Before the Country: Native Renaissance, Canadian Mythology 9781442684041

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Introduction
1. The Headwaters of Design
2. The Seventh Generation
3. Native Literature of the 1960s and 1970s in Canada
4. Day of Atonement
5. Searching for Sun-Gods: Robert Kroestch’s Badlands and Sky Lee’s Disappearing Moon Cafe
6. Admitting the Possibility of Transitional Texts in Canadian Literature
Conclusion
Notes
Works Cited
Permissions
Index

Citation preview

BEFORE THE COUNTRY: NATIVE RENAISSANCE, CANADIAN MYTHOLOGY

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Canada witnessed an explosion in the production of literary works by Aboriginal writers, a development that some critics have called the Native Renaissance. Before the Country explores the extent to which this body of literature exposed the fallacies of one specific story, or non-Native national myth, that had been developed at an early date in Canada. In the context of Northrop Frye’s theories of myth, and in light of the attempts of social critics and early anthologists to define Canada and Canadian literature, Stephanie McKenzie suggests ways in which stories react to one another. She examines anew the aesthetics of Native literature and, in a style that is as creative as it is scholarly, incorporates the principles of storytelling into the unfolding of her argument. This strategy not only enlivens her narrative, but also underscores the need for new theoretical strategies in the criticism of Aboriginal literatures. Before the Country invites us to engage in one such endeavour. STEPHANIE MCKENZIE teaches in the Department of English at Sir Wilfred

Grenfell College, Corner Brook.

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STEPHANIE MCKENZIE

Before the Country: Native Renaissance, Canadian Mythology

U N I V E R S I T Y O F TO R O N TO P R E S S Toronto Buffalo London

www.utppublishing.com © University of Toronto Press Incorporated 2007 Toronto Buffalo London Printed in Canada ISBN 978-0-8020-9208-3 (cloth) ISBN 978-0-8020-9446-9 (paper)

Printed on acid-free paper Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication McKenzie, Stephanie Before the country: native renaissance, Canadian mythology / Stephanie McKenzie. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8020-9208-3 (bound) ISBN 978-0-8020-9446-9 (pbk.) 1. Canadian literature (English – Native authors – History and criticism. 2.Canadian literature – 20th century – History and criticism. 3. Nationalism and literature – Canada – History – 20th century. I. Title. PS8089.5.I6M44 2007

C810.9'897

C2007-901140-3

Cover image from the permanent collection of Yukon Arts Centre Public Art Gallery.

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support for its publishing activities of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP). University of Toronto Press acknowledges the publication subvention given to this book by the School of Humanities, Waterford Institute of Technology, Waterford, Ireland.

For Doug Beardsley, who introduced me to Canadian literature, and Nang Kiingiaay Laas (Bearer of Good News), Thomas Reginald Kelly, who shared with me some stories and showed me there were different ways of looking at the world.

As I write, the centennial of Confederation in 1967 looms up before the country with the moral urgency of a Day of Atonement. – Northrop Frye, ‘Conclusion to a Literary History of Canada’ (1965) in The Bush Garden, 224

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Contents

Acknowledgments ix Abbreviations

xiii

Introduction

3

1 The Headwaters of Design 2 The Seventh Generation

12

33

3 Native Literature of the 1960s and 1970s in Canada 4 Day of Atonement 114 5 Searching for Sun-Gods: Robert Kroestch’s Badlands and Sky Lee’s Disappearing Moon Cafe 136 6 Admitting the Possibility of Transitional Texts in Canadian Literature 161 Conclusion Notes

180

191

Works Cited

199

Permissions

215

Index

217

54

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Acknowledgments

Warmest thanks and appreciation go to the Head of the School of Humanities, John Ennis, at Waterford Institute of Technology, Waterford, Ireland, whose school provided publication subvention for this work. Thanks also to friends in Corner Brook, Newfoundland: Elizabeth Behrens, Beverley Greene, Brenda Lomond-Carey, Pam Parsons, Pauline Hayes, Darcy Andrews, Allison Stamp, and Louise McGillis, who helped me access information and research and provided valuable help with communication and information technology; Doreen Klassen, Matt Janes, David Freeman, and Martin Ware, who perused late drafts of the manuscript and offered valuable comments; Marc Thackray and Jim Greenlee, who read and offered comments on early drafts of this work; Rainer Baehre, who shared with me certain perspectives as a historian; Rex Brown and Rebekah Robbins, who provided support and help; Adrian Fowler, who lent me the services of a research assistant; and, especially, Nick Novakowski, who provided a writing space and home for me at a crucial stage. A special thank you to Adam Baker, who, as a brilliant undergraduate student, assisted me with two drafts of this book. Thanks, as well, to professional mentors who worked with me when I began shaping ideas as a PhD candidate at the University of Toronto: in particular, thanks to Chelva Kanaganayakam, who was my dissertation supervisor and who never let his own interests or agenda control my work; Diana Brydon, who was my external examiner and who offered valuable and intelligent feedback; Heather Murray and Keren Rice, who were committee members, always operating with the utmost integrity. A big thanks, too, to J.E. Chamberlin, under whom I had the

x Acknowledgments

pleasure to study and whose work has been an invaluable informant in the way I have come to express ideas about literature. I also wish to thank Kristina Fagan, who was my closest ally (both in friendship and scholarship) for five years at the University of Toronto. We spent many long hours talking about Aboriginal literature in Canada. I would also like to thank important mentors at the University of the West Indies, Kingston, Jamaica, where I went during my PhD years as the Louise Bennett exchange scholar to study tricksters, and, in particular, Anancy; though I never wrote that book on tricksters, humbled after six months of research, I attribute my knowledge of tricksters to that period of intense study. Thanks to Nadi Edwards, Maureen WarnerLewis, and Mervyn Morris, scholars of the highest order. Thanks, too, to Victor Chang, who made my stay in Kingston comfortable and profitable. Without question, the discoveries made about tricksters in this book are the result of my immersion in Caribbean scholarship. Thanks also to Stan Dragland for sending me materials and for being an impeccable scholar whose work and writing style have left deep impressions on me. I also wish to thank the editors at University of Toronto Press. I owe this book to Siobhan McMenemy, acquisitions editor (cultural studies, film, Canadian literature, and book history). Not only did she solicit the most professional of reviewers, but she also provided encouragement and support over an intense deliberation process. More than that, she considered the work worthwhile at a very early stage and remained dedicated and devoted to the project. I also wish to thank the three anonymous reviewers who took care and time to provide invaluable commentary on different drafts: your feedback and dedication to scholarship are most appreciated. This book is dedicated to two major influences in my scholarly life. Doug Beardsley taught me my first course in Canadian literature at the University of Victoria. It was not until my last year of undergraduate study and in his class that I read an author from my home province, British Columbia. Doug Beardsley introduced me to Ethel Wilson but, most importantly, to Emily Carr. He also performed ‘At the Cedars’ and ‘Dark Pines under Water’ in class one day, and it was then I decided to go on to further study in Canadian literature. Nang Kiingiaay Laas (Bearer of Good News), Thomas Reginald Kelly, of the Haida Nation and father of a dear friend, Kristely, with whom I had the pleasure of growing up on British Columbia’s Sunshine Coast, always took the time to tell me stories and to teach me how the world

Acknowledgments xi

can be seen by different cultures in different ways. For many years, he also stressed to me the importance of Aboriginal self-government. His gentle manner and unequivocal principles have had a major impact on my life. Given the size of this project and the number of years it has taken to pull ideas together into a book (well over a decade), I am sure there are a number of people who have helped me and whom I might not have remembered here, though I wish to thank them, too. Any faults, omissions, or miscalculations found within this book are entirely my responsibility.

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Abbreviations

BG BL DMC LHC LTW

Northrop Frye. The Bush Garden: Essays on the Canadian Imagination. Toronto: Anansi, 1971. Robert Kroetsch. Badlands. 1975. Reprint, Toronto: Paperbacks, 1976. Sky Lee. Disappearing Moon Cafe. 1990. Reprint, Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 1991. Carl F. Klinck, ed. Literary History of Canada: Canadian Literature in English. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1965. Robert Kroetsch. The Lovely Treachery of Words: Essays Selected and New. Toronto: Oxford UP, 1989.

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BEFORE THE COUNTRY: NATIVE RENAISSANCE, CANADIAN MYTHOLOGY

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Introduction

If it can’t be shown, it can’t be understood. – Lee Maracle, ‘Oratory: Coming to Theory,’ 7

In 1965 ordained United Church minister Northrop Frye, one of Canada’s most recognized literary scholars, and, internationally, one of the foremost mythic commentators of the twentieth century, wrote the conclusion to the first edition of Literary History of Canada: Canadian Literature in English. As general editor Carl F. Klinck outlined in his introduction, this anthology was ‘a co-operative project which began in 1957,’ and the book was ‘written’ by himself, five other editors,1 including Frye, and ‘twenty-nine scholars’ (ix). Not surprisingly, Frye’s conclusion drew attention to the process of anthologizing, an act inextricably bound up with presenting convictions and arguments (explicit or implicit) about the nature of a literary collective, in this case, national: Some years ago, a group of editors met to draw up the first tentative plans for a history of English Canadian literature. What we then dreamed of is substantially what we have got, changed very little in essentials. I expressed at the time the hope that such a book would help to broaden the inductive basis on which some writers on Canadian literature were making generalizations that bordered on guesswork. By ‘some writers’ I meant primarily myself: I find, however, that more evidence has in fact tended to confirm most of my intuitions on the subject. (BG 213)

Frye’s intuitions were many, but they were almost always made cohesive by his deference to archetypal criticism or understanding, a

4 Before the Country

way of thinking which would also flavour what Linda Hutcheon rightfully recognizes to be Frye’s ‘landmark text’ on Canadian literature, published in 1971 – The Bush Garden: Essays on the Canadian Imagination. In her introduction to the second edition (1995), Hutcheon reflects on the somewhat strange medley of pieces that constitute the Bush Garden, noting that, as a whole, it ‘speak[s] to Frye’s conception of what has made the Canadian imagination distinctive’ (vii): ‘Despite the fact that it is actually a collection of odd bits and pieces – reviews from the University of Toronto Quarterly in the 1950s, lectures, introductions and conclusions to other books – early readers were quick to note a continuity of vision or, more accurately, a developing vision of what makes Canadian poetry and visual arts particularly “Canadian”’ (viii). As Hutcheon also recognizes, it was not just poetry and the visual arts with which Frye concerned himself, however; considerations of these mediums allowed him to assess what he might have called the spirit of Canada, and it seemed fitting that this book ended, too, with his conclusion written for Klinck’s major representation of Canadian writing. Frye’s famous conclusion includes many claims now often quoted in the criticism of Canadian literature: ‘To enter the United States is a matter of crossing an ocean; to enter Canada is a matter of being silently swallowed by an alien continent’ (BG 217); ‘Canada in its attitude tends to be more royalist than the Queen’ (218); ‘The Canadian genius for compromise is reflected in the existence of Canada itself’ (219); ‘I have long been impressed in Canadian poetry by a tone of deep terror in regard to nature’ (225). ‘Swallowed by an alien continent,’ ‘more royalist than the queen,’ ‘genius for compromise,’ ‘tone of deep terror’ … If one were to compile a list of potential titles for a Bible of Canadian literature, Frye’s mythic markers would probably have only to compete with themselves. It is, however, the following, lessknown claim from Frye’s conclusion that seems to most strongly mark a narrative revelation: ‘As I write, the centennial of Confederation in 1967 looms up before the country with the moral urgency of a Day of Atonement’ (BG 224). This ‘Day of Atonement,’ the fixation of Before the Country, is a moment in a story. During the 1960s and 1970s in Canada, a nationally inspired myth, which had set out as early as the nineteenth century to fulfil its own prophecy, buckled. This story is not necessarily the most important in Canadian history, though it is a significant part of this nation’s history, in particular, its literary history. Within the great code in which Frye’s ‘Day of Atonement’ operates, the Native Renaissance of the 1960s and 1970s in Canada arrested with acts of remembrance a

Introduction 5

narrative that competed with Renaissance sensibilities and that was predicated on a need to forget. This story had been primed by a disproportionate number of early Canadian critics, such as Edward Hartley Dewart, Archibald Lampman, and Archibald MacMechan, who saw national literary and historical development in need of rebirth. The belief was later perpetuated and made solidly mythological by Frye. However, despite such fostering, the story’s fallacies were exposed by the Native Renaissance. The deduction was simple. Like other nation states, Canada would have a moment of greatness that would nationally create the basis for a blank slate. Ernest Renan would say these thinkers were looking to forget: ‘Forgetting, I would even go so far as to say historical error,’ Renan asserts, ‘is a crucial factor in the creation of a nation’ (‘What Is a Nation?’ 11). He continues: ‘ … the essence of a nation is that all individuals have many things in common, and also that they have forgotten many things’ (11). Renan maintains ‘a nation is above all a dynasty, representing an earlier conquest, one which was first of all accepted, and then forgotten by the mass of people’ (12); he speaks specifically of Western European nations created since the fall of the Roman Empire, or the disintegration of Charlemagne’s empire. However, believers in this story took it up into nineteenth-century Canadian arms. Canada, like the United States and France (the latter even creating a new calendar to mark a similar crisis and rite of passage), would one day begin anew, as in world war or, perhaps, conversion. Canada was a ‘new world,’ though, with a new constitution. This story did not see wars on its soil. War and conquest, the raising of new flags, would not usher in the epoch. Frye predicted its climax could very well be Canada’s centenary. He honed the language and ideologies upon which critics had been dependent. Instead of looking to history, an empirically founded inquiry into the past, as the key to unleashing new literary potential and strong national voices, he pinpointed mythology, a sacred belief system inextricable with faith, as the great equivocator. Frye maintained that, within the design of the ostensible code which had begun to give Canadian literature a recognizable imagination, ritual would shake this nation, its letters and thoughts. Frye’s transfiguration of history into myth was powerful. However, its climax hit a wall. This anticipated moment of greatness – ‘Day of Atonement’ – coincided with disdain for nationalism. Global changes challenged its foundations. The Vietnam War heightened the world’s awareness of suppression and revolution, as did the Civil Rights Movement in the

6 Before the Country

United States and Black Power uprisings. The Biafran, or Nigerian, Civil War (1967–70) became a haunting comment on the tragedies that can ensue from civil tensions. Nationally, the October Crisis (1970) and the demand that the FLQ manifesto be honoured, indicated cultural rights should be recognized and dealt with seriously. Several years earlier, Charles de Gaulle’s address to Quebec at Expo in 1967 – a world fair intended to commemorate the centenary of Canada’s confederation – had set the stage for nationalist upset. The French president’s forceful cry ‘Vive le Québec!’ was fine. ‘Vive le Québec, libre!’ was not. Unexpected protests fuelled and flaunted separatism in the face of a precarious nationalism. Separatist sentiments and a loss of love for Canadian nationalism were also germinating in Newfoundland and Labrador. By the mid-1960s, the lustre had worn off Newfoundland premier Joseph Smallwood, who had brought Newfoundland into the Canadian federation. There was a price for being part of a larger centre: the province’s rationalization of how resources should be distributed smacked of federalism’s tendency to put policy before people; artists such as David Blackwood, whose prints captured lives dragged across the Atlantic during Newfoundland’s resettlement campaign, later put frustration on record.2 The story out of which the ‘Day of Atonement’ grows, however, does not include French Canada, Newfoundland, or those the City of Halifax (and a supporting federal structure) forcibly relocated in the 1960s from Africville (recognized as the city’s oldest and largest black neighbourhood), to name only several shocking omissions. It ignored other cultural and national constituents, too. The American Indian Movement (AIM) in both Canada and the United States rendered nations and narratives suspect, reviewing national systems that had dealt with the ‘Indian problem.’ Lee Maracle was a member of the Native Alliance for Red Power, or NARP, an organization that came into existence in 1968, fashioning its political ideals on those of the Black Panthers. Maracle recalls in the epilogue to her second edition of Bobbi Lee: Indian Rebel (1990) that this was a time of change and inspiration: Young Native people from all parts of the province [British Columbia] and the country were coming together, tribalism, the village focus was breaking down. We are all Indians, one people with many cultures. Thinking of all sorts blossomed among us. A ground swell, a tide, everywhere in the country little groups of Red Power youth were springing up. I remember

Introduction 7 thinking what a miracle the Indian way of being was. All at once, every major city turned out Native youth who were talking about the same kinds of things … We had minds; we could think … Youth everywhere were holding conferences, chiefs were meeting, everyone was talking about our rights; rights we didn’t dare to believe existed in the 1950s. (208–9)

Maracle’s retrospective enthusiasm reflects not only the group to which she belonged but also the time period during which Red Power came to centre stage in Canada, promoting the ideals of those who chose to speak and act out. Like AIM, NARP and its advocates attested to a changing political climate. Blue Quills Residential School in Alberta, which became the first Canadian residential school to be run by Aboriginal people after its Catholic control ended, stands out as an example of Aboriginal determination and a staunch refusal to let education be defined by a limited way of thinking or abusive administration. The second stand-off at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, in 1973 led to further solidarity between Aboriginal peoples across North America. What Frye recognized as a potential moment of greatness not only coincided with the Native Cultural Renaissance but also the Native Literary Renaissance. During the 1960s and 1970s, and in the midst of Aboriginal social and political activism, an explosion of writing by First Nations and Métis authors entered the Canadian literary market and announced the arrival of not only significant individuals but also a body of literature after almost six decades of Aboriginal ‘silence’ in the Canadian publishing world. Notably, a significant number of writers of this recent Native Renaissance were chiefs and elders. Authoritative voices possessing position and power blended with those of other spokespeople, activists, and artists. Perhaps they blended, too, with a global literary movement. In his study of a similar phenomenon in the United States, Native American Renaissance, Kenneth Lincoln notes a ‘resurgence of “native” American consciousness in the 1960s’ (61), accompanied with an unprecedented number of American Indian publications. The movement was best represented for Lincoln by Geary Hobson’s The Remembered Earth: An Anthology of Contemporary Native American Literature (1979), which, for Lincoln, boasted ‘energies’ that ‘generated an American Indian renaissance in print’ (75–6). In his study of Australian Aboriginal literature during the period 1929–88, Black Words, White Page, Adam Shoemaker also ‘contend[s] that a fundamental relationship exists between the socio-political milieu and Aboriginal creative

8 Before the Country

writing in English’ (6) and traces a heightened awareness of this connection to the 1960s and 1970s; he observes that ‘the years since the 1970s have witnessed the appearance of a great deal of Aboriginal creative writing in English’ (11). In Canada, Aboriginal voices would arrest, with collective acts of remembrance, the teleological trajectory of what could be called romantic nationalism. Before the Country does not offer neat answers to the large questions it raises. It does not ‘worry the nation,’ as Jonathan Kertzer has recently done.3 Before the Country ‘stories’ the nation. This book attempts to identify mythological patterns that are likely to become formulaic when critics assume that Canada is like any other nation to have emerged since the breakdown of Charlemagne’s empire, despite this nation’s ‘uncustomary’ development. One day, the trappings of romantic nationalism might be recognized as comparable to the ‘So’ that begins Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf, the ‘one day Nanabush went walking,’ or the ‘once upon a time’ that has us enter other narrative expectations. Before the Country tries to show how, in a formal, mythological manner, Canadian history shifted shape in a corpus of ‘postmodern,’ mythological texts published after this Native Renaissance. The inheritance of romantic nationalism would create camps, binaries, mythological and reductive delineations. Like most myths, this one would also look for and create the sacred and profane. When its grand informants crashed, its shatters bore a character which, given these conditions, has often tricked the cross-culturally, historically, and mythologically expectant. Chapter 1 traces the legacy of romantic nationalism from the nineteenth century to Canada’s ‘Day of Atonement,’ and the emergence in subsequent years of a revitalized and self-conscious attempt to produce national myths. The chapter participates in Frye’s mythologically based criticism in order to later reveal how this narrative destroys itself on its own terms – a finding which, I think, Frye would be interested in today. As is the case in subsequent chapters, chapter 1 does not employ postcolonial or poststructuralist theories to challenge the oft-questioned theories of liberal humanism which influenced Frye and his followers. Rather, it shapes Before the Country with storytelling principles, in particular, the grand informants of mythological narratives. Chapter 2 considers this latest Native Renaissance in Canada and attempts to understand the gestures of the Native Cultural Renaissance and Native Literary Renaissance; this chapter also sets the stage for a later analysis of ‘mythpoesis’ in certain Canadian texts.

Introduction 9

Chapter 3 examines the aesthetics of the literature of the Native Renaissance. Challenging the prevalent claim that Native literature of the 1960s and 1970s in Canada was mainly a literature of protest, and speaking of what could be called a ‘wisdom literature,’ this chapter suggests that Aboriginal literature of the 1960s and 1970s in Canada is self-consciously continuous with anterior literary traditions. Moreover, the chapter considers how Aboriginal writers of the Native Renaissance employed Aboriginal aesthetics which rival received canonical understandings of literature (probably born out of an Anglo-Saxon inheritance). Chapter 4 traces significant reactions to the Native Renaissance, for the most part, in white, male, postmodern texts published after the advent of the Native Renaissance. This chapter reveals evidence of a notable reaction; it does not offer lengthy analyses of the specificities of any one text. Participating solidly in the traditions of romantic nationalism and mythic criticism in an attempt to account for a shift in mythological thought, this chapter determines that the recent Native Renaissance arrested a journey that romantic nationalism set for itself at an early stage in Canadian letters. Chapter 5 analyses Robert Kroetsch’s Badlands (1975) and Sky Lee’s Disappearing Moon Cafe (1990), attempting to determine how the mythological shifts spoken of in chapter 4 might have taken place. As well, though much good work has been done in the field of postcolonial criticism that often brings together similar voices who have resisted colonization, this chapter does not forge affinities between Lee’s work and Aboriginal literatures, and inevitably illustrates how Aboriginal literatures often need to be understood on their own terms. Chapter 5 thus endorses Diana Brydon’s claim that ‘at this point in Canada’s history, it is important to distinguish Indigenous theorizing as a category that overlaps with the postcolonial but also often insists on standing apart from it’ (‘Canada and Postcolonialism’ 53). This chapter also shows how, as part of a grand ‘Canadian’ story, ‘Day of Atonement’ makes no sense. Chapter 6 suggests that at the intersection of post-centenary, nonAboriginal renegotiations with romantic nationalism and this latest Native Renaissance ‘mythpoesis’ – a formal stage in mythological change – can be noted. This chapter proposes that Canadian ‘postmodernism’ needs to be rethought, as certain of its strands might be attributable to the impress of Aboriginal values, as well as aesthetics, which entered the public domain in force during this latest Native Renaissance.

10 Before the Country

Before the Country attempts to be an exploratory addition to the criticism of both Aboriginal literatures in Canada and the manner in which stories react to one another. Dealing with broad questions and several significant bodies of literature, this book is not able to trace the influences of specific authors upon others, though it does implicitly suggest this focus should form one interest in future study. This book seeks to enter new questions into a critical debate which, post-Frye and, now, poststructuralist, might seem outdated. However, if we concede, as Kertzer has done, that ‘our vexed desire for a national literature has made us obsessed with history and myth, which we produce in abundance because they offer two major discourses for interpreting national identity’ (55), we cannot ignore talking about history and myth. In fact, we must. Although we might first recognize mythologies and realize the power of stories, we might also find there is precedent for forgetting myth as well as history. I think Frye would have believed this, too. Though Frye looked around him in 1965 and recognized the foundations of a great Canadian code beginning to settle the Canadian imagination – with the promise of a ‘Day of Atonement’ rising on history’s hill – he spoke another sentence: I use a Jewish metaphor because there is something Hebraic about the Canadian tendency to read its conquest of a promised land, its Maccabean victories of 1812, its struggle for the central fortress on the hill at Quebec, as oracles of a future. (BG 224)

Frye seemed a bit tired with what he saw as Canada’s ‘preoccupation with its own history, its relentless cultural stock-takings and inventories’ (223). He also seemed to be washing his hands, though, albeit with passivism’s active benediction. There seemed to be a large part of him unable to put this story down, even though he might have known how the story could play itself out. One catches him yawning, ever so slightly, before giving credence to the idea of a Canadian holy day: ‘The Burke sense of society as a continuum – consistent with the pragmatic and conservative outlook of Canadians – is strong and begins early’ (223–4). Could, or did, Frye anticipate this moment would create its own end? Did he predict unpredictable beginnings could only be created out of a conclusion set by a fallacious teleology? I do not know. What Frye did see, however, was the possibility of stories colliding. Two

Introduction 11

years before national baptism, and in the same conclusion, Frye wrote that the Canadian ‘imaginative writer is finding his identity within the world of literature itself’ (238). Frye also believed this ‘identity’ would never be easily borrowed from Canada’s Aboriginal peoples: ‘We have been shown how the Indians began with a mythology which included all the main elements of our own’ (233). However, as he also said, ‘it was, of course, impossible for Canadians to establish any real continuity with it: Indians, like the rest of the country, were seen as nineteenthcentury literary conventions’ (233). For Frye, though, the Canadian writer was ‘withdrawing from what Douglas LePan calls a country without a mythology4 into the country of mythology, ending where the Indians began’ (238). It is strange, really, that Frye almost flippantly anticipated what only significant retrospective history or mythology might one day convincingly determine. Before the Country does not determine that it holds convincing new answers to questions which have guided the study of Aboriginal and Canadian literatures. However, this book does try to convince its readers that new questions need to be asked. If faults are found within (and I am sure there are many), I would hope there would be enough interest to warrant their exposure and challenging.

1 The Headwaters of Design

Canada is not holy; it is no New Jerusalem. – Jonathan Kertzer, Worrying the Nation, 83

In 1962 James Reaney, in an article entitled ‘The Canadian Poet’s Predicament,’ commented on Canadian literature and its sources of inspiration. He noted a large difference between Canadian mythology and those mythologies present in the Americas before European settlement. ‘We have Indians,’ Reaney wrote. ‘I’ve already glanced at their poetry, but the other things they’ve accomplished – the rituals, the sculpture, the design, just themselves – have always looked suggestive of development to me. The totem poles and the mounds seem so effortlessly to come out of the country; but our culture, as yet, doesn’t’ (120–1). Reaney suggested that ‘the idea expressed in the Indian lyrics that a raven is the spirit of creation seems so right for this country and the way it often looks’ (112). He insinuated what later writers would consider more closely. Reaney pointed to traditions that came before this country, suggesting that in order to produce viable mythology, Canada’s citizens would have to look beneath ineffectual shrines and embrace different gods, different ways of knowing. Perhaps Reaney was articulating, in part, what he had learned from Northrop Frye. Four years earlier, Reaney had completed a PhD dissertation on Yeats and Spenser under Frye’s supervision at the University of Toronto, and although, as Richard Stingle points out in ‘“all the old levels”: Reaney and Frye,’ Reaney, in his undergraduate years, ‘remained for some time actively hostile to what [Stingle and others] had told him of Frye’ (34), Frye would later have a great effect on

The Headwaters of Design 13

Reaney’s thinking. In his article ‘The Identifier Effect,’ Reaney would describe an experience ‘at the end of [his] freshman year’ (27) when he went to Bloor Street United Church with Stingle and others to hear ‘Frye preach on the wisdom literature in the Apocrypha’ (Stingle 39). Though not fond of sermons, Reaney notes this one was an exception: ‘As a work of literature, [Frye] calmly discussed Ecclesiasticus, a book not even in my Bible; God wants us each to be a candle of witnesses. Suddenly the whole congregation changed into lighted candles’ (27). Stingle is one of many critics to note ‘a marked similarity in the intellectual backgrounds of Frye and Reaney’ (35), not least of which was Reaney’s adoption of ‘Frye’s belief that students must be steeped in their literary tradition, in a mythology, in a total order of words’ (Stingle 36). Reacting against New Criticism, or what Reaney calls the ‘verbal texture’ which, as he saw it, later came to plague the academy during his years teaching English and creative writing at the University of Manitoba, Reaney sums up his indebtedness to Frye: ‘Verbal texture’ makes you crawl like an aesthetic King of Babylon gone mad over seeing grass close up; what Frye and Blake’s structuralism does is send you up in an airplane to show you not only the field patterns, but the buried fort, the remains of the chieftain’s barrow – all things you might miss for years in the myopic approach. (‘Identifier Effect’ 28)

Perhaps it is not surprising, then, that near the end of his career and after half a decade of reading world mythologies, Frye seemed to be saying much the same thing as Reaney. Frye suggested Native literature should be given the greatest respect within a consideration of Canadian writing and that it ‘forms a tradition which should be at the head-waters of our own’ (‘Levels of Cultural Identity’ [1989–90], in Gorjup 201). What Reaney had said twenty years before Frye indicates a desire to learn from Aboriginal cultures. However, Frye suggested as late as 1989/90 that there was still a need to explore beyond limits of established modes of thinking and to pay attention to Aboriginal thought. For Frye, this had not yet happened in a convincing way. This is one observation. What is equally interesting is that the traditions of romantic historicism, or nationalism, were pricking the skins of Frye and Reaney just as they had earlier Canadian writers and thinkers. This was a tradition of Canadian insecurity, fostered by a narrative which repeatedly suggested the foundations of Canadians letters were somehow inauthentic.

14 Before the Country

The lack of confidence that marked early discussions of Canadian literature would also underlie the quest for a national literary tradition. This is not surprising given the common assumption that history forges literature. Canada’s history could not be traced back to Gold, Silver, or Bronze; there seemed to be no unifying myths indigenous to Canada which took history out of the realm of the contemporary and placed it in the care of the gods. A search for mythology, or for a national literature, begins in Canada, then, with an examination of the history which shaped this nation not so long ago. With an eye turned towards history, this narrative participates in romantic and revolutionary reactions which examine Canadian literary development by emphasizing such things as Canada’s colonial roots. For disciples of romantic nationalism, discomfort grows with the idea that Canada lacks a notable national past. Literary critic Edward Hartley Dewart was conscious of an emerging conundrum when he noted in 1864 an ‘almost … universal absence of interest and faith in all indigenous literary productions’ (‘Selections from Canadian Poets, 1864’ 14), linking this recognition to the idea that Canada’s ‘colonial position’ was ‘not favorable to the growth of an indigenous literature’ (15). What Dewart meant by indigenous was national; he was arguing that there was no such thing yet as a truly Canadian literature. For Dewart, this ‘state of things’ (14) was a result of Canada’s people seeing much more cultural and imaginative worth in the places they and their ancestors had left than in the regions they came to occupy: ‘Not only are our mental wants supplied by the brain of the Mother country … but the majority of persons of taste and education in Canada are emigrants from the Old Country, whose tenderest affections cling around the land they have left’ (15). Though Dewart’s convictions are surprisingly contemporary and well worth considering as early laments in a canon of Canadian ‘postcolonial’ sensibility, Dewart wrote on the eve of Confederation, his convictions reflecting the frustration of a colony. There would be other complaints. Even after the promise of a Dominion had been delivered, critics consistently bemoaned Canada’s colonial origins. In 1891 Canadian poet Archibald Lampman observed that most discussions of Canadian writing had taken ‘the form of question and answer as to whether a Canadian literature exists’; for Lampman, the answer was simple: ‘Of course it does not’ (‘Two Canadian Poets: A Lecture, 1891’ 27). Lampman believed political exigency mobilizes nations and artistic innovation. He lamented that, as of the

The Headwaters of Design 15

late nineteenth century, there had not been in Canada an event large enough to inspire any significant creations. ‘The time has not come for the production of any genuine national song’ (38), Lampman wrote. ‘It is when the passion and enthusiasm of an entire people, carried away by the excitement of some great crisis, enters into the soul of one man specially gifted, that a great national poem or hymn is produced. We have yet to reach such an hour, and we may pray that it will not come too soon or too late’ (38). Roughly two decades later, Canada would enter the Great War, during which the nation would lose almost sixty thousand lives overseas. This gives Lampman’s assertion a haunting tone; retrospectively, it would seem that Canada had experienced a crisis great enough to inspire several bodies of national literature. However, as Charles Taylor observes, and as Kertzer notes, ‘The sharing of great events usually welds a nation together, but these in Canada have often as not been moments of acute inner conflict: the Riel rebellion and the two world wars (which brought about two conscription crises) were sources of division rather than unity’ (Taylor, quoted in Kertzer 46). I would add that Canada’s authors, like her soldiers, continued to be driven by an extrinsic, rather than intrinsic, allegiance, but, most importantly, an inherited story. The idea that people were operating within an acquired narrative is nowhere more evident than in another claim Frye forwarded in his ‘Conclusion to a Literary History of Canada’: America moved from the back country to the wild west; Canada moved from a New France held down by British military occupation to a northwest patrolled by mounted police. Canada has not had, strictly speaking, an Indian war: there has been much less of the ‘another redskin bit the dust’ feeling in our historical imagination, and only Riel remains to haunt the later period of it, though he is a formidable figure enough, rather like what a combination of John Brown and Vanzetti would be in the American conscience. (BG 224)

When Archibald MacMechan published the first real book-length study on Canadian writing in 1924, Headwaters of Canadian Literature, he echoed Dewart and Lampman, posing two questions: ‘How much of the work produced in Canada during the last century is destined to live? How much will be read or remembered at the end of the twentieth century?’ (237). MacMechan devoted much of his book to arguing that, aside from Archibald Lampman and Sara Jeannette Duncan,

16 Before the Country

Canada had not yet produced any authors with ‘that fiery conviction which alone brings forth a masterpiece’ (215). Although his questions were rhetorical, he provided a blunt response: ‘The answer must be – very little. The bulk of it is ephemeral; it smells of mortality’ (237). Wiping his hands like King Lear, MacMechan resolved that Canadian literature was far too dependent on external influences, such as its British legacy, indicating not much had changed since Dewart had made his disparaging comments. Almost twenty years later, and just a couple of years before Canada would again return its troops from a war-ravaged Europe, E.K. Brown, one of Canada’s foremost Canadian critics, said roughly the same thing as Dewart, Lampman, and MacMechan. Although praising both Lampman and E.J. Pratt for their originality, Brown maintained that Canada’s colonialism was ‘deep’ (On Canadian Poetry [1943] 19), its ‘perpetuation’ found ‘in the descendants of emigrants even to the third and fourth generation’ (15). A case in point would be what Brown saw as MacMechan’s virtual disregard for the poetry of Duncan Campbell Scott. Referring to Headwaters of Canadian Literature as the ‘fruit of a course given for many years’ by MacMechan in his ‘long career as professor of English literature at Dalhousie University’ (118), Brown claimed ‘MacMechan’s standards [were] not rigorous.’ While ‘space [was] found to refer to more than forty poets and to study with care some dozen of these,’ as Brown also said, ‘Duncan Campbell Scott is not of the dozen … not even of the forty’ (119). Brown had begun to engage in a faithful literary correspondence with Scott in 1940, which he would continue until 1947.1 As he saw it, Scott’s work, at its best, could ‘not be equalled … by any of the Canadian poets of his generation’ (Brown 128), and MacMechan’s lack of attention to it ‘[reflected] the long failure of the Canadian public and Canadian critics’ (119). ‘In a word,’ Brown sarcastically wrote, ‘it is Scott’s originality which explains the long time he had to wait before readers in any considerable numbers began to appreciate that he was one of the chief masters of Canadian literature’ (120). Endorsing the claims Lampman made in 1891, Brown took the argument further: There has been no moment in our history comparable with what England knew on the eve of the Elizabethan efflorescence, when the Armada approached her shores, or at the height of the Romantic achievement, when Napoleon gathered his forces at Boulogne, or in the early summer of 1940, when the salvation of the country depended upon itself alone.

The Headwaters of Design 17 Nor has Canada known an internal crisis at all comparable to the War between the States. It is probable that, as Lampman supposed, a national crisis of supreme intensity would call forth emotions of such a strength and purity as to issue in a significant expression in the arts. We are probably as far, or almost as far from such a crisis in 1944 as in 1891. (20)

Canada had already participated in two world wars and could look back to the Loyalist War of 1812, claiming the outcome of that event as a national victory. However, in hindsight, Brown was suggesting that Canada’s dependency on alliances could never allow for any real fruition in a national sense. Perhaps Brown’s convictions are understandable: both world wars had been fought in Europe, not on Canadian soil, and the War of 1812 has only become an anachronistic national victory. In light of these claims, I find it interesting to note here an observation made by Robert L. McDougall in his introduction to The Poet and the Critic: A Literary Correspondence between D.C. Scott and E.K. Brown which ironically supports what Brown had been saying. Referring to the ‘level of consciousness … at which the correspondents function’ (10), McDougall asks ‘what are we to make of the near-invisibility of a world war which spreads its arch of fire over a bed of human suffering throughout practically the whole span of the correspondence?’ (11). There is little or no evidence in the Scott-Brown letters of any kind of interest in the Second World War: In England at this time, a loaded question was: ‘Don’t you know there’s a war on?’ The Scott-Brown correspondence would have had to answer, on balance, ‘No.’ There may be a conventional response to a dramatic moment in the war, as there is from Scott, for example, when General Montgomery’s Eighth Army turns back Rommel’s forces from the borders of Egypt in 1942. There are a number of references to the political arena when the conscription crisis boils up in the Canadian Parliament in 1944. There are glimpses of rationing and billeting. The rest, however, is pretty well silence. The unconditional surrender of Germany on May 7, 1945, goes unnoticed in Brown’s letter to Scott of May 8. The dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and 9 goes unnoticed in Scott’s letter to Brown of August 11. (11)

Perhaps it is not surprising that Brown would speak of Canada as lacking ‘the spiritual energy to rise above routine’ (14). Maybe Brown

18 Before the Country

and Scott were in shock. Maybe they were nonplussed, but their avoidance of drawing attention to something so alarming ironically mirrors the ‘routine’ which Brown had been cursing. The dropping of atomic bombs – one of the greatest tragedies of the twentieth century – would be part of an extended record of human rights violations that would lead the General Assembly of the United Nations to draw up the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, included in which is the right of self-determination for all peoples. Canada’s signing was also connected with a move in 1951 to revise the Indian Act of 1876, as it was recognized as violating some significant Aboriginal rights. Scott had played a role in this violation in his work as a civil servant in the Department of Indian Affairs pursuing and directing a staunch assimilationist campaign against Aboriginal peoples. In many ways, Brown himself could not rise above routine. ‘What is the real theme of “The Forsaken”?’ Brown asked. ‘It is nothing less than a universal tragedy, the tragedy of Lear and Goriot. Those who once were strong become weak; their value dwindles and those whom they reared from helpless weakness to strength discard them as costly superfluities’ (131). The inheritance of romantic nationalism ran deep in Brown, too, though he strongly protested certain manifestations of it. There were other opinions. Charles G.D. Roberts delivered an alumni oration at the University of New Brunswick in 1883, ‘The Beginnings of Canadian Literature’; he roused national sentiments, recognizing ‘too [many] universities in Canada rather than Canadian universities’ (Selected Poetry and Critical Prose 247): In Canada, where do we want a more vivid realization of the fact that we have a country, and are making a nation; that we have a history, and are making a literature; that we have a heroic past, and are making ready for a future that shall not be inglorious? In our universities, if they would not lose their birthright. (248)

In a letter published in the Halifax Herald in 1886, Roberts maintained that ‘our own ancestors have left us noble themes’ (263): ‘In the coming of the Loyalists there is a treasury of subjects hardly inferior to that which New England has found so rich in the deeds of her Puritan fathers’ (263). While Roberts was arguing that Canada had a history, and while others were discounting this idea, they all underscored the importance of history in national literary development.

The Headwaters of Design 19

Frye added to this story, marking a theoretical turning point in the narrative. In December 1943, four months after the launch of E.K. Brown’s On Canadian Poetry, Frye reviewed A.J.M. Smith’s The Book of Canadian Poetry, recognizing it as ‘an important event in Canadian literature’ (‘Canada and Its Poetry’ [1943], in BG 129). Frye supported what Brown had been saying about Canadian writing, paying homage to Canada’s writers, above all, E.J. Pratt. However, Frye mourned the ‘colonial position of Canada.’ He described it as ‘a frostbite at the roots of the Canadian imagination’ and suggested that Canada greatly needed to get rid of ‘[p]rudery,’ a word he used to stand for a fear that impeded creativity in a number of ways (‘Canada and Its Poetry,’ in BG 134). Frye believed Canada’s colonial mentality – this nation’s historical past – had arrested the true development of a national consciousness. He encouraged writers and thinkers to begin conceiving of things in different ways. In a review of the latest poetry in 1952, Frye summed up the real problem with Canadian literature. There was ‘far too much accurate Canadian history … and far too little Canadian vision’ (‘Letters in Canada,’ in BG 13). While Frye, like Dewart, Lampman, MacMechan, and Brown, seemed to suggest that Canada lacked ‘faith’ (Dewart), ‘passion and enthusiasm’ (Lampman), ‘fiery conviction’ (MacMechan), and a ‘supreme intensity’ (Brown), unlike others, Frye suggested literature should be freed somewhat from the clutches of history. Then, Canadian literature would come into its own. In 1959 Frye prophesied that ‘Canadian poetry in the sixties [would] … be dealing with a fully matured culture, no longer preoccupied with the empty unpoetics of Canadianism, but with the genuine tasks of creative power’ (‘Letters in Canada,’ in BG 127). He spoke specifically of Canadian verse. However, he suggested in a larger sense that Canada, during the next decade, would be confident enough to explore its own collective consciousness. Perhaps, as Frye suggested at the end of this same publication, enough groundwork had been done by the writers of the 1950s to usher Canadian literature into its own. Most notably, he anticipated the effect that Canada’s centenary would have on the nation and its artists. Frye gave weight to ritual. He was not suggesting that one hundred years was an adequate amount of time for a nation to mature, but that the symbolic significance of a century, a big rite of passage, had a mythic appeal. What Frye had been suggesting in a number of ways in his criticism of Canadian literature was that a national literature could sprout only from a recognition of its own rites of passage and rituals, or

20 Before the Country

the seeds of its own indigenous mythology – from a body of mythology that somehow grows out of a pan-national consciousness. For Frye, national writers had to believe in literary national codes under whose umbrella they expressed themselves; moreover, there were ceremonies of belief to mark rites of passage, to validate and honour articulations which could be placed (by both critic and writer) in some sort of totality which had meaning and could provide grounding in a great code for national development. What Frye seemed to be advocating was that literature should be held at a comfortable distance from history, placed within the primary care of mythology. Writing about Canadian poetry in 1957, Frye challenged Canadian writers and thinkers alike to recognize their own national mythologies. ‘As for mythology,’ Frye began, ‘that is one of poetry’s indispensable languages’ (‘Letters in Canada,’ in BG 74). From his standpoint at mid-century, ‘most of the major English poets, including the best poets of today, demand and expect a considerable knowledge of myth, and although Douglas LePan calls Canada a country without a mythology, the same thing is increasingly true even of Canadian poets’ (74). As Frye would also maintain, meeting this demand for a national mythology would be incredibly difficult since ‘the Canadian literary mind, beginning as it did so late in the cultural history of the West, was established on a basis, not of myth, but of history’ (‘Conclusion to LHC’ [1965], in BG 231). Frye believed considerations of mythology and literature must be complemented by an understanding of social and national development: Literature is conscious mythology: as society develops, its mythical stories become structural principles of storytelling, its mythical concepts, sun-gods and the like, become habits of metaphorical thought. In a fully mature literary tradition the writer enters into a structure of traditional stories and images. He often has the feeling, and says so, that he is not actively shaping his material at all, but is rather a place where a verbal structure is taking its own shape. (‘Conclusion to LHC,’ in BG 232–3)

Frye thought mythological remembrance, or awareness, is the core of national literatures. Mythology shapes the speaker’s articulations because, when the speaker has grown with collective mythology, literature is born out of mythology’s collective awareness. More than this, it would seem that a consideration of the sacred is at the heart of Frye’s convictions. When a nation is very old, it can trace its past beyond history to gods of creation, or ‘sun-gods.’ When a nation can do this, its

The Headwaters of Design 21

literature is ordained by maturity. Kertzer concludes Worrying the Nation by admitting that ‘the nation endures as a sacred object,’ claiming that ‘nationalism is not just a belief or a program, but a passion’ (175); he would place Frye solidly within the tradition of romantic historicism or what, for Stingle, would be a combination of ‘the romantic and revolutionary’ (36) which he saw dominating the work of both Frye and Reaney. For Kertzer, ‘romantic historicism treats national literature as a benediction: part blessing, part prayer, it is the eloquence through which a people aspires to immortality’ (57). The problem for Kertzer is that ‘these splendid rewards have not been shared equally by all Canadian citizens’ (57). The real problem is the adoption of blind faith in such programmatic narrative, for this story privileges Christianity, patriarchy and its attendant glorification of conquest and war, as well as linear thinking. Within the story which Before the Country is tracing, the text of narrative design upon which early Canadian critics depended to establish the possibility of a beginning was shaped by an extensive memory which nevertheless did not correspond to other existing memories present within the physical space of the ‘Canadian’ nation. It seems unlikely that Indigenous perspectives conceived the possibility of Canada’s centenary becoming a symbol in swaddling clothes. It was not women ‘think[ing] back through [their] mothers’ (Woolf 82) who desired a good bloody battle to ensure children’s pride in a nation. However, this story does not allow yet for its own deconstruction. The whole narrative needs to be examined, and on its own terms, as it is one basis for interrogating what happened at a particular moment in contemporary Canadian mythology and literary history. To this end, we need to employ the language, or empiricism, of the narrative’s design and attempt to answer or understand the questions it raises: What happens when there are no indigenous ‘sun-gods’ to provide the foundations of mythological awareness? What happens when there is no sacred reason or explanation behind a nation’s history? What ‘habits of metaphorical thought’ (Frye) does a nation produce? Long before Canada had become confederated, ‘metaphorical habits’ were already developed. For those who could trace their histories back only so far as memories or rumours of having arrived here, North America was a ‘new world,’ a domain without a history. It was a place to which people could bring established stories and sacred histories. Because of an inherited myth of concern predicated on the JudaeoChristian myth, the ‘new world’ became Eden and paradise,2 or hell

22 Before the Country

and the ends of the world when the earth would not easily yield fruit. For those who were enticed by mercantilism, this was El Dorado; because of the dissatisfaction of the working class, which largely settled the Americas, the ‘new world’ could be the entry to a different social station. For those who were intent on spreading the word of God and suffering in fine Christian fashion, the ‘new world,’ as E.J. Pratt’s Brébeuf could testify,3 was the perfect redemptive reward for martyrdom. For some women, almost always outside the pale of nationalism’s patriarchal foundations, this could be an empire of escape. In terms of ‘expected’ mythological development, Canada was atypical at the moment of its ‘beginning.’ These early Canadian seekers boast of a returning, not to what was known in Canada, but to what was known elsewhere. ‘Canadian’ writers did not have a comfortable cache of archetypes and symbols to which they could turn; in fact, they tried to run from their shadows. Here, then, lies a problem. To have recognized Canadian archetypes as such at a much earlier point would have encouraged a challenging of their values; it would have been useful to have had them already dismantled when Aboriginal literatures and voices forcefully engaged the public domain in the 1960s and 1970s. This did not happen, though, and archetypes were destined for a familiar story of creation predicated on an understanding of the sacred and profane. When Mircea Eliade theorizes about the formation of ‘worlds,’ he points to conquests, underscoring the rebirth which can ensue from grand battles. Eliade shows how history – the secular and empirically governed – can be made sacred – predicated on faith – when a significant ritual or ceremony of rebirth is performed: What is to become ‘our world’ must first be ‘created,’ and every creation has a paradigmatic model – the creation of the universe by the gods. When the Scandinavian colonists took possession of Island (land-nama) and cleared it, they regarded the enterprise neither as an original undertaking nor as human and profane work. For them, their labor was only repetition of a primordial act, the transformation of chaos into cosmos by the divine act of creation. When they tilled the desert soil, they were in fact repeating the act of the gods who had organized chaos by giving it a structure, forms, and norms. Whether it is a case of clearing uncultivated ground or of conquering and occupying a territory already inhabited by ‘other’ human beings, ritual taking possession must always repeat the cosmogony … A territory

The Headwaters of Design 23 can be made ours only by creating it anew, that is, by consecrating it. (The Sacred and Profane 31–2)

Speaking of the Hittites and Egyptians, who annually ritualize ‘the passage from chaos to cosmos’ (77), Eliade interprets the significance of this rite and celebration: Since the New Year is a reactualization of the cosmogony, it implies starting time over again at its beginning, that is, restoration of the primordial time, the ‘pure’ time, that existed at the moment of Creation. This is why the New Year is the occasion for ‘purifications,’ for the expulsion of sins, of demons, of merely a scapegoat. For it is not a matter merely of a certain temporal interval coming to its end and the beginning of another (as a modern man, for example, thinks); it is also a matter of abolishing the past year and past time. Indeed, this is the meaning of ritual ‘purification’; there is more than a mere ‘purification’; the sins and faults of the individual and of the community as a whole are annulled, consumed as by fire. (The Sacred and the Profane 77–8)

If Eliade’s theories about annual rebirth are applied to the Norman colonization of England, the Battle of Hastings is a ritual comparable to those ‘reactualization[s] of [a] cosmogony’ that abolish the past and set a new slate for a new beginning. This act provided a new moment of Creation: everything that happened prior to 1066 was consumed by fire. History began for these conquerors in 1066. History began in the United States in 1776 and in France in 1789. At these moments, mythological foundations were created to which these nations could trace their beginnings. Through significant ritual acts – albeit secular in their origin – history was erased, and nations were given metaphysical foundations. Revolution is a literal end to history, a moment when history stops and starts again. It is the French Revolution that provides the best example. French revolutionaries wanted to sweep away history, the aristocracy, and the Crown. They wanted to end time, and they did. They created a new calendar, and time began in a new beginning. In Canada, the various myths that competed at an early date to provide an understanding of the ‘new world’ were never pre-empted and unified by a significant, collective ritual. As Kertzer puts it, ‘Romantic historicism bequeaths to national literatures the duty to rediscover and celebrate their origins, a duty that is bound to puzzle Canadians,

24 Before the Country

whose origins are so diverse’ (49). Lampman, MacMechan, and Brown were really yearning for the mythological weight which historical struggles and their promises or origins carry. Pointing as they did to the absence of social revolution in Canada, they anticipated this nation’s rise to maturity, its acting out and wiping away of the past, and, most importantly, its ‘new’ beginning. However, this would not happen in their lifetimes, and this story’s search for a national mythology would continue. This search would also embrace those narratives which wipe away a significant part of the past – but only a part – and which, therefore, seem to pave the road for the foundations of that originary moment which national mythologies traditionally demand. The myth of the empty land, for example, looms long and hard in Canadian literature and seems to resurface when fervent nationalism is in need of something. These trends, or traditions, and this search for the originary moment, derive from British nationalism and capitalism when Britain was at the height of her empire. Because Canada’s mythological traditions derive from a framework of imported colonial beliefs, the foundation upon which old mythology traditionally rests could be said to have been transfigured in early Canada, as the relationship between people and ancient ties to geography typically, perhaps romantically, boasts of an ‘organic’ union between peoples and environments. Interestingly, though, Stephen Muecke and Adam Shoemaker, in Aboriginal Australians: First Nations of a Ancient Continent, do not feel it necessary to qualify or problematize the notion of organic union between land and peoples. They acknowledge the Aboriginal population of the land to have been ‘pushed back so far in time – up to 60,000 years – that it exceeds [a] capacity to measure it precisely’ (21) and draw distinctions between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal ties to the land. Speaking of white Australian author Les Murray, Shoemaker notes that ‘the sense of belonging of which he speaks is of a different order of magnitude to the sense of being owned by the land, which is the traditional Aboriginal concept, with all the sanctity of religious veneration’ (Black Words, White Page 199). Muecke and Shoemaker further explain that ‘the ceremonies of the Indigenous Australians make life rise up from the land, travel along it, and off and down into the soil again’ (31). One would be hard-pressed – outside a consideration of Aboriginal literature in Canada – to recognize a similar relationship between peoples and land and, by extension, the stories and myths that record such a connection.

The Headwaters of Design 25

One could further say that Canada’s inherited framework of mythological belief allowed for a brief courting period between mythologizers and the ‘new world,’ but never permitted the two a traditional marriage. At best, it has provided a simulacrum of tradition – a deceptive or shadowy likeness of tradition which speaks more of Britain or a kingdom many miles away from Canada. One may stall at, embrace, dispute, deny, hate, or love the likeness. However, one will have a hard time accepting it as an archetype – part of a narrative design – for to accept, or make archetypal, the ‘lack of a traditional, mythological foundation’ spells defeat if one is looking for a mythological base similar to that which has traditionally served other nations. ‘To a historically informed European,’ W.J. Keith writes in Literary Images of Ontario, ‘venturing into this [new] land was like returning to the way of life of the “dark-age” Anglo-Saxon world, a pattern of isolated communities encircled by wilderness that was unknown and almost certainly dangerous’ (19). In order to escape such harsh dictates, settlers had to fashion this world according to views that had stepped out of an age of past darkness. There are many different ways in which this philosophy would be employed. In 1887 Premier William Smithe, one of three provincial representatives to meet a delegation of Nisga’a and Tsimshian chiefs who had travelled down from British Columbia’s northern interior to Victoria to discuss principles of Aboriginal title and self-government, told the Indian leaders that ‘when the whites first came among you, you were little better than the wild beasts of the field’ (British Columbia, Legislature, Sessional Papers [1887], 264; quoted in Tennant 58). Only beasts would live on uncultivated land. Smithe’s convictions were dangerous; they not only offended Native political leaders at the time but also did more than offend their children and grandchildren. Joseph Trutch, who would become chief commissioner of lands and works in British Columbia in 1871, wrote to the governor in 1867 to express his dismay with the reserves that had been established along the Lower Fraser in 1864: The Indians regard these extensive tracts of land as their individual property; but of by far the greater portion thereof they make no use whatever and are not likely to do so; and thus the land, much of which is either rich pasture or available for cultivation and greatly desired for immediate settlement, remains in an unproductive condition – is of no real value to the Indians and utterly unprofitable to the public interests.

