by John L. Tobias
Red Deer College
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Walter Hildebrandt. Views from Fort Battleford: Constructed Visions of an Anglo-Canadian West. Regina: Canadian Plains Research Center, 1994. Pp. x, 129. ISBN 0-88977-086-7.
By means of a study of the events in the Fort Battleford region in the decades from 1875 to 1890, Walter Hildebrandt shows how English Canada, under the guise of the National Policy, fastened its imperialist vision on the region. He explains how the North West Mounted Police served as an agent of this imperialism, and facilitated the government policies which had as their purpose to control the indigenous inhabitants of the region. In the process Hildebrandt also provides a review of the major revisionist interpretations of the National Policy as that policy applied to the Prairie West in this era.
Hildebrandt is especially good in dealing with the NWMP as a symbol and harbinger of a new social order that Anglo-Canadians were about to introduce into the west. This new social order ignored the local models of the indigenous peoples and sought to master the environment and impose British values on the people of the region. He stresses that these Anglo-Canadians feared nature, in contrast to the aboriginal peoples of the region, and that Anglo-Canadians tried to modify the landscape as quickly as they could.
Hildebrandt’s discussions of the architecture of the new-corners, and the layout of Fort Battleford and its buildings as demonstrating Anglo Canada’s desire to dominate the region, are particularly good on this subject.
Hildebrandt offers many interesting suggestions and insights on this theme of Anglo-Canadian determination to control the environment and its people. However, this reader wishes that his discussions of some of these themes were more fully developed. This is particularly true of his discussion of such matters as the entertainments and social activities which Hildebrandt claims marginalized indigenous peoples. It is also true of his suggestion that the natives had an alternative social and political order that was overlooked or ignored as a potential model.
In this reader’s opinion, Views from Fort Battleford needs to be a longer book for Hildebrandt to be more successful in the development of his thesis. More space is needed to permit Hildebrandt to reconcile his statements regarding his belief that the benevolent paternal-ism of the Mounted Police towards the Indians has been exaggerated by the more recent interpretations of the histories of the Prairie West. The evidence he presents for the 1876-1885 era supports these disputed interpretations. He also would have been able to provide a better explanation for the changes in police attitudes that occur after 1885, which he attributes to fear of further violence and the actions of local officials such as Indian Commissioner Hayter Reed. Hildebrandt does not take into account the role that Ottawa played in the change in policy, despite his earlier contentions that policy was made in Ottawa and the field personnel could only do what Ottawa permitted. A slightly longer book than one of 113 pages of text, might have allowed him more opportunity to provide fuller explanations.
Hildebrandt’s book is a very useful survey of the more recent historiography of the government policy as it applies to the Fort Battleford region. This reader only wishes that he had exercised a little more care with his bibliography and footnotes. In same instances Hildebrandt refers to an author in the text, but in the footnotes cites a different work by the author than the one where the author makes the particular argument Hildebrandt uses in the text. The bibliography does contain the correct work, but does not include the work that was cited in the footnote, and from which the lion’s share of the citations from that author are drawn.
Despite these few shortcomings, Views from Fort Battleford provides a good introduction to the National Policy and how the Anglo-Canadian vision came to prevail in the west.
Cree Chief Fine Day and his son Toostoos Awasis, a studio photograph taken at Battleford in 1896.
Source: RCMP Museum, Regina
Page revised: 26 September 2012
