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The "Civilizing" of Indigenous People in Nineteenth-Century Canada*
IT HAS been claimed that the Victorian epoch is the colonial age par excellence and also that it is the period in which Europeans shifted from a range of relatively benevolent attitudes toward indigenous peoples to a more deeply negative racism.l This claim is associated with a second argument that there was a single modem global theory of "biological" racism, which began with Buffon and his views on animal types in the eighteenth century and was adumbrated in the nineteenth by imperialist pundits, such as H. M. Stanley on the Africans and Raffles on the Javanese and Malays.2 In this article I agree that the Victorian era marked a departure from earlier periods in its novel coinage of harsh racial attitudes toward indigenous people, but I dispute the suggestion that these always took a "biological" character. Further, I reject the claim that Victorian ethnicity should be called "modern," if by that one means that there was a great divide between, on the one hand, a period in which ethnicity was based on philosophical and moral doctrines and, on the other, "modern times"-the nineteenth and twentieth centuries-in which racism was based on natural science. Such a division is flawed in two respects. First, not all varieties of nineteenth-century racism depended on biological typecasting, and second, while Victorian racism might have been more pervasive, or more widespread and intrusive, than earlier varieties, it was quite distinct from twentieth-century attitudes to indigenous peoples. In order to demonstrate that there is no overarching modern theory of European colonial racism that can explain the perceptions and treatment of indigenous peoples, I shall examine the notion of "civilization" as it pertains to nineteenth-century Canada. There "civilization" largely depended on an advocacy of the virtue of a sophisticated material culture, which the indigenous people lacked. The intention behind this explanation is not to substitute another universal claim or constant (i.e., that nineteenth-century racist attitudes were always caused by a strong emphasis on the superior material culture of the European ethnic group) for one stating that all Victorian attitudes were derived from a belief in animal typology and natural science. Rather my intention is to plead for a more nuanced and accurate account of...