At the Ormsby Review, J.R. Miller, the author of a shelf of authoritative works on indigenous-settler relations, reviews Royally Wronged,
The book was commissioned by the Royal Society of Canada as a Truth and Reconciliation project, to examine the Society's dealings with indigenous peoples over its long history. And since the Society lists Duncan Campbell Scott as one of its presidents, and its Transactions are full of nineteenth-century (and not only nineteenth-century) essays in history and anthropology featuring comfortable white men writing about primitive and disappearing indigenous races, it should seem they would have a lot to find.
Miller isn't buying a lot of what they offer.
The opening of Miller's essay mostly sets forth a lot of small errors and mis-statements he finds. But its later parts make a strong argument that the contributors express their own complacency and their own sense of comfortable superiority when they dismiss out of hand the work of all the early anthropologists and historians who attempted, even in their own blinkered ways, to document and preserve what they could of societies and cultures that Canada was doing its best to extinguish.
Many of the authors who contributed to Royally Wronged do not understand earlier literature about Indigenous people or the scholarly context in which it was produced. Dr. Ian Wereley, for example, provides a list of papers focused on Indigenous peoples given at the RSC’s annual meeting and dismisses them as demonstrating “mixtures of curiosity and contempt” (p. 40). One of those presentations was an 1895 paper on “An Iroquois Condoling Council” by the eminent early anthropologist Horatio Hale. The rituals of condoling a group for losses to death and of requickening, or recognizing a successor to someone deceased, were central to Haudenosaunee governance, and over time the ceremonies came to constitute the format within which all Six Nations diplomacy took place. The casual dismissal of Hale’s “An Iroquois Condoling Council” is symptomatic of the lack of awareness of the significance of earlier scholarship that is found in the volume.
It's a tough critique and I suspect it may not be well received. It's worth reading.
