The American Empire and the Fourth World

John Abbott is a professor of history at Laurentian University’s Algoma University College. He is the co-author of The Border at Sault Ste Marie and The History of Fort St. Joseph.

Anthony Hall believes that the contemporary American doctrine of
pre-emptive attack on entities supporting international terrorism has
its roots in the 18th and 19th centuries, when the state and its agents
swept Amerindian communities out of its continental path and onto
reserves. This policy of unilateral Aboriginal clearances was carried
out in the face of a well-defined alternative policy of negotiation and
accommodation, implemented in New York by Sir William Johnson under the
auspices of the British Imperial Indian Department after 1755. His
administration of Indian affairs stressed respect for Aboriginal
persons, communities, and territorial rights. Hall argues that this
enlightened British imperial approach, rejected by the United States,
informed Canadian Indian policy after Confederation and, despite
numerous transgressions on the part of policy-makers and administrators,
continues to exercise a salutary influence. The author suggests that
anglo-Canadian practice offers the United States and other nations that
have dispossessed their fourth-world communities an effective model and
a second chance.

The innumerable historical details and permutations associated with
this thesis are set out in some 550 pages of text, followed by manifold
footnotes and a lengthy index. That should not deter non-academic
readers, for Hall writes with clarity, develops his theme systematically
if somewhat discursively, and argues cogently within the confines of his
premises. Those premises are conservative, valuing community and group
over individual and private property rights. For him, the overarching
international interest, and the development of an integrated
international community, trump national interests.

His tone is that of the Canadian Red Tory, in a range somewhere between
Joe Clark and the prophet Jeremiah. The book is a tract and a missionary
statement (since the American Revolution some Canadians have been
hopeful proselytizers, purveying the gospel of first of an
Anglo-Northern, then a reformed British Imperial, and now an
internationalized, institutionalized human brotherhood). One wonders,
however, why Americans, whose employment of classic liberal virtues has
helped to create a civil society of unparalleled prosperity, a strong
sense of identity, and an acute appreciation of the national interest,
would accept dictation from a Canadian. Americans, much like Quebec
nationalists, may suspect that Canada is not a “real” country. Very
little of the “gristle” present at Confederation has hardened into
bone, and even that threatens to return to its original condition as
Canadian governments make multicultural fundamentalism the state
religion, and countenance—even fund—those who style their
communities as nations.