Writing Poetry Can Endanger Your Health - Part Seven by Dave Jaffe

        The Poet As Murderer by Dave Jaffe


    Not all poets turned into victims or lived lives just writing poetry. A few of them turned into mass murderers.
     A small crowd gathered outside the Catholic Holy Rosary Cathedral in downtown Vancouver one Sunday morning in March 2008.
      They had come there to protest the Catholic Church's role in the creation and running of residential schools. These schools were financed by Canada's Department of Indian Affairs, who gave money to build the schools. The Catholic Church, the Anglican Church, and the United Church and its forerunners provided the teachers. From the 1890's to the 1960's, First Nations children were torn away from their homes. They were thrust into these so-called 'residential schools' which were in places a long way from where they were born.
    Here nuns, and  ministers and priests assaulted, brutalized and molested the children,. They were supposedly teaching the students to speak English and giving them an education in other subjects.
    But in fact, the teachers traumatized hundreds of thousands of children and murdered thousands of First Nations students. "60,000 children died in residential schools," says the former United Church minister Kevin Annett who was kicked out of the United Church and helped organize the April 2008 protest. Some have disputed Annett's numbers. Yet most estimates put the number of murdered children at at least 6,000.
    Yet there's no doubt that residential schools helped to destroy or nearly did destroy many First nations people. And a poet named Duncan Campbell Scott oversaw this project from 1913 to 1932. Scott wrote some very fine poetry.
    "Think of the death of Akoose," wrote Scott in this poem called 'In Memory of Edmund Morris'
    Fleet of foot

    who in his prime, a herd of antelope
     Drove through rank prairie; loping like a wolf
    Tired them and slew them."
   Scott was photographed by the famous photographer Yousuf Karsh. his photo shows us a prim thin man. He was active in Ottawa and led there cultural pursuits in drama, music and poetry.
     Yet as far as First Nations were concerned Scott was brutal. He became the deputy superintendant of India Affairs in 1913. In that job he tried to get governments to force First Nations to give up their legal status. He repressed and tried to wipe out the rights of First Nations. Due to his efforts First Nations people were denied the right to hire lawyers or advisors when they clashed with government rules.
    He oversaw the running of residential schools from 1913 to 1932 and thought they did a great job assimilating Indians into the larger Canadian society. His object, he told a Parliamentary Committee is to absorb Indians into Canada "until there is no Indian question." Scott's poetry on the other hand, says Robert l. McDougall was "precise in imagery, intense yet disciplined and flexible in metre and form."
    A fine poet? Scott surely was that. Yet he was also a racist bureaucrat who oversaw a school system that murdered thousands of First nations children. Scott was one of a few poets who was also a mass murderer.