Floating Voice: Duncan Campbell Scott and the Literature of Treaty 9

Paul Hjartarson is an associate professor of English at the University
of Alberta.

Throughout his working life, Duncan Campbell Scott pursued two very
different careers: one as a civil servant (who from 1913 until his
retirement in 1932 was deputy superintendent of the federal Department
of Indian Affairs) and the other as a writer (most commonly grouped with
the “Confederation Poets,” he frequently took indigenous peoples as
his subject). Until the mid-1970s, there was little interest in
Scott’s activities as deputy superintendent; he was primarily
remembered as a poet and short-story writer. In the past two decades, as
Stan Dragland observes in Floating Voice, “the balance of interest,
even that of many literary people, has been shifting toward the record
of the civil servant, and the question that is always asked by those who
read his Indian poems in the light of his administrative record is: how
could the same man be responsible for both?”

In Floating Voice Dragland confronts that question. The book is divided
into two parts: in the first, Dragland weighs Scott’s record as deputy
superintendent, particularly his role in the negotiation of Treaty 9
with the Cree and Ojibway peoples of Northern Ontario in the summer of
1905 and 1906; in the second, he examines Scott’s writing on Native
peoples, particularly the poetry that dates from those treaty trips. The
book’s strength lies both in Dragland’s long-standing admiration for
Scott’s best writing and in his steadfast resolve not to be an
apologist for Scott the civil servant. “The reader who hopes to see
the apparently contradictory sides of Scott slide together, the problem
solved,” Dragland declares in the introduction “might just as well
stop reading now. It is impossible to strip from Scott his portion of
guilt without concluding that what happened to First Nations people
under him does not matter, and yet it is impossible to condemn him as a
mere culprit when much of the evidence of his whole life and the era he
lived in, not to mention the writing, suggests the superficiality of
that judgement.” Between these contending views, Dragland seeks to
navigate. The course he chooses is beset with difficulties, but his
negotiation of them makes Floating Voice a fascinating study.