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By Root 1130 0

in North America in the same tone as they used for ruins in Europe, as though they were charming and exotic remnants of a disappearing culture. Philosophers and poets, from Rousseau to Wordsworth, had extolled native people’s freedom and self-reliance as a dignified alternative to the grasping cruelty of “civilization.” Many of the authors had never actually met a native, but they imparted to emigrants like the Stricklands a fuzzy belief in their innate goodness. So Susanna and Catharine approached their Chippewa neighbours with rosy expectations, and they weren’t disappointed. They made regular calls on the band’s camp along the lakeshore. They enjoyed hearing their new friends singing hymns on Sundays (the band had been converted to Christianity by a Methodist missionary a few years earlier). They got to know several members of the band quite well: Peter, the chief, his wife, Mrs. Peter, and various hunters, young men and children. Both sisters conversed easily with the women in the camp who, like themselves, were pregnant, nursing babies and teaching older children how to behave. These shared female experiences forged a bond between English and Indian women much stronger than any rapport established between an Indian hunter and a newly arrived Englishman.

Each sister was intrigued by different aspects of the native way of life. Catharine was fascinated by the Chippewa habit of carrying children in specially woven baskets fastened to their mothers’ shoulders with deerskin straps, and infants in flat cradles strapped to their backs. “I have seen the picture of the Virgin and Child in some of the old illuminated missals,” remarked Catharine, “not unlike the figure of a papouse in its swaddling-clothes.” Catharine embraced these neighbours with unqualified friendship and adopted many of their customs: she wore deerskin moccasins in the snow, and she dosed her children with arum alropurpureum when they had diarrhea. She was also impressed with the exquisite native craftsmanship. It wasn’t long before letter cases and flower stands decorated with quillwork, and knife trays and work baskets made of birchbark, were scattered all over her parlour, and a miniature birchbark canoe was soon on its way to Sarah Strickland, in England.

Susanna found her Chippewa neighbours honest and grateful for any kindness shown to them. She deplored the way that most white settlers treated the natives. Indians met with more approval than Susanna accorded many settlers. She allowed any Indian visitor to sit at the table with her, although she still wouldn’t permit her Irish servants the same privilege. “An Indian is Nature’s gentleman—never familiar, coarse or vulgar,” proclaimed “Moodie’s squaw,” as the Indians called her. She delighted in the nicknames in their own language that the Indians had given some settlers: muckakee, meaning bullfrog, for an odious braggart, and segoskee, or rising sun, for a young man with a red face.

But Susanna was incapable of the simple warmth that her sister found so easy and the lack of prejudice that real friendship with these “dark strangers” would require. European to her marrow, Susanna found the Chippewa men ugly: “with very coarse and repulsive features. The forehead is low and retreating, the observing faculties large, the intellectual ones scarcely developed; the ears large, and standing off from the face, the eyes looking towards the temples, keen, snake-like, and far apart … the jaw-bone projecting, massy and brutal.” She decided that their tents were dirty and that the native women who slept with white men were immoral. And close encounters with the Chippewa convinced her that the talents and good qualities of Indians “have been somewhat overrated, and invested with a poetical interest which they scarcely deserve,” by many of their armchair admirers in the Old Country.

On Catharine’s receipt of the legacy from the sisters’ English uncle, Thomas Traill, like John Moodie, had immediately embarked on ambitious plans. An energetic settler working by himself could clear only four acres a year, so Thomas