The Routledge Concise History of Canadian Literature

Richard J. Lane

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136816345
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria

The Routledge Concise History of Canadian Literature introduces the fiction, poetry and drama of Canada in its historical, political and cultural contexts.

In this clear and structured volume, Richard Lane outlines:

• the history of Canadian literature from colonial times to the present
• key texts for Canadian First Peoples and the literature of Quebec
• the impact of English translation, and the Canadian immigrant experience
• critical themes such as landscape, ethnicity, orality, textuality, war and nationhood
• contemporary debate on the canon, feminism, postcoloniality, queer theory, and cultural and ethnic diversity
• the work of canonical and lesser-known writers from Catherine Parr Traill and Susanna Moodie to Robert Service, Maria Campbell and Douglas Coupland.

Written in an engaging and accessible style and offering a glossary, maps and further reading sections, this guidebook is a crucial resource for students working in the field of Canadian Literature.

1 Introduction

First Peoples and the Colonial Narratives of Canadian Literature

Overview

Paradoxically, Canadian literature begins before written texts existed: with the oral stories of Canada’s First Peoples. These narratives exist today in spoken and written form, with competing accounts from different indigenous groups, and from other cultural perspectives (anthropological transcripts, for example). Colonial allegories and narratives of adventure and conquest eventually overlayered and re-interpreted indigenous stories; re-naming became a key process in the colonial claiming of cultural and economic space. Written literature, based upon European models such as the Bible and what we now simply call “the canon”, took priority, and indigenous stories were often perceived as ethnographical data, best preserved before indigenous peoples died out or were assimilated (the “vanishing Indian” myth or fantasy). But while Canada was partly formed through European and North American political battles and land-grabs, indigenous cultures continued to survive and grow with their own notions of belonging and place. After Confederation, while the story of the unified nation state continued, marginalized and oppositional voices were increasingly heard: such as those in the regions, or the Quebecois who demanded autonomy and freedom. Increasingly strong ethnic and minority groups re-shaped Canada, and the old colonial notion of uniformity or homogeneity gave way to modern ideas of heterogeneity or diversity. New narratives emerged among ethnically diverse groups, re-claiming and re-writing the stories of Canada.

First Peoples and Founding Narratives

Pondering “pivotal moments” in indigenous history, Mohawk writer Brian Maracle (b. 1947) rejects locating his native identity in key Canadian events as they involve “our interactions with so-called ‘white people’” (2). In other words, from an indigenous perspective, “They were not about us. Most of them involve things that happened to us. They have helped determine where and how we live but they have not determined how we think or what we believe” (2). Maracle prefers to go back to the moment of creation as the key indigenous founding event, which he narrates in his “First Words”: “With a few quick movements, the glowing being reached down, scooped up a handful of clay from the riverbank, and shaped it into the doll-like form of a man. The being then laid the doll-like figure on the riverbank next to the woman and gently blew into its mouth. Instantly, the clay doll was transformed into a human being” (3). For many indigenous people, history starts with creation stories. The “handful of clay” in “First Words” is indicative of a close relationship between indigenous peoples and the land, a relationship that is honoured from the very beginning of existence:

[The stories]… emphasize and confirm the peoples’ fundamental attachment to the land. The Gitksan of northern British Columbia maintain that the Upper Skeena River valley is their garden of Eden; several groups, such as the Salish Thompson River people and the Ojibwa, believe that their first ancestors were born of the earth; the Athapaskan Beaver hold that humans crawled through a hollow log in order to reach earth, an obvious birth analogy; the Iroquoians (including the Huron), that the mother of mankind, Aataentsic, fell through a hole in the sky and landed on a tortoise with earth piled on its back. On another plane, the Tsimshian have legends in which migration is a theme.

(Dickason, 4)

Such creation stories, including those that concern migration, share an important feature: they are autonomous, fully descriptive, coherent cultural and spiritual narratives. In other words, they do not need some other perspective to validate them. Such stories, on the whole, tell us that Canada’s First Peoples have occupied the land since time immemorial.

