Representing the Great War

Abstract

When the Great War broke out, poets in Britain, Australia, South Africa, New Zealand, Canada, and throughout the empire represented the war, its suffering, and the imperial struggle with the central powers, above all Germany. Although the poetry of Rupert Brooke and Wilfred Owen is well known, there are other poetic and culture dimensions to this history. In this chapter, I would like to discuss Duncan Campbell Scott, a key poet and friend to Archibald Lamp-man, and how Scott’s work as a civil servant in the department of Indian Affairs in Canada related to his ideas on empire and war and his poetic representations of these and related topics, like land and wilderness. The ambivalent view of the imperial government in London toward Native Canadians (“Indians”) fighting Germans after the Second Geneva Convention of 1906 shows the tension between sovereignty and association, between the indigenous peoples and the Crown as well as stereotypes of the aboriginal population. Scott, a controversial person, helped to build a Canadian literature and also sometimes aided the Natives in upholding their claim against recruiters who would put them in the armed forces, although Scott is often criticized retrospectively for his work in Indian Affairs.¹ Even though this chapter will concentrate on Scott and the indigenous peoples concerning this issue of recruiting and how it relates to his construction of Canadian and imperial identity in his poetry and literary work, it will also try to frame this issue in such a way that it may have implications for poets and cultural figures in Singapore, Australia, New Zealand, India, South Africa, and elsewhere by suggesting that the role of Native populations might or might not make for poetic, political, and cultural differences in the colonies from the views and circumstances of poets and cultural figures in Britain.