That an Indian ceases to be such in the eye of the law, and in all practical relations to society, when he becomes an educated industrious member of the general community, and competes not only for its privileges but for its highest honours, is inevitable. But it is not with the Indian as with the Negro mixed race. The privileges and the disabilities of the Indian ward may both be cast off; but a certain degree of romance attaches to Indian blood, when accompanied with the culture and civilisation of the European. The descendants of Brant and other distinguished native chiefs are still proud to claim their lineage, where the physical traces of such an ancestry would escape the eye of a common observer. Traces of Indian descent may be recognised among ladies of attractive refinement and intelligence, and with certain mental as well as physical traits which add to the charm of their society. Similar indications of the blood of the aborigines are familiar to Canadians in the gay assemblies of a Governor-General’s receptions, in the halls of Legislature, in the diocesan synods and other ecclesiastical assemblies, and amongst the undergraduates of Canadian universities.
But the condition of men and women of mixed blood, admitted to all the privileges of citizenship, and mingling in perfect equality with all other members of the community, is in striking contrast to that of the occupants of the Indian reserves, where they are settled, for the most part in isolated bands, in the midst of a progressive White population. Such a condition is manifestly an unfavourable one, and one, moreover, which cannot be regarded as other than transitional. They are confessedly dealt with as wards, in a state of pupilage.
A growing sense of the necessity for some modification of this system has been felt for a considerable time; and in 1867 “An Act to encourage the gradual Civilisation of the Indian Tribes,” received the royal assent. This Act avowedly aims at the “gradual removal of all legal distinctions between them and Her Majesty’s other Canadian subjects; and to facilitate the acquisition of property, and of the rights accompanying it, by such individual members of the said tribes as shall be found to desire such encouragement, and to have deserved it.”
That the ultimate result of this will involve the disappearance of the Indian as a distinct race is inevitable. He will be absorbed into the dominant race; not to be displaced or driven out of the community; but to be perpetuated, as the precursors of the blonde Aryans of Europe still survive in the “dark Whites” that now, in undisputed equality, enjoy all the rights of citizenship of a common race. They will indeed constitute but a small remnant of the nations of Euramerican blood. That whole tribes and peoples of the American aborigines have been exterminated in the process of colonisation of the New World is no more to be questioned, than that a similar result followed from the Roman conquest and colonisation of Britain. Nevertheless, long and careful study of the subject has satisfied me that a larger amount of absorption of the Indian into the Anglo-American race has occurred than is generally recognised.
Fully to appreciate this, it is necessary to retrace the course of events by which America has been transferred to the descendants of European colonists. At every fresh stage of colonisation, or of pioneering into the wild West, the work has necessarily been accomplished by hardy young adventurers, or the hunters or trappers of the clearing. It is rare indeed for such to be accompanied by wives or daughters. Where they find a home they take to themselves wives from among the native women; and their offspring share in whatever advantages the father transplants with him to this home in the wilderness. To such mingling of blood, in its least favourable aspects, the prejudices of the Indian present little obstacle. Henry, in his narrative of travel among the Cristineaux on Lake Winipagoos upwards of a century ago, after describing the dress and allurements of the women, adds: “One of the chiefs assured me that the children borne by their women to Europeans were bolder warriors and better hunters than themselves.” This idea recurs in various forms. The half-breed lumberers and trappers are valued throughout Canada for their hardihood and patient endurance; the half-breed hunters and trappers are equally esteemed in the Hudson Bay territory; and beyond their remotest forts Dr. Kane reported, as his experience within the Arctic circle, that “the half-breeds of the coast rival the Esquimaux in their powers of endurance.”
Mr. Charles Horetskey, in his Canada on the Pacific, after remarking on the well-known fact that Japanese junks have been known to drift on to the Pacific coast of America, and so contribute new elements of Mongolian character to the native population, thus proceeds to notice another element of hybridity. “There is,” he says, “another mixture in the blood on the west coast of Vancouver Island, and a very marked one—the Spanish, owing to the Spaniards having long had a settlement at Nootka. Strangely enough, the Spanish cast of countenance does not show in the women, who have the same flat features as their sisters to the eastward. Nor is it so noticeable among the young men, many of whom, however, have beards—a most unusual appendage among American Indians, and of course traceable to the cause referred to. The features are more observable among the older men, many of whom, with their long, narrow, pointed faces and beards, would, if washed, present very fair models for Don Quixote.” Within the region of Alaska, Russian traders have contributed another element to the mingling of races; and Mr. Wm. H. Dall, in his Alaska and its Resources, states specifically the number of the Creoles or half-breeds of that region as 1421. But the present condition of society there favours their increase. In 1842, they were, for the first time, qualified to enter the Church as priests; and in 1865, the American Expedition found Ivan Pavloff, the son of a Russian father and a native woman of Kenai, filling the office of Bidarshik, or commander of the post at Nulato. He was legally married to a full-blooded Indian woman, by whom he had a large family.
Another intrusive element, that of the Asiatic Mongol, has awakened alarm for the possible future of the white race of settlers, both in America and in Australia. In 1875 the number of Chinese in California amounted to 130,000; 19,000 arrived in a single year. They speedily made their way to the New England States, and to Eastern Canada; till it has been deemed politic to forbid further immigration. It is the intrusion of a type approximating to the American Mongol, and so has a special interest in its bearing on the ethnology of the continent; for here we see the approximate types of Asia and America brought into contact, it may be as descendants of a common stock, separated through unnumbered centuries by untraversed oceans.
The Indians of Vancouver Island and British Columbia were estimated in 1860 to number 75,000. The observations of Paul Kane in 1846 showed that a considerable half-breed population already existed then in the vicinity of every Hudson Bay fort. But at the later date the reported richness of the gold-diggings was attracting hundreds of settlers; and as usual, in such cases, nearly all males. The admixture of blood with the native population consequent on such a social condition is inevitable; and though such a population is least likely to leave behind it any permanent traces among settled civilised colonists, yet the condition of things which it presents illustrates the social life of every frontier settlement of the New World. Everywhere the colonisation of the outlying territory begins with a migration of males, and by and by the cry comes from Australia, Canada, and elsewhere, for stimulated female emigration. It is a state of things old as the dispersion of the human race, and typified in such ancient legends as the Roman Rape of the Sabines. The abstract of the United States census of 1860 showed that the old settled states of New England are affected even more than European countries by this inevitable source of the disparity of the sexes. In Massachusetts, at that date, the females outnumbered the males by upwards of 37,000; while in Indiana, on the contrary, they fell short of the males by 48,000.
In the latter case, on a frontier state, where the services of the Indian women must necessarily be courted in any attempt at domestic life, intermixture between the native and intruding races is inevitable, and the feeling with which it is regarded finds expression constantly through the genuine New World lyrics of Joaquin Miller, with his “brown bride won from an Indian town”—
Where some were blonde and some were brown,