Francis, D. (1992). The imaginary Indian. Vancouver: Arsenal Press.

This introduction outlines the key argument of the book, i.e. “Indians, as we think we know them, do not exist. In fact, there may well be no such thing as an Indian” (p. 4). Even more radically speaking, “there is no such thing as a real Indian” (p. 5). What there is, rather, is an image of the Indian, an imaginary Indian. The purpose of the book is hence to trace the construction of the image of the Indian that Canadians have constructed since the middle of the 19^th century.

Francis begins with two anecdotes. The second reports about the poem Charles Mair who travelled in 1899 into the far Northwest to be part of a team negotiating with the Indians. Although he was very well informed and had few (negative) prejudices about Indians, he was surprised to discover even in the remote regions “men with well-washed unpainted faces, and combed and common hair; men in suits of ordinary store-clothes, and some even with “boiled” fi not laundered shirts” (p. 3). The second anecdote is a century apart. Going to a world heritage site where Indians lived and cultivated their animals for over six millennia, the author witnessed - with a similar surprise as Mair - Indians in charge of a museum that showcased the lives of the Indians over the past centuries. Francis argues that the experience was  “an encounter not just with an important place in the history of the continent, but also with an idea, my own idea bout what an Indian was” (p. 3).

The two anecdotes are evoked to challenge the claim that every generation claims a clearer grasp of the reality than its predecessors. This is not true with regards to Indians, because “the Indian is the invention of the European” (p.4), and because “the image of the Other, the Indian, was integration to this process of self-identification” (p. 8). The author maintains that Indians were not known as much as they were imagined, and this was/is prevalent not only among politicians, but also among authors and even businessmen. That’s why the book does not seek to better understand the natives, but “to understand where the Imaginary Indian came from, how Indian imagery has affected public policy in Canada and how it has shaped, and continues to shape, the myths non-Natives tell themselves about being Canadians” (p. 6).

I found this introduction super interesting and I am indeed interested in reading the book. The book answers some of the questions that I personally ask about how Canadian decision making institutions understand immigrants and use this knowledge as the basis of their decision making processes. How do we understand the Other? Is there an Other indepdently from our perception, i.e. does the Other impose its reality on us or do we impose our reality on the Other? I think these are important questions that the author seeks to answer and, I believe, these are also important issues that teachers need to discuss with their students in class.

If I could be picky about a claim in the argument, perhaps it would be whether the passage of time has not contributed to our understanding of the Indians. I have to objections to this for two reasons. The first is what it means to understand? I believe that understanding is a process that results from, as Gadamer would say, the fusion of two horizons: the first being the horizon of the observer, which is constantly changing, and the other being that of the Other, which is likewise constantly changing. So while there is no ultimate point for understanding, understandings of the same phenomenon intrinsically change across different times and contexts. The second objection is that temporal distance usually helps negative prejudices that are destructive to more genuine understanding to lose their vigor and to be replaced by those that are more acceptable. I believe the more is written about Indians, the more negative prejudices will lose their authority and the more of the reality of the Other will be reflected in the discourse of our common knowledge.