ayiman:

I thought that this passage was particularly relevant, as it deals specifically with popular perceptions of indigeneity and how those perceptions are created, reinforced, and propagated throughout colonial enterprise.

What’s most alarming about these portrayals is that, while dealing specifically with the indigenous in Canada, identical iterations of them can be found throughout the world, wherever colonial enterprise has inflicted itself upon an indigenous population.

The reasoning that engendered the creation of the treaty system and residential schools was, for their duration, also the lingua franca of mainstream newspapers. In general it avers that Aboriginals, when compared to white Canadians, exemplify three essentialized sets of characteristics - depravity, innate inferiority, and a stubborn resistance to progress.  These representations cross-pollinate and contain within them a wide variety of elements.  Collectively, on one hand, this imagery has served to informally yet persuasively teach countless Canadians about imagined Native inferiority (that is, the Other in its many guises); and, on the other hand, the portrayals have served to reinforce prevalent mainstream notions about Aboriginal peoples, all of which degrade, denigrate and marginalize.  In this way, the press has both reflected naturally and regurgitated spontaneously and necessarily the culture from which it emerged at the same time as reinforcing and teaching prevailing social norms to youth and newcomers. “Along with notions of common history and traditions and shared representations,” Bohdan Szuychewycz writes, “a significant element in the discursive construction of nations and national identities involves the articulation of difference and contrast with respect to other national identities.”

The idea that Canadians of Aboriginal ancestry epitomize moral depravity is as old as the press in Canada.  The notion finds expression in a variety of ways, including identified sneakiness, poor parenting, thievery, whorishness, dishonesty, laziness, ungodliness, and a tendency for debased afflictions associated with the body (such as sexual debauchery, alcoholism, and capricious violence).

The second perception also dates in the press to at least as early as Confederation.  It asserts that Aboriginals exhibit inherent racial inferiority, though newspapers mostly remained mum on how they understood the flexible term of “race.” Early on, the press critically embraced then-common social Darwinist concepts.  Such presumed inadequacy leads, for example, to alleged stupidity, poor decision making (with links to depravity), and childish, irresponsible, frequently irrational behaviour.  It is often conflated with and used to explain espied archetypical savagery, the alleged Aboriginal proclivities for wanton violence, crime, viciousness, and a general tendency toward mayhem.

Third, the press throughout Canadian history has cast Aboriginals as mired in an unprogressive and non-evolving past, as if they exist outside of linear time.  Behaviour associated with this theme includes excessive stubbornness, childishness, and maladaptive cultural characteristics that make it difficult for Aboriginal culture to progress in the ways understood and appreciated by the mainstream.  Additionally, this theme reinforces cultural depravity and racial inferiority in ways that buttress all three colonial essentialisms.  For example, note that childishness may be lumped in with alleged innate inferiority because adults (whites) are smarter and more advanced than children (Aboriginals).  By the same token, childishness may be associated with racial inferiority insofar as the superior (white adults) stands above the inferior (childish Aboriginals).  The point is simply that identifying three prominent varieties of treatment is useful for the purpose of analysis and discussion, yet the three tropes themselves behave as is their wont, following their own internal colonial logic, and frequently overlap.

Variations on the three perceptions include popular archetypical packaging such as the moribund Native, the savage, the Indian princess, the stoic or noble Native, the childish Native, the intemperate Native (a.k.a., the drunkard), and so on.  The list frequently decussates itself.  What the archetypes share in common is that each is constructed by the characteristic three aforementioned essentialisms.