26 Before the Country I am, therefore, of the opinion that these reserves should, in almost every case, be very materially reduced. (Quoted in Tennant 43)4

Trutch had an agenda,5 but this example is indicative of wider arrogance – as well as an unquestioned belief in a particular way of seeing the world – that found fertile ground when capitalists transposed to the ‘new world’ a belief that nature could, and should, be controlled. Economic motives and theories of societal progress combined to fashion methods of dealing with a bewildering ‘new world’ and its inhabitants. The ‘new world’ was often understood not in terms endemic with pre-colonial existence but with ideologies transplanted from different interpretive communities.6 This version of reality produced strange results in Canadian literature. Frye remarked that ‘to begin one’s culture by severing so many links with nature and the earlier inhabitants poses the most formidable problems for its development’ (‘Culture and Society in Ontario, 1784–1984’ [1988], in Gorjup 176–7). (I am sure that descendants of ‘earlier inhabitants’ might have equally formidable responses to such claims.) If the ‘new world’ were taken to be a new place whose landscapes were unfamiliar and whose ‘sun-gods and the like’ were not recognized, then the stories that resulted from such outlooks would naturally register discomfort. As Kertzer maintains, ‘Romantic historicism inspired nineteenth-century Canadians to yearn for a national literature, but they had to adapt the theory to a colonial society’ (44). Those who follow in the footsteps of this myth ‘must continually be reminded – … through the propaganda decried by [John] Metcalf – of what they are supposed to know in their bones’ (Kertzer 7).7 However, as Frye seemed to be saying, Canada was really a phenomenon that had more often than not chilled the heels of mythological seekers: ‘Canada is more than most countries a milieu in which certain preconceived literary stereotypes are likely to interpose between the imagination and the expression it achieves’ (‘Canada and Its Poetry’ [1943], in BG 132). What these colonial attitudes towards landscape and geography of the ‘new world’ meant for Canadian literature is that certain images grew fertile roots, providing a tenuous, mythological framework for Canadian writing. It might not have been such a bad thing to have stopped at this recognition and to have begun another story; however, critics stood their course, perhaps even more so than their teacher or mentor, Frye, who, I think, might have been getting a little bored with where it was all so

The Headwaters of Design 27

neatly going. Nonetheless, and while he joked with irony that ‘it is doubtless only an accident that the theme of one of the most passionate and intense of all Canadian novels, A.M. Klein’s The Second Scroll, is Zionism’ (224), one could almost picture him polishing a chalice with resignation’s pride, saving Niagara grapes for this story’s graduation day. Reflecting on Canadian literature in 1970 in Butterfly on Rock: A Study of Themes and Images in Canadian Literature, D.G. Jones claimed that ‘if we were looking for a single or archetypal pattern in terms of which Canadian literature could be placed in perspective, the pattern of the Old Testament might suit us best’ (15). Jones further maintained that ‘if the world of Canadian literature is an Old Testament world, it is a world of Adam separated from his Creator’ (15). Jones testified Canadian mythology was, and would continue to be, different from other and older national mythologies because he also believed that Canadian imaginations had not grown ‘organically’ with the world which they were attempting to describe. For Frye, Isabella Valancy Crawford was an exception. Her long poem Malcolm’s Katie: A Love Story (1884) was ‘[put] … in an Indian form,’ suggesting to Frye that Malcolm’s Katie ‘may have sprung from an unconscious feeling that the primitive myth expressed the imaginative impact of the country as more artificial literature could never do’ (‘The Narrative Tradition in English-Canadian Poetry’ [1946], in BG 148). Frye was noting that Crawford’s poem shows a reverence for patterns of images which are derived from Aboriginal mythologies: ‘the South Wind [lays] his moccasins aside’ (Part II, 1) and ‘cast[s] / His useless wampum’ (Part II, 2–3); the ‘North Wind’ springs ‘from his far wigwam’ (Part IV, 1); and ‘ … the Sun, / Relights his Council fire in the Moon …’ (Part IV, 22–3). Pointing to Crawford as an anomaly in Canadian letters, Frye recognized Canada’s voice registered a discomfort with the imaginative language it had learned from England. As Frye explained, Crawford’s poem underlines a ‘process [that] is almost an allegory of the Canadian poetic imagination, making a tremendous effort to rouse itself and create a reborn mythology out of the abandoned Indian one, an effort still premature and collapsing before its fulfilment’ (‘Haunted by Lack of Ghosts’ [1977], in Gorjup 127). Malcolm’s Katie underscores a desire or impulse to tell stories which derive somehow from the old world of the Americas, but it also reveals that such a desire is incredibly difficult to satisfy for those who continually search for their origins, especially those guided by the teleological.

28 Before the Country

Kate is in love with Max, ‘a half-breed lad’ (II, 165), and she ‘would not change these wild and rocking woods … / For the smooth sward of selfish Eden bowers, / Nor – Max for Adam’ (VII, 36–40). However, she is unable to understand her Max without an idea of how he compares to Adam, unable to express ideas about the ‘new world’ without using Eden as touchstone. Although Frye saw Crawford’s poem as failing to fulfil its ideals, he also recognized that Malcolm’s Katie was evidence ‘something new [was] on the way’ (127). Frye believed mythological imaginations could be created. Almost a century after Malcolm’s Katie, Gwendolyn MacEwen addressed an unknown Canadian explorer in ‘Dark Pines under Water’ (1965). MacEwen depicts an ‘elementary’ world without a history. Its ‘pines’ remain ‘dark’ and under water because the source of this world – the gods – cannot be tracked by the explorer who has just arrived. At this point, MacEwen was writing out of an established literary tradition, complete with patterns, if not archetypes. It was not a tradition dependent on recognizable mythology but a search for mythology, a desire to understand the land as holding clues to some kind of national awareness or narrative. Like Canada’s foundational poets, MacEwen was continuing a ‘preoccupation with landscape’ (E.K. Brown 143); like Canada’s ‘discoverers and explorers,’ she was recording the phenomenon of strange lands; like Canada’s early critics, she was asserting that much had yet to be ‘told.’ MacEwen’s poem lends credence to the critical reflections of Robert Kroetsch, who has noted that Canadian writers have consistently underscored their own inability to provide convincing, national narratives, something smacking of mythology connected to a sacred knowledge of land. As Kroetsch has suggested, ‘ … we have in Canadian history an abundance of explorers, but so far the narrative has surrendered them entirely to Thomson’s absolute and “empty” landscape’ (‘Reciting the Emptiness,’ in LTW 39). What Kroetsch is really saying is that Canada’s writers, while recording the properties of their land, were, for a long while, perplexed by what they were recording; a large portion of Canadian literature, therefore, reveals a lack of relationship between speaker and location. While migrants might have carried with them philosophies that had worked in the places of their birth, they found they would have to learn new languages to describe the worlds they encountered. Frye would maintain in 1965 that the ‘Canadian sensibility’ is ‘less perplexed by the question “Who am I?” than by some such riddle as “Where is here?”’ (‘Conclusion to LHC,’ in BG 220), a conviction

The Headwaters of Design 29

quoted ad nauseam but still one of the most telling observations about Canadian culture. It reveals a tiresome, but very real, fixation. When one begins a formal or historical study of Canadian literature, one is inevitably directed to such texts as Tom Marshall’s The Harsh and Lovely Land, John Moss’s Patterns of Isolation in English-Canadian Fiction,8 and Margaret Atwood’s Survival9; they underscore, as quickly as in their titles, the idea that Canada’s artists have thought of these lands not as an ‘organic’ part of themselves but as potential predators. Such texts and the theories they pose are predicated on old impulses formed at an early date in Canadian mythological thought: they keep alive a sense of disparagement with respect to the phenomenon of the ‘new world.’ They resist embracing the ‘new world’ as a recognizable archetype in this nation’s mythological make-up and persist in attempting to revisit and rewrite the past. Perhaps it is no wonder, then, that, as Kroetsch has remarked, ‘Canadians, from the beginning of their history, have been unwilling or slow or even unable to locate the overriding stories, the persistent and recurring narratives, that allow for the development of a national meta-narrative’ (‘The Veil of Knowing,’ in LTW 182). In 1943 E.K. Brown observed that ‘originality [had] been rare in Canadian literature’ and that ‘what originality there [had] been [was] narrowly limited’ (143): In the early generations with whom imaginative writing began, there was a tendency, natural enough in transplanted Englishmen and Americans, to depend on English and American authors for tragedy and comedy, general history and general criticism, philosophical reflection whether in prose or verse, in short for the presentation of all general problems of human experience. Canadians were impelled to write descriptions either of the landscape round about them or of the peculiar circumstances in which they lived: these they must describe for themselves since the material was unknown to anyone else. (143)

Brown pointed to the first stages of Canada’s imaginative writing, which he thought revealed imported paradigms of thought. What Brown was suggesting was that no matter how Canadian the locale seemed to be within early Canadian writing there was evidence things had been filtered through a foreign lens. Perhaps this is why Frye, observing Canadian modernist verse almost a decade later, noted that while Canada’s American contemporaries had made it new, Canada’s imaginative or ‘mythological’ development had somehow been arrested.

30 Before the Country

In 1954 Frye noted that ‘Carman’s poetic sense told him, as it told Isabella Crawford before him and Pratt after him, that the most obvious development of a romantic landscape poet is towards the mythological, towards making his emotional impressions into a dramatic personae of forces at once human and natural’ (‘Letters in Canada’ [1954], in BG 34–5). However, as Frye further observed, when international influences encouraged Canadian writers to start producing new mythologies, the results fell flat. ‘The generation of poets growing up in the twenties encountered more urban and intellectual influences,’ Frye wrote, ‘and found in T.S. Eliot especially a technique for adapting the old mythological themes to a human as well as a natural environment, and to ironic as well as to romantic uses’ (36). As Frye saw it, ‘The mythological impulse … simply reinforced the romantic heritage’ (36). Frye’s comments suggest that Canadian literature and its imaginative impulses were suspended in colonial traditions. He insinuated that it would take more than some literary great from across the border or ocean to encourage and precipitate a real national mythology. Frye believed familiarity with environment could never create an arena for proper myths. He argued that not only does a nation have to be intimately familiar with its landscape, but it also needs a social impetus to encourage a revisioning of its mythology. Frye echoed Lampman, MacMechan, and Brown in his conclusion to Literary History of Canada: ‘… there must be a period, of a certain magnitude, as Aristotle would say, in which a social imagination can take root and establish a tradition’ (BG 219). Drawing a distinction between the literature of the United States and Canada, Frye noted that while social revolution had inspired developments in American writing, Canadian literature had not been shaped by any similar impulse: ‘American literature had this period, in the north-eastern part of the country, between the Revolution and the Civil War. Canada has never had it’ (219). Frye was repeating the arguments which Lampman, MacMechan, and Brown had already made, but Frye was writing in 1965. He not only recognized the continuance of notable literary habits but also reiterated the idea that Canada still had not experienced some sense of national need or agency which is necessary for national myth-making. For Kertzer, this reaction would be understandable. As he notes, ‘It is remarkable how often Dewart’s ideas recur in different guises whenever Canadian criticism becomes nationalistic, if not openly patriotic’ (45). Two years before Canada’s centenary, patriotism was carried like an unborn child.

The Headwaters of Design 31

In Butterfly on Rock (1970), D.G. Jones seemed to sum up the anxiety of a nation entering a new phase of maturity: ‘It is apparent that we must now move into our own cultural house, for we are no longer at home in the houses of others’ (1). Jones recognized, like Brown, that ‘a great art is fostered by artists and audience possessing in common a passionate and peculiar interest in the kind of life that exists in the country where they live’ (Brown 17). Like Brown, Jones suggested that Canadian authors would have to overcome their reliance on imported, colonial beliefs. One year after The Bush Garden had been published, Atwood released Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature (1972) with the same publisher, Anansi, its dedication paying homage to a strong school of established thought in Canadian literature: ‘For Jay Macpherson, Northrop Frye, D.G. Jones, James Reaney, Eli Mandel and Dennis Lee.’ Atwood maintained that ‘to know ourselves, we must know our own literature’ (17). Atwood’s and Jones’s critical reflections are not unlike those which prevailed in discussions of Canadian writing during the late nineteenth century. What is different is that they grew out of a time period when people could look back on both a history and a literature which deviated from their present. While Canadian literature did not record the markings of a settled populace, what it did not lack was a record of what had not ‘worked’ when Canadian authors had attempted to produce some kind of contemporary mythology. In fact, what had not worked would be reinstated in a strange way at the same time as Aboriginal voices began publishing en masse across the nation. Looking back on Canadian literature in 1970, D.G. Jones employed the language of what could be called an early Canadian mythological discourse to make sense of where Canadian literature had been and where it should be going: ‘To escape from the garrison and from the alienation it breeds, one must go into the wilderness’ (166, my emphasis). Jones endorsed one of the two most notable stereotypes that had been bandied about in Canadian writing and discussions of Canadian literature since settlement, suggesting Canadian writers would have to deconstruct those patterns which had produced paradigms which he supported by making this claim. Admittedly, Jones noted that such poets as Isabella Valancy Crawford, D.C. Scott, E.J. Pratt, A.J.M. Smith, Earle Birney, Irving Layton, Jay Macpherson, and John Newlove had ‘all, in their fashion, [abandoned] the garrison of an exclusive culture and [gone] into the wilderness, where they [experienced], not a greater sense of alienation, but a greater sense of vitality and community’ (136);

32 Before the Country

however, Jones pointed to the idea that a ‘more inclusive view’ (166) of the Canadian world had yet to be witnessed in a larger sense, or broader way, in Canadian literature. Though it had existed in many different forms, the myth of romantic nationalism dug in its heels. Only one thing was needed: history would have to be apotheosized. ‘[F]or the nationalistic writer, intent on realizing the dream of a nation-state,’ Kertzer maintains, ‘the historical narrative quickly turns visionary. History turns into myth’ (10). Many critics and writers desired to throw history aside and embrace a sacred ritual that would render history myth. Would Canada’s centenary suffice? Frye thought it might. However, Canada’s ‘Day of Atonement,’ or centennial, shared a space in history with the Native Literary Renaissance and with the larger Native Cultural Renaissance of which it was a part. This was not planned. The myth of romantic nationalism, though, had reserved a space for something just like this. As any good myth, it had nurtured beliefs in grand informants – the sacred and profane. It also had believers, investors, and few alternatives.

2 The Seventh Generation

Here again is a choice … in our minds – whether Canadians as a whole want to continue treating the Indian population as something outside, a group of Canadians with which we have treaties, a group of Canadians who, as many of the Indians claim, have aboriginal rights; or whether we will say we’ll forget the past and begin today. – Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau, Vancouver, 10 August 1969, quoted in Walsh, Indians in Transition, 36

During the late 1960s and 1970s in Canada there was an outburst of writing by Aboriginal peoples. The manner in which First Nations and Métis writing came to the forefront of national attention has no counterpart elsewhere in Canada’s literary history. Although there had been previous moments when groups had marked points of departure from literary traditions, no body of literature defined by a shared cultural identity and sense of political urgency suddenly ‘appeared’ to the public. While critics had recognized, at a very early date, that FrenchCanadian literature was distinct from English-Canadian writing, this ‘awareness’ had never really produced a national epiphany or pause. Archibald MacMechan had asserted at a relatively early date, and in perfectly colonial fashion, that ‘the history of Canada involves the destiny of two races’ (53); French-Canadian writing and its criticism had grown quite gradually, albeit separately, alongside the production and criticism of English-Canadian literature. However, the same is not true of Aboriginal writing in Canada. While Native literature of the 1960s and 1970s was not without precedent, it had, for the most part,

34 Before the Country

remained beyond the pale of Canadian literary criticism. As the criticism of Native literature consistently points out, its emergence made a notable impact because it seemed to emerge out of a preceding ‘period of silence.’ Critics such as Greg Young-Ing and Penny Petrone note that between the mid-1910s and the mid-1960s in Canada very few Native authors published literary works,1 and while the nuances of this observation need to be interrogated in the criticism of Aboriginal literature, it is true this time period was quiet. In his article ‘Native Alliance for Red Power,’ included in The Only Good Indian: Essays by Canadian Indians, Henry Jack observed from his standpoint in 1970 that the recent past was not to be noted for the publishing of Aboriginal literatures: ‘Not more than two years ago, a reader could count on his fingers the number of books written and published by Indians about Indians. Today that is changing’ (163). If we follow the traditional logic which has attended the criticism of Native literature in Canada thus far, it seems significant to note that the lean years of Native publishing in this country coincided with Canada’s residential schools, institutions which destroyed cultural pride, cultural worth, First languages, and much more. Adam Shoemaker observes a comparable phenomenon in Australia, noting that ‘during the entire assimilation era [1945–61], when Aborigines were in theory being gradually absorbed into the mainstream of Australian society, not a single Aboriginal writer’s work was published’ (85). Shoemaker further maintains that ‘one can only speculate upon the reasons for the hiatus in the production of Aboriginal literature’ as ‘there seems to be little doubt that there would have been a market for such literature if it conformed to expectations; in short, if it looked like material derived from traditional sources’ (86–7). I would suggest that, in Canada (and perhaps a comparable claim could be made about Australia), it would be more than understandable that Aboriginal authors would choose not to share with the Canadian public their stories and ideas during those years when they and their children had been subjected to a new height of assimilationist policies and brutal systems that threatened their cultural survival. The history of cultural separation between Aboriginal and nonAboriginal peoples in Canada is not simply a governmental construct, though. Canadian governments have had to become increasingly aware over the years that policies on Indian affairs would be best informed by directives that shape an understanding of foreign relations. The consistent fight for Aboriginal self-determination and

The Seventh Generation 35

self-government is not only a sign of resilience and reaction but also a manifestation of the fact that many Indian nations have never been guided by a desire to become Canadian. Perhaps inclusion in this country’s literary practices might never have been a key desire of various Aboriginal peoples who conceivably identify more with their own national values than with Canadian ones. In fact, a consideration of Newfoundland literature and its fierce pride in maintaining traditions distinct from those of mainland Canada seems to suggest some future basis for rethinking the history of national literary production and its inclusions. Thomas King’s article ‘Godzilla vs. Post-Colonial’ raises this idea in another way when he forwards a new set of terms for the study of Aboriginal literature. He suggests that ‘associational’ literature might best describe ‘the body of literature that has been created, for the most part, by contemporary Native writers’ (14): While [associational literature] may also describe a non-Native community, it avoids centring the story on the non-Native community or on a conflict between the two cultures, concentrating instead on the daily activities and intricacies of Native life and organizing the elements of plot along a rather flat narrative line that ignores the ubiquitous climaxes and resolutions that are so valued in non-Native literature. (14)

This type of literature, which ‘does not pander to non-Native expectations’ (14), shares a relation with what King calls ‘tribal’ literature, ‘literature which exists primarily within a tribe or community, literature that is shared almost exclusively by members of that community, and literature that is presented and retained in a Native language’ (12–13). As King maintains, ‘It is virtually invisible outside its community, partly because of the barrier of language and partly because it has little interest in making itself available to an outside audience’ (13). To fail to recognize such continuities between associational and tribal, past and present, would be anathema to the criticism of Native literature of the 1960s and 1970s. When Aboriginal people began sharing their stories during these decades, their works embodied the characteristics of old forms of literature which had been maintained and adapted to the demands of changing times over many years. When Norval Morriseau published his Legends of My People: The Great Ojibway (1965), he was not concerned with discovering his lineage or legacy or searching for a historical past. He was concerned with

36 Before the Country

what Ojibway elders would have to say when he offered to the general public translations of ancient histories and mythologies. ‘Although I am an Ojibway Indian artist and I paint the ancient art forms of the Ojibway,’ Morriseau began, ‘no Indian would ever take the step I took, for fear of the supernatural’ (68). Morriseau further claimed that he had, in a way, ‘broken a barrier, a taboo,’ despite the fact that he had ‘a great respect for [his] ancestral beliefs’ (68). Morriseau’s work and comments are evidence that Ojibway traditions, including literary ones, had been fiercely protected. Entry into the public literary domain made them ‘new’ in that they were translated and presented in an untraditional manner and offered as a gift for the first time. George Manuel and Michael Posluns noted in The Fourth World: An Indian Reality (1974) that while ‘the sixties stand out like a mountain rising above the quiet mists of the fifties’ (156), while this was ‘the decade in which [Indian people] were rediscovered,’ this process of discovery was heavily ironic: ‘As in the earlier discoveries of European history, we knew where we were all the time,’ the authors wrote. ‘It was the explorer who was lost’ (156). They also problematized the conception that Indian nations had newly begun to resist: It is very much a mistake to identify the cultural and political renaissance that is going on among Indian societies today with a new Indian resistance. The fact of the matter is that there was never a time since the beginning of colonial conquest when Indian people were not resisting the four destructive forces besetting us: the state through the Indian agent; the church through the priests; the church and state through schools; the state and industry through the traders. (69)

Shoemaker makes a comparable point when he discusses the need ‘to consider Aboriginal history from the black viewpoint’ in Australia: Rather than emphasising what has been done to Black Australians, recent studies have also highlighted Aboriginal reaction and response. For example, [Richard] Broome details the Aboriginal resistance movements of the 1920s and 1930s, illustrating the fact that black political protest is not a phenomenon which commenced in the 1960s. (23)2

Not only was Aboriginal protest no new thing in Canada, but the determination of Aboriginal peoples to regulate their own affairs (and the recording of this desire) was also part of a lengthy history. Manuel

The Seventh Generation 37

and Posluns pointed to the significance of one of the earliest treaties negotiated by Europeans and Indian nations, recorded by the Iroquois on the Two Row Wampum Belt: ‘the two rows that are woven into the pattern symbolize the path of two vessels traveling on parallel paths but neither interfering with the other,’ and they indicated that ‘it is only through the mutual acknowledgment of the other’s reality that it is possible to travel on parallel courses and avoid collision’ (8). There had been a long history of parallel traditions – both literary and otherwise – in the Americas; the years of ‘silence’ leading up to this Native Literary Renaissance were not necessarily years of no production but, rather, years during which cultures remained more rigidly separate from one another. When James Sewid recounted his memoirs to James Spradley for Guests Never Leave Hungry: The Autobiography of James Sewid, a Kwakiutl Indian (1969), Sewid remembered his life as a child on the West Coast of British Columbia; he described how his family and others ‘had to be very careful about taking part in potlatches that were going on in the other villages’ (41) because government officials were around at that time monitoring travel to dances and potlatches, which had been made illegal. Sewid explains that when the government ordered different nations to give up their religious regalia and masks, ‘there were only people from three villages who did what they were ordered, Cape Mudge, Village Island, and Alert Bay’ (54). Despite governmental injunctions, traditions were maintained, perhaps more rigorously, as their survival had been threatened. Manuel and Posluns also noted that ‘when the potlatch had been outlawed, the Indian spiritual societies that maintained … traditions had largely gone underground in order to carry on their work’ (118). Douglas Cole and Ira Chaikin, in their study of the West Coast potlatch and its changing forms, An Iron Hand upon the People: The Law against the Potlatch on the Northwest Coast, refer to the new potlatching forms that grew out of necessity when the Canadian government passed the anti-potlatch law of 1884; these reflections thereby provide a touchstone for understanding Aboriginal literature of the 1960s and 1970s as a continuation of past traditions. Potlatching could land one in jail, as the government had determined that a potlatcher became ‘impoverished’ (Cole and Chaikin 128). Indian agent W.M. Halliday endorsed these beliefs in 1935 in Potlatch and Totem, and the Recollections of an Indian Agent, claiming that the potlatch was a ‘particularly wasteful and destructive custom [which] created ill-feeling, jealousy, and … great

38 Before the Country

poverty’ (4). For many Aboriginal peoples on the West Coast, potlatching is an ‘“announcement-of-standing” ceremony, a way of claiming one’s accession to a social distinction’ (Cole and Chaikin 10); West Coast nations did not want to give up their traditions any more than a religious devotee would want to give up membership in the Anglican or Catholic Church. To maintain the potlatch practice, people had to be as innovative as the post-Reformation British. Cole and Chaikin draw attention to the marriage of Jane Nowell and Arthur Shaughnessy in 1921, when the couple still engaged in ‘open potlatching, but in a new way: ‘Nowell … announced that everyone could go to the movie show free on Saturday night and bought boxes of apples and oranges, candy, cakes, soda pop and chewing gum to distribute there’ (141). Sometimes a fear of the law shared a relation with new forms of potlatching which Cole and Chaikin dub ‘disjointed’ potlatches (142): ‘Alfred, an elderly man who had been arrested in 1920 and was among those second offenders of the Cranmer potlatch3 pardoned for signing the agreement, had an enormous amount of goods stored and ready to give away in 1934. In December he simply tagged each article with the name of the person for whom it was intended (“I must say it certainly looked like a Christmas tree to me,” the agent commented) and walked away’ (143). Practices were adapted, reminding one that Aboriginal cultures, like other cultures, are adaptive and accretive. This is a point also broached by Stephen Muecke and Shoemaker in their discussion of Catholic, Lutheran, and Anglican missions in Australia: Missionaries had great difficulty translating concepts into the local languages. At one mission Aborigines sang for years ‘Jesus loves hair on the chest’ instead of ‘Jesus loves me.’ Clearly the missionary was pointing to his chest and suggesting the word for ‘me,’ and had become the victim of the kind of practical joke for which Aboriginal people are famous. (68)

Muecke and Shoemaker also understand Aboriginal cultures, like others, to be syncretic, even though to recognize certain origins of syncretism might be incredibly troubling: Aborigines were not predisposed to worship a single god, and their own beliefs made them cherish life in the here and now. Yet when thrown together in missions … and dislocated from their ancestral lands, they began to talk, in the south-east of the continent, of a god called Baiami who,

The Seventh Generation 39 some said, ‘dwells in heaven on a throne of transparent crystal surrounded by beautifully carved pillars from which emanate the colours of the rainbow.’ This syncretic vision emerged in the absence of sacred rituals, which could not be performed without visiting the sacred places. (69)

Sometimes, even within forms that seem ostensibly distinct from Aboriginal traditions, one might recognize old Aboriginal art forms at play; moreover, one might glimpse new traditions which respond to old cultural means of adaptation. In his article ‘Re-creation in Canadian First Nations Literatures: “When You Sing It Now, Just Like New,”’ Robin Ridington broaches a similar point: In my work with the Dane-zaa, I was initially puzzled by a story about choices made by the first people on earth that included a reference to cartridge belts (Ridington, 1999a: 178). When I asked the translator what word the narrator had used, she told me it was atu-ze, literally ‘belonging to arrows.’ Rather than fixing Dane-zaa identity by reference to discontinued items of material culture, the narrator and translator told the story with reference to contemporary experience. The story was about how people continue to use tools and a knowledge of the environment in making a living, not about defining Dane-zaa hunters as users of bows and arrows. (224)

A lot of this is common sense. One would not expect a Canadian writer of the twenty-first century to tell a story about beaver hats during an introductory meeting with someone from another culture. However, Aboriginal nations are often understood in relation to some romantic past, or, as Shoemaker notes in a similar discussion of popular conceptions of Black Australians, ‘all that is worthwhile belongs to the traditional realm rather than to the ongoing, adaptive life of the people’ (88). The past explored in the criticism of Aboriginal literature in Canada seems easy prey for romantic theories which do not grow out of Aboriginal epistemologies. Continuity of Aboriginal literary traditions often comes as a surprise, and is misrepresented, as a result of discontinuity in knowledge about Aboriginal literature; as Shoemaker puts it, ‘… the formalisation of tradition can lead to a denigration of the present’ (88). Four decades, at least, of critical ‘silence’ in Canada, with no inroads laid for integrity in the criticism of Aboriginal literatures, come up short against a wealth of diverse voices.

40 Before the Country

During the 1960s and 1970s, translations of traditional stories became available in print for the first time.4 Collaborative projects between non-Native editors and First Peoples continued to appear,5 but Aboriginal translations which did not bear the stamp of another culture’s interpretation were also published.6 A significant number of political works characterized these years; they not only ‘protested’ against past and present injustices but also offered suggestions for reform. These texts were written by those trained or self-taught in legal and judicial matters; the language of litigation with which these authors were familiar should ultimately define this body of writing not as ‘protest’ literature but as ‘legal’ or ‘strategic’ literature.7 Such writing documented a different side of Canadian history than what had been formerly offered to the public, telling more than half a story that had never been told. Authors suggested specific changes be made to the political structures that governed Canada. Autobiographies or life stories were also frequent, and they gained a considerable amount of respect for Aboriginal voices. Most notably, Métis author Maria Campbell published her autobiography, Halfbreed, in 1973, and in 1975 Lee Maracle published an autobiographically inspired fiction entitled Bobbi Lee: Indian Rebel. These texts were popular, and they have rightfully been given a considerable amount of critical attention. Perhaps most notably, though, elders and chiefs were publishing their life stories and accounts of history.8 Like those manuscripts which had been revived and offered publication for the first time during these decades, such as Edward Ahenakew’s Voices of the Plains Cree (1923),9 Mike Mountain Horse’s My People the Bloods (1936),10 and Walter Wright and Will Robinson’s Men of Medeek (1935–6),11 these works incorporated recollections of a past which differed greatly from the world of the midtwentieth century. It is interesting, and worth further consideration that is not within the scope of this study, to consider a comparable example in Australia, where ‘the achievements of the first Aboriginal writer, David Unaipon, who published in the 1929–1945 period, were almost totally ignored until the 1970s’ (Shoemaker 41). In Canada, readers were consistently presented with recollections of a pre-industrial era and a body of literature which shared an affinity more with nineteenth-century sentiments (if one were to look at it that way) than with twentieth-century world views. During these years, two other texts signalled that artists were not only extending their separate Indigenous practices but also engaging in new literary traditions that would be bound together. In 1969 the first anthology of Native literature, I Am an Indian: Essays by Canadian

The Seventh Generation 41

Indians, appeared, and in 1970 the first collection of essays by NativeCanadian scholars, The Only Good Indian, was published. These works boasted a concert of voices, indicating pan-Indianism would come to characterize Native literature and its criticism for a significant period of time. They also signify, within a consideration of global Aboriginality, that much work has to be done in the field of comparative Aboriginal literature, politics, and history. For Shoemaker, a ‘significant aspect of contemporary Black Australian protest relates to a pan-Aboriginal identity’ (120). More specifically, Shoemaker notes that the politics out of which many Aboriginal literatures grow must be considered in discussions of Aboriginal expressions. His ideas provide important caveats for scholars working with Aboriginal literatures in many areas: ‘… black creative writing in Australia cannot be studied in isolation: it must be examined and evaluated in terms of the social environment which surrounds it and the historical events which precede it’ (6). The same is true of Aboriginal writing in Canada. It is notable that pan-Indianism in Canada had also become characteristic, almost instantaneously, beyond the specialized field of literary production; ‘the term “Native” itself was adopted in the 1970s to refer to members of all … [different Aboriginal] groups’ (Burnaby 306). People had begun to speak in larger terms of a Native Cultural Renaissance. The First Nations gained notable attention, exerting significant influence in not only the arts but also politics. In the early 1960s, a National Indian Council had been established to represent both status and non-status Indians, though it was later formally dissolved. However, with the creation in 1969 of the National Indian Brotherhood, it became even clearer that pan-Aboriginal unity in Canada was growing and that the government would have to pay close attention and learn to negotiate with powerful voices. Negotiations would be imperative, for Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau believed every bit as much in the story of romantic nationalism as Dewart, Lampman, MacMechan, and Brown. He also had spell binding charisma. Like Frye, he, too, had a large following, but he would have a cabinet, not a classroom, and even access to a form of martial law if he so chose. On 6 April 1968 he was elected leader of the Liberal Party of Canada, and on 20 April he was sworn in as prime minister. He would have at his fingertips a story that was weaving itself and searching, just like himself, for a ‘Day of Atonement.’ In 1967 the federal government, under Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson, had announced it would create a task force under the leadership of the Honourable Robert Andras to solicit opinions and advice from Indian

42 Before the Country

people across the country in order to create a major policy statement. Whether the government actually weighed Native sentiments that carefully is suspect, but it did follow through with a proposal. In 1969 Trudeau’s government introduced The Statement of the Government of Canada on Indian Policy, and precipitated a host of ensuing debates. This White Paper on Indian Policy can be seen as the accumulation over a number of years of changes made to the 1876 Indian Act, and as a response to the experience of the Second World War and what had been witnessed in Europe: memories of human rights’ transgressions had been carried back to Canada by returning soldiers as well as by the international press. The end of this war would also have a significant effect on Aboriginal/white relations in Australia. Shoemaker maintains that ‘the end of World War II in 1945 marks a turning point in black/white relations’; he traces the changes, in part, to ‘the returning servicemen [who] had fought against tyranny, discrimination, and oppression in various theatres of war around the globe’ (9). Chief John Snow also draws attention to this time period in Canada, suggesting a different interpretation: ‘The years 1948 to 1965 are passed over too quickly.’ For Snow, these years constitute ‘a period when the Indian people were forgotten because the dominant society became too involved with the economic boom and its own growing influence’ (x). Maybe the truth lies somewhere between these two poles of thought, as well as others. What should be recognized is that there was a movement to review policy during these decades in Canada. In his article ‘The Indian Act: An Historical Perspective,’ John F. Leslie summarizes post-war responses to the government’s inquiries into Aboriginal/ non-Aboriginal relations and Aboriginal rights in Canada: The plight of Canada’s Indian peoples became a matter of national concern at the close of World War II, when the House of Commons Special Committee on Reconstruction and Re-establishment was struck … In this period of national account-taking, Indian reserve conditions and Indian policy and administration came under sustained public scrutiny for the first time since before Confederation. Between 1946 and 1948, a special joint committee of the Senate and House of Commons examined the operation of the Indian Act and Indian administration … Three years of committee hearings produced significant policy and administrative recommendations … The committee suggested that an Indian claims commission be established … [and] the committee felt the minister had too many discretionary powers and that these should be reduced in a new act. The committee argued that Indian bands should

The Seventh Generation 43 be able to develop their own charters or constitutions for selfgovernment … and that the bands should be allowed to incorporate and hold title to reserve lands. (5)

While government officials rejected almost all of what became known as the ‘Committee’s Bill,’ it would fuel further governmental deliberations, such as those for the revised Indian Act of 1951, which was tabled after an earlier revised Indian Act (presented to the House of Commons in June 1950) was withdrawn ‘because Indian people and their supporters claimed they had not been formally consulted’ (Leslie 5). Significantly, in the revised Indian Act of 1951, ‘there was no claims commission, and there was no federal vote for Indians’ (Leslie 6), and bans on dances and ceremonies (such as the anti-potlatch law of 1884) were simply dropped, never to be formally repealed; however, ‘the ban on the pursuit of land claims’ was lifted and discretionary measures reduced somewhat. The record of these deliberations and actions – containing both proof of government disregard for Aboriginal rights and some precedents which could be extended – would be drawn upon for important reminders in the years to follow. In a seeming attempt to bolster ‘an equality which preserves and enriches Indian identity’ (Statement of the Government 6), the government suggested in its 1969 White Paper on Indian Policy that it would do six basic things: amend the British North America Act and remove the distinction between Indians and other Canadians; repeal the Indian Act; recognize the contributions of Indian culture to Canadian society; discontinue the Indian Affairs Branch and transfer responsibilities for Indian peoples from the federal government to provincial agencies; provide economic assistance to Indian peoples; and put Indian lands within Indian control. The proposal was ostensibly sensitive to Native Canadians, but its underlying premise was that Aboriginal rights would be abolished, a point clarified by Prime Minister Trudeau in Vancouver in 1969: But aboriginal rights – this really means saying. [sic] ‘We were here before you came and you took the land from us. And perhaps you cheated us by giving us some worthless things in return for vast expanses of land and we want you to re-open this question. We want you to preserve our Aboriginal rights and restore them to us.’ And our answer – and it may not be the right one and it may not be the one which is accepted, but it will be up to all of you people to make your minds up and to choose for or against it and to discuss with the Indians –

44 Before the Country our answer is no. We can’t recognize rights because no society can be built on historical might-have-beens. (Quoted in Walsh 36)

The National Indian Brotherhood responded: ‘[T]he policy proposals put forward by the Minister of Indian Affairs are not acceptable to the Indian people of Canada … We view this as a policy designed to divest us of our aboriginal, residual and statutory rights. If we accept this policy, and in the process lose our rights and our lands, we become willing partners in cultural genocide. This we cannot do.’ (Quoted in Canada, Indian Claims Commission, Indian Claims in Canada, 23)

In the ensuing months, Native leaders and spokespeople from across the country began campaigning against the White Paper, and the public soon became aware that there was a political body in Canada that was more than a bit uneasy with the present state of things. When Harold Cardinal published his rebuttal to the White Paper and to Trudeau’s vision of a ‘just society,’ The Unjust Society: The Tragedy of Canada’s Indians (1969), he carefully attacked all of the main points of the White Paper in an attempt to speak for the majority of Native Canadians, who also felt the proposal was unfair. Although Cardinal recognized that the Indian Act was not a good document, he suggested that to repeal it would be to remove an important memory of discrimination from public record. The following excerpt from the White Paper is virtually ludicrous when one considers that in presenting this paper to the public, the government was assuming it would actually go through at a time when people were being forced to consider how Canada had negotiated with Aboriginal peoples in the past: The Government believes that each band must make its own decision as to the way it wants to take control of its land and the manner in which it intends to manage it. It will take some years to complete the process of devolution. The Government believes that full ownership implies many things. It carries with it the free choice of use, of retention or of disposition. In our society it also carries with it an obligation to pay for certain services. The Government recognizes that it may not be acceptable to put all lands into the provincial systems immediately and make them subject to taxes. When the Indian people see that the only way they can own and fully control land is to accept taxation the way other Canadians do, they will make that decision. (Statement of the Government 12)

The Seventh Generation 45

Despite the fact that there were some notable Aboriginal figures, such as Cree lawyer William I.C. Wuttunnee12 and Nisga’a leader Frank Calder,13 who supported the document, the White Paper became more of an embarrassing comment on Canada’s tradition of assimilationist policies than an indication of the country’s progression out of a not-socommendable past. Native leaders and spokespeople campaigned against the White Paper, producing a colourful debate which underscored that the government should think more carefully in the future. In June 1970, the Indian Chiefs of Alberta and the Indian Association of Alberta presented to the prime minister and his government a rebuttal to the White Paper which, formally called ‘Citizens Plus,’ became popularly known as ‘The Red Paper.’ On 17 November 1970, the Union of British Columbia Indian Chiefs constructed a very different, but equally important, declaration against the government’s proposal: together with Alberta’s appeal, and with the support of different lobbying groups, British Columbia’s ‘Brown Paper’ helped to ensure that the government’s plan was eventually shelved. During the 1960s and 1970s, the Canadian nation was reminded by Aboriginal public action, challenges to the Canadian court, and land-claims activities it should be acutely aware that this country’s lands had been violated and that Canada’s one-hundred year legacy must be considered in relation to Aboriginal legacies.14 The debates that grew out of and around the White Paper are indicative of what was happening in Canada during those years when people began to speak of the ‘rebirth’ of Aboriginal cultures. Diverse Indian nations, despite years of historical differences, were coming together. Governmental policies on Aboriginal matters were subjected to severe criticism. Indian organizations were gaining respect. Some kind of revolution was taking place. The nation was addressed, but what would people hear? A focus on pan-Indianism and no existing corpus of criticism for Aboriginal voices and literatures could potentially produce strange results. Canada’s inheritance of romantic nationalism and its attendant fixation on mythology seemed all too ready for what it now had at its disposal – something ‘large’ and ‘grand’ and quite adaptable to a pre-existing agenda. Aboriginal literature of this period often shared a strong relation with the politics of the time. Native leaders, spokespeople, and activists were coming together, fighting for recognition and legal rights, and authors and writers were joining them. While diverse Indian nations staked land claims and protested cultural appropriation, writers and orators staked literary claims, ensuring their voices and stories would no longer be controlled by others. First Peoples were engaging in both

46 Before the Country

new and old rituals to pay homage to their Indigenous legacies; writers were engaging in both new and sustained literary traditions to make sure their legacies were not forgotten. A number of important voices began instructing people to share with the public the histories and stories of the First Nations. Edward Ahenakew had written the following words in 1923 in his text Voices of the Plains Cree, but it was not until 1973 that they were offered to the public in his revived testimony: ‘The time has come in the life of my race when that which has been like a sealed book to the masses of our Canadian compatriots – namely the view that the Indians have of certain matters affecting their lives – should be known’ (23). Ahenakew had to wait nearly five decades before he was heard, but similar claims would be reiterated time and time again by different groups and writers during these years. In her fascinating (but overlooked) overview of First Peoples in British Columbia, A Traveller’s Guide to Aboriginal B.C., Cheryl Coull provides a brief summary of the Gitxsan/Wet’suwet’en land claim, which also opened up sealed records over a decade later and offered to a new audience what had formally not been shared: In 1987, the Gitxsan with their old friends and neighbours, the Wet’suwet’en, launched the boldest trial in Canada’s history. Fifty-four chiefs seeking outright control of an area spanning 22,000 square kilometres took their case to B.C.’s Supreme Court. Cautiously opening their ada’ox, ‘treasure boxes,’ they described, in their own languages, territories governed long before written history. Then came the paradoxical judgement of a 100-year-old colonial society, which, in denying their claim, summarized Gitxsan and Wet’suwet’en life as having been at best, ‘nasty, brutish and short.’ (180)

As J.E. Chamberlin explains in If This Is Your Land, Where Are Your Stories, the Gitxsan told their story ‘with all the ritual that it required, for as Mary Johnson reminded the court, the stories and songs that represent their past are about belief, and therefore need ceremony’ (22). The Gitxsan had ‘opened up’ their ‘ada’ox (histories)’ (Coull 179), but, as Chamberlin recognizes, they had also opened up a different storytelling ‘imagination,’ which did not cohere with the court. Likewise, writers of the 1960s and 1970s ‘opened up’ their ‘treasure boxes,’ or ways of knowing, and expressed what many had not been trained to understand.

The Seventh Generation 47

In 1965 Morriseau introduced Legends of My People: The Great Ojibway with the following assertion: ‘I understand a lot is known of other respected tribes of North American Indians but only a little of the great Ojibway people. I believe it will require some years of study before much is known of my people. I wish to see this accomplished in my lifetime, so I am writing this book as a foundation and I am sure many more will follow’ (2). Here, one is reminded of the relatively new phenomenon of pan-Indianism as Morriseau is first and foremost concerned with passing on knowledge about the Ojibway nation; however, his voice would be met by many more who were intent on offering education from Aboriginal perspectives. When Chief Max Gros Louis published First among the Hurons (1973), he noted that while there was ‘no shortage of books about [American Indians] written by learned historians (or writers who are recognized as such!)’ (10), they were to be rejected ‘because too often they contradict what [Native] ancestors have transmitted to [Native Peoples] orally, from generation to generation’ (10–11). Thus, he recorded his account of past and present Huron history. Aboriginal people were drawing attention to the idea that the time had come to insert their histories and ideas, in new written form, into ‘mainstream’ Canadian practices. As Sewid expressed to Spradley, if history were not told from the perspective of Aboriginal peoples, and if their arts were not protected, the result would be devastating: ‘If we do not take a firm stand now, we shall lose our dances, carvings, etc. to the non-Indians as well as to other Nations. These people know the great demand and value of our Arts for they have already begun to learn and produce them. Let us not lose our Arts like we did our lands, for if we do so we shall regret it’ (242). Chief Dan George underscored assertions comparable to Chief Sewid’s when he made the following declaration in a soliloquy in the Playhouse Theatre, Vancouver, in the spring of 1968: ‘I am a chief but my power to make war is gone, and the only weapon left me is my speech. It is only with tongue and speech that I can fight my people’s war’ (In Gooderham, ed., I Am an Indian 18). Chief Dan George drew attention to the fact that times had changed; he suggested his nation and others should adapt to the demands of a ‘new world’ or adapt the ‘new world’ to other ways of seeing. He made this point again in 1974 in My Heart Soars: Soon there will be many books that will tell of our ways

48 Before the Country and perhaps will shame even those who think us inferior only because we are different. To those who believe in the power of the written word these books will proclaim our cultural worth. It has been done so for other races and their teachings. This is how our young people will bring to you the true image of our native people and destroy the distortion of which we have been the victims for so long. Then we will prosper in all things.

(55)

Like many of his contemporary equals, Chief Dan George underlined his conviction that history had many faces, that there were other stories telling different histories. He encouraged the younger generation to write, suggesting Aboriginal peoples should partake in ‘mainstream’ literary traditions in order to ensure their voices be heard and traditions protected. Aboriginal traditions had been assiduously protected, both orally and by inscripted means; however, as Chief Kenneth Harris noted in Visitors Who Never Left: The Origin of the People of Damelahamid (1974), so many changes had taken place in the previous fifty years that it was imperative Aboriginal peoples write and engage with Canadian publishing practices: ‘There is no longer the time to tell the myths as we used to in the old days’ (xxiii). In Legends of My People: The Great Ojibway, Morriseau appealed to Aboriginal peoples to foster the youth and encourage them to partake in the traditions being carved by his generation: ‘I wish as I am writing that you, my people, would try to preserve our precious knowledge by encouraging our younger people to take an interest in it’ (55). Both Morriseau and Chief Harris, like the political activists, were recognizing that silence and separation were no longer effective reactions to recent history, and that literary, like political, endeavours would have to be governed by a desire to inform those who were not educated about Aboriginal traditions. It is almost as if notable Aboriginal voices were somehow formally acknowledging ‘settlers’ were here to stay and that it might be a good time, in the midst of a big mess, to start sharing stories.

The Seventh Generation 49

This adaptive stage in Aboriginal-Canadian literature exposes a fundamental difference between the developmental history of Canadian literature and First Nations literature. Canada’s first stages of mythological ideation were governed by a search for a notable past and frustration with the recognition that Canadian literature does not grow out of old mythological roots. A survey of Aboriginal writing in Canada in the 1960s and 1970s, however, suggests that First literatures boast an awareness of, and pride in, literary origins and precedents. The Aboriginal writing which grew out of these decades reveals no real crisis of identity comparable to that found in Canadian literature, though there is the reality of disrupted Aboriginal literary traditions. Aboriginal writing of the 1960s and 1970s in Canada recorded Aboriginally maintained histories which extend beyond a consideration of colonization and ‘conquest.’ At the end of his Smoke from Their Fires: The Life of a Kwakiutl Chief (1968), Clellan S. Ford recounts the words of the teller of this history, Charles James Nowell, who describes a totem pole standing in his village: That painting of Alfred now is the hok-hok on the top of that totem pole. My wife is a descendant of this man through her mother, for her mother was a Giksum, and her mother’s father was a Giksum. Her mother’s mother was a Tlowitsis. The old man called Wakias of that clan told my wife and me about this when I got married to her. And he told my wife to remember it all. At nights he used to tell that over and over again, so we would have it straight. That is the way the old people used to do in the nighttime when there is nothing else going on, so the stories won’t be forgotten. (248)

This recounting of both memory and tradition is a recognition of continuity, something which also comes to the fore in Men of Medeek (1962), by Walter Wright, chief of the Grizzly Bear People of Kitselas. Wright explained how he became his nation’s historian: When I was a boy my Grandfather, who was Neas Hiwas, taught me the history of Medeek. His had been the duty of carrying it through his generation. His was the responsibility of choosing one of The Royal Blood to keep it safe after he had died. As a lad I sat at my Grandfather’s feet. Many times he told me the story. It is long. In the Native tongue it takes eight hours to tell. So, several times each year, I sat at his feet and listened to our records. I drank in the words.

50 Before the Country In time I became word perfect. I knew all the story. I could repeat it without missing any of its parts. So I became the historian of Medeek. (Robinson 1–2)

No matter how ‘new’ or ‘novel’ this literature may have appeared to some people, Wright’s description makes clear that this literature was sometimes based on very old traditions. Futhermore, Wright’s words emphasize that repetitive rituals, inter-generational exchange, and a signifiant, if not astounding, investment of time and patience were employed to protect and pass on history. There were more than just Aboriginal histories. Writers drew attention to honed theatrical traditions, as Lee Maracle has more recently done. Speaking at the National Native Theatre Symposium at the University of Toronto in 1998, Maracle claimed that ‘anyone who has watched Basil Johnston perform a story knows that the Ojibway have theatrical traditions.’ She did note a problem, however: ‘We all have theatrical traditions … [and] we haven’t been schooled in that’ (quoted in Manossa, 179). When Spradley wrote down the life story of Sewid, Spradley recorded in significant detail the tradition of Kwakwaka’wakw15 (Kwakiutl) theatre which Sewid had told him about. Sewid explained that ‘the Kwakiutl were unsurpassed among North American Indians in their theatrical skill’ (11). His following description of the Kwakwaka’wakw’s most popular theatrical spectacle indicates this nation possessed refined art forms involving religious initiates and requiring significant amounts of labour and precious materials: Huge masks with moveable parts danced around the fire. Trap doors in the floor enabled dancers to mysteriously disappear. Lifelike heads carved of wood and carried on top of a dancer’s costume were skillfully cut from the body. Then a powerful shaman would revive the decapitated person to the amazement of the audience. The most important secret was the simulated nature of these dramas which the uninitiated thought to be supernaturally produced. (11)

This passage reminds one of Chief Dan Kennedy’s depiction of a religious rite in Recollections of an Assiniboine Chief. More specifically, both excerpts illustrate ceremonial performance, though they might exist at different points on some shared spectrum: The shaman entered, stripped his clothes to breach clout [sic], lay down on the large elk skin, and folded the sides of the skins over himself, leaving

The Seventh Generation 51 only his head uncovered. Then two young warriors took forty yards of elk-skin rope and wrapped it around and around the shaman, binding him tightly. Next the shaman was lifted and placed between the stakes. For an hour the onlookers listened to mutterings: a crescendo of the voices of the spirits that spewed from the mouth of the shaman on a range of pitch from whispering to raving. Foam dribbled from the mouth of the shaman and he fell into what appeared to be a state of utter exhaustion. Suddenly the medicine man sprang to his feet, free from his bonds. ‘My brothers! The Great Spirit has talked with his servant!’ Carver masked his astonishment when the shaman’s prediction that men would arrive at high noon the following day was fulfilled. (17)

A careful distinction needs to be posed between what Robert Pelton, a scholar of oral literatures, would call ‘sacred histories,’ those literatures which must guard the specifics of cultural spiritual memories and beliefs, and oral ‘literature[s] of the imagination’ (19). However, it is just as necessary not to relegate the simulacrum of Aboriginal literature to some sense of the untouchable ‘spiritual,’ a relentless and imprecise term bandied about in contemporary pop-psychological responses to Aboriginal peoples and their traditions. Such a term detracts from a more precise recognition of the sacred – that which bears both the ceremonial gift and responsibility of ritualized articulation and which speaks for the spirit of an established totality. Understood in bold mythological relief, the ‘pan-Indian’ and the ‘Canadian’ appear to be stark opposites, a reduction which has fed problematic, dichotomous thinking until the present day. There are recent and healthy challenges, however, such as those made by Armand Garnet Ruffo, who warns ‘not to advocate some kind of inherent quality that comes with being Aboriginal’ and to recognize and speak of the ‘culturally initiated’ ((Ad)dressing Our Words 7). However, there is a legacy behind that imagist-school of Aboriginal criticism (which followed on the heels of this Native Renaissance), fascinated with ‘fear’ and ‘desire,’ ‘us’ and ‘them,’ ‘centre’ and ‘margin’; its sentiments are traceable to the 1960s and 1970s, when non-Aboriginal critics and writers, for the most part, reacted to the Renaissance without significant critical precedent. It is interesting and fruitful to consider that a counterpart to this school exists in Australia, where Shoemaker speaks of ‘the school of concerned conscience (often motivated by guilt)’ (201). A shift in focus away from dominant schools which respond to Aboriginal voices to those Indigenous articulations which prompted a new dialogue in the 1960s and 1970s is important;

52 Before the Country

such a redirected concentration reveals no discourse in the literature of the Native Renaissance comparable to the story those such as Dewart, Lampman, MacMechan, and Brown were telling when they claimed that Canadian literature did not exist, that it needed to be discovered or created. Much of this pan-Indian literature discloses a sense of confidence about the past and a certainty about tradition not found within the bulk of English-Canadian literature. While First Nations literature was announcing its entry into the Canadian publishing world during these decades, it was also assiduously underscoring cultural difference. The significance of this last claim is best understood by considering what writers had been saying during these years about the differences between Aboriginal and nonAboriginal traditions in their discussions of governmental policies. In a small pamphlet entitled Two Articles (1971), Wilfred Pelletier made the following assertion: ‘Indians don’t really want to fight for their rights,’ Pelletier stated. ‘They really don’t want to get into the society at all.‘16 Pelletier went further by drawing a distinction between the Civil Rights Movement in the United States and the American Indian Movement, even though many people have recognized that Black Panther politics influenced and fuelled the activities of both AIM and NARP. ‘In this way,’ Pelletier maintained, ‘[the American Indians] are probably different from the black people on this continent who are a much larger group, and have no choice but to fight for their rights. When they get these rights, what they are doing in essence is moving into society.’ Likewise, Shoemaker, from his position as an observer of Black Australian literature and protest claims, felt it important to quote in his concluding remarks to Black Words, White Page Aboriginal writer Jack Davis, who, as Shoemaker notes, ‘has commented [that] the assimilation policy never could have worked [in Australia] because “[t]there will always be differences between black and white”’ (‘Interview with Jack Davis’ 114; quoted in Shoemaker 278). Harold Adams would also draw attention to the idea that assimilation had never been the goal of most First Peoples when he noted that ‘since natives identify themselves as separate from white mainstream society, Canadian bourgeois nationalism means very little to them because it fails to provide a meaningful native identity’ (Prison of Grass [1975], 193). Pelletier and Adams were speaking out against the dictates and legacies of the White Paper, as Carninal had most notably done in his book-length response to this proposal. Like many others, they were antagonistic to this specific policy because the government, again, had

The Seventh Generation 53

assumed that Aboriginal peoples would naturally desire to meld with the Canadian mosaic and give up Indian ‘status.’ The introduction to this policy includes the following claim upon which proposals for change were inevitably based and upon which Aboriginal peoples launched some significant attacks: ‘For many Indian people, one road does exist, the only road that has existed since Confederation and before, the road of different status, a road which had led to a blind alley of deprivation and frustration. This road, because it is a separate road, cannot lead to full participation, to equality in practice as well as in theory’ (Statement of the Government 5). However, in both theory and practice, the government had either incorrectly read most of the signposts along the way, or it had ignored them. Separate roads were not the problem, but gaping potholes were. Mythologically, though, and for poised romantic nationalists, separate roads were just perfect. The stage was now set for the resurrection of a morality play that fit most neatly into a preconceived story. There was something to blame and something to praise. If disciples of romantic nationalism were to actually read the literature of the Native Literary Renaissance, they would have had ostensible ready-made symbols awaiting their disposal, if they chose to look at the surface, that is. I doubt anyone read everything. Even Daniel David Moses and Terry Goldie only anthologized six Renaissance writers in their groundbreaking An Anthology of Canadian Native Literature in English.17 However, the voices were so many, and too strong to ignore. They seemed to be coming from all sectors – the political, the social, the literary, the cultural. There was something about land and heroes. There was revolution.

