One assignment of the history course was to complete a research paper on a topic prior to 1867. Contact between settlers and Indigenous people held the greatest interest for me. Although there was much more written about and from men, I chose the often neglected female perception in order to gain insight into their experience.
So I started my research paper as following:

Topic:
Female perception of pre-confederation Canada around 1800 with regards to contact with Indigenous people.
Thesis question:
In what way did female settlers in pre-confederation Canada have contact to Indigenous people and did they perceive them as equals?

See the full outline.

Another topic that I also considered was the female role and participation in the Gold Rush. However, the people that interested me the most were unfortunately exceeding the date-wise timeline.
So I settled on the settler – natives contact. During my research I came across Ms. Simcoe’s diary which was a conclusive and actually very entertaining read.

  • Quayle Innis, Mary. Simcoe’s Diary. Toronto: Macmillan of Canada, 1965.

Although Mr. Simcoe is, as stereotypical for her class, a bit snobbish but sometimes she showed a fine sense of humour.

  • When she describes that the catholic churches in Canada being pretty but very cold because no fires were allowed. The priests had said because of the fine paintings and her answer in the diary is: I didn’t see any fine paintings.
  • Or one time, Mrs. Simcoe was attending a party where she naturally met a range of people who later described her as very nice in their own letters. Mrs. Simcoe just noted: I dislike them all.

Sometimes the diary was very detailed which allowed an interesting insight into earl upper-class life in Canada around 1800, for example the constant parties at the chateaux or the common prime fear of rattle snakes.

Interesting was that Mrs. Simcoe does not mention her famous husband’s efforts to abolish the slave trade. Apparently she had other priorities.

Indigenous men, for example.

Mrs. Simcoe was a lot on her own and during the end of her diary she begins swooning about a Mohawk man. That lead to the suspicion that European women were more intrigued by Native men than the lack of relationship accounts would make us believe. Further research on relationships between European women and Indigenous men before 1800 where however really scarce and one would need more time to “dig a little deeper”.

From Mrs. Simcoe’s diary I widened my research onto several other female reports about their lives in Canada. The two main ones were the writings of Catharine Parr Traill and Mrs. Ramsay Simpson’s diary. They are all relative congruent on the main question. Although the women express a certain fascination for the Indigenous people and learn from them, they regard themselves as clearly superior to the Native population.

Short: It was a very interesting research project of an area which we never covered in my classes in Germany.