DAVIN, NICHOLAS FLOOD
Publication
28 February 2023Born Kilfinane, County. Limerick, Ireland, 1843. Died Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada 1901
Author: Michele Holmgren
In the summer of 1885, Nicholas Flood Davin, the publisher of the Regina Leader (1883), announced the Canadian news story of the year: Louis Riel, the Métis politician and leader of the North-West Resistance, would be the subject of a “state trial; the trial of a leader in a rebellion.” “For a trial of such importance you have to go back to England to 1798,” declared the paper on 9 July, and compared Riel to the United Irishmen Wolfe Tone and Robert Emmett or the Young Irish leaders of 1848. After Riel was found guilty, Davin disguised himself as a priest and interviewed Riel a few nights before his execution. A century, an ocean, and nearly a continent removed from the United Irish Rising, Davin’s journalism and politics in the new political riding of Assiniboia West were informed by Irish history. As the first M.P. for the region, Davin used both his political influence and poetry to promote Western settlement, while his authorship of a government paper left a darker legacy: the Indigenous residential schools advocated in the Davin Report.
Born in Kilfinane, Co. Limerick in 1843, Davin briefly attended Queen’s College, Cork in 1864, before studying law in London, then becoming a war correspondent and Westminster parliamentary reporter, then editor of the short-lived Belfast Times. Arriving in Toronto in 1872, Davin wrote literary criticism for the Toronto Globe (and unsuccessfully defended its publisher’s murderer in 1880). After a debate against American “spread-eaglism” in 1873, Davin’s published rebuttal, British versus American Civilization, influenced the founders of the Confederation School of Canadian poetry, and his series of Irish lives, The Irishman in Canada (1877), added to his reputation. In his criticism and in Eos: An Epic of the Dawn and Other Poems (1889), he argued that a national poetry based on British traditions was essential to maintaining Canada’s independence and progress.
Davin’s views on cultural progress are apparent even in the Davin Report, officially titled Report on Industrial Schools for Indians and Half-breeds (1879), a temporary patronage appointment awarded by John A. MacDonald. Davin reported on and visited several schools in the United States. Substituting evangelical fervor for bureaucratic prose, his report promotes Western settlement, which the schools were intended “to welcome and facilitate.” He created a tragic portrait of Indigenous people on the edge of extinction who had accepted that they must adapt and blend into what he believed was a superior culture that would be established on the prairies. He thus justified the removal of children from their families and communities to erase “the influence of the wigwam.”
Davin’s sense of urgency was likely fuelled by the poverty and land wars in Ireland. In The Irishman in Canada, Davin had noted that Canada could be an answer to the Irish Question, since “land can be no apple of discord … in a country where we open up provinces as men in the old country would open up a paddock.” Once Indigenous and Metis people were contained on reserves, the Canadian Prairies could become “Homes for Millions.” Even his epic Eos contrasts peaceful and bucolic Canadian scenes with the vision of well-dressed land agents “gutting huts” while “the aged palsied mother weeps,” and “sons tall, strong with murderous eye survey the bailiff hard.” The poem concludes with Indigenous people singing their culture’s death-song while Eos commands her Celtic “bard” to “write an epic worthy of …the Irish” who “have play’d a great part” in the westward expansion of “the great empire which is theirs no less/ than others.” With that, the poet wakes from his “dream” to the sound of hammers building “the ‘city’ of a few weeks old” on “the monotonous plain.” For Davin, British culture bore “the mark of an Irish chisel” that would continue to build “a young, a free, a great, a prosperous Canadian nation,” thus benefitting Ireland by both opportunity and example. Arguing that Assiniboia West—“home of the buffalo ten or twelve years ago”—now enjoyed “more control over… local affairs than the millions of people of Ireland,” Davin advocated a similar form of Home Rule in Ireland.
Davin’s life closed in bitterness and disappointment. He never became a Cabinet minister, and he lost his seat in 1900. Losing his lifelong battle with alcoholism and dealing with unhappy personal relationships, he committed suicide on a visit to Winnipeg in 1901.
In British versus American Civilization, Davin predicted that “men will look back on our boasted nineteenth century with wondering pity and amused contempt.” While he might have hoped to be celebrated by future generations as an architect of responsible government, many today look back on Davin as part of a cruel government campaign of eradication that Indigenous communities are still recovering from. Having once derided a London Times boast that “a Celtic Irishman” would soon be “as rare in Connemara as an Indian on the banks of the Manhattan,” Davin seemed incapable of drawing parallels between the dispossession and cultural eradication endured by Irish and Indigenous peoples. In his poetic and political vision, the Irish were linked to the British empire and a peaceful Canadian future, while Indigenous people were linked to the violent Irish republicanism of the past.
Further Reading
Bentley, D.M.R. The Confederation Group of Canadian Poets, 1880–1897.Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004.
Davin, Nicholas Flood. British versus American Civilization: A Lecture Delivered in Shaftsbury Hall, Toronto, 19th April, 1873. National Papers 2. Toronto: Adam, Stevenson, 1873.
Eos: An Epic of the Dawn, and Other Poems.Regina: Leader Company, 1889.
The Irishman in Canada. Toronto: MacLear and Company, 1877.
Report on Industrial Schools for Indians and Half-breeds. Ottawa: N.p., 1879. https://collections.irshdc.ubc.ca/index.php/Detail/objects/9427
Koester, C.B. Mr Davin M.P.: A Biography of Nicholas Flood Davin. Saskatoon: Western Producer Prairie Books, 1980.
Thompson, John Herd. “Davin, Nicholas Flood.” In Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 13. Toronto: University of Toronto/Université Laval, 2003–. Article published 1994. www.biographi.ca/en/bio/davin_nicholas_flood_13E.html.