Know your place
Know your place
The deeper history of the Timmons controversy
Armine Gosling campaigned to get the vote for women in Newfoundland in the 1920s. Born in Quebec in 1861, she came to St. John’s to teach at Bishop Spencer College, the Church of England girl’s school. In the early 20th century, Gosling organized a group of women to press for the right to vote and spoke publicly as part of the campaign. She was very much a product of her time but Gosling also led change.
This past August a local theatre company started a fund-raising campaign to pay for a statue in Gosling’s memory. Margot Duley, a historian originally from Newfoundland who spent her career on the mainland, is chairing the committee. She turned up on CBC’s Morning Show to explain the project.
On International Women’s Day 2023, the company organised a luncheon and had Duley deliver a lecture on Gosling’s life. It was a great step forward for a great project. Hopefully it will kindle some deeper interest in people today about a very important event in a very important time in Newfoundland and Labrador history. It’s a great project and deserving of your support.
During the interview last August, host Krissie Holmes called Gosling a suffragette. Oh no, corrected Duley, whose east end townie accent survives even after years of teaching in the States. It was a like a voice from the past that would have been quite familiar had she been teaching at Spencer alongside Gosling a century ago.
As Duley described them, suffragettes were nasty women who protested loudly and made nuisances of themselves. Those are not exact words but the tone and sense of the description. Suffragists were quiet, polite, and proper. They used “traditional politician techniques” and galvanized people to petition for the right to vote. It was the largest political campaign of its kind in Newfoundland history to that time.
Duley wasn’t proclaiming the message but the combination of the words and the accent seemed to open a crack in the space-time continuum to the generational echo of today’s social message: know your place in society. Fit in. Don’t rock the boat or if you do, don’t rock it too much.
Context matters. Context helps us understand.
Let’s look a bit closer at the history of the campaigns in the English-speaking world to extend the right to vote to women.
In Britain and elsewhere in the English speaking world, women campaigned for the right to vote starting in the 1860s. They were polite. They were genteel. And they failed. Hence, the rise of more militant activists in Australia and the United Kingdom. In the violent chaos of Russia in early 1917, groups agitating for women’s right to vote took to the streets and protested loudly along with other political agitators as the Tsarist regime collapsed.
The powerful never give up power easily. And it’s worth noting that in Newfoundland a century ago, men only expanded the franchise in 1925 to include women *after* it happened everywhere else. Long after, if you consider that Britain changed its voting law in 1918. That doesn’t diminish the accomplishment of Gosling and her fellow campaigners but it is worth noting that by the time Newfoundlanders got around to extending the franchise, this was hardly revolutionary in that wider context of what was happening across Europe and North America.
To explain this, it’s tempting here to fall back on a old trope that Newfoundland is backward, late, slow. It’s an especially Canadian thing. You can find it in scholarly articles like C.P. Stacey’s 1936 paper on the withdrawal of the British garrison from Newfoundland in 1870. It’s unmistakable in any talk of the supposed “omission” of Indigenous people in Newfoundland and Labrador from Confederation in 1949. It’s implicit in the notion that before 1949 Newfoundland was a mere British colony and not a self-governing Dominion with some different constitutional characteristics. You’ll even find it in buried just below the surface of the old joke about television programs on the CBC being broadcast a half hour later in Newfoundland.
Tempting. Convenient. But wrong. The event should be understood in its own context, firstly and foremostly, and what it represented for the people who made the decision. To understand why women in Newfoundland got the vote in 1925, you need to look at the local context. Some of it had to do with the war. The Great War changed the country socially and politically. No accident that the wartime Women’s Patriotic Association became crucial in the campaign. But it happened in a deeply conservative society, with a rigid class structure, and deep social divisions. Women got the vote in Newfoundland in 1925 on the same terms men had voted since 1855 . But to be a candidate, men and women had to meet a property qualification to keep the riff-raff out. Newfoundland in 1925 was still as, conservative, tory, and corporatist as it had been in the 19th century.
Don’t forget, though, that the government in 1925 was slowly collapsing under the weight of its own debt and deficits. We really cannot ignore the popularity among the leading people in society - in full flower by 1925 - of a dictatorship to run the country. In that light, letting women vote was perhaps less an act of progress, less a success of people going along to get along or knowing their place, or even of using typical political technique to make social change as it was of a society where at least some prominent leaders had already started thinking of how democracy should end in the country. Many of them never supported local government in the first place.
