How the Wisdom in the Writings of the Novelist George Eliot Can Inform Views of the Indigenous Situation in Canada

Literary insight by Peter Best

George Eliot - Image from Firstpost

Why write, why read, if not to offer, to find, a larger image of life, an image of man as deep as the problems that make up his greatness? -Victor Serge¹

We’re one planet, one humanity, and everything is connected. – Canadian astronaut Robert Thirsk²

 By Peter Best   

Great literature- and the great thoughts and emotions within it- timelessly reflect life as humans have always lived it. It informs, guides and comforts us. It makes us think better-more wisely- on past and present-day issues, and on life generally. It portrays the nature of humanity’s interior mental and emotional life, an inevitable omission of historical works. We must look to it for partial answers to today’s political, philosophical, and social problems.

Through her novels the brilliant, nineteenth century English novelist, George Eliot, offers timeless wisdom, acute psychological insight and emotional solace to her readers, both in relation to their own personal situations in life, and about contentious issues in the societies of which her readers are a part.

One of the most contentious and disturbing issues in Canadian life is the situation of our Indigenous peoples, who, living under the legal yoke of the Indian Act and the reserve system, occupy the lowest levels of most national indicators of social health and well-being. Their leaders, fully supported by Canadian non-Indigenous leaders, seem inadvertently intent on worsening this situation by, in the name of “decolonization”, changing the names and forms of this yoke, but in effect fully retaining and even expanding its fatally flawed, illiberal “separate but equal” substance. The inevitable result of this will be the continuing and worsening tragic social failure of Indigenous peoples.

It seems to be a long, unrelated mental and imaginative distance between George Eliot; a brave, socially pioneering single woman living with a married man in the Victorian London of the 1860’s and 1870’s, and today’s clever and aggressive Canadian Indigenous leaders, who Canadians daily see poking the finger of blame³ at them for their all and sundry professed Indigenous ills. As fully argued in my book, There Is No Difference, Indigenous peoples, with their lives centred around the Indian Act and the reserves, are by that fact alone, stuck on the road to perdition, and their leaders, with our non-Indigenous leaders help, are leading them further down it.

What can George Eliot possibly have to say to them that might possibly give them pause and, like Fagin in Oliver Twist, “review the situation”?

At the heart of the divisions between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Canadians is the false notion propagated by Indigenous spokespersons that Indigenous peoples, past and present, are innately and unchangeably different than non-Indigenous Canadians- (a fundamentally illiberal notion)– that they possess a unique form of humanity not possessed by other Canadians- and that this should compel Canadians to acquiesce forever in them living under the same Canadian roof with us but being subject to a large subset of their own laws and special rights.

George Eliot differs.

In Romola, her historical novel set in Renaissance Florence- a novel, like all her novels, much about the moral choices humans are constantly confronted with, reflecting on the core spiritual idea espoused by sages and spiritual leaders throughout the ages that humanity is a constant, similar whole, she aptly writes:

“The great river-courses which have shaped the lives of men have hardly changed; and those other streams, the life-currents that ebb and flow in human hearts, pulsate to the same great needs, the same great loves and terrors. As our thought follows closely in the slow wake of the dawn, we are impressed with the broad sameness of the human lot, which never alters in the main headings of its history- hunger and labour, seed-time and harvest, love and death.” (Italics added)

The reserve system that Indigenous leaders want to cling to is the root cause of Indigenous social and economic failure. Yet, notwithstanding this, Indigenous elites play up and romanticize reserve life.

 As long ago as 1972 Indigenous lawyer and Assembly of First Nations co-founder William Wuttunee wrote in his book, Ruffled Feathers,⁴ that “there is absolutely nothing to do on some reserves.” This inevitably results in anomie and idle hands that become the proverbial devil’s playthings. Nishnawbi Aski Grand Chief in 2016 said this about reserve life:

“The themes are constant, and they re-occur. There’s this whole issue of substance abuse in the parents, lack of school engagement and attendance, domestic violence in the home, suicide in the nuclear family and beyond, some will have had a history of mental health issues.”⁵

Tanya Talaga’s best selling book,  Seven Fallen Feathers, vividly described both some of the social horrors of reserve life and the failed attempts of reserve-raised children to suddenly adjust to anonymous, unsupervised life in the city. Indigenous lawyer Harold R. Johnson, in Peace and Good Order-The Case for Indigenous Justice in Canada, described the tragic consequences of the rampant use of alcohol on reserves, as does former Manitoba Provincial Court Judge Brian Giesbrecht in his startlingly  revealing article, The Untold Story of Indigenous Child Neglect and Alcohol Abuse-The Firewater Complex.

