Imagine being in a room full of powerful people who all share the same opinion on a matter of national significance. Now imagine being the lone dissenter.

That’s the focus for Dr. Kevin Hutchings who is investigating the life and literary works of Sir Francis Bond Head, as part of a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Insight Grant.

Bond Head was a best-selling British journalist and travel writer who governed the British colony of Upper Canada from 1836 to 1838, and held a contrarian position to his peers regarding the ideology of assimilation that came to inform Canada’s residential school system.

“Sir Francis played a fascinating and controversial role in our nation’s colonial history, to which past scholarship has failed to do justice,” says Hutchings, an English Professor and former Canada Research Chair in Literature, Culture and Environmental Studies. “My investigation of the relationship between his literary and political activities will demonstrate the important role that literature played in English Canada’s early colonial history.”

Hutchings will produce the first detailed literary study of Bond Head’s life and times, with a goal of demonstrating how he exploited his literary celebrity to support his often-controversial political work, including his treaty-making among First Nations in Upper Canada, and his contentious role in both inciting and crushing the 1837 Upper Canada Rebellion.
Perhaps of most interest, however, is what appears to be Bond Head’s stance regarding the residential school system.

“The Truth and Reconciliation Commission is concerned with finding and publishing the truth about residential schools, the sole purpose of which was to assimilate Indigenous people into ‘mainstream’ European Canadian society by severing them from their families, from their cultural traditions and from their language,” adds Hutchings.

“During the 19th century, most members of Canada’s settler society embraced the idea that Indigenous people should be converted to Christianity and be assimilated to European ways of life. Sir Francis doesn’t quite fit in with that position because he came on the scene with the opposite idea. He’s fascinating to me for that reason.”