Other founding narratives tell the story of a vast migration approximately 15,000 years ago, whereby retreating ice and a lowered sea level created a land bridge between Siberia and Alaska. The word “bridge” may be misleading: the land was up to 2,000 kilometres across, offering a challenging but nonetheless liveable environment, with land and sea food sources hunted and gathered by the Homo sapiens who made their way across into North America, and then east and south throughout the entire land mass, with groups settling along the way. This migration took place over thousands of years, with complex cultures and language groups developing in the process. Archaeological evidence for these migratory routes and settlements include the delicately produced fluted stone arrow heads used in hunting, although other technologies were also developed for the hunting, gathering and preserving of food, such as the bow and arrow (introduced by Paleo-Eskimos), collecting and grinding tools, the existence of the latter leading some scholars to note that the largely Eurocentric myth of the nomadic native is incorrect: “[T]he mobile lifestyle in pursuit of different food resources cannot be assumed to have been universal at any period; and even when it was practised, it followed a seasonal pattern within a known area. The vision of early humans as aimless wanderers in search of food does not equate with the evidence at hand; in fact, the contrary is strongly indicated, that they have always lived in communities that were as stable as food resources permitted” (Dickason, 16).

At contact, then, diverse and self-sufficient First Peoples existed in the land that would eventually become known as Canada. There were twelve main indigenous language groups or families, with up to seventy different languages spoken. The two largest population densities occurred in the culturally rich Pacific Northwest and in southern Ontario (using modern terms for these places), although a country-wide trading network also existed. The Iroquois (in the East) forged a confederacy in the sixteenth century known as the Great League of Peace. Such peace treaties were an important factor in the ongoing maintenance of political and social stability, and while warfare existed, indigenous societies were largely concerned with a holistic, respectful relationship with their natural and spiritual environments (the two are in some ways indistinguishable from an indigenous perspective).

Overall population densities have been estimated as somewhere between 500,000 and two million First Peoples (depending upon methodological approaches to this question), with a high level of cultural and religious sophistication, embedded and shared in an oral and at times highly ritualized culture. Yet all of these ways of describing Canada’s First Peoples represent what would be an inconvenient truth for the masters of “discovery” and conquest who would eventually arrive from Europe, beginning with the Norse in 1000 CE. This truth essentially reveals that the land was already occupied. Centuries of re-description of indigenous peoples would follow contact, casting them as less-civilized nomads who did not have a claim (or only had a weak claim) to place. Ironically, it is now thought that indigenous peoples actually helped the first non-native visitors to North America survive in harsh conditions; as Currie argues, “The discourse of ‘discovery’ now belongs to a colonial version of history to which there are alternatives” (7).

Negotiating Contact

Scholarly and cultural efforts have enabled a more complex understanding of contact, with an important shift in understanding whereby Canada’s First Peoples are now understood to have taken an active part in negotiating and constructing the terms and conditions of contact. Thus the Norse, having encountered on Baffin Island and the North Atlantic coast early indigenous peoples known as Dorset and Beothuk, were soon involved in positive trading relationships. The Norse named these people Skraelings (small or little people), probably the first case of Europeans taking control of the naming of indigenous ethnic groups. The Norse failed to endure in Canada, having made four expeditions to their settlement at L’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland; scholars debate whether this was supposed to be a permanent or temporary settlement, but either way the Skraelings’ battle skills meant it was not a viable location. Yet it was not land that would be of primary interest for the next wave of European visitors: it was the rich cod fisheries that attracted fishermen from England and Spain. While it was Christopher Columbus who had “discovered” America (he initially thought he had arrived at Asia) with his landing at the Bahamas in October 1492, it was the Genoese Giovanni Caboto (1461–99), representing the English Crown as John Cabot, who claimed Newfoundland for King Henry VII during his expedition of 1497. A more extensive expedition the following year, with considerable exploration of the East coast, provided data on the teeming Bank Fisheries. The Portuguese visited the region in 1500 and 1501 under the leadership of Gaspar Corte Real (d. 1501?); they claimed the region as Terra Corterealis, taking slaves in the process. The person who discovered New York harbour, Giovanni da Verrazzano (1486?–1528), also gave the name Acadia to the Maritimes, annexing the region for King Francis I. Yet it was a French explorer, Jacques Cartier (1491–1557), who would have the greatest impact upon the early colonial contact period, with three voyages in 1534, 1535–36, and 1541–42.

