Next in our Native American Heritage Month coverage, we have the October 1930-published Pictorial History of New Brunswick, reprinting twenty-five strips by George A. Bradshaw, which ran in the New Brunswick Sunday Times.

The first strip focuses on the natives, ending in panel four with Dutch troops suddenly entering the picture, to “demand satisfaction from the Indians for depredations committed upon white settlers on Staten Island”. As expected, this completely ignores the fact that Europeans were the invaders, and that “Staten Island” is the name given it, by those who took it.

The next three strips in the series, deal mostly in Europeans purchasing land from other Europeans, skipping over the details of just how that land became “owned” by those Europeans in the first place. Mention of Native Americans rapidly diminishes in these strips, with their complete disappearance after the fourth strip unexplained — as if the natives had just magically disappeared…

Pictorial History of New Brunswick is in line in its treatment of Native Americans with several other “cartoon histories” produced around this same time. Some of these, I’m certain we’ll see in future years, in this series.

Click on the below strips, to view them in more detail, and read them.

Doug Wheeler

NativeAmericanHistory