Trigger, Bruce Graham - F.R.S.C.

ENCAENIA, MAY, 1987
BRUCE GRAHAM TRIGGER
to be Doctor of Science

We have dignified Dr. Enders today in the heady atmosphere of international diplomacy and Canada-U.S. relations, and we have honoured Dr. Kent in the context of his deep commitments and remarkable contributions to his own special corner of our small Canadian province, but it is in the larger context of Canada – our home and native land – that I present Bruce Trigger to this August assembly.

Born in Upper Canada – which is deemed by many to confer Canadian citizenship – his undergraduate degree in Anthropology is from the University of Toronto, and his doctoral work was done at Yale, a great university located in that southern extension of the Maritime Provinces known as New England. He was trained as an Egyptologist and his first book, published in 1965, was History and Settlement in Lower Nubia. This was quickly followed in 1967 by another book on Nubia, and in 1968 by a broader study, Beyond History: the Methods of Prehistory. In 1969 he turned his studies to the native peoples who had inhabited his own birthplace – Southern Ontario – and published two books: The Huron: Farmers of the North and The Impact of Europeans on Huronia. Reviews and articles and books have continued to pour forth, and in 1976 he published what has been called “an undoubted masterpiece,” The Children of Aataentsic: A History of the Huron People to 1660. Egypt was not forgotten, however, for in the same year he produced Nubia Under the Pharaohs, and has continued to present studies of ancient Egypt. But it is primarily as an ethnohistorian of the native peoples of Canada that we seek to honour him today. In 1985 he produced Natives and Newcomers: Canada’s “Heroic Age” Reconsidered. In this monumental and definitive study of the relations between the native Indians and the Europeans, he has opened our eyes to the myths and distortions which have coloured our perceptions of our early history as a nation.

Professor Trigger’s work has been “animated by his belief in equity among individuals and groups,” and he has written that at the centre of his studies, whether on Nubia or Huronia, “is a preoccupation with the question of how people get power over other people, and how that leads them to behave.” As a researcher he has tried to weigh and to judge the facts and the artifacts which lie before him, and then to go beyond these surfaces to the truth which may lie hidden or obscured. Knowledge inevitably leads to understanding, and understanding, just as surely, leads to sympathy. This is a testing time in the tangled and sometimes tragic story of the relations between “Natives and Newcomers,” and the timely work of this find scholar and compassionate man will help us to seek with clear and unclouded eyes, and informed understanding, for the fair and honest and equitable solution which we must find.

Many honours have, of course, come to Bruce Trigger. For over twenty years he has been a distinguished member of a distinguished Department of Anthropology at our distinguished sister institution, McGill University. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and the recipient, in 1985, of that society’s Innis Gerin medal. The list could go on, but I must content myself with a quotation from Professor Trigger’s letter of acceptance to President Downey, in which he work.

I appreciate this connection with the University of New Brunswick all the more since you have had among your distinguished staff, professor Alfred Bailey, who pioneered the study of ethnohistory in North America, thus laying the foundation for the work done by many, including myself, who have since come to this research.

This is a very generous and greatly deserved tribute to the scholarship of ‘Alfie,” and I close with Doctor Bailey’s own judgement: “Bruce Trigger is quite simply the leading scholar in the field of ethnohistory in North America.”

Insignissime Praeses, amplissima Cancellaria, tota Universitas, praesento vobis Briocum Graham Trigger ut admittatur honoris causa ad gradum Doctoris in Scientia in hac Universitate.

From: UA Case 70, Box