Although E.K. Brown, a highly admired literary critic, once called poet and bureaucrat Duncan Campbell Scott “one of the chief masters of Canadian literature,” Scott’s reputation today lies in tatters. 

Mark Abley in his fascinating biography Conversations with a Dead Man, The Legacy of Duncan Campbell Scott, explains why. 

I met with him at his home in Point Claire near Montreal – where the ghost of Scott appeared. We talk, among others things, about boarding schools, Canada’s residential school system, “genocide,” the Department of Indian Affairs, Sir John A. MacDonald, forms of biography, assimilation, the “Indian Problem,” and Scott’s poetry, notably a sonnet to an “Onondaga Madonna.”