Chapter 11. Politics to 1860
11.15 Indigenous Politics at Mid-Century
Important changes in the relationship between Indigenous and colonial peoples began in the 1830s. As early as the mid-18th century there was an appetite in Britain and in some of the North American colonies for the abolition of slavery, but not much came of it. We have seen how Governor John Graves Simcoe made some modest moves in this direction in the 1790s. In 1807 Parliament in London passed the Slave Trade Act, which put an end to the legal trafficking in slaves across the empire. In 1833 Britain passed the Slavery Abolition Act.
Improvement
The rise in support for abolitionism in the 1830s pertains to Indigenous people because it was a landmark in a movement that came to be known as humanitarianism. Generally, British opinion shapers and political leaders were in the process of developing a more egalitarian perspective generally.[1] In part this sprang from the acceptance of individualism as an ideal. The link between individualism and humanitarianism may seem like a contradiction, but the connection was simple: Enlightenment-era individualism stressed the autonomy and value of the individual. If everyone had an equal moral significance then, regardless of race or culture, colour or religion, they were entitled to equivalent treatment or at least respect. This principle played out in many different ways when it came to Indigenous people globally, but in British North America it mostly took on the flavour of “improvement” and “civilization” of Native societies, one individual at a time.
After the War of 1812 and the end of Indigenous power around the Great Lakes, there appeared growing enthusiasm on the part of Euro-Canadians to “improve” Indigenous peoples by settling them in colonial-style villages, modifying their housing styles, teaching them farming and animal husbandry, setting up European-style schools, and enforcing Euro-Canadian-style gender relations. Missionary activity in British North America had been largely neglected since the Conquest, Protestants being evidently less interested in the task than were the Catholics. But from the 1820s on Protestant missionary activity accelerated in Upper Canada and the Maritimes, as it did throughout the rest of the British Empire. By the 1840s the missionary movement had made it all the way to the West Coast.
Set in that context of humanitarian thinking and expanding missionary interest in Indigenous societies, the timing of Britain’s mid-decade Select Committee on Aborigines is important. The Select Committee conducted a study of the treatment and condition of Indigenous peoples around the empire. What it found, of course, was that settler societies everywhere dispossessed Indigenous peoples of their lands and their means of making a living. Where Indigenous lands were at the disposal of Indigenous individuals or the community as a whole, there were also sales and further alienation of lands being made.
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