People looking back note the very high turnout of women who voted in the first election when they got the chance. Indeed, it was quite a high turnout but that’s because there was no property qualification to vote in Newfoundland as there was in some other places at the time. Canada, for example, had all sorts of barriers to voting even among males. Some of them lasted until 1960. The notion of one person, one vote was not common even in the 1920s. Indigenous people in Canada couldn’t vote in 1949. By contrast, Indigenous people in Newfoundland were enumerated alongside everyone else. In Labrador, no one had the vote until the election to the National Assembly and in the two referenda on the country’s future. But in 1946 and 1948, Indigenous and non-Indigenous alike could vote.
None of that is hindsight, even though we know democracy collapsed less than a decade after women got the right to vote in Newfoundland. We know from comments in public at the time that local elites were already looking for an autocratic solution that divided power among the three major religious groups of Anglicans, Roman Catholics, and Methodists. The idea came publicly from William Coaker, darling of the left-wing historians in the later part of the 20th century, whose only complaint in 1933 was that the six-member commission government appointed to run the country wasn’t the dictatorship he had in mind.
From the 1860s onward, society and politics in Newfoundland and Labrador was split along religious lines. Seats in cabinet, jobs in the civil service, and even the way districts were configured reflected the religious make-up of the country. Starting in the 1890s, the government published a booklet that showed every job in the civil service, the name of the incumbent, the salary he or she got, and their religious affiliation (Church of England, Roman Catholic, or Methodist). There was some open discussion and debate but many things were settled quietly behind closed doors among leaders of government and leaders of groups.
A century and more later, it’s hard to see a difference sometimes. We’ve just replaced other groupings for religion. The messages are still the same: ordinary people only get to participate in politics and society within carefully set boundaries. Others will make the real decisions. Just like at the university last week, those in authority define an issue to suit themselves and decree who can and cannot speak.
University president Vianne Timmons is in the midst of controversy over her claims about Indigenous identity. In the week between Timmons’ abysmal interview with CBC and when the story broke, the university senior administration decided to do two things. First, they’d defend Timmons rather than do what other universities have done when the same sorts of issues arose: suspend and then investigate.
Second, they’d frame it as an issue that only Indigenous people at the university would discuss led by the branch of the university’s administration created since Timmons arrived. At least one of the officials from that part of the university started defending Timmons *before* the story aired and has been commenting publicly regularly since along the same lines as her original comments.
The official reason for this secrecy and exclusion is that the issues involved are complex. They are not. The only issue is about Timmons decision to claim Indigenous identity or membership when - by her own admission - she had none and had no attachment of any kind to any community of Mi’gmaw people recognised generally as such.
Even if the issue were complicated, silence and secrecy are not the best way to handle it. Openness is the best way to clean up anything that affects the integrity and reputation of an institution like the university.
What university officials seem concerned about is Indigenous identity. There are three observations to make about that.
First, we have a very good example here of the harm done to Indigenous people when others falsely claim an identity. Within the university’s Indigenous communities - note the plural - and for Indigenous individuals, there are discussions they need to have among themselves. Absolutely. But there’s not one Indigenous community. All Indigenous people are not the same, no matter how some people want to lump them together with hideously and nakedly racist terms like “racialized” or BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and Person of Colour).
Second, the Timmons affairs does not directly involve Indigenous communities in Newfoundland and Labrador except to the extent that Timmons has claimed some vague connection to Miawpukek First Nation and no one there seems to have heard of her or her relatives.
The identity Timmons claimed and the heritage she claims is to Nova Scotia Mi’kmak. Newfoundland Mi’gmaw people are related to them but that’s another community with a very different history. That aspect of the Timmons controversy is for them to judge.
Third, when it comes to Indigenous people in Newfoundland and Labrador, the issues of identity and history may appear complicated but they are not, really. Even if they were complicated and complex, now is an excellent time to peel back the layers, raise the issues, and inform people about them. It’s a perfect moment to advance reconciliation through widespread discussion, which is something the university and the provincial government endorses.
That brings us to the real issues that are actually difficult - not complicated - for many of the people at the university making decisions about the Timmons affair. The Timmons affair has political implications, which brings us back to that overtone of silence, knowing your place in the hierarchy, and leaving decisions to those in authority. That’s the real reason for the university’s very traditional and undemocratic way of dealing with the issues coming out of the Timmons controversy. The people who hired Vianne Timmons, who’ve seen their issues advanced under her Presidency, and those who have risen in status alongside her have personal interests in what happens with the controversy.
Remember that the university played up three things about Timmons when it announced her appointment: first was that she was the first woman president of the university. Second, that she was from here. CBC referred to it as “coming home” and Timmons said she always thought of Labrador as her home. Third was her Indigenous connection. CBC called it ancestry. Saltwire said that Timmons “is also of Mi'kmaq descent — her great-grandmother came from a Mi'kmaw family in Nova Scotia.”
