In A Narrow Vision, Brian Titley chronicles Scott's career in the Department of Indian Affairs and evaluates developments in Native health, education, and welfare between 1880 and 1932. He shows how Scott's response to challenges such as the making of treaties in northern Ontario, land claims in British Columbia, and the status of the Six Nations caused persistent difficulties and made Scott's term of office a turbulent one. Scott could never accept that Natives had legitimate grievances and held adamantly to the view that his department knew best.

"The writing of Duncan Campbell Scott has long represented a sympathetic understanding of Canada's Native peoplesÑperhaps mistakenly so, however, as in his work as a bureaucrat, Scott put in place white paternalistic policies that Native peoples resist to this day. Floating Voice examines Scott's contradictions, with renewed consideration of his best ÒIndianÓ fiction and poetry ."

Thomas Chandler Haliburton was perhaps the only Canadian writer whose name was a household word in nineteenth-century Canada. The ten papers in this volume reappraise the historical, geographical, political and literary contexts within which Haliburton lived and worked. His letters, his historical books, the Club papers and Sam Slick sketches are all included in these valuable and lively criticisms. Published in English.

The Royal Society of Canada’s mandate is to elect to its membership leading scholars in the arts, humanities, social sciences, and sciences, lending its seal of excellence to those who advance artistic and intellectual knowledge in Canada. Duncan Campbell Scott, one of the architects of the Indian residential school system in Canada, served as the society’s president and dominated its activities; many other members – historically overwhelmingly white men – helped shape knowledge systems rooted in colonialism that have proven catastrophic for Indigenous communities. Written primarily by current Royal Society of Canada members, these essays explore the historical contribution of the RSC and of Canadian scholars to the production of ideas and policies that shored up white settler privilege, underpinning the disastrous interaction between Indigenous peoples and white settlers. Historical essays focus on the period from the RSC’s founding in 1882 to the mid-twentieth century; later chapters bring the discussion to the present, documenting the first steps taken to change damaging patterns and challenging the society and Canadian scholars to make substantial strides toward a better future. The highly educated in Canadian society were not just bystanders: they deployed their knowledge and skills to abet colonialism. This volume dives deep into the RSC’s history to learn why academia has more often been an aid to colonialism than a force against it. Royally Wronged poses difficult questions about what is required – for individual academics, fields of study, and the RSC – to move meaningfully toward reconciliation.

Based on decades of extensive archival research, Seen but Not Seen uncovers a great swath of previously-unknown information about settler-Indigenous relations in Canada.

The Gay]Grey Moose is a collection of essays presenting a comprehensive view of English poetry in Canada from the early colonial period to the Post-Modern era. From a wide range of poets, this book provides fresh contexts for viewing and discussing three centuries of English Canadian poetry. Both national and regional in its orientation, it seeks to discover the relationship between poetry and landscape in a poetic continuity that stretches from the late 17th century to the present.

The second edition of Mark Abley’s acclaimed creative biography, revised and expanded with a new introduction by the author. When he died in 1947, Duncan Campbell Scott was revered as one of his country’s finest poets and honoured as a devoted civil servant. Today, because of his work as head of the Department of Indian Affairs, he's widely considered one of history's worst Canadians. When word of this reaches Scott's ghost, he returns to the land of the living to ask poet and journalist Mark Abley to clear his name, and in the ensuing research, Abley learns of a man who could somehow write vibrant poems about Indigenous people in one moment, and in another institute policies designed to destroy Indigenous culture and force assimilation. With intelligence, moral ferocity, and a hunger for truth, Abley delves into Scott’s professional and personal lives while also exploring the hostile government policies — including the residential school system — that damaged and continue to damage the lives of hundreds of thousands of Indigenous people. By mixing traditional non-fiction with an imagined debate between the author and Scott’s ghost, Conversations with a Dead Man makes it clear that “the villain was a man, and his nation is our nation. Abley’s act of radical empathy makes it harder to turn the page on a chapter of our history we might otherwise slam shut” (Andrew Stobo Sniderman, Maclean’s).

Mapping with Words re-conceptualizes early Canadian settler writing as literary cartography. Examining the multitude of ways in which writers expanded the work of mapmakers, it offers fresh readings of both familiar and obscure texts from the nineteenth century.