3 Native Literature of the 1960s and 1970s in Canada

In the world today, there is a commonly held belief that, thousands of years ago, as the world today counts time, Mongolian nomads crossed the land bridge to enter the western hemisphere, and became the people now known today as the American Indians. The truth of course, is that Raven found our forefathers on the beach at Naikun … There is, it can be said, some scanty evidence to support the myth of the land bridge. But there is an enormous wealth of proof to confirm that the other truths are all valid. – Bill Reid, quoted in Coull, A Traveller’s Guide to Aboriginal B.C., 9 If this is your land … where are your stories? – Gitksan man speaking to government foresters in a dispute over jurisdiction in Canada’s Northwest, quoted in J.E. Chamberlin, If This Is Your Land, Where Are Your Stories? 1

It is the strict posing of continuity between the past and present and an allied dependence upon the ‘heroic’ or ‘neo-heroic’ which defines a significant amount of Aboriginal literature of the 1960s and 1970s. Most notably there were a number of works during these decades which collected together stories of tricksters, culture heroes, and gods,1 heroic forms of epic literature which connect living cultures to ancestral and pre-human pasts. (207). However, these literatures do more than simply underscore longevity. Foregrounding ‘epic poetry or memory’ (for lack of more specific words), they actively employ mythology either consciously, or unwittingly, as counters and challenges to current history – its very modus operandi – as well as ‘national’ literary traditions contemporary with them. If witnessed

Native Literature of the 1960s and 1970s in Canada 55

by those who identified with a nation immersed in history’s search for its own narrative informants, Aboriginal mythology could become a record, or touchstone, against which non-Aboriginal thinkers might consider how Canadian history had not yet been (and might never be) transformed into comparable mythology: the resultant feeling, I imagine, would be one between jealousy and humility. For those Aboriginal authors capable of employing the epic (which, by its very nature, challenges history’s strengths), I would imagine a very different feeling would ensue – a feeling of connection with that which preceded contemporary history and a feeling of confidence and security. I am reminded here of Marcel Jousse and his seminal work The Oral Style, which seamlessly connected together the ideas of others to forward a unique argument about oral literatures.2 It is perhaps Jousse’s discussion of spontaneous cultures or oral composers which illuminates the previous claims. Relying on the theories of Godefroid Kurth, Jousse explains an essential difference between epic and historical articulations: ‘What we in our rhetoric call “Epos is, among all nations, the earliest form of history; it is history before the historians”’ (136). While the difference between history and epic could be considered by some as hair splitting at times, Jousse further defers to the ideas of Raoul de la Grasserie: ‘“epic poetry is in fact … history [for the rhythmists] but history that is no longer such” [for us]’ (4; in Jousse 135). (By rhythmists, Jousse meant the ‘oral composers and reciters of the time’ [135] who had [orally] created or recorded epics.) Jousse’s ideas remind one of Mircea Eliade’s theory that history, abolished, can become the property of mythology – part of a system of belief rather than empirical remembrance. I mean to suggest here that, revitalized in a politicized era by Aboriginal voices which sought survival and recognition of longevity, old epic ‘stories’ functioned during the Native Literary Renaissance, because of both their simultaneity with revolution and their freshness to uneducated ears, as the oldest form of epics – those ‘before the historians’ – those which embodied ancient belief. To elucidate this last claim – and it is an important one – it is useful to consider, as Jousse has done, the distinction between the Iliad and the Aeneid which Jousse underscores: ‘Nobody today would dare to confuse, from this point of view, the Iliad with the Aeneid. We have here, most certainly, two of the most brilliant masterpieces of [concrete human speech, finely put into rhythm]; but

56 Before the Country what a gulf separates them! Homer’s immortal [recitation], in spite of all the editing to which [it] was subjected, appears to us as the [purely oral and mnemonic] work [of a still spontaneous and sincere historian-rhythmist] who believes in his gods … ‘The Aeneid is, by contrast, [something laboriously fashioned in the manner of the Iliad, it is …] the long-elaborated product of a refined civilisation [which has written history books] and which may already be viewed as corrupt. Virgil [did not put together the traditional oral clichés of his milieu; he] wrote his incomparable verse after discussions with epicurean, sceptical types like Horace. He made of his gods [who, to him, are merely so much poetic machinery,] a finished portrait, but he did not believe in it.’ (Gautier 49–50; in Jousse 136)

The difference being described is really the difference between Basil Johnston’s recounting of the story of Zhowmin and Mandamin and E.J. Pratt’s long national poem Towards the Last Spike.3 While both speak for communal spirits, the latter, grounded in history which has not been forgotten – its prescience still, today, in need of romantic nationalism’s protection – pales (within a story which searches for mythological beginnings) in comparison with that which has the luxury of being forgotten (as history) – that which is ‘no longer’ (Jousse) – but which may be believed in or which can serve belief. In his preface to Ojibway Heritage, Basil Johnston underscored the mythological legacies of the stories he was about to relate, drawing parallels between Ojibway, European, and Near Eastern legends: ‘Ojibway stories are as broad and deep in meaning and mystery as are the tales, legends, and myths of Greek, Roman, Egyptian and other peoples and just as difficult to understand as are the parables in the Bible’ (8). These tales are equally full of those glorious deeds and heroic battles which govern other heroic literatures, but the rhythmic structures of Johnston’s recounting and the totality which they suggest also insinuate an ancient legacy which speaks for a community of belief in something which has significant power because of its incredible distance from the present. The story of Zhowmin and Mandamin is the story of a warrior with great strength who fights, not for individual well-being, but for the betterment of the Anishnabeg: Zhowmin glared at Mandamin, ‘I am not afraid. I will fight,’ he growled. ‘Good,’ Mandamin said, ‘Tonight we’ll fight.’ Zhowmin and Mandamin went into the forest, selected a clearing for their battle and then

Native Literature of the 1960s and 1970s in Canada 57 stripped to the waist. First they circled one another, looking for a weakness and an opening. They then grappled. Equal in determination and strength they fought on equal terms; wrestling, punching, pounding, and twisting in order to gain advantage. One moment Zhowmin would knock Mandamin to the ground; the next, Mandamin would hurl Zhowmin to the earth. So the battle went all night until both warriors fell exhausted to the soil. Zhowmin and Mandamin, bleeding and bruised returned to the lodge to rest and sleep. They slept all day. When they awakened, it was evening. Hungry, they made a meal and ate as if there was no enmity between them. After a smoke they went back to the forest clearing to resume their struggle. Again they fought and they fought like life-long enemies. Such was the violence of their struggle that they uprooted small trees and crushed all the grasses until only the sands remained. But in spite of all their efforts neither could overcome the other. Finally, weariness forced Zhowmin and Mandamin to suspend their mighty battle. Battered, cut, and wounded, the warriors returned to their lodge to sleep. Weak and drawn from loss of blood, they woke up late in the afternoon, ate, and then rested to regain some strength. About midnight, they slowly made their way back to the battleground. Once there, they fought as hard as their remaining strength enabled them. Arms were weak; legs feeble; only the knowledge that the loser was to die kept them going. Somehow, some way, during the struggle Zhowmin knocked Mandamin to the ground; and before the unfortunate stranger could rise to his feet Zhowmin struck him with his war club. As Mandamin slumped down, Zhowmin plunged his knife into Mandamin’s back. Mandamin moved no more; he was dead. (36–7)

To find an equivalent tale of prowess and battle in the traditions of English literature, one would have to turn back to the likes of Beowulf, admittedly an ancient creation from the past but not really a story for whom any good Canadian pioneer might have broken bread. Zhowmin’s fierce and courageous spirit is not only comparable to the spirit which Beowulf possesses when he seeks to slay Grendel in order to protect his people, but the lyric lament which Zhowmin sings after having killed Mandamin is also remindful of the laments of AngloSaxon wanderers: ‘I do not fear death My time has come

58 Before the Country I will walk the Path of Souls Back to whence I came.’

(37)

Zhowmin and Mandamin are governed by heroic ideals, and there is something comparable to the heroic paradox when Mandamin, the food of wonder, dies gloriously in battle to become a kernel, ensuring forever his fame. As the storyteller’s voice asserts at the end of the story, ‘By his death, he has given life to the Anishnabeg,’ and both Zhowmin and Mandamin are therefore to be ‘rewarded for [their] obedience’ (38). On the surface, drawing parallels between this passage and AngloSaxon conventions foregrounds the understanding that Aboriginal literatures are defined by longevity: Johnston’s ‘traditional’ stories prove there are those still living who remember stories traceable to the equivalent of a Germanic or Anglo-Saxon heritage and that there is continuity between generations. This is a reflection not without problems: such parallels are tenuous as there are no critical precedents to determine whether this story operates within applications comparable to the British canon. What seems more telling is that Johnston’s foregrounding a past mythic battle at an early point in this collection of myths and ceremonies reminds the contemporary reader of cultural continuity, the relation between history and myth, and the relation between belief and literature or history ‘older than historians.’ It is the power of numerous voices coming together at the same time, repeatedly denying and rewriting history, employing mythology, tradition, and cultural memory for new insights, that is striking about Aboriginal literature of this period. During the 1960s and 1970s in Canada, Johnston and others were engaging in collective acts of resistance, dismantling colonial teleologies. In addition to the traditional stories which Johnston and others were offering, there were also records of living heroes, or heroes who had lived in a recent past who connected the present in glorifying terms not only to the ancient but also to the more contemporary. Stories which elders and chiefs were recounting were full of heroic accounts and deeds. Old histories and traditional mythologies recorded warfare and battle, and conquests by nations and their national heroes. In Great Leader of the Ojibway: Mis-quona-queb (1972), James Redsky passed on his knowledge of Mis-quona-queb, whom he called ‘the greatest leader of [the Ojibway] people’ (27); in addition to recounting those stories of the trials and tests which Mis-quona-queb had to endure in order to

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prove his worthiness, Redsky also told of the many battles fought between the Ojibway and Sioux. He included in his text the following speech which had been delivered to a group of warriors by the o-gemah (leader) of the Ojibway before they were to battle the Sioux: ‘A warrior must be capable and outsmart the enemy. If the enemy is more intelligent than you, you will be destroyed. As warriors of the Ojibways you are never to give yourselves up – even if you are completely surrounded. You must not fall into captivity. To be captured is a great disgrace to the Ojibway nation. So you must fight to the death or run away from the enemy. ‘There are many hardships on the trail of war. Warriors go days without water, food and sleep. An Ojibway must endure these trials or bring great shame to himself. ‘It is the responsibility of the war o-gemah to choose the very best fighting men of our people. My young brothers, you have been chosen for this patrol. I warn you, you must not fail our people.’ (29)

This passage embodies the sentiments of heroic thought and the language of a hero’s tongue. Dynamism dominates the passage: declamatory statements follow warnings, and there is a reliance on the imperative. It is the consistent, repetitive appearance of cultural imperatives, admonitions, and heroic ‘returnings’ for the sake of instructing generations contemporary with them that Native writers of this period left a heavy impress of rhetoric in their wakes. In Alex Grisdale and Nan Shipley’s Wild Drums: Tales and Legends of the Plains Indians (1972), Grisdale would relay the history of Chief Great Rock, a ‘fine leader … [who] was loved and respected by all his own people’ (9); he would set his history in ‘the wild drums and bow and arrow days’ (9) and give depictions of traditional activities, emphasizing familiar heroic qualities such as adeptness, strength, and bravery. Grisdale explains that ‘as the men carved bows and arrows of oak and ashwood, tipped them with flint, and made strong bow strings of buffalo sinew, they sat about their fires and talked of their early history and the bravery of their ancestors’ (12). He also includes in this collection the story of ‘the wife that would not be captured’ (16) and the story of ‘Torch Woman’ (29–31); both underline the tenacity and bravery of two females whose reputation for fortitude was staked ‘many years ago before the white man came to this country’ (29). In his life history Chiefly Indian (1972), Henry Pennier would paint a picture

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of a heroic past which he remembered from the stories his stepfather’s dad had told him. They were full of ‘brave Indian warriors and spooky dead spirits and beautiful Indian maidens’ (18); he would recall that ‘the story [he] liked best was about the Yokoughltegth Indians from the west coast of Vancouver Island who were known as the fiercest warriors on the whole coast of British Columbia and farther south into what is now Washington state’ (18). The language of war, battle, and conquest, in tandem with stories and histories set in pre-conquest North America, forcefully and ironically weds communal memories of disparate First Nations who, connected in a prescient pan-Indianism, record histories of intertribal warfare and competition, and, for the most part, ignore colonial chronologies. These histories neither belong to the European legacy nor are they dependent on the language used to relay them. A large portion of this literature also appears to be heroic in a more contemporary sense. A significant portion of this literature was written by those who had lived a long while and could recall a time when the world was quite different, when more traditional lifestyles were mainstays of life. In an essay entitled ‘My Very Good Dear Friends …’ (1970), included in The Only Good Indian (1970), Chief Dan George begins with the following claim: ‘I was born a thousand years ago … born in a culture of bows and arrows. But within the span of half a lifetime I was flung across the ages to the culture of the atom bomb … And from bows and arrows to atom bombs is a distance far beyond the flight of the moon’ (184). This is a sentiment found also in Edward Ahenakew’s Voices of the Plains Cree. Born in 1885, Cree author Ahenakew felt more of an affinity with the world of the nineteenth century than with the twentieth; he described feeling caught between the old world of Chief Thunderbird, whose stories he recorded in the first half of his work, and the world he saw changing around him when he wrote the following words in 1923: Ours is a different life now. Is it any wonder that, confused by increasing changes and difficulties, we look back with longing to the days that our Old Men still remember, to the familiar scenes of their youth made real to us in story and legend? For they remember the days when teepees against a prairie sky marked the Indian encampment, when buffalo were without number, when horses, carts, and our own skills served our needs. The sun has set upon those days, but the heart of our nation still mourns for them, still weeps behind the closed door-flaps of the teepee.

Native Literature of the 1960s and 1970s in Canada 61 The council fires have gone out, the voice of the Indian is not heard, the ploughshare of the settler has long since turned the over-grown paths that the buffalo followed. (23)

With the ‘sun set’ on a past which authors could remember but could no longer see, it is perhaps not surprising that their writing incorporated a sense of yearning for a past. However, this is only a surface recognition. These texts often forge connections between the present and past in time measurements which do not adhere to Eurocentric values: Grisdale recalls the history of ‘the wild drums and bow and arrow days’; Chief Dan George situates his birth ‘in a culture of bows and arrows’; Ahenakew speaks of the days ‘when teepees [marked] … a prairie sky,’ when ‘buffalo were without number.’ Time is not represented with European-informed dates but metonymic units of time which derive from Aboriginal memories. In her article ‘Aboriginal Identity and Its Effects on Writing,’ Anita Heiss relies on the knowledge of ‘Kumbumerri writer, lecturer and consultant in Aboriginal matters, Mary Graham [, who] offered the Australian Publisher’s Association Residential Program in 1999 some basic differences between writing based on oral story-telling and European writing’ (Heiss 217). Graham included in her catalogue of eight essential characteristics the following: ‘There is a different sense of time for Aboriginal people, with the idea of beginning/middle/end being a foreign concept, meaning the Aboriginal view is not linear’ (217). Attempting to explain how Black Australian Dreaming reflects a philosophy of time different from that governed by the Eurocentric, Muecke and Shoemaker also broach a similar consideration: ‘anthropologist W.E.H. Stanner expressed the atemporal nature of Aboriginal philosophy by characterizing the Dreaming as “everywhen,” capturing its spatial and temporal ubiquity.’4 Whether or not writers self-consciously problematize the equating of time with the linear, the veracity of colonial linear memory is challenged or, perhaps even more accurately, disregarded when Ahenakew and others record Aboriginal memories ‘made real … in story and legend’ with accompanying Aboriginal measurements. Authority is also a value in this body of literature. Many of these writers held revered positions in their communities, and their voices reminded one, as Graham does, of the worth associated with maturity and wisdom in Aboriginal cultures: ‘The place for authority is well defined in Aboriginal society and the older people in communities work out of a distinction between power and authority. Grey hair is a

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good thing, denoting authority, and it is a good thing to have children and grand-children’ (in Heiss 217). Commensurate with the appearance of a body of literature that consistently advocated the importance of Aboriginal remembrance and the past was the recording of histories and mythologies by those who had a position in their communities and the years behind them to speak for a community. Many of these authors were born in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century, and their life stories included recollections of a past which demanded very different things than a post-industrial world. Born at Soda Creek in the Cariboo country of British Columbia in 1888, Mary Augusta Tappage would tell her stories to Jean E. Speare for The Days of Augusta (1973). Tappage would recall the days of the gold rush and western settlement. She would tell the famous story of a hold-up at ‘the Hundred-and-Fifty-Mile on the old trail’ (‘The Holdup’ 11) when robbers stopped a stage and robbed the drivers of gold. Tappage would also recall when she was a midwife, and although she would tell her story with nonchalance, any familiarity with this area of British Columbia, its cold winters and vast distances between homes and centres, would suggest that Tappage was outside the ken of the average person. One of this text’s accompanying pictures shows Tappage mending a fishing net, and Speare records another story told to her by Tappage entitled ‘It’s Easy to Make a Net.’ Again, for those who know anything about gill nets and the lack of craftspeople now able to create or fix them, Tappage’s abilities stick out as both extraordinary and representative of older times. Born on Carry-the-Kettle-Reserve in 1874, Chief Dan Kennedy would also describe a world that had changed significantly by the time Recollections of an Assiniboine Chief was published: Often in the dead of winter the angry elements would drive the buffalo from its haunts, overnight leaving hunger and famine in its wake. Hence, in the struggle for survival the Indian invented the buffalo pound – his abattoir which gave him security. The buffalo pound symbolizes the ingenuity and resourcefulness of the Plains Indian. After he acquired the horse, from 1770–1800, he became the most expert rider in the world and the chase became his popular pursuit. Thereafter, the mystic rite of the buffalo pound was seldom invoked. The last buffalo pound was made by Kan-ghi-Ska, ‘White Raven,’ and it stood almost intact even after we arrived here on the Assiniboine Reserve from the Cypress Hills in 1882. (52)

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By the time Chief Kennedy was writing, the buffalo were virtually extinct, and Chief Kennedy, linked as he is in his narrative to a past and demanding time, underscores his importance as an authoritative commentator. Born in 1896 on the Bloodvein Reserve on the east shore of Lake Winnipeg, Chief George Barker, author of Forty Years a Chief (1979), would begin his life story by saying that while he was now eightythree years of age and while his ‘old legs refus[ed] to provide much transportation’ for him any longer, ‘it [gave him] plenty of time to think back to when the main road through the community was just a trail and [his] driveway was a narrow path through the woods’ (1). Barker also described traditional activities which he had taken part in during his life and which were now dwindling. He would point out that he had attended one of the last medicine dances, or mitewiwins, held at ‘Drumming Point, at the northern end of Black Island on Lake Winnipeg’ (94). In his life story, Trapping Is My Life (1970), John Tetso wrote about his experiences on the trapline in British Columbia. He depicted skills needed to trap and clean wild animals, recalling the ‘good years’ (30) and drawing attention to the dangers of his trade which he was fortunate enough to survive: ‘Many times I have gone to bed without supper in weather thirty below,’ Tetso wrote, ‘not because I was bad, but I made mistakes … I have gone thus far, learned a few things through understanding, acquired a fair amount of knowledge about this kind of life, and I have the scorched pants to prove it’ (13). In combination with Aboriginal measurements of time, ideograms which do not value the imperial suggest a continuous and consistent Aboriginal experience. The hold-up (Tappage), buffalo pound (Kennedy), and medicine dance at Drumming Point (Tetso) are symbolic markers of historic distance which pose and recall a continuity of Aboriginal memory and older stories or, perhaps most significantly, the machinery of these stories’ codes. Though historical dates are mentioned, the prevalence of Aboriginal symbols, or symbols which record what is significant for Aboriginal histories, is akin to the compiling of an iconic calendar, not necessarily linear, certainly not ‘familiar’ in terms of ‘Canadian’ historicizing. The use of these symbols recalls Muecke and Shoemaker’s discussion of both old and contemporary forms of Black Australian recordings which sometimes remain as difficult to comprehend for minds not schooled in Aboriginal history as they were in their bewildering newness during the initial contact period when Aboriginal ‘civilization did not present itself in ways that were easy for the Europeans to recognize’ (11);

64 Before the Country

they note, for example, that ancient iconography ‘now provides the basis for much contemporary art’ (23). It is the relation between the ancient and the contemporary which is most telling here. Muecke and Shoemaker, recognizing the continuance of pictorial means of recording in today’s Aboriginal Australian arts, point not so much to reclaimed symbols or resurrected ‘artifacts’ in contemporary Black Australian expressions as to the continued presence of what Jousse might call ‘rhythmo-mimical gestures’ (xxii) which have shaped collective ways of seeing and understanding the world. I mean to suggest the same thing about Aboriginal literature in Canada during the 1960s and 1970s. In tandem with what could be called a ‘land-based’ system of ‘imagizing,’ some codes revealed in the literature of the Renaissance challenge what Janice Acoose, in her article ‘“A Vanishing Indian? Or Acoose: Woman Standing above Ground,”’ has recently termed ‘the Wiintigo like forces of Western literary criticism’ (37). If ever there was a need to suspend disbelief and to begin to believe that belief is both empirically governed and capable of being sanctioned by the sacred, it might be here, in the interrogation of beliefs colliding, being shared and exchanged, bewildering one another at this crucial moment in history. To make sense of this last claim and one of the most dominant characteristics of expression in the literature of the Renaissance – a landbased ‘imagery’ – it is necessary to revisit that romantic conception too often spoken about in vague and simple terms when people refer to the ‘special’ connection between Aboriginal peoples and the land. In his essay ‘For Every North American Indian Who Begins to Disappear, I Also Begin to Disappear’ (1971), Wilfred Pelletier spoke in broad terms of the differences between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal cultures: ‘I cannot forget that originally we had a very different relationship to this land and that we had evolved a society which was more closely integrated with nature, a society where the order that existed was organic rather than mechanical’ (3–4). Manuel and Posluns correctly anticipated the simplistic dualities and deductions which could grow out of such comments when they noted that ‘nature … is not any kinder to Indian people than to anybody else’ (43). However, it was not that readers of Aboriginal literature of the 1960s and 1970s were simply being presented with platitudes about different orientations towards the land and differences between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal world views. A number of works emphasized vital rituals performed by certain Aboriginal nations to

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pay homage to Mother Earth; this awareness that the lands of North America still held a place of honour in the oldest of ceremonies underscored the recognition that pre-colonial Indigenous belief systems were inextricable with the physical properties of this world. Furthermore, Aboriginal relationships to land seemed to suggest that for those who had been schooled in world views born out of Aboriginal cultural ‘gestures’ (Jousse), there might be in Aboriginal records very different attitudes towards and relationships with the land than those found in records stemming from a Eurocentric perspective. These comments are not unlike those put forward by Muecke and Shoemaker, who speak of Black Australian creation stories, tracing them to an effacement of dominant, received forms of history or the empiricism which governs a specific way of understanding history. Creation stories, they say, ‘just like the ceremonial songs that are chanted as one travels the country, encountering sacred sites – keep [a] multiple sense of being in flux’ (38); moreover, ‘people can be sure about their belonging in places; historical time becomes far less important’ (38): Stories speak of the Eternal Ancestors and their creation of the characteristics of the places (a tree, a rock, a spring of fresh water). So space is not merely a geographical extension, but carries a particular significance for religion and identity … The shape and meaning of the landscape is thus the Aboriginal heritage. (39)

In Canada, Delaware author Enos T. Montour would inform his readers that ‘there are many … Longhouses belonging to different tribes … [which] all have this special Awakening Ceremony for Mother Earth’ (13). Stoney author Chief John Snow would also explain that, for the Stoney Nation, there were equally important rituals performed in the Rocky Mountains or what, for the Stoney, are ‘temples,’ ‘sanctuaries,’ and ‘resting places’ (13). Chief Dan George’s poetry spoke of a Coast Salish, sacrio-religious tie to the land and his nation’s relationship to Mother Earth: as he explained, ‘the earth and everything it contained was a gift from See-see-am’ (37). Old narratives recorded during these years revealed that Indigenous histories and mythologies had developed out of a close association with this world and its landscape, which could be understood as ‘not merely a geographical extension’ but, more importantly, as having ‘a particular significance for religion and identity’ (Muecke and Shoemaker). Most notably, Indigenous creation stories were set in this world and traced

66 Before the Country

the beginning of time back to narratives which included – and which recorded in a manner different from that of colonial thinking – the formations of this continent. Etiological tales, frequently housed in translations of old Indigenous mythologies in this period, show how land (often, in the Americas, an adjunct of historical record for the non-Indigenous and colonially derived) is commensurate with Aboriginal memory, which reaches beyond certain (and powerful) empirically founded inquiries into the past. In Legends of the River People (1976), Norman Lerman recorded a collection of legends from the Chilliwack Nation, including a story which precedes Cultus Lake: At that time there was no Cultus Lake and the people lived in the basin where the lake is now. The creeks from the mountain came down into this basin and disappeared into an underground river. Koothlak went the next morning to swim in his lake as usual, but as he ran from the village, the other boys teased him again. Koothlak became angry once more and when he reached the lake he began to pull on the branches in the dike. The water had become very heavy and was ready to wash the dike right out. As soon as Koothlak pulled out the first branches, the dike broke with a sound like thunder! Koothlak started to run down the mountain, the water splashing on his legs. Below him the people heard the rumble of the water but they couldn’t run away fast enough. The water filled the basin and drowned all the people that lived there. The branches from the dike went into the underground river, stopping it up, and the lake which we call Cultus Lake covered that place. (17)

No doubt there are those writing from a colonial inheritance who forge rights to Canadian lands on the basis of religious precepts and who further trace historical ties to lands through ancestry and litigation; however, the difference between a literature which sits on a continuum derived from mythologically registered and still visible landmarks – the etiological – and a body of literature which grows out of an empirically governed (albeit, at times, religiously sanctioned) claim to the land recalls Muecke and Shoemaker’s comparable observation about the preponderance of transformation myths in Aboriginal literature in Australia. Referring to an account told by the Arrernte of central Australia to T.G.H. Stehlow in 1946, which was accompanied by the ritualization of ‘a subterranean river of blood used for travelling unseen through the country of unfriendly neighbours’ (46),

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Muecke and Shoemaker note that ‘the story this culture told about human life and death was not one of redemption, transcendence to a better place, or reincarnation, but it was a narrative that stressed assent to the laws of the ancestor beings spiritually embodied in places’ (48, my emphasis). The idea of stories embodied in place (instead of in the temporal or the factual, and ipso facto separated from the concrete) is paramount to the ability to begin to desire conceiving of different ways of thinking. In many ways, it is unfortunate that Frye and his theories have been so challenged in a postcolonial academy that the baby has almost been thrown out with the bath water, so to speak, for Frye’s ideas about codes and beliefs governing the world of literatures with which we identify and in which we operate seem to have a place here. Muecke and Shoemaker, for example, seem guided by a comparable belief in operational codes and the urgent necessity to recognize different cultural ways of knowing when they further elaborate on a sense of place in Aboriginal philosophy: ‘So many Aboriginal stories seem to culminate in metamorphoses: beings turning into trees, stars or tracks. But these are not everyday stories, they are magical stories that are part and parcel of the strong beliefs and rituals that intensify … bodily energies of the participants in the ceremony’ (48). It would seem that some engaged in the ceremonies of today’s academic belief are open to approaching the study of Aboriginal literatures with a new and necessary suspension of disbelief; this last claim, for example, evokes Len Findlay’s recent admonition to ‘always indigenize.’ Relying on the theories of Linda Smith in Decolonizing Mythologies, Findlay observes in his article ‘Always Indigenize! The Radical Humanities in the Postcolonial Canadian University’ that ‘Eurocentrism has for more than a century been underpinned by two related fictions which, in their most extreme forms, are captured in the doctrines of terra nullis (empty land) and scientific objectivity’ (310).5 To counter these legacies, Findlay indicates that the critic must begin with the following recognition: ‘In the (human) beginning was the Indigene’ (308). It is unfortunate that more precise instruction does not really attend, or is not met by, such important pronouncements as these, for it is difficult to picture at times how these admonitions can be applied. Just how do we begin to know things differently? Jousse, relying on Baudin, said any such attempt to truly understand different cultural perspectives would be most difficult (though not impossible) at best: ‘“If men have come to understand one another, it is

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only by having trained themselves to associate the same ideas with the same” [propositional gestures]’ (Baudin 456; in Jousse 75–6). Jousse, as Baudin, would take time to revisit this idea at length: ‘The idea that one has of any object is composed of all that one knows about the object. Every idea is essentially a system of things known. My idea of man comprises all that I know of man. But one can know a great many things; and we do not know the same things about the same objects. It is this that makes ideas [mental dispositions] so very different depending on the knowledge that constitutes them.’ (Baudin 344–5; in Jousse 73)

I am reminded here of the opening of J.E. Chamberlin’s The Harrowing of Eden: White Attitudes toward North American Natives: ‘What was done becomes clear enough, what people thought they were doing is much less clear, but often more important’ (11). This admonition to interrogate ways of thinking – and to challenge one’s own cultural framework – also inflects Stan Dragland’s introduction to editor Leslie Ritchie’s collection Duncan Campbell Scott: Addresses, Essays and Reviews. Recognizing Scott’s policies on Indians to be largely ‘nonsense,’ Dragland questions, ‘what nonsense are you and I now holding to be true?’ (xvi). Rather than simply suspending colonial disbelief, and without essentializing or exoticizing Aboriginal epistemologies, it is necessary to read Aboriginal literatures and their markers of longevity as tied to the land in a manner unlike that which accompanies the criticism of many Western literary traditions. In her article ‘Let’s Vote Who Is Most Authentic! Politics of Identity in Contemporary Sami Literature,’ Rauna Kuokkanen, drawing on the theories of Lee Schweninger, notes significant differences between representations of land in Europeanderived and Aboriginal literatures: ‘… nature is present in almost all [Aboriginal] literature. Indigenous peoples’ relationship with nature and land is interdependent and continuous throughout annual cycles rather than dominant and objectified, as it often has been in Western tradition springing from Biblical authority’ (92, my emphasis).6 When Randy Bouchard and Dorothy I.D. Kennedy collected stories from southwestern British Columbia between 1971 and 1975 for their collection Shuswap Stories (1979), they, like Lerman, also recorded a number of narratives which show how Indigenous stories are inextricably connected with an understanding of landscape which precedes colonial ‘discovery.’ The Shuswap, an old and anglicized word for the Secwepemc, traditionally inhabited (and still largely do) a large area of south-central British Columbia known for its rivers (the North and

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south Thompson, the Fraser, and the Columbia) and mountains. In ‘THLEE-sa Travels the Land,’ the first story of this collection and a story which belongs to the time period when only animal people, and not humans, inhabited the earth, Ike Willard relates how THLEE-sa and his brothers were entranced and ‘hypnotized into a deep sleep’ (5) while they watched a woman dance; subsequently, the woman ‘transformed THLEE-sa and his brothers into rocks, which can still be seen today’ (5). Today, these are mountains in the Monte Creek area of British Columbia, but to understand or objectify them as the latter in the fullest context of what they mean would be like trying to determine whether the serpent of Eden was most likely an asp or anaconda. To begin to understand a body of literature which may be dependent on metonymy, for lack of a better word, or concrete attributes which are part of a cosmos in which culture and land are inextricable, an act of faith is demanded, for what is prerequisite is a reconfiguring, or discarding, of entrenched analyses of figurative language. Maria Campbell, in her and Linda Griffiths’s prologue to The Book of Jessica, describes working with Griffiths: ‘I hate working with the English language,’ she said. ‘I have a hard time working with white people, because everything means something else’ (17). Certainly, Campbell and Griffiths’s working history is remembered as politically charged and fraught with cultural impasses, personality conflicts, disrespect, and much more.7 However, I want to extrapolate Campbell’s comment about communication, for it reminds me of the explanation Jousse gives to the epigraph framing chapter 4 of The Oral Style – ‘“Images” do not exist’ (Dr Moutier; Jousse 27): ‘It is absolutely necessary to give up the old theory of images and their centres which gave rise to a whole host of petrified clichés, the basis of which was purely theoretical and which did nothing to illuminate the mechanisms of thought. Images do not exist. This term must disappear from our vocabulary’ (Moutier: 248). The ephemeral motor images, the latest arrivals, have dragged with them in their speedy downfall the whole useless construction of images. ‘For motor action [permanent gesticulation, macroscopic or microscopic] is distributed right through the psyche.’ (Ribot 1; in Jousse 27)

Jousse began thinking as a physiologist, but he was also an epistemologist and a scholar of literatures (in particular, oral literatures). It was not as if he was saying that one simply cannot imagine T.S. Eliot’s ‘patient etherized upon a table’ (‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’)

70 Before the Country

or that both patient and evening did not exist; what I think he might say is that there is something more touchable perhaps than the image itself. To understand the man who wrote these lines and the world which, in turn, understood and made him, one would have to be able to extract and understand the properties which landed the patient upon the table in the first place (and in a poem) and which speak for the new sensibility of a modernist community, or era. Divorced from the totality of Eliot’s expressions, in other words, one might wonder what strange ceremony is taking place and why (and one might not wonder why streets are somewhat deserted). More than that, to understand the patient and to be able to touch, feel, smell, and taste the ether, which mixes with a yellow cat at a crucial point in Eliot’s story, does not mean that one could then understand a code dependent on informants different from those which charged Eliot’s verse, even though cats, patients, and ether might crowd another narrative. Working with oral composers for a lengthy time, Jousse was frustrated with things that meant something else, too, and though the word ‘oral’ might not be the word which most accurately defines Campbell’s sensibility, there is something important in Campbell’s polemical flippancy that reminds me of Jousse’s frustration. There is also something frustrating to a scholar raised with the codes of canonical English literature when reading a good deal of the literature of this latest Native Renaissance. What is becoming clearer to me, though, is that especially when it comes to making sense of representations of land in Aboriginal literature, it might be necessary to disregard or think beyond an analysis of specific types of mimesis, such as metaphor and simile. In her article ‘Inclusive and Exclusive Perceptions of Difference: Native and Euro-Based Concepts of Time, History and Change,’ Deborah Doxtator explores Rotinonhsyonni identity,8 which is rooted in place and territory. Doxtator traces the impress of this relationship in words used to define peoples: In Mohawk the word for clan, otara, means land, clay, and earth. When one asks an individual what clan they belong to (oh nisen’taroten’), one is literally asking ‘What is the outline or contour of your clay?’9 … [T]he Seneca called themselves Nundawaono or ‘Great Hill People,’ the Cayuga Guengwehoni or ‘People of the Mucky Land,’ and the Mohawk, Kahnye’kehaka or ‘People of the Place of the Flint.’10 In the traditional story outlining the founding of the Confederacy, the Onondaga word for nation is tsyakauhwetsya’atta’shu’, or ‘earth, land be one,’ implying that, in order

Native Literature of the 1960s and 1970s in Canada 71 to be a nation, a group of people must fundamentally share the same land. The term for nations outside the Confederacy of shared lands is thihotiohwentayatenyo, literally ‘other land existing.’11 (Doxtator 42–3)

There is a charged and associative weight behind references to land in much Native writing which presumes foreknowledge and familiarity; perhaps this is why so much Aboriginal poetry which depicts land is composed with very few adjectives and adverbs and is dependent, instead, on strong nouns and verbs. It would seem that lengthy descriptions typically do not attend references to nature in a significant amount of Aboriginal literature; moreover, what those schooled in British-inflected canonical criticism term ‘nature imagery’ might not be applicable to the study of this literature. These reflections could inform part of a code for interpreting poetic articulations such as those made by Chief Dan George, whose poetry is some of the most memorable and beautiful from this period. Chief Dan George begins to end his collection My Heart Soars with the following: The beauty of the trees, the softness of the air, the fragrance of the grass, speaks to me. The summit of the mountain, the thunder of the sky, the rhythm of the sea, speaks to me. The faintness of the stars, the freshness of the morning, the dew drop on the flower, speaks to me. The strength of fire, the taste of salmon, the trail of the sun, And the life that never goes away, They speak to me. And my heart soars.

(My Heart Soars 83)

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‘[T]rees, ‘air,’ ‘grass,’ ‘mountain,’ ‘sky,’ ‘sea,’ ‘stars,’ ‘flower,’ ‘fire,’ ‘salmon,’ and ‘sun’ are elements which make one aware of the totality of a natural cycle. They are also concrete – or measurable – things. What is associated with the land, though, is at times abstract: ‘beauty,’ ‘softness,’ ‘fragrance,’ ‘faintness,’ ‘freshness,’ and ‘strength.’ Chief Dan George’s litany, composed of parallel metonyms which are part of nature’s entirety, builds momentum; pause between contemplations builds to associational meaning, provided by Chief Dan George: ‘And the life that never goes away, / They speak to me’ (83). The accumulation of these parallel structures also allows for the book’s penultimate poem, one line of verse: ‘My people’s memory / reaches into the / beginning of all things’ (85). What I mean by ‘builds to associational meaning’ can be explained, perhaps, by turning again to Jousse. Although one needs to temper established theories about the differences between oral and written literatures with a keen understanding of the cultures who produce them, it is useful, at times, to turn to theorists who have attempted to make sense of forms of expression which might be grounded in orature. Jousse relies on the words of Abel Hovelaque and Henri Bergson in an attempt to explain differences between written and oral forms of thinking: ‘In our European languages themselves the division into words was not something that happened of its own accord’ (Hovelaque 89). ‘A word achieves individuality for us only once our teachers teach us to abstract it. It is not words that we first learn to pronounce, but sentences [more or less abbreviated, deformed, propositional clichés]. A word always anastomoses with those accompanying it, and takes on different aspects according to the flow and movement of the sentence, [of the propositional gesture,] of which it forms an integral part.’ (Bergson 124; in Jousse 56)

The fault of the written (Jousse’s feelings, not mine) is that, in the act of writing, something has been lost about the totality out of which words were shaped in the first place. A lengthier, but valuable, example here could provide further clarification: Except for the way suggested by Philo ‘one can never translate a text exactly from one language into another, precisely because the empirical ideas [the mental dispositions] of the original text never correspond to the empirical ideas of the new text’ (Baudin 347). The translator of Jesus ben Sirach felt this very acutely: ‘I urge you to read [this book] with benevolent attention, and to show indulgence to those passages where notwithstanding

Native Literature of the 1960s and 1970s in Canada 73 the care we have put into the translation, we may seem to have misinterpreted certain words; for the Hebrew terms do not have the same force when expressed in another language. This defect is not peculiar to this book only … (Prologue: Crampon translation) ‘Although there may be no mental relation at all between two ideas, the one may suggest the other … because of the association between the verbal forms which express them’ (Queyrat 29). This correlation not being reproduced in the translation, the link between the ideas is broken and one may wonder why a given clause follows another. Now, we have seen how deep-rooted this manner of reasoning by word-association is in spoken language, particularly among still spontaneous people, not yet disassociated by daily use of the abstract schemes of the written period. (Jousse 78–9)

In light of these claims, I would not say that the poetry of Chief Dan George is nonchalant, but that the deceptively simple claims which make up My Heart Soars are plucked from a very complex code and that it would take strict schooling to understand what Jousse might recognize as ‘the association between the verbal forms’ (79) which provide links to a total expression. I am hopeful that more formal analysis will be seen in the criticism of Native literatures in Canada in the years to come (and, in particular, by those who speak Aboriginal languages). Here, I can only offer what I think is one well-thought out (yet perhaps premature) assertion. The trick with the poetry of Chief Dan George is neither to reduce his verse to concepts of Eurocentric romanticism nor to categorize his poetry under some kind of inherited canopy of Romantic pantheism. Ironically, this kind of interpretive act would be akin to understanding the poetry of William Blake as representative rather than associative: … Little Lamb, who made thee? Dost thou know who made thee? Little Lamb, I’ll tell thee, Little Lamb, I’ll tell thee: He is called by thy name, For he calls himself a Lamb. He is meek, & he is mild; He became a little child. I a child, & thou a lamb,

74 Before the Country We are called by his name. Little Lamb, God bless thee! Little Lamb, God bless thee!

To understand Blake’s lamb as being anything other than the Christian Lamb of God would be as futile and inappropriate as trying to understand the bread and wine of communion as a specific type of dough and sweetness of grape. Likewise, to understand the mountain in Chief Dan George’s poetry as something other than a part of Mother Earth might discredit an epistemological framework which, as Starr Favel points out in ‘The Artificial Tree: Native Performance Culture Research 1991–1996,’ is governed by an awareness that Aboriginal ‘reference points are from Native culture [which] originate in this land’ (83; quoted in Manossa 179). As Geraldine Manossa also notes in ‘The Beginning of Cree Performance Culture,’ ‘the idea of working from an Indigenous source through songs, dances and stories reinforces the worldview of a Native performer whose creative starting points would then originate from the land of his or her ancestors’ (179). In this sense, for Favel, ‘artistic source is not transplanted and colonial’ (83; quoted in Manossa 179). It is interesting to note that Shoemaker’s interests bring one to convictions similar to mine about the need to reconsider mimesis in some Aboriginal literatures. Shoemaker quotes Stanner and draws attention to ‘the Black Australian sense of oneness with the soil … [which] is a relationship which requires a poetic understanding’: No English words are good enough to give a sense of the links between an aboriginal group and its homeland. Our word ‘home,’ warm and suggestive though it be, does not match the aboriginal word that may mean ‘camp,’ hearth,’ ‘country,’ everlasting home,’ ‘totem place,’ ‘life source,’ ‘spirit centre’ and much else all in one. Our word ‘land’ is too sparse and meagre. We can now scarcely use it except with economic overtones unless we happen to be poets. (44; in Shoemaker 180)

In tandem with Stanner’s reflections, Shoemaker‘s discussion of various reviews of Black Australian poet Oodgeroo Noonuccal’s (Kath Walker’s) verse is provocative. Some reviews, like Leon Cantrell’s in 1967 of The Dawn Is at Hand,12 were sharply critical; for Shoemaker, they reflect ‘a limited conception of the “permissable” forms of [Aboriginal] literature’ (182): ‘According to my system of pigeon-holes

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and prejudices she is not a poet. She has absolutely no feeling for words: it’s almost as if they use her rather than she use [sic] them’ (Cantrell; in Shoemaker 185). Interestingly, it is one positive review of Noonuccal’s We Are Going,13 in tandem with Cantrell’s response, that seems to hold the kernel of fertile critical reflection: ‘Kath Walker has no need of metaphorical paraphernalia. She has a subject …’ (‘Australian Poets’; in Shoemaker 185). The idea that words ‘use’ Noonuccal – rather than Noonuccal using words – and the reflection that she has no need of the ‘metaphorical’ seem part of the same assertion, though governed by different intents. In one sense, this is what Frye might have been saying when he spoke about those who write out of ‘a fully mature literary tradition’ in which the writer is ‘not actively shaping his material at all, but is rather a place where a verbal structure is taking its own shape’ (‘Conclusion to LHC,’ in BG 233). How, though, are we to know for sure? How is one schooled in English literary criticism able to analyse and understand the following verse unless there is some basis for believing that familiar methods of literary analysis need to be discarded or adapted? Go On! Raise the unattainable potlatch pole, For this is the only thick tree The only thick root Of the tribes. Ya, ye, a, a! Now our chief will become angry in the house, He will perform the dance of anger. Our chief will perform the dance of fury. I shall suffer from The short life maker of our chief Ya, ye, a, a! (From ‘The Potlatch Song of Qwaxila,’ in Gooderham, ed., I Am an Indian 11)

It is tempting to address distinctions between representation of rituals (the potlatch pole) and the ‘only thick root,’ which, ipso facto, bears into the ground, vital and living. However, publicly available criticism for the analysis of Aboriginal literature is scant, and critical supposition would be especially irresponsible here since the song seems dependent

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on a knowledge of Kwakwala. The critical humility which needs to attend such examination is represented by the words of Ronsard, whom Jousse quotes to support a similar point: Les François qui mes vers liront, S’ils ne sont et Grecs et Romains, Au lieu de ce livre ils n’auront Qu’un pesant faix entre les mains. The French who will read my verse, If they are not Greeks and Romans, Instead of this book they will have A heavy burden in their hands.

(Jousse 78)

The following Nootka song, however, seems to contain within itself a foundation for its own criticism: Complaint against the Fog Don’t you ever, You up in the sky, Don’t you ever get tired Of having clouds between you and us? (From ‘The Songs of the Nootka,’ in Gooderham, ed., I Am an Indian 16)

Two words – ‘you’ and ‘us’ – register a relationship between atmosphere and earth – a continuum. This poetic contemplation also indicates communion between the natural world and the speaker, who registers a ‘complaint against the fog.’ This song from the Nootka might also be funny, depicting a sensibility which grows out of a geographical location, British Columbia, constantly enveloped in clouds; it would make sense if this natural feature informed a self-reflexive lament. Doxtator maintains that ‘Native concepts of forming and transferring knowledge are based on kinds of concrete conceptual thinking that individualize or “personalize” knowledge’ (44). In future scholarship on Aboriginal literatures, it may be worth considering the early inscribed traditions of Aboriginal peoples, which, Doxtator says, stored knowledge in ‘symbolic form using images on wampum belts, birchbark, and fur pelt drawings, utilizing images that evoked concepts rather than reproducing spoken languages’ (40). It might also be interesting to consider, in the criticism of comparative Aboriginal literatures, not only

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similarities but also differences between Aboriginal voices of different countries. Although Shoemaker devotes a small amount of space in Black Words, White Page to a consideration of what he calls Canadian Indian writing (to be distinguished from Aboriginal Australian), he notes that ‘the majority of Canadian Indian poets have succeeded in creating extremely visual poetry, in which word positioning on the page, artwork and design are important components’ (210). This reveals a difference, as he sees it, between Black Australian and Canadian Aboriginal literatures: ‘while the Indian writers have largely written more visual, unrhymed verse, the Aboriginal authors have developed more rhymed and, particularly, more oral poetry, which has a greater impact when read aloud as a result of its increasing emphasis upon phonetic sounds and the spoken dialect’ (212–13). What stands out in the literature of this Native Renaissance in Canada are the numerous texts which include accompanying images, such as drawings and paintings.14 Two books, in particular, seem to provide the basis for further study of the concrete in Aboriginal literature: Marty Dunn’s Red on White: The Biography of Duke Redbird and Sarain Stump’s There Is My People Sleeping: The Ethnic Poem Drawings of Sarain Stump. The errata slip added to Daniel David Moses and Terry Goldie’s An Anthology of Canadian Native Literature in English would seem to detract somewhat from a consideration of the former text: The Note is largely based on Red on White, and, though that 1971 publication combined fact, fiction, and fantasy in a rather disconcerting fashion, it created a catharsis in Redbird’s life. The bitterness expressed in it has been replaced over the past 20 years with a desire to promote tolerance and understanding.

It is unfortunate, though understandable, perhaps, that sections of this work were not included in Moses and Goldie’s anthology. Rather than including selections from Dunn’s overview of fellow Métis author Redbird’s life or Redbird’s poems which are spread thoughout Dunn’s biography, Moses and Goldie chose Redbird’s poem ‘I Am a Canadian’ and a selection from Redbird’s later publication We Are Métis (1980). Though Redbird and this text are certainly not representative of this period, as Redbird was thirty-one at the time, disconcerted, and partisan within the larger Native Renaissance himself, there are possible consistencies between Red on White and other Native texts. The beginning of Red on White, which introduces Redbird as ‘a mystic, a painter, a hypnotist, a businessman, a prophet, a poet, a politician,

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a writer, a sideshow freak, a lecturer, a playboy, an actor, a red-power militant, a lover and most recently, an independent television producer’ (1), is reminiscent of Chief Kennedy’s introduction to the Assiniboine at the beginning of Recollections of an Assiniboine Chief: ‘The largest, boldest, handsomest, most able buffalo hunting, gregarious, peripatetic, and most individualistic and iron-willed of all the Northern Great Plains Indian tribes were the Assiniboines’ (7). As well, as Sandra Carolan-Brozy suggests in her article ‘“No Conventional Verbal Portrait”: Hypertextuality and Synchronicity in Red on White: The Biography of Duke Redbird,’ it is at the intersection of text and image that Redbird finds a unique means of expression. Carolan-Brozy suggests that ‘it is through visual means that Red inspired a nonsequential reading’ (154). For Carolan-Brozy, ‘the use of graphic design is also a visual means of linking information in a non-chronological and nonsequential manner’ (154), while ‘the notion of closeness, trust, and intimacy between reader and narrator is achieved mainly in eight passages, printed in italics, that present emotional details from experiences viewed in retrospect’ (157). Carolan-Brozy hypothesizes that ‘most quotes verbalize the distance in time between narration and experience, with only two focussing on the time of narration (Red 55, 59)’ (157). Perhaps the images of this Métis text foster continuity between visual and concrete-based ways of thinking. It is Sarain Stump’s beautiful poem-drawings, though, that remain some of the richest finds in the literature of the Native Literary Renaissance. This text, unlike anything I have seen before, is difficult, almost impossible, to describe without Stump’s accompanying drawings. The narrative in There Is My People Sleeping is a combination of text and image which, as Stump explains, grew out of his study of old Indian drawings: I went to some government schools outside the reserve, but I had some troubles. My older relatives, Shoshone, Cree and Flathead (Salish) gave me some form of education. They had seen me interested in the old stories and they were telling me them. I started to draw when I was just a little kid, on the groceries papers … Later I got interested in the Indian painters … Then I started to understand the old paintings and drawings and finding them ever more full of meaning and life. These paintings and the Indians who explained them to me are my real teachers, I think … I liked some European art too but it doesn’t excite me, except for somebody by the name of Bosch and some Picasso’s. But Picasso took much from our art and the Negro and Oceanian drawings. (Preface)

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That Stump approached writing through a study of the visual could, at first glance, be interpreted as reflecting the special interests of an individual artist. However, in the explanation Stump gives of a fully formed pictographic tradition and how this concrete system serves as the basis for his poetic artistry lies the suggestion that, for many Aboriginal writers who have either grown up with Aboriginal instruction or who have later educated themselves in Aboriginal ways of knowing, there might be some relationship between Stump’s overtly visual poetic depictions and the concrete and tactile metonyms which dominate Chief Dan George’s verse and so much of the poetry of the Native Renaissance. Stump provides an explanation of one poemdrawing, identified here as the full text which accompanies the image ‘BUT HE COULDN ’ T UNDERSTAND ’: [T]he two pierced hands (Poem 9) belong to the Indian in the background who is without hands but has some feathers growing instead. The meaning of this drawing is that the white man took our freedom, the hands – in our pictography the hand means to do or did so – without understanding completely what he was doing and didn’t see at all our new minds, feelings and dreams – the wings growing in place of the hands. (Preface)

Both Stump’s and Redbird’s combination of images and text, and the disproportionate number of works from the Renaissance which include images, suggest, as Neal McLeod has recently done in his article ‘Coming Home through Stories,’ that ‘the emerging forms of Aboriginal consciousness … will be hybridized forms’ (33). To go one step further, and to underscore the hypothetical nature of this next suggestion, it might be interesting to consider the relationship between ‘hybridization’ (if it really is a mark of Aboriginal literatures of this Native Renaissance in Canada) and the various art forms which are brought together in established ceremonial acts. Could ritual – with all its various components – also be said to characterize the participant on the textual page? Is hybridity in Aboriginal literatures a result of various art forms coming together which have come together for a long time in various acts of ceremonial exchange? Could a comparative study of the influence of ritual and ceremony in non-Aboriginal and Aboriginal literatures prove fruitful? What seems easier to address at this point is that texts like Redbird’s and Stump’s recall what Craig Womack terms ‘the vast libraries of Mesoamerica’ which extend back ‘hundreds of years before contact in … Mayan and Aztec pictoglyphic

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alphabets’ (2; in Acoose, ‘A Vanishing Indian’ 51) and other Aboriginal inscripted traditions. There is definitely something ceremonial about the language one encounters in the literature of the Native Renaissance – and something both different and familiar about the language. It is notable that much of this literature was written by highly skilled rhetoricians, orators, and elders. The language was different in that it was often very formal, elaborate, and stylized, and therefore anachronistic in the Canadian publishing world of the time; it was also familiar because it was reminiscent of the epic spirit of heroic language. Chief Dan George was an especially gifted speaker and writer. As the following passage from My Heart Soars indicates, the language which he used to instruct the younger generation was formal and ceremonial: Heed the days when the rain flows freely, in their greyness lies the seed of much thought. The sky hangs low and paints new colors on the earth. After the rain the grass will shed its moisture, the fog will lift from the trees, a new light will brighten the sky

(14–15)

It was not simply the case that Chief Dan George and others were using a language characterized by a strict sense of propriety. Their writing carried with it something that can be compared to the language of the King James Bible or the language of other ‘sacred’ texts. There is a prophetic tone inherent in both translations of traditional stories and in life or cultural histories. In his prologue to Men of Medeek (1962), Chief Walter Wright claimed that ‘with the coming of the men whose skins are white like the peeled willow stick there have come many new modes of life’ (Robinson 2). He explained why he wrote this work: So, lest the record be lost, I tell it that it may be written down and preserved.

Native Literature of the 1960s and 1970s in Canada 81 Thus may the Men of Medeek, now scattered in many places, read. Thus may they learn of the deeds that are recorded on their Totem Poles. Thus may they come to have an honest pride in their lineage, and in the deeds performed by their ancestors. (Robinson 2)

One might consider that this language is an indication that those who exercised it possessed the authority to do so because they held a position of respect among their peers, and had the knowledge and years behind them to speak a certain way. Words such as ‘heed’ and ‘lest’ stand out in Canadian literature of the 1960s and 1970s, aside from the literature of litigation. However, it is not isolated words which should be given consideration but the cumulative effect of what could be called a wisdom literature. The first wave of Aboriginal writers of the 1960s and 1970s was not simply of an older generation; these people were, for the most part, also spiritual leaders or authoritative commentators on the past. Even if one were to send out expeditionary writers from the top legions of ‘Canadian authority’ at a time when national solidarity was urgent – the prime minister, governor general, premiers, and ministers – the result would not be a spiritually charged and stoic corpus of survival literature. It is the language, or various languages, of a faith-inflected literature which dominates the literature of the Native Renaissance, and it is necessary to admit the entry of ‘different’ formulaic conventions into Canadian literature during the 1960s and 1970s. The following passage from Basil Johnston’s Ojibway Heritage possesses characteristics of what those who study oral epic forms would call the markings of ‘formulaic’ language – intrinsic qualities indicative of ancient orature – as well as an ancestral ethos inextricable with an examination of belief systems: CREATION

Young and old asked: Who gave to me The breath of Life My frame of flesh? Who gave to me The beat of heart My vision to behold Who?

82 Before the Country When to Rose the gift Of shade, of beauty And grace of form? When to Pine the gift Of mystery of growth The power to heal When? How to Bear the gift Of sense of time A place of wintering? How to Eagle came the gift Of glance of love The flash of rage? How? Who gave to Sun His light to burn His path to tread? Who gave to Earth Her greening bounty Cycles of her being? Who? Who gave to us The gifts we do not own But borrow and pass on? Who made us one? Who set the Path of Souls? Who carved the Land of Peace? Who?

(11–12)

Johnston tells his readers that these stories were once transmitted orally, and both the poem’s repetitious quality and parallel structures are reminiscent of the mnemonic aids characteristic of traditional oral literatures. Significantly, the type of ‘parallel’ or ‘balanced’ questions asked, notably, in the passive voice, registers humility and deference not only to the storyteller’s authority but also, more importantly, to spiritual authority, and underscores a search for wisdom’s continuity in a literature of belief. Life, death, nature’s properties, time, the changing of the seasons, love, anger, growth, peace and the living dead become philosophical contemplations. One would be hard-pressed to

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point to other examples of national literatures during this same time period – unless one were to consider Aboriginal literatures from nations other than Canada – that consistently foregrounded faith in belief systems as intrinsic components of their artistry. This recognition necessitates a conscientious re-imagining of what we have come to believe (especially of late, in a postcolonial academy which almost demands, ironically, a strict and unwavering belief in the staunchly secular) and an effacing of the disbelief that is necessary to begin to believe and understand anew. McLeod, too, speaks of the importance of faith and belief which, as he sees it, governs a number of Aboriginal articulations and which require the critic to recognize culturally dictated forms and values which perhaps have not been interrogated in many educational systems in Canada; he observes that the negotiating between past and present history, ‘the process of “coming home” [for Aboriginal writers] is not so much returning to some idealized location of interpretation: rather, it is a hermeneutical act, perhaps an act of faith’ (33). A strict divide must be overcome, then, if Aboriginal literatures are to be assessed with new tools appropriate to the codes of their designs. For example, it is important to note here that while romantic nationalists had proselytized for over a century in their story’s search for a ‘Day of Atonement,’ they did not self-reflexively admit to being believers. If they had, we might have been able to deconstruct them at a much earlier date. Except for Frye, they seemed oblivious of their own faith, though they wielded it widely and though, I would suggest, critics continue to wield equal amounts of faith today in a seeming abandonment of belief – itself an operational mode. Whether one terms the literature of the Native Renaissance sacrio-religious, faith-based, pantheistic, or spiritually inflected, one cannot disregard that this literature both instructs and inspires, and that it is bound up, at many twists and turns, with ceremony. How this body of writing came to be defined as one of protest is perplexing, for Aboriginal literature of the 1960s and 1970s is a literature of praise, resilience, hope, and instruction by example. Perhaps there is worth and a healthy caveat in Shoemaker’s observations about Aboriginal ‘protest’ literature in Australia, a category of writing that seems to have been created more by the expectations and desires of non-Aboriginal literary markets than Aboriginal writers themselves. Speaking of Black Australian poet Kevin Gilbert, who has said that ‘publishers didn’t want [his] love poetry’ (interview with Shoemaker, 1981; in Shoemaker 197), Shoemaker suggests that ‘it seems to be

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commercially more profitable to publish a militant Aboriginal writer – as long as he or she is not too acerbic – than to print less controversial material’ (197). To go further, even the idea of ‘protest’ literature is somewhat strange, a point Shoemaker also raises: ‘As Bobbi Sykes points out, this dismissal of the merits of Aboriginal creative literature of social comment and analysis is often unjust’ (189). Shoemaker quotes Sykes: ‘Have you ever heard of any white person in the socalled free world calling Alexander Solzhenitsyn a protest writer? The protest literature title that whites try and lay on Black Writers is no more than an attempt to try and negate the value of what Black writers are saying’ (189). If we were to trace a legacy of ‘protest’ writing in Canada, the laments of Dewart, Lampman, MacMechan, and Brown – and many more of Canada’s foundational writers – would have to be given due consideration. In Canada, the claim that Aboriginal literature of the 1960s and 1970s was mainly a literature of protest – one perpetuated by both non-Aboriginal and Aboriginal critics – might, in large part, be the result of many not having read the corpus of literature from this period aside from such texts as Halfbreed and Bobbi Lee. This is quite understandable, though it was more understandable a decade or so ago when, following on the heels of the first wave of Renaissance writers, the work of Tomson Highway, Daniel David Moses, and Beatrice (Culleton) Mosionier, to name only a few, established the second wave just as the academy and critics were feeling compelled to begin dealing with Aboriginal literatures in earnest. I would imagine that, in an attempt to react (almost instantly) to Aboriginal literature, critics responded to the writing of the 1980s and later years, and relied upon Petrone’s Native Literature in Canada to quickly fill in the background for the previous decades as there was little material available at the time to create a critical foundation for the study of Native literatures in Canada. Though Petrone’s text remains a valuable reference tool, it covers much too wide a range to account for the intricacies of any one period of Aboriginal literature in Canada, and it is time to move beyond and to challenge suppositions inherent in this text, and others which borrow from Petrone, just as it will be necessary to almost instantly move beyond the reflections gathered here in Before the Country. If one looks at the literature of the Renaissance closely, one will find a strong corpus of wisdom literature, guided by gentle instruction and honed aesthetics. My Heart Soars incorporates the characteristics of a literature as old as the stories Johnston records, showing readers the value of familial

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and cultural connections when Chief Dan George begins by acknowledging those who shaped him: THANKS : TO MY FATHER !