Timmons was overwhelmingly qualified for the job yet those three points came to the fore in the announcement. They came up because the university’s communications people played them up. The university played them up because - implicitly - officials who decided to hire her felt those things were the three most important things to know about her. It’s a simple logical trail.
All of that is small potatoes against the sensitivity evident in official circles at the university about the implications of Timmons’ apparently false claim of an Indigenous that was more than one ancestor. That’s the one that raises questions that some people don’t want to deal with. That’s the complexity and complication the university is talking about. Again, it’s not actually complex and complicated. It’s just politically very touchy for them.
The issue centres on what happened in 1949. As a separate country, Newfoundland did not treat Indigenous people differently from anyone else like Canada did. In the talks between officials about bring the two countries together, what to do with Indigenous people was a sort point. Canadian officials assessed most as being “assimilated” under Canadian law, which means they wouldn’t be registered under the Indian Act. Newfoundland officials were concerned that people who enjoyed all the benefits of citizenship - the right to vote, own property, and so on - would be stripped of those rights if Canadian officials wanted to register them.
So the officials struck a compromise. No registration but the Newfoundland and Labrador government would continue to provide them services with financial help from the federal government. Over the next 40 years, changes to the Indian Act and changes in attitudes led to Indigenous people in Newfoundland and Labrador seeking registration under the Indian Act and the benefits that went with status under the Act. Landmark decisions by the Supreme Court of Canada - notably R v Powley and Daniels v Canada - supported a wider acceptance of people as Indigenous who would not have been officially recognized as such before, at least by the federal government.
Some of those changes were intended to address the harm done by Canadian law before 1951 that Newfoundland and Labrador’s Indigenous people escaped at the time of Confederation in 1949. At the same time, and as a result of those changes, new controversies arose both inside and outside Indigenous communities over who ought to be considered Indigenous.
That controversy extends into groups like the one Timmons was connected to. It is unrecognized by any Mi’gmaw group or the federal and Nova Scotia governments. In Newfoundland and Labrador, Nunatukavut Community Council (Southern Labrador Metis) and Qalipu (officially recognized as Mi’gmaw people, but also considered Metis by other) are at the centre of national controversy over identity and recognition.
That’s why Timmons’ claim causes so much anxiety in some circles within Newfoundland and Labrador. It raises difficult - not complicated - and divisive questions about the history of Newfoundland and Labrador and its people. For example, there is a case currently before the Supreme Court of Newfoundland and Labrador’s General Division in which people are fighting a decision to exclude them from membership in Qalipu even though other members of their family have been accepted. Tens of thousands will be affected by the outcome and the parties will be lucky if it does not wind up before the Supreme Court of Canada.
Across Canada there are Indigenous people who would consider both NCC and Qalipu to be pretendians, as the phrase goes. There’s no small irony that at least one person has referred folks to a piece by local writer Justin Brake in Maisonneuve a couple of years ago. Brake, who gained national fame and awards for covering protests against Muskrat Falls, wrote about his own connection to the Qalipu community. While that’s an insightful and nuanced presentation of his own experience, Brake turned up in January 2022 on National Public Radio in the United States in a radio episode called “Playing Pretendian.” He was not subtle or nuanced.
The program featured interviews with Indigenous Americans about the phenomenon of “pretending to be Native American when they're not Native American.” Brake was there to talk about Qalipu and his personal experience. But he made it quite clear how he feels about many of the people trying to gain membership in Qalipu First Nation. “[It] is the epitome… of white privilege to be able to get your hands on documents that show that you have an Indigenous ancestor and suddenly say, that makes me Indigenous. That's very dangerous. And it's not something that I'm interested in being a part of.”
Yet, as Brake noted in Maisonneuve, anthropologist Dorothy Stewart and Mi’kmaw Elder Marlene Companion told the federation of Newfoundland Indians (FNI) that his family provides “provide an interesting example of how aboriginal and immigrant [sic] cultures merged in west coast Newfoundland. Elements of both cultures were retained, but it seems that, in day to day life, the Micmac [sic] way of life prevailed.”
Again, there’s no small irony that most of the political difficulty the Timmons controversy inflames is actually about efforts by Indigenous people in Newfoundland and Labrador to assimilate into Canadian Indigenous society decades after Confederation even though they do not fit. The process of assimilation has included its fair share of myth-making like the myth of omission, residential schools and resurrection of the Beothuk genocide myth. It’s also included horrible anguish and division, both within families and arguably within individuals as they try to reconcile their own family history in Newfoundland and Labrador with a very different culture and experience in Canada.
We will not get to resolve these deeper controversies, these deeper troubling questions by this process of secrecy and arbitrary decisions by those with power to limit discussion and suppress difficult conversations. None of us can find our place if we follow the old ideas about knowing our place.
