The Co-optation of Tecumseh: The War of 1812 and Racial Discourses in Upper Canada

Abstract

The Shawnee leader Tecumseh is one of very few named Aboriginal figures who are accorded a place in Canadian history texts. In the years following the War of 1812, he was claimed by Upper Canadians as a war hero and symbol of the struggle with the United States, a “Noble Savage” whose life and death provided material for nation-building discourses. Through the analysis of two long poems about Tecumseh published in the 1820s, this essay examines the early stages of Upper Canada’s co-optation of Tecumseh as a component of its national identity. The valiant but ultimately savage character the poems depicted could inspire Upper Canadians and remind them of their wartime sacrifices, but he also served to mark off Indigenous people from the Euro-Canadians whose cultural superiority legitimated their possession of the colony’s lands and resources. These literary works produced a “Canadian” hero who could be incorporated as a national symbol for a settlement colony he never set out to defend, and whose massive expansion after his death he would have vigorously opposed.

As the Tsunami of Histories of Atlantic and Liberal Revolutions Wash up in Upper Canada: Worries from a Colonial Shore – Part One

“…When Jasanoff turns to the period after 1800, she draws on Taylor to emphasize that the war and the subsequent reimaging of the loyalists gave a conservative colour to the ‘spirit of 1783.’ Both overestimate the power of a social memory of the American Revolution and War of 1812 to define the colony before mid‐century, but see Knowles, Inventing the Loyalists, Coates and Morgan, Heroines and History; Brownlie, ‘Co‐optation of Tecumseh;’ and Morgan, Creating Colonial Pasts.…”