Morgan, Cecilia

English

Histoire sociale / Social History (E-Journal, York University)

260 Histoire sociale / Social History This kind of work will hopefully inspire the current and the next generation of femi-nist historians to push the boundaries of the discipline by further exploring women’s role in sustaining or resisting colonialism. Indeed, much historical research has yet to be done regarding the relationship between gender, race and the colonial enterprise in Canada. In sum, Joan Sangster’s  Through Feminist Eyes is a thought-provoking overview of Cana-dian women’s and gender history and will be of particular use to younger scholars, look-ing to understand the development of women’s history in Canada and the influences and questions shaping the field.  Amanda Ricci  McGill University  Sherwin , Allan –  Bridging Two Peoples: Chief Peter E. Jones, 1843-1909.  Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2012. Pp. 244.  Over the past few decades, developments in biographical writing have demonstrated that the boundaries separating biography from history have been somewhat artificial and, often, unhelpful demarcations. Particularly when the biographer’s subject is an individual from a less powerful group, biography can provide an important window through which we can glimpse their engagement with larger social, political, and cultural structures: the negotiations, accommodations, compromises, and confrontations that arise as individuals make their way in various worlds.  In many ways, Allan Sherwin’s study of Peter Edmund Jones does just that. Jones, son of the well-known Anishinabe Mississauga leader and minister, Kahkewaquonaby (or the Reverend Peter Jones) and his English wife, Eliza Field Jones, led a life marked by both his Mississauga and British identities and locations. Born October 30, 1843 at the Methodist mission in London, Ontario, Jones’ childhood was shaped both by illness – he contracted polio at the age of three and suffered from bronchitis – and his mixed-race background. In 1851 the Jones family moved to Brantford, where Peter Edmund grew up, close to – but not on – the Mississauga’s New Credit reserve. Educated at home because of his physical frailty, Jones would go on to graduate from Queen’s University in Medicine, the first Status Indian to do so in Canada. He estab-lished a medical practice in Hagersville, near the New Credit, and served as the latter’s doctor, introducing a number of public health measures that Sherwin believes were critically important to the Mississauga.  Sherwin also points out, though, that his energies and talents extended beyond the field of medicine. Just as his father worked as both minister and advocate for the Missis-sauga, from 1874 Peter Edmund attempted to serve the community in a number of capaci-ties: as an elected band chief, researcher for New Credit land claims, secretary-treasurer for the Grand General Indian Council of Ontario and Quebec, and publisher of  The Indian , Canada’s first Indigenous newspaper, which he used as a forum to advise newly registered Indians of their (short-lived) voting rights. Jones also worked as a mediator or cultural broker between Indigenous and settler society, as he advised John A. Mac-donald on modifications to the Indian Act, was appointed an Indian agent, and advised Comptes rendus / Book Reviews 261Ontario’s archaeologist, David Boyle, and the Smithsonian Museum about Indigenous settlements and artifacts. By the 1890s, having battled chronic illnesses which may, Sher-win believes, have been a form of ‘post-polio’ syndrome, Jones’ time was spent tending to his patients in Hagersville and farming with his stepson. He died in Hagersville of cancer of the tongue in 1909 and was buried in Brantford.  As those who are familiar with Peter Jones’ career will probably have noted, in many ways Peter Edmund Jones’ life closely resembled that of his father: indeed, Sherwin’s work is indebted to that of Donald B. Smith, who published his biographical study of Kahkewaquonaby in 1987. As one who inherited the complicated, sometimes ambiguous, position of ‘bridging two peoples,’ Peter Edmund experienced the stresses and strains that marked his father’s life. Contrasting Sherwin’s biography with Smith’s, the son dealt with racially inflected boundaries between Indigenous and Ontario’s settler society that became more rigid and intractable over the nineteenth century. Moreover, while Kahke-waquonaby’s espousal of certain aspects of European society was certainly not welcomed by all members of the Mississauga, he at least was able to communicate with them in Ojibwa. His son, however, was quite self-consciously brought up (primarily, it seems, by his English mother) in English (p. 45); while he visited his paternal grandmother at the New Credit to practice his Ojibwa, it appears that he was not entirely fluent in the lan-guage (pp. 45, 51). As Sherwin points out, Peter Edmund’s engagement in Mississauga politics was not always welcomed at the New Credit, particularly by traditionalist fami-lies determined to preserve their language and cultural practices who viewed his family history, lack of deep connections to the reserve, and belief in the need for various aspects of assimilation with suspicion and at times outright hostility.  Sherwin also, though, points to the important role Jones played as a mediator on the Grand Council, and his clearly expressed desire that Mississauga land rights be upheld.  