and elsewhere.

More obviously than 'A Scene at Lake Manitou,' 'At Gull Lake: August,1810 ' returns to the theme of racial doubleness and conflicted conscious-ness that Scott had engaged decades earlier in 'The Onondaga Madonna'and 'The Half-Breed Girl.' Based on an incident in Alexander Henry's NewLight on the Early History ofthe Great Northwest (1897), the poem is set on thelake of its title in what is now Saskatchewan, where 'two camps are pitchedon the shore,' one belonging to 'Tabashaw Chief of the Saulteaux' and theother to a Scottish trader from the Orkney Islands named Nairne {GreenCloister, 54-55). This racial binarism is replicated in the poem's femaleprotagonist, Keejigo, who is the 'daughter of Launay / The Normandyhunter / And Oshawan of the Saulteaux' and is now the 'third of [Taba-shaw's] wives.' Like the half-breed girl of Scott's earlier poem, Keejigo is'Troubled by fugitive visions' and 'Dreams of sounds unheard - / Theechoes of an echo' that are 'Vague as shadows cast by a shadow,' and - tojudge by the fact that they lead her to identify Nairne as 'her hero' -manifestations of a European racial memory inherited from her father. InKeejigo's case, the result of her dual racial origins is a conflicted conscious-ness that issues in a desperate desire to 'Release the captive /Heal the wound'in her being by offering herself 'body and spirit' to Nairne {Green Cloister,

55-56).Since 'the wound' is racial and genetic, it cannot be healed, however, and

the ensuing events bespeak the dreadful consequences of attempting toaffirm a biological inheritance in adverse cultural circumstances: afterNairne has twice rejected her out fear 'of the venom of Tabashaw,' Keejigois disfigured and blinded by the chief and then 'dragged ... away' andthrown 'over ... [a] bank / Like a dead dog' by his 'old wives' {Green

17 See Mnemographia Ganadensis 1:173-74 for the similarly blighted landscape of FrancesArme Hopkins's Relics ofthe Primaeval Forest (circa 1885) as a comment on the vanishingway of life of the Native peoples, and the following passage in Ocean to Ocean that may bein the background of Scott's poem: 'Before us, at times, [lay] a grove of dark green spruce,and beyond the sombre wood, the infinitely more sombre grey of the mountains. Wherethe wood has been burnt, bare blackened poles seemed to be only a screen hung before,half revealing, half concealing, what was beyond' (229).


766 D.M.R. BENTLEY

Cloister, 36-^7). In hriefly descrihing the suhsequent fate of Keejigo, theconcluding lines of the poem imply that her proper place - the place of aMetis - is either among Native people or in the natural world:

... Keejigo came no more to the camps of her people;Only the midnight moon knew^ where she felt her way.Only the leaves of autumn, the snows of winterKnew where she lay. (Green Cloister, 58)

But hetween these lines and the description of the mutilation and expulsionof Keejigo comes a passage that gathers up the poem's repeated referencesto the firmament - for example, the name 'Keejigo' means 'star of themorriing' and earlier in the poem she wears 'A half-moon of powder-hlue/ One her hrow'; 'The beauty of peace' is typified by 'The twilight moon /Coloured like a prairie lily [and] / The round moon of pure snow,' and soon'^ - to suggest that, although the whereabouts of Keejigo's physical beingare unknown, her spirit has ascended to a realm where race and colourcease to exist:

The setting sun struck the retreating cloudWith a rainbow, not an arc but a columnBuilt with the glory of seven metals;Beyond the purple deeps of the vortexFell the quivering vines of the lightning.The wind withdrew the veil from the shrine of the moon.She rose changing her dusky shade for the glowOf the prairie lily, till free of all blemish of colourShe came to her zenith without a cloud or a star,A lovely perfection, snow-pure in the heaven of midnight.After the beauty of terror the beauty of peace. (Green Cloister, 58 )

But if Keejigo's spirit has transcended the psychological and sexualproblems engendered by her racial duality, the phrases 'dusky shade' and'blemish of colour' in this passage, coupled with the fact that 'white' is aracial category as well as a fusion of all colours that is no colour, betray the

18 A further aspect of the poem's emphasis on binarisms is the contrast between 'The Beautyof Peace' and 'The Beauty of Terror,' which manifests itself Ln 'Wind-rush ... lightning,'and 'A storm-cloud ... Scored with livid ropes of hail' and 'Quick with nervous vines ofUghtning,' descriptions to which Grant may also have contributed. See Ocean to Ocean:'Every form of beauty was combined in the sky at this time.... ahead of us and overheadwas a swollen black cloud.... Extending from this... the expanse was a dun-coloured masslivid with lightning, and... torrents of rain were pouring, and nearing us every moment.... lightning rushed towards the earth in straight and zigzag currents' (89).



very racist assumptions that, for Scott, made mixed racial origins the sourceof conflict and confusion that were insoluble on this side of the grave.

