Note from Andrea: Today we’re excited to bring you a very special guest post by Rachel Bryant. This post was previously published on her blog (https://rachelbryant.ca), and she has graciously given us permission to repost it here! Enjoy!
Rachel Bryant is a is a Settler Canadian researcher who divides her time between the unceded territories of the Mi’kmaq and Wolastoqiyik peoples. She is a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of English at Dalhousie University in K’jipuktuk/Halifax and the author of The Homing Place: Indigenous and Settler Literary Legacies of the Atlantic (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2017). She spends most of her time in Menahkwesk/Saint John with her partner and their two babies.
Yesterday, the New York Times published a fairly smarmy piece by Daniel Victor, titled “No, Mr. Trump, Canada Did not Burn Down the White House in the War of 1812.” Here is the crux of Victor’s argument:
“No, Canada did not burn down the White House during the War of 1812, which was fought with Britain over maritime rights. What is now Canada was not yet a country in 1812, but rather British colonies.
Canada didn’t become a nation until 1867, long after British troops did, in fact, burn down the White House in 1814. The fire gutted the president’s house along with several other crucial structures in Washington, which was still a relatively small town when the seat of government moved there 14 years earlier.
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So you can’t really pin that on Canada, considering that Canada didn’t exist.”
Who is responsible for history? Reading Victor’s piece, I was reminded of another article that ran in the New York Times — this one by the Irish Member of Parliament William Trant, originally published in The Westminster Review in 1895. “Canada has never fought the Indians,” Trant argued in that piece,
“and she will not begin to do so now. Never has Canada had an Indian war; an Indian massacre is unknown in the annals of her history. She is too poor to seek glory by slaughtering the natives born of her soil, and too proud to defame her character or stain her escutcheon.”
In the first chapter of The Homing Place, I discuss how this kind of logic was developed to intentionally absolve Settler Canadians of everything that happened on Turtle Island prior to 1867. If the people who today call themselves “Canadians” spontaneously manifested with Confederation, then Settler Canada can’t be implicated in wars fought before that date — we remain pure and guiltless in everything from the Pequot War to Father Le Loutre’s War and beyond, even if the people who fought in those wars were our direct biological or cultural forebears.
This is a context in which Canada actively chooses to situate and understand itself, and as I’ve argued elsewhere, such framing makes it very difficult for Settler Canadians to understand or historicize contemporary eruptions and ongoing conflicts, such as the clash at Elsipogtog in 2013. We have protected our societies against history in an effort to make our present offences, systematic or otherwise, mostly unintelligible and even unpredictable to ourselves. And this makes us bad neighbours.
In Red Ink, Drew Lopenzina talks about how important the idea of continuance is for Indigenous writers and scholars seeking to help heal the cultural and historical ruptures that have been caused by the violence of colonialism. Many Indigenous scholars are invested in the work of demonstrating continuity — demonstrating that their cultures and nations are the same cultures and nations that were here before the Europeans showed up and started shouting over everyone else. Meanwhile, it seems that societies like mine have been involved in the reverse work — in establishing or maintaining our discontinuity with a past that we can’t bear to claim or associate with.
We aren’t the only settler society who has changed its name and formation over the course of time, and I can’t help but wonder if Victor would extend this same disassociative logic to the United States, rendering history of the New England and Virginia colonies (for example) suddenly and exclusively British. Who owns the history of the Massachusetts Bay Puritans or the Salem witchcraft trials? What nations were produced by and through the New England colonial wars? Which chapter of my British history textbook contains the story of Benjamin Franklin’s kite experiment?
I understand that poking fun at Donald Trump’s endless gaffes can be a fun activity, even if it is a bit like shooting fish in a barrel. But given the historical mythology that pieces like Victor’s are helping to perpetuate this week, I wonder if we should’ve just left this one alone.
Thank you so much to Rachel for her permission to share this blog post with you! If you enjoyed this post, please consider sharing it on the social media platform of your choice! And don’t forget to check back on Sunday for a brand new Canadian history roundup. The regular length! See you then!
You’re ignoring that the men who put torch to town were British regulars whisked from the Iberian Peninsula, and units made up of freed slaves.
I agree entirely with you, Rachel, on the way we pick and choose labels that suit sanitized narratives. If we say that “Canada/Canadians” fought the War of 1812, we must also consider that “Canada/Canadians” were responsible to a great extent for the shape of native-settler relations in the same period and thereafter.
However, unless I am missing something, the title of this article is misleading. The military forces that disembarked in the Chesapeake and proceeded to Washington did not consist to any significant degree of British North Americans or Canadian militiamen. These were British regulars who had fought in Europe and who were led by British officers. We must not imagine any substantial force of “Canadians” arriving en masse in Maryland in 1814, although it is conceivable that a small percentage of the soldiers and sailors had been born in British America.
Hey Patrick, thanks for your thoughts! Do you think there is a way to distinguish between distinct groups of British subjects, all engaged in conflict with what was at this time the US, without separating Canada from its colonial legacies? I can’t help but feel like these kinds of distinctions are often used as devices that, especially in the context of Settler/Indigenous relations on northern Turtle Island, help divorce Canada from those legacies.
We can firmly establish that non-Canadians and non-British North Americans “did burn down the White House” while acknowledging the settler betrayal and dispossession of Native groups. And yes, we must make distinctions among British subjects. Perhaps there is cause to lump Scottish Highlanders, French Canadians, American-born immigrants, free Blacks, and the Colonial Office in certain contexts, but it seems more appropriate to the historical enterprise to be as precise as possible. The idea isn’t to absolve anyone but to do justice to the many different interests and agencies (e.g. did they all share a single, coherent colonialist agenda?) that molded historical events – just as we would for Indigenous groups, where distinctions of identity also matter. In any event, this is all to say that the English-born infantrymen who sailed from Europe to be marched through Maryland and the District of Columbia were not Canadian by any stretch of the mind (nor was that campaign orchestrated by Canadians). Renée Lafferty makes a case for why this matters: https://theconversation.com/what-donald-trump-doesnt-know-about-the-war-of-1812-97997
Patrick, I think what Rachel is trying to argue is that the specific ethnic heritage of the individuals involved have been erased and rewritten as Canadian, as part of the larger discourse around the War of 1812 as a Canadian victory, and that if we want to claim historical victories as Canadian, we need to also claim the massacres and other atrocities. She’s not arguing that the ethnic heritage of the individuals who physically burned down the White House doesn’t matter, but rather discussing how the very idea of “Canadian” history before Confederation is shaped. Much like in Adam Barker’s previous blog post.
Understood. My quibble – perhaps a very small one – was the example, but we certainly agree on the principle.
Rachel, could we not expand this to accept responsibility for the betrayal of Indigenous allies in the treaty of Utrecht?