George Eliot, In Daniel Deronda, her novel partly centering on Jewishness, anti-Semitism and the early days of the Zionist movement in England, called out the unreality of this tendency to, from distant vantages, romanticize the rough and rude:

“What horrors of damp huts, where human beings languish, may not become picturesque through aerial distance!”

In Felix Holt: The Radical, a novel centering on the social and political conditions in England in the early 1830’s leading up to the passage of the First Reform Act in 1832, (which extended the vote to certain members of the rising mercantile class), she warned of the mental cost suffered by people stuck in situations where there is “nothing to do”:

“…there was dullness in its ease, and in the absence of high demand.”

In Mill on the Floss, focusing through her characters on the grinding effect of remote, rural, feudal-like poverty and despair on the human spirit, she expands on her theme of passive, purposeless, dysfunctional communities- where “oppressive narrowness” and constant scenes of “home sorrow” pervade- causing permanent, damaging psychic effects on their members, who each have their tragedy, but a tragedy:

“…of that unwept, hidden sort, that goes on from generation to generation, and leaves no record- such tragedy, perhaps, as lies in the conflicts of young souls, hungry for joy, under a lot made suddenly hard to them, under the dreariness of a home where the morning brings no promise with it, and where the unexpectant discontent of  worn and discontented parents weighs on the children like a damp, thick air, in which all the functions of life are depressed.”⁶

For Eliot, as for anyone coping with tragedy, loss and ineffable sorrows, the only positive way to cope with that state- to “move forward”- is to be positively busy, to, as stated in Adam Bede, “don the iron glove and breastplate of duty”, so that our sorrow, “living in us as an indestructible force”, can “pass from pain into sympathy.”

Only the phasing out of the reserve system, so that the “broad sameness” of Indigenous and non-Indigenous Canadians can manifest itself in day-to-day, purposeful and integrated living, will put an end to these constant, reserve life “home sorrows” tragedies.

Eliot brings her expansive wisdom and great psychological acuity to the issue of all Canadians’ relationship with our shared past.

Indigenous leaders and spokespersons, contrary to their own culture, which specifically venerates “elders” and those who have gone to the “spirit world”, and contrary to the teachings of even their own spiritual leaders, denigrate, insult and dehumanize the ancestors of non-Indigenous Canadians, (shamefully acquiesced in by our seemingly Western Enlightenment history and culture-renouncing non-Indigenous elites), by reducing them all to thought-killing, one-dimensional, dehumanized stereotypes- called their “favourite abstraction(s)” by Eliot in Mill on the Floss⁷– such as, in Canada’s case, “settlers”, “colonialists”, “White” people, and “imperialists”; terms that, boiled down, insultingly and disrespectfully depict all these millions of people, on whose shoulders we all, Indigenous and non-Indigenous alike, stand relatively comfortably with a wine glass or beer in one hand and a barbecue utensil in the other, as essentially knowing, callous, culture-killers and land thieves.

George Eliot knew and thought better about the ancestors of members of any good society, non-Indigenous or Indigenous.

In Romola she wrote of our predecessors as:

“…valiant workers whose names are not registered where every day we turn the leaf to read them, but whose labours make a part, though an unrecognized part, of our inheritance, like the ploughing and sowing of past generations.”

In Middlemarch, her most famous novel, the narrative center of which is the heroine’s disastrous marriage choice, (a product of naïve idealism, an intellectual Pollyanna, she read too many books and didn’t look around enough and see how, outside of books, people really lived and how they really thought, felt and acted.⁸), she writes of the debt of remembrance, respect and ongoing connection all members of such a society owe to their ancestors:

“For the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who live faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”

What is most unsettling about the shrill, unimaginative and morally presumptuous nature of the attacks by Indigenous spokespersons against the ancestors of non-Indigenous Canadians is the unforgiving nature of them. Nothing is allowed for the human shortcomings, which all humans have, of these earlier Canadians. This is surprising because the dominant religion of Indigenous Canadians is Christianity, and forgiveness- “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass pass against us”– is at the heart of Jesus’ teachings.

In Adam Bede, another novel the narrative centre of which is again, a disastrous one-way love, (the innocent, stout-hearted hero mistakes his beloved’s drop-dead gorgeousness for moral virtue), Eliot writes that “we cannot reform our forefathers.”

In Mill on the Floss, Eliot delves deeper into the need for all of us, in a spirt of true Christian humility, to strive to forgive each other’s trespasses, which must include the trespasses of all our forefathers:

“I, too, am an erring mortal, liable to stumble, apt to come short of my most earnest efforts; your lot has been harder than mine, your temptation greater; let us help each other to stand and walk without more falling;- to have done this would have demanded courage, deep pity, self-knowledge, generous trust- would have demanded a mind that tasted no piquancy in evil speaking, that felt no self-exaltation in condemning, that cheated itself with no large words into the belief that life can have any moral end, any high religion, which excludes the striving after perfect truth, justice, and love towards the individual men and women who come across our own path.”

