Charm Offensive: Epideixis and a Microhistorical Reading of the Indian

This essay examines epideictic rhetoric in The Indian (1885-86), an Ontario newspaper edited by Dr. Peter Edmund Jones (Ojibwa). A microhistorical reading demonstrates that paper's epideixis aims to neutralize its Euro-settler readership's potential hostility towards First Nations peoples by appearing to endorse vanishing race and other colonialist stereotypes of them. In her extensive study Shooting Messenger: Historical Impediments to Mediation of Modern Aboriginality in Ontario, Kathleen Buddle traces history of First Nations-controlled media in province over past two hundred years to demonstrate that, since early nineteenth century, province's First Nations have developed and adapted technologies of mass communication to serve the contemporary communication requirements of their (98). Briefly mentioned in Buddle's discussion is The Indian, the first Native controlled newspaper in Canada (111), published between 1885 and 1886 from Hagersville, near Mississauga of New Credit and Six Nations on Grand River in Southern Ontario. Buddle points out that as a vehicle for public exchanges of written among First Nations readers, newspaper aimed to arm [First Nations] community with information they required to successfully resist attempts to break up reserves (112). Over twelve months of its publication, The Indian drew attention to urgent political and legal matters affecting First Nations people in North America. Yet, to contemporary readers, The Indian's repeated inclusion and apparent acceptance of most cliched colonial stereotypes of First Nations may undermine notion that paper served resistance purposes, as may its editor's unshakeable belief that Ontario should replace councils of hereditary chiefs with settler model of elected municipal governments, a proposed change viewed by some in Ontario's First Nations communities as assimilationist and therefore part of government attempt to break up reserves (Buddle 112). How can frequent appearance of First Nations stereotypes and advocacy of Euro-settler systems of governance in The Indian be understood as resistance? One answer involves reading The Indian as rhetoric in relation to Euro- settler audience that it courted in addition to its First Nations one. In this essay, I will argue that The Indian featured familiar Euro-settler stereotypes of Anishnabe--as subordinate, as vanishing, as requiring a colonial education--in order to appeal to a Euro-settler readership. The paper's deployment of these stereotypes and its often flattering treatment of colonial governing systems belong to an epideictic (or ceremonial) rhetoric that appears at first to endorse common Euro-settler assumptions about First Nations in order to then attack those assumptions in later issues. Made possible by editor Dr. Peter Edmund Jones's active solicitation, selection, and arrangement of materials for his newspaper, as well as his many editorial contributions to it, this rhetoric allows The Indian strategically to camouflage its more critical review of First Peoples' place in late nineteenth-century neo-colonial North America. The disarming tactics of this epideixis precipitate The Indian's challenge to these peoples' marginalized position in relation to Canadian state, and in particular to fact that they have many of responsibilities of national citizenship without its rights. Making this case through a document as varied in its contents as a newspaper calls for an elaboration of and rationale for methodology that justifies doing so, particularly since much work on early First Nations newspapers (Buddle; Coward, Newspaper, Murphy and Murphy) presents a broad overview of genre without resorting to kind of close reading that I will undertake here. The Indian consists of a diverse array of news articles, editorials, literary pieces, missionary memoirs, and regular columns. …

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