For he gave me skill, stamina and the knowledge of my past. TO MY MOTHER ! For she gave me the love for life and taught me to respect it. TO MY WIFE ! Because she shared my burden when it threatened to slow my pace and kept by my side when we travelled lightly. TO MY CHILDREN AND THEIR CHILDREN !

Because in their eyes I have seen myself. THIS IS GOOD !

(6)

Immediately, My Heart Soars reminds readers of the continuity between generations; this is not only the expression of one individual voice, but also one which speaks for the vital relationship between generations, and which foregrounds instructions to readers to value familial and cultural connections. In her article ‘Narrative Authority in the Storytelling of Native American Grandmothers,’ Regna Darnell thematically compares plains Cree stories, recorded in H.C. Wolfart and Freda Ahenakew’s kôhkominawak otâcimowiniwâwa / Our Grandmothers’ Lives as Told in Their Own Words, and ‘southern Yukon life histories of three elderly women as told in English to Julie Cruikshank’ (48), recorded in Life Lived like a Story: The template for telling a life story seeks coherence in relation to past stories, both history and myth, and a pedagogical model of what will resonate with the experiences of the audience. Storytellers ‘mobilize traditional dimensions of their culture … to explain and interpret their experiences’ (Cruikshank 1990: x). Narrative authority rests precisely in reflecting on experience continuous to that of the next generation. (50)

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This claim reminds one of Chief Dan George, who teaches by poetic example throughout My Heart Soars. He recounts memories from his youth of fishing with his father one day, when he witnessed his father giving thanks for the fruit of the earth: ‘… standing by the water’s edge with arms raised above his head while he softly moaned … “Thank, thank you,”’ his father ‘left a deep impression on [Chief Dan George’s] mind’ (37). This memory, like others, is connected to the numerous instructions Chief Dan George gives to his readers: ‘In the midst of a land / without silence / you have to make a place for yourself’ (13); ‘You too must follow the path of your own race’ (14); ‘learn of [the white man’s] ways, / so you can bear his company’ (16); ‘Do not despise the weak’ (19); ‘of what you take, / you must share’ (25). Intergenerational responsibility is underscored throughout this work. ‘If the very old will remember, / the very young will listen’ (58), writes Chief Dan George, self-reflexively aware that he is charged with passing on wisdom ‘continuous to that of the next generation.’ Darnell speaks of a tradition of continuity born out of need: ‘The content of the lessons matters far less than the continuity to community, history and continuously performed emergent identity that are inherent in storytelling with a living oral tradition’ (61). Darnell then uses this knowledge to account for aesthetics, or southern Yukon and Plains Cree styles: ‘Narrative authority rests precisely in reflecting on experience continuous to that of the next generation. The subjectivity of the speaker remains in this textual form, as it does not in the conventional ethnographic account. And yet the subject as narrator is not “Ego” as the centre of the story’ (50). Comparably, in My Heart Soars, the ego of the storyteller, or individual voice of Chief Dan George, is effaced and rendered subservient to a felt need to speak for and to community. The book is framed by the author’s reflections about his personal family, and personal memories are interspersed throughout this text; however, My Heart Soars ends with a maxim that transcends the personal and focuses on the significance of the younger generation: ‘A wild rose whispers sweetness to the squirrel, / a child loves everybody first’ (86). My Heart Soars records ‘traditional dimensions’ in verse, ‘mobilizing’ cultural signifiers to register the importance of continuing and maintaining cultural traditions. It is also the combination of this trait with another dominant characteristic which underscores continuity. The poetry of Chief Dan George is shaped not only by an awareness of

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communal vitality but also by a dependence on repetition, perhaps a repository of oral traditions: As I see beyond the days of now I see a vision: I see the faces of my people, your sons’ sons your daughters’ daughters, … It is good to live! It is good to die!

(22)

The repetition of words, parallel structures, sentiments, and generations (sons’ sons, daughters’ daughters) indicates that litany will come to characterize Chief Dan George’s poetry: No longer can I give you a handful of berries as a gift, no longer are the roots I dig used as medicine, no longer can I sing a song to please the salmon, no longer does the pipe I smoke make others sit with me in friendship, no longer does anyone want to walk with me to the blue mountain to pray, no longer does the deer trust my footsteps …

(30)

The repetition of a structure (‘no longer’) serves to build momentum and pose consistency between the disparate considerations listed, which are all defined by loss, so that what the reader is made aware of are things that are ‘no longer.’ More specifically, concrete metonyms which, in totality, paint a portrait of Mother Earth, repetitively draw attention to the waning of forces that are vital for the maintenance of a healthy culture: social interaction (a gift of berries), health (roots used for medicine), thanksgiving (a song for salmon), and spirituality (a walk to the blue

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mountain) are ‘no longer,’ or in threat. However, not only is continuity between past and present foregrounded as a vital concern; honed aesthetics also carry messages. Critics of oral literatures consistently point out that repetition is a key marker of oral literatures, and this quality, infused throughout Chief Dan George’s voice, signals stylistic longevity. It is small wonder that John Miles Foley, in his foreword to the sixth volume in the ‘Albert Bates Lord Studies in Oral Tradition’ – Jousse’s The Oral Style – notes that Jousse’s Le style oral rythmique et mnémotechnique chez les verbo-moteurs (originally published in 1924) influenced the work of Milman Parry and Albert Lord (vii), notable foundational critics of oral literatures, who built upon Jousse’s ideas about parallelism, or ‘balancings,’ in oral literatures. If Jousse, Parry, or Lord had been able to take even the quickest glimpse at Chief Dan George’s text, they would have instantly proclaimed it as indicative of the machinery of oral literature. Though it is not conventional to bring together schools of criticism dedicated to oral literatures which often share a relation with nonNative canonical texts and the criticism of Aboriginal literatures, there is worth and reason to look beyond the parameters which can confine the study of Aboriginal literatures, if only to open up the field of inquiry. It is tempting to turn here to Parry’s seminal, albeit surpassed, article ‘Studies in the Epic Technique of Oral Verse-Making. I: Homer and Homeric Style,’ where Parry, speaking of Homeric poems, stated that ‘a formula is a group of words which is regularly employed under the same metrical conditions to express a given essential idea’ (272). The importance of this premise was not fully realized until ‘Parry, in the summer of 1933, and Parry and [his then student Albert] Lord in the years 1934–35, studied the production of the oral epic style in Yugoslavia and collected some 12,500 texts’ (Magoun 446n2). Their studies were based on the oral performances of Yugoslavian singers, or guslars. During this time, as Gregory Nagy explains, Parry ‘moved from thinking of epics diachronically, as descendant from Homer, to thinking of them synchronically, as being composed around him in many versions’ (20; quoted in Clark xix). Lord then claimed the following in his 1949 dissertation, which ‘eleven years later became The Singer of Tales’ (Foley 183): An oral text will yield a predominance of clearly demonstrable formulas, with the bulk of the remainder ‘formulaic,’ and a small number of nonformulaic expressions. A literary text will show a predominance of

Native Literature of the 1960s and 1970s in Canada 89 nonformulaic expressions, with some formulaic expressions, and very clear formulas. (Singer of Tales 130)

While the strict (and fuzzy) separations drawn between oral and literary traditions are no longer credible as expressed by Lord, there is still some worth in considering the dominant trait of repetition in established forms of ‘orature.’ Here, I am not only reminded of Chief Dan George but also of Cherokee author Thomas King and Ojibway writer Basil Johnston, who have been pressured to edit out repetitive material in their fiction or who have received negative reviews because of their reliance on repetition; it is telling that both their works embody characteristics found in Chief Dan George’s verse. In his review of Johnston’s Indian School Days, Menno Boldt notes that Johnston’s narrative is weakened and ‘frequently interrupted by purposeless listings of names’ (311). While Constance Rooke observes that King did not choose to ‘delete certain repetitions’ in his novel Medicine River and calls his repetition a ‘pleasing effect,’ King draws attention to the fact that he would have liked to have included more repetition: Actually, that kind of repetition was more prevalent in the earlier drafts where I would rename and re-introduce characters at the beginning of each chapter. That didn’t bother me at all. But the editors at Penguin said, you know, we don’t mind the fact that you keep introducing these people in different ways, but let’s take off their last names, so it doesn’t appear that they are being introduced for the first time, and maybe get rid of some of the information that is redundant. I probably would have left it in because it gives you a feeling of starting over again, and the repetition of all that makes it easier for you to remember characters. There’s something soothing and comfortable about seeing the same characters and hearing them over again, like a refrain in a song. But I did make changes and some of the chapters have lost that sense of wholeness and some of the stories do begin to lean on each other. They don’t stand as nicely on their own as they did at first. (In Rooke 64)

I do not wish to conflate Yugoslavian literatures with Aboriginal literatures or to suggest that other bodies criticism can be easily applied to a study of the literature of the Native Renaissance. As well, it is important to note that there is much that has been rightfully challenged in the legacy of Parry/Lord scholarship. However, I do think it is important and

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useful to look for critical theories which might be applicable or malleable in the study of Aboriginal literatures in Canada, if only to arrive at new questions. For example, there is one notable challenge to Parry/ Lord criticism that seems of special interest here. While Lord claims in The Singer of Tales that there can be no such thing as a transitional text, that ‘it is not possible that [a poet] be both an oral and written poet at any given time in his career’ (129), Larry Benson, in ‘The Literary Character of Anglo-Saxon Poetry,’ argued that ‘we must admit the possibility of “transitional texts”’ (337), a point supported and developed by many subsequent scholars who have keenly attempted to identify characteristics of formal ‘orature’ in the written and vice versa. Seth Lerer’s reading of Hrothgar’s speech on the hilt in Beowulf argues in an unconventional manner for the transitional nature of the Beowulf text: ‘… at the poem’s start, the narrator supplies all the information we need to understand, frame, and appreciate the making of the hall, the skill of the scop, and the nature of God and Grendel’ (177). However, ‘in the hilt scene, we are left alone’ (177), where Hrothgar, ‘sees or “reads” alone’ (193). If we agree with Lerer, then the hilt scene admits the presence of what Lois Bragg calls ‘the objectivity and distance that literacy gradually introduces in a manuscript culture’ (112); to recognize this possibility is not simply to acknowledge a Christian influence in Beowulf but to conceive of the text ‘on the spectrum between the oral and the written’ (Pasternack 3), or, in A.N. Doane’s words, as a text ‘writing at the “interface” with orality’ (86; in Pasternack 3). Could it be said that a number of the texts published during this latest Native Renaissance were also ‘writing at the “interface” with orality’? Is it possible to abandon the seemingly conclusive – Native literature of the 1960s and 1970s was one of protest – and move toward exploratory considerations: can certain texts published during the Native Literary Renaissance and after be considered ‘transitional’? Here, I do not mean can Aboriginal literatures be considered moving towards a new end in a line of progress, but, rather, can they be considered to employ the gestures of both the oral and written, terms (their definitions admittedly superseded) which Jousse distinguishes: Oral Style (preserved in writing) is traditional. … haïn-teny, merinas, biblical and rabbinic, recitation, the Koran, etc. This oral style, which is designed to be remembered, after simply having been heard, and is recited and transmitted by memory, conforms to the traditional mnemonic and mnemotechnical devices explained in this work.

Native Literature of the 1960s and 1970s in Canada 91 Written Style, as used by us, is, one must admit, an extremely practical means of intercommunication. And when its publication has been undertaken by a publishing house, a book can reach large numbers of readers. It is no longer a question of listeners or chosen pupils but of an indefinite number of actually unknown readers. (231)

One form is not better than the other (although, at times, different forms might best serve different purposes). There might be a reason, though, why a significant amount (but not all) of literary criticism by Aboriginal authors reveals a refreshing directness of language used to forward points and arguments which can be remembered, and why it has become so very difficult, by contrast, to remember arguments (without texts in hand) wielded in a significant amount of poststructuralist criticism (also written by some Aboriginal critics). This is not an argument for different ethnicities having different brains, but it is the recognition that perceptions and forms of communication, as Jousse also observed, are shaped by what people are and how they have learned: ‘You must not suppose that we judge on the basis of facts. We judge on the basis of what we are’ (xx). Kimberly M. Blaeser makes a comparable point in ‘Native Literature: Seeking a Critical Center’: The critical language of Mikhail Bakhtin and Walter J. Ong may profitably be applied to Native American literature, but as Owen’s Uncle Luther reminds us, we must first ‘know the stories of our people and then make our own story too.’ And, he warns, we must ‘be aware of the way they change the stories we already know’ for only with that awareness can we protect the integrity of the Native American story. One way to safeguard that integrity is by asserting a critical voice that comes from within that tribal story itself. (61)

When Jean Speare recorded the stories of Mary Augusta Tappage, Speare also recorded the repetitious (perhaps oral) quality infused throughout all of Tappage’s stories, suggestive of an older and highly refined art form. The first poetic narrative in this collection provides a striking example: My aunt told us. We were excited. It was at Three-mile Creek there at the Hundred-and-Fifty-Mile on the old trail;

92 Before the Country well the same way you go to Ashcroft now; well here is this creek, they call it Three-Mile. It was all bushy right to the edge of the trail it was bush; the government didn’t cut right-of-ways in those days, no – so it was all bush. … Anyhow this place was bushy and here the robbers must have waited till the stage went by. ‘Stop!’ They told the driver to stop but he was hard-of-hearing. … The driver, he didn’t stop, no, when they told him. They shot at him above his horses. They didn’t kill a soul. They scared the horses. I think they scared everyone. My aunt told us everyone was scared.

(11–12, my emphases)

Tappage’s use of repetition is intricate, and I have attempted to highlight the different types of repetition in this narrative: the repetition of words (‘creek,’ ‘trail,’ ‘Three-mile,’ ‘bush,’ ‘bushy,’ ‘here,’ ‘stop,’ ‘driver,’ and ‘scared’), a phrase (‘it was’), and clauses (‘it was bush,’ ‘my aunt told us,’ and ‘they were scared’). However, other types of repetition, or insinuated repetition, seem to be created by syntax play. It would be beneficial here to have more honed analysis of Tappage’s work (as it would be worthwhile for a scholar to dedicate undivided attention to Tappage), so that one could more fully understand both Tappage’s and Speare’s contributions to Days of Augusta; however, one can begin by recognizing that the syntax of this passage seems to reflect a narrator trained to tell a story. The third stanza begins by employing a subject complement which is an adjective – ‘bushy’; by the second line, the subject complement has become a noun. By the end of the stanza, the subject complement is preceded by an adjective – ‘all’ – which marks a significant change

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from the description at the beginning of the stanza. What was previously a description – ‘bushy’ – has become a concrete noun – ‘all bush.’ By the first line of the next stanza, the subject complement has reverted to being an adjective, but it has a new association based on the crescendo of changes which took place in the previous stanza, and ‘bushy,’ therefore, takes on a more forceful meaning. The repetition of the word ‘stop’ is not straightforward either. It is invoked first as an imperative – ‘Stop!’ It is then situated within a main clause – ‘They told the driver to stop’ – and, in the next stanza, the verb appears in its negative form, though again in a main clause – ‘he didn’t stop.’ There is some similar method being employed in the recounting of the robbers’ actions – ‘they told,’ ‘they shot,’ ‘they didn’t kill.’ And there is something similar in the poem’s ending – ‘they scared the horses’; ‘they scared everyone’; ‘everyone was scared.’ When words are taken out of the original context in which they appear and employed in different ways throughout the poem, the reader is quickly, though subtly, led to the emphasis in this passage. The narrative voice creates drama – ‘they scared’ – and reminds one of the possibilities of danger alluded to in an earlier use of a forceful verb – ‘they didn’t kill’ – which follows on the build-up of the use of the active voice in two crucial instances of this narrative – ‘they told’ and ‘they shot.’ By the time we get to the end of this passage, we realize there has been great potential for danger, and we feel this not only because of what is said, but also, more importantly, because how it is said; it is largely shifts in syntax which build momentum and drama. It is also both the repetition of syntax and the shift in syntax at the beginning and end of this passage – ‘my aunt told us’ – that creates effect. By the time we get to the end of this segment of Tappage’s poem, we realize that the poem’s opening – ‘my aunt told us’ – highlights that ‘everyone was scared.’ The focus of this portion of Tappage’s poetic account, then, is not only the fact that robbers stopped a stage and robbed the drivers of gold, but also that the event created fear: fear is recorded and remembered. In his discussion of the poetry of Colin Johnson (Mudrooroo Narogin), Shoemaker briefly touches on comparable points, which suggests there is much work to be done and much richness to be found in comparing Aboriginal poetry in Canada (particularly that of the Native Renaissance) with Aboriginal poetry of other nations. Speaking of the ‘song-cycle format’ in Johnson’s The Song Circle of Jacky, Shoemaker notes Johnson has ‘reached back for inspiration to the oral poetic traditions of his forebears,’ claiming that he ‘captures the stylistic

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wholeness of traditional Aboriginal songs, with their frequent repetition of words and sounds, and their incremental progress of storyline’ (202): … He takes young man, he takes old man, makes them shiver in fright and fear; He takes young man, he takes old man, makes them see his visions; Makes them shiver in fright and fear, makes them suffer from the storm; Makes them see their spirit maker, makes them leave him all alone, While he finds his secret things, sacred objects of his trade: Whispers to the magic wand, sings softly to the dilly bag, Murmurs to the emu feathers, lights the first with a word, Brings the whirlwind to his feet, glides off to see the world: Jacky, Jacky, he no fool; Jacky, Jacky, he kurdaitcha man! (‘Song Two’ 13; in Shoemaker 203)

Significantly, like Chief Dan George (and Narogin), Tappage also consistently employs repetition throughout Days of Augusta to remind her readers of what has vanished. ‘Thoughts of the Mission School’ not only depends upon repetition similar to that employed in ‘The Holdup’ but also refers back to the opening story to underscore an awareness of how types of transportation have changed: It’s different now when Sammy goes to school. We wait on the road for the down bus. This time, last week, the Mission bus came along. No stages and horses these days. That’s gone! It was my intention to take him as far as Williams Lake but when the bus came along, Sammy says, ‘You don’t have to come.’ The bus drops us at Three-Mile Creek and then we walk in from there. Oh, it’s quite a walk from Three-Mile Creek to the Mission after we get off the bus you know. Three-Mile Creek, it runs past the Hundred-and-Fifty you know, where the robberies were. (22)

At the end of this story’s second movement, Tappage indicates she ‘was telling Sammy not to forget what you learn’ (22), and it is almost as if Tappage is passing on to her readers the same advice and instructing by example: her writing is both a record of cultural memories and the rhetoric and structures used to record. ‘In those days’ sticks out like

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a poetic refrain throughout Days of Augusta, as do other phrases which mark the passage of time: ‘in the early days, long ago’ (33), ‘before my time’ (37), ‘a long time since 1931’ (38), ‘a long time ago’ (39). Time and the passing of time is a dominant reflection throughout this work; the reader becomes preoccupied with time and an awareness that there are different sorts of markers to measure different kinds of time or different ways of recording it. In a short piece entitled ‘Gill Net,’ where Tappage speaks of her mother ‘fishing for trout in the lakes,’ the last line echoes the passing of time by virtue of one word which is symbolic of an entirely different generation: ‘Gill nets cost a lot. My mother’s cost a lot. She paid a horse for it’ (62, my emphasis). Perhaps it is the case that Aboriginal literatures tied to old (perhaps even ancient) traditions have a richer vocabulary for measuring time differences than literatures which are not born out of such an ancient past. One can almost feel the jealousy of a Dewart, Lampman, MacMechan, or Brown here, who might have stopped short at 1812 or some other recent date in the past to speak of ‘long ago’ in a discussion of Canadian literature. Perhaps Aboriginal literature of the 1960s and 1970s marked a generational difference. When Wilfred Pelletier told Ted Poole his life story, which became No Foreign Land: The Biography of a North American Indian, Pelletier drew attention to those who mourned the loss of an old world: And another thing about houses: take Isaac’s parents, for example, a beautiful new, modern house was built for those two old people. The whole idea seemed to be to make life easier for them. But what does the old man say to me? It’s a whole different way of life. What he says is, ‘Now I’m useless. My wife just pushes the button and the lights go on.’(28)

Is this literature simply a chronicle of times past, though? There are two voices in the above passage, and both the speaker and Isaac are doing the same thing: lamenting and appealing to and recording nostalgia. In her study of Plains Cree literatures, Darnell attempts to explain the function of storyteller Mrs Whitecalf’s use of the repetitive address ‘you’: These are things that greatly hurt us and break us … we who are old have a great deal of grief you know … We cannot even sleep when we hear of all the things which happen to our relatives, or all the trouble our children get into; that is what is causing things to break down, you know … (Wolfart and Ahenakew 75; quoted in Darnell 56; Darnell’s emphasis).

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For Darnell, ‘the direct address, the repetition of “you know,” underscores the urgency of Mrs Whitecalf’s exhortation to her listeners to change these harmful behaviours’ (56). Most importantly, Darnell posits that ‘this lament seems to be a narrative convention’ (56). She notes a preponderance of nostalgia, interpreting the significance of its ethos: ‘… such nostalgia is essential to the maintenance of narrative authority in an oral tradition – it validates and privileges the continuity which is its essence’ (56). Darnell then touches on a consideration of aesthetics: ‘We should not read these stylized laments solely in literal form’ (56). She underscores other repetitive phrasings: ‘Markers of distance experienced by the narrator but unwitnessed by others now living are frequent’ (57). For example, Mrs Whitecalf begins her discussion of dyeing quills with ‘“Well, long ago …”’ (Wolfart and Ahenakew 31; quoted in Darnell 57) in order to introduce her lament that ‘“the people of long ago” did things differently’ (Darnell 57). Shoemaker, in his comparison of Black Australian and Canadian Indian poetry, also notes an ‘atmosphere of evanescence – of witnessing the fading away of the old ways,’ which, he says, ‘strikes one of the strongest chords in indigenous poetry, both in Canada and Australia.’ He speaks of the ‘lamentation for lost heritage [which, he says,] is equally fervent in Canadian Indian poetry’ (205). However, how can we move beyond this recognition? The question I am interested in is not Why do these markers of distance exist? but, rather, How do they function? I would tentatively suggest at this point that these conventions, which surface in the literature of the Native Renaissance in Canada (though I am not sure if they are inextricable or share a relation with the properties of what I am calling ‘heroic’ or ‘neo-heroic’ language), force, or make the reader aware of, distances between speakers and readers, generations, types of authors, time periods, and narratives within narratives. Darnell’s suggestion that nostalgia ‘validates’ and ‘privileges’ for the sake of cultural ‘continuity’ (56) is fine, if we are considering an ethos. However, these laments and nostalgic utterances are maintained in so many different Aboriginal texts written or spoken by elders and chiefs, who possess, with the strictest authority among their peers, continuity to the past, that we must question whether or not this trait is comparable (yet different in its intent and form) to a narrative formula such as ‘once upon a time’ or the traditional ‘beginning,’ ‘middle,’ and ‘end’ of a story. Are lament, nostalgia, and heroic qualities part of formulaic aesthetic structures as much as they are utilitarian recordings of a waning past?

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Is there a ‘new dimension’ to be considered in a discussion of the literature of the Native Literary Renaissance? Is it possible to trace a significant relation between ‘aesthetics and meaning’ in these literatures? Paula Gunn Allen claims that Native stories which share a relation with orature ‘hold the listeners’ attention so that they can experience a sense of belonging to a sturdy and strong tradition’ (4), and various critics of different bodies of oral literatures which are connected to a lengthy oral heritage note that these literatures embody precise rhetorical techniques to foster a relationship between audience and listener. However, translated to written mediums during the 1960s and 1970s, old Aboriginal oral literatures and traditions could also be said to have maintained distinctions and separations between speaker and audience, especially if the audience did not share the same cultural background as the storyteller. They also perhaps signal differences between those within the same community, reminding one that those who maintain a certain authority can speak of ‘long ago’ because they have the wisdom and years behind them to do so. The following passage taken from the beginning of George Clutesi’s relaying of the story ‘Ko-ishin-mit and the Shadow People’ in Son of Raven, Son of Deer illustrates the familiar relationship Clutesi had with storytelling traditions which, to those unfamiliar with these traditions, might incorporate a lack of foreshadowing: Ko-ishin-mit, the Son of Raven, was a very selfish and greedy person. He was always longing to own other people’s possessions and coveted everything that was not his. Oh he was greedy! One fine day, early in the spring of the year, when the sun was shining and smiling with warmth, Ko-ishin-mit overheard a group of menfolk talking about a strange place where you could see everything you could think of lying about, with never a person in sight. ‘What kind of things? Where is this place? How far is it from here?’ Koishin-mit demanded in a high state of excitement. He was hopping up and down and his voice became croaky as he kept asking where to find the place. The menfolk ignored his frantic questions and the speaker, a greyhaired, wizened old man, kept on with his story. (53–4)

It is not until this last paragraph that we are made aware that there is not only an author, narrator, and characters, but also a speaker, notably, ‘grey-haired’ and ‘wizened,’ representative of age, authority, and a

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communal status which permits him to speak, recount, and be heard. A challenge reveals itself for one not formally trained in the literature which Clutesi shares. Is the appearance of the ‘wizened old man’ here a mark of authority? Does this appearance emphasize the role of the storyteller in what could be called Clutesi’s ‘transitional’ text? Are these good questions? This marked tension between narrators or narratives is also found in a different form in Chief Kennedy’s Recollections of an Assiniboine Chief: ‘It is told that passion and jealousy over a woman caused an inter-tribal war among the Yanktonai’ (my emphasis), Chief Kennedy begins an account, employing a formula – ‘it is told’ – that registers not only an awareness of the story’s longevity but also the distance between Chief Kennedy, the author, and other voices responsible for the story. The phrase also recalls disclaimers or formulaic conventions which govern other oral and written literatures. For instance, many Caribbean Anancy stories end with a formulaic closure, perhaps best explained by Daryl C. Dance in Folklore from Contemporary Jamaicans: ‘Traditionally, the Jamaican folktale has closed with the line, “Jack Mandora, me nuh chose none,” which has been interpreted as ‘Jack, man of the door [or ‘Jack, heaven’s doorkeeper,’ or “Jack, Dora’s man’], I am not responsible for this story, it is not of my choosing”’ (xxv).15 Such a convention deflects responsibility for what has just been said away from the storyteller and gives responsibility for the story to the agencies of mythology or old history (or maybe other people). Dance also offers Chaucer as a comparative example here, who, as Dance says, ‘had to issue a lengthy apologia when preparing his collection of folktales’: But, first, I beg you in your kindness not to consider me vulgar because I speak plainly in this account and give you the statements and the actions of these pilgrims, or if I repeat their exact words. For you know just as well as I that whosoever repeats a tale must include every word as nearly as he possibly can, if it is in the story, no matter how crude and low; otherwise, he tells an untrue tale, or makes up things, or finds new words. (Chaucer 14–15; in Dance xxv)

Likewise, the Victorian fondness for addressing the reader – ‘oh, dear reader’ or ‘oh, gentle reader’ – while not deflecting responsibility in exactly the same way as someone who has the authority to recount a

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tale from the Anansesem (the large collection of Anancy stories), still deflects responsibility to the narrative’s machinery, as readers are acutely reminded they are engaged in a narrative process. There might also be another way to consider these ‘tensions’ in narratives. Darnell theorizes about what has too often and too simply been called the ‘communal nature’ of Aboriginal literatures: ‘… there is also a widespread narrative connection that foregrounds generic rather than uniquely autobiographical experience. The template for telling a life story seeks coherence in relation to past stories, both history and myth, and a pedagogical model of what will resonate with the experiences of the audience’ (50). Both Clutesi’s and Chief Kennedy’s conventions embody a recognition that there is a sense of continuity between their stories or accounts and those of the past. If we focus on a consideration of culture, we might be reminded of claims which Daniel David Moses made twelve years ago in his and Terry Goldie’s preface to An Anthology of Canadian Native Literature in English: ‘I think our cultures probably allow us to be more autobiographical than the mainstream. In the mainstream markets editors want to know what one alienated individual thinks. Our culture is suspicious of that. We want to know where the opinion is coming from. Who are his people?’ (xxi). But could this foregrounding of tensions between author and voices within narratives also serve an aesthetic? This idiom, if I can call it that, manifests itself in yet another way in Edward Ahenakew’s Voices of the Plains Cree: We have our own view of the life that has been imposed upon us, and these pages are written that others may glimpse what we feel and experience. It is not my personal opinion that I intend to present. I serve only as recorder of what I have learned during my life-time, first among my own people, the Plains Cree of Ah-tah-ka-koop’s Reserve, where I was born in 1885, and where I spent my childhood. (23–4)

The self-reflexivity of the author is foregrounded in both his recognition that he is an individual responsible for the recording of communal memory and in the author’s reminder that he is putting down in written form what he has learned from listening. The individual versus the community, oral sources versus the written, and oral traditions incorporated within the written become concerns which are as important as the events recorded.

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Where ‘self-reflexivity’ takes place, a layering of narratives results. There is a heightened awareness of relation between intersecting narratives. Ironically, for a medium traced back to oral sources which are said to pose solid connections between speakers and listeners, a separation is posed between different participants in these narratives. This tension can manifest itself with a direct address to the audience or in the underscoring of multiple voices, as it does in Clutesi’s, Chief Kennedy’s, and Ahenakew’s works. It can also manifest itself in a temporal sense, as it does in Henry Pennier’s Chiefly Indian when Pennier ends his autobiography with the chapter ‘I Remember the Now Days’: ‘And so I guess that’s all my story up to now or as much as I can remember of it’ (129), Pennier begins to conclude a work that has also included ‘I Remember My Kid Days,’ ‘I Remember My 1920’s Days,’ ‘I Remember My 1930’s Days,’ and ‘I Remember My 1940’s and 1950’s Days.’ There is something here that reminds me of ‘the wild drums and arrow days’ (9) of which Grisdale speaks in Wild Drums, the other sort of distancing marker Grisdale uses to begin his story of torch woman – ‘Many years before the white men came to this country’ (29) – the demarcation used by Tetso to explain his life on the trapline – ‘Way back in the days of the bow and arrow’ (18) – and the denotation used to explain times of prosperity – ‘the fifteen-beaver days’ (30). On the one hand, these authors were recounting stories of the past which offered more solace than a changing present; on the other, governing aesthetics were being brought into the present, offering examples of new stylistic forms that would come to shape a body of literature as Aboriginal, Indigenous, and stylistically different from ‘foundational’ Canadian literary canons. There is also in much Aboriginal literature of the 1960s and 1970s a paring away of the unnecessary, the excessive, the not needed. At the same time in Canadian literature when postmodernism and its attendant parodies, ironies, playful metanarratives, and fragmentations were surfacing and redefining Canadian literature, a significant number of Aboriginal writers were offering what could be called sparse artistry (for lack of more precise terms) in both poetry and prose, exemplified by the following excerpt from Rita Joe’s poem: I lost my talk The talk you took away. When I was a little girl

Native Literature of the 1960s and 1970s in Canada 101 At Shubenacadie school. You snatched it away: I speak like you I think like you I create like you The scrambled ballad, about my word ... (‘I Lost My Talk,’ from Song of Eskasoni, in Moses and Goldie, eds, An Anthology of Canadian Native Literature in English, 113)

While there are honed repetitive structures here, there is also a stark sensibility in Joe’s verse, reminiscent, perhaps, of the ‘clipped line length’ (195) of which Shoemaker speaks when he considers the poetry of Kevin Gilbert. Perhaps it is a piece of wisdom found in Chief Dan George’s poetry which suggests possible ways to interpret an aesthetic which comes to dominate not only the poetry of Rita Joe but also a significant amount of Renaissance literature: … When a thought forms it needs much time to grow. Silence between spoken words has always been a sign of deliberation. In these times of a modern world where everything has become of value silence has become time. Time unused has become time wasted. We are told: ‘Time is money.’

(My Heart Soars 54)

This excerpt functions (as does Rita Joe’s ‘I Lost My Talk’) in terms of units which build upon one another and which are separated by a demand to process the causal relations between units. Lines 1–2, 3–4, 5–7, and 8–9 form units which first function independently to produce individual ideas and which must then be connected by the reader to provide a larger narrative or message. Here, I mean to consider Jousse’s ideas about what he called the ‘phenomenon of the parallelism of clauses’ (95) or ‘balancings’ (104); certainly, poetry within a British canonical tradition is also dependent on ‘balancings,’ and there is no better example of this than the neoAugustan poets of the eighteenth century, who wrote reams of epic

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verse in rhyming couplets. Consider the following example Jousse offers in The Oral Style, taken from Father Condamin’s translation of Jewish scripture in Le livre de Jérémie: And the word of Yahweh was addressed to me to say to me: ‘What do you see, Jeremiah?’ And I said: ‘I see the branch of an almond-tree’ And Yahweh said to me: ‘You saw well for I watch over my word to accomplish it.’ (Condamin 4; in Jousse 80)

Jousse attempts to understand the totality of this expression by registering the relations between ‘balancings’: [T]he tenuous thread that leads us from one mental disposition to another is broken, and even a long and careful examination of the text of the Septuagint will still leave us perplexed. But if the pronunciation of the Hebraic propositional gestures begins to play upon our lips of its own accord, ‘the association of verbal forms’ leads us to understand the powerful cement that holds together these apparently random blocks … The almond-tree is called watchful, because it flowers earlier than the other trees; it is the first to awaken from its winter sleep … Its Hebrew name therefore evokes the idea of watching. Saint Jerome translates, in accordance with the etymology, virgam vigilantem, which does not suggest a clear meaning [but preserves the association of verbal forms that underlies the thought: it is between these two extremes that all translations of verbal syllogisms have to oscillate, to a greater or lesser degree]. It is just as difficult to translate this word play into French. We have here not simply a pun, as if one were to say, apropos of the amandier (almond-tree), ‘il faut que vous vous amendiez’ (‘you must amend your ways’) or, at the sight of a pêcher (peach-tree) ‘le péché (sin) has taken root in the midst of this people.’ However, the following word-association is altogether analogous: ‘You see this tremble (Trembling-poplar, a tree whose leaves tremble to the slightest breeze), well tremble for vengeance is at hand!’ (Condamin 4 and Jousse; in Jousse 80)

I am not suggesting that the ‘threads’ between ‘mental dispositions’ or ‘balancings’ are as tenuous in the above passage from Chief Dan

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George’s My Heart Soars. However, I am suggesting that they could be, especially given the emphasis on time and the fact that a significant amount of the literature of the Native Renaissance reveals a culturally dictated emphasis on time, as well as culturally dictated understandings of time which are potentially strange or unfamiliar with respect to Eurocentric concepts. To deliberate on the first unit – ‘When a thought forms / it needs much time to grow’ – is to ponder the time taken to produce significant ideas. The second unit – ‘Silence between spoken words / has always been a sign of deliberation’ – leads one to consider the value of silence in conversation. The third unit – ‘In these times of a modern world / where everything has become of value / silence has become time’ – equates silence with one of the most significant measurements of the contemporary world – time. The fourth unit – ‘Time unused has become time wasted. / We are told: “Time is money”’ – emphasizes that time is a mercantilist value of the contemporary world. Together, these different considerations endorse the following suggestion which the poem then makes, again in incremental steps: It is harder to find somebody who will listen, but everybody reads. Therefore, we must write about our ways, our beliefs, our customs, our morals, how we look at things and why, how we lived, and how we live now.

(55)

There is a consistency throughout the fifteen lines and different units, fostered by repetition; most glaringly, the reader is led to consider Chief Dan George’s admonition that Aboriginal peoples write in order that the uneducated learn about Aboriginal values. However, there are numerous other considerations here – the reader is given pause in the space between ideas, which, though they build on one another, must be considered individually. Throughout the portrayal of separate units, strong verbs and nouns are employed, and few, if no, adjectives or adverbs. Perhaps there is worth in considering Shoemaker’s observation in his comparative analysis of Black Australian and Canadian Indian poetry that, while Australian Aboriginal poetry frequently ‘incorporates a steady rhyme scheme and rhythm together with the repetition of key words in successive lines … Canadian Indian poets have been more inclined to write unrhymed verse which emphasises word order, positioning, and pauses, rather than repetitive

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sounds’ (209). Perhaps more could be made of this in future scholarship, but what is telling is that the language in much of the Canadian/ Aboriginal literature discussed here does not play with itself as we have come to expect in postmodernist poetry, which draws attention as much to play as it does to meaning. Rather, play, or ornamentation of language, is repetition which serves to endorse the separate maxims asserted. As well, a lot is not said here, and that is one of the poem’s prime strengths. In her study of communication in a remote Alberta community, where she focused on photography, diary writing, and interviews, ‘Taking It Back, Passing It On: Reverence for the Ordinary in Bush Cree Teacher Education,’ Christina Mader speaks of the ‘reverence for the ordinary’ she found to dominate Bush Cree custom: ‘Reverence for the ordinary was an important thing to hear inside the women’s stories in Moosetrack. Reverence for the ordinary isn’t an easy thing to find. But it is satisfying’ (113). Whether or not ‘ordinary’ is the suitable or precise term to use when attempting to define this important characteristic which permeates the literature of the Native Renaissance, the search to understand Aboriginal aesthetics is inextricably connected to Kenneth Lincoln’s suggestion in Native American Renaissance that ‘Native American literature, in brief, is literature and culture in translation’ (25). In his foreword to Henry Pennier’s Chiefly Indian, E. Wyn Roberts describes his reaction to researching Salish stories, including Pennier’s: [T]he stories or vignettes came pouring out and I began to anticipate more the composition of the stories than I did to my accumulation of vocabulary and grammar. I found I was becoming more like Wilhelm Grimm than Jacob Grimm, the German philologists and grammarians who began as serious grammarians but ended with Wilhelm becoming more and more interested in collecting folk fairy tales than in their use for grammatical studies. I began to love this subtle humour, the kind and optimistic nostalgia of the stories, their honesty and lack of pretension and a certain mystique in them that appealed to me – possibly because I am Welsh and like most Celts, find irresistible anything fey. (My emphasis)

This is unbearably romantic, but what Roberts terms a ‘lack of pretension,’ and, Mader, a ‘reverence for the ordinary’ (113), is called ‘unadorned narrative’ by Freda Ahenakew and H.C. Wolfart (19; quoted in Darnell 49). When Agnes Grant contributed to the University of Manitoba’s Monographs in Education series in 1986 with Native

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Literature in the Curriculum, Grant identified approximately thirteen characteristics of Native literature. Speaking of works founded on Indian oral traditions, Grant noted that they were identified by a ‘reverence for words,’ or ‘words … not spoken apart from meaning’ (63). Grant also suggested that in Native literature ‘the good story-teller does not create words to relay his story; rather, he discovers words which have already created a story’ (64). Furthermore, Grant suggested that much is ‘implied’ in Native writing because ‘common understandings are assumed’ (69). Speaking of an American movement that is similar to this latest Native Renaissance in Canada and that took place roughly at the same time in the United States, Lincoln also addresses a similar aesthetic: In general, a storyteller does not interpret or gloss the tale or tell too much. Listeners imagine their participatory places in the story. Just as silence speaks primally to the mind, so space is fertile without objects. Everything counts. ‘Nothing’ can be suggestive presence … resonant on the Great Plains or shadowed in the northern woodlands. (49)

Lincoln combines a consideration of ethos and aesthetics to account for those characteristics that grow out of the storytelling conventions in which he is interested. Perhaps this combined focus is a good starting point for understanding the ‘white space,’ or uncluttered nature, of much Aboriginal literature, for one is first led to consider the valuing of silence and participation in narrative exchange. In a significant amount of literature from the Renaissance (as well as contemporary Aboriginal literature) there is room to pause, process, and reflect when reading; in fact, these things are subtly demanded of the reader. There seems to be some sort of relation between repetition, the valuing of breath, pause, or space, and uncluttered sentiment and sparseness of language in Aboriginal writing. To make sense of this combination, one could begin considering what writers of this Native Renaissance said about one specific difference between non-Aboriginal and Aboriginal values. In Wilfred Pelletier (Baibomsay) and Ted Poole’s collaborative work No Foreign Land: The Biography of a North American Indian, Pelletier speaks of silence and its value in Aboriginal cultures by drawing attention to the lack of this same value in non-Aboriginal cultures: One of the differences I noticed was that they would talk and talk and talk. My father talked some too, but not as much as those guys would, and

106 Before the Country my mother didn’t say anything. It was hard to get used to. But even though I couldn’t keep track of it all, I thought it was great. Even in later years when I used to hear those intellectual arguments, I thought that was great. I don’t think that now; I think it’s a disease. (37)

Jeannette Armstrong speaks of this same ethos in her and Douglas Cardinal’s The Native Creative Process, where she explains that ‘one of the central instructions to [her] people is to practice quietness, to listen and speak only if you know the full meaning of what you say’ (90). Could it be that a valuing of silence – an adjunct of a cultural ethos – has translated itself into a specific aesthetic in Aboriginal literature? Is silence related somehow to this ‘reverence for words,’ words ‘not spoken apart from meaning,’ of which Grant speaks? At this point, I think it is fair to suggest (though not healthy to conclude) that there is something significant about the emergence of a pan-Indian voice and a commensurate, acute awareness of the importance of listening (often to leaders or elders). Perhaps a strong connection with formal, ceremonial orature and its living continuance within an immediate community leads to the paring away of the not needed. Almost a paradox – repetition – the excessive – supports and lends itself to pared-away aphorisms and maxims. It is important to recognize, though, that Native texts of this time period were not homogeneous, certainly not static. This is an essential understanding if one is to recognize one of the most important features of Maria Campbell’s Halfbreed. Campbell’s trailblazing autobiography, published in 1973 and heralded as the ‘watershed for native literature’ (Lee Maracle, quoted in Andrews, ‘Forming a Powerful Voice’), employs Aboriginal traditions to forceful new ends. Campbell introduces her autobiography with a clear explanation of its purpose: ‘I write this for all of you, to tell you what it is like to be a Half-Breed woman in our country. I want to tell you about the joys and sorrows, the oppressing poverty, the frustrations and the dreams’ (2). Here again is a self-reflexive address to readers, yet there is a notable difference between Halfbreed and other texts of the Renaissance. While writers such as Johnston, Tappage, Clutesi, Kennedy, Pennier, and George were writing to both Aboriginals and non-Aboriginals, taking the time to speak of generational changes and instructing the young, Campbell was specifically writing to a non-Aboriginal audience and explaining cultural difference, thereby invoking a new tradition of sorts in Aboriginal literature. Speaking of Aboriginal writers and the relation

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they share to the communities of which they are a part, Daniel David Moses notes that ‘most Native writers are … speaking first to their own community’ (xxi). While a strong affiliation with a Métis and larger pan-Indian community asserts itself in Halfbreed, Campbell, as Grant also recognizes, ‘is not writing for other Métis; she is preoccupied with telling non-Natives what it is like to be a half-breed’ (‘Contemporary Natives Women’s Voices’ 126). Throughout her autobiography, Campbell offers information to educate an uneducated audience. ‘One thing about our people is that they never hoard,’ explains Campbell. ‘If they have something they share all of it with each other, regardless of good or bad fortune’ (55). Campbell describes differences between the Métis and status Indians, again sharing knowledge with those outside her Métis community: ‘Then there were our Indian relatives on the nearby reserves. There was never much love lost between the Indians and Half-Breeds. They were completely different from us – quiet when we were noisy, dignified even at dances and get-togethers. Indians were very passive – they would get angry at things done to them but would never fight back, whereas Halfbreed were quick-tempered – quick to fight, but quick to forget’ (25). Campbell’s decision to provide English glosses for her language in Halfbreed is in keeping with this instructional text. Cultural information is strewn throughout Halfbreed which posits a connection between past and present; more recent memories, recounted through the eyes of a Métis narrator, support the text’s didactic comments and examine the world Campbell occupied. When Campbell depicts her trip to the welfare office, where she is humiliated by the official in charge and her Métis status is not understood by a government representative, the distinction Campbell drew earlier between status and non-status Indians is supported by example: I went to the Office in a ten-year-old threadbare red coat, with old boots and a scarf. I looked like a Whitefish Lake squaw, and that’s exactly what the social worker thought. He insisted that I go to the Department of Indian Affairs, and when I said I was not a Treaty Indian but a Half-Breed, he said if that was the case I was eligible, but added ‘I can’t see the difference – part Indian, all Indian. You’re all the same.’ (155)

Halfbreed breaks a code of silence, though perpetuating aesthetics possibly born out of a valuing of silence; she points appropriate fingers at agencies and individuals, representative of wide-reaching values, in

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clear, straight terms. As Janice Acoose claims, Maria Campbell’s 1973 Halfbreed ‘is an important document which initiated re-creation, renaming, and empowerment for many Indigenous writers’ (Iskwewak – Kah’Ki Yaw Ni Wahkomakanak 13). In keeping with her cultural tradition, however, Campbell, while not writing to a Métis or pan-Indian community, writes for community, a point she clearly underscores: When I started writing about my community I think I was politically very radical. Having decided that I wanted to create political change through literature, I had to sit down and really think about the responsibility I had in writing about my people, my culture, my history. I couldn’t let myself get carried away romantically, because it’s not my story I’m telling; it’s the story of a people. (‘Literary Passport’ 85)

What Petrone calls Campbell’s ‘disturbing testimony’ (120) ostensibly depicts an individual’s plight and self-healing in light of larger cultural concerns. Certainly, Halfbreed is a chronicle of injustice and suffering, and it is only on the last page that Campbell reveals a strong new identity: ‘The years of searching, loneliness and pain are over for me. Cheechum said, “You’ll find yourself, and you’ll find brothers and sisters.” I have brothers and sisters all over the country. I no longer need my blanket to survive’ (184). Again, there is a newness here. Campbell’s voice was a relatively young voice, and at the end of Halfbreed, the reader is left with the understanding that there are other testimonies Campbell will give, and that this is not the chronicle of a life lived, but of a life moving forward. In the midst of the older generation stepping forward and recording life histories, Campbell employs the autobiographical mode for the voice of the young. In her article ‘Literature in English by Native Canadians (Indians and Inuit),’ Margaret Harry notes that, traditionally, ‘cultural restraints on making judgements before acquiring the wisdom that comes with age have meant that many autobiographies are largely reminiscences of the very old’ (149). Though Harry speaks specifically of Indian and Inuit literature, Campbell participates in the pan-Aboriginal traditions of a wisdom literature surfacing around her, extending its principles and values and opening up the genre to a different generation. This text and others published during the Native Renaissance deserve much more scholarly attention, and further studies of publication histories and editorial interventions in this period are needed. As

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Campbell explains in her interview with Harmut Lutz in Contemporary Challenges, Halfbreed shares affinities with problems which attend astold-to narratives in the corpus of Aboriginal literature: ‘… a whole section was taken out of the book that was really important, and I had insisted it stay there. And that was something incriminating the RCMP … [W]hen the book came, it was gone. It was the 100th anniversary of the RCMP that year’ (42). Campbell says that if she had the opportunity to rewrite Halfbreed, she would ‘put the piece back in’ (47). This situation reminds one of Lee Maracle’s autobiographically inspired Bobbi Lee: Indian Rebel, published two years after Halfbreed. The ‘writing’ process of Bobbi Lee: Indian Rebel involved non-Aboriginal editor Don Barnett recording and editing Maracle’s story, which Maracle spoke, and, as Maracle explains in the prologue to the second edition of Bobbi Lee (published in 1990), it also involved significant problems: There are two voices in the pages of this book, mine and Donald Barnett’s. As-told-tos between whites and Natives rarely work, when they do, it’s wonderful, when they don’t it’s a disaster for the Native. Don never intended it to be a disaster for me. The first Bobbi Lee was the reduction of some two hundred pages of manuscript to a little book. What began as a class to learn how to do other people’s life history, turned into a project to do my own. We had disagreements over what to include and what to exclude, disagreements over wording, voice. In the end, the voice that reached the paper was Don’s, the information alone was mine. (Prologue to Bobbie Lee, 1990 ed., 19)

This situation, in turn, recalls a similar case of editorial imposition in Australian Aboriginal literary history. Speaking of the poetry of Kevin Gilbert, Shoemaker refers to a sense of ‘bitterness’ in Gilbert’s verse. It is attributable, as Shoemaker sees it, to ‘a sense of profound frustration’ linked to ‘betrayal,’ as Gilbert saw the manuscript version of his first published collection of verse, End of Dreamtime,16 radically altered by a white editor – without his permission – prior to publication’ (192). Because Shoemaker recognizes a colonial sense of entitlement in this case of editorial interference, as well as an unsanctioned decision to make it adhere to the editor’s own taste, Shoemaker refuses to discuss or analyze that version of Gilbert’s poems, just as Gilbert refuses to acknowledge the edition. It might be telling and worth serious critical attention to compare international cases of editorial interference in Aboriginal literatures

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with an eye to investigating if there is some kind of consistency not only in the politics which provided an arena for such actions but also in the type of material or stylistics that editors removed or altered. Is there something specifically ‘Aboriginal’ that was being cut (and probably not understood or appreciated from a different perspective)? Was there something inherent in these texts which was threatening to an established way of understanding or expressing ideas about the world? These are large questions, but I am convinced that the only way to assess, with integrity, the aesthetics in Maracle’s Bobbi Lee would be to compare the original recordings of Maracle’s story with both editions of Bobbi Lee and study the variants and Barnett’s choices. Aboriginal literature of the 1960s and 1970s in Canada challenges what Richard Kearney would call the established ‘hermeneutics of imagination.’ In his study of European thought, Poetics of Modernity: Toward a Hermeneutic Imagination, Kearney speaks of Irish writers and distinguishes the visions of Yeats and the literary revivalists from those of Joyce and other Irish modernists. He considers how Irish nationalists, responding to Ireland’s brutal colonial history, employed mythology for different purposes. Kearney maintains that while ‘Yeats and the advocates of the Celtic Revival looked to mythology for stories of continuity that history refused them’ (180), ‘Joyce’s utopian use of myth’ opened history to ‘a multiplicity of futures’ (181): Joyce differs principally from Yeats and the revivalists in his belief that the dualistic opposition between myth and history can be overcome. Yeats conceived of myth as a sacramental refuge from history … Joyce redefines myth as something to be interrogated and creatively explored so as to open up new possibilities of historical meaning. For Yeats myth offers the promise of cultural identity based on the retrieval of tradition. (184)

Yeats hunkered himself in tradition and mythology, holding fiercely onto myths which came before the historians and burying himself in this remembrance. As Daniel Albright says in his introduction to Yeats’s collected verse, W.B. Yeats: The Poems, ‘Yeats hoped that the readers of his poems would feel the shudder of a god’s physical presence’ (xxvi); perhaps this recognition might explain the ‘mathematics of Yeats’s historical system … [,] complicated by the existence of gyres within gyres,’ which enabled Yeats to ‘account for any inconvenient deviations in history from circular perfection by appealing to some subsidiary system’ (xl-xli). One feels the impress of a Basil Johnston or a George

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Clutesi in the opening stanza of Yeats’s ‘A Prayer for Old Age,’ where his narrator shuffles history off and fiercely holds onto mythology: God guard me from those thoughts men think In the mind alone; He that sings a lasting song Thinks in a marrow-bone …

(332)

Joyce, as Kearney understands, however, took myth and transformed it in present history, giving myth new shape with historical prescience. There is no better example than Finnegan’s Wake, the Celtic hero ‘Fionn’ appearing ‘again’ but in a new and innovative, almost unrecognizable, form which both significantly departed from the ancient past but also upheld it. Perhaps there are parallel differences between Basil Johnston’s recording of old myths (albeit, in what could be called a ‘transitional’ text) and Chief Dan George’s employing of ancient knowledge in what could come to define a distinct poetic form in Canadian poetry. Once the critic is able to move beyond the ostensible recognition that Aboriginal writers of the 1960s and 1970s were mostly protesting the injustices of history or, in the tradition of Yeats, seeking refuge from it, a comparably sophisticated analysis of Aboriginal literatures might be conceivable. This is only one reflection, though, and, admittedly, theoretical and abstract and difficult to envision. What is more concrete and easier to envision is a frustrated artist intent on giving new shape to ideas in paint and words. Ira Dilworth, Emily Carr’s literary agent, recalls Carr explaining to him why she turned to writing: [Carr] once told me … when she was working on the first stages of a painting, trying to put down in pictorial form a subject for which she had made field sketches, [that] she found it of great value to ‘word’ her experience. In this way, she said, the circumstances and all the details of the incident or place would come back to her more vividly and she could reconstruct them more faithfully than was possible with paint and canvas alone. From this developed … one of the controlling principles of her method and style in literary composition. (Foreword to Klee Wyck)17

What were the controlling principles of Carr’s writing? Dilworth remembers Carr ‘“peeling” a sentence, as [Carr] called it, – a process which involved stripping away all ambiguous or unnecessary words,

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replacing a vague word by a sharper, clearer one until the sentence emerged clean and precise in its meaning and strong on its impact on the reader.’ For Dilworth, this process led to the ‘quality of [Carr’s] immediacy, the ability, by means of descriptive words chosen with the greatest accuracy, to carry the reader into the very heart of the experience she [was] describing.’ Dilworth attributes Carr’s ‘forceful, inimitable style’ to her uncanny ‘sincerity,’ perhaps attributable, in turn, to the ‘great simplicity and directness’ of her prose, which reminded Dilworth of ‘quick, sure brush strokes and dramatic, strong colours.’ Dilworth also notes that Carr’s ‘prose style has much in common with poetry,’ evidenced in ‘her rigid selectivity … of diction,’ her ‘daring use of metaphorical language [perhaps a questionable term], in the rhythm, the cadence of her writing and in her consciousness of form.’ For Dilworth, Carr’s writing ‘transcends the usual limits of prose and becomes (but without aesthetic offense) lyrical.’ Carr’s writing certainly stands out among her contemporaries, as well as later writers. But just what were Carr’s ‘literary’ influences? Dilworth also notes that Carr ‘was not a great reader,’ though she did like and read Walt Whitman. For Dilworth, Carr’s lack of anxiety with literary influence was a good thing, ‘for the originality and simplicity which marked all her work … remained uninhibited by academic literary standards.’ Dilworth would speculate for a moment, though, that in Carr’s writing there might have been ‘a discernible influence at times of the Bible, notably of the Psalms, and of the English Prayerbook’ (a ceremonial tone, perhaps?). I am not convinced that these are the only plausible ‘literary’ influences to which Carr turned. I am now more convinced than ever that when Carr was ‘peeling’ sentences, stripping away excess in what seemed to be typical inveterate editorial mania, she was practising what she had heard, that she was drawing upon West Coast Aboriginal influences. What is the exact word for the fear that grips one, walking through the woods dreading D’Sonoqua? In Carr’s story ‘D’Sonoqua,’ the narrator, having chanced upon ‘her head and trunk … carved out of, or rather into, the bole of a great red cedar’ (33) is also at a loss for words: ‘The power that I felt was not in the thing itself, but in some tremendous force behind it, that the carver had believed in’ (36). I think Carr was peeling words, not to create precise diction, but to find tropes different, perhaps, than those which can be traced back to Frances Brooke’s The History of Emily Montague (the ‘first Canadian novel’), or the beginnings of Canadian literature as defined by romantic nationalism.

