In Transatlantic Upper Canada: Portraits in Literature, Land, and British-Indigenous Relations, Kevin Hutchings analyzes the intersection of nineteenth-century Romanticism and indigeneity in a transatlantic context. Employing a biographical approach, Hutchings focuses his chapters on British and Indigenous figures who either wrote about or commented upon land and culture in the colony of Upper Canada. At root, he is interested in his subjects’ “cross-cultural relationships, environmental philosophies, and political activities” (27).

Hutchings first treats the settler perspective through a close reading of the works of Bishop John Strachan, Sir John Beverley Robinson, Anna Brownell Jameson, and Sir Francis Bond Head. He then flips to the Indigenous viewpoint, centering chapters on the Haudenosaunee leaders John Norton (Chief Teyoninhokarawen) and John Brant (Chief Ahyonwaeghs) and the Anishinaabe leaders Peter Jones (Chief Kahkewaquonaby) and George Copway (Kahgegagahbowh). Hutchings's dramatis personae will be familiar to readers of Canadian history, but his unique contribution is to reveal the connections between this transatlantic cast, often mediated by notable third parties in Britain, like the poets Thomas Campbell and Sir Walter Scott and the abolitionist William Wilberforce.

By collapsing the disciplinary and methodological boundaries between the studies of Indigenous political culture and the literary tradition of British Romanticism, Hutchings aims to “untie the Gordian knot” (5) of this small literary network—a project that he sees as having an underlying political motive. Indeed, Transatlantic Upper Canada is refreshing in that Hutchings quite consciously frames his analysis through his own political awakening to the legacies of colonialism and through his experience teaching Indigenous students at the University of Northern British Columbia. This project is thus Hutchings's effort to mobilize his expertise in Romanticism to help make sense of Canada today, as a settler society “in an age of truth and reconciliation” (237).

In an important opening chapter—the only one to deviate from his biographical approach—Hutchings sets the stage, demonstrating how Indigenous and Romantic writers alike opposed the prevailing Enlightenment era philosophy of agricultural improvement. In Upper Canada, Indigenous writers like Jane Johnston Schoolcraft (Bamewawagezhikaquay) and George Copway, among others, invoked Romantic ideas to “challenge adverse stereotypes supporting the colonization of their people and territories” (9). At the same time, Anna Jameson and other Romantic writers criticized the colonial policy of deforestation in Upper Canada. Hutchings argues that, together, this transatlantic network of Romantic and Indigenous dissent formed an “activist literary politics” that, although unsuccessful, indicated a possible “alternative anticolonial environmental ethic” (33).

While exploring counter-histories, Hutchings is also keen to challenge the commonly held assumption that Indigenous peoples were treated with respect in Upper Canada, especially in contrast to how their counterparts were mistreated in the United States. This sanitized understanding of settler-Indigenous relations often frames contemporary political discourse in Canada. Instead, Hutchings reminds readers in chapter 2 that John Strachan—leading light of the so-called Loyalist Family Compact and first Anglican bishop of Toronto—gave energy and voice to the policy of child separation and residential schools championed by Peregrine Maitland. In chapter 3, he recounts Jameson's decision to plunder an Indigenous gravesite as she traveled through Upper Canada, making off with a skull, possibly to give to a phrenologist friend. There are clear parallels in this chapter to works like Clifton Crais and Pamela Scully's Sara Baartman and the Hottentot Venus: A Ghost Story and a Biography (2009) and Kim Wagner's The Skull of Alem Bheg: The Life and Death of a Rebel of 1857 (2017). Readers on the hunt for materials to generate classroom discussion may find that putting these three texts in conversation yields good results among undergraduates.

In his final four chapters, Hutchings is most effective in emphasizing the duplicitousness of colonial officials as they worked overtime to abrogate Indigenous land claims and undermine Indigenous efforts to lobby the Crown. In traveling to the heart of empire, Indigenous leaders acted as “cultural brokers” (161), attempting to leverage their liminal positions for political gain. In July 1804, for example, Hutchings locates John Norton in Cambridge performing a series of Mohawk war dances before an entranced audience that included Wilberforce and members of the Clapham Sect. Norton was in Britain as part of a failed attempt to secure Crown confirmation of Haudenosaunee title to a tract of land on the Grand River. John Brant and Peter Jones would later follow Norton's example by making their own lobbying campaigns to Whitehall, Westminster, and other sites of British social and political authority. Hutchings's meticulous efforts to show how these individuals negotiated their transatlantic identities adds nuance to the established portrait of Indigenous leaders who tried to work within the framework of the colonial system and recognition-based politics. While seeking Crown favor, their participation in an activist literary politics nevertheless challenged the British colonial system and its raison d’être—the so-called civilizing mission of empire.

In a brief afterword, Hutchings muses on the type of readers that might be interested in this book. Scholars of British Romanticism, he notes, have shown scant interest in Upper Canada in the past—and he questions whether they will do so in the future. He states instead that he would be happy if his work was taken up by practitioners of Indigenous, colonial, and Canadian studies. Hutchings would be wise to add British studies to his list, as Transatlantic Upper Canada falls squarely within the domain of scholars of Britain working on the nineteenth century and those with interests in literary, Atlantic, colonial, transnational, and indigenous questions.