In recent years, Homi K. Bhabha, Paul Gilroy, Stuart Hall, and numerousother theorists and critics have argued and demonstrated that, far frombeing the source of the conflicts and confusions of the sort imagined byScott, mixed racial origins can be productive of a hybridity and syncretismthat is creative, liberating, and empowering. To Scott, such thinking wouldprobably seem at best partially true, especially in the context of miscegena-tion and its results, for, as has been seen, he could celebrate the 'marri[age]'of European and Native in the singing of a hymn, but regarded actualmarriages - sexual relationships - between Natives and Europeans as thesource of generations of individuals in whom racial and cultural differ-ences are not eradicated but internalized in such a way that the suppressedalterity becomes a spectre that manifests itself with varying degrees ofpsychological and social disturbance and destructiveness. It is of courseimportant to observe and ponder the fact that these were the views of aman who for decades, as both a major poet and a senior civil servant,helped to shape perceptions of Canada's Native peoples and peoples ofmixed race and to frame and execute policies conceming their treatmentand the treatment of their cultures. To many people in his own day anddoubtless many more today, Scott's belief that 'the happiest future for theIndian race is absorption into the general population' {Addresses, 1:212) wasand is repellent. Yet to read his poems about women of mixed race andculture only in this light, to overlook their manifest pathos and sympathy,to ignore or resist their emotional power is to negate part of their work aspoems and to deny Scott his just portion of the 'sensitive discernment' thatcoexisted with his ideological assumptions and at least to some extentsupports his conviction, expressed a year before his death, that 'the artistictemperament' is the most reliable guide to 'native qualities and also ... [to]their modification as they were gradually being overcome by an alienculture' {Addresses, 2:485). It is also to deprive the poems of their interestand significance as a testament to Scott's repeated poetic engagement withNative cultures and with his fear of their potential to compromise anddisrupt the culture of which he was a part and an exponent.

More than half a century after Scott's death and several centuries awayfrom the time when he believed the problems between Canada's Nativepeoples and the newcomers would be 'finally' solved, there are grounds forpositive reflection and an intriguing reflection of his views in an event thatoccurred as this essay was taking shape: the 'pilgrimage' in the latesummer of 2004 of a group of Cree Indians of 'mixed blood' from

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 7^, NUMBER 2, SPRING 2006

768 D.M.R. BENTLEY

Saskatchewan to the Orkney Islands to meet descendants of their common'forefathers' (Boswell). The events in Scotland included a '"homecoming"concert' in which 'feather-dressed dancers from the Canadian plains andtheir fiddle-wielding Orcadian cousins perform[ed] side-by-side.' '"The tripwas a magical voyage into our heritage,"' said Wes Stevenson, the vice-president of First Nations University who led the group: '"It was reallyinteresting and almost eerie when we met these relatives.... They showedus pictures of their ancestors and in some cases the people coming fromCanada had the very same pictures. It sent shivers up my spine"' (qtd inBoswell). 'Magical... almost eerie ... pictures of ... ancestors ... shivers up[the] spine': inadvertently recalling the tropes and terms of Scott's poemsof racial haunting, Stevenson's words make the poems' apprehensions andapparitions strangely present yet absent, leaving them far distant in thewell-wrought crypt of Victorian colonialism but summoning them forthinto the russet and dissipating light of another place and time and adifferent way of thinking. 'To be "in-between" the established racial normsoften causes a crisis of identification' for 'people of mixed race,' WarrenCariou had observed some four years before Stevenson's 'magical voyage'in a review article on David Day's The Visions and E^evelations ofSt Louis theMetis, Robert Hunter's Red Blood: One (Mostly) White Guy's Encounters withthe Native World, and Gregory Scofield's Thunder through My Veins: TheMemoir of a Metis Childhood and I Knew Two Metis Women: The Lives ofDorothy Scofield and Georgina Houle Young; 'however, the acknowledgementof hybridity can also be seen as a radical claim of self-determinism, and anact of resistance against the colonial imperative of clarifying racialboundaries' (141).

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