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Dear Editor,
I have just read Lyle Dick’s article “Nationalism and Visual Media in Canada: The Case of Thomas Scott’s Execution” in your latest issue [No. 48, Autumn/Winter 2005]. I would like to make a correction and a comment.
On page 5 Dick states: “The same press was used to published The Nor’Wester from 1859 to 1869 and the Métis journal The New Nation during the resistance in early 1870.” This is not true.
In late 1869 William Coldwell and James Ross were planning to establish a second newspaper in the settlement, the Red River Pioneer. A press was brought in and set up. The first issue was partly printed when, on 2 December, the Métis National Committee stopped both this new newspaper and The Nor’Wester from publishing. The Settlement was temporarily without a newspaper. Coldwell and Company sold the Red River Pioneer to H. M. Robinson, and a new newspaper began to appear on 7 January 1870, the first issue containing the front and back pages of the defunct Red River Pioneer dated 1 December 1869! Any interested person can verify this for himself by consulting the New Nation microfilm available at the Legislative Library of Manitoba.
All during the life of the New Nation in 1870 the old Nor’Wester press lay idle. The New Nation continued to appear until 3 September 1870. In September John Christian Schultz purchased at auction the Nor’Wester press and a new newspaper The Manitoba News-Letter began publishing. It was this newspaper that Schultz used to subvert the volunteers of the Ontario Rifles, recently stationed at Fort Garry. The result was a “reign of terror” which saw the killing of Elzéar Goulet, the persecution of Métis, the many difficulties of Lieutenant-Governor Archibald and the mutiny of 18 February 1871. Schultz was carrying out at Red River policies arising from “Canada First”’s deliberations of the preceding April.
With all respect to Dick’s thesis on the subject of visual media in Canada, I must point out that it was the print media and “Canada First”’s connections in Ontario Orange lodges that so thoroughly aroused that province’s people in April of 1870. George Taylor Denison bragged about his part in the effort, [1] and the inflammatory editorials in the Telegraph and Globe may still be read by anyone wishing to find what Ontarians were reading in April of 1870. By the time the representation of Scott’s execution was published by the Canadian Illustrated News on 23 April the damage was effectively done. Government policy was paralyzed except where it happened to agree with “Canada First” policy, and that policy was punitive.
If in the 1990s Canadian people were taken in by this form of propaganda it was because their historians had not given them the facts.
Allen Ronaghan
Edmonton, Alberta
Lyle Dick responds:
I appreciate receiving Mr. Ronaghan’s comments and will respond to them in sequence.
For the treatment of early printing in the Red River settlement, I relied on Bruce Peel’s monograph Early Printing in the Red River Settlement, 1859-1870 and its Effect on the Riel Rebellion (1974), in which Peel referred to the “printing capability” of the Red River settlement as represented in its “one operational press on the eve of the political excitement which generated a flurry of broadsides” (Peel, 17). I inferred from this statement that this “one operational press” was used to publish the different newspapers that appeared around this time. Ronaghan states that a second press “was brought in” for Coldwell’s and James’s intended second newspaper Red River Pioneer. If he would kindly share a reference that can verify both the importation of this second press and that it was used to print the New Nation, the text of my article will be revised accordingly and his assistance acknowledged. However, this fact has no bearing on the overall argument of the article.
Regarding more substantial matters of interpretation, Ronaghan notes that the first publications to whip up indignation over Scott’s execution were text-based articles in Ontario newspapers, most notably the Telegraph and the Globe. I agree with him and said so in my article in the sentence on page 9: “In pronouncing the execution a murder, the Canadian Illustrated News echoed similar sentiments in the Toronto Globe and other Anglophone newspapers of central Canada.” In the same paragraph I also placed the Illustrated News engraving and texts within the context of the larger role of the central Canadian media in influencing the outcome of the Northwest Resistance and related events: “Collectively, these publications succeeded in stirring up public opinion against the provisional government, hastening Canada’s assemblage of a military force to take possession of Manitoba and forcing Riel to the sidelines.”
My argument was not that the engraving’s publication had a decisive impact on Canada’s suppression of Métis aspirations so much as it helped establish a pattern within the national media of applying visual stereotypes to the representation of Canada’s constituent peoples, especially Aboriginal peoples. In order to exert enduring effects, stereotypes need to be reinforced over time and that is probably where the significance of the engraved image of Scott’s execution resides. It has been republished often enough to become a readily recognizable illustration in the image repertoire of a large number of Canadians, although its meaning and historical use have not previously received much critical attention.
The continuing uncritical use of the 23 April 1870 image of the Scott execution in the national media is demonstrated in a recent newspaper article, “Witnessing Canada,” in The Globe and Mail, 4 January 2003, on page D3. Here, the Globe book review section reproduced a version of the Illustrated News engraving to illustrate selected excerpts from the book First Drafts: Eyewitness Accounts in Canadian History by J. L. Granatstein and Norman Hillmer. Readers might have assumed that the Scott image had graced the book being reviewed but in fact no illustrations were included in this book. Apparently, the Globe staff selected the image for its utility as a general signifier of eye-witness testimony in Canadian history. Thus, this incendiary tableau, probably drawn by a Montreal artist who had never visited Red River and based on inaccurate accounts of Scott’s execution, has been promoted by the national media to an emblem of truth itself.
Whether Canadians are “taken in by this form of propaganda,” to use Ronaghan’s words, is difficult to determine. What can more readily be documented is the historical role of the national media in generating and disseminating such images, usually in combination with texts, to promote particular ideological values. We will probably never be without stereotypes but historians can play a role in challenging readers of both journalistic and historical writing to critically evaluate images and texts, hopefully mitigating some of the negative impacts of stereotyping. If my article sparks some discussion along these lines, it will have served a useful purpose.
Lyle Dick
West Coast Historian
Parks Canada
1. G. T. Denison, The Struggle for Imperial Unity: Recollections and Experiences. Macmillan and Company, London, 1909, pages 23-32.
Page revised: 12 January 2011
