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Articles

Vol. 16 No. 2 (2024)

On Treaty, Virtue, and Plots that Choose Death: Moses Perley's Sporting Sketches

Submitted
November 20, 2024
Published
2024-11-20

Abstract

It remains somehow contrary to the mythology that Canadian academics have built up around Moses Perley over the course of the past 180 years to say that he believed the elimination of Waponahki people from this land was in his own interest—and yet he clearly did, and not only because this is how settler colonialism works, but because he says as much in his own writings. This article situates Moses Perley’s sporting sketches, first published in the London Sporting Review in the 1830s and 1840s, within the related contexts of self-interest and of what colonial literary historians since Howard Mumford Jones have discussed as “promotion literature.” The author models and advocates for a process of reading the literatures of this land through the Peace and Friendship Treaty relationship—a reading strategy that can draw each of us into the work of restoring our collective treaty order.