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What was Carr doing when she was ‘peeling’ her sentences? Was she trying to come up with a sentence like that found in the stories Clutesi recorded: ‘One must not defile the home of the Us-ma of our band / With the smell from the den of the wolves’ (Potlatch 169)? I am sure Carr was not enjoying a ‘lack of anxiety with literary influence.’ Something was driving her nuts. There was a reason she willed Clutesi her oils, brushes, and unused canvases.

4 Day of Atonement

My roots grow in jackpine roots … I grow here. I branch here. – Kitty Smith, southern Yukon Native grandmother, quoted in Cruikshank, Life Lived like a Story, 163

When it came time to produce a ‘national song’ (Lampman) in Canada, Canadian writers could not avoid engaging with Aboriginal history and traditions. Canada’s centenary coincided with a revolution that demanded citizens remember an effaced part of this nation’s past. Aboriginal authorities challenged the authority of the Canadian government and the history upon which this nation had been built. What seemed to be an unprecedented body of Native literature suddenly appeared to the public and introduced new stories into the realm of Canadian publishing. Perhaps it is no wonder that new myths would be created during this moment in Canadian history. For those schooled in the expectations of romantic nationalism, Canada, until this time, had been waiting for two phenomena: a social revolution and a new ‘mental landscape’ (Frye, ‘Culture and Society in Ontario, 1784–1984,’ in Gorjup 189) which would allow for ‘the uniting of subject and object in the imaginative experience’ (‘Conclusion to LHC,’ in BG 245). These decades demanded that people remember the past and reconfigure ideas about the present in light of revolution. Aboriginal land-claims activities of the 1960s and 1970s were refashioning ideas about the literal lands of Canada, dispelling this nation’s legacy of colonial ownership, and provoking Canadians to consider anew their relationship with the environment. As Marlene Castellano also observes in her article ‘Vocation of Identity: The Dilemma of

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Indian Youth,’ included in The Only Good Indian, Aboriginal activism was fed by the radical environmentalism of the time: ‘It is doubtful that this cultural renaissance could have gained momentum had there not developed concurrently in North America an awareness that society cannot continue to exploit its human and natural resources for the sake of production without bringing about dire consequences’ (58). What also developed concurrently was the exploitation of narrative resources that seemed inextricably bound up with something to do with the land and a reaction to Aboriginal revolution. Potential rituals and ceremonies seemed to lie just under the surface of something very deep, something Aboriginal, something land-based. This time period in Canadian history witnessed a notable increase in works which tried to engage with Aboriginal history and traditions. As Russell Brown noted in 1973 in an article entitled ‘The Time of the Redmen,’ by the early 1970s, Canadian writing had become overrun by what he called ‘the children of Tekakwitha’ (92). Brown was referring to the precedent which Leonard Cohen set when he published his novel Beautiful Losers (1966), a loose tribute of sorts to the Iroquois saint Catherine Tekakwitha. ‘Blame it on Leonard Cohen perhaps,’ Brown sarcastically wrote, but ‘every second Canadian novel now seems to have an Indian hiding behind its trees, Eskimos moving across its Arctic wastes, or – at the very least – a protagonist who, like the narrator of Surfacing, himself becomes a primitive thereby replacing the native gone from the land’ (92). Interestingly, this same pattern, as Shoemaker indicates, is not to be found in Australia’s literary history. While Shoemaker notes that ‘when Oodgeroo Noonuccal’s first collection of poetry appeared in print in 1964, a new phase of cultural communication began in Australia’ (5),1 and that the years since the 1970s are to be noted, in particular, for a new outburst of writing by Black Australian writers, ‘there has not been a corresponding increase in the amount of creative writing by White Australians dealing with Aboriginal themes’ (11). Perhaps the losers referred to in the title of Cohen’s book are specifically Canadian, then, and certainly this is what one is led to believe, given Cohen’s interrogation of Canadian nationalism. Cohen’s Beautiful Losers is not unlike the ‘terrible beauty’ of which Yeats’s narrator speaks in ‘Easter 1916’ when he sees the promise of something new (equally horrifying and promising) being born out of the dregs of the recent historical past, but carried by the inheritance of mythology that transcends and drives spears into the side of history. However, the paradox which Cohen’s

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novel boasts as early as its cover is particularly Canadian and a clear product of its time, though it, too, ‘slouches towards’ (Yeats, ‘The Second Coming’) or, perhaps, out of, the nexus of competing teleologies. Beautiful Losers begins with zeitgeist: Catherine Tekakwitha, who are you? Are you (1656–1680)? Is that enough? Are you the Iroquois Virgin? Are you the Lily of the Shores of the Mohawk River? Can I love you in my own way? I am an old scholar, better-looking now than when I was young. That’s what sitting on your ass does to your face. I’ve come after you, Catherine Tekakwitha. I want to know what goes on under that rosy blanket. Do I have any right? I fell in love with a religious picture of you. You were standing among birch trees, my favorite trees. God knows how far up your moccasins were laced. There was a river behind you, no doubt the Mohawk River. Two birds in the left foreground would be delighted if you tickled their white throats or even if you used them as an example of something or other in a parable. Do I have any right to come after you with my dusty mind full of the junk of maybe five thousand books? (3)

Almost immediately, Beautiful Losers makes its readers aware that history is part of a myth-making process. Having come to this story to ‘rescue [Catherine] from the Jesuits’ (5), having come to rescue her from a process of interpretation which has been clouded by missionary zeal and dogma, the narrator of Beautiful Losers attempts to remove this Iroquois saint from historical misrepresentation. However, the narrator is confused and unsure how he will rewrite her history. He defines Catherine Tekakwitha by historical dates – 1656–1680; he prods her sexuality – ‘Are you the Iroquois Virgin?’; he employs the language of the King James Bible and the world of nineteenth-century romance – ‘Are you the Lily of the Shores of the Mohawk River?’; he understands Tekakwitha as an extant iconic image of her, to which he attaches his own desires. Cohen’s text, which, as Linda Hutcheon understands, is a ‘portrayal of Edouard Lecompt’s 1927 Jesuit textual inscription of [Catherine Tekakwitha] in his Une Vièrge Iroquoise Catherine Tekakwitha: Le Lis des Bords de la Mohawk et du St. Laurent (1656–1680)’ (Canadian Postmodern 14), begins by drawing attention to the process behind myth-making and historical interpretation. This is not a verifiable account of Tekakwitha’s life. ‘I am a well-known folklorist, an authority on the A — s, a tribe I have no intention of disgracing by my own interest’ (5), this English-Canadian

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historian asserts. He will thoroughly undermine this declaration. Catherine will share a space in this narrative with Edith, the narrator’s wife, who, before she commits suicide under an elevator, spends hours in a hotel with the narrator’s best friend, F., engaging in every form of sexual act condemned by the Catholic Church. She shares narrative space with F., who goes mad from syphilis, dying slowly on a ward, his hand shoved up the skirt of a nearby nurse. She is given new breath by a narrator who, when confronted by his profession’s limitation, conflates the ironic, sometimes funny, almost always troubling stereotypes which serve to question the process of writing history. Attempting to depict seventeenth-century Canada, this narrator scribbles: ‘Lots of priests got killed and eaten and so forth. Micmacs, Abénaquis, Montagnais, Attikamègues, Hurons: the Company of Jesus had their way with them. Lots of semen in the forest, I’ll bet’ (18–19). He reduces Catherine Tekakwitha to absolutely nothing: ‘she was taken captive in an Iroquois raid, which was probably the best lay she ever had’ (19). Violence drives Beautiful Losers. It is the violence of Canada’s past to which this novel turns time and time again. The beautiful Indian maiden whom this narrator constructed out of his own desires never existed in such a form. Catherine Tekakwitha, like the rest of her family, died of smallpox. This narrator curses the plague when it ‘invades [the] pages of [his] research’ (28). His ‘erection topples’ (28) because he realizes that Catherine, the only one of her family to have survived, has ‘the price of admission gouged in her face’ (28): ‘Catherine Tekakwitha is not pretty! Now I want to run from my books and dreams. I don’t want to fuck a pig. Can I yearn after pimples and pock marks?’ (28). The violence of the past becomes inextricably connected with a questioning of truth. ‘I’ve lost my erection,’ the narrator mourns again at a later point because, as he says to Catherine in apostrophe, ‘I fear you smell of the Plague’ (43). Ultimately, he poses the following question: ‘Is it because I’ve stumbled on the truth about Canada?’ (43). Cohen seems to be asking ‘is there really any truth to Canada?’ or ‘is there any real truth in this nation’s history?’ Midway through the first half of Beautiful Losers, ‘The History of Them All,’ the narrator stops to organize his thoughts: ‘I have been writing these true happenings for some time now’ (121, my emphasis). He poses the following question: ‘Am I any closer to Kateri Tekakwitha?’ (121). Several pages later, he will fabricate a story about Catherine Tekakwitha spilling wine at a high table during a great feast in Quebec (123–5) and give it all kinds of significance; later, in another apostrophe to Catherine, he will admit

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that this narrative has been created from his own fancy, that, in fact, he ‘find[s] no mention of this feast in any of the standard biographers’ (126). Beautiful Losers becomes a sort of game, and readers are not so much left to determine what is true but to ponder the nature of truth and its relation with history-making. ‘To discover the truth in anything that is alien, first dispense with the indispensable in your own vision’ (107), the narrator declares. Is that why, then, everything in our line of vision disappears at the end of this novel into some strange, cinematic process or mythological symbol? Is that why an English Canadian, a Québécois, a Canadian Indian, and an Indian – what would seem to be the indispensable properties of the Canadian nation – disappear? As Hutcheon questions, ‘What sense can be made of the complex tale of a nameless English Canadian historian, his Québécois friend known simply, if evocatively, as F., and his Canadian-Indian wife, Edith, especially when, at the end, all the male characters merge and transform into a Ray Charles movie projected against the sky, and all the female characters’ identities (including that of a verifiable historical saint, Catherine Tekakwitha) blur to form a composite mythical Isis figure?’ (Canadian Postmodern 28). For Hutcheon, this image ‘allegorically acts out … the history and political destiny of the Canadian nation: of its successive conquests (mirrored in the deaths of the Indian, Edith, and then of the Frenchman, F.) and perhaps also its future fate (turning into an American fiction)’ (Canadian Postmodern 28–9). More than simply acting out Canada’s past or future, I would argue that this novel is acting out mythology in the making. It is reacting to its own grand precedents, informants, and teleological design. Understood in the context of the story in which Beautiful Losers is being discussed – the search for Canada’s ‘Day of Atonement’ – Cohen’s novel reminds one that, while there are not an infinite number of great codes, there are numerous, competing ones. Beautiful Losers suggests, as Jousse did, drawing on the theories of Baudin, that it is important not to simply discard one’s own way of looking at the world (in order to arrive at new truths) but to recognize the possibility that there are other ways of looking at the world: ‘“the ideas of a nation, ethnic [mental dispositions] are as diverse as [even more diverse than] individual ideas, [personal mental dispositions]. That is the lesson of translations”’ (Baudin 347; in Jousse 76). Certainly, competing ideas of what constitutes (and what could constitute) Canada’s codification of nation

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hover at the end of Cohen’s text, though we are given no clear answers as to who should control, determine, or adjudicate the nation. The national pause that Canada’s centenary inspired coincided with the seventh generation bringing to the national table different stories and strong articulations. The Native Renaissance forced people to remember the past, and this remembrance was not prescribed by the dictates of romantic nationalism. This narrative needed to forget in order to develop its preconceived fruition. However, people were forced to recognize that Indigenous gods and Indigenous authorities were both very strong and alive in this place now being celebrated as Canada. In comparison to those whose ancestry could be traced back to colonizers or the past which controlled the impulses of romantic nationalism, Aboriginal peoples possessed cultural histories of which they could be proud, old stories with which they were familiar, heroes of magnitude and longevity, and leaders with authority and sacred voices. Those peoples who traced their legacies back to a non-Indigenous past were led to position their stories in relation to a tenuous ‘national’ authority or to attempt to borrow authority from the wealth of panIndian material now ‘available.’ The latter should have commanded more sophisticated reaction and analysis, but the Native Renaissance – recognized broadly as a force within the web of romantic nationalism – got caught. Russell Brown’s ‘Time of the Redmen’ also drew attention to Rudy Wiebe’s The Temptations of Big Bear (1973), Alexander Knox’s Night of the White Bear (1971), James Bacque’s A Man of Talent (1972), R.D. Symon’s North by West: Two Stories from the Frontier (1973), Alan Fry’s The Revenge of Annie Charlie (1973), and Robert Kroetsch’s Gone Indian (1973). While Brown appreciated some of these works and criticized others mercilessly, his reviews were held together by a strong argument: ‘Indian material’ (92) had indisputably become very attractive to non-Native Canadian writers. Brown pinpointed a new trend in Canadian writing. As Terry Goldie has also observed, the literature of ‘the late sixties and early seventies’ was characterized by a sort of ‘back-tothe-land-primitivism’ (‘Getting It Right’ 64), or what Brown would call ‘the new pastoralism’ (‘Time of the Redmen’ 92) of the times. Goldie further claimed that this characteristic was indicative of a desire ‘to become as though native’ (‘Getting It Right’ 79), a conclusion anticipated by D.G. Jones in Butterfly on Rock (1970): ‘… it is our North American inheritance embodied here in the Indians that idles about

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and hides, waiting to be given a voice … [T]he voice that demands to be heard is the voice of the land’ (5). There was certainly some impetus to conflate land, the sacred, and the indigene, though this trend does not seem to derive from Aboriginal literature or activism. In addition to the novels which Brown had mentioned, Howard O’Hagan’s Tay John, first published in 1939 and resurrected in 1960, enabled the reading public to truly appreciate the mythic story of a prophet of sorts who led the Shuswap, or Yellowhead, Nation through the lands of the Canadian West in search of a promised land. Had the dominant narrative of romantic nationalism not been so applicable, Canadian criticism might have seen an early analysis of British Columbian gothic that would let us trace connections today between this text and Eden Robinson’s Traplines (1996) and Monkey Beach (2000). However, writers, who would, in turn, shape the critics of the 1980s, forged up the hill pointed to a century before. Patrick Lane wrote ‘Treaty-Trip from Shulus Reservation’ (1966), a poem which created a mournful portrait of a ‘raven woman’ who ‘knelt in the dirt / like some aged black / supplicant bird’ (37); John Newlove created ‘The Pride’ (1968), a monument in verse which ended up insinuating that ‘the grand poem / of our land’ (109) was no less than the Aboriginal populations of Canada; and Rudy Wiebe rewrote the story of Almighty Voice in his ironic ‘Where Is the Voice Coming From?’ (1972). As well, Margaret Laurence’s first instalments of the Manawaka series, The Stone Angel (1964), The Fire-Dwellers (1969), and A Bird in the House (1970), posed divisions between the Métis family of Jules Tonnerre and the surrounding values of ‘white’ society. Later, in Laurence’s The Diviners (1974), the protagonist, Morag Gunn, would leave her husband for her Métis lover, giving birth to a daughter with Métis blood. Susan Musgrave’s collection of Haida-inspired verse, The Impstone (1976), included a poem appropriately called ‘Lure,’ because it connected the sensibility of the times with a benevolent and god-like trickster Raven who ‘carve[d] the / bone hollow / to help blow sickness / out’ and who ‘[beat] / his spirit-drum, [to tap] for his / spirit helper’ (98–9). Most memorably, there was Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing, complete with a narrator traipsing on a quasi-spiritual Indian quest, abandoning faith in the Canadian nation, and turning mad in the bush. Indian pictorials, symbols of what Terry Goldie would later call ‘desire,’ and, in turn, criticism which Len Findlay would dub ‘an analysis of the reified and commodified Indigene’ (309), had escaped her grasp.

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From the late-1960s on, many Canadian works quickly displayed an ‘Aboriginal presence.’ What Russell Brown referred to in the early 1970s as a ‘contemporary sense of existing in a Heraclitian flux’ (93) seemed to be popularly addressed by a turning to things Aboriginal. Revisionist studies of the development of Canadian literature would also record Aboriginal influences and presences. Leslie Monkman’s A Native Heritage: Images of the Indian in English-Canadian Literature would be a timely and appropriate addition to Canadian criticism in 1981. As Monkman indicated in his preface to this text, the early 1970s marked a time of change in Canadian literary scholarship since this decade seemed more open to considering how Aboriginal influences had manifested themselves in English-Canadian literature: This book developed out of a reaction against a prevalent notion in the 1960s that the Indian’s role in English-Canadian literature written by whites was relatively insignificant. In 1970, after initial encouragement from Gordon Roper, I began documenting a long tradition of white writers incorporating images of Indian culture into their work and argued for the importance of this pattern in a doctoral dissertation for York University in 1975.

While Monkman went on to discuss the image of the Indian in Canadian writing from the eighteenth century to the late twentieth, he began by situating his study against the changing attitudes of the 1970s: Only during the last decade has the importance of the Indian in Canadian literature been acknowledged. Limited surveys in the 1960s concluded that the role of the Indian was essentially minor. As late as 1976, the revised edition of the Literary History of Canada spoke of ‘the historical absence of an Indian presence in Canadian literature.’2 Yet in 1971, Dorothy Livesay called for a renewed examination of the roles of native peoples in English-Canadian literature and argued that ‘bit by bit and almost without being aware of it, the Canadian writer has had to find himself by finding the Indian.’3 Chapters in critical studies by Margaret Atwood, Elizabeth Waterston, and John Moss reflected qualified acceptance of Livesay’s argument, and increased interest in the Indian and his culture among contemporary poets, playwrights, and novelists reinforced this critical response. Surveying new publications in the spring of 1974,

122 Before the Country George Woodcock commented: ‘Indians are, this season, an even hotter topic than oil.’4 (3–4)

Monkman recognized that ‘development of this interest [in Native culture] by contemporary writers and critics continues an EnglishCanadian literary tradition,’ and he would, therefore, note a natural line of descent between Robert Rogers’s Ponteach; or, The Savages of America (1766) and Robertson Davies’ ‘Pontiac and the Green Man’ (1977) (4). However, despite the fact that Monkman recognized a very long-lived tradition in Canadian literature whereby ‘white writers have illuminated their own and their readers’ worlds through reference to Native cultures’ (3), he still had to acknowledge that the 1970s stood out as a climax of sorts in some kind of narrative. In Frye’s language, it could be said that Canadian literary history had begun to bear new ‘habits of metaphorical thought’ (Frye, ‘Conclusion to LHC,’ in BG 232), or had entered a new phase of mythological maturity. Speaking in 1977 of Newlove’s ‘The Pride,’ Frye maintained that ‘the Indians symbolize[d] a primitive mythological imagination which [was] being reborn in us’ (‘Haunted by Lack of Ghosts,’ in Gorjup 131). For Frye, Newlove’s poem seemed to be an indication that ‘the white Canadians, in their imaginations, [were] no longer immigrants but [that they were] becoming indigenous, recreating the kind of attitudes appropriate to people who really belong here’ (131). What Frye was characteristically suggesting is that a new mythology was being born out of a revisioning of history and an embracing of mythology; at this point in history, Aboriginal values and beliefs seemed to provide the latter. In ‘The Pride,’ Newlove suggested it was possible to create new stories by turning to Aboriginal literatures and cosmologies. Newlove’s narrator begins by drawing attention to images and stories of Aboriginal peoples which have been created through popular conceptions and misconceptions: to ‘… the pawnees / in their earthlodge villages’ (Black Night Window 105), to those stricken by ‘smallpox’ (105), and to the Cree, who fought back ‘… with good guns / creating terror in athabaska’ (105). However, the sense of the poem soon changes. ‘This western country crammed / with the ghosts of indians’ (106) is witness that the ‘… spirit / of the wind ethlinga’ (106), ‘that black joker, broken- / jawed raven’ (106), ‘thunderbird hilunga’ (106), and ‘kwunusela’ (107) are still alive and strong and capable of rewriting

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histories such as those recorded by the ‘chronicler’ who would have readers understand the ‘teton sioux’ as a ‘… wild / fickle people’ (105): they are all ready to be found, the legends and the people, or all their ghosts and memories, whatever is strong enough to be remembered.

(107)

Newlove’s narrator suggests these histories and stories will provide direction for those who do not share this history: the pride, the grand poem of our land, of the earth itself, will come, welcome, and sought for, and found, in a line of running verse, sweating, our pride; … we are no longer lonely but have roots

(109)

These are not the roots, however, of which Kitty Smith speaks in the epigraph to this chapter. These are not anything comparable to what Muecke and Shoemaker speak of in their discussion of ancestral transformations in which ‘Dreaming Ancestors’ left their ‘marks,’ ‘naming all the places, singing life into things and leaving a massive culture whose signs were there to be read: constellations in the sky, powerful rivers, sacred places’ (31). These are the roots planted by those such as Dewart, Lampman, MacMechan, E.K. Brown, and Frye. Newlove’s poem ends with a self-conscious attempt to embrace Aboriginal mythologies: … the indians are not composed of the romantic stories about them, or of the stories they tell only, but

124 Before the Country still ride the soil in us, dry bones a part of the dust in our eyes, needed and troubling in the glare, in our breath, in our ears, in our mouths, in our bodies entire, in our minds, until at last we become them in our desires, our desires, mirages, mirrors, that are theirs, hardriding desires, and they become our true forebears, moulded by the same wind or rain

(111)

A stolid believer in the myth he and others had inherited, Newlove predictably attempts to reverse traditional power imbalances that had grown to dominate Canada: ‘… in this land we / are their people, come / back to life’ (111). The ‘roots’ which Newlove’s narrator recognizes to be the true roots of this land – the Aboriginal histories, values, cultures, and beliefs which are ‘… all ready / to be found’ – are discovered by the narrator with a sense of surprise, inevitably related to the assumption that Aboriginal histories, or ‘roots,’ were waiting to be discovered. Newlove attempts to revise and dispel the myth of the empty land by forcefully drawing attention to a Native presence; despite his efforts, Newlove is forcefully wed to an inherited national myth. It could be said that the time period during which Newlove was writing was commensurate with a heightened consciousness about, and engagement with, inherited colonial archetypes and that one of the results of this new awareness was the desire to fashion new myths out of old ones. While the myth of the empty land had attended late nineteenth-century nationalism in the sense that it had accompanied a desire to forget past history, in ‘The Pride’ it appears again by accompanying a desire to rewrite the past. If we understand Newlove’s poem to be representative of a larger, collective, and national attempt to embrace perspectives which have grown ‘organically’ with this world and to therefore contest such myths as the myth of the empty land, Newlove’s ‘The Pride’ indicates

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that James Reaney’s earlier prediction was valid. Reaney had provocatively suggested in 1962 that Canadian writers who were intent on providing new and verifiable national mythologies would inevitably be led to embrace Indigenous ‘spirit[s] of creation’ (112) and the ravens of an old world turned new. However, ‘The Pride’ is really more of a comment on the possibility of creating new myths than it is a convincing portrait of ‘organic’ union between national and Aboriginal epistemologies. ‘The Pride’ prophesies that there would be many attempts to embrace the true ‘pride’ of this land in the near future, but would this ‘pride’ and these ‘spirits’ (Reaney) be easily embraced? Would Canadian literature become testimony to the idea that Canadian writers were beginning to ‘un-name’ imported and colonial ‘experience[s]’ (Kroetsch, ‘Unhiding the Hidden,’ in LTW 58) by turning to Aboriginal influences? It is impossible to begin answering these questions without drawing immediate attention to George Ryga’s The Ecstasy of Rita Joe. The second of Ryga’s plays, The Ecstasy of Rita Joe was a response to the production demands of Canadian theatre and funding agencies in 1967; it was also a response to the political and social fervour of its day. Interested in promoting works which appealed to nationalism during Canada’s centenary, the Canadian government offered subsidies to any theatre which would produce new plays, and Malcolm Black, then the artistic director of the Vancouver Playhouse in British Columbia, decided to respond to this demand and promise of money. As Christopher Innes explains in Politics and the Playwright: George Ryga, Black was ‘intending to produce a whole season of Canadian works at the Vancouver Playhouse … when he came across a short paragraph in a 1966 Vancouver newspaper reporting the murder of an Indian girl, whose body had been found in a rooming house in the slum area of the city’ (29). Black approached the Ukranian-Canadian writer George Ryga who, at this time, was best known for the short stories he had written for CBC Radio during the 1960s. Black suggested Ryga consider writing a play based on the news clip (Innes 30). The result was The Ecstasy of Rita Joe, first performed at the Playhouse Theatre in Vancouver, British Columbia, on 23 November 1967 and later re-staged at the official opening of the National Arts Centre in Ottawa in 1969. Did Ryga fully anticipate what it would mean to engage with that newspaper clipping? For me, that one sentence in Innes’s study of Ryga is haunting, for how many Indian bodies were to be found in

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Canada’s makeshift rooms, in the slum areas of this nation? It was not until 2002 that the Mushuau Innu of Davis Inlet (Utshimassits) began to see what the Canadian government had been promising for so long: new homes and relocation from a chunk of unprotected rock in the middle of the Atlantic (a perfect place to hide a concentrated example of Canada’s human rights’ violations) to Natuashish. In 1995, the Royal Commission on Aboriginal People would record that ‘suicide in Canada among Native people between the ages of 12 to 25 is the highest in the world,’ a figure which provides the epigraph for Armand Garnet Ruffo’s ‘World View,’ a poem depicting the Aboriginal ‘… wounded, shot by accident, a hunting accident, / [in] a grand expedition so big it changed the face of the world’ (56). The expedition spoken of is colonial ‘discovery,’ nation building, and the search for ‘railroads and gold mines,’ ‘oil’ and ‘blood’ (Ruffo 56): … And wounded, that’s us too, the walking wounded. … As another stands to dance almost believing she’s in a birthing room getting her parts repaired before the hole spills out all she has managed to save of herself, while the one over there with eyes of black water sits and stares, hand up, calling for help but sinking all the same, eyes pulled back by an anchor no less than memory’s hard fuck.

(56)

Could this be part of the history and memory non-Aboriginal writers had wanted to borrow, or use by forgetting, in an attempt to serve the interests of national narrative security? It is almost impossible to understand or give words to a systematic and programmatic attempt to eradicate a people, though Ruffo and many other poets continue to chronicle that very reality: … Oh sister! Oh Brother! You still clenched and weeping for your dead brother and sister, mother and father

Day of Atonement 127 who shot themselves after drinking and sniffing themselves mad because they thought they had lost faith in our ability to heal our earth, heal ourselves.

When Ryga chose to create a play based on that ‘clipping,’ he had decided to engage with nothing less than a record of holocaust. Such an act could only be met by the most troubling and powerful of spirits, those which also speak and are spoken of in Oodgeroo Noonuccal’s poem ‘The Past’: Let no one say the past is dead. The past is all about us and within. Haunted by tribal memories, I know This little now, this accidental present Is not the all of me, whose long making Is so much of the past … But a thousand thousand camp fires in the forest Are in my blood. Let no one tell me the past is wholly gone … (‘The Past’ 92; in Shoemaker 129)

The tension embodied in this moment when, attempting to produce a work of art for nationalist celebration, Ryga turned to a history that could never be part of such praise for nationhood ultimately frames Tomson Highway’s novel Kiss of the Fur Queen (1998). His use of two epigraphs reveals the tenuous logic in the belief that Canada’s past could be ‘consumed as by fire’ (Eliade) in this nation’s search for a new beginning: ‘Use your utmost endeavours to dissuade the Indians from excessive indulgence in the practice of dancing’ – From a letter by Duncan Campbell Scott, Deputy Superintendent General of the Department of Indian Affairs, Ottawa, Canada [,] sent out as a circular on December 15, 1921. ‘At night, when the streets of your cities and villages are silent, they will throng with the returning hosts that once filled them, and still love this beautiful land.

128 Before the Country The whiteman will never be alone. Let him be just and deal kindly with my people. For the dead are not powerless.’ – Chief Seattle of the Squamish, 1853, translated by Dr. Henry Smith.

As Stan Dragland notes in his study of Duncan Campbell Scott, Floating Voice: Duncan Campbell Scott and the Literature of Treaty 9, ‘… the national identity that Scott and his contemporaries conceived of [was] as a solid intelligible unity that the future would eventually produce’ (14). However, as Chief Seattle’s statement makes clear, such an ‘intelligible unity’ was not intelligible to either ‘returning hosts’ or their living kin. While The Ecstasy of Rita Joe is now considered romantic, reductive, and reliant on too many stereotypes, it was heralded as a forceful depiction of what needed to be seen in 1967 – the long-term effects of systematic attempts to destroy Aboriginal peoples. The inclusion of Chief Dan George in the original cast added a vitality and authority to the play, which means that it is still recognized today by many Aboriginal peoples and artists as an influential vehicle in contemporary, Native literary history. Lee Maracle claims that The Ecstasy of Rita Joe is a ‘classic,’ that ‘it remains hauntingly true and tremendously healing for all of us, Canadian and first-nations people alike’ (‘A Question of Voice’ D9). Today, almost forty years after the first production and in a world of theatre which now includes Tomson Highway, Daniel David Moses, Monique Mojica, and Drew Hayden Taylor, The Ecstasy of Rita Joe is a cardboard representation of a history which has been explored in more sophisticated ways. However, during its moment, it was shocking and effective. Ryga presented a portrait of West Coast Indians caught in the foreign and unwelcoming city of Vancouver; he painted a memorable image of desperation and despair. Originally from the Cariboo country of British Columbia, Rita Joe, the play’s main character, has come to the city only to spend most of her time on the streets and in court. When the play opens, Rita Joe is charged with vagrancy and prostitution; she is defending herself in front of a magistrate for the seventh time in one year. Like her childhood lover, Jamie Paul, Rita Joe feels lost in a world that does not understand her, and when she is sentenced to thirty days in prison, the magistrate lets loose a prophecy full of hate for Rita Joe and her culture: ‘You’ll be back … always be back … growing older, tougher … filthier … looking more like stone and prison bars … the lines in your face will tell everyone who sees you about prison windows and prison food’ (113). Rita Joe will not return, and the magistrate’s

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sentiments will reign. At the end of the play, Rita Joe is raped and killed; her lover, Jamie Paul, is pushed in front of a train. This play was unsettling and lauded in reviews. Those who saw the play during its first performance in Vancouver stepped out of the insular world of theatre onto Vancouver’s downtown strip, well-known for the homeless, the dislocated, the dispossessed. They were confronted by what this play had shown. Joy Coghill, who succeeded Malcolm Black in 1967 as artistic director of the Playhouse Theatre and who produced The Ecstasy of Rita Joe, explains that the tension within the theatre was dense and memorable: [I]t wasn’t taken as a sort of dramatic event that you applauded afterwards. It was such a moving experience that people didn’t want to clap. They simply were stunned in some very basic way. The performance ended with all the actors appearing from nowhere, coming out to stand looking at the audience. And as they walked away the audience always just sat there. The cast would be out of the theatre and up at the Alcazar drinking beer together, and the audience was still sitting there. Then gradually one person would move, and another, and the theatre slowly emptied. (Quoted in Innes 51)

The Ecstasy of Rita Joe indicated it was time for this nation’s citizens to rethink their past. For writers, it also meant that it was time to rethink a literary past and reconsider the relationship between myth and history. As Innes points out, in 1967, ‘With the upsurge of cultural consciousness across Canada and the new demands on Canadian artists, it was time for myth-making’ (34). However, what myths could be made out of the recognition that Canadian history shared a relation with holocaust? And what myths could be made out of a recognition of holocaust when such a recognition accompanied this nation’s most significant rite of passage, which was supposed to efface and erase remembrance that stood in its path of predicted forgetting? This is a tricky question to answer, but The Ecstasy of Rita Joe serves to suggest that the myths which would be created out of the nexus between a celebration of this nation’s centenary and the revisiting of the history exposed during the 1960s and 1970s would be unfamiliar. At the very least, these myths would be untraditional. On the one hand, Canada’s centenary was an important ritual that encouraged people to think about the past and question their colonial legacies and dependencies. This was a time ripe for mythologizing.

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Canada had had her first real birthday. The nation was complete. All provinces had joined Confederation, and the nation could look forward to a new beginning of sorts. Or so it seemed. On the other hand, at the same time that Canada’s centenary seemed to provide a new slate for the basis of a new beginning, this Native Renaissance made people remember the past – in large part, a devastating one. As First Nations writing and political actions recorded, and as The Ecstasy of Rita Joe underscored, the last four hundred years of Aboriginal history were, among other things, a record of holocaust; this history made Canadian citizens aware their lands were not spot free, that something horrible had happened. Public declarations and Native writing also made citizens aware that something was continuing to happen. Many sources reiterated that suffering was widespread and rampant. Residential schools had left their ugly marks on thousands of Indian children; languages were in danger; the land had been taken and destroyed. Suicide rates were, and still are, far higher for Aboriginal populations than for non-Aboriginal ones. The rape of Indian women, a tiresome fixation in non-female writing, but a reality, was underscored. If, before this point, Canadians had conceived of their lands as being without an ‘internal crisis’ (E.K. Brown 20), the literature which grew out of the Renaissance and the social actions which grew out of the Native Cultural Renaissance made people rethink their naïve or self-serving suppositions. Dewart, Lampman, MacMechan, Brown, and Frye had argued that some kind of social revolution was necessary for the creation of traditional national mythologies, the same idea which Eliade had forwarded when he theorized the past could be forgotten in significant ritual and swept away to make room for a new beginning. What these Canadian critics were actually anticipating was a revolution that would allow this nation to collectively forget the past and begin again as a new entity. However, during the 1960s and 1970s, Aboriginal writers and spokespeople were intent on providing alternative histories and educating the uneducated because the Canadian community, in Benedict Anderson’s phrase, had imagined a certain ‘image of … communion’ (6) which could not sanely include terms granted by conquest. For Aboriginal nations, Canada had already forgotten, and it would not be allowed to forget again. What attended this act of remembrance, though, was a forceful mythological reaction which had little, or no, schooling in Aboriginal epistemologies.

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If Canada’s centenary ever had the chance to become something akin to that ritual which provides the basis for an originary moment, this pan-Indian revolution of the 1960s and 1970s quashed that possibility. Pan-Canadian nationalism, Canada’s own history, denied Canada the possibility of that originary moment which is capable of consuming the past ‘as by fire’ (Eliade) and providing the basis for a traditional body of mythology. Thus, works such as The Ecstasy of Rita Joe, which not only included a picture of this past but were also dependent on this past to provide their story, bear witness to the failure of Canada’s ‘Day of Atonement.’ This ritual or rite of passage could not precipitate a traditional impulse to forget and to create a new calendar of national pride because this Native Renaissance urged people to remember and recognize that this nation was a long way off from any kind of atonement. Ironically, the local matter which Brian Parker said had finally provided a mythic base for Canadian drama with the emergence of The Ecstasy of Rita Joe,5 grows out of revolutionary ideals which put nationalism in check. We may praise Ryga, as Parker has, for combining ‘local subject matter with various experiments in spatial form’ (187) and for thus putting an end to the question ‘Is there a Canadian drama?’ (Parker). However, this play and its ‘new’ characteristics reveal the untraditional nature of this mythological moment. New Canadian myths would be born out of undeniable tensions. Even though the trajectory of romantic nationalism had been arrested, its mythological and archetypal informants spiralled and consistently reappeared. Mythology itself seemed to be in trauma. Ryga and Cohen were not alone, and their self-reflexive attempts to make sense of history might be understood as the ancestors of a work such as George Bowering’s Burning Water (1980). An ironic rewriting of the voyages of Captain George Vancouver, the British explorer who charted the west coast of current-day British Columbia between 1792 and 1794, Burning Water is, like Cohen’s rewriting of Tekakwitha, suspect from the start. While Bowering’s narrator is not necessarily a liar, he certainly is a participant in a playful history. We are aware we are reading a story. ‘George’ – the author himself – claims that ‘we are making a story, after all, as we have always been, standing and speaking together to make up a history, a real historical fiction’ (prologue). From this moment on, the process of storytelling is underscored. More specifically, it is this emphasis on the process of storytelling that serves to elucidate the idea that everything else – most definitely history – is

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also part of a fiction. Cultural stereotypes become the butt of many a joke, and, as the following passage indicates, serve to question historical ‘truths’ which have come to define this nation: A Yankee named Magee stepped out of the nearby copse with a donkey loaded down with supplies. He held his hand up, palm forward. ‘How!’ he said, in a deep voice. The two Indians made their faces look patient. ‘What is this “How”?’ asked the first Indian of his companion. ‘Search me,’ said the second Indian. ‘But we may as well go along with him.’ He put his hand up in his best imitation of the skin-covered stranger. ‘Aeh, shit!’ he said. ‘Do you fellows want to buy some whiskey?’ asked Magee in his own language, taking a bottle out of his saddlebag. ‘No thanks,’ said the second Indian in his own language. ‘Guns?’ ‘No thanks.’ ‘You want to trade some waterfront property for some mirrors and necklaces?’ ‘I wouldn’t mind having one of those mirrors,’ said the first Indian to the second Indian. ‘Offer him a fish,’ said the second Indian. (199–200)

Bowering resurrects national stereotypes in order to undermine them and comment on the process of mythologizing; he plays with stereotypes to expose ludicrous notions which serve to define Native peoples. This is funny stuff, but Bowering links such moments to the more serious recognition that there is some kind of price to be paid for the inability to understand other cultures. Vancouver and his men have come to this world with preconceived ideas and questions which are impediments to any discovery of truth. In the following passage, Menzies, the ship’s botanist, confronts his ‘Indian friends’ (111), attempting to glean some knowledge about cannibalism, a myth which dominated early conceptions of the ‘new world’ and which served to endorse the opinion that Aboriginal peoples were barbarian and fit prey to be conquered: ‘During the general run of things, in times of great hunger, or in the course of particular ceremonies, do your people ever eat a little bit of

Day of Atonement 133 human bodies? I’m not accusing you now, you understand. It is my vocation to collect knowledge for my people, and this I do without blaming anyone for anything.’ ‘I have never eaten a person,’ said the first Indian. ‘I also am innocent of eating any person,’ said the second Indian … ‘Is there any tradition in your culture of eating people? Slaves or elders or captives, anything of that sort?’ The two Red Men looked at one another and then toward the forest where they would go if things worked out. ‘It seems as if I did hear something once about our forefathers eating people long ago before the time of the Great Flood,’ offered the first Indian. ‘Earlier this summer we found a village that had been abandoned within the month. It was attended by heads on sticks, and human bones thrown into the fire,’ said Menzies, examining the cheeks of a sockeye. ‘There is a rumour, unsubstantiated, that a remnant of that ancient people-eating society survives. They are entirely isolated, of course,’ said the second Indian. ‘Nobody I know has ever come across them …’ ‘Uh, one more question, I pray you,’ said Menzies, walking with them. ‘We will do our best to supply an answer,’ said the first Indian. ‘Thank you,’ said Menzies. ‘My question is, and I know that you can only tell me what you have heard, and I know that knowledge is sketchy in this area because the activity is so rare. But I would like to know for what purpose these elusive people-eaters eat people.’ (112–13)

Whatever truth Menzies is in search of has already been constructed by his own frame of reference; his circular questioning serves to underscore that this game of cultural exchange can, at best, end in stalemate. What is most ironic is that the outcome of this game will shape history and the textbooks used to instruct the British and Canadians. As the increasingly insane Captain Vancouver explains to Mr Whidbey, these lessons will all be given to the grand disseminators of knowledge upon their arrival home: ‘Mr. Whidbey,’ he said, ‘we shall return to Britain, and we shall return not as fools but as sailors who have worked harder than any other men in the history of the sea. Do you know what we have worked so hard for? To bring detailed and correct information from around the world to lay before powerful men who live on speculations and require miracles.’ (236)

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If this is the history we are left with, and if this is the history upon which the Canadian nation has been built, then God help us one and all, Bowering seems to be saying. Bowering’s history lesson not only serves to provide a new-world comedy. Bowering’s Burning Water also exposes the violence upon which the foundations of this nation have been built. Taken aback by a convoy of six canoes they initially deem to be a friendly group but whom they quickly understand to be a ‘thieving party’ (218), Vancouver and his men fire on those Indians who, ‘without any address to the white men’ (219), begin helping themselves to English property. The narrator’s description of the aftermath of this confrontation ironically underscores and undermines the violence which history books have so often evaded in their depictions of Canada’s great explorers: When it was all over there were two wounded sailors, and eight dead Indians, some of them probably sons of the gang’s leader. Vancouver had slumped onto the wobbly stool made for him by the late carpenter’s mate. The last dying Indian was brought to him and dumped at his feet. Menzies looked him over and signaled that he was through. ‘What was this all about?’ Vancouver asked the teeth-gritting man in Tlingit. ‘You Russians!’ grated the man. ‘No, we are not Russians.’ ‘You Yankees, you Russians and you Yankees! You make us go to war with our sacred enemies, the Tsetsaut, and then you take all our sea otter furs and give us muskets that do not function. You rabbit fuckers!’ Whereupon saying, he died. ‘I am really getting sick of all this,’ said Vancouver. He ordered the eight bodies to be carried to the edge of a defile and dumped over. (219–20)

In this depiction of destruction, Vancouver is exposed as brutal. On the one hand, this passage suggests that in the face of death and holocaust it little matters what nationality defines a perpetrator. On the other hand, this novel seems to suggest that nationalities do not deserve remembrance when they have been involved in such a pitiful past. It is with the erasure of history and trace that this novel ends. While Vancouver actually died in London in May 1798 (Wainright 88), Bowering’s Vancouver is shot by Menzies at the novel’s end and consumed by the Pacific Ocean: ‘Vancouver pulled himself to his feet, and then full of pain, leaned upon the rail. A gust of wind punched into the mainsail,

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and every man took a little shuffling step to stay erect, save their captain who seemed to be lifted by some strength unwitnessed, over the rail and into the unsolicitous sea’ (258). Bowering rewrites history so that Vancouver becomes prey to that which he attempted to chart and discover without any understanding. Vancouver is cast, by some unknown and undefinable source, into the waters which he has pioneered. This is poetic justice, but this ending may also be indicative of some kind of mythological pattern which was an impulsive reaction to the history with which Burning Water deals. By virtue of being impulsively and mythologically driven, Burning Water, like other texts of its type and time, reacted with dichotomies and psychomachiac informants. Burning Water suggests that to confront such a myth as that of the empty land – a myth which allowed a space for the erasure of Aboriginal histories and for the crimes of colonization – is to confront the implications or philosophies behind this myth. In turn, Bowering’s text suggests that a recognition of these philosophies leads to a desire to erase Canadian history or engage with it in such a way that it is significantly rewritten. However, what pattern reveals itself in these desires and attempts to rewrite history? What mythological need is being represented here? How do these reflections suggest that Bowering is responding to a ‘national’ anxiety with notable Aboriginal influences? Bowering throws a famous Canadian explorer over the side of his ship with poetic justice and wipes his hands of the whole messy legend. George Ryga leaves for dead two potential Indian heroes who had been prey to the dictates of the Canadian courtroom. Cohen makes a joke out of the recognition that an English-Canadian historian and a Québécois madman could never revive the spirit of Catherine Tekakwitha. Just what is happening in a mythological sense in these works?

5 Searching for Sun-Gods robert kroestch’s B a d l a n d s and sky lee’s D i s a p p e a r i n g M o o n C a f e

There is no record of the lyrics of these songs or the music to which the words were set. What remains of [the Beothuk] now is the property of brooks and ponds and marshes, of caribou and fox moving through the interior as they were sung two hundred years ago. Of each black spruce and fir offering up its single note to the air where not a soul is left to hear it. – Michael Crummey, River Thieves, 410 Our Art is of the Moon and plays with shadows, while Greek art is of the Sun and deals directly with things. – Oscar Wilde, De Profundis, 954

Published in 1975 in the midst of the Native Cultural Renaissance and the Native Literary Renaissance, Robert Kroetsch’s Badlands records the tensions that grew out of this period in Canadian history and registers the reality of a changing mythological climate in Canada. Badlands is a road map in a discussion of Aboriginal influence in post-centenary Canadian mythology. In addition to the significance of the novel’s historical position, Kroetsch’s literary career and public comments underscore the recognition that Aboriginal influences have incessantly played a key role in his creative works. The fifth of Kroetsch’s novels, Badlands follows on the heels of Gone Indian (1973), a work that attempted to make use of the Indian trickster figure; it precedes the publication of Kroetsch’s second book of poetry, The Stone Hammer Poems (1975), a collection that includes a section entitled ‘Old Man Stories.’ This portion of Kroetsch’s work was influenced by his exposure to traditional Blackfoot literature, an influence felt in Badlands. This

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text is a self-conscious attempt to provide a contemporary form of myth, carrying impulses contemporary with the time period during which it was published. Badlands is a story told in retrospect by Anna Dawe, a forty-fiveyear-old woman, unmarried and living in a ‘winterized summer place on the shore of Georgian Bay’ (3). Anna is isolated, entirely alone in southern Ontario. Both Anna’s mother, Elisabeth, and father, William, have died, and Anna is without siblings. Although it takes nearly the entire novel to piece together a family history from the scattered pieces of information Anna offers, we find out the following. In 1916, William Dawe married Elisabeth Kilbourne; he then left for the Alberta badlands. Dawe would be possessed by wanderlust his whole life, spending all his time engaged in fieldwork away from his family, returning only once each autumn, and for only one evening, to his wife’s bed. In October 1926, Dawe would stay a third night with his wife in Ontario. The result of this ‘lengthy’ visit would be Elisabeth’s pregnancy and their daughter, Anna. Until Dawe returned home to visit his dying wife in October 1942, when Anna was fifteen years old, Anna and Elisabeth would know their father and husband, respectively, only through the field notes which he kept sending home. After the death of Anna’s mother, Dawe would not go into the field again; for the next twenty years, and although he would remain in Ontario, he would continually hire himself out to museums and keep away from home. In 1962, Dawe planned his death. He rowed out into Georgian Bay in an old, red canoe. Anna begins writing the story we are reading in 1972, and Badlands is ostensibly Anna’s attempt to recreate the story of William Dawe and his crew who, in 1916, scoured the badlands of Alberta in search of dinosaur bones. Anna relies upon Dawe’s old field notes, and her imagination, to weave the narrative. We find out Dawe’s expedition was to be a failure from the start. Dawe and his men end up recovering almost the entire skeleton of what will come to be known as Daweosaurus, but the trip is a disaster. Dawe is accompanied by Web, an oversexed and under-skilled deckhand who, at the end of the whole ordeal, joins the army, goes overseas, and is never heard from again. He is also joined by Grizzly, a Chinese cook who speaks only when not spoken to, and Claude McBride, a skilled hand who hates the leader and ends up jumping ship. McBride is replaced by Tune, a young, fat kid who has two weeks’ experience with dynamite; he blows himself up with his first blast. A photographer, Michael Sinnott, appears from

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time to time taking shots of Dawe’s expedition, and it really comes as no surprise to find out later that this man has only one good eye. Anna Dawe is most interested, though, in the Blackfoot woman who follows Dawe’s crew in hopes of finding her husband, who has gone off to the World War on an ‘iron ship’ (148). This is Anna’s namesake, a woman who kept Dawe company for two weeks of the season and a woman who kept the rest of the men happy, too, as the tale goes. Badlands has all the makings of a formal myth, including lack, loss, exile, and rescue, or transformation. The story also offers a reward and delivers a prophecy. Dawe and his wife lack an heir or progeny until 1916 when Dawe returns home and breaks a cycle he has repeated throughout his life. He stays this time for three nights; this aberration, like most in classic folktales, produces a result – Anna Dawe. Loss of a sort is restored, and Dawe imposes a type of self-exile upon himself, leaving his wife and child for the Alberta badlands. Here, Dawe enters into a type of Orphic quest,1 battling the harshness of the badlands with as much determination as any hero should have, although McBride – the one who disappears from the narrative – is ‘the only one with the ability to become a hero’ (45). Dawe’s inept crew members – each lacking something fundamental to the success of the mission – give this folktale a classic, comic structure, and Dawe is rewarded in part (and only in part because his Daweosaurus will forever lack a tail) by unearthing a nearly complete dinosaur skeleton. The story’s prophecy is not clearly articulated but is found at the end of the novel in an ambiguous image. Anna Dawe has found her namesake, Anna Yellowbird, and the two have travelled, not down river, as the Dawe expedition had in 1916, but upriver to the source of the Red Deer. Drunk out of their minds on gin and beer, the two women look up to the sky to see a grizzly bear dangling in a net from beneath a helicopter. The pilot is unaware that the tranquillizer has worn off, that the bear has awakened too soon: ‘The grizzly had stirred itself awake … had kicked itself loose, was foaming at the mouth, was shitting’ (268). In a ritualistic manner, Anna throws her father’s field notes away. She ends her story by describing herself and her companion walking out of the mountains together: Anna and I walked out of there together. We walked through the night, stumbling our way by the light of the stars; we looked at those billions of years of light, and Anna looked at the stars and then at me, and she did

Searching for Sun-Gods 139 not mention dinosaurs or men or their discipline or their courage or their goddamned honour or their goddamned fucking fame or their goddamned fucking death-fucking death. ‘Like pissing in the ocean,’ she said; that Anna, who had never seen the ocean. We sang together, that awful song about rolling over in the clover, because that was the only song we both remembered and could sing long enough to see us through. We walked out of there hand in hand, arm in arm, holding each other. We walked all the way out. And we did not once look back, not once, ever. (270)

The symbolic weight of this image and Kroetsch’s novel is defined by the last line, the recognition that Anna and Anna refuse to look behind. The intricacies of this prophecy can only fully be understood, though, by first recognizing that Badlands is obsessed with myth and the process of storytelling. The initial epigraph to Kroetsch’s novel is taken from a well-known Nez Percé story entitled ‘Coyote and the Shadow People’: But suddenly a joyous impulsion seized him: the joy of having his wife again overwhelmed him. He jumped to his feet and rushed over to embrace her. His wife cried out, ‘Stop! Stop! Coyote! Do not touch me. Stop!’ Her warning had no effect. Coyote rushed over to his wife and just as he touched her body she vanished. She disappeared – returned to the shadowland.

This story is recorded in a volume called Nez Percé Texts, a collection of tales told by narrator Wayi’latpu to editor and translator Archie Phinney. Coyote is inconsolable since he greatly misses his dead wife. However, he is permitted by the ghost of the ‘Shadow People’ to see his loved one, to speak with her one more time. Coyote descends to the underworld, catches a glimpse of his wife, and ignores the advice given him. He reaches out to touch her. His wife disappears forever, and Coyote loses his chance to commune with her one more time. Kroetsch makes his readers aware of the importance of mythology even before they begin reading Badlands. This novel is also reliant on Canadian stereotypes which underscore a fictive process. Kroetsch sets his novel in the ‘wild west’ of Canada. Dawe must unearth skeletons from the ‘wind-burned, wind-scoured prairies of Alberta’ (25) to ‘grace the museums of the civilized world’ (37), or Ontario. The body of Anna Yellowbird, which Dawe possesses

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with as much respect as he explores the badlands themselves, also provides a counterpoint ‘to the memory of the civilized east, his home and his wife’ (195); the anarchic behaviour of an immoral crew in the middle of the bush contrasts sharply with an image of Dawe, who, when home, studies expedition reports ‘spread out on his desk’ (223). Readers are presented with the familiar notion that the height of this country’s civilization is to be found in Upper Canada, that anything west of this old bastion of power is necessarily less cultured. When Anna Dawe meets her namesake, Anna Yellowbird, stereotypes become more distinct. Anna Dawe, ‘the white woman in white, too well-dressed for either the weather or the place’ (259), contrasts sharply with the ‘pitiful young squaw’ (11), who is dressed in a ‘dirty blue sweater and … canvas shoes’ (256). Anna Dawe, epitome of Upper Canadian purity, is a middle-aged spinster and virgin, while Yellowbird ‘doesn’t know what virgin means’ (263). Kroetsch employs stereotypes that have been attacked by Janice Acoose, Beatrice Culleton, Maria Campbell, Tomson Highway, and many others.2 Yellowbird is the wild woman of the woods, a one-dimensional figure who bears the weight of what Terry Goldie would call another culture’s ‘desire,‘3 and who is not, therefore, a rounded character but a symbol. Anna Yellowbird is mistaken by Web for the ‘stump of a balsam poplar, an animal come to drink’ (23). Throughout Kroetsch’s text, she is presented as a kind of animal, and as one naturally destined to serve the sexual whims of any and every male whom she encounters. The mythmaking process of Badlands plays with the figure of Anna just as much as Kroetsch plays with fire. As Robert Lecker shows in his ontological survey of Badlands,4 the teller of this tale, Anna Dawe, is also a notorious liar. Anna consistently reminds her readers that she has no authority to which she can turn; the novel of Badlands becomes a contemporary ‘western yarn’ (45), as Anna puts it, a reflection that ‘there are no truths, only correspondences’ (45). We are consistently made aware that like Web, who is ‘a damned big talker’ (155), the narrator of Badlands is a tenuous authority. The novel is a self-consciously embellished narrative. However, just what sense can be made out of the fact that Kroetsch seems to be intent on underscoring a myth-making process in Badlands? What myth is he attempting to create? What myth is he attempting to destroy? Seeds sown by earlier national myth-seekers seem to dominate this work. Badlands is composed of a team of myth-seekers, as much as hunters of dinosaur bones, who look ‘down there’ (MacEwen), beneath the Cana-

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dian landscape, for some kind of verifiable meaning and record. However, there might be something else happening here. Unlike Dewart, Lampman, MacMechan, Brown, and their crew, Kroetsch self-consciously tests the faith behind his myth’s design. Badlands creates a story out of the tension between history and myth. Against this backdrop of Western buffoons, civilized Ontarians and wild Injuns, Kroetsch interrogates the notion of history as empirical truth; he ultimately shows how history itself is part of a myth-making process. The novel begins with a letter written by Anna Dawe. ‘[W]e are a people raised not on love letters or lyric poems or even cries of rebellion or ecstasy or pain or regret,’ Anna writes, ‘but rather old hoards of field notes’ (2). This claim echoes Dennis Lee’s Civil Elegies (1972), an extended examination of nation. Lee’s narrator believes Canada and its citizens are defined by a lack of self-awareness: Many were born in Canada, and living unlived lives they died of course but died truncated, stunted, never at home in native space and not yet citizens of a human body of kind. And it is Canada that specialized in this deprivation.