Sherwin’s biography also deals with Jones’ work as a physician; the book paints a clear portrait of his life as an often-struggling country doctor who attempted to serve two constituencies. Unfortunately it is difficult to discern clearly Jones’ perspective on the relationship between Indigenous and Western medicine, as his graduating the-sis for Queen’s, ‘The Indian Medicine Man,’ has not survived (Sherwin addresses these relationships more directly in his Appendix on Aboriginal women’s herbal medicines). Moreover, Peter Edmund’s life was also shaped by his marriage to an English woman, Charlotte Elvin Dixon, a union that echoed that of his parents while, simultaneously, differed from the Jones-Field marriage since he and Dixon had no children (a widow, Dixon already had three young sons). One wonders if Jones’ attempts to move between Anishinabe and European society might have been less fraught if he had married a mixed-race or Indigenous woman.  Overall, Sherwin has crafted a clearly written, well-researched narrative of Jones’ life, a complex mix of opportunities and achievements and, especially in his later years, disap-pointments and failure. The biography also sheds lights on the dynamics of Indigenous-settler relations in nineteenth-century Ontario, a presently somewhat under-explored area. It could, perhaps, have benefited from closer attention to and comparison with other, similar individuals, both those within Peter Edmund Jones’ own circles (the Mis-sissauga Methodist missionary, writer, and advocate George Copway, for example, who also married an Englishwoman) and those Indigenous or mixed-race people in other 262 Histoire sociale / Social Historysettler societies, such as the United States or Australia, who faced similar dilemmas in their encounters with Indigenous modernity.  Cecilia Morgan  University of Toronto  Westhues , Anne, and Brian  Wharf (eds.) –  Canadian Social Policy. Issues and Per-spectives ,  5 th edition . Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2012. Pp. 440.  New editions of Anne Westhue’s edited text on current Canadian social policies are always welcome to students of social policy in Canada. Edition five benefits from the co-editing of Brian Wharf, for years Canada’s foremost scholar on community social devel-opment. Sadly Professor Wharf passed away in August, 2011, as work on the book neared completion. Some of the topics explored in this book are mental health, child poverty, child welfare, disabilities, racism, and Aboriginal welfare. Every chapter is characterized by a focus on social determinants of health, and by a critical analysis of unequal power relations in every aspect of social policy, from the Canadian Human Rights Commission to risk assessment policies in child welfare.  Historians however will find Westhue’s volume to be aimed too squarely at social work students and practitioners, to be disappointingly narrow in its limited efforts to locate the origins of the social attitudes and disparities of power that it emphasizes throughout. One notable exception is Yves Vaillancourt’s chapter, “The Quebec Model of Social Policy, Past and Present”. The chapter traces Québec’s changing paradigms of social policy from the late nineteenth century, when anti-statism predominated, through to the Quiet Revolution and its “entrepreneurial” model of the state’s obligations, and finally to a more recent model of the state as a partner with civil society in the social policy arena. Vaillancourt rejects the notion that there has been consistent neo-liberalism in Quebec social policy in the period after 1980, regarding the Parti Québécois govern-ment policies from 1994 to 2003 as progressive overall, and reflecting a willingness of the state to work with non-government partners rather than an abandonment of the gov-ernment’s role in social policy.  Marilyn Callahan and Karen Swift, in their critique of the underlying attitudes regarding risk assessment in child welfare, which was introduced about two decades ago, attempt to locate its origins in earlier events. They note that revelations about battered children in the 1960s, child sexual abuse in the 1970s, and violence within families in the 1980s neces-sitated a social response, but suggest that the policies adopted “reified the explanation that individual family pathology is at the core of this maltreatment” (p. 204). The solutions pro-posed and adopted ignore the colonial subjection of Native peoples, racism, poverty, gender inequality, and much more. Therese Jennissen and Colleen Lundy, in their excellent history of Canadian social work,  One Hundred Years of Social Work: A History of the Profession in English Canada, 1900-2000 , document the constant struggle within the field between a strain of thought, focused on “case work,” in which social causation is largely eclipsed, and social justice perspectives. Over time, the latter have come to dominate the profession, though their relative importance in the larger society has waxed and waned with the former 

Sherwin, Allan – Bridging Two Peoples: Chief Peter E. Jones, 1843-1909

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Sherwin, Allan – Bridging Two Peoples: Chief Peter E. Jones, 1843-1909

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Histoire sociale / Social History (E-Journal, York University)