Naming Culture: Colonial Interpretation, or, Power-Knowledge Narratives

Names are of great importance: when the spoken stories of Canada’s First Peoples, handed on from generation to generation, are called “oral literature” then one cultural tradition – that of “orature” – is being interpreted and measured by a different cultural tradition.

Oral stories, in other words, belong to an alternative expressive paradigm, one which is situational and community based. Such stories don’t so much change as develop in different ways, for different environments, or for the cares and concerns of the speaker and the community in which he or she is embedded. Many of the subtle nuances of a story being shared come about during its delivery: bodily gesture, vocal shifts, and group responses, such as laughter or surprise, all contribute to the performative nature of story-telling and therefore the meaning that emerges for a particular story-teller and audience. While Canada’s First Peoples have been passing on their stories for generations, non-indigenous peoples have, since contact, been involved in collecting, preserving, interpreting, distorting and at times attempting to disrupt and destroy these stories; the engagement with Aboriginal story-telling and stories, in other words, has often been agonistic (based on conflict or at the least competition), and at times problematic.

Orature is the transmission of cultural and religious knowledge through spoken stories, rather than through writing or print; the Oxford English Dictionary notes that it occurs in societies where speech “is the primary medium of communication”, or, in what Walter Ong calls “primary oral cultures” (1). Oral transmission is an event: it is something that takes place, or is performed, in the moment, in a particular context (time and place), with a specific audience; such an event is unique, even though the story may be repeated with variations and a new context, by another speaker. The word “orature” is often used to avoid the contradictions embedded in the more common phrase “oral literature”, where “literature” implies a written-down text (which, in “orature”, does not exist).

Nuu-Chah-Nulth artist and poet Ron Hamilton (b. 1948) contextualizes this agonistic relationship in a poem called “Telling” in which he says “We long for a new reading of history”, one where:

Warriors would drop their rifles.

Constructed residential schools

Could be deconstructed.

Dying languages would find

Our throats once more.

The Indian Act would be unwritten.

(169)

The poem ends with a comment on ownership: “Such a story would remain our own / … Gentle and honest and telling, / Before all eyes” (169). In the residential schools, indigenous stories were not allowed, and in fact even the act of indigenous naming was overwritten with a European name system.

In My Name Is Seepeetza, her autobiographical account of her time spent at a residential school, Interior Salish author Shirley Sterling (b. 1948) narrates this frightening moment of re-naming:

The Indian Act (1876) is the regulatory legislation that defines Canada’s First Peoples and their cultural existence from a colonial perspective, restrictively mapping-out their land, and encouraging assimilation into White Canada. The initial act was subject to many modifications, such as the banning of potlatches (a gift-giving ceremony) and spirit dances in section 3 of the Indian Act of 1880, strengthened in the Indian Act of 1927. An internal political system, based on the European model, was introduced to Canada’s First Peoples, instituting elected chiefs and a “band” system, which, from an indigenous perspective, is largely meaningless. Land and money is set aside by the government for the provision of Canada’s First Peoples, but always controlled by the Department of Indian Affairs. For many activists, the Indian Act, which is still in force, remains one of the main obstacles to progress in cultural and societal recovery. In July 2010, Shawn A-in-chut Atleo, the National Chief of the Assembly of First Nations and Chancellor of Vancouver Island University, called for the Indian Act to be repealed within two to five years.