(33)

Sure, Canadians have their history, but Civil Elegies suggests these ‘field notes’ (BL 2) are paltry, embarrassing, and unable to provide any sense of collective pride and being. The rebellion of 1837 is a cartoon: … I saw regeneration twirl its blood and the rebels riding riderless down Yonge street, plain men much goaded by privilege – our other origin, and cried ‘Mackenzie knows a word, Mackenzie knows a meaning!’ but it was not true. Eight hundred-odd steely Canadians turned tail at the cabbage patch when a couple of bullets fizzed and the loyalists, scared skinny by the sound of their own gunfire, gawked and bolted south to the fort like rabbits, the rebels for their most part bolting north to the pub: the first spontaneous mutual retreat in the history of warfare. Canadians, in flight. (Civil Elegies 33–4)

For Kertzer, this poem indicates that Lee is ‘a nationalist without a nation’ (94): ‘At the end of the poem, an authentic national home

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remains a pious hope, but Lee trusts more in piety than in history. He has already shown that history, especially when pressured by modernity, corrupts the best intentions by turning them idolatrous’ (115). Confined and confused by this same nation, Anna Dawe can only buy her ‘gin by the case’ and, in a drunken stupor, ‘[imagine] to [herself] a past, an ancestor, a legend, a vision, a fate’ (Badlands 3). She must create a myth out of incomplete accounts and an ultimately disappointing sense of national history. Anna’s personal narrative and the story she tells about her father’s expedition record her sense of the futility of trying to understand history. Anna comes to the conclusion that she is ‘without a history’ (138), and her ‘fiction’ embodies this same kind of realization. These adventurous men, as we find out, cannot even understand what they are looking for. They are in search of dinosaur bones, but the ancient past to which these reptiles belong cannot be comprehended. When Anna has us look through the eyes of Web, the absurdity of the men’s adventure is underscored: ‘Seventy million years later. Whatever that meant. Seventy million, when he couldn’t grasp the notion of seventy’ (166). As Anna Dawe insinuates, part of the problem here is that the history for which Dawe and his men are searching is actually prehistory, having little or no relevance to the present. Ironically, in the middle of history in the making, in the middle of the Great War raging in Europe, Dawe searches for a past that can never be known. ‘[I]n his summer of 1916, in the Badlands of the Red Deer River,’ Anna imagines, ‘discovering the Mesozoic era, with all of Europe filling its earth with the bones of its own young – [Dawe] removed himself from time’ (139). It is not as if history is eluding Dawe and his men. It is not as if they have to be removed from time to find remnants of an understandable and tangible history; they just have not been trained to recognize the history of the world they are exploring. Web’s first discovery is not a dinosaur bone but a Blackfoot woman, Anna Yellowbird, who crawls out of a ‘mound of fresh, newly opened earth’ (5) on the edge of ‘an Indian or Métis burial ground’ (6). She knows of certain bones in the area, of ‘the place of the dead’ (8), but Dawe and his men have no interest in what she knows. Anna Yellowbird is dismissed by Dawe when she will not offer him any information about the bones he is interested in. He tells her, flat out, that they ‘have no place for women’ (9). She is a ‘pitiful young squaw’ (11). Dawe and his men cannot see beyond the limits of the cultural stereotypes to which they are heir. They do not recognize Anna as a person who is connected to a history they are

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digging up, one which defines the area with more relevance than reptiles of an ancient, unreachable past. It is no wonder that Dawe became ‘a man without a history’ (138), then, in ‘that summer of his glory’ (138). Dawe could never know pre-colonial history because he had never been properly trained to read it. He and his men are like Coyote when Coyote enters the shadowland. Dawe and his entourage are witless, unable to understand a world governed by forms of knowledge different than those which Dawe and his men possess. This lack of knowledge seems linked to the fact that Dawe and his crew cannot ‘read the land’ around them. The idea of romantically ‘reading the land’ conflates too easily with mystical understandings of Aboriginal cultures, and it is notable that Badlands will ultimately employ conflation to promote something between a challenging of its own belief systems and a revised version of romantic nationalism. Anna imagines how Dawe and his men reacted to the surrounding landscape. She underscores the limitations of their knowledge: The stiff blade of light came over the rimrock; the light grew from purple to a blue veil, from blue to red to orange; the tall and starkly outlined buttes emerged from the darkness. The buttes came as pyramids against the light; they came as mounds, as beehives, as cones. They had those forms of the past and yet they were not any landscape that Dawe had known, that Web had imagined. (21–2)

This smacks of MacEwen’s ‘Dark Pines.’ Unable to recognize that the badlands are full of history, Dawe and his men search ‘down there’ (MacEwen). They know there is something in this land that demands to be ‘told’ (MacEwen). Like MacEwen’s ‘explorer,’ these men are ‘sinking’ in a world they deem ‘elementary’ (MacEwen). The land does not reveal to them what the ‘dark pines’ of their minds are intent on finding because they are unable to understand that this land has never been empty, that there are layers of human history lying on top of dinosaur bones. While these men cannot understand the land, there is one person in the novel who predictably can – Anna Yellowbird. Anna Dawe tells us her father recorded the following description of Anna Yellowbird’s uncanny powers in his journal: ‘Didn’t find, in all those tons of debris, one fragment of fossil that was worth collecting, after a mere slip of an Indian girl, walking ignorantly along, reaching down with her eyes shut, picked up a piece of the dental battery of a hadrosaur’ (34). Here,

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Anna’s proclivity for discovering the bones which Dawe and his men cannot unearth until a later point (and only in an incomplete form) contrasts sharply with the inept crew. The reader discovers Anna is guided by the words and power of a shaman, a power which knows the land and which is turning Dawe’s hunt for bones into Anna’s own search for the land of the dead: [D]espite the Anglican if not Christian missionaries who taught her husband submission and love, she recalled a shaman whose whereabouts she did not know but whose sacred and recollected words she knew she must heed. And she found, was found by, three strange white men and a chinaman. And she knew, had known, watching the four of them leave Tail Creek in their hurry to be away from her necessary if imitation grave, it was the hunchbacked man, not the others, who could find the way to the place of the dead. Even as she vaguely knew, vaguely and yet vividly remembered, what the shaman had said: do not eat, lie in your grave, wait for the guide. And she had followed her guide so bravely she had preceded him to his own goal. (148)

Kroetsch underscores stereotypes which have come to be attacked. Anna is ‘the guide, helper, or shaman’ (Fee, ‘Romantic Nationalism’ 29), whom Margery Fee considers in her discussion of the use of Native peoples as symbols. Even the trickster-like Dawe, who bears ‘some talisman of splendid good fortune’ (BL 7) on his back, marking the route to the dead, is prey to Anna’s power. Instead of simply attacking the superficiality of Kroetsch’s portrayal of Anna, however, one might consider the manner in which Kroetsch blends ‘Indians,’ spirituality, and omniscience; the stereotypes upon which he is relying are indicative of mythological informants which are always, by their very nature, superficial and symbolic. This is not to say that mythology does not beg deconstruction; however, it must be put together first. Kroetsch somehow points to something beneath the dinosaur remains in Anna’s hand. As Frye said of the paintings of Emily Carr, ‘In Emily Carr, … the real focus of vision seems to be in the depth of the forest, behind the picture as it were’ (‘Letters in Canada’ [1952], in BG 10). What Frye was insinuating is that Carr’s work is not so much an artistic depiction of the West Coast as a mythological comment on that which has shaped peoples’ perceptions of British Columbia. Something similar could be said of Kroetsch’s Badlands: what is not

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seen is almost as important as what is seen. Anna Yellowbird roams the badlands of Alberta without food, relying on Grizzly to surreptitiously provide her with rations from the crew’s groceries. Signalled here is that disrespect of another culture and its land has resulted in near cultural devastation: there are no bison left to support Anna’s wandering lifestyle. The only bones missing in Kroetsch’s Badlands are those of the bison – they are not spoken of, definitely not seen. In this sense, we are made aware of absence, of what has been destroyed. Land, indigene, and absence are conflated in Kroetsch’s text. Together, they are larger than their separate parts. I would say they are symbolic of the sacred. This grand mythological understanding is no less reductive than the individual stereotypes which feed this basic informant – the sacred – in Canadian myth-making of the time. Badlands laments that Aboriginal histories, peoples, stories, and beliefs have been effaced by such myths as the myth of the empty land, ideologies which have attempted to threaten the Aboriginal legacies of Canada. However, it laments more than this. Badlands seems to lament that the loci – the metaphysical foundations – of Aboriginal cultures have been offended and threatened; it does so by pointing to many different layers of threatened Aboriginal histories, suggesting that the origins upon which Aboriginal cultures base themselves have been attacked. Digging as deep as he can, Dawe inevitably disturbs the dead, the spirits, the ‘sun-gods’ of this land. What Badlands seems to be suggesting is that the sacred has been offended. These comments on absence in Badlands share an affinity with memories from Kroetsch’s formative years as a young boy in Alberta. In The Lovely Treachery of Words, Kroetsch describes an experience he had one day as a child in Alberta which, he says, produced for him his ‘first lesson in the idea of absence’ (‘The Moment of the Discovery of America Continues,’ in LTW 2): I was a child – I don’t know how old – when my parents took me to Spring Lake, to a picnic … a few miles from the valley of the Battle River. I was playing in a large, shallow depression in the ground, a depression that somehow wasn’t natural … [My father] said, casually, that it was a buffalo wallow. It’s where buffalo rolled and scratched, he said … ‘What buffalo’? I asked … Even at that young age I was secure in the illusion that the land my parents and grandparents homesteaded had had no prior occupants, animal or human. Ours was the ultimate tabula rasa. (LTW 1)

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Kroetsch asserts that he was ‘that day on [his] way to embracing the model of archeology, against that of history,’ in which he was first led to consider that ‘the authorized history, the given definition of history, was betraying [people] on those prairies’ (2). The notion that Kroetsch’s Alberta was part of a ‘new world’ without any kind of legacy had broken down through the act of witnessing archaeological evidence. As Kroetsch explains, he began to ‘learn the idea of trace,’ to search for that which was ‘always … left behind’; therefore, he decided he had to ‘[respond] to those discoveries of absence, to that invisibility, to that silence, by knowing [he] had to make up a story’ (2). More than simply creating a fiction, though, Kroetsch indicates he was intent on telling a narrative informed by a collective identity. He poses the following question, concluding his anecdote: ‘How do you write in a new country?’ (2). Badlands itself can be understood as a response to this search since it is a work roughly contemporaneous with notable comments made by Kroetsch about writing in a ‘new country.’ In an interview with Russell Brown, published three years before Badlands, Kroetsch suggests that ‘discovering … landscape … and myth’ is ‘more intense in Canadian writing than it is in that of an older country because we don’t have models to play off against’ (7). In the same interview, Kroetsch explains that, at this time, he wanted to ‘explore Blackfoot and Cree folklore’ because his ‘home was near the Battle River – so named because Blackfoot and Cree met and fought along that river’ (6). Kroetsch recognizes that Indigenous stories can potentially provide different models for Canadian myths; he seems to counter the myth of the empty land, to some degree, even while his language supports this myth. However, it is as if Kroetsch is looking beyond the actual significance of stories in Badlands to the properties which shape stories in the first place. In Badlands, Kroetsch makes land, indigene, and absence representative of collective memories or sacred origins which have been systematically destroyed along with cultural landscapes; the act of excavating becomes thematically linked to an attempt to exhume sacred, cultural truth from the soil. Kroetsch engages with the myth of the empty land in Badlands in order to suggest this land was never void of ‘sun-gods.’ By suggesting there are different cultural truths in Canada, that they are inextricable with, or as old as, the earth, Kroetsch intimates these truths precede the advent of colonial ‘discovery’ or ‘arrival.’ Badlands was born and

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reborn out of a moment when the relation between people and the literal lands of this world was being reconsidered, and Kroetsch attempts to create a new ‘mental landscape’ (Frye, ‘Culture and Society in Ontario, 1784–1984’ [1988], in Gorjup 189) by prompting his readers to think of the relation between ideology and environment. However, Kroetsch also attempts to do much more than this. Dawe’s ‘whole existence,’ we are told, ‘was become a veritable and deliberate wager, a gamble, a bet that he could in one season find the rib or femur or skull that would insinuate to him, however grotesquely, the whole truth’ (8). But for just what kind of truth does Dawe search? Dawe postulates that ‘the lost bones [of dinosaurs] … will [immortalize] the mortal man’ (36); Anna Dawe’s fiction suggests that the ‘Daweosaurus must be recovered in its entirety’ (213) in order to somehow cure Dawe of ‘death’ (211). Dawe is in search of immortality. In mythological terms, this means that he is in search of gods. Dawe will die after a lifetime of digging. He could dig for eternity to the earth’s core, but he could never find truth. Like Coyote in ‘Coyote and the Shadow People,’ Dawe disregards the voice of the dead, or the ‘death spirit’ (Phinney 282). He, too, reaches out to the past, disregarding caution. More than this, Dawe’s archaeological endeavours are an act of violation. He is accurately immortalized by Sinnott as one of the ‘Grave Robbers in the Badlands of the West’ (119) because he desacrilizes the dead spirits in the land he is turning up; such an act forecasts ultimate failure. While Sinnott’s name is, in itself, a command to Dawe, Dawe is a walking transgression. When Coyote is permitted to see his dead wife, he is told that he ‘may talk with her but may never touch her’ (Phinney 284); however, he makes a mistake and reaches out to her and, therefore, forever denies the possibility of establishing ‘the practice of returning from the dead’ (Phinney 285). Like Coyote, Dawe must die because he not only fails to listen but is also unable. Dawe is doomed. His frame of reference, ways of knowing, are ultimately incapable of providing him with the knowledge he needs to understand truth. Dawe is too much like Coyote, unwilling to dispense of his own beliefs. As the ghost of the ‘Shadow People’ explains to Coyote before Coyote embarks on his quest, ‘Here we have conditions different from those you have in the land of the living. When it gets dark here it has dawned in your land and when it dawns for us it is growing dark for you’ (Phinney 283). Like Coyote, Dawe has entered a world which he does not understand.

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It is as if Kroetsch is creating a myth out of the same sort of tension which is registered in the Appendix to his travel guide, Alberta (1968). Under the title ‘Historic Gravesites,’ Kroetsch makes the following comment: The prehistoric graveyard of the dinosaurs has yielded up skeletons to all the major museums of the world. The burial places of Indian peoples, and the fascinating buffalo jumps where, for thousands of years, the plains Indians killed in order to live, are now being recognized and preserved; one careless amateur, one bulldozer, or one dam can destroy centuries of our history. (216)

As Kroetsch says in an article entitled ‘The Exploding Porcupine,’ ‘Archeology of necessity, involves violence – the uncovering of past lives’ (in LTW 111). Badlands indicates it can entail more than this: Archaeology – the furious digging up of the past – can result in the dismissal of competing world views. This is a point underscored by Hana Samek in The Blackfoot Confederacy, 1880–1920: A Comparative Study of Canadian and U.S. Indian Policy. Samek notes that traditional tensions between the Blackfoot and European settlers were compounded by the differing cosmologies of Native and European peoples. For Europeans, the ‘Dawe impulse’ was an extension of a divinely ordained pattern for living; for Native peoples, it was heretical. As Samek points out, the introduction of European agricultural techniques into traditional Blackfoot territory was most offensive, not because ‘nomadic warriors and buffalo hunters such as the Blackfeet had no agricultural tradition, and consequently … did not find farming appealing;’ rather, ‘their most basic objection was against turning Mother Earth “wrong side up”’ (57). D.G. Poole also suggests in ‘Integration,’ an article included in For Every North American Indian Who Begins to Disappear, I Also Begin to Disappear, that ‘the final breakdown in [Aboriginal/non-Aboriginal] relations occurred as a result of the divergence of White and Indian customs with regard to the land. To the Indian, the concept of owning the land was as foreign as that of owning the atmosphere to Whites’ (34). What Dawe does, of course, in the loci of Blackfoot lands, is literally blow apart Mother Earth. What Kroestch’s Badlands and texts of its kind will foster is a conflation of polemics and mythology and the emergence of dichotomies. Superlatives govern Kroetsch’s text. Dawe has entered the underworld from a very different world, just like Coyote; he has performed

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sacrilegious acts in foreign lands because he cannot understand the presiding gods. Badlands, like all myths, is based on grand distinctions: a notable tension is central to this text. There is a clear sense of what Dawe stands for and what Anna Yellowbird stands for. Dawe, associated as he is with those who have pillaged Anna’s world, provides a striking contrast to what Anna Yellowbird and her world symbolizes – the sacred. In this sense, Dawe can only be understood as symbolizing the profane. This is the legacy and, in a sense, fruition of a long-lived myth carried by Dewart, Lampman, MacMechan, and Brown, as well as others, and codified by Frye. Anna Dawe ends her story by throwing away her father’s old field notes. She decides to remain alone in the mountains ‘where [she] can look to the east, and downward, to where it is all behind [her]’ (264). Anna shows disgust with the profane. She throws away something symbolic of it and remains in the mountains, where the sacred resides, in an attempt to understand the sacred or that which is opposite her inheritance. This detail offers no definitive views about history or the past, and as Frances W. Kaye and Robert Thacker note in their article ‘Gone Back to Alberta: Robert Kroetsch Rewriting the Great Plains,’ ‘Kroetsch’s postmodernism offers no clues to the solution of the question of who owns the past of either bones or stories’ (175). While this may be true, Badlands offers a strong comment on its own time. The reader is left with an image of Anna Dawe and Anna Yellowbird looking up at that grizzly caught in the net which swings from the bottom of a helicopter. Just as Dawe and his men have violently ripped apart the badlands and traces of important history and cultural truth, so, too, has someone or something torn the grizzly out of its natural habitat and left it half alive. As Frye put it in his article ‘Haunted by Lack of Ghosts,’ ‘There are gods here, and we have offended them’ (in Gorjup 122). This is what Badlands seems to be ultimately deducing: by ripping apart the physical world – by digging past the ‘sun-gods,’ totems, and culture heroes which have grown up with this land – stories capable of yielding truth are blown to dust. There is potential for rebirth here, but Badlands suggests it is not yet time. When that ‘helicopter, yellow as the sun’ (267), hovers at the end of Kroetsch’s myth, above the gaze of Anna and Anna, it is reminiscent of Anna Yellowbird and the sacred weight for which she stands. However, the helicopter carries a trapped animal which, though it is ‘about to be born into a new life’ (268), awakens and arrests the possibility of a renaissance moment. This is not surprising. The pilot who manoeuvres

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the helicopter and this symbol of new potential and sacred promise is ‘unknowing’ and ‘indifferent’ (268). This novel leaves its reader hanging between a consideration of the profane and the sacred. It also leaves its reader to consider what may be born out of the tension between the two. When Anna Yellowbird looks to the stars at the novel’s end, uttering the words ‘like pissing in the ocean’ (270), Kroetsch seems to suggest this story, this myth he has just told, is the tip of an enormous iceberg. Anna, ‘who had never seen the ocean’ (270), is able to recognize the absurdity of her own individualism in reference to a cultural expression whose meaning she has somehow learned without ever partaking in. If we extend this recognition to what Kroetsch in this novel seems to be saying about national mythologies, Anna’s prophecy is powerful. Kroetsch’s Badlands might be only one narrative, but it records tensions between Aboriginal and English-Canadian cultural values and narratives, history and myth, sacred and profane. The legacy and principles of romantic nationalism, transformed and promoted by Frye into the mythologically and religiously dependent, forcefully raise their heads; they also begin to reveal how, if we cleave to this inherited mythology, it begins to destroy itself on its own terms. If aboriginality is to be reduced to a symbol by the dictates of formal mythological thinking, so, too, is the obverse, the Canadian nation. Recognizing how this bent of mythological thinking cannot survive its own measures is a step towards moving beyond it and focusing on tensions, rather than absolutes. Before moving beyond, however, it is necessary to pause and identify. Anna and Anna sing together ‘that awful song about rolling over in the clover … the only song [they can] both [remember]’ and the only song they can ‘sing long enough to see [themselves] through’ (270). What is needed in their world is a certain revisioning of the past, a glimpse towards new possible futures. Anna and Anna walk out of the Badlands together; they literally turn their backs on everything that Dawe’s history-making has afforded. The hope in this final image exists in the union of the two women who are symbolic of a meeting of Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples and of their respective stories. The ultimate key to unleashing this potential seems to exist behind the women, in the land on which Anna and Anna are walking. The sacred still exists in the land, although something has forced the sacred into hiding. There are a number of things not hidden, however. Badlands draws attention to itself as myth and to the process of storytelling. This novel

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also underscores the tenuous authority of its narrator. The historical and cultural stereotypes Kroetsch uses serve to indicate that history itself is part of a myth-making process. Badlands depends on the idea that there is no possibility of true history, and its characters suffer from the recognition that they are without a national history. There is the repetitive feeling and recognition that no kind of story exists that will yield the truth of this place because the profane has effaced truth. Within this narrative design, the historical ‘beginning’ of this nation stands in the way of any attempt to set this nation free from the past; therefore, the concept of truth becomes a dominant concern. While ‘truth’ is evasive, it is inextricable somehow with the land and ‘indigene,’ which become symbolic of the sacred and of different cultural truths, charted and ‘pruned’ almost beyond recognition. Badlands posits a distinction between what, in facile terms, could be called a European/Aboriginal tension. Its interrogation of history, then, is very much an exploration of what postcolonial criticism would call the discomfort between colonizers and colonized. In light of the fact that much critical activity has been devoted to an interrogation of how Aboriginal peoples, their symbols, and literatures serve the ‘desires’ of what some would call the imperial ‘other,’ one might ask whether or not the patterns found in Badlands exist in other stories which are not predicated on the same cultural histories and perspectives upon which Kroetsch builds his narrative. It is telling, I think, that Sky Lee’s Disappearing Moon Cafe, published in 1990, is a story which, though bringing together European, Aboriginal, and Chinese-Canadian peoples from an ostensibly contrasting perspective to that which governs Badlands, embodies much the same narrative possibilities and patterns as Kroetsch’s text. Similarities might be traceable, in part, to the fact that Lee began researching this novel around the same time Badlands was published. As Marke Andrews notes in an interview with Lee published in the Vancouver Sun in 1990, ‘Lee spent 15 years researching and writing the book.’ In a manner comparable to Kroetsch’s novel, Sky Lee’s Disappearing Moon Cafe includes a search for truth based on interpretations of an ancestral past. Kae Ying Woo uses the epistolary correspondence between her grandmother, Chan Fong Mei, and her great aunt, (Mok) Chan Fong Bo, as well as remembered stories, to recreate her lineage and ostensibly dispel or endorse a myth of incest which haunts her family, while Anna Dawe has relied on her father’s old field notes and her memories to recreate the man who was absent for most of her

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childhood and, by proxy, to discover her own identity. Interestingly, Kae Ying Woo, like Anna Dawe, becomes involved in a quest imbricated in a reading of the cultural landscape; like Anna, Kae is led to discover that forming a collective consciousness is an inordinately difficult task in the contested site of the ‘new world.’ Kae Ying Woo relives, through her own narrative account, generations of immigrant conflict in Canada; inevitably, she must rewrite the story of Gold Mountain since she realizes it is not only a land of ‘warmth and hope’ but also a ‘nightmare’ (26). While Disappearing Moon Cafe cannot be understood as perpetuating what Kroetsch has called the ‘quarrel with Eden’ (LTW 67, my emphasis), an ideological impulse he sees as endemic to the Americas, like Badlands, Lee’s text does question the stories which originally defined the region where her ancestors would settle. Perhaps it is no wonder that, like Kroetsch, Lee underscores a fictive, storytelling process. Kae explicitly lets her readers know she ‘prefer[s] to romanticize [her family] as a lineage of women with passion and fierceness in their veins’ (Lee, DMC 145, my emphasis). She admits at the novel’s beginning that, having given birth to her first child, having encountered ‘a close scrape with death,’ she has been forced not really to ‘rethink’ her life but to ‘rewrite it wherever possible’ (21). Furthermore, Lee employs a heightened style to relay her story, what she says are the ‘melodramatic elements … of Chinese popular theatre and story-telling’ (quoted in Lacey). What one reviewer describes as a lot of ‘sound and fury, of Victorian-style melodrama which just doesn’t work’ (Goldfarb)5 may be seen, on the flip side, as what Kae admits to be intentional ‘embellished speculation’ (136), a kind of postmodern play for which Kroetsch has been praised. Landscape is depicted within this playful narrative; the fact that geography is given prominent importance in Disappearing Moon Cafe suggests representations of the land are not immune to irony. Lee inscribes recognizable assumptions which have grown out of traditional attitudes towards the lands of the ‘new world’ which, taking into consideration factors both intrinsic and extrinsic to this text, would seem to suggest that they will naturally not support any assumptions or stereotypes similar to those found in other non-Aboriginal texts which appropriate Aboriginality to represent other cultural ‘desires.’ Lee is well known for her humanitarian gestures. Her contributions in the published proceedings of the conference Telling It: Women and Language across Cultures indicate she is well informed about this country’s different ethnic struggles. Her writing, in both poetry and prose,

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consistently attempts to redress imbalances of power. In an interview with Liam Lacey, Lee asserts that Disappearing Moon Cafe is not only a calculated attempt to address ‘misogyny’ but also an effort to confront the different cultural ‘power divisions that exist in the world.’ For example, Kae’s coming out story in Disappearing Moon Cafe is a reflection of Lee’s convictions that certain groups, whether defined by ethnicity, sexuality, or gender, must ‘battle’ common and ‘constant victories of power’ (quoted in Lacey). However, just as postcolonial readings of Aboriginal literature have been rendered healthily suspect by Aboriginal scholars so, too, is it necessary not to create camps for the study of literature which do not derive intrinsically from literature itself. Ojibway scholar Kimberly Blaeser maintains that the ‘insistence on reading Native literature by ways of Western literary theory clearly violates its integrity and performs a new act of colonization and conquest’ (55). A violation of integrity can also occur when the critic begins analysis intent on finding literary commonalities because of similar political sensitivities between authors. Throughout Disappearing Moon Cafe, Lee equates the Canadian wilderness with pejorative images of Indigenous peoples, thereby forwarding what Thomas King calls one of the three visions of the Indian readily available in Canadian literature – namely, the image of the ‘barbarous savage’ (Native in Literature 8). Fong Mei, a second-generation Chinese Canadian whose loyalty lies with her homeland of China, not with a land of white devils, consistently expresses dismay with what she calls the ‘backwash bush’ (29) where she fears her kids will have to grow up ‘darkskinned and as wild as indians’ (140). She also says that, here, in this ‘new world,’ there is ‘so much land … without any use for it’ (42), a traditional ‘white myth,’ according to Paul Tennant, which he claims has successfully ‘legitimized the denial of aboriginal title’ (37) and rights of the First Nations in Lee’s home province.6 Given that, in her acknowledgments, Lee recognizes and thanks John Haugen of the Lytton Indian Band, among others, it can be assumed that Lee’s text is consciously informed by an awareness of Indigenous politics, not least of which is the history of land claims, especially significant in British Columbia.7 Like Kroetsch, who inscribes in his text questionable but well-known public assumptions, Lee brings to the fore of her novel popular and inflammatory beliefs to seemingly render tenuous the efficacy of customary authority. Admittedly, a significant difference must be noted between a work which inscribes a voice for both Chinese Canadians and feminists in the corpus of Canadian literature and

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a work written by an established and postmodern author whose narrative forms and stories are staunchly masculine; however, although these authors might be compelled by different political agendas, Lee manipulates her narrative much like Kroetsch. In Disappearing Moon Cafe, Lee foregrounds racist stereotypes, the result of historical impasses between cultural groups. When Gwei Chang and Kelora first meet, readers are presented with public conceptions which have had a long legacy in Canadian history: ‘My father is a chinaman, like you. His eyes are slits like yours. He speaks like You.’ [Kelora] spoke deliberately and demonstrated by pulling back the skin beside her dark, round eyes … ‘But you’re a wild injun.’ He spilled out the insults in front of her, but they were meaningless to her. In chinese, the words mocked, slanglike, ‘yin-chin.’ (3)

The meeting of Gwei Chang and Kelora is a meeting of the savage and coolie, brutal stereotypes which draw attention to concepts of racial superiority, colonization’s kindred. The passage brings together two groups of people who have experienced a somewhat comparable relationship with Britain and its colonial agendas. Anthony Chan points out in his study of Chinese immigration to the Americas, Gold Mountain: The Chinese in the New World, that ‘the Chinese arriving in British North America and Canada between 1858 and 1880 entered a land already conditioned by a tradition of racism implanted by the European empires as they sought to extend their dominion to the New World’ (11). As Chan ironically continues, ‘Britain’s easy victory over China in the Opium War of 1839–42’ had ensured ‘proof of [Britain’s] superiority, racial or otherwise’ (11), over the population of immigrants who would be the ancestors of present-day Chinese Canadians. That Lee addresses such an extended history, reaching back beyond the reality of contemporary Chinese Canada, is also evident in how she not only traces a family’s history back to China but also makes Old Man Chen an ambiguous figure, representative of many different Chinese immigrants. ‘As far as Gwei Chang could make out,’ Kae Ying Woo writes, ‘Chen had worked on the railroad. He also seemed to have participated in the gold rush over thirty years ago. He also might have come because of the tong wars in San Francisco’ (7). One could say that Old Man Chen symbolizes the very act of Chinese immigration to

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Canada; however, living as he does in the mountains with Kelora, he is also representative of a different sort of history. As Chan also points out, while ‘the first wholly Chinese family to plant roots in Canada was the Chong Lee household, arriving in 1860’ (98), there was a much earlier history of the Chinese in Canada, although it has not gained as much critical attention: More than half a century earlier, in 1788, 50 Chinese artisans had accompanied a Captain Meares to develop a fur trade in sea otter pelts between Canton and the natives of Nootka Sound by building a trading post, Fort Nootka, on Vancouver Island. After Meares was driven out by the Spanish, who were seeking a trade monopoly on the west coast, many of the Chinese crew decided to settle there, and sought shelter among the natives on the island. (33)

Chan further notes that the children of this union ‘with native women became in time less Chinese and more indigenous in culture and language [and that] [b]efore long, traces of any Chinese cultural lineage were wiped out’ (98). While Lee does not offer this information to her readers, having spent such a significant time researching and writing her first novel, it seems unlikely she was not informed by this history; it is worth considering what Lee has done with these perceptions and how she has reconfigured them in Disappearing Moon Cafe. It is interesting that the idea of a vanishing race would come to define the first populations of Chinese Canadians, for the idea of a vanishing race has served to eliminate a consideration of the vitality and longevity of Aboriginal populations in Canada and the United States, especially when national sentiment has been at a height. In his doctoral dissertation, ‘Inventing the Indian: White Images, Native Oral Literature, and Contemporary Native Writers,’ Thomas King notes that the image of the ‘dying Indian’ (28), although predicated upon an awareness of history’s brutalities, was part of a powerful and destructive teleology. This has also been a dominant modus operandi in Canadian literature; for example, winner of three Atlantic literary awards and shortlisted for one international, as well as two national, awards, Michael Crummey’s River Thieves, published in 2001, romantically fixates on the near-extinct Beothuk of nineteenth-century Newfoundland.8 Though denial of attempted genocide also attends Canadian records, to understand peoples as having disappeared entirely is tantamount to

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ensuring they no longer exist. It is this awareness that is at the core of Lee’s novel. The very title of this work makes one question what is disappearing or, at the very least, what is, or has been, threatened. Lee revisits the union between early Chinese and Aboriginal populations. She produces narrative possibilities out of a meeting which has been historically ignored or interpreted as non-productive. Old Man Chen explains to Gwei Chang how he and Kelora came to be a family: ‘I got this cabin from a white man,’ Chen grinned foolishly. ‘I climbed up here and found a white man dying of a festering gunshot wound, with his head in an indian woman’s lap right here,’ he pointed to the bed Gwei Chang was lying on. ‘So, as he died, I just stayed and took over where he left off, you see. I took care of his woman like a wife and his cabin like a home. She had a daughter, Kelora – indian name. I taught her to speak chinese. She’s old enough to have a husband now,’ Chen smiled down at Gwei Chang. (7)

Ting An, the child of Gwei Chang and Kelora, is representative of the union between these two populations, although he is inevitably cut off from both Gwei Chang’s family and his Indian history: Ting An hardly knew a closeness of kin. His mother was an Indian dead of a fever by the time he was two … Ting An buried his grandfather himself. He still thought about the spot where his grandfather lay – on the eastern side of his mountain, at the base of two ancient ponderosa pines, cradled in the arms of their massive roots. He remembered the afternoon when he finished propping up the wooden marker with stones. (114)

Though Ting An lives nearly his whole life without being embraced by his Chinese father and family, and although he lives at a geographical and cultural remove from his Indian family, he still carries the cultural memories and values of both peoples. The possibility he signals is telling: Ting An dies drunk, alone, and unhappy, but his very existence and destruction are witness that ‘new world’ history is not solely the product of a European/Aboriginal collision. Disappearing Moon Cafe, like Badlands, ultimately turns to an awareness of First Nations history and values in order to make sense of a common or collective consciousness. However, Lee’s ‘borrowings’ are not immune to the legacy of romantic nationalism.

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Lee, like Kroetsch, turns to landscape to address cultural identity. At a very early point in her novel, Lee insinuates a connection between appropriation of the land and destruction of culture. Lee’s novel opens in 1892 with Gwei Chang, a Chinese immigrant who has been hired by the Chinese Benevolent Association to find the bones of Chinese labourers who worked on Canada’s CPR and bring them back to Victoria in preparation for their repatriation to China. Gwei Chang, however, is unfamiliar with this world: ‘his eyes [are] untrained to see beyond the wall of wilderness’; he suffers a ‘penetrating solitude’ and ‘hunger’ (2). He fears he will also become prey to the harsh dictates of geography, that his bones, like those of the Chinese labourers who came before him, will be found ‘gleaming white, powdery in the hot sun’ (1). What Fong Mei calls the ‘wilderness’ (27) of Canada becomes an anthropomorphous predator comparable to that which lies east of the Continental Divide in the badlands of Alberta, where William Dawe and his men search the Old Man beds of the Belly River formation for dinosaur skeletons. Like the ‘landscape of sorrow and denial’ (BL 25) which threatens to kill Dawe’s men and ruin their expedition, the mountains of British Columbia in Lee’s Disappearing Moon Cafe have the potential to reduce their explorers to ‘bones bleaching in [the] blaze of the sun’ (189). With genealogical history traced back to Chinese immigration to the ‘new world,’ one is immediately reminded of those Chinese labourers used to achieve Prime Minister John A. Macdonald’s dream of a country united from east to west. We must also recall, then, the lack of gratitude historically shown this population. Macdonald’s depiction of the Chinese worker as ‘a sojourner in a strange land,’ as one as ‘valuable … as a threshing machine or any other agricultural implement’ (quoted in Roy 30), must wrestle now with a record that suggests ‘for every foot of railroad through the Fraser Canyon, a Chinese worker died’ (Chan 67). Cultivating land for the sake of national advancement was more important than ensuring basic human and cultural rights, a correlation which also brings to consideration indigenously owned lands, for Kelora signals a very specific history and a unique cultural landscape which embodies the central tension of Disappearing Moon Cafe. Gwei Chang has journeyed into British Columbia’s southern interior to an area roughly approximate with Lytton, where he meets for the first time Kelora, a member of ‘the Shi’atko in the village at the mouth

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of the two rivers’ (DMC 8). This is the confluence of the Fraser and Thompson, ancient capital of the Nlaka’pamux world and an area most memorable to contemporary readers for the protests staged here by the Nlaka’pamux and St’at’imc in the 1970s when these nations fought to keep the Stein Valley from being logged.9 For the Nlaka’pamux and St’at’imc, ‘the valley shares the importance of Moses’ Mountain or the Catholics’ Rome’ (Coull 111). Beginning in 1878, around the same time period which provides the beginning for Lee’s novel, the Nlaka’pamux began their campaign to protect the sacred valley by establishing a new council to deal with growing concerns over land rights.10 Lytton is also the place where, on 8 May 1883, only nine years before Gwei Chang’s arrival, a group of white men attacked a camp of Chinese construction workers, burning their dwellings, beating a large number of Chinese people, and killing one man. This event was described at the time by Chief Justice Begbie as ‘one of the most brutal massacres that had ever taken place on the coast’ (Roy 21). Within British Columbia’s history and Lee’s text, Lytton is a symbol of resistance, survival, subjugation, and colonization; landscape, therefore, must be considered not only as a geographical site but also a political domain. Lee draws a correlation between death of the land and death of Aboriginal cultures near the end of Disappearing Moon Cafe when Kae describes Gwei Chang’s last summer with Kelora in 1894. Here, Gwei Chang recalls how Kelora and the Sh’iatko community used to dipnet, a traditional type of fishing which has been severely threatened by commercial fishing practices at the mouth of the Fraser and by placer mines. At one time, Gwei Chang remembers how the river ‘teemed with tens of thousands’ of salmon and how ‘they only needed to be lifted out by the netful,’ thereby making him ‘feel good to learn the indian ways, because they made him think that he might never starve like a chinaman again’ (234). However, when Kelora tells him ‘that even with this abundance, her people faced famine in the winter,’ Gwei Chang feels again ‘the sallow face of famine’ (234), something with which he was too familiar in China. He attributes the devastation to savagery inherent in Kelora’s world: He could see how famine was the one link that Kelora and he had in common, but for that instant, it made him recoil from her as surely as if he had touched a beggar’s squalid sore. The memory of hunger flung him back to that other world again, where his mother’s wretchedness plucked at his sleeve and gnawed through his stomach.

Searching for Sun-Gods 159 In the next instant, he looked at Kelora and saw animal. His stare hostile, as if he just recognized her for what she really was. (234)

Gwei Chang leaves Kelora, returns to China, and begins to live a life that will never again physically include her, but, in 1939, his ‘dying soul’ remembers part of a story told to him by Kelora. Gwei Chang’s apostrophe to Kelora’s spirit indicates that his refusal to recognize the moral of her narrative has led to his own demise: ‘O.K., I did leave you. In the gorgeous full bloom of our love, I left you and went back to China where my family beckoned. Yes, I surely did leave you. And to marry another, no less. I swore to you that I was coming back … I’ve lived a miserable life, grieving for your loss, bitterly paying. You told me that indians have another name for the eagle – the one who stays perched on a tree, who doesn’t fly.’ (235)

Gwei Chang has disregarded the value of another’s mythology which, if he had incorporated it into his life in the ‘new world,’ would have supplied valuable wisdom. Like European colonizers who systematically destroyed various nations’ world views by reading an area like Lytton as part of a ‘backwash settlement’ which required the civilizing effects of development, Gwei Chang, like some of the later Tang people of Vancouver, chooses to understand Kelora simply as a ‘savage’; because he does so, he inevitably disregards those narratives which are a vital key to understanding this world. From the very beginning of Lee’s novel, a contrast is drawn between myths that have ineffectually described the nature of this land and those that would seem to embody some sort of truth. In a dream, Gwei Chang is presented with competing mythologies, one imposed on the ‘new world’ and one endemic to it: [Gwei Chang] felt he must tell of a most peculiar dream he’d had around that period of his life when he went looking for the bones of dead chinamen strewn along the Canadian Pacific Railway … In order to make himself feel better, he began to search the ground, hoping to spot a glimmer of gold in the dirt, convinced that the Gold Mountains weren’t a myth at all … The rest was a blur, but he did manage a glimpse of the menace: huge wings of a black raven swooping down upon him. When its talons ripped into his flesh, he felt neither pain nor fear, just the sensation of being lifted into a flying dream. (5–6)

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Gold Mountain, or gumshan, a myth which promised ‘hope, prosperity and stability’ (Chan 32) to those Chinese labourers who came to America in search of a better fortune, is arrested by a vision of the ubiquitous West Coast trickster Raven, most memorably responsible for having stolen the sun in Haida mythology and for creating the world and its inhabitants. This is an image that Gwei Chang remembers until his death, when, in another dream, he envisions a raven-like Kelora: The shuffle of wooden rattles in his head. Her black cloud hair woven across his face, weblike, dreamlike … Nudging and pressing against the stars, he soaring, she soaring. She, keeper of the fire, covering him with intense desire, he searing, they searing. She opened herself like a secret revealed: their bodies joined in dance, writhing with power. She, wet from tears, slick with lust, steeped in sweat; their souls keening, reaching for eternity … He melting into her molten gold, like sunset. (236)

That the fruition of Gwei Chang’s life would witness the melting of gold, the property which created an inviting myth for Chinese immigrants in the mid-to-late nineteenth century in Canada, into an image of the sun with all its attendant resonances of Indigenous Pacific mythology, suggests that story assumes a powerful position in Disappearing Moon Cafe. The last lines of Lee’s novel seem to indicate that something is being suggested about the power of words. As Gwei Chang closes his eyes for the last time, ‘the heavy chant of the storyteller [turns] to mist in his head’ (237); both Gwei Chang and the reader are left to consider the nature and function of narrative. However, the ‘sun-gods’ remain beyond Gwei Chang’s dying grasp. What sense can be made out of this concluding image? What is Lee’s text saying about narrative potential, national mythologies, and history? What literary strategies or characteristics is Lee employing here, and from what tradition do they come? Are Badlands and Disappearing Moon Cafe doing comparable things? Disappearing Moon Cafe is no less romantic than Badlands. One almost hears Dewart, Lampman, MacMechan, Brown, and Frye chanting with Raven at this novel’s end.

6 Admitting the Possibility of Transitional Texts in Canadian Literature

When Leonard Cohen ended Beautiful Losers by turning all of his characters into a projection beam and mythological symbol, he removed any kind of potential hero from the community he created. He kept alive a belief in the process of transmitting knowledge or telling stories, but he sacrificed any kind of potential hero to dust and light. Dealing with the same kind of history found in Beautiful Losers, Robert Kroetsch made sure there were no heroes left at the end of Badlands, although he, too, kept alive a belief in storytelling. There is something heroic about that last image of Anna and Anna, who together, alone, and female in a man’s world defy the path of history and travel the riverbed their own way, throwing out letters which have threatened to encase them in Dawe’s twisted legacy. However, there is no promise of resurrection. The climax of Frye’s story begins to come to an early end. Anna and Anna will not rewrite the history they have uncovered. Anna Dawe will simply remain alone in the mountains; if there were ever hope for Dawe to become the hero of this legend, Kroetsch has taken care of that by sacrificing him in Georgian Bay. McBride, the only one who could ever hope to be the hero of this narrative, walks out of the story moments after it begins. In George Bowering’s Burning Water, George Vancouver is thrown by some unknown force into Pacific waters, rendered impotent and unpromising. Bowering’s Vancouver will not survive the trip back home as did his namesake; he, too, is somehow sacrificed. Gwei Chang’s death in Disappearing Moon Cafe is romantic and not convincing of any real fruition; though Gwei Chang is not as despicable as Dawe, Vancouver, and F., he fails to learn something from Kelora and her people. Commensurate with returned visions of Kelora and Raven’s rattles is Gwei Chang’s death. Mythological icons hover

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beyond his reach, as they also loom, almost unbearably, just above nationalism’s slipping grip on nineteenth-century bedrock. This removal of potential heroes is inseparable from the fact that they grow out of a history of madness and sickness. These are not tragic heroes. They are anti-heroes. It is not surprising that heroes die in these worlds since heroes traditionally die in mythologies; however, it is significant that they are written off with disgust. Associated with a sick past, the protagonists of these myths – seeming heroes – become symbolic of everything a hero should not represent. Renan had said that the past needed to be ‘forgotten’ in order for a nation to successfully grow. In these works, not only has the past been remembered, but it has also become a larger-than-life force with which no one can sanely reckon. These postmodern works record madness by depicting individuals unable to function in their societies. There is nothing sane about Dawe. He sends a young man with two weeks’ blasting experience and dynamite into the badlands. Dawe is an appendage of a larger force that has taken Anna Yellowbird’s husband away on an iron ship and that continues to destroy her homeland. There is nothing sane about George Vancouver and the history to which he is connected. This story of exploration comes complete with the rape of an Indian corpse and the premeditated murder of an old Indian woman who leads an expedition intent on getting back goods the British have stolen from her people. It is understandable that Vancouver is tossed overboard at the novel’s end like mackerel from a trawler. There is obviously nothing sane about F., although there is something sane about his telling his nameless friend to connect nothing. As he knows, sitting in an asylum, to connect the history of Edith to the history of Catherine, to connect the narrator’s knowledge that ‘the forests of Québec are mutilated and sold to America’ to his awareness of the ‘Church’s victory over the Medicine Man’ (Beautiful Losers 73), leads only to madness. Everything in the ‘new world’ is linked to its insane beginnings, and so he says to his friend, ‘You mustn’t meddle any longer in this shit. Avoid even the circumstances of Catherine Tekakwitha’s death and the ensuing documented miracles’ (237). These works removed heroes – the very loci of community – from the centre of madness; in turn, they created anti-heroes. Canadian authors seemed to be sending their heroes away to the past because the present was not worthy of them. Moreover, it was not as if metaphorical crucifixion was going to provide a neat conclusion. As James Clifford has argued, there is ‘no master narrative that can reconcile the tragic and comic plots of global cultural history’ (Predicament of Culture 15).

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Revised romantic nationalism had no narrative way out. Perhaps when non-Aboriginal authors turned to Indigenous history and literature for new material or for the stuff of mythology, the confidence and authority they confronted in Aboriginal voices prompted introspection which lent itself to the creation of myths without heroes. As well, it seemed Aboriginal mythology grew out of something a bit too old and established to be borrowed too quickly. There certainly was not enough time to be adequately educated about the richness of the traditions that were making themselves known. Mythologically, this stage, or type, of national Canadian ideation became arrested in the reliving of trauma; this is not surprising, perhaps, since much of Aboriginal history had been traumatic since conquest. As well, when consciousness, like melancholia, is suspended in old designs without a significant ritual which provides the basis for mourning, and ipso facto, for then moving on, the psychological result is perpetuation, not atonement.1 Shoemaker has made a comparable observation in his study of Australian literature by white authors which also comes up against a history of holocaust and resiliency: The decades of physical and psychological violence suffered by Australian Aborigines had to take their toll, but this was not exacted only from the victims. It was impossible for a sensitive conscience to remain untouched by the exploitation, murder, and dispossession of Aboriginal people – especially if one’s own ancestors had been directly involved in the process … It is not surprising that, following the stresses of World War II, this latent guilt would find its way to the surface through the workings of a hyper-sensitive mind. In this case, it was the mind of a poet keenly attuned to suffering and injustice; the mind of Judith Wright. Wright’s work ushered in a phase of guilt investigation and symbolic expiation which has persisted in White Australian literature until the present day. (81)

‘It is significant that for Wright,’ Shoemaker says, ‘Europeans have never atoned for that invasion and atonement is essential if there is to be harmony between black and white in Australia’ (83). Similar recognitions are needed in Canada, where holocaust goes largely unnoticed, though the memory might catch people by surprise at times, as I think it did the writers who wrote after the advent of this Native Renaissance. These Canadian texts which have been examined at length do not mark an end to history. While they grow out of a moment in Canadian

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history which was ripe for mythologizing, while Canada’s centenary may have promised an originary moment, these texts register the reality that this blank slate could not be created. Writers were led to reexamine history in light of revisionist history, and social revolution – a necessary ingredient for the revisioning of national mythologies – seemed to provide some sense of a new beginning. However, this beginning turned out to be a strange one. Myths which history had driven, faltered, paused, and stalled. History was traumatic. Writers recorded, with all the stereotypical, superficial informants of mythology, the profane: the Canadian nation and its history. By imposing this as a standard of value, they defined the sacred: Aboriginal nations and the lands to which they lay claim. This story may not be the one many want to hear, but to not accept that it exists would be to allow for its perpetuation, which haunts the criticism of Aboriginal literatures, with discussions of ‘us’ and ‘them,’ ‘centres,’ ‘margins,’ ‘desires,’ ‘temptations.’ Looking back, romantic nationalism was inherently fallacious to begin with. To return to Kroetsch’s Badlands, it is significant that Anna is first found in a grave to which she has been led by the wisdom of a shaman. Dawe and his men inevitably recognize her as potential chattel and a guide through the badlands, but Kroetsch’s text will turn time and time again to the notion that there is something ‘down there’ (MacEwen), something in the land that is divine. In that last image of Anna and Anna, the only constant source of truth that remains is the land. Badlands is predicated on the idea that truth is inextricable with landscape; truth is a long way off, though, when dynamite and picks are destroying the vestiges of old dynasties. Disappearing Moon Cafe also offers up Gwei Chang to death, with Raven almost tacked on in an unconvincing manner, beating time outside this larger Chinese-Canadian narrative. Somehow, Gwei Chang has missed an important lesson, and whether or not his spirit meets Kelora or Raven, he has left behind a mess: his son and Kelora’s child dies drunk and alone. While a recognition of the sacred manifests itself in different, and sometimes subtle, ways in these texts, their respective acts of sacrifice are indicative of a belief in the sacred. Bowering, Cohen, Lee, and Kroetsch record history’s profanities because the sacred has been offended. They sacrifice symbols of profanity in different ways, but they sacrifice them, nonetheless. This is not to say that with this specific mythological and romantic story arrested or exposed, the critic now has a new or blank slate from which to write about Aboriginal literatures. In fact, the arresting of this myth in

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trauma becomes an equally rude cross to bear in the criticism of contemporary Aboriginal literatures, which demand solid analysis, void of the critic’s need to muddy works with confession and traumatic recall at every bend. These non-Aboriginal, self-conscious myths are attempts to cast away old mythologies and create new ones. It could be said that these writers were attempting to clear the ground of cultural garbage and bury the dead. However, their texts inevitably ended up suggesting that the time had not yet come for the creation of new myths. Perhaps that is why these myths, unlike most myths, are without gods, an answer, or a way out. It would be rather difficult to create a governing god for these narratives, or to borrow Indigenous gods, when recent history had exposed a past which this nation hoped would be forgotten. The history Canadian writers turned to when it came time to produce a ‘national song’ (Lampman) was brutal. While Indigenous ‘sun-gods’ might have been recognized as existing, they were off limits. This is not to say that this nation is still waiting for a moment of ‘passion and enthusiasm’ (Lampman 38) or a notable change of ‘expression in the arts’ (E.K. Brown 20). The stereotypical nature of much of the literature of the late 1960s and 1970s, indicative of large currents, signifies that something profound did take place in Canadian literature around Canada’s ‘Day of Atonement.’ This ‘new pastoralism’ (R. Brown, ‘Time of the Redmen’ 92), or ‘back-to-the-land-primitivism’ (Goldie, ‘Getting It Right’ 64), coupled with the emergence of the sacred and profane, signal a resurrected engagement with the archetypes of one of this nation’s ‘foundational’ myths. Though the mythological reaction did not drink deeply, the reaction seemed to create something. Registering the recognition that it would be impossible to appropriate Native histories, cultures, and figures to justify pan-Canadian nationalism, writers created strong and reductive binaries between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal cultures, reducing these two camps to symbols. The ‘Canadian nation’ became the profane. The First Nations became the sacred. This is reductive and stereotypical, but the division is mythological and, ipso facto, grand and figurative. In these texts, the profane – inscripted in a new and forceful way – met the sacred headon. When the sacred and profane meet, a certain and well-known type of character typically emerges: the trickster. As Carl Jung claims in ‘On the Psychology of the Trickster Figure,’ ‘the trickster haunts the mythology of all ages’ (200), and so it seems that a trickster of sorts has come to take its haunt in Canadian mythology. However, this is not Raven,

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Coyote, or Mink. It is not Aboriginal. This is not Jacob or the serpent in the garden of Eden. It is not biblical or European. It is a narrative reaction between stories produced in both pre-colonial and confederated Canada. I am not saying this is a good or bad thing, but that it is. What is telling is the manner in which Canadian history has taken on a persona. Despite the fact that history might enter one narrative as a buffoon, another as a villain, and even another as a lapsed saint – it is significant to note that history enters as a character. Kertzer maintains that ‘when nations are regarded as historical subjects, they take on characteristics of people’ (9); I would argue that, in this case, Canadian history has taken on the characteristics of a trickster. It seems as if Canadian history will one day be given a face, a nose, and, perhaps, even a select and confined space within the study of characters in Canadian literature. Unlike Nanabush, Weesageechak, Raven, Old Man, and Glooscap, though, Canadian history in this form does not sit comfortably in a national collection of stories which include trickster tales, sacred histories, literatures of the imagination, and other genres which constitute wide collections of Aboriginal literatures. Thinkers are as nervous, as they should be, of this trickster as critics have rightfully become of nineteenth-century, British-derived archetypes. This trickster was born out of traumatic and fairly recent recall, and its legacy is romantic, sharing a relation with colonial imaginings. The bay, the ocean, the camera can, at any moment, consume history, because history is only partially sacred and a hell of a lot profane. That is why, perhaps, Dawe dies in the waters of Georgian Bay. That is why George Vancouver is thrown ‘by some strength unwitnessed’ (Burning Water 258) into the sea. That is why stereotypical symbols of national identity – an English-Canadian historian, a Québécois, a Canadian Indian, and an Indian – disappear in a symbol of human processing (Beautiful Losers). Perhaps this is also why Donal Keneally, the founder of the Colony of Truth in Jack Hodgins’s The Invention of the World (1977), is corkscrewed into the earth in an attempt ‘to redeem his mythic beginning’ (Horner 7). While this is but one detail in a complicated narrative, the British Columbian dystopia which Keneally founded neighbours the site of an old gallows where, in the first trial in this colony, two Indians were hanged for the murder of one Peter Brown. While Julius Champney supposes this historical event cannot be compared to anything that happened on the Prairies, ‘where one incident like that is hardly remembered’ (Invention 226), Hodgins ends up drawing his readers’ attention to the recognition that British Columbia’s history – as traced

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back to its judicial beginnings – is suspect. The Colony of Truth is more an ironic comment on the inability to create a satisfying myth out of this history than it is a symbol of truth. The young man who befriends Julius snorts and sardonically wonders whether ‘the jury was all Indians’ (226), a possibility this young man and Hodgins’s readers realize to be ridiculous. Donal Keneally, the would-be hero who is part god and part madman, attempting to preside over this Irish-Canadian stronghold of ‘truth,’ invites the earth to swallow him as it had swallowed his mother before him. This world’s history does not lend itself to the creation of an easy and satisfying myth any more than the republic of the Irish. It is also understandable that the narrator of Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing (1972) turns mad and becomes part of the bush and scrub at the end of Atwood’s novel. While Carol Anne Howells observes that Atwood ‘began by representing wilderness to Canadians as their own distinctive national space’ (21) in Surfacing as well as in Survival (1972) and the Journals of Susanna Moodie (1970), Atwood also says something different about the wilderness or lands of Canada in Surfacing. In an article aptly entitled ‘Postcolonial Guilt in Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing,’ Janice Fiamengo notes that ‘the narrator’s explanation of her father’s retreat to the bush echoes the dream of the earliest European settlers … [replaying] the fantasy of a pure, empty land that fueled European exploration and settlement in the erroneously named New World’ (143). Consumed by guilt which grows from this awareness of romantic colonial myth, Surfacing, as Fiamengo also observes, ‘consistently uses ideas associated with aboriginality to make its critique of white culture’ (154). True, the novel does show dismay with American influence and encroachment on Canadian beliefs, culture, and soil, and it can accurately be described as a ‘product of cultural nationalism’ (23), as it has been by Howells. However, Atwood also draws a distinction in this novel between English- and French-Canadian history and Aboriginal histories; Surfacing, as William Closson James points out in Locations of the Sacred: Essays on Religion, Literature, and Canadian Culture, seems to be fashioned as a sort of ‘Amerindian vision quest’ (71). The novel begins with the narrator remembering her father’s claim that ‘there was nothing in the North but the past and not much of that either’ (9). The irony of this comment is revealed much later in the novel when the same man is discovered to have drowned while searching for one of the North’s ancient petroglyphs, or Indian rock carvings. That the lands of Canada are literally records of old Indigenous histories is underscored here, and

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like Kroetsch, Bowering, Cohen, Hodgins, and Sky Lee, Atwood points to the idea that this world has seen its share of destruction. When the narrator becomes one with the land at the novel’s end – when she removes herself from her community and from the history of the French, the English, and Canada’s southern neighbour – it is as if she has turned her back on history in an attempt to create something new out of a sacred force which she feels but cannot yet define. For Fiamengo, ‘the Indian is the sign of redemption’ in Surfacing, and the narrator’s ‘attempt to escape, not only from her friends or from the outside world, but also from her self’ (153), indicates an ‘intolerable postcolonial guilt’; the narrator ‘imagines safety to be a wholesale rejection of Western culture and a reconnection with the gods of nature, which she associates with the land before white settlers invaded it’ (153). For these reasons, Fiamengo considers Surfacing, like its narrator, unbearable. As she argues, ‘in appropriating Native ritual and identity, the text repeats, at the symbolic level, the trophy-hunting tourism that it ostensibly rejects … Surfacing might be said to represent Indianness as merely a phase that the white narrator must pass through on her route to self-realization’ (156). However, I am not so much interested in Fiamengo’s qualitative adjudication as I am in her tracing of patterns, that is, how her analysis of Surfacing captures what floats through other mythologically inspired works of its kind. These patterns have shaped schools of thought. Fiamengo suggests that ‘just as the Quiet Revolution and the October Crisis made the myth of peaceful partnership difficult to sustain for English Canadians, David’s erasure of a prior Native presence also required a deliberate forgetting’ (143); moreover, ‘the narrator’s emotional journey involves coming to understand that she cannot claim absolution for the suffering that she witnesses because she – like Canada – is implicated in it’ (148). Just as ‘guilt, nostalgia, empathy and rage cluster around the narrator’s evocation of the Indian, a powerful symbol of her desire to be “accepted as part of the land”’ (Fiamengo 158; Atwood, quoted in Fiamengo 178), so, too, do these emotions and desires gather in Beautiful Losers, Burning Water, Badlands, Disappearing Moon Cafe, The Invention of the World, ‘The Pride,’ The Ecstasy of Rita Joe, and numerous other texts driven by the crisis which the Native Renaissance of the 1960s and 1970s created for romantic nationalism (a crisis which would be met by other crises as a result – most notably, the reductive and guilt-charged analysis of Aboriginal literatures up to the present).

