ABSTRACT
On the postcard, the red-coated Mountie smiles warmly as he reaches out to shake hands with Chief Sitting Eagle who is dressed in a colourful feather headdress, buckskins and beads. The caption reads, ‘Here indeed are the symbols of Canada’s glorious past. A Mountie, resplendent in his famed scarlet greets Chief Sitting Eagle, one of Canada’s most colourful Indians.’ This image of reconciliation and equality, presented in such a picturesque manner, invokes an older mythology of Canadian identity which I call the ‘Benevolent Mountie Myth’, a myth based on the story of the Westward expansion of the nation at the end of the nineteenth century. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police, representatives of British North American justice, are said to have managed the inevitable and glorious expansion of the nation (and the subjugation of Native peoples) with much less bloodshed and more benevolence and tolerance than the violent US expansion to the South. This benevolent gentleness, it was believed, was a result of naturally superior forms of British justice, and was an important element in the mythologies of Canadian national identity emerging at the turn of the century (Francis 1992:69). The image of the Mountie and the ‘Indian Chief’ places a representative of the state and a representative of minority culture-coloniser and colonised-in a friendly, peaceful and collaborative pose. Aboriginal people and the state are represented as if they are equal: as if the Mountie did not have the force of
the crown and the military behind him, shoring up his power. This image of collaborative cultural contact could be contrasted with a quintessential American frontier image: cowboys chasing and killing ‘Indians’. In the American images, the cowboys are presented as rugged individuals. In contrast, the Mounties in the Canadian image are symbols and representatives of the kind and benevolent state —the state that supposedly treated, and still treats, its minorities more compassionately than the USA.
