Nicholas Flood Davin

Canadian politician

Nicholas Flood Davin, KC (January 13, 1840 – October 18, 1901) was a lawyer, journalist and politician, born at Kilfinane, Ireland (then part of the United Kingdom). The first MP for Assiniboia West (1887–1900), Davin was known as the voice of the North West. Davin founded and edited the Regina Leader, the first newspaper in Assiniboia. He tried to gain provincial status for the territory. Davin is considered one of the architects of the Canadian Indian residential school system. In 1879 he wrote the Report on Industrial Schools for Indians and Half Breeds, otherwise known as The Davin Report, in which he advised the federal government to institute residential schools for Indigenous children. In 2015, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission concluded that the assimilation amounted to cultural genocide.

He was the only son of Nicholas Davin, doctor, and Eliza Davin (née Lane). Davin's own telling of his early life is the subject to doubt. It is thought he falsified his middle name, the year of his birth, his father’s occupation, and a claimed Catholic background. He was briefly apprenticed to a ironmonger before being admitted to Queen's College Cork, where he attended for only a year before moving to London. Despite being trained in law, while in England he mostly work in journalism, as editor of the Monthly Journal, parliamentary reporter for The Star, and war correspondent for the Standard and the Irish Times during the Franco Prussian War. In 1872 he returned to Ireland to edit the Belfast Times, but was dismissed after five months amid lawsuits and allegations of drunkenness. Davin's major early non fiction work was The Irishman in Canada (1877) a history of the Irish diaspora (mainly, but not only, in Canada) which focused on famous personalities rather than social trends. He asserted that in the New World the division between Catholics and Protestants was irrelevant and the communities would merge into a pan denominational "Irish" identity. The industrial boarding school was in his view the best option for Indians ‘to be merged and lost’ within the nation. But Davin also felt that the migratory nature of Indigenous groups in the northwest made the extensive establishment of industrial boarding schools expensive and inefficient; he argued Canada should use its already existing network of denominational missions for the residential schooling system. Soon after his report, several government sponsored boarding schools opened.

Davin used, among others, the literary device of inter textuality to draw upon British canonical writers including Tennyson, Byron, and Shakespeare to connect the associations of empire with his 19th century audience. In 1876, Davin wrote an adaptation of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet entitled The Fair Grit; or The Advantages of Coalition. A Farce. The play is a farce on governmental coalitions and the corrupted role of media in Canadian politics – a power fully realized by Davin as a writer and founder of the Regina Leader newspaper located in Canada’s North West. Three years later, Davin produced the Report on Industrial Schools for Indians and Half Breeds, otherwise known as The Davin Report (1879), in which he advised John A. Macdonald’s federal government to institute residential schools for Indigenous youth; the recommendation led, in part, to the establishment of the Canadian Indian residential school system that decimated Canadian Aboriginal families. In 1884, while visiting Ottawa, Davin wrote Eos – A Prairie Dream (1884), a collection of poems that, in his own words, "strike a true and high note in Canadian politics and literature" while he represents, through his poetry, the destruction of Aboriginal culture.

Nicholas Flood Davin complimented the 'Gunhilda letters' "for felicity of expression, cogency of reasoning, fierceness of invective, keenness of satire and piquancy of style" and "Nothing equal to them has appeared in the Canadian press for years." In 1881, Susan Anna Wiggins used the nom de plume 'Gunhilda' to write the Gunhilda Letters Marriage with a Deceased Husband's Sister: Letters of a Lady to [John Travers Lewis], the Right Rev. the Lord Bishop of Ontario, which consisted of letters of support for Mr. Girouard's bill regarding the legalization of marriage with a deceased wife's sister, long time prohibited by British law at home and overseas. The Gunhilda Letters were dedicated to the members of the Senate of Canada and of the House of Commons of Canada who supported Mr. Girouard's Bill.