In Daniel Deronda, reflecting the religious/spiritual nature of our connection with our ancestors, and of our obligation to venerate them, she quotes from a hymn in the Hebrew liturgy:

“As thy goodness has been great to the former generations, even so may it be to the latter.”

George Eliot understood that we are not superior to our ancestors- that they cannot be just dust to us- of no consequence. She understood that we do a terrible disservice to them, to ourselves, and to our country, when we rashly deride them and tear down their, and our, symbols, namesakes and monuments. She understood that, as stated, we stand and thrive on their civilizational shoulders!

Finally, Eliot understood our common human nature, in all its confusing subtleties, contradictions, strengths, weaknesses, nuances and complexities. To read her novels is to discover yourself, and by doing so, better experience the reality of that common “human sameness” that should bind and unite us. She understood and reflected in her novels what historian Robert Conquest wrote:

“Reliance on reason alone is irrational. It neglects the instinctual or deep-set elements of the real human being.”⁹

In Romola Eliot referred to these instinctual or deep-set elements as “the sympathies that lay deeper than all theories.”

One fundamental Canadian sympathy- a key sympathy baked into the Canadian soul- that lies deeper than all the shallow, inhuman stereotypes and “favoured abstractions” listed above, is the instinct for equality under the law- equal treatment for all under the law, regardless of race or history. This sympathy- this instinct- reduces to ashes in the minds and hearts of Canadians all the government “decolonizing,” “rationally”-concocted laws and programs that make equality under the law an increasingly difficult and distant state of civic being to achieve between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Canadians.

All Canadians support “reconciliation” between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples. But when it turns out, to the surprise and chagrin of ordinary Canadians,  that what this word is meaning in practice is the endless, “one way street” transfer of more taxpayer-supplied monies and benefits to Indigenous groups- when it turns out that it’s a concept that, in execution, is increasing social and legal distances between Canadians- that it’s binding us apart rather than binding us together– then ordinary Canadians cannot and will not embrace it. This cold, materialistic¹⁰ version of reconciliation goes against the grain of the Canadian soul. It violates the Canadian “sympathy” for equality under the law, that lies deepest in the Canadian temperament.

Our elites, by almost willfully ignoring human nature here, as so compellingly revealed by George Eliot- by pushing Canadians so recklessly and foolishly against the grain of our civic souls and instincts- are bound and determined to thwart our country from even starting on the journey to true reconciliation- the coming together of Indigenous and non-Indigenous Canadians under the aegis of civic brotherhood and equality under the law.

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Thanks for reading. For more from this author, read The Novelist Anthony Trollope as a Guide and Moral Support for an Unpopular Political Argument AND, for some recommendations for essential books on indigenous issues in Canada, read Essential Books on Indigenous Issues and Indian Residential Schools

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Woke Watch Canada Essentials:

1. James Pew contributed a chapter to the best-selling book Grave Error: How The Media Misled us (And the Truth about Residential Schools). You can read about it here - The Rise of Independent Canadian Researchers

2. A long-form essay by Dr. M - Fulcrum and Pivot: The New Left Remaking of Toronto School Policy

3.  For evidence of the ideological indoctrination in Canadian education, read Yes, schools are indoctrinating kids! And also, Yes, The University is an Indoctrination Camp!

1. From Unforgiving Years, New York Review of Books, New York, 2008

2. From article Exploring Space and the Wonders of our World, by Theo Nicitopoulos, Sky News Magazine, July/August 2022

3. “Nothing comes from blame but evil tempers.” – George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss.

4. William I.C. Wuttunee, Ruffled Feathers-Indians in Canadian Society, Bell Books Ltd., Calgary (out of print)

5. Newspaper article: Ontario Court Examines Spate of First Nation Youth Suicides, Canadian Press, July 17, 2011.

6. To me, this brilliant, poignant, heart-rendering passage illustrates the real reason for women leaving- fleeing- the reserves and taking their chances on the mean streets of urban Canada, often becoming a crime statistic- often becoming one of the “murdered and missing”.

7. …but they had their favourite abstraction, called Society, which served to make their consciences perfectly easy in doing what served their own egoism.”

8. “And pause awhile from letters to be wise.”- Samuel Johnson, The Vanity of Human Wishes. (Or, as one’s spouse would say: “If you know what’s good for you, you’ll put down that gadget and talk to me!”)

9. From Robert Conquest, Reflections on a Ravaged Century, W.W. Norton & Company, New York, 2000

10. A cynical, manipulative, selfish misuse of the word “reconciliation” by persons “shut up in the narrowness that hedges in all merely clever, unimpassioned men.”– George Eliot, from Romola.