Unsettling: How Euro-whiteness was portrayed to Indigenous school children as superior to Indigeneity through the textual construction of the “Indian” in Missionary texts during the 1830s to 1845 in the Great Lakes Area.

Abstract

During the mid-1800s, a small influx of American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions missionaries set up in the areas of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota where the Anishinaabe people lived and travelled. A nuanced power dynamic existed between the missionaries and Indigenous populations, and it can be argued, neither the Indigenous community nor the missionaries regarded each other with the respect and deference each expected. During this time period, the missionaries endeavored to ‘educate’ any Anishinaabeg that was willing to participate. These missionaries wrote bilingual textbooks in Anishinaabemowin and English from which to instruct the Ojibwe children. Within these educational texts, a portrait is painted. One of heathens and the saved, of savages and the (Eurocentric) civilized, of Indigeneity and whiteness. This thesis will conduct an exploration of the textual construction of the ‘Indian’ in relation to the Euro-white in the 1830s to 1845 and how the missionaries portrayed Euro-whiteness to Anishinaabe and Métis school children as superior to Indigeneity through the use of the mission schools’ teaching materials.October 201