KevinHutchings.ca

NASSR 2015 Aboriginal Rights Panel July 10th, 2015

I’m currently researching and writing the paper I’ll present on the Aboriginal Rights panel at next month’s NASSR conference in Winnipeg. My brief talk will sketch some of the Romantic-era contexts leading to the creation, in the later nineteenth century, of Canada’s oppressive residential school system. I will focus on the educational philosophy of John Strachan, educator of the “Family Compact,” Toronto’s first Anglican Bishop, and founder of Ontario’s first two universities (Kings and Trinity, both now incorporated into the University of Toronto). Strachan, incidentally, cultivated a transatlantic friendship with the celebrated Romantic-period poet Thomas Campbell, and his scathing poetic critique of the USA’s treatment of Native Americans is likely a response to Campbell’s Gertrude of Wyoming (1809). For an incisive meditation on the relationship between Romanticism and Aboriginal Rights, see Arden Hegele’s fine recent entry on the NASSR Grad Student Caucus site at http://www.nassrgrads.com/romanticism-aboriginal-rights-canada/.