This article caught my attention.
I usually steer clear of the National Post and the robber Baron who founded this corporatist rag,
https://nationalpost.com/opinion/jerry-amernic-canadas-two-tier-historical-memory-egerton-ryerson-and-joseph-brant
First off, let me start with the extent to which I agree with the writer about Egerton Ryerson, he HAS been defamed. I have stated before that Ryerson was intent on creating a public school system that was based on the needs of local residents. Ten families could start a school. Ten families of whites, ten families of blacks etc.
What I diasgree with in this article is the cherry picking of facts.
Some of what he references I don't know, because I have not heard or read the work of the Hamilton writer he mentions.
What I want to address is his use of Benjamin Drew's narratives of Fugitive slaves, quite specifically Drew's interview with Sarah Burthen Pooley in the Queen Bush to do no more than to prove that she was a former slave of Joseph Brants and that Brant statues should basically be decapitated in the way that Sir John A MacDonald's statues were over the residential schools.
Ryerson and MacDonald were blamed for the schools, which were in fact established in the wake of Sir Charles Bagot's 1840s hearing into various matters connected to the First Nations. Brant (who died in 1806) supported the creation of educational systems to help the remnant Six Nations and others adapt to the industrialization of European economics, including in farming.
The industrial residential schools were 19th century, ie. These were hard-ass in the same way that the first public schools were run by variant hard ass evangelicals who kept young women teachers as much in line and on the edge of poverty, as the teachers kept the students in line.
First Nations did not want the vote, which MacDonald later offered them, because it was a bait and switch game in which their treaty rights, founded on the principles of the Royal Proclamation (1763) would lose their rights as distinct peoples, and turn into nothing more than subjects (not so much as the Crown but of a predominantly white male landowning electorate.) The role of clan mothers would have been reduced to, in the same way that the role of women in general in a males-only electoral system left them with nothing but moral authority in the home, an anathema to most indigenous peoples
In that effort to get "Indians" the vote, MacDonald turned to the Mohawk doctor Dr. Peter Martin, who knew the plan would fail, but did his best and then packed in the failed effort.
So back to Sarah Pooley, Benjamin Drew, Joseph Brant and and The Post's anti-woke selectivism of fact. Drew recorded Pooley's view of Brant, which is easy enough to find online through a copy of Drew's book https://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/drew/drew.html. To Pooley , Brant was a great man, "a king," if anything she thought of herself as his subject not his object. The object of Pooley's contempt was Catherine Brant. Pooley describes her life with the Brant children as one of running around hunting and fishing, so it is possible she was actually their nanny.
It is fully possible that Brant was an Emancipationist, which is to say that he bought slaves to free them.
The only other known slave of Brants, was his Butler/maitre'd Prince Van Patten. Prince's son John was clearly a free man who spearheaded a number of black settlement projects. He had been a corporal in the 1812 Coloured Corps, completed and sold his free land Grant in Wellington County before Richard Pierpoint showed up, and probably did so with the help of all the Head of the Lake UEL settlers who were given tracts of land in North Eramosa township in 1818, those settlers were mostly former Butler's Rangers.
When Brant died, Prine Vanpatten inherited the who Strawberry Hill portion of Brant's land in what became Brantford, hardly the act of a slaver on the scale of residential school violations of human dignity that The Post wants readers to believe.
One other point, there were two black families among the small cluster of UEL settlers at the head of the lake who bought land (1807) from Catherine Brant right after Joseph died the year before , Michael Grote, and Ebenezeer Guire. It is highly probable that Joseph already set the deal in motion, as Grote was connected to William Davis, and the Ghent's UE. It is thought that Grote was a former slave of the Davis'. Catherine Brant's land agent was the surveyor Augustus Jones, whose son Reverend Peter Jones was also the son of the daughter of one of the Chiefs of the Mississauga.
In 1794 George Washington passed the first Fugitive Slave act, which turned America into a slave prison, the same year Lt. Governor Simcoe, turned Upper Canada into a destination for fugitives. That is what the War of 1812 was mostly about, beyond pure American imperialism, founded as it was on Slavery.
In any event, the Post writer is right about Ryerson wrongly being blamed for residential schools. Four Mississauga/Ojibway chiefs went to England to plead their case with Queen Victoria, Jones among them. He came back engaged to an anti-slavery activist named Eliza Fields.
In any event, read Benjamin Drews account of his conversation with Sarah Pooley here.
https://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/drew/drew.html
