Review of Royally Wronged: The Royal Society of Canada and Indigenous Peoples, by Constance Backhouse, et al., eds, and It Was Dark There All the Time: Sophia Burthen and the Legacy of Slavery in Canada, by Andrew Hunter

Reframing history as constructed by white people is a challenge met in these notable books.Both directly address the construction of knowledge itself as the ground of racial injustice, and the writers try hard to avoid committing new offences of their own in their necessarily proprietary roles as scholars working from within academic frames of reference.Royally Wronged answers a 2017 call for papers by the Royal Society of Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Task Force.The Task Force requested studies addressing the Society's and Canadian scholars' historical complicity in producing "disastrous interactions" (6) between white settlers and Indigenous Peoples.Some of the fourteen interdisciplinary essays in the volume focus on the origins of the RSC and the influence of Duncan Campbell Scott, long-time Society member and president from 1921-1932, and creator of ignominious policies governing Canadian residential schools; others consider how the RSC has shaped Canadian scholarship in general.Indigenous and non-Indigenous contributors speak from a range of disciplinary perspectives including history, law, anthropology, archaeology, political science, education, social sciences, and literature.They assess the role of the RSC in perpetuating rather than challenging academic mindsets that fostered limited and limiting views of Indigenous reality, experience, and knowledge.Constance Backhouse and Carole Gerson in their opening arguments establish the scope of the volume and emphasize the odd trajectory of Scott's career.Groomed by the Society for each of the positions he eventually held within it, he was promoted through its ranks based primarily on personality and social connections, despite his mediocrity as a poet and scholar.Outshone especially in the early years by more accomplished academics and writers comprising the majority of RSC membership, Scott nevertheless gradually garnered immense power in the organization that, in turn, enhanced his status as the "principal architect" of Indigenous policy.Like many of his colleagues who saw themselves as supporters of Indigenous people, Scott espoused racialized conceptions of them ranging from condescendingly appreciative to openly unsympathetic.Backhouse and others contend that Scott's obliviousness to systemic racism cannot be excused as simply the common ignorance of his era.Shedding fascinating light on his conscious rejection of views opposing his own is Gerson's account of Scott's grudging preoccupation with the works of celebrated Mohawk poet Pauline Johnson.By analyzing their works in tandem over time, Gerson reveals how Scott both appropriated and repudiated Johnson's perspectives in an ongoing, implied dialogue of which Johnson herself remained unaware.Further evidence of how Scott's and other RSC members' publications perpetuated the

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