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‘[W]e may march behind [Riel’s] hearse into the wilderness perhaps for generations’ (128), Sir. John A. Macdonald declared at the end of John Coulter’s Riel (1972). Perhaps he was right. While this nation may have collectively experienced that social impetus or ‘period of a certain magnitude’ (Frye, ‘Conclusion to LHC,’ in BG 219) which Frye had claimed was necessary for the creation of a national mythology, the mythological reaction to this impetus could only be governed by a recognition of Aboriginal ‘authority’ (the obverse of Canadian history, mythologically rendered ‘unauthoritative’), and, thus, by a symbolic act which rendered this nation’s collective self subservient to that authority. The problem here is that the reductive, mythologically informed conception of authority, derived from the conflation of Aboriginality, spiritual and sacred, can get confused with the ‘tone’ of authority, rhetorical and aesthetic, and the cadences of propriety in Aboriginal literatures and public speech. This mythological pattern indicates these texts might be examples of what Jarold Ramsey, in Reading the Fire: Essays in the Traditional Indian Literatures of the Far West, calls ‘mythpoesis.’ Ramsey defines this term when he makes the following observations about the influence which biblical myths have had on Western Indian creation narratives: In general, looking from Scripture to the native texts, I propose that there are three main kinds of assimilation – really, three broad and no doubt overlapping degrees of Bible-story derivations. First, there is simple incorporation: a story is taken in and recited with simple alterations, generally centering on details of setting. Second is adaptation: a story is adapted more or less drastically, often so as to fit into a pre-existing native cycle or scheme, and often with dislocation of narrative order and alteration of motives and meanings. Third, we might see a kind of mythpoesis, in which, through what looks like a genuine free play of imagination over the convergence of native and Christian traditions, ‘something new’ is created. (Reading the Fire 172)

While Ramsey speaks specifically of Christian influences and their effects in Aboriginal stories, it seems fitting to reapply his definitions. Frye, too, noted the influence which Native traditions had had on Canadian literature after 1960, speaking of ‘absorption’ (‘Levels of Cultural Identity’ [1989–90], in Gorjup 201), a process which could be defined in Ramsey’s terms as either ‘incorporation’ or ‘mythpoesis.’

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Critics often speak of ‘desire’ and ‘appropriation’ in their discussions of non-Native literature and its ‘borrowings’ of Native material; however, these phenomena might also be understood in terms of traditional, mythological development. Although there is a danger in stereotyping and a strict return to cultural separation through romanticization, are there mythological traditions behind something which can only represent a force as symbolic? Ramsey traces the influences of cultural belief systems upon one another: Several Salishan-speaking Indian tribes of interior British Columbia have oral-historical records of their apparently unanticipated encounters with Simon Fraser’s canoe expedition as it struggled down the rugged Fraser towards its Pacific mouth in the summer of 1808 … One of these stories, from the Lilloet tribe, gives a quite detailed and literal account of ‘the drifters,’ … literal that is, except for one gnomic detail. The expedition’s headman, presumably Fraser, is said to have had ‘a tattoo of the sun on his forehead and a tattoo of the moon on his chest.’2 Now there is no reason to suppose that Fraser was so ornamented (the Lilloets did practice tattooing themselves), yet he is vividly identified with the sun and the moon in the oral tradition of another native group, The Thompson River Indians (or Nlaka’pamux). When the party reached the Thompsons’ country immediately above the Lilloets, they suffered a spectacular canoe-capsizing some miles below the present-day town of Lytton, and when James Teit transcribed the Thompsons’ oral literature for Franz Boas a full century later, he recorded … three accounts of the accident … Taken together with Simon Fraser’s own journal narrative of the event, they offer a rare illustration, a paradigm in fact, of the working process of adaptive myth-making. (123)

This example supports Clifford’s assertion that ‘what one sees in a coherent ethnographic account, the imaged construct of the other, is connected in a continuous double structure with what one understands’ (‘On Ethnographic Allegory’ 101). Fraser is tattooed because his tattoo appropriately defines him in terms of what the storyteller’s world knows. I would argue that just as the Salishan Fraser wears a sun on his forehead and moon on his chest, so, too, did Canadian literature – after the advent of this recent Native Renaissance – begin to wear the imprint of different symbols. However, it wears these symbols much as a band-aid would be worn on a gunshot wound. This is where the

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mythological inheritance of romantic nationalism is irreparably blown apart by its own informants. While the sacred is recognized as being, it glaringly sits on top of a history that is not born out of the source of this sacred material. This is not to say that the process is either good or bad, or filled with ‘fear or temptation’ (Goldie) – these are points which belong to a different discussion, though I would suggest that the ‘imagist school’ of criticism which dominates Aboriginal literature is, perhaps, related to certain mythological impulses. The focus on the image of the Native is a troubling and dominant fascination, bound up with dichotomies, essentialism, and absolutes. If symbols of ‘sacred’ Aboriginality and ‘profane’ nation can be deconstructed, however, using the same mythological principles which constructed them (as well as different theoretical strategies), the critic might be led to a new fascination with tensions; in this manner, the critic might be able to part more easily from the rituals, images, and myths upon which romantic nationalism depends. Thus, we might turn to Otto Rank, who in ‘The Myth of the Birth of the Hero’ claims that ‘appropriation of mythological contents always represents at the same time an independent mythological construction; because only that can be retained permanently which corresponds to the borrower’s stage of mythological ideation’ (4). What has been retained here, then? What constructions tell of a new stage of mythological ideation in Canada? Anti-heroes, new and forceful inscriptions of the sacred and profane, an inability to move beyond a recognition of violence, and a new trickster. This is only one set of considerations. More importantly, and more difficult to answer, are the following questions: just how did these tensions happen, and how did subsequent patterns surface in specific types of post-centenary Canadian writing? In this complicated process of mythological revisioning, there were influential Aboriginal aesthetics at play, and if we look outside mythological interests, we are led to new tensions and new considerations about literary stylistics. It is telling that not long after this Native Renaissance, critics began to herald the arrival of a new kind of writing in Canadian literature in a body of literature obsessed with Canadian history. In her chapter, ‘The Novel 1972–84,’ for volume 4 of the second edition of The Literary History of Canada (1990), Linda Hutcheon speaks of ‘Canadian metafiction after 1970’: [A]n interesting split developed between the use and awareness of … two kinds of sources, specifically between the written chronicle and the oral

172 Before the Country tale. On the one hand, many novels also played with overt fictionality and the transience (if immediacy) of the oral tradition. The chronicle, the mode of written history, was clearly an attractive structuring device for even the most self-reflexive of metafictions. But it was not just at the level of structure that this model had its impact. In this fiction, new ‘trappings’ of realism were made possible by modern technology. (Canadian Postmodern 211)3

Housed as an appendix in Hutcheon’s The Canadian Postmodern, this chapter suggests an affinity between an exploration of the intersection between oral and written sources in post-1970 Canadian literature and the defining characteristics of postmodernism, which Hutcheon says began to arrive in Canada in the 1970s and 1980s (Canadian Postmodern 1). Hutcheon speculates this emphasis on an oral-literate dichotomy may have reflected the ‘legacy of the theories of Marshall McLuhan’s work, including The Gutenberg Galaxy’ (212). However, this interest in oral and literary forms of communication, which, granted, manifested itself in Canadian literature shortly after the publication of some of McLuhan’s trailblazing works,4 might also reflect the emergence in this same decade and in ensuing years of a body of written First Nations literature often tied to an ‘oral’ heritage. The appellation ‘oral’ is too general to serve much good, but it is a starting point for thinking about the process of exchange. Aboriginal literature published during the 1960s and 1970s often drew attention to itself as being expressed for the first time in ‘conventional’ written form. Chief Kenneth Harris, in his foreword to Visitors Who Never Left (1974), a collaborative, as-told-to work written down by Frances M.P. Robinson, began in the following manner: This is Ken Harris speaking. I will attempt to translate the history of our people of Damelahamid as it was told by Arthur McDames who was the Chief of Damelahamid and my mother, Mrs. Irene Harris, who explained the meaning of the Indian terms to me. I also speak for myself as I am the last source of such information and as I hold the title of Hagbegwatku, First Born of our Nation. I feel that this information must be passed to my relatives and clansmen. Because of the changing times and the fact that our people are now in a transition period, my choice of media, the printed word, is essential. (xxiii)

Chief Harris underscored the difference between the printed medium and the speaking voice, indicating the former was now conveniently

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being used to express the latter. The publisher’s foreword to Edith Josie’s Here Are the News (1966) also indicated that Josie’s text incorporated heavy signs of the spoken: ‘Pat Youngs, until recently village nurse, says, “Edith writes exactly as she talks in English, just as the other women of her age group talk in Old Crow”’ (vii). Anglican priest and director of the Nishnawbe Institute (Toronto) at the time, John A. MacKenzie drew attention to the fact that his contribution to For Every North American Indian Who Begins to Disappear, I Also Begin to Disappear (1971), ‘On the Demonic Nature of Institutions,’ captured the nexus between oral and written traditions: When I am asked to write something for a book, I feel the need to begin by making a few observations about writing itself. When one writes for a book, one does not know the readers personally. On the other hand, the writer, at least this one, is attempting to express personal feelings and observations in written form. Immediately, a gap between author and reader is created. This gap, which is natural and not essentially significant, becomes demonic in the context of present day society for we have made literacy into some kind of criterion for ultimate truth, which in turn begins to determine the nature of personal relationships. It is this element of literacy, of reading and writing, which is disturbing and I think characteristic and symptomatic of one of the deeply embedded attitudes of our society in this era which is a fundamental cause of much social conflict. (141)

While J.E. Chamberlin accurately notes that ‘cultures are not oral or written’ (‘Doing Things with Words’ 75), much of the literature of the Native Renaissance did draw attention to the newness of what was happening. This literature endorses the second part of Chamberlin’s claim: ‘Their most important forms of expression sometimes are [oral or written]’ (75, my emphasis). In Trapping Is My Life, John Tetso indicated he was willing to share his cultural expressions; he also insinuated they might be different at times from those of non-Aboriginal cultures: ‘… it has been suggested to me to write about life on the trapline. I am following that suggestion because I am always willing to help bridge the gap between our two worlds. Integration, that is’ (1). A consideration of this ‘integration’ or ‘transition’ (Harris) is crucial, for it is possible to suggest that certain types of postmodernism in Canada are actually the vestiges of old structures and ideas which authors began either actively interrogating or unwittingly greeting when the face of social history and its traditions became suspect

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because of pan-Indian activism and unprecedented Aboriginal ‘re-entry’ into the Canadian public domain. I am unable to determine conclusively how these influences might have entered postmodern texts – whether through authors reading written Aboriginal literatures which bore the marks of ‘orature,’ listening to Aboriginal declarations, or witnessing actions. However, a consideration of cultural exchanges will hopefully bring new and important questions to the study of both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal literatures in Canada. ‘Originality,’ as Northrop Frye put it, ‘is largely a returning to origins’ (‘Canada and Its Poetry,’ in BG 136), and postmodernism is no exception. It is not that postmodern characteristics are necessarily synonymous with those of various Indigenous traditions, simply dubbed too often and too reductively ‘oral’; rather, the rough verisimilitude which exists between what has been called ‘postmodernism’ and Aboriginal literatures reveals the possible adoption by non-Aboriginal authors of both an ethos and aesthetics which differ, in varying degrees, from those found in written literatures born out of Eurocentric, perhaps Christian-inspired, traditions. It is necessary, however, to temper these speculations with the deconstruction of romantic impulses and theories carried by such stories as those which inform Frye’s predicted ‘Day of Atonement.’ Examples of critics claiming Aboriginal literature to be ‘oral’ and Europeanderived literatures ‘written’ are too numerous to list. As late as 2002, this clear-cut dichotomy surfaced again in an article entitled ‘The Places of Aboriginal Writing 2000 in Canada: The Novel.’ E.F. Dyck begins this study by noting that ‘indigenous cultural tradition was of course oral and, as such, contrasted sharply with the written cultures of the European colonizers’ (63). It is this belief which also ultimately shapes Hutcheon’s theories in her contribution to the second edition of The Literary History of Canada, as well as a significant amount of contemporary criticism of Aboriginal literatures. In her article ‘The Gentle War,’ Mi’kmaq poet and elder Rita Joe addresses this popular conception when she describes her desire that younger Aboriginal people engage in ‘mainstream’ publishing to bolster a contemporary, written Aboriginal canon: What little I found done by Native people I read and received inspirations from, arguing against non-literal attestations by non-Indians about the aboriginal lack of arts and word not left behind. I pointed out the stone writings, hieroglyphics and many other ways our people left word. It took me ten years of the gentle war of words all over the country, even in

Admitting the Possibility of Transitional Texts 175 the United States to point out that our people need more than what we have in written word, the heroes we want to learn about, the more positive outlook for our children, what they learn. (28)

Indigenous, North American cultures, like the progenitors of modern-day European peoples, have a significant history of written activity. As Richard Daly explains in his essay ‘Writing on the Landscape: Protoliteracy and Psychic Travel in Oral Cultures,’ ‘the activity of “writing things down” … constitutes a form of literacy, whether it be executed on people’s bodies, their tools or the landscape around them’ (226). The Huron and Iroquois Nations used branches and porcelain necklaces as currency and as expressive mediums. In her article ‘From Royal Cabinets to Museums: A Composite History,’ Anne Vitart notes that there are documents which record that the Huron and Iroquois made deals with branches and porcelain necklaces which ‘serve[d] as words, writing, and contracts’ (37). The ubiquitous custom of wampum belts, totem poles, masks, as well as the Plains Indian tradition of painted buffalo hides and Navajo sand paintings, are other examples of refined, inscribed activities. One need not rely solely on historical documents to understand that systems of writing existed before European explorers descended on the ‘new world.’ ‘Navajo author Scott Momaday,’ in his novel House Made of Dawn (1966), foregrounds in fictional recall (connected to anterior traditions) what Richard Daly terms the ‘pictorial literacy’ (223) that constitutes a significant corpus of First Nations’ chronicles. In the following passage, Tosamah provides the context necessary to understand one of the stories recounted in the Kiowa calendar, as relayed to him by his grandmother: [T]he last Kiowa sun dance was held in 1887 on the Washita River above Rainy Mountain Creek. The buffalo were gone. In order to consummate the ancient sacrifice – to impale the head of a buffalo bull upon the Tai-me tree – a delegation of old men journeyed into Texas, there to beg and barter for an animal from the Goodnight herd. She [Tosamah’s grandmother] was ten when the Kiowas came together for the last time as a living sun dance culture. They could find no buffalo; they had to hang an old hide from the sacred tree. That summer was known to my grandmother as A’pote Etóda-de K’ádó, Sun Dance when the Forked Poles Were Left Standing, and it is entered in the Kiowa calendars as the figure of a tree standing outside the unfinished framework of a medicine lodge. (122)

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European concepts of writing might share an affinity with those inscribed traditions which, at first blush, appear fundamentally different. It is interesting to note here, as Seth Lerer does in Literacy and Power in Anglo-Saxon Literature, that ‘our Modern English words for writing and reading ultimately derive from terms for carving and decipherment’ (11). Without recognizing similarities and comparisons between cultures, it is easy to relegate Aboriginal oral literatures and their memories to a distant past. Critics of First Nations literature also tend to speak still of communally created art as opposed to individual artistry, taking their prompts, perhaps, from those voices who speak of a collective ethos in their cultural, artistic expressions. Lakota critic Paula Gunn Allen explains that ‘the Indian ethos is neither individualistic nor conflict-centred, and the unifying structures that make the oral tradition coherent are less a matter of character, time and setting than the coherence of common understanding derived from ritual tradition that members of a tribal unit share’ (7). There is something important in the recognition that many traditional Indigenous societies were guided by a ‘shame-culture morality … enforced mainly by fear of public shame’ (Ramsey 171), and that this characteristic is divorced, in many ways, from the Christian concept of ‘private guilt’ (Ramsey 171). However, as Ruth Finnegan observes in Literacy and Orality: Studies in the Technology of Communication, ‘the idea that non-written literature is somehow “communally” rather than “individually” created … is associated with a certain era of the romantic movement’ (72). In his introduction to The Only Good Indian, Waubageshig underscores how similar theories about the ‘communal nature’ of Aboriginal literature and articulations threaten true and sophisticated understandings: ‘Too often in the past, statements uttered by individual native people have been regarded as being representative when, in fact, all that was being presented was one man’s viewpoint’ (v). It is understandable, though not helpful, that recent critics have largely avoided these considerations in their exploration of Aboriginal literatures in Canada. While both French and English ethnographers and missionaries began recording traditional Native narratives at an early date in Canada, they produced translations; scholars of literatures are extremely suspect of such interpretation, an act exceptionally problematic when it comes to Aboriginal literatures. Aboriginal authors and spokespeople, as well as other scholars, realize that the ‘as-told-to tradition’ is not to be unconditionally accepted as the truth. As Lee Maracle

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says of the 1970s, when Aboriginal publishing houses (incorporated largely in the 1980s) did not exist, ‘our dilemma was that we still needed some European author to validate our thoughts’ (Epilogue to Bobbi Lee [1990], 210). Thorough criticism of editorial and publishing interference in Aboriginal voices is desperately needed. In addition, the profession of literary studies demands that scholars account for and build upon those theories already postulated; this has meant that anterior traditions have consistently been regarded as natural precursors to innovation. When we speak of realism and its changing face, we speak of surrealism. When what has been called modernism begins to shift, we say postmodernism. Attention needs to be drawn to how such a linear concept of literature misses the nuances of literary change. It is to the past pages of both Aboriginal and Canadian texts that one should turn to understand a significant moment of exchange between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal authors – both ‘oral’ and ‘literate’ – since the advent of this recent Native Renaissance. There are important suggestions in the work of J.E. Chamberlin. Instead of considering different sorts of authors, Chamberlin notes that in a consideration of oral and written traditions ‘these differences have much less to do with whether languages are spoken or written than with the particular languages themselves, and with the different ways in which they negotiate between the authority of experience and the authority of the imagination’ (‘Doing Things with Words’ 75). There are also important directives to follow in Kertzer’s claims about national conditions and styles: An intrinsic history might trace the development of the sonnet from Petrarch to Milton Acorn. An extrinsic history might explain how uses of the sonnet express different social, ideological, or national conditions. This analysis separates the ‘inside’ from the ‘outside’ of literature by distinguishing between aesthetic form and social function … [O]ne can trace a detailed parallel between the growth of the nation and a succession of literary styles and genres, each an improvement on the previous one. (18–19)

It is necessary to account for the difference between an aesthetic and ethos, inside and outside, to abandon the conflation which so often besets interpretations of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal literatures which engage with the literary and political. It is necessary to give devoted literary attention to Aboriginal literatures. The trick here is to

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respect cultural difference and make sense of literary difference without separating cultures into strict camps, as post-centenary Canadian mythologists have done in their inscriptions of Indian sacred and nonIndian profane. The problem, as Ruffo also acknowledges, is that there is little critical precedent yet for achieving sophisticated analysis: speaking of the ‘creative “renaissance” or “rebirth”’ which he notes began in the ‘early seventies,’ Ruffo suggests that because the Aboriginal writing of this period was ‘so new and unexpected, there was little critical writing attempting to provide context and analysis of the literature’ ((Ad)dressing Our Words 5). This ‘period of silence’ that is spoken of so often in discussions of Aboriginal literature needs to be more carefully considered. The decades between Pauline’s Johnson’s death in 1913 and the late 1960s were not only years of ‘silence’ in Aboriginal publishing but also years of silence in Canadian criticism. When Aboriginal literature entered the Canadian public domain in force during the 1960s and 1970s, no sophisticated body of scholarship existed for the criticism of Aboriginal literatures in Canada. Thus, many critics spoke of Aboriginal literatures in general terms. Many critics – mostly those nonAboriginal – are not at the stage yet in the criticism of Aboriginal literatures to offer convincing theories about contemporary Aboriginal literatures or their anterior traditions. When Chamberlin writes about ‘one of the most celebrated cases in recent Native North American litigation,’ the ‘case known as Delgamuukw v. the Queen’ (‘Doing Things with Words’ 69), and examines Judge McEachern’s denial of the Gitksan and Wet’suwet’en’s 1987 land claim, he avoids engaging in the resurrection of morality plays that choke the throats of many critics today. He records Judge McEachern’s reaction to one of the Gitksan elders, Anigulilibix (Mary Johnson), who offered to the courts her testimony in the form of a song: [F]inally, in the face of a dignified intransigence, he agreed to let Mary Johnson sing the song. Just as she was about to start he fired his final salvo. ‘It’s not going to do any good to sing it to me,’ he said. ‘I have a tin ear.’ His comments, both during Mary Johnson’s oral testimony and in his written judgment, have been roundly castigated. But Judge McEachern was right. He did have a tin ear; and more importantly, he said so. That puts him a cut above most of us, who go through life – and who teach in the academy – assuming that we could make not only music but meaning out of Mary Johnson’s song. (76)

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‘It is hard to not know what you do know’ (145), says the narrator of Alistair MacLeod’s ‘As Birds Bring Forth the Sun,’ a Cape Breton short story infused with Maritime orature. However, it is important to admit the possibility of not knowing to allow for the advancement of scholarship. Perhaps we need to continue telling and sharing stories, exposing designs in informants, theories, and mythologies, deconstructing the faith systems which still inflect ostensibly different and better criticism, before declaring truths about literatures. If critics have tin ears, then let them admit that. Janice Acoose suggests that ‘those coming from outside a culture must seek the necessary prerequisite information so that any attempt to address its literature will be more than merely superficial, or, in the extreme, inaccurate’ (‘A Vanishing Indian?’ 47). True. I would add that many minds in Canada have been ‘storied,’ many ears blocked by the weight of narrative inheritance, and that it is necessary to keep telling stories and examining their make-up, so that we might be able to move beyond some.

Conclusion

Only indirectly, by association and suggestion, is Indian legend likely, I think, to exert marked influence upon our creative literature. – Charles G.D. Roberts, writing in 1886, in Selected Poetry and Critical Prose, 261–2

More than prompting people to remember a past that had been ‘forgotten’ for the sake of imperialism and nationalism, the Native Renaissance of the 1960s and 1970s in Canada boasted what Renan claims is the second necessary ingredient for the successful cohesion of nations: The nation, like the individual, is the culmination of a long past of endeavors, sacrifice, and devotion. Of all cults, that of the ancestors is the most legitimate, for the ancestors have made us what we are. A heroic past, great men, glory (by which I understand genuine glory), this is the social capital upon which one bases a national idea. To have common glories in the past and to have a common will in the present; to have performed great deeds together, to wish to perform still more – these are the essential conditions for being a people. (19)

The political actions and the literature that grew out of the 1960s and 1970s drew attention to proud ancestral pasts. Aboriginal spokespeople and writers underscored that ancient heroes were still living because the living could still remember and speak of them. Ancient histories full of ‘common glories’ and a contemporary ‘common will,’ reflected in the pan-Indianism of the day, indicated there were more great deeds in waiting. This was the seventh generation.

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The Native Renaissance provided a striking contrast between the history of the Canadian nation and the histories of Aboriginal nations. This realization led to problematic fixations when the inheritors of romantic nationalism tried to make sense of differences: Aboriginal nations possessed ‘sacred’ origins to which they could trace their histories and contemporary writings; the Canadian nation did not possess a comparable metaphysical foundation from which it could legitimize its current history. Early attempts to provide Canadian mythologies indicated authors were not familiar with this world’s Indigenous ‘sun-gods’; they had not experienced what Frye called a true ‘uniting of subject and object in the imaginative experience’ (‘Conclusion to LHC’ [1965], in BG 245). Authors were reliant on imported paradigms of thought and the imaginative language learned from other places. Thus, for a significant while, tenuous mythological frameworks defined Canadian writing; readers were presented with a body of literature continually searching for indigenous mythological material. The early stages of Canadian literary development reveal it was national mythologies people intended to possess. Colonization of the ‘new world’ had created a largely unsettled populace which mourned that it did not possess convincing stories to define its spirit. The story which searches for the goals of romantic nationalism pauses uncomfortably at this recognition. Notable critical voices would say that a Canadian literature did not exist (Lampman), that the ‘bulk’ of Canadian literature ‘smells of mortality’ (MacMechan), that there was ‘far too little Canadian vision’ (Frye). People would look forward to change, when the moment for ‘a national song’ (Lampman) presented itself with a ‘crisis’ (Lampman and Brown) or ‘social impetus’ (Frye) great enough to change the colonial spirit which plagued Canadian writing. This is romantic and extreme. Uncomfortable with the extrinsically shaped nature of Canada’s mythology, writers and critics posed sharp divides between history and mythology, Canada and Aboriginal nations, respectively. These were false divides, reductive and stereotypical. Deborah Doxtator observes that ‘one fundamental point of separation between the two ways off conceptualizing the past has been the idea that Native people have “myth” but not history’ (34). Jordan Wheeler also notes that ‘Aboriginal people have their own history, but judged by a society that doesn’t share the same values and attitudes, the traditional stories are passed off as mythology’ (38). Early Canadian writers, as well as those who followed in the footsteps of romantic

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nationalism, desired what they did not ‘nationally’ have; unable to understand the difference with sophistication, the result was mythological reduction which, at the same time, was attempting to account for some very real influences. Perhaps there might not only be notable differences between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal aesthetics but also, as Doxtator has suggested, differences between Aboriginal and nonAboriginal conceptions of history and myth. Doxtator maintains that ‘Indigenous conceptualizations of history are not the same as those that came out of a European tradition’ (35). She relies on the work which Terence Turner and Alcida Ramos have independently done in South America: Turner argues that European history is based on a tradition that stems from Thucydides’ emphasis upon retelling events in a chronological sequence as part of one universal history, but that other kinds of history order events as episodes, not strictly connected to one another in a set chronology (Turner 1988, 249–50). Alcida Ramos further argues that the separation of myth from history is part of a process of compartmentalization that is unnecessary in indigenous thought but essential to European-based ideas of rationalism and empiricism (Ramos 1988, 229). (Doxtator 35)

If critics were to abandon their own empiricism’s legacy in future studies of Aboriginal literatures, they might even find that forgetting mythology is equally as important as forgetting history. However, one has to recognize mythology first: part of Canada’s mythology is an archetypal search for mythological greatness. What is notable about early Canadian mythological ideation and its legacy in certain postmodern texts obsessed with history is that this search for a national mythology reveals an entire lack of confidence, an incessant turning to a consideration of what Canadian writing does not possess. At an early date, it was determined that Canadian literature did not possess strong foundations for the making of national mythologies because its people did not possess an ancient national identity. It did not possess a continuous literary history because its people had arrived in boatloads on a politically divided shore as little as five hundred years ago. It did not possess ‘sun-gods’ (Frye) or Indigenous ‘spirit[s] of creation’ (Reaney) because its people had not grown up with this world for thousands of years. ‘Canadian’ writers lacked everything of which the First Nations boasted during the 1960s and 1970s. This Native Renaissance revealed continuous, albeit disrupted,

Conclusion 183

literary histories; continuous cultural histories; heroes – both living and dead; Indigenous ‘sun-gods’; narratives inscribed on the faces of mountains, rocks, and trees; sacred pasts; and living voices that could remember stories as old as those once sung in the halls of Heorot. For a nation which, at this point, considered itself to be composed of ‘losers and quislings’ (Dennis Lee, Civil Elegies [1972] 44), these Indigenous possessions could only create humility and envy. Frye remarked that ‘empathy between poet and listening audience … is broken by the rise of a writing culture’ (‘Silence in the Sea’ [1968], in BG 187). However, when cultures writing out of solid traditions, perhaps traceable to ‘orature,’ become a focal point of national consideration, the desirous gaze of writers from outside this tradition may either inadvertently resurrect, through a kind of public osmosis, or wittingly appropriate not only beliefs but also structures dependent on speaker and listener; thus, we might consider that both Aboriginal texts of the 1960s and 1970s and certain non-Aboriginal postmodern works might be ‘transitional.’ It is the emergence, or perhaps resurgence, of a meaningful, albeit questionable, ‘connection’ between speaker and audience which, in large part, defines Canadian postmodernism as understood by Linda Hutcheon. Hutcheon has interpreted the genre as one which, ‘unlike the art or literature of modernism … uses its tendency towards self-reference as a way both of engaging with its own past, usually through irony and parody, and also of engaging with its audience’ (Canadian Postmodern xi). ‘[R]eaders of the postmodern novel (like the modernist one),’ she continues, ‘must participate, even if we do not identify’ (27). While Hutcheon aptly recognizes a ‘continuity between the modernist and the postmodernist,’ what she says ‘distinguishes them’ is the use of postmodernism’s ‘self-consciousness’ to foster a ‘new engagement with the social and the historical world … in such a way as to challenge (though not destroy) our traditional humanist beliefs about the function of art in society’ (1–2). In these postmodern texts of which Hutcheon speaks, there is a felt need to question how historical truth has been presented. There is also an attempt to make the reader part of an artistic process which is inextricably concerned with questioning. The conclusion of Leonard Cohen’s Beautiful Losers (1966), deemed by Hutcheon to be ‘the forerunner of this postmodern fiction of the seventies and eighties’ (14), draws attention to itself as narrative process and gives the following meaning to an attempt to re-story the life of Iroquois saint Catherine Tekakwitha: ‘… we petition the country for

184 Before the Country

miracle evidence, and we submit this document, whatever its intentions, as the first item in a revived testimonial to the Indian girl’ (306). In his invention of a romantic western which attempts to recreate some of the circumstances of the Métis Red River Rebellions, ‘Where Is the Voice Coming From?’, Rudy Wiebe begins by asserting that ‘the problem is to make the story’ (135). His narrator further points out Aristotle’s famous maxim: ‘the true difference [between the historian and the poet] is that one relates what has happened, the other what may happen’ (141). This adage is ironically undermined throughout the narrative as the collecting of artefacts and reconstruction of historical discourse are lent more than a maniacal and suspect edge. Howard O’Hagan’s Tay John, a text originally published in 1939 but recognized and resurrected just prior to the postmodern period (republished in 1960), is strongly informed by Shuswap stories, narratives which were once spread orally. O’Hagan’s text, dependent as it is upon ‘legend,’ ‘hearsay,’ and ‘evidence’ (the titles of the book’s three sections), suggests something about the vitality of spoken sources and the tenuous nature of history. At the heart of Mordecai Richler’s Solomon Gursky Was Here (1989), a later postmodern work, lies the Inuit myth of Iktoomi, which, together with the fact that Moses is intent on following the Gursky legend (his own culture’s body of oral literature), is thematically tied to a recognition that correspondences must necessarily be interpreted by a recognition of how speaker and receiver understand one another. Relating the story of raven to Moses, Hymie murmurs: ‘As you well know, Moses, the raven speaks in two voices, one harsh and dissembling, and the other, which he used now, seductive’ (500). Charles G.D. Roberts is an aberration in the considerations which have shaped Before the Country, as he felt Canadian literature to be somehow truly Canadian at an early date in the nation’s history. However, he might have been correct in his prediction that it would be by some kind of general association and insinuation that Aboriginal literature would be recognized as having made an impress on Canadian writing and thought. This postmodern attempt to include the reader is, on the one hand, the extension of a desire to involve the individual in historical processes, including the unmasking of buried truths. It is the attempt to find and take meaning from some sort of inspirational collectivity or ethos while ‘one’s own’ is seen to be standing on shaky moral ground, or while one’s own is unknown. Maybe it is possible to question, then, whether or not postmodernist self-reflexivity could be a

Conclusion 185

reaction to the political and social nature of Renaissance activism and literature, as well as to the conventions used by Aboriginal writers to examine history. In his conclusion to Black Words, White Page, Shoemaker, recounting his major findings about Black Australian literature in the period from 1929 to 1988, notes that Aboriginal writing is ‘inescapably socio-political’ for the following two reasons: The first is that it expresses a culture which has survived in a tangible and ongoing sense despite nearly two centuries of oppression. It is therefore frequently self-analytical, self-referential and self-defining. The second reason is that Aboriginal writing is consciously produced to express and investigate relationships with the dominant White Australian society. (272)

Shoemaker’s observations again suggest there is good reason to examine and investigate relationships – both cultural and literary – which exist within different national borders. On the other hand, could this same phenomenon – self-reflexivity – be recognized as the extension of aesthetics which grow out of literatures tied to certain types of oral traditions or a formula for public speaking and address that demands that speakers foreground, with what postmodernism would call ‘selfreflexivity,’ an awareness of self and one’s own position and participation in narrative? Canadian postmodernism might not owe its origins entirely, or even largely, to Native literatures and their influences, and perhaps postmodernism is not the word that best describes that type of writing which seems to have been born when non-Native writers inscribed new literary characteristics in their recent confrontations with history. There is still something to be said for the recognition that a corpus of non-Aboriginal, postmodern texts are reliant on formal characteristics common to both postmodernism and what people have called ‘oral’ literatures, and that a mythological character seems to emerge out of the nexus of NativeRenaissance and postmodern, post-centenary narratives. I think it is notable that Frank Davey has claimed ‘the term “postmodern” first occurs around 1973’ (106), and that Lee Maracle and many others claim that ‘Halfbreed is the watershed for Native literature’ (Maracle, quoted in Andrews, ‘Forming a Powerful Voice’). I think Doxtator is right to pose the following question: ‘How could two groups of people have lived together for 500 years and not have influenced one another’s thinking or have communicated with one

186 Before the Country

another?’ (46). Whatever words we choose to define the influence which Aboriginal writing has had on Canadian literature will probably be better chosen in the years to come. However, if we can learn more about the old traditions on which contemporary Native literatures are based, we might be able to separate strands in Canadian postmodernism which render this form distinct from other forms of postmodernism and which point to a more specific reason for the newness of Canadian literature from the late 1960s onwards. More importantly, we might be able to understand Aboriginal literatures, and possibly the old traditions on which some are based, with more sophistication. This is not to suggest that critics should maintain a pattern which Thomas King highlights in his introduction to The Native in Literature: he says there are simply too many studies which become ‘an examination of how the presence of the Native has influenced white literature’ (13). Before the Country has immersed itself in the grand design of romantic nationalism to suggest abandoning what King identifies as a problem. It is not the ‘Native’ to which literary critics should turn, but to Native aesthetics. The challenge is great, however, as this book’s limited interrogation of Aboriginal aesthetics illustrates; a truly capable study of Aboriginal aesthetics can only be exploratory at this point if critics, such as myself, admit to having tin ears. If, as Frantz Fanon has said, every language, ‘every dialect, is a different way of thinking’ (25), then, to go a step further, every different epistemology is traceable to language. Even when younger Aboriginal writers write today strictly in English (and not all do), if they have been strong participants in Aboriginal communities dedicated to cultural instruction, they might inherit – not through pedigree or essentialism but osmosis and learning – the principles of Aboriginal languages. While writers of the 1960s and 1970s were using English to tell their stories and histories, the influence of other languages (their rhetorical principles, cadences, qualities, philosophies) might have been inherent in their English works. Good critical time could be devoted to examining this body of literature from another perspective. How many of these authors spoke Aboriginal languages? How was their position defined and understood among their immediate communities? Who could be interviewed to find out more? This Native Renaissance has challenged Eurocentric, Canadian epistemologies. However, though the story that predicted Canada’s ‘Day of Atonement’ comes up short and pauses in traumatic recall at the moment of its promised climax, it still operates. In 2001, attempting to

Conclusion 187

make sense of Newfoundland and Labrador’s cultural identity and its relation to ‘former’ Beothuk inhabitants, Michael Crummey wrote a new and old mythological story which spiralled in trauma just as much as Burning Water or Badlands. John Peyton of River Thieves is every bit as spiteful as Dawe or Vancouver, every bit as ignorant of Aboriginal culture and language. The most acclaimed white settler in the Bay of Exploits, he is uneasy in Newfoundland’s woods. Something pricks his spine and conscience. He is unable to deduce what fills him so full of fear: Peyton lifted his mug in acquiescence and then threw the cold remains of his tea into the snow. His companion took out his black prayer beads and rolled them through his fingers as he muttered those ancient prayers to himself. The dog got up from its place by the fire, walked a little ways outside the circle of light and began barking wildly into the woods. Reilly interrupted his rosary to quiet the dog but it would not come back to the fire. The hair was ridged along its spine and it stood there growling at the dark. Peyton felt like crawling out beside the animal and joining in himself. (73)

At the very beginning of this novel, Crummey frames his story with a preface that records what one of the novel’s voices considers to remain of the Beothuk, the teleology of the vanishing race surviving long and hard in Newfoundland’s mythology: Before all of this happened the country was known by different names … A few have survived in the notebooks and journals of the curious, of the scientifically minded who collated skinny vocabularies in the days before the language died altogether. Annoo-ee for tree or woods or forest. Gidyeathuc for the wind, Adenishit for the stars. Mammasheek for each of the ten thousand smaller islands that halo the coastline, Kadimishuite for the countless narrow tickles that run among them. Each word has the odd shape of the ancient, the curiously disturbing heft of a museum artifact. They are like tools centuries old, hewn for specific functions, some of which can only be guessed at now. Kewis to name both the sun and the moon, the full face of pocket watches stolen from European settlers. Washwitt, bear; Kosweet, caribou; Dogajavick, fox. Shabathoobet, trap. The vocabularies a kind of taxidermy, words that were once muscle and sinew preserved in these single wooden postures. Three hundred nouns, a handful of unconjugated verbs, to kiss, to run, to fall, to kill. At the edge of a story that circles and circles their own death, they stand dumbly pointing. Only the land is still there.

188 Before the Country

There is much more than land, of course, though it has formed an undeniable focus of attention in both writing and criticism. Louise Bernice Halfe’s (Sky Dancer’s) Blue Marrow records language and continuity between generations: ohkomipanak. We are Eternal Grandmothers. We who speak. I am she who called. Whispering, hopeful you might hear. nôsisimak, oh don’t cry. We will guide your feather, dipped in ink. We will flow. We will flow. The well will never dry. In those days we lay heavy loaded with children, grub. The men added to our burden, whipped us as if we were dogs, horses ploughing. We are here. Here. Here. Patience, nitânisak. My Daughters. We will speak.

(27–8)

Halfe’s poem records presence and denies erasure. It also denies the patrilineal and patriarchal. Blue Marrow suggests there are many other stories to be told: We will leave our tracks, laugh through the thunder. Feel the crack of our whips will cast lightning,

Conclusion 189 torch hearts full of memory. Listen.

(28)

Stories are vital. People live them. As critics, it matters what stories we invest our time and participate in. More than that, it is important to be able to recognize a story.

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Notes

Introduction 1 Alfred Bailey, Claude Bissell, Roy Daniells, Northrop Frye, and Desmond Pacey. For a record of the other scholars, see the list of contributors at the end of LHC. 2 ‘Between 1954 and 1975, 30,000 people were resettled in Newfoundland and Labrador, leaving 300 communities abandoned’ (MacLeod and Brown 267). 3 Jonathan Kertzer, Worrying the Nation: Imagining a National Literature in English Canada (1998). 4 Douglas LePan, ‘A Country without a Mythology,’ 11–12. 1. The Headwaters of Design 1 See McDougall. 2 Frye notes in The Critical Path that ‘the myth of concern which European and American culture has inherited is, of course, the Judaeo-Christian myth as set out in the Bible, and as taught in the form of doctrine by the Christian church’ (37). 3 See E.J. Pratt, Brébeuf and His Brethren (Toronto: Macmillan, 1940). 4 Papers Connected with the Indian Land Question, 1850–1875 (Victoria: Government Printer, 1875), 42. 5 Trutch wanted to reduce acreage allotments of reserves before British Columbia joined Confederation. He would propose in term number 13 that the Dominion government (which would take over such things as land claims) should continue to honour ‘a policy as liberal as that hitherto

192 Notes to pages 26–34

6

7

8

9

pursued by the British Columbia Government’ (quoted in Tennant 43). As Tennant points out, the catch here was that Trutch was ensuring that the Dominion would continue to honour British Columbia’s ‘power to veto reserves exceeding ten acres a family’ (Tennant 44). Typically, the acreage allotment for reserves in central Canada was eighty acres, and Trutch realized that federal officials who were cut off from a region without a transcontinental link might not consider too closely what policies they were honouring. See the first chapter of William New’s Land Sliding: Imagining Space, Presence, and Power in Canadian Writing, ‘Landing: Literature, Contact, and the Natural World,’ for a detailed discussion of how explorer myths shaped attitudes towards the ‘new world.’ New maintains the following: ‘… two criteria governed what European eyes considered acceptable in the “new world”: usefulness and beauty. Whatever was useable in the old world’s terms was deemed to be of value – that is, whatever was open to cropping and therefore to economic advantage. Whatever accorded with the old world’s measures of aesthetic order, moreover, was deemed to be beautiful’ (57). Kertzer observes that ‘John Metcalf and Robert Lecker both show, though for different reasons, how flimsy the “Canadian tradition” is, how quickly it was canonized by editors and anthologists, and how easily it was abandoned’ (3). Moss makes the following claim in this work: ‘Canada is a vast landscape and the context of innumerable regions. Its geography and climate impose an isolation of place, of many places, upon the consciousness of its populace’ (125). According to Atwood, ‘The central symbol for Canada … is undoubtedly Survival, la Survivance.’ As Atwood maintains, ‘For early explorers and settlers, it meant bare survival in the face of “hostile” elements and/or natives: carving out a place and a way of keeping alive.’ She also states that ‘the word can also suggest survival of a crisis or disaster’ and that ‘for French Canada after the English took over it became cultural survival.’ Lastly, Atwood suggests that ‘survival can be a vestige of a vanished order which has managed to persist after its time is past’ (32).

2. The Seventh Generation 1 Greg Young-Ing notes that ‘after Pauline Johnson’s untimely death in 1913, almost six decades were to pass before another Aboriginal author would be published in Canada’ (182); and Penny Petrone states that

Notes to pages 36–40 193

2 3

4

5

6

‘the decades between the First World War and the 1969 government White Paper on Indian policy was a barren period for native writing in Canada’ 95). See Richard Broome, Aboriginal Australians: Black Response to White Dominance, 1788–1980 (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1982). ‘On 16 February 1922 thirty-two people (two who were ill) appeared in Halliday’s schoolhouse courtroom for the beginning of the most decisive legal action against the potlatch. The charges stemmed from Dan Cranmer’s potlatch, the largest ever recorded on the central coast. Held at Village Island … W. Murray (their defence lawyer) asked for the leniency of the court on the basis of an agreement, already signed by the defendants and some fifty others, to potlatch no more … His suggestion that the whole Kwakiutl agency make a voluntary surrender of all potlatch property was accepted by the court … The Fort Ruperts refused to sign. Seven offenders received two-month sentences … Nimpkish Charlie Hunt, a second offender who refused to sign, received a sentence of six months … George Heye, founder of New York’s Museum of the American Indian, called in and wanted to buy a considerable amount of stuff. Halliday … sold him thirty-five pieces for $291 … The remaining material, seventeen cases, went to Ottawa where Museum anthropologist Edward Sapir appraised it at a value of $1456, without the coppers. Cheques were sent to [Indian agent] Halliday in April to be given to the former owners … The Indians considered the compensation “entirely inadequate.” No compensation was ever paid for the coppers … In all, by April 1922, fifty-eight Kwakiutl had appeared before Halliday’s makeshift bench. Nine cases were dismissed, twenty-three received two-month suspended sentences, and four were given six-month sentences, although three were later paroled. But twentytwo people served two-month sentences. Four of those imprisoned were women, and at least one was a grandmother’ (Cole and Chaikin 118–23). See, for example, Alex Grisdale and Nan Shipley’s Wild Drums: Tales and Legends of the Plains Indians (1972); and James Redsky and James R. Stevens’s Great Leader of the Ojibway: Mis-quona-queb (1972). Norman Lerman’s collection of stories from the Lower Fraser area in British Columbia, Legends of the River People (1976), and Randy Bouchard and Dorothy I.D. Kennedy’s collection of narratives, Shuswap Stories (1979), are notable examples. Norval Morriseau’s Legends of My People: The Great Ojibway (1965), George Clutesi’s Son of Raven, Son of Deer: Fables of the Tse-shaht People (1967), Alma Greene’s Forbidden Voice: Reflections of a Mohawk Indian (1971), Chief Kenneth Harris’s Visitors Who Never Left: The Origin of the People of Damelahamid

194 Notes to page 40

7

8

9

10

11

(1974), and Basil Johnston’s Ojibway Heritage (1976) all recorded, in written form, stories and legends which had been handed down to, or remembered by, the tellers of these works. See Harold Cardinal’s The Unjust Society: The Tragedy of Canada’s Indians (1969) and The Rebirth of Canada’s Indians (1977); William I.C. Wuttunnee’s Ruffled Feathers: Indians in Canadian Society (1971); Wilfred Pelletier’s Two Articles (1971) and the collection of essays contained in For Every North American Indian Who Begins to Disappear, I Also Begin to Disappear (1971); and Harold Adams’s Prison of Grass: Canada from the Native Point of View (1975). Henry George Pennier published his life story, Chiefly Indian: The Warm and Witty Story of a British Columbia Half-Breed Logger (1972); Mary Augusta Tappage told her accounts of history to Jean E. Speare, who published a rich work called The Days of Augusta (1973); Chief John Snow published These Mountains Are Our Sacred Places (1977), an outline of Stoney history, which described this nation’s negotiations with the Canadian government during the making of Treaty Six and Treaty Seven; and Chief George Barker published his life history, Forty Years a Chief (1979). In her introduction to this text, Ruth Matheson Buck explains that while Ahenakew’s text was written in 1923, ‘it was [only] after the death of Edward Ahenakew in 1961 that the papers were found in a tattered and neglected state by his niece, Katherine Ahenakew Greyeyes, who sent them to [Buck] because of [her] own interest in western history and the long association and friendship between [their] families’ (10). There is no clear explanation why Mike Mountain Horse’s story was not published earlier. In his introduction to this work, Hugh Dempsey explains that Mountain Horse’s story was notably ‘prejudiced against the old-time pagan Indian’; Dempsey suggests that this was because the publishing industry was still very much prejudiced against Aboriginal authors and that Mountain Horse ‘believed he had to satisfy [certain expectations such as these] if he expected to get his manuscript published’ (x). Stan Rough explains that Men of Medeek was written during 1935–6, but that ‘its author, Will Robinson, submitted the manuscript to several publishing companies, whose editors felt that its appeal was too limited’ (Acknowledgment). Then, in 1953, following the death of Mr Robinson, his wife ‘endeavored again to secure its publication, but while editors showed interest, no company was prepared to arrange for its publication.’ When Stan Rough became aware of the manuscript in 1960, he ‘submitted it to yet another publisher, and after holding the manuscript for a year, they returned it feeling that it had a limited sales potential.’ It was not until 1962 that the Kitimat Northern Sentinel Print Shop published the work.

Notes to pages 45–67 195 12 Wuttunnee’s Ruffled Feathers: Indians in Canadian Society (1971) is basically a defence of the White Paper and an attack on Cardinal’s The Unjust Society. 13 As Raunet explains, ‘Frank Calder was one of the few Native figures to endorse Trudeau’s suggestion,’ but, in fact, ‘his overall position differed greatly from the federal plan’ (158). Raunet maintains that ‘his approval of repeal was conditional on acceptance of the same land claims the prime minister had specifically rejected’ (158). 14 For a succinct summary of the land-claims activities of this period, see Canada, Indian Claims Commission, Indian Claims in Canada, and Frideres, Native People in Canada. See also Raunet, Without Surrender, without Consent, for a detailed explanation of the precedent-setting legal battle, the Nisga’a, or Calder, case, and O’Malley, The Past and Future Land, for an overview of the important Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Inquiry, or Berger Commission. 15 The name Kwakiutl is a word which came to define fifteen different nations who are known as the Kwakwaka’wakw, ‘speaker of Kwakwala’ (Coull 55). The word properly refers to only one nation, the Kwagul or Kwagiulth (same as Kwakiutl) (Coull 56). 16 There is no pagination in this pamphlet. 17 They chose selections from Alma Greene’s Forbidden Voice, Rita Joe’s Song of Eskasoni, Harold Cardinal’s The Rebirth of Canada’s Indians, and Jean Speare’s recording of Mary Augusta Tappage’s stories in The Days of Augusta. They also included ‘The Prophecy,’ ‘One Generation from Extinction,’ and ‘Is That All There Is? Tribal Literature,’ by Basil Johnston, and ‘I Am a Canadian’ and selections from We Are Métis (1980), by Duke Redbird. 3. Native Literature of the 1960s and 1970s in Canada 1 Legends of My People: The Great Ojibway; Son of Raven, Son of Deer; Legends of the River People; Ojibway Heritage; Wild Drums; and Kwakiutl Legends (Wallis and Whittaker) are notable examples. 2 All material enclosed in double quotation marks (or, when in block quotations, material enclosed in single quotation marks) indicates what Jousse has borrowed from the critic he has cited. Jousse’s own words, when they interrupt borrowed material, are surrounded by square brackets. This applies to all substantial quotes taken from The Oral Style which appear in Before the Country. 3 E.J. Pratt, Towards the Last Spike (Toronto: Macmillan, 1947). 4 See W.E.H. Stanner, ‘Religion, Totemism and Symbolism,’ in Aboriginal Man in Australia, ed. Ronald. M. Berndt and Catherine. H. Berndt (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1965). 5 Smith, Decolonizing Mythologies, 53; in Findlay, ‘Always Indigenize!’

196 Notes to pages 68–111 6 Cf. Schweninger 47. 7 The Book of Jessica includes the play Jessica but also a lengthy discussion of the production history of the play. 8 ‘The Mohawk word for Iroquois’ (Doxtator 47). 9 Hewitt 192. 10 Brodhead 1: 83n1. Doxtator acknowledges her spellings differ from those of Brodhead’s. 11 Gibson 426. 12 Kath Walker (Oodgeroo Noonuccal), The Dawn Is at Hand (Brisbane: Jacaranda P, 1966). 13 Kath Walker (Oodgeroo Noonuccal), We Are Going (Brisbane: Jacaranda P, 1964). 14 Lee Maracle, Bobbi Lee: Indian Rebel (with photographs, maps, and illustrations); Chief George Barker, Forty Years a Chief (with photographs and also illustrations by Judith Anne Rempel); George Clutesi, Potlatch and Son of Raven, Son of Deer (with illustrations by the author); Clellan S. Ford and Charles James Nowell, Smoke from Their Fires (with map and crests); Chief Dan George, My Heart Soars (with drawings by Helmut Hirnschall); Randy Bouchard and Dorothy Kennedy, eds, Shuswap Stories (with photographs); Kent Gooderham, ed. I Am an Indian (with illustrations, paintings, drawings, and photographs); Alma Greene, Forbidden Voice (with illustrations by Gordon McLean); Max Gros Louis, First among the Hurons (with photographs); Chief Kenneth Harris, Visitors Who Never Left (with photographs); Basil Johnston, How the Birds Got Their Colours – Gah w’indinimowaut binaesheehnyuk w’idinauziwin-wauh (with illustrations by Del Ashkewe); Norman Lerman, Legends of the River People (with pictures); Norval Morriseau, Legends of My People (with illustrations by Morriseau); Wilfred Pelletier et al., For Every North American Indian Who Begins to Disappear, I Also Begin to Disappear (with silkscreen prints by Daphne Odjig); Wilfred Pelletier, Two Articles (with artwork by Francis Kagige, and photographs by Tamio Wakayama and Howard Anderson); James Redsky, Great Leader of the Ojibway: Mis-quona-queb (with photographs); Chief John Snow, These Mountains Are Our Sacred Places (with maps and photographs); Jean Speare and Mary Augusta Tappage, Days of Augusta (with photography by Robert Keziere); John Tetso, Trapping Is My Life (with illustrations by Lorne H. Bouchard); Jane Willis, Geniesh: An Indian Girlhood (with photographs). 15 Dance credits Louise Bennett, in particular her work Anancy and Miss Lou, and Leonard Barrett (The Sun and the Drum) for this knowledge. 16 Kevin Gilbert, End of Dreamtime (Sydney: Island P, 1971). 17 There is no pagination in this Foreword.

Notes to pages 115–53 197 4. Day of Atonement 1 Kath Walker (Oodgeroo Noonuccal), We Are Going (Brisbane: Jacaranda P, 1964). 2 W.H. New, ‘Fiction,’ in Literary History of Canada, 3 vols, ed. C.F. Klinck et al., (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1976), 3:248, quoted in Monkman 3. 3 Dorothy Livesay, ‘The Native People in Our Canadian Literature’ 22; quoted in Monkman 3. 4 George Woodcock, ‘Turning the Facts into Bad Fiction’ 84; quoted in Monkman 4. 5 Parker claims that during Canada’s early years, ‘the very situation of Canada was inimical to drama’ (23). In addition to the fact that ‘the country was too big and too sparsely populated for a medium that is essentially an art of developed cities,’ Parker claims that Canada lacked ‘an imaginative myth of itself, any ideal such as the “American Dream” or the “frontier” or even “democracy”’ (153). 5. Searching for Sun-Gods: Robert Kroestch’s Badlands and Sky Lee’s Disappearing Moon Cafe 1 See Chapter 4 of Peter Thomas’s Robert Kroetsch, ‘The Far Interior: Gone Indian; Badlands,’ and Ann Mandel’s article ‘Uninventing Structures: Cultural Criticism and the Novels of Robert Kroetsch’ for a discussion of the Orphic descent in Badlands. 2 See Janice Acoose’s (Misko-Kìsikàwihkwè’s) Iskwewak – Kah’Ki Yaw Ni Wahkomakanak: Neither Indian Princesses nor Easy Squaws for a detailed discussion of how Indian women have consistently been portrayed as either princesses or squaws in creative works by non-Native authors. 3 Goldie claims that ‘indigenous peoples in literature are not a reflection of themselves but of the needs of the white culture which created that literature’ (‘Fear and Temptation,’ in King et al., eds, The Native in Literature 78). 4 Robert Lecker, ‘Freed from Story: Narrative Tactics in Badlands.’ 5 In her review of Disappearing Moon Cafe, Denise Chong, author of The Concubine’s Children, also refers to the structural weakness of Lee’s novel, saying that it is this ‘cutesy sort of melodrama that undermines the imaginative intricacy and pathos of the relationships Lee has contrived’ (23). 6 Tennant observes that British Columbia was originally seen as ‘an empty land, devoid of society, government and laws’ and that such an outlook ‘sanctified the new white doctrine that all land in the colony was not only under British sovereignty but also directly owned by the Crown’ (40).

