Jim’s Vision: Some Reflections on J.R. Miller

Donald Wright

When I learned that Jim Miller had died, I reached out to his partner, Lesley Biggs, to express my condolences. A few weeks later, she invited me to share a few words about him that would be read at his celebration of life. “It would be my honour,” I replied. And I meant it. Jim was something of a hero to me back in the day, when I was a graduate student and junior professor starting my academic career.

I first “met” Jim in the fall of 1993. I say “met” because I didn’t actually meet him. I was a first-year PhD student at the University of Ottawa, and he was a professor at the University of Saskatchewan. But I did read “Owen Glendower, Hotspur, and Canadian Indian Policy,” an article that he had published just a few years earlier.

Picture of J.R. Miller, courtesy of Lesley Biggs

As a green-as-grass graduate student, I thought that it was about the coolest thing I had ever read. The title alone was worth the price of admission. What did two characters from Shakespeare’s Henry IV have to do with Canada’s “Indian” policy in the late Victorian era? A lot, in fact.

When Owen Glendower pronounces that he can “call the spirits from the vasty deep,” Hotspur replies, “But will they come?” In other words, what matters, according to Hotspur, is the response, not the call, or the outcome, not the intent.

Riffing on Shakespeare, Dr. Miller – as I would have addressed him in those days – examined the difference between the intent of government policies and the outcome of those policies. Long story short, he showed that Indigenous peoples, in his words, “resisted, evaded, and defied” a series of policies that took aim at their suppression and assimilation.

“Owen Glendower, Hotspur, and Canadian Indian Policy” effortlessly combined original research and clear writing to reach broad conclusions, or so it seemed to me, although I now know that academic writing is bloody hard and never effortless.

Jim’s 1990 article, which was later re-printed in a reader for undergraduate students, challenged our understanding of Indigenous history: Indigenous peoples weren’t passive victims, they were active agents.

Two years later, in 1995, I “met” Jim for a second time. Again, I say “met” because I had yet to actually meet him. For a paper I was writing on the Canadian historian Donald Creighton, I spent a long, hot summer at the National Archives, today known as Library and Archives Canada. Tucked into the Creighton papers was a series of letters between Donald Creighton and a young Jim Miller, then a PhD student at the University of Toronto.

It’s clear from the correspondence that Donald Creighton thought very highly of Mr. Miller, as he called him. He was smart, hardworking, and focused on his research and writing. And when the time came, Creighton wrote a generous letter of reference that helped his last PhD student land a permanent position at the University of Saskatchewan.

A few months later, I gave my first academic paper at the annual meeting of the Canadian Historical Association on, well, Donald Creighton. Afterwards, someone introduced me to Jim, who had attended my talk! I was starstruck, and mumbled something incomprehensible.

Although Jim may have been a star, he didn’t comport himself like a star, which is to say that he didn’t parade his learning or his academic stripes. He was kind, decent, and solicitous, and he instantly put me at ease.

Curiously enough, Jim and I would cross paths at the Canadian Historical Association that fall, and, for the next couple of years, we worked closely together. I was the English-language Secretary, and he was the president.

Watching him chair meetings, navigate difficult conversations, and find consensus on contentious topics, I learned a lot about academic leadership and the importance of listening.

I also learned a valuable lesson in leading by example, which I remember very clearly. Shingwauk’s Vision: A History of Native Residential Schools had just been published. It’s a remarkable piece of scholarship which we devoured as graduate students at the University of Ottawa.

J.R. Miller’s seminal work, Shingwauk’s Vision: A History of Native Residential Schools

Almost certainly, it would have been a finalist for what was then called the Sir John A. Macdonald Prize for the Best Book in Canadian History. And who knows, it may have even won.

But as president of the Canadian Historical Association, Jim knew that he couldn’t possibly accept the award even though prize juries operate at arm’s length, and so he made it clear that he had instructed his publisher, the University of Toronto Press, not to submit his book for the Macdonald Prize. I was terribly impressed by his integrity and his example.

Fast forward 10 years, I had finished my PhD, secured an academic position, and resumed my research on Donald Creighton. I sent a formal note to Jim, requesting an interview, and he agreed. Meeting in his office at the University of Saskatchewan, we spent a wonderful couple of hours talking about the University of Toronto, Donald Creighton, and the writing of Canadian history.

When my book was finally published, I sent him a copy to say thanks. A few weeks later, he sent me a generous note. It was clear that he had read the thing, which meant a lot to me at the time. All these years later, it still does.

Jim and I continued to exchange occasional e-mails about this and that. I am not going to pretend that I was a confidant, because I wasn’t. But re-reading those e-mails, I am struck by his essential generosity and kindness. He was one of the good ones.

There was one e-mail, however, that I didn’t read, because I never sent it. After the CHA released its 2021 Canada Day statement describing the historical treatment of Indigenous Peoples as genocide, Jim signed a counter statement that acknowledged “the historical and ongoing legacies of residential schools and other forms of attempted assimilation” but stopped short of describing them as genocidal. He was heavily criticized and called a residential school denier.

Speaking to Jim’s family and close friends, I gather that it was all very painful. No one wanted to engage with him, preferring instead to dismiss him.

I wish had reached out to apologize for the intemperate climate, and to tell him not to let it get him down. But I didn’t, and now it’s too late.

After Jim’s death, I did what historians do. I took his books off my shelves and dipped into them, especially Shingwauk’s Vision, a book that takes its title from Chief Augustine Shingwauk’s 1832 vision of a “teaching wigwam” in what is now northern Ontario. Of course, Shingwauk’s vision of a teaching wigwam was very different than the eventual Sault Ste. Marie mission and school that, in Jim’s words, “oppressed and attempted to assimilate” Shingwauk’s people.

Although it had been years since I cracked its spine, I was instantly reminded of why my friends and I had eaten it up. The research is remarkable, and the writing is impeccable.

But Shingwauk’s Vision wasn’t only a scholarly project. It was also a moral project premised on notions of understanding, respect, and what we now call reconciliation.

“Native peoples in Canada,” Jim concluded, “still have a vision of the healthy and effective education of their children and the development of their communities, and they still look to the people who have usurped their lands for assistance in bringing it to reality. Now, as always through the history of Native policy and residential schools, it is up to the Euro-Canadian majority to decide if they will help or hinder, facilitate or oppress, support or tyrannize. Will it be the realization of Shingwauk’s vision, or another episode of the Native nightmare?”

It was a big question, and for that matter, it still is.

And that’s when it dawned on me. Shingwauk’s vision of a teaching wigwam was also Jim’s vision of a better and fairer Canada, of a country that, if it can’t change its past, can imagine a different future.

Donald Wright is acting Chair of Historical Studies and Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of New Brunswick