… Sister Maura asked me what my name was. I said, my name is Seepeetza. Then she got really mad like I did something terrible. She said never to say that word again. She told me if I had a sister to go and ask what my name was. I went to the intermediate rec and found Dorothy lying on a bench reading comics. I asked her what my name was. She said it was Martha Stone. I said it over and over. Then I ran back and told Sister Maura. After that she gave me a number, which was 43. She got some of the older girls to teach us how to embroider. Then we had to chain stitch our numbers on all our school clothes.

(18–19)

In this passage there are a number of subtleties: Seepeetza’s new western name is told to her by her sister, who has already been integrated into the residential school’s ideological system; but then the name change is even further transformed: by turning it into a number. Using a non-indigenous craft – embroidery – Seepeetza has to label herself with that number. The idea behind this re-naming/numbering system is to remove any last vestiges of indigeneity before starting again with a “blank slate” on which a white Canadian sensibility can be inscribed. The end result of this process was a double consciousness, one reflected by the compound name that Tomson Highway’s (b. 1951) semi-autobiographical protagonist creates for himself in Kiss of the Fur Queen (1998): “Champion-Jeremiah – he was willing to concede that much of a name-change for now” (58). Reclaiming oral culture is of great importance to counter colonial processes of re-naming, something Sterling further addresses in her exploration of matriarchy in Quaslametko and Yetko (1995) and The Grandmother Stories (1997).

Cultural re-naming and the Indian Act

Re-naming was clearly a powerful colonial tool designed to challenge the cultural and political autonomy of Canada’s First Peoples. If oral stories are a cultural storehouse, and naming has immense cultural significance, then the impact of the residential school system is clear, even before other aspects of the experience are taken into account. Re-naming during the colonial period did not stop at individuals: it included the re-naming of indigenous places and nations. As Dickason notes:

Labels such as “Cree”, “Huron”, “Beaver”, “Haida” were imposed by Europeans and do not represent how the people termed themselves, at least aboriginally. In some cases a single label, such as “Cree”, “Abenaki”, or “Odawa”, included a number of distinct groups, more or less closely related by language. These three all belong to the Algonkian language group. [ . ] While many of the Europeanized labels have come to be accepted by the Aboriginal peoples, some have not; for instance, the tundra-dwellers of the Arctic objected to “Eskimo” on the grounds that it was pejorative as it had come to be popularly believed that it came from an Ojibwa term that translated as “eaters of raw meat”, despite the opinion of linguists that it actually derived from a Montagnais term meaning “she nets a snowshoe”. The tundra-dwellers won their point, and their term for themselves, “Inuit” (“the people”, “Inuk” in the singular), has been officially accepted.

(xiv)

Indigenous places would also be claimed and re-named by European explorers and settlers, for example, the Haida archipelago in British Columbia was named, by Captain George Dixon in 1778, “The Queen Charlotte Islands” (the name of his boat, after the wife of King George III). In 2009, the islands were claimed back by Aboriginal peoples and re-named “Haida Gwaii”.

Indigenous oral stories preserve and transmit a dynamic, living culture, yet colonial acts of re-naming and cultural attack were in many cases quite profound. Such efficacy derives from the fact that in 1880 the Indian Act codified in law the suppression of Aboriginal rituals and rights known as the “Potlatch” (a gift-giving process, including the awarding of meaningful names and titles) and the “Tamanawas” (a spirit dance); this Act would not be countermanded in Canada until 1951. As Mathias and Yabsley argue, the suppression of Aboriginal land rights can be seen, but “less obvious is the extent to which federal law in particular reached into Indian communities in an effort to suffocate the most forceful elements of traditional Indian political life and cultural identity. The Indian Act was repeatedly used to destroy traditional institutions of Indian government and to abolish those cultural practices that defined Indian identity” (36). By striking at the heart of these “forceful elements”, then, the Canadia...