198 Notes to pages 153–72 7 See Tennant for a discussion of how, historically, ‘B.C. Indians [did] not even … maintain equality with other Indians’ (37). 8 River Thieves was winner of the Winterset Award, the Thomas Head Raddall Atlantic Fiction Prize, and the Atlantic Independent Booksellers’ Choice Award. It was shortlisted for the Giller Prize, the Commonwealth Writers Prize, and the Amazon.com / Books in Canada First Novel Award. 9 ‘In 1995 the entire 107,000 hectares was permanently protected as the Stein Valley Nlaka’pamux Heritage Park’ (Coull 112). 10 See Tennant 54. 6. Admitting the Possibility of Transitional Texts in Canadian Literature 1 Cf. Freud, ‘Mourning and Melancholia.’ 2 In Bouchard and Kennedy, eds, Lillooet Stories, 42. 3 Literary History of Canada: Canadian Literature in English, vol. 4, ed. W.H. New (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1990). All quotes by Hutcheon are taken from the reprinting of her chapter ‘The Novel (1972–1984)’ found in The Canadian Postmodern. 4 See McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy and Counterblast.

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210 Works Cited Parry, Milman. L’épithète traditionelle dans Homère. Paris: Société d’éditions ‘Les belles lettres,’ 1928. – ‘Studies in the Epic Technique of Oral Verse – Making. I. Homer and Homerie Style.’ 1930. In The Making of Homerie Verse: The Collected Popers of Milman Parry. Ed. Adam Parry. London: Oxford UP, 1971. 266–324. Pasternack, Carol Braun. The Textuality of Old English Poetry. Cambridge Studies in Anglo-Saxon England 13. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995. Pelletier, Wilfred. Two Articles. Toronto: Neewin, 1971. Pelletier, Wilfred, et al. For Every North American Indian Who Begins to Disappear, I Also Begin to Disappear; Being a Collection of Essays Concerned with the Quality of Human Relations between the Red and White Peoples of This Continent. Toronto: Neewin, 1971. Pelletier, Wilfred, and Ted Poole. No Foreign Land: The Biography of a North American Indian. New York: Pantheon, 1973. Pelton, Robert. The Trickster in West Africa: A Study of Mythic Irony and Sacred Delight. Berkeley: U of California P, 1980. Pennier, Henry George. Chiefly Indian: The Warm and Witty Story of a British Columbia Half Breed Logger. Ed. Herbert L. McDonald. West Vancouver: Graydonald Graphics, 1972. Petrone, Penny. Native Literature in Canada: From the Oral Tradition to the Present. Toronto: Oxford UP, 1990. Phinney, Archie, ed. Nez Percé Texts. Columbia University Contributions to Anthropology Series 25. New York: Columbia UP, 1934. Poole, D.G. ‘Integration.’ In Pelletier and Poole, 25–51. Queyrat, Frédéric. L’imagination et ses variétés chez l’enfant. Paris: F. Alcan, 1983. In Jousse. Radin, Paul. The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1956. Ramos, Alcida. ‘Indian Voices: Contact Experienced and Expressed.’ In Rethinking History and Myth: Indigenous South American Perspectives on the Past. Ed. Jonathan Hill. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1988. 214–34. Ramsey, Jarold. Reading the Fire: Essays in the Traditional Indian Literatures of the Far West. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1983. Rank, Otto. ‘The Myth of the Birth of the Hero.’ In In Quest of the Hero. Ed. Robert A. Segal. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1990. 3–12. Raunet, Daniel. Without Surrender without Consent: A History of the Nisga’a Land Claims. 1984. Rev. ed. Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 1996. Reaney, James. ‘The Canadian Poet’s Predicament.’ In Masks of Poetry: Canadian Critics on Canadian Verse. Ed. A.J.M. Smith. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1962. 110–22. – ‘The Identifier Effect.’ CEA Critic 42.2 (January 1980): 26–31.

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212 Works Cited Smith, A.J.M., ed. The Book of Canadian Poetry: A Critical and Historical Anthology. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1943. Smith, Linda. Decolonizing Mythologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. London: Zed Books, 1999. Snow, Chief John. These Mountains Are Our Sacred Places: The Story of the Stoney Indians. Toronto: Samuel Stevens, 1977. Speare, Jean E., ed. The Days of Augusta. As told to by Mary Augusta Tappage. Vancouver: J.J. Douglas, 1973. Spradley, James P. Guests Never Leave Hungry: The Autobiography of James Sewid, a Kwakiutl Indian. As told to by James Sewid. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1969. Stanner, W.E.H. After the Dreaming. The 1968 Boyer Lectures. Sydney: Australian Broadcasting Commission, 1969. Stingle, Richard. ‘“all the old levels”: Reaney and Frye.’ In Approaches to the Work of James Reaney. Ed. Stan Dragland. Downsview, ON: ECW P. 32–62. Stump, Sarain. There Is My People Sleeping. Sidney, BC: Gray’s Publishing, 1970. Symon, R.D. North by West: Two Stories from the Frontier. Toronto: Doubleday, 1973. Taylor, Charles. Reconciling the Solitudes: Essays on Canadian Federalism and Nationalism. Ed. Guy Laforest. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s UP, 1994. Tennant, Paul. Aboriginal Peoples and Politics: The Indian Land Question in British Columbia, 1849–1989. Vancouver: UBC P, 1990. Tetso, John. Trapping Is My Life. Toronto: Peter Martin Associates, 1970. Thomas, Peter. Robert Kroetsch. Studies in Canadian Literature Series 13. Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 1980. Turner, Terence. ‘Commentary. Ethno-Ethnohistory: Myth and History in Native South American Representations of Contact with Western Society.’ In Rethinking History and Myth: Indigenous South American Perspectives on the Past. Ed. Jonathan Hill. Urbana: University of Illinois P, 1988: 195–213. Vitart, Anne. ‘From Royal Cabinets to Museums: A Composite History.’ In Robes of Splendour: Native American Painted Buffalo Hides. New York: New York UP, 1993. 27–57. Wainright. J.A. ‘Post-Kingdom Come! Exile and Empire in George Bowering’s Burning Water.’ World Literature Written in English 29.1 (Spring 1989): 87–95. Wallis, Chief James. Kwakiutl Legends. As told to Pamela Whittaker. Surrey, BC: Hancock, 1989. Walsh, Gerald. Indians in Transition: An Inquiry Approach. Curriculum Resource Books Series 23. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1971. Waubageshig (Harvey McCue), ed. The Only Good Indian: Essays by Canadian Indians. Toronto: New P, 1970.

Works Cited 213 Wheeler, Jordan. ‘Voice.’ In Aboriginal Voices: Amerindian, Inuit, and Sami Theater. Ed. Per Brask and William Morgan. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1992. 37–43. Wiebe, Rudy. The Temptations of Big Bear. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1973. – ‘Where Is the Voice Coming From?’ In Where Is the Voice Coming From? Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1974. 135–43. Wilde, Oscar. De Profundis. 1905. In Complete Works of Oscar Wilde. Ed. Vyvyan Holland. London: Collins, 1966. 873–957. Willis, Jane. Geniesh: An Indian Girlhood. Toronto: New P, 1973. Wolfart, H.C., and Freda Ahenakew, eds. kôhkominawak otâcimowiniwâwa / Our Grandmothers’ Lives as Told in Their Own Words. Saskatoon: Fifth House, 1992. Womack, Craig. Red on Red: Native American Literary Separatism. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1999. Woodcock, George. ‘Turning the Facts into Bad Fiction.’ Maclean’s 87.3 (March 1974): 84. Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. 1929. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1957. Wuttunnee, William I.C. Ruffled Feathers: Indians in Canadian Society. Calgary: Bell Books, 1971. Yeats, W.B. ‘Easter 1916.’ In Michael Robartes and the Dancer. 1921. In Albright, 228–30. – ‘A Prayer for Old Age.’ In A Full Moon in March. 1935. Rpt. in W.B. Yeats: The Poems. Ed. Daniel Albright. 332–3. – ‘The Second Coming.’ In Michael Robartes and the Dancer. 1921. In Albright, 235. Young-Ing, Greg. ‘Marginalization in the Publishing Industry.’ In Looking at the Words of Our People: First Nations Analysis of Literature. Ed. Jeannette Armstrong. Penticton, BC: Theytus, 1993. 177–87.

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Kimberly Blaeser, ‘Native Literature: Seeking a Critical Centre,’ in Looking at the Words of Our People (1993). Used with permission of the author. George Bowering, Burning Water. Used with permission of the author. Excerpts from An Iron Hand upon the People: The Law against the Potlatch on the Northwest Coast, © 1990 by Douglas Cole and Ira Chaikin. Published by Douglas & McIntyre Ltd. Reprinted by permission of the publisher. Cheryl Coull, A Traveller’s Guide to Aboriginal B.C. Used with permission of the author. Excerpt from Life Lived Like a Story: this excerpt is reprinted with permission of the Publisher from Life Lived Like a Story by Julie Cruikshank © University of British Columbia Press 1990. All rights reserved by the Publisher. Excerpt from River Thieves by Michael Crummey. First published in Great Britain by Canongate Books, Led, 14 High Street, Edinburgh, EH1 1TE. Copyright © 2002 by Michael Crummey. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company and Doubleday Canada. All rights reserved. Northrop Frye, The Bush Garden. Used with permission of House of Anansi Press. Excerpts from ‘My Heart Soars’ from the book Best of Chief Dan George by Chief Dan George and Helmut Hirnschall. Publisher: www.hancockhouse.com. Used with permission.

216 Permissions Louise Bernice Halfe, Blue Marrow. Used with permission of Coteau Books. Excerpts from Tomson Highway, Kiss of the Fur Queen. Used with permission. ‘Creation’ and ‘Mandamin’ from Ojibway Heritage © 1976 by Basil Johnston. Used with permission, McClelland & Stewart Ltd. Marcel Jousse, The Oral Style. Trans. Edgard Sienaert and Richard Whitaker. Used with permission. Jonathan Kertzer, Worrying the Nation: Imagining a National Literature in English Canada. Used with permission of University of Toronto Press. Robert Kroetsch, Badlands. Reprinted with permission of the author. Dennis Lee, Civil Elegies. Reprinted with permission of House of Anansi Press. Excerpts from Disappearing Moon Cafe, © 1991 by Sky Lee. Published by Douglas & McIntyre Ltd. Reprinted by permission of the publisher. Lee Maracle, ‘Oratory: Coming to Theory,’ Essays on Canadian Writing 54 (1994). Used by permission of Essays on Canadian Writing. Leslie Monkman, A Native Heritage: Images of the Indian in English-Canadian Literature. Used by permission of University of Toronto Press. Excerpt from Aboriginal Australians: First Nations of an Ancient Continent by Stephen Muecke and Adam Shoemaker. English-language translation © 2004 Thames & Hudson Ltd, London. Reprinted by kind permission of Thames & Hudson Ltd, London. Armand Garnet Ruffo, ‘World View,’ from At Geronimo’s Grave. Used with permission of Coteau Books. Adam Shoemaker, Black Words, White Page. Used with permission of the author. Gerald Walsh, Indians in Transition. Used with permission of the author.

Index

Note: numbers set in bold refer to pages in the cited text. Aboriginal literature: as associational, 35; in Canadian identity, 11, 168–9, 187; ceremonial language of, 80; compared to Australian, 77, 103–4; essay collection, 41; first anthologies in English, 40; identity, 41, 43, 49, 52, 65, 70, 86, 110; influence of language, 177–8, 186; influence of ritual on, 37–9 (see also ceremony or ritual); interdependence of people and nature, 68–9; lamenting loss of past, 96; literary traditions of, 49–51; longevity, 58, 68; parallels with British canon, 58; during the period of silence, 178; relations among generations, 85; traditions of, 174; as in transition, 173–4, 183. See also authority; collaborations; landscape and geography; literary criticism; Native Renaissance (1960s and 1970s); publishing of Aboriginal literature Aboriginal people: and Chinese, 155–6; as a dying race, 155; selfdetermination, 18, 32–5; as stereotypes in literature, 144

Aboriginal rights. See politics and political writing absence, 145 Acoose, Janice: ‘A Vanishing Indian?’ 64, 79–80, 179; criticism of Badlands, 140; Iskwewak, 108 activism, 115, 174 Adams, Harold, 52 Aeneid, 55–6 Africville, 6 age in Aboriginal literature, 61–3, 97–8, 108. See also authority Ahenakew, Edward: Voices of the Plains Cree, 40, 46, 60–1, 99–100, 194n9 Ahenakew, Freda, 104 Alberta, 146 Albright, Daniel: W.B. Yeats: The Poems, 110 Allen, Paula Gunn, 97, 176 American Indian Movement (AIM), 6–7, 52 Anansi Press, 31 Anderson, Benedict, 130 Andras, Robert, 41 Andrews, Marke, 151

218 Index Anglican missions in Australia, 38–9 Anglo-Saxon heritage, 58 anthologies of Native literature, 3, 7, 40–1, 53, 77, 99–101, 192n7 archetypes (Canadian): Canadian history as the trickster, 166; inherited colonial, 124; in MacEwen’s poetry, 28; recognition of, 22; resisting the ‘new world,’ 29; romantic nationalism and, 131; search for mythological greatness, 3–4, 25–8, 165, 182 Armstrong, Jeannette: The Native Creative Process, 106 Arrernte (Australia), 66–7 assimilation, 18, 34, 45, 52, 169 Assiniboine Reserve, 62 atomic bombs, 17–18, 60 Atwood, Margaret, 121; Surfacing, 120, 167; Survival, 29, 31, 167, 192n9 Australia: Aboriginal arts, 64; Aboriginal literature, 7–8, 24, 40, 63–5, 96, 101; Aboriginal transformational myths, 66–7; Aboriginal/white relations after WWII, 42; assimilation period, 34; black poets of, 74–5; Christian missions in, 38–9; Dreaming, 61; history from black viewpoint, 36; history of violence, 163; imagist-school, 51–2; pan-Aboriginal identity, 41; poetry compared to Canadian Aboriginal, 103–4; protest literature, 52, 83–4; song cycles, 93–4; white and black collaborations, 109; white Australians dealing with Aboriginal themes, 115 Australian Publisher’s Association Residential Program, 61 authority: of Aboriginal, 119, 169; in Aboriginal literature, 61–4; of Aboriginal writing, 96; of age,

61–2, 97–8, 108; narrative, 85–6, 98. See also wisdom literature autobiography and life stories, 40 Bacque, James: A Man of Talent, 119 Badlands. See under Kroetsch, Robert Bakhtin, Mikhail, 91 Barker, Chief George: Forty Years a Chief, 63, 196n14 Barnett, Don, 109 Baudin, Émile, 67–8, 72, 118 Begbie, Chief Justice, 158 Benson, Larry D.: ‘The Literary Character,’ 90 Beothuk, 155–6, 187 Beowulf, 57–8, 90 Bergson, Henri, 72 Birney, Earle, 31 Black, Malcolm, 125 Blackfoot, 136, 146, 148 Black Panthers, 52 Blackwood, David, 6 Blaeser, Kimberly: ‘Native Literature,’ 91, 153 Blake, William, 73–4 Bloodvein Reserve (Lake Winnipeg), 63 Blue Quills Residential School (Alberta), 7 Boldt, Menno, 89 Bouchard, Randy: Shuswap Stories, 68–9, 196n14 Bowering, George, 164, 168; Burning Water, 131–5, 161, 166, 187 Bragg, Lois, 90 Britain: colonial exports of, 24; Opium War, 154 British canon, 58, 70, 101–2, 111; Irish modernists, 110. See also foundational Canadian literary canon

Index 219 British Columbia: Aboriginal land claims, 46; Aboriginal land title (1887), 25–6; in Aboriginal poetry, 76; as empty, 197n5.6; gothic, 120; mythological perceptions of, 144; Native traditions in, 37–8; oral tradition of Aboriginal literature, 62; reservations in Lower Fraser (1864), 25–6, 191–2n5; Salishan Fraser, 170; Shuswap, 68–9; Stein Valley, 158, 198n9; theatre in, 125; trapping in, 63; treatment of Native peoples, 198n7; Yokoughltegth Indians, 60 British North America Act, 43 Brooke, Frances: The History of Emily Montague, 112 Brown, E.K., 16–18, 24, 28, 41, 52, 84, 95, 123, 130, 141, 160, 165, 181; colonialism, 31; lack of Canadian vision, 19; A Literary History of Canada, 30; On Canadian Poetry, 19; on originality, 29; romantic nationalism, 18 Brown, Russell, 120, 146; ‘The Time of the Redmen,’ 115, 119 ‘Brown Paper,’ 45 Brydon, Diana, 9 Buck, Ruth Matheson, 194n9 buffalo, 62–3, 148 Bush Cree, 104 Bush Garden, The, 4, 31. See under Frye, Northrop Calder, Frank, 45, 195n13 Campbell, Maria, 140; The Book of Jessica, 69–70; Halfbreed, 40, 106–9, 185; interview with Lutz, 109 Canadian imagination, 4, 19, 30 Canadian literature: Aboriginal influence on non-Aboriginal

writing, 115–17, 121–2; acknowledging Aboriginal influences, 119–20, 122, 136, 185–6; appropriation of Aboriginal literature, 170; criticism of, 4; as dependent on external influences, 15–16; historical lack of, 14; as inauthentic, 13; inspiration for, 12; to know ourselves, 31; national identity, 10– 12, 33, 146, 157, 166, 168–9, 182, 187; parallel traditions of, 37; severing ties with past, 26; use of ‘heed’ and ‘lest’ in, 81; ‘Where is here?’ 28–9. See also national mythology Cantrell, Leon: The Dawn Is at Hand, 74–5 capitalism, 25–6 Cardinal, Douglas: The Native Creative Process, 106 Cardinal, Harold: The Unjust Society, 44, 195n12 Caribbean Anancy stories, 98–9 Carolan-Brozy, Sandra: analysis of Duke Redbird’s biography, 78 Carr, Emily, 111–12, 144 Castellano, Marlene: ‘Vocation of Identity,’ 114–15 Catholic missions in Australia, 38–9 Celtic Revival, 110–11 centenary (Canada), 4–5; holocaust of Aboriginal Peoples, 127, 129–30, 163; mythic appeal of, 19–20; national song, 114; recognition of Indigenous authority, 119; theatre, 125; writing after, 171–2 ceremony or ritual, 127; in Aboriginal literature, 75–6, 83; appropriation of Native, 168; in environmentalism, 115; Frye’s belief in, 19–20; in language of Aboriginal literature,

220 Index 80; of rebirth of a nation, 22–3; relationship to the land, 65 (see also landscape and geography) Chaikin, Ira: An Iron Hand upon the People, 37–8, 193n3 Chamberlin, J.E.: ‘Doing Things with Words,’ 173, 177–8; The Harrowing of Eden, 68; If This Is Your Land, 46, 54 Chan, Anthony, 157, 160; Gold Mountain, 154–5 Chaucer, 98 chiefs and elders, literature by, 7. See also Native Renaissance (1960s and 1970s) Chilliwack Nation, 66 Chinese Canadians, 153–5, 158, 160; as a vanishing race, 155 Chong, Denise, 197n5.5 Christianity: influence in Beowulf, 90; missions in Australia, 38–9; myth of concern, 111n1.2; in national mythology, 22; in national narrative, 21; symbols, 74 ‘Citizens Plus.’ See ‘The Red Paper’ Civil Rights Movement (U.S.), 52 cliché, 73 Clifford, James, 162 Clutesi, George, 99–100, 106, 110–11; illustrated books of, 196n14; Potlatch, 113; Son of Raven, 97–8 Coghill, Joy, 129 Cohen, Leonard, 164, 168; Beautiful Losers, 115–18, 131, 135, 160, 162, 166, 183–4 Cole, Douglas: An Iron Hand upon the People, 37, 193n3 collaborations, 40, 109–10; as-told-to, 176–7 colonialism: Aboriginal history outside, 60–1, 65–6, 143, 166;

Aboriginal resistance to, 36, 46, 58; archetypes of, 124; artistic source and, 74; Canada’s deep, 14–16, 19, 26; Canadian literature and, 30, 181; Canadian reliance upon, 24, 31, 33; Chinese immigration and, 154; countering with Aboriginal influences, 125–6; cultural frameworks and, 68, 146–7; dismantling teleologies, 58; holocaust of Aboriginal Peoples, 126, 129–30; Ireland’s history of, 110; and lack of history, 151; Norman conquest of England, 23; Scandinavia, 22–3; sense of entitlement, 109. See also land claims; literary theory colonial origins, 14–15 ‘communal nature’ analysis, 99 comparative Aboriginal literature, 41 Condamin, Father: Le livre de Jérémie, 102 Confederation centennial (1967), 4. See also centenary (Canada) conscription crisis, 15 Coull, Cheryl: A Traveller’s Guide to Aboriginal B.C., 46, 54, 158, 198n9 Coulter, John: Riel, 169 Cranmer potlatch, 38, 193n3 Crawford, Isabella Valancy, 30–1; Malcolm’s Katie, 27–8 creation stories, 65–6. See also mythology Cree folklore, 146 crucifixion, 162 Cruikshank, Julie: Kitty Smith, 114; Life Lived like a Story, 85 Crummey, Michael, 187; River Thieves, 136, 155–6, 187

Index 221 Culleton, Beatrice, 140 cultural frameworks, 68 Daly, Richard: ‘Writing on the Landscape,’ 175 Dance, Daryl C.: Folklore from Contemporary Jamaicans, 98, 196n15 Dane-zaa, 39 Darnell, Regna: ‘Narrative Authority,’ 85–6, 95–6, 99 Davey, Frank, 185 Davies, Robertson: ‘Pontiac and the Green Man,’ 122 Davis Inlet (Utshimassits), 126 ‘Day of Atonement’ (Frye), 4–5, 41, 83, 118, 131, 165, 174, 186–7; omissions of, 6 de Gaulle, Charles, 6 de la Grasserie, Raoul, 55 Delgamuukw v. the Queen, 178 Dempsey, Hugh, 194n10 Department of Indian Affairs, 18 desire (in literary criticism). See literary theory Dewart, Edward Hartley, 5, 14–16, 19, 30, 41, 52, 84, 95, 123, 130, 141, 160 Dilworth, Ira, 111–12 Disappearing Moon Cafe. See under Lee, Sky Doane, A.N., 90 Doxtator, Deborah: ‘Inclusive and Exclusive,’ 70–1, 76–7, 181, 185–6 Dragland, Stan: Duncan Campbell Scott, 68; Floating Voice, 128 Dreaming, 61–2, 123 Duncan, Sara Jeannette, 15–16 Dunn, Marty: Red on White, 77–8 Dyck, E.F.: ‘Places of Aboriginal Writing,’ 174

elders and chiefs, publication of, 40. See also publishing of Aboriginal literature Eliade, Mircea, 22–3, 55 Eliot, T.S., 69–70 empiricism, 182 empty land myth, 24, 28, 67, 124–5, 135, 143, 145–7, 153, 167, 197n5.6 environmentalism, 115 epic, 55, 81–2 Eurocentricism, 186 experience as continuous (Aboriginal), 63, 66–7, 86, 182–3 Fanon, Frantz, 186 Favel, Starr: ‘The Artificial Tree,’ 74 Fee, Margery, 144 feminism, 153–4 Fiamengo, Janice, 167–8 Findlay, Len: ‘Always Indigenize!’ 67, 120 Finnegan, Ruth: Literacy and Orality, 176 First languages, 34 First Nations, use of term, 41 First Nations literature. See Aboriginal literature Foley, John Miles, 88 Ford, Clellan S.: Smoke from Their Fires, 49 For Every North American Indian Who Begins to Disappear …, 173 forgetting in the making of a nation, 5. See also mythology foundational Canadian literary canon, 28, 84, 88, 100, 165 France, 23 French Canada, 33, 167–8, 192n9. See also Quebec

222 Index Fry, Alan: The Revenge of Annie Charlie, 119 Frye, Northrop, 3, 123, 130, 160, 181; Aboriginal mythology, 27–8; as aware of faith, 83; Canada and history, 10; Canadian sensibility, 28–9; on Carr’s paintings, 144; creation of a national mythology, 29–30, 169; criticism of Canadian literature, 4; ‘Culture and Society in Ontario,’ 26; cultural ways of knowing, 67; expectations of romantic nationalism, 114; ‘Haunted by Lack of Ghosts,’ 27–8, 122, 149; on influence of Native literature, 11, 13; lack of Canadian vision, 19; Literary History of Canada, 15; literary tradition, 75; ‘mental landscape,’ 147; mythology in Canadian writing, 122; needs for national writers, 19; originality, 174; revolution, 30; sungods, 182; writing culture, 183. See also ‘Day of Atonement’ (Frye); Literary History of Canada – The Bush Garden (BG pages cited): 10, 144; 13, 19; 34–5, 30; 36, 30; 45, 30; 74, 20; 127, 19; 129, 19; 132, 26; 134, 19; 136, 174; 148, 27; 187, 183; 213, 3; 217, 4; 219, 4, 30, 169; 220, 28–9; 223, 10; 223–4, 10; 224, 4, 10, 15; 225, 4; 231, 20; 232, 122; 232–3, 20; 233, 11, 75; 238, 11; 245, 114, 181 funding of Canadian theatre, 125 garrison, 31 Gautier, L., 56 generational relationships, 85 George, Chief Dan, 47, 61, 65, 106, 111; in cast of The Ecstasy of Rita Joe,

128; illustrated books of, 196n14; My Heart Soars, 47–8, 71–4, 80, 84– 9, 101–3; ‘My Very Good Dear Friends,’ 60 Germanic heritage, 58 Gilbert, Kevin, 83–4, 101; End of Dreamtime, 109 Gitksan / Wet’suwet’en, 46, 178 Goldfarb, Sheldon, 152 Goldie, Terry, 120, 140, 165; An Anthology of Canadian Native Literature, 53, 77, 99, 195n17; ‘Getting It Right,’ 119; Indigenous people in literature, 140, 197n5.3 Gooderham, Kent. See I Am an Indian Graham, Mary, 61–2 Grant, Agnes, 106–7; Native Literature in the Curriculum, 104–5 Great Rock, Chief, 59–60 Great War, 15 Griffiths, Linda: The Book of Jessica, 69 Grisdale, Alex, 61; Wild Drums, 59– 60, 100 guilt, 163, 168 Halfbreed, 84 Halfe, Louise Bernice (Sky Dancer): Blue Marrow, 188–9 Halifax, 6 Halifax Herald, 18 Halliday, W.M., 193n3; Potlatch and Totem, 37–8 Harris, Chief Kenneth, 172–3; Visitors Who Never Left, 48, 196n14 Harry, Margaret: ‘Literature in English,’ 108 Haugen, John, 153 Heaney, Seamus: Beowulf, 8 Heiss, Anita: ‘Aboriginal Identity,’ 61–2

Index 223 heroic traditions: with Aboriginal influence, 138, 149, 175, 180; in Aboriginal literature, 54, 56–61, 119, 183; anti-heroes, 161–3, 167, 171; of British canon, 111; in Canadian literature, 18, 53, 135, 161–2; language of, 80, 96 Highway, Tomson, 84, 128, 140; Kiss of the Fur Queen, 127 history and myth: Aboriginal and Canadian, 27, 54–5; Aboriginal influence on non-Aboriginal writing, 115–17; appropriation of Native, 165; for Canada’s centenary, 32, 114, 128–30; Canada’s lack of, 14–17, 151; Canada’s obsession with, 10; of Canadian and Aboriginal nations, 181; in Canadian literature, 20; difference between epic and, 55–6; differences of, 181–2; effect of publishing of Aboriginal literature on, 8–9, 31, 114–15, 120, 136–7, 155; experience as continuous, 63, 66–7, 86, 182–3; fiction’s retelling of, 134–5; in literary criticism of Aboriginal literature, 99; made sacred, 22–3; narrative tension between, 141; in national literature, 18–19, 23; revealed through archeology, 146, 148–9; as supported by Canadian universities, 18; surprised discovery of, 124; as taken on a persona, 166; as traumatic, 164–5; violence, 116; written by Aboriginal peoples, 47–8. See also empty land myth; heroic traditions; mythology; Raven (West Coast trickster); romantic nationalism Hobson, Geary: The Remembered Earth, 7

Hodgins, Jack: The Invention of the World, 166–8 Homer, 55–6 Howells, Carol Anne, 167 Huron Nation, 175 Hutcheon, Linda, 4, 116, 118, 183; Canadian Postmodern, 171–2; Literary History of Canada, 174 hybridization, 79 I Am an Indian, 40–1, 47; ‘The Potlatch Song of Qwaxila,’ 75; ‘The Songs of the Nootka,’ 76 Iliad, 55–6 imagist-school of Aboriginal criticism, 51. See also literary criticism Indian Act: revised post-WWII, 42–3; 1951 revision of, 18. See also politics and political writing Indian Association of Alberta, 45 Indian Chiefs of Alberta, 45 Innes, Christopher: Politics and the Playwright, 125, 129 Inuit literature, 108. See also Aboriginal literature Irish modernists, 110 irony, 152, 167 Iroquois Nation, 175. See also Rotininhsyonni identity Jack, Henry: ‘Native Alliance for Red Power,’ 34 James, William Clossen: Locations of the Sacred, 167 Joe, Rita: ‘I Lost My Talk,’ 100–1; ‘The Gentle War,’ 174–5 Johnson, Colin (Mudrooroo Narogin): The Song Circle of Jacky, 93–4 Johnson, Mary, 178 Johnson, Pauline, 178, 192–3n1

224 Index Johnston, Basil, 50, 84–5, 106, 110–11; illustrated books by, 196n14; Indian School Days, 89; Ojibway Heritage, 56, 81–2; story of Zhowmin and Mandamin, 56–8 Jones, D.G.: Butterfly on Rock, 27, 31, 119–20 Josie, Edith: Here Are the News, 173 Jousse, Marcel, 64–5, 67–8, 118; The Oral Style, 55–6, 69–70, 72–3, 76, 88, 90–1, 101–2 Joyce, James, 110–11; Finnegan’s Wake, 111 Jung, Carl, 165 Kaye, Frances W.: ‘Gone Back to Alberta,’ 149 Kearney, Richard: Poetics of Modernity, 110–11 Keith, W.J.: Literary Images of Ontario, 25 Kennedy, Chief Dan, 99, 106; Recollections of an Assiniboine Chief, 50–1, 62–3, 78, 98–100 Kennedy, Dorothy I.D.: Shuswap Stories, 68–9, 196n14 Kertzer, Jonathan, 8, 10, 15, 166, 177; national mythology, 30; romantic historicism, 23–4, 26, 192n7; Worrying the Nation, 12, 21 King, Thomas: ‘Godzilla vs. PostColonial,’ 35; Medicine River, 89; The Native in Literature, 153, 186 King James Bible, 80, 116 Kitimat Northern Sentinel Print Shop, 194n11 Klee Wyck, 111 Klein, A.M.: The Second Scroll, 27 Klinck, Carl F., 3–4. See also Literary History of Canada

Koran, 90 Kroetsch, Robert, 125, 168; Alberta, 148; ‘The Exploding Porcupine,’ 148; Gone Indian, 119, 136; The Lovely Treachery of Words, 145–6; national meta-narrative, 29; ‘quarrel with Eden,’ 152; relationship with land, 28; The Stone Hammer Poems, 136 – Badlands, 136–60 passim, 164, 168, 187; creating myth, 138–9; influence of Blackfoot literature, 136; narrator as liar, 140–1; no heroes, 161; plot outline, 137–8; tension between history and myth in, 141–3; use of stereotype in, 139–40, 144 (see also Lee, Sky) – Badlands (BL pages cited): 2, 141; 3, 137, 142; 5, 142; 6, 142; 7, 144; 8, 142; 9, 142; 11, 140, 142; 21–2, 143; 23, 140; 25, 139, 157; 34, 143; 45, 138, 140; 138, 142–3; 139, 142; 148, 138, 144; 155, 140; 166, 142; 195, 140; 223, 140; 256, 140; 259, 140; 263, 140; 268, 138; 270, 139 – The Lovely Treachery of Words (LTW pages cited): 1, 145; 2, 145– 6; 39, 28; 58, 125; 67, 152; 111, 148; 182, 29 Kuokkanen, Rauna: ‘Let’s Vote Who Is Most Authentic!’ 68 Kurth, Godefroid, 55 Kwakwaka, 195n15; Kwakiutl theatre, 50 Kwakwala, 76 Lacey, Liam, 152–3 Lampman, Archibald, 5, 14–15, 17, 19, 24, 30, 41, 52, 84, 95, 114, 123, 130, 141, 160, 165, 181 land claims, 25–6, 43, 45–6, 66, 114, 195n14. See also colonialism

Index 225 landscape and geography: Aboriginal land title, 25–6; in Aboriginal literature, 24, 64–6, 68–9, 71–2, 76; Canadian stereotypes of, 28–9, 140–1, 192nn8–9; as cultural identity, 157; in environmentalism, 115; in literary criticism of Aboriginal literature, 64–5; mythological depictions of, 144–5; in mythological framework, 26; relation between ideology and environment, 147; represented with irony, 152; as sacred, 145, 149–50, 164; stories embodied in place, 67; union between land and peoples, 24, 27, 29; in vanishing race, 187. See also empty land myth Lane, Patrick: ‘Treaty-Trip from Shulus Reservation,’ 120 language: Aboriginal, 186; in Aboriginal literature, 75; grammatical analysis of, 91–3; and individual epistemologies, 186; of King James Bible, 116; of land in Aboriginal literature, 24, 64–6, 68–9, 71–2, 76; literary criticism in Aboriginal, 73; of sacred texts, 80–1; of warfare, 60; working with English, 69 Laurence, Margaret: A Bird in the House, 120; The Diviners, 120; The Fire-Dwellers, 120; The Stone Angel, 120 Layton, Irving, 31 Lecker, Robert, 140, 192n7 Lecompt, Edouard, 116 Lee, Dennis, 31, 183; Civil Elegies, 141–2 Lee, Sky, 168; Telling It: Women and Language, 152 – Disappearing Moon Cafe, 151–60 passim, 164, 168; compared to

Badlands, 151–2; criticism of, 152, 197n5.5; lack of heroes in, 161–2; legacy of romantic nationalism, 156–7; mythology in, 158–60; use of racist stereotypes, 154–5; wilderness in, 157 – Disappearing Moon Cafe (DMC pages cited): 5–6, 159; 8, 158; 21, 152; 26, 152; 136, 152; 189, 157; 234, 158; 235, 159 legislation: Trudeau review of Indian policy, 42–4. See also politics and political writing LePan, Douglas, 11 Lerer, Seth, 90; Literacy and Power, 176 Lerman, Norman: Legends of the River People, 66, 196n14 Leslie, John F.: ‘The Indian Act,’ 42–3 Lincoln, Kenneth: Native American Renaissance, 7, 104–5 literary collective, 3 literary criticism: of Aboriginal literature, 34, 73, 99, 111, 176, 178; acknowledging the Aboriginal presence in Canadian writing, 121–2; of Australian Black poets, 74–5; blinded by romantic nationalism, 120; concept of time in Aboriginal literature, 60–3, 103; image and text in Aboriginal literature, 62, 77, 79–80, 164n14; imagist-school of Aboriginal, 51; influence of writing in English, 186; investing in stories, 179, 188–9; land-based imagery, 64–5, 71–2, 74–5; metaphor, 21, 70–1, 75, 122, 162; reading Aboriginal literature, 153; romanticism, 73; simile, 70–1; sparse artistry of Aboriginal literature, 100–1, 105–6,

226 Index 113–14; tension between author and narrative voices in Aboriginal literature, 99; theories used for Aboriginal literature, 90; tools for Aboriginal literature, 75–6; use of metonymy in Aboriginal literature, 61, 69, 71–2, 79, 87–8; use of oral traditions, 88; use of repetition in Aboriginal literature, 88–9, 94– 5, 101, 106; use of silence in Aboriginal literature, 106. See also heroic traditions; literary theory Literary History of Canada, 3–4, 121, 171–2; Frye’s conclusion to, 4. See also Frye, Northrop; Klinck, Carl F. literary national codes and rites of passage, 20 literary theory: desire, 51, 120, 140, 151–2, 164, 168–70; Indigenous, 9; modernism, 29, 70, 110, 177; postcolonialism, 8–9, 14, 35, 67, 83, 151, 153, 167–8 (see also colonialism); postmodernism, 100, 104, 149, 172–4, 177, 183–6; poststructuralism, 9–10, 91; structuralism, 13; used for Aboriginal literature, 90. See also literary criticism literary tradition, 13 Livesay, Dorothy, 121 Lord, Albert: The Singer of Tales, 88– 90 Louis, Chief Max Gros: First among the Hurons, 47, 196n14 Lovely Treachery of Words, The. See under Kroetsch, Robert Loyalists, 18 Lutheran missions in Australia, 38–9 Lutz, Harmut: interview with Maria Campbell, 109

Macdonald, John A., 157, 169 MacDougall, Robert L.: The Poet and the Critic, 17 McEachern, Judge, 178 MacEwen, Gwendolyn, 164; ‘Dark Pines under Water,’ 28, 143 MacKenzie, John A.: ‘On the Demonic Nature,’ 173 MacLeod, Alistair: ‘As Birds Bring Forth the Sun,’ 179 McLeod, Neal, 83; ‘Coming Home through Stories,’ 79 McLuhan, Marshall, 172 MacMechan, Archibald, 5, 19, 24, 30, 33, 41, 52, 84, 95, 123, 130, 141, 160, 181; Headwaters of Canadian Literature, 15–16 Macpherson, Jay, 31 Mader, Christina, 104; ‘Taking It Back,’ 104 Mandel, Eli, 31 Manossa, Geraldine: ‘The Beginning of Cree Performance Culture,’ 74 Manuel, George, 64; The Fourth World, 36–7 Maracle, Lee, 3, 6; Aboriginal theatre traditions, 50; Bobbi Lee: Indian Rebel, 6–7, 40, 84, 109–10, 176–7, 196n14; on postmodernism, 185; ‘A Question of Voice,’ 128 Marshall, Tom: The Harsh and Lovely Land, 29 Mashuau Innu, 126 medicine dances (mitewiwins), 63. See also ceremony or ritual memory: in Aboriginal writing, 49– 50; mythology and history, 54–5; portraying communal, 99; repetition in Aboriginal literature, 94–5;

Index 227 sense of time, 60–1; teaching through poetic example, 86 metamorphoses, 67 metaphor, 21, 70–1, 75, 122, 162. See also literary criticism Metcalf, John, 26, 192n7 Métis in English-Canadian literature, 120, 184 Métis literature, 107; Duke Redbird, 77–8; Maria Campbell, 40. See also Aboriginal literature metonymy, 61, 69, 71–2, 79, 87–8 midwifery, 62 Mis-quona-queb, 58–9 Mohawk, 70–1 Mojica, Monique, 128 Momaday, Scott: House Made of Dawn, 175 Monkman, Leslie: A Native Heritage, 121–2 Montour, Enos T., 65 morality plays, 53, 178 Morriseau, Norval: Legends of My People, 35–6, 47–8, 196n14 Moses, Daniel David, 84, 107, 128; An Anthology of Canadian Native Literature, 53, 77, 99, 195n17 Mosionier, Beatrice (Culleton), 84 Moss, John, 121, 192n8; Patterns of Isolation, 29 Mountain Horse, Mike: My People the Bloods, 40, 194n10 Muecke, Stephen, 38–9, 61, 63–7, 123; Aboriginal Australians, 24 Murray, Les, 24 Musgrave, Susan: The Impstone, 120 mythology: acknowledging Aboriginal influences, 122, 150; Canada’s relationship to British, 25; Cana-

dian changing climate, 136; Canadian development of, 29–30; Canadian literature’s search for, 49, 135; conflated with polemics, 148; contact with Aboriginal, 181; creating, 138; cultural belief systems in, 170; explorer myths, 192n6; foundational, 25, 165; history becoming, 5; myth of concern, 191n1.2; need to forget, 4–5; of ‘new world,’ 167, 175, 192n6; as poetry‘s language, 20; recognition of a holocaust, 129–30; relationship with land, 24, 65–6, 144–5; stereotypes of, 151; storytelling, 8, 150–1; in theatre, 131; of theatre, 131, 197n5; value of another‘s, 159; of vanishing race, 187; without heroes, 163; Yeats and, 110–11. See also empty land myth; history and myth; national mythology; revolution mythpoesis, 8–9, 169–70 Nagy, Gregory, 88 narrative authority, storytelling, 85– 6, 98. See also authority narrative design of Canadian literature, 21 narrative inheritance, 179 narratives intersecting, 100 National Arts Centre (Ottawa), 125 National Indian Brotherhood, 41, 44 National Indian Council, 41 nationalism: faith in belief systems in, 83; holocaust of Aboriginal Peoples, 63, 127, 129–30; national song, 165; as a passion, 21; romantic, 8, 13; search for literary traditions, 14;

228 Index as unpopular, 5–6. See also centenary (Canada); empty land myth; romantic nationalism national mythology, 8; acquired narrative, 15; Canada‘s lack of, 30; as inspired by Aboriginal peoples, 12; no master narrative, 162–3; not a blank slate, 164; sun-gods in, 21; wilderness, 31, 157, 167–9 Native aesthetics, 186 Native Alliance for Red Power (NARP), 6–7, 52 Native Literary Renaissance, 8; apparent silence prior to, 33–4, 192–3n1; and Canada‘s centenary, 114; culture in transition, 104; generational difference, 95–6; parallel traditions, 37; protest literature in, 84; reverence for the ordinary in, 104; role of epic tradition in, 55–6; second wave of, 84; transition from oral, 98; as transition from oral, 90. See also Native Renaissance (1960s and 1970s) Native literature. See Aboriginal literature Native Renaissance (1960s and 1970s), 4–5; achievements of, 180– 1; continuous literary histories, 63, 66–7, 86, 182–3; crisis for romantic nationalism, 168; culture not oral or written, 173; explosion of writing on Canadian literary market, 7–8; faith-inflected language, 81; holocaust of Aboriginal Peoples, 129–30, 163; influence on centenary, 131; influence on white Canadian literature, 170–1; and romantic nationalism, 119; use of term, 41; writing accompanied by

images, 62, 77, 79–80, 196n14. See also literary criticism; Native Literary Renaissance neo-Augustan poets (1700), 101–2 New, William: Land Sliding, 192n6 New Criticism, 13. See also literary criticism Newfoundland and Labrador: Beothuk, 155–6, 187; in Canadian federation, 6, 191nI.2; literature, 35 Newlove, John, 31; ‘The Pride,’ 120, 122–5, 168 ‘new world’: anti-heroes of, 162; archetype of, 29; Chinese immigration to, 154, 157; collective consciousness in, 152; colonial myth of, 167, 175; control of nature in, 26; as Eden, 21–2, 28; explorer myths of, 192n6; history defies idea of, 146, 156; lack of mythological foundation in, 25; mythologies of, 159; Native adaptation to, 47; place to begin anew, 21–2; stories of, 181; transplanted ideologies, 26. See also empty land myth New Year as annual rebirth, 23 Nez Percé: ‘Coyote and the Shadow People,’ 139 Nisga’a chief (1887), 25 Nlaka’pamux, 158 Noonuccal, Oodgeroo, 74–5, 115; ‘The Past,’ 127; We Are Going, 75 Nootka song, 76 nostalgia, 96 Nowell, Charles James, 49 October Crisis (Canada), 6, 168 O’Hagan, Howard: Tay John, 120, 184 Ojibway elders, 36 Ojibway legends, 56–7

Index 229 Ojibway nation, 47, 58–9; theatre traditions, 50 Old Testament, 27 Ong, Walter J., 91 Only Good Indian, The, 34, 41, 60, 114– 15, 176 oral literatures: cultures not oral or written, 173; as if communally created, 176; differences between cultures of, 77; differences to written, 72–3; distinct from sacred histories, 51; epic and history, 55–6; formulaic language in, 81; intersection with written, 172; long tradition of, 97; mnemonic aids in, 82; in postmodernism, 185; sense of time in, 61; traditions in written, 99; in transition to written, 90–1; use of images, 69–70; use of repetition, 88–9, 101. See also literary criticism Orphic quest, 138, 197n5.1 pan-Indianism: in Aboriginal literature, 180–1; activism, 174; beginnings of, 47; and ‘Canadian,’ 51–2; histories of intertribal warfare, 60; influence on centenary, 131; in multiple areas, 41 Parker, Brian, 131, 197n5 Parry, Milman, 88, 90 Pasternack, Carol Braun, 90 pastoralism, 119, 165 patriarchy in national narrative, 21. See also romantic nationalism patriotism before centenary, 30. See also centenary (Canada) Pearson, Lester B., 41 Pelletier, Wilfred: ‘For Every North American Indian,’ 64; illustrated

books by, 196n14; No Foreign Land, 95, 105–6; Two Articles, 52–3 Pelton, Robert, 51 Pennier, Henry, 106; Chiefly Indian, 59–60, 100, 104 Petrone, Penny, 34, 84, 108, 192–3n1 Phinney, Archie, 139 Plains Cree, 86, 95–6 politics and political writing: Aboriginal literature as sociopolitical, 36, 68–9, 77–8, 185; in editing of Aboriginal literature, 109–10, 130; to educate nonAboriginals, 48–9, 86, 108; effect of Aboriginal literature on, 33, 55, 125; in forming national literature, 15–17, 118, 180, 182; in landscape, 158; in literary criticism, 153, 177– 8; protest literature, 40–1, 52, 83–4, 111; Red Power, 6, 52; self-determination, 18, 32–5; White Paper, 44– 5. See also land claims; revolution Poole, D.G.: ‘Integration,’ 148 Poole, Ted: No Foreign Land, 95, 105–6 Posluns, Michael, 64; The Fourth World, 36–7 postcolonial theory. See literary theory postmodernism. See literary theory poststructural theory. See literary theory potlatch, 37–8, 43, 193n3 ‘Potlatch Song of Qwazila, The,’ 75 power imbalances, 124 Pratt, E.J., 16, 19, 30–1; Brébeuf, 22; Towards the Last Spike, 56 protest literature: distinctions among, 52; pan-Aboriginal identity, 40–1; as questionable characterization, 83–4, 111. See also politics and political writing

230 Index publishing of Aboriginal literature: by Aboriginal houses, 177; effect on Canadian history/myth, 8–9, 31, 114–15, 120, 136–7, 155; audience for, 106–8; breaking taboos with, 35–6; decades of silence, 7, 33–4, 192n1, 194nn9–11; diversity of, 39–41; history of, 174–5; image and text, 62, 77, 79–80, 164n14; in ‘mainstream,’ 174–5; oral into written, 47, 61, 90–1, 172–3; political commentary, 44, 52, 83–4; scholarly attention to, 37–9, 108–9, 177–8; selection process of, 83–4. See also Aboriginal literature purification in ritual, 23. See also ceremony or ritual Quebec, 168; in English-Canadian writing, 118; Quiet Revolution, 168; separatism, 6. See also French Canada Queyrat, Frédéric, 73 Ramos, Alcida, 182 Ramsey, Jarold: Reading the Fire, 169– 70, 176 Rank, Otto: ‘The Myth of the Birth of the Hero,’ 171 rape, 130, 162 Raunet, Daniel, 195n13 Raven (West Coast trickster): in a Canadian mythology/history, 12, 166; in non-Aboriginal writing, 120, 122, 125, 136, 144, 159–61, 164–6, 184; in post-centenary writing, 171; in storytelling traditions, 54, 97 RCMP, 109 Reaney, James, 31, 125, 182; ‘The Canadian Poet’s Predicament,’ 12;

‘The Identifier Effect,’ 13; romantic historicism, 21 Redbird, Duke, 77–9; ‘I Am a Canadian,’ 77; We Are Métis, 77 redemption. See resurrection/ redemption ‘Red Paper, The,’ 45 Red Power, 6–7 Red River Rebellions, 184 Redsky, James: Great Leader of the Ojibway, 58–9, 196n14 Reid, Bill, 54 Renan, Ernest, 5, 180 repetition in Aboriginal literature, 87–9, 92–6, 101, 103–6; use of silence, 106. See also literary criticism reservations: in Lower Fraser (1864), 25–6, 191–2n5 residential schools, 7, 34, 130 resistance: in Aboriginal literature, 58; not new with renaissance, 36 resurrection/redemption, 22, 53, 67, 161, 168 revolution, 168; base for Canadian drama, 131, 197n5; Canada and American differences, 30; and Canada’s centenary, 114; Canadian lack of, 23–4; for national mythologies, 130; in nations’ beginnings, 21, 23 rhythm and rhyme, 102–4. See also literary criticism Richler, Mordecai: Solomon Gursky Was Here, 184 Ridington, Robin: ‘Re-creation in Canadian First Nations Literature,’ 39 Riel rebellion, 15, 169

Index 231 Ritchie, Leslie: Duncan Campbell Scott, 68 rites of passage, 19–20 ritual. See ceremony or ritual Roberts, Charles G.D., 180, 184; ‘The Beginnings of Canadian Literature,’ 18 Roberts, E. Wyn: Chiefly Indian, 104 Robinson, Eden: Monkey Beach, 120; Traplines, 120 Robinson, Will: Men of the Medeek, 40, 49, 80–1, 194n11 Rogers, Robert: Ponteach, 122 romantic nationalism, 32, 112; Aboriginal rights and, 18; and Aboriginal writing, 53; arrested in centenary, 131; Canada’s national past, 14; at the Canadian centenary, 119; in Canadian literature, 120; colonialism and, 181–2; crisis for, 168; with diverse origins, 23–4; as fallacious, 164; as flimsy, 192n7; legacy of, 150, 156–7; in literary criticism of Aboriginal literature, 104; with notion of the sacred, 21; in political negotiation, 41–2; revised, 142–4, 163, 171; revised in Badlands, 143–4; with the revolutionary, 21; turn to Native aesthetics, 186. See also nationalism Rooke, Constance, 89 Rotininhsyonni identity, 70–1, 196n8 Rough, Stan, 194n11 Roy, Patricia E., 158 Royal Commission on Aboriginal People (1995), 126 Ruffo, Armand Garnet, 51; ‘(Ad)dressing Our Words,’ 178; ‘World View,’ 126–7 Ryga, George: The Ecstasy of Rita Joe, 125–31, 135, 168

sacred: in Aboriginal literature, 83; in Aboriginal national poetry, 83; Canadian nation as the profane, 165; depictions of land as symbolic of, 145, 149, 164; explanation of term, 51; at heart of Frye’s convictions, 20–1; historic origins, 181; role in national mythology, 21; and romantic nationalism, 21; symbols of, 171; texts, 80–1 Samek, Hana: The Blackfoot Confederacy, 148 scapegoat, 23 Schweninger, Lee, 68 scientific objectivity, 67 Scott, Duncan Campbell, 16–18, 31, 68, 127–8; as civil servant, 18 Seattle, Chief of the Squamish, 127–8 Second World War, 42 Secwepemc, 68–9 separation policies, 34–5 separatism, 6 Sewid, Chief James, 47, 50; Guests Never Leave Hungry, 37 Shipley, Nan: Wild Drums, 59–60 Shoemaker, Adam, 34, 36, 38–42, 51, 61, 63–7, 74–5, 83–4, 93–4, 96, 101, 103–4, 109, 115, 123, 163; Aboriginal Australians, 24; Black Words, White Page, 7–8, 52, 77, 185 Shuswap (Secwepemc), 68–9, 120, 184 Shuswap Stories: ‘THLEE-sa Travels the Land,’ 69 simile, 70–1. See also literary criticism Sioux, 59 Smallwood, Joseph, 6 Smith, A.J.M., 31; The Book of Canadian Poetry, 19 Smith, Kitty, 114, 123

232 Index Smith, Linda: Decolonizing Mythologies, 67 Smithe, William, 25 Snow, Chief John, 42, 65, 196n14 Soda Creek (Caribou country, BC), 62 ‘Songs of the Nootka, The,’ 76 Speare, Jean E.: The Days of Augusta, 62, 91–3, 196n14 Spradley, James, 47, 50; Guests Never Leave Hungry, 37 Stanner, W.E.H., 61 Statement of the Government of Canada on Indian Policy (1969). See White Paper on Indian Policy (1969) St’at’imc, 158 status and non-status Indians, 107–8 Stehlow, T.G.H., 66–7 Stein Valley (BC), 158, 198n9 stereotypes, 128, 132, 181; historical and cultural in myth-making, 151; of landscape and peoples, 28–9, 139–41, 192nn8–9; in literature, 165; of Native people as symbols, 144; of Native women, 140, 197n5.2; racist, 154–5 Stingle, Richard, 12–13, 21 storytelling, 8, 150–1, 188–9. See also narrative authority Stump, Sarain: There Is My People Sleeping, 77–9 sun-gods, 165, 181–3; in Badlands, 145–6; destruction of in Badlands, 149; not recognized, 26; role in national mythology, 21 Sykes, Bobbi, 84 Symon, R.D.: North by West, 119 Tappage, Mary Augusta, 62, 106; Days of Augusta, 91–5, 196n14 Taylor, Charles, 15

Taylor, Drew Hayden, 128 Tekakwitha, Catherine, 115–18, 135, 183–4 Telling It: Women and Language, 152 Tennant, Paul, 25–6, 153, 191–2n5, 197n5.6 terra nullis, 67. See also empty land myth Tetso, John: Trapping Is My Life, 63, 173, 196n14 Thacker, Robert: ‘Gone Back to Alberta,’ 149 theatre: during Canada’s centenary, 125; mythic base for, 131, 197n5; traditions in Aboriginal writing, 50 Thunderbird, Chief, 60 time measurement, 60–3, 103 Totem Poles, 12, 49, 81, 149. See also potlatch translations of Native literature, 40. See also publishing of Aboriginal literature trapping, 63 treaties with Aboriginal people, 37. See also land claims trickster. See Raven (West Coast trickster) Trudeau, Pierre Elliott, 33, 41–4, 195n13 Trutch, Joseph, 25–6, 191–2n5 Tsimshian chief (1887), 25 Turner, Terence, 182 Two Row Wampum Belt, 37 Unaipon, David, 40 Union of British Columbia Indian Chiefs, 45 United Nations, 18 United States: American Indian literature, 7–8; beginning of history for, 23; effect of revolution on literature,

Index 233 30; influence on Canada, 167; Native Literary Renaissance, 105 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 18 University of Toronto Quarterly, 4 Vancouver, George, 134 Vancouver Playhouse (BC), 125, 129 vanishing race, 187 Victorian literary traditions, 98–9 violence of Canada’s history, 116 Vitart, Anne: ‘From Royal Cabinets,’ 175 Walker, Kath, 75 War of 1812, 16 Waterston, Elizabeth, 121 Waubageshig (Harvey McCue): The Only Good Indian, 176 Wheeler, Jordan, 181 White Paper on Indian Policy (1969), 42–5, 53, 192–3n1, 195nn12–13 Wiebe, Rudy: The Temptations of Big Bear, 119; ‘Where Is the Voice Coming From?’ 120, 184

Wilde, Oscar: De Profundis, 136 wilderness, 31, 157, 167–9 Willard, Ike: ‘THLEE-sa Travels the Land,’ 69 wisdom literature, 9, 13, 81–4, 86, 101, 108. See also authority Wolfart, H.C., 104; kôhkominawak otâcimowiniwâwa, 85 Womack, Craig, 79–80 Woodcock, George, 122 Woolf, Virginia, 21 world wars, 15–16 Wounded Knee, 7 Wright, Chief Walter: Men of Medeek, 40, 49–50, 80–1 Wright, Judith, 163 Wuttunnee, William I.C., 45, 195n12 Yeats, W.B., 110, 115–16 Yokoughltegth Indians, 60 Young-Ing, Greg, 34, 192–3n1 Yugoslavian literatures, 89 Zionism, 27