Years ago while rummaging through a used book store in Victoria I ran across and bought a two volume biography of the archbishop of St. Boniface, Manitoba who was installed in 1853. His term ended with his death in 1894. The biography was written by Dom Benoit, Superior of the Regular Canons of the Immaculate Conception of Canada after 1894 and was published in 1904. Dom Benoit’s story is worthy of a blog post in and of itself but his recounting of the life of Mgr. Taché is truly monumental, running to over 1400 pages. Much of it is based on Taché’s letters and reports but Benoit’s research is far-ranging and comprehensive. Of course this isn’t a critical biography. It’s definitely written by someone who admired and respected his subject. Still, the work that went into producing this work is impressive.

That said, when I first opened the pages of La Vie de Mgr Taché, Archevêque de St-Boniface I was struck by the narrative’s accounts of travelling long distances in birch bark canoes with very few of the comforts most of us would find necessary on a modern camping trip. It was about how saintly and long-suffering the missionaries were. I was also struck by the depictions of the First Nations people the missionaries encountered on their travels. They were at best condescending and at worse blatantly racist towards them. But, it’s complicated. We should not feel superior to the missionaries Dom Benoit follows in his narrative. In fact, the default setting in our relations with people we encounter in the world who are not like us is racism and/or xenophobia. It’s the rare person in our culture who can see beyond the blanket prejudgments of others that is pervasive in our workplaces, our communities, our playgrounds, our restaurants and our homes. Beyond the overt racism,which I expected, in the excerpt you are about to read , there is another message that I found even more interesting.

First, read the following:

From: Vie de Monseigneur Taché, Archevêque de St. Boniface by Dom Benoit, Superior of the Regular Canons of the Immaculate Conception of Canada. Published in a limited edition by the Librairie Bauchemin, Montréal, Québec, 1904.

On page 44, Benoit quotes a book by Mgr Laflèche the title of which is Etat général des Missions de la Rivière Rouge.  This is the text in my translation. It’s not clear when this quotation was written but it was around 1850.

“From the moral point of view, a distinction must be made between  the woods and the prairie savages. The prairie savages, who are the Blackfoot, the Assiniboine, the Cree and a large part of the Saulteux, are the worse type and I do not believe it is an exaggeration to say that these people occupy the lowest rung of the human ladder. This state of degeneration and wickedness derives from their way of life; they can be found in large camps of 60 to 80 lodges and often more, and they lead a wandering and lazy existence following the innumerable herds of bison that feed and clothe them. When we witness the disgusting lives of these savages we understand that the penance of toil imposed upon man by his sin has been for his happiness and not for his misfortune…If the prairie tribes have become the bilge of all the vices that degrade man, that is, when theft, murder and everywhere terrible debauchery have become daily practice for a large number of these barbarians, it is because work is unknown to them.”

Benoit continues:

“The woods savages, who are the Montagnais, some Cree, Maskegons and Sauteux, have a way of life much different from the former. The poor quality of the lands they occupy forces them to live apart from each other and the land is sparsely populated: on first coming to this land one would be tempted to believe that mankind had yet to settle since there is so little evidence of its presence. They do not have, like the former, herds of bison to feed them when they are hungry or to clothe them when they are cold. They prey on somewhat rare and wary deer. They sometimes fall upon roaming herds of cariboo, but it takes time and patience to kill one. Fishing in certain rivers also offers them a resource to fend off hunger. It is such that these nations must live a much more active existence than the others if they do not wish to disappear. It is rare to find more than two or three families together and these families are always related to one another. It is to this active and remote existence that we must attribute the different morals between the woods and the plains savages. They are generally at peace with the world, are horrified at the thought of theft and murder, just like white people. Although they practice polygamy they are nowhere near as debauched at the others and we do not encounter crimes against nature as is evident on the plains.”

Alright, so it’s obvious the writers have no time for the plains nations. They are much more sympathetic towards the woods nations. Why? Well, according to them, the plains nations are idle, ‘lazy’ and indolent. They (only applying to the men, of course) only ‘work’ intermittently when in need of food or clothing. The woods nations on the other hand had to work hard to make a living.  Their lives were not easy. Laflèche’s argument, echoed by Benoit, is that the problem with the plains ‘savages’ is that they didn’t understand that their fate for original sin was toil. According to the Bible, when Adam and Eve were thrown out of the Garden of Eden, what was their fate? They now had to work for a living. Apparently the plains people just didn’t get the memo. Their bad.

It’s easy to argue that the writers here are racist, but John A. Macdonald, the first Canadian Prime Minister said some equally racist things about aboriginal people many times and completely unapologetically. So did my parents, and they are not exceptional. I don’t believe that people today are, on average, any less racist or xenophobic than the people of the mid-nineteenth century. We may express it differently today, but generally, we are no less racist than we were 150 years ago. Times have not changed much.

In my